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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Mark Manson
Read between
June 19 - June 27, 2018
“The smallest dog barks the loudest.”
“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience.
To not give a fuck is to stare down life’s most terrifying and difficult challenges and still take action.
When most people envision giving no fucks whatsoever, they imagine a kind of serene indifference to everything, a calm that weathers all storms. They imagine and aspire to be a person who is shaken by nothing and caves in to no one. There’s a name for a person who finds no emotion or meaning in anything: a psychopath. Why you would want to emulate a psychopath, I have no fucking clue.
Subtlety #1: Not giving a fuck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different.
You can’t be an important and life-changing presence for some people without also being a joke and an embarrassment to others.
pain and loss are inevitable and we should let go of trying to resist them.
Disappointment Panda would be the hero that none of us would want but all of us would need. He’d be the proverbial vegetables to our mental diet of junk food. He’d make our lives better despite making us feel worse. He’d make us stronger by tearing us down, brighten our future by showing us the darkness.
Problems never stop; they merely get exchanged and/or upgraded.
True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving.
Everything comes with an inherent sacrifice—whatever makes us feel good will also inevitably make us feel bad. What we gain is also what we lose. What creates our positive experiences will define our negative experiences.
“What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?”
And what it took me a long time to discover is that I didn’t like to climb much. I just liked to imagine the summit.
Our lives today are filled with information from the extremes of the bell curve of human experience, because in the media business that’s what gets eyeballs, and eyeballs bring dollars. That’s the bottom line. Yet the vast majority of life resides in the humdrum middle. The vast majority of life is unextraordinary, indeed quite average.
If suffering is inevitable, if our problems in life are unavoidable, then the question we should be asking is not “How do I stop suffering?” but “Why am I suffering—for what purpose?”
the first layer of the self-awareness onion is a simple understanding of one’s emotions. “This is when I feel happy.”
The second layer of the self-awareness onion is an ability to ask why we feel certain emotions.
The third level is our personal values: Why do I consider this to be success/failure? How am I choosing to measure myself? By what standard am I judging myself and everyone around me?
our values determine the nature of our problems, and the nature of our problems determines the quality of our lives.
Problems may be inevitable, but the meaning of each problem is not. We get to control what our problems mean based on how we choose to think about them, the standard by which we choose to measure them.
Starting a small business with friends while struggling to make ends meet makes us happier than buying a new computer. These activities are stressful, arduous, and often unpleasant. They also require withstanding problem after problem. Yet they are some of the most meaningful moments and joyous things we’ll ever do.
As Freud once said, “One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
Some examples of good, healthy values: honesty, innovation, vulnerability, standing up for oneself, standing up for others, self-respect, curiosity, charity, humility, creativity.
When we feel that we’re choosing our problems, we feel empowered. When we feel that our problems are being forced upon us against our will, we feel victimized and miserable.
We don’t always control what happens to us. But we always control how we interpret what happens to us, as well as how we respond.
We are responsible for experiences that aren’t our fault all the time. This is part of life.
Fault is past tense. Responsibility is present tense. Fault results from choices that have already been made. Responsibility results from the choices you’re currently making, every second of every day.
Many people may be to blame for your unhappiness, but nobody is ever responsible for your unhappiness but you.
We should approach the news and media with a healthy dose of skepticism and avoid painting those who disagree with us with a broad brush.
your turnaround will reverberate out through your relationships, and many of them will blow up in your face. This too is normal and this too will be uncomfortable.
As you reassess your values, you will be met with internal and external resistance along the way.
We are always in the process of approaching truth and perfection without actually ever reaching truth or perfection.
Certainty is the enemy of growth.
Uncertainty is the root of all progress and all growth.
The only way to solve our problems is to first admit that our actions and beliefs up to this point have been wrong and are not working. This openness to being wrong must exist for any real change or growth to take place.
there is little that is unique or special about your problems.
measure yourself by more mundane identities: a student, a partner, a friend, a creator.
It’s worth remembering that for any change to happen in your life, you must be wrong about something.
Question #3: Would being wrong create a better or a worse problem than my current problem, for both myself and others?
if it feels like it’s you versus the world, chances are it’s really just you versus yourself.
Improvement at anything is based on thousands of tiny failures, and the magnitude of your success is based on how many times you’ve failed at something. If someone is better than you at something, then it’s likely because she has failed at it more than you have. If someone is worse than you, it’s likely because he hasn’t been through all of the painful learning experiences you have.
These are VCR questions. From the outside, the answer is simple: just shut up and do it.
Life is about not knowing and then doing something anyway.
you still won’t know what the hell you’re doing. Don’t ever forget that. And don’t ever be afraid of that.
my math teacher Mr. Packwood used to say, “If you’re stuck on a problem, don’t sit there and think about it; just start working on it. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, the simple act of working on it will eventually cause the right ideas to show up in your head.”
Action isn’t just the effect of motivation; it’s also the cause of it.
Your actions create further emotional reactions and inspirations and move on to motivate your future actions.
If we follow the “do something” principle, failure feels unimportant. When the standard of success becomes merely acting—when any result is regarded as progress and important, when inspiration is seen as a reward rather than a prerequisite—we propel ourselves ahead.
