The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

by Mark Manson

if you’re able to not give a fuck about the pain, you become unstoppable.

These moments of non-fuckery are the moments that most define our lives.

No matter where you go, there’s a five-hundred-pound load of shit waiting for you. And that’s perfectly fine.

Happiness comes from solving problems. The keyword here is “solving.” If you’re avoiding your problems or feel like you don’t have any problems, then you’re going to make yourself miserable. If you feel like you have problems that you can’t solve, you will likewise make yourself miserable. The secret sauce is in the solving of the problems, not in not having problems in the first place.

True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving.

What determines your success isn’t, “What do you want to enjoy?” The relevant question is, “What pain do you want to sustain?” The path to happiness is a path full of shitheaps and shame.

The point is to nail down some good values and metrics, and pleasure and success will naturally emerge as a result. These things are side effects of good values. By themselves, they are empty highs.

In other words, we assume we know how the story ends. Certainty is the enemy of growth. Nothing is for certain until it has already happened—and even then, it’s still debatable. That’s why accepting the inevitable imperfections of our values is necessary for any growth to take place.

The problem was that my emotions defined my reality. Because it felt like people didn’t want to talk to me, I came to believe that people didn’t want to talk to me. And thus, my VCR question: “How do you just walk up and talk to a person?” Because I failed to separate what I felt from what was, I was incapable of stepping outside myself and seeing the world for what it was: a simple place where two people can walk up to each other at any time and speak.

I was responsible for teaching myself web design, Internet marketing, search engine optimization, and other esoteric topics. It was all on my shoulders now. And so I did what any twenty-four-year-old who’d just quit his job and had no idea what he was doing would do: I downloaded some computer games and avoided work like it was the Ebola virus.

Action isn’t just the effect of motivation; it’s also the cause of it.

Our culture today confuses great attention and great success, assuming them to be the same thing. But they are not.