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by
Mark Manson
Self-improvement and success often occur together. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the same thing.
Our culture today is obsessively focused on unrealistically positive expectations: Be happier. Be healthier. Be the best, better than the rest. Be smarter, faster, richer, sexier, more popular, more productive, more envied, and more admired. Be perfect and amazing and crap out twelve-karat-gold nuggets before breakfast each morning while kissing your selfie-ready spouse and two and a half kids goodbye.
You follow dating and relationship advice because you feel that you’re unlovable already.
The key to a good life is not giving a fuck about more; it’s giving a fuck about less, giving a fuck about only what is true and immediate and important.
we really have become victims of our own success.
Our crisis is no longer material; it’s existential, it’s spiritual.
The more you desperately want to be happy and loved, the lonelier and more afraid you become, regardless of those who surround you.
Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience. Any attempt to escape the negative, to avoid it or quash it or silence it, only backfires. The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering.
And like the road not taken, it was the fucks not given that made all the difference.
To not give a fuck is to stare down life’s most terrifying and difficult challenges and still take action.
You can’t be an important and life-changing presence for some people without also being a joke and an embarrassment to others.
The problem with people who hand out fucks like ice cream at a goddamn summer camp is that they don’t have anything more fuck-worthy to dedicate their fucks to.
Maturity is what happens when one learns to only give a fuck about what’s truly fuckworthy.
Happiness is a constant work-in-progress, because solving problems is a constant work-in-progress—the solutions to today’s problems will lay the foundation for tomorrow’s problems, and so on.
People deny and blame others for their problems for the simple reason that it’s easy and feels good, while solving problems is hard and often feels bad. Forms of blame and denial give us a quick high. They are a way to temporarily escape our problems, and that escape can provide us a quick rush that makes us feel better.
The truth is, I thought I wanted something, but it turns out I didn’t. End of story.
wanted the reward and not the struggle. I wanted the result
and not the process. I was in love with not the fight but...
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This is the most simple and basic component of life: our struggles determine our successes.
It turns out that merely feeling good about yourself doesn’t really mean anything unless you have a good reason to feel good about yourself. It turns out that adversity and failure are actually useful and even necessary for developing strong-minded
and successful adults.
The Jimmy who spent so much time talking about how good he was that he forgot to, you know, actually do something.
The truth is that there’s no such thing as a personal problem. If you’ve got a problem, chances are millions of other people have had it in the past, have it now, and are going to have it in the future.
you and your problems are actually not privileged in their severity or pain—that is the first and most important step toward solving them.
It’s strange that in an age when we are more connected than ever, entitlement seems to be at an all-time high.
Self-awareness is like an onion. There are multiple layers to it, and the more you peel them back, the more likely you’re going to start crying at inappropriate times.
The second layer of the self-awareness onion is an ability to ask why we feel certain emotions.
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.
If you want to change how you see your problems, you have to
change what you value and/or how you measure failure/success.
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.
When I was with my first girlfriend, I thought we would be together forever. And then, when that relationship ended, I thought I’d never feel the same way about a woman again. And then when I felt the same way about a woman again, I thought that love sometimes just wasn’t enough. And then I realized that each individual gets to decide what is “enough,” and that love can be whatever we let it
That woman doesn’t get out there and date because she would be forced to confront her beliefs about her own desirability.
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. Instead of looking to be right all the time, we should be looking for how we’re wrong all the time. Because we are.
Even if we see evidence that contradicts the meaning we created, we often ignore it and keep on believing anyway.
At the time it was assumed that people did bad things because they felt horrible about themselves—that is, they had low self-esteem.
For individuals to feel justified in doing horrible things to other people, they must feel an unwavering certainty in their own righteousness, in their own beliefs and deservedness.
Evil people never believe that they are evil; rather, they believe that everyone else is evil.
It’s the backwards law again: the more you try to be certain about something, the more uncertain and insecure you will feel.
But the converse is true as well: the more you embrace being uncertain and not knowing, the more comfortable you will feel in knowing what you don’t know.
We cannot learn anything without first not knowing something.
The more we admit we do not know, the more opportunities we gain to learn.
The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.
You avoid writing that screenplay you’ve always dreamed of because doing so would call into question your identity as a practical insurance adjuster. You avoid talking to your husband about being more adventurous in the bedroom because that conversation would challenge your identity as a good, moral woman.
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.
When we let go of the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves, we free ourselves up to actually act (and fail) and grow.
My recommendation: don’t be special; don’t be unique. Redefine your metrics in mundane and broad ways.
Instead, measure yourself by more mundane identities: a student, a partner, a friend, a creator.
That’s simply reality: if it feels like it’s you versus the world, chances are it’s really just you versus yourself.
If someone is better than you at something, then it’s likely because she has failed at it more than you have.
