For decades, we’ve been told that positive thinking is the key to a happy, rich life. "F**k positivity," Mark Manson says.
At its core, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck is a book about finding what’s truly important to you and letting go of everything else. In the same way that he encourages limiting exposure to mindless distractions such as social media, television and technology, he encourages limiting concern over things that have little to no meaning or value in your life.
In an interview, Mark says, “If seeing things online or hearing things your co-workers say is really affecting you that much then you need to look at the values in your life. If your emotions are constantly being pushed this way or that way, and you feel like you’re never in control, it’s probably because you’re valuing a lot of the wrong things.”
More than a practical guidebook to choosing what’s important in our lives and what’s unimportant, it’s a brutally honest and much needed reality check about our personal problems, fears and expectations. It’s a bold confrontation of self, our painful truths, faults and uncertainties, without all the positive airy fairy fluff we’ve been spoon-fed to believe by self-help gurus.
Here are the notes I took from the book "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life" by Mark Manson:
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. Then fly your helicopter to your wonderfully
fulfilling job, where you spend your days doing incredibly meaningful work
that’s likely to save the planet one day.
There’s a saying in Texas: “The smallest dog barks the
loudest.” A confident man doesn’t feel a need to prove that he’s confident. A
rich woman doesn’t feel a need to convince anybody that she’s rich. Either you
are or you are not. And if you’re dreaming of something all the time, then
you’re reinforcing the same unconscious reality over and over: that you are not
that.
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. The avoidance of struggle is a struggle. The denial of failure is
a failure. Hiding what is shameful is itself a form of shame.
We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is
biologically useful. It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change. We
have evolved to always live with a certain degree of dissatisfaction and
insecurity, because it’s the mildly dissatisfied and insecure creature that’s
going to do the most work to innovate and survive. We are wired to become
dissatisfied with whatever we have and satisfied by only what we do not have.
This constant dissatisfaction has kept our species fighting and striving,
building and conquering. So no—our own pain and misery aren’t a bug of human
evolution; they’re a feature.
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. True happiness occurs
only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving.
This is the most simple and basic component of life: our
struggles determine our successes. Our problems birth our happiness, along with
slightly better, slightly upgraded problems.
People who become great at something become great because
they understand that they’re not already great—they are mediocre, they are
average—and that they could be so much better.
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?”
Dave Mustaine, whether he realized it or not, chose to
measure himself by whether he was more successful and popular than Metallica.
The experience of getting thrown out of his former band was so painful for him
that he adopted “success relative to Metallica” as the metric by which to
measure himself and his music career. Despite taking a horrible event in his
life and making something positive out of it, as Mustaine did with Megadeth,
his choice to hold on to Metallica’s success as his life-defining metric
continued to hurt him decades later. Despite all the money and the fans and the
accolades, he still considered himself a failure.
If you want to change how you see your problems, you have to
change what you value and/or how you measure failure/success.
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. This, in a nutshell,
is what “self-improvement” is really about: prioritizing better values,
choosing better things to give a fuck about. Because when you give better
fucks, you get better problems. And when you get better problems, you get a
better life.
Imagine that somebody puts a gun to your head and tells you
that you have to run 26.2 miles in under five hours, or else he’ll kill you and
your entire family. That would suck. Now imagine that you bought nice shoes and
running gear, trained religiously for months, and completed your first marathon
with all of your closest family and friends cheering you on at the finish line.
That could potentially be one of the proudest moments of your life. Exact same
26.2 miles. Exact same person running them. Exact same pain coursing through
your exact same legs. But when you chose it freely and prepared for it, it was
a glorious and important milestone in your life. When it was forced upon you
against your will, it was one of the most terrifying and painful experiences of
your life. 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.
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.
The point is, we are always choosing, whether we recognize it or not. Always. 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 real question is, What are we choosing to give a fuck about? What values are we choosing to base our actions on? What metrics are we choosing to use to measure our life? And are those good choices—good values and good metrics?
We are responsible for experiences that aren’t our fault all
the time. This is part of life. Here’s one way to think about the distinction
between the two concepts. 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. You are
choosing to read this. You are choosing to think about the concepts. You are
choosing to accept or reject the concepts. It may be my fault that you think my
ideas are lame, but you are responsible for coming to your own conclusions.
It’s not your fault that I chose to write this sentence, but you are still
responsible for choosing to read it (or not).
It’s worth remembering that for any change to happen in your
life, you must be wrong about something. If you’re sitting there, miserable day
after day, then that means you’re already wrong about something major in your
life, and until you’re able to question yourself to find it, nothing will
change.
