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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Mark Manson
Read between
February 10 - February 10, 2023
It’s part of the game of love. You can’t win if you don’t play.
I wanted the reward and not the struggle. I wanted the result and not the process. I was in love with not the fight but only the victory. And life doesn’t work that way.
People who are entitled delude themselves into whatever feeds their sense of superiority.
The true measurement of self-worth is not how a person feels about her positive experiences, but rather how she feels about her negative experiences.
It takes just as much energy and delusional self-aggrandizement to maintain the belief that one has insurmountable problems as that one has no problems at all.
It just means that you’re not special.
A lot of people are afraid to accept mediocrity because they believe that if they accept it, they’ll never achieve anything, never improve, and that their life won’t matter.
But maybe they’re ordinary for a reason: because they are what actually matters.
we should be asking is not “How do I stop suffering?” but “Why am I suffering—for what purpose?”
People may perceive that they feel lonely. But when they ask themselves why they feel lonely, they tend to come up with a way to blame others—everyone else is mean, or no one is cool or smart enough to understand them—and
Much of the advice out there operates at a shallow level of simply trying to make people feel good in the short term, while the real long-term problems never get solved.
But what if I’m choosing a poor metric for myself and my life?
Problems may be inevitable, but the meaning of each problem is not.
The question is not whether we evaluate ourselves against others; rather, the question is by what standard do we measure ourselves?
If you want to change how you see your problems, you have to change what you value and/or how you measure failure/success.
Pleasure is great, but it’s a horrible value to prioritize your life around.
As humans, we’re wrong pretty much constantly, so if your metric for life success is to be right—well, you’re going to have a difficult time rationalizing all of the bullshit to yourself.
They lack the ability to take on new perspectives and empathize with others. They close themselves off to new and important information.
Constant positivity is a form of avoidance, not a valid solution to life’s problems—problems
To deny that negativity is to perpetuate problems rather than solve them.
Problems add a sense of meaning and importance to our life.
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 have poor values—that is, poor standards we set for ourselves and others—we are essentially giving fucks about the things that don’t matter, things that in fact make our life worse. But when we choose better values, we are able to divert our fucks to something better—toward things that matter, things that improve the state of our well-being and that generate happiness, pleasure, and success as side effects.
“self-improvement” is really about: prioritizing better values, choosing better things to give a fuck about.
Often the only difference between a problem being painful or being powerful is a sense that we chose it, and that we are responsible for it.
If you’re miserable in your current situation, chances are it’s because you feel like some part of it is outside your control—that
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.
It comes back to how, in reality, there is no such thing as not giving a single fuck. It’s impossible. We must all give a fuck about something. To not give a fuck about anything is still to give a fuck about something.
The more we choose to accept responsibility in our lives, the more power we will exercise over our lives.
Many people may be to blame for your unhappiness, but nobody is ever responsible for your unhappiness but you.
I learned the hard way that if the people in your relationships are selfish and doing hurtful things, it’s likely you are too, you just don’t realize it.
And you know what? My ex leaving me, while one of the most painful experiences I’ve ever had, was also one of the most important and influential experiences of my life.
We all love to take responsibility for success and happiness. Hell, we often fight over who gets to be responsible for success and happiness. But taking responsibility for our problems is far more important, because that’s where the real learning comes from. That’s where the real-life improvement comes from. To simply blame others is only to hurt yourself.
People who consistently make the best choices in the situations they’re given are the ones who eventually come out ahead in poker, just as in life. And it’s not necessarily the people with the best cards.
There are those who are abused and violated and screwed over, physically, emotionally, financially. They are not to blame for their problems and their hindrances, but they are still responsible—always responsible—to move on despite their problems and to make the best choices they can, given their circumstances.
“Outrage is like a lot of other things that feel good but over time devour us from the inside out. And it’s even more insidious than most vices because we don’t even consciously acknowledge that it’s a pleasure.”
You are already choosing, in every moment of every day, what to give a fuck about, so change is as simple as choosing to give a fuck about something else.
And then I realized that each individual gets to decide what is “enough,” and that love can be whatever we let it be.
Many people become so obsessed with being “right” about their life that they never end up actually living it.
Instead of striving for certainty, we should be in constant search of doubt: doubt about our own beliefs, doubt about our own feelings, doubt about what the future may hold for us unless we get out there and create it for ourselves.
Being wrong opens us up to the possibility of change. Being wrong brings the opportunity for growth.
The comedian Emo Philips once said, “I used to think the human brain was the most wonderful organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me this.”
Evil people never believe that they are evil; rather, they believe that everyone else is evil.
Uncertainty is the root of all progress and all growth. As the old adage goes, the man who believes he knows everything learns nothing. We cannot learn anything without first not knowing something.
openness to being wrong must exist for any real change or growth to take place.
This is why people are often so afraid of success—for the exact same reason they’re afraid of failure: it threatens who they believe themselves to be.
Until we change how we view ourselves, what we believe we are and are not, we cannot overcome our avoidance and anxiety. We cannot change.
I say don’t find yourself. I say never know who you are. Because that’s what keeps you striving and discovering. And it forces you to remain humble in your judgments and accepting of the differences in others.
there is little that is unique or special about your problems. That’s why letting go is so liberating.
It’s worth remembering that for any change to happen in your life, you must be wrong about something.