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.
Fear and anxiety and sadness are not necessarily always
undesirable or unhelpful states of mind; rather, they are often representative
of the necessary pain of psychological growth. And to deny that pain is to deny
our own potential. Just as one must suffer physical pain to build stronger bone
and muscle, one must suffer emotional pain to develop greater emotional
resilience, a stronger sense of self, increased compassion, and a generally
happier life.
Life is about not knowing and then doing something anyway.
All of life is like this. It never changes. Even when you’re happy. Even when
you’re farting fairy dust. Even when you win the lottery and buy a small fleet
of Jet Skis, you still won’t know what the hell you’re doing. Don’t ever forget
that. And don’t ever be afraid of that.
When I was in high school, 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.” During that early self-employment period, when I struggled every day,
completely clueless about what to do and terrified of the results (or lack
thereof), Mr. Packwood’s advice started beckoning me from the recesses of my
mind. I heard it like a mantra: Don’t just sit there. Do something. The answers
will follow. In the course of applying Mr. Packwood’s advice, I learned a
powerful lesson about motivation. It took about eight years for this lesson to
sink in, but what I discovered, over those long, grueling months of bombed
product launches, laughable advice columns, uncomfortable nights on friends’
couches, overdrawn bank accounts, and hundreds of thousands of words written
(most of them unread), was perhaps the most important thing I’ve ever learned
in my life: Action isn’t just the effect of motivation; it’s also the cause of
it. Most of us commit to action only if we feel a certain level of motivation.
And we feel motivation only when we feel enough emotional inspiration. We
assume that these steps occur in a sort of chain reaction, like this: Emotional
inspiration → Motivation → Desirable action If you want to accomplish something
but don’t feel motivated or inspired, then you assume you’re just screwed.
There’s nothing you can do about it. It’s not until a major emotional life
event occurs that you can generate enough motivation to actually get off the
couch and do something. The thing about motivation is that it’s not only a
three-part chain, but an endless loop: Inspiration → Motivation → Action →
Inspiration → Motivation → Action → Etc. Your actions create further emotional
reactions and inspirations and move on to motivate your future actions. Taking
advantage of this knowledge, we can actually reorient our mindset in the
following way: Action → Inspiration → Motivation If you lack the motivation to
make an important change in your life, do something—anything, really—and then
harness the reaction to that action as a way to begin motivating yourself. I
call this the “do something” principle. 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. We feel free to fail, and that failure moves us forward.
Promise yourself that you will assume that you are the root
of your problems next time you get upset. Just try on the idea and see how it
feels.
The point is this: we all must give a fuck about something,
in order to value something. And to value something, we must reject what is not
that something. To value X, we must reject non-X. That rejection is an inherent
and necessary part of maintaining our values, and therefore our identity. We
are defined by what we choose to reject. And if we reject nothing (perhaps in
fear of being rejected by something ourselves), we essentially have no identity
at all.
Honesty is a natural human craving. But part of having
honesty in our lives is becoming comfortable with saying and hearing the word
“no.” In this way, rejection actually makes our relationships better and our
emotional lives healthier.
Conflict is not only normal, then; it’s absolutely necessary
for the maintenance of a healthy relationship. If two people who are close are
not able to hash out their differences openly and vocally, then the
relationship is based on manipulation and misrepresentation, and it will slowly
become toxic. Trust is the most important ingredient in any relationship.
Trust is like a china plate. If you break it once, with some
care and attention you can put it back together again. But if you break it
again, it splits into even more pieces and it takes far longer to piece
together again. If you break it more and more times, eventually it shatters to
the point where it’s impossible to restore. There are too many broken pieces,
and too much dust.
The big story for me personally over the past few years has
been my ability to open myself up to commitment. I’ve chosen to reject all but
the very best people and experiences and values in my life. I shut down all my
business projects and decided to focus on writing full-time. Since then, my
website has become more popular than I’d ever imagined possible. I’ve committed
to one woman for the long haul and, to my surprise, have found this more
rewarding than any of the flings, trysts, and one-night stands I had in the
past. I’ve committed to a single geographic location and doubled down on the
handful of my significant, genuine, healthy friendships. And what I’ve
discovered is something entirely counterintuitive: that there is a freedom and
liberation in commitment. I’ve found increased opportunity and upside in
rejecting alternatives and distractions in favor of what I’ve chosen to let
truly matter to me.
