THE SUBTLE ART OF NOT GIVING A F*CK 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:
• A confident man doesn’t feel a need to prove that he’s confident.
• 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.
• Very few animals on earth have the ability to think cogent thoughts to begin with, but we humans have the luxury of being able to have thoughts about our thoughts.
• We have so much fucking stuff and so many opportunities that we don’t even know what to give a fuck about anymore.
• The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.
• Suffering through your fears and anxieties is what allows you to build courage and perseverance.
• Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience.
• These moments of non-fuckery are the moments that most define our lives.
• To not give a fuck is to stare down life’s most terrifying and difficult challenges and still take action.
• Most of us struggle throughout our lives by giving too many fucks in situations where fucks do not deserve to be given.
• Look, this is how it works. You’re going to die one day. I know that’s kind of obvious, but I just wanted to remind you in case you’d forgotten. You and everyone you know are going to be dead soon. And in the short amount of time between here and there, you have a limited amount of fucks to give. Very few, in fact. And if you go around giving a fuck about everything and everyone without conscious thought or choice—well, then you’re going to get fucked.
• There’s a name for a person who finds no emotion or meaning in anything: a psychopath.
• Not giving a fuck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different.
• There’s no such thing as not giving a fuck. You must give a fuck about something. It’s part of our biology to always care about something and therefore to always give a fuck.
• To not give a fuck about adversity, you must first give a fuck about something more important than adversity.
• I think what most people—especially educated, pampered middle-class white people—consider “life problems” are really just side effects of not having anything more important to worry about.
• Whether you realize it or not, you are always choosing what to give a fuck about.
• Maturity is what happens when one learns to only give a fuck about what’s truly fuckworthy.
• I believe that today we’re facing a psychological epidemic, one in which people no longer realize it’s okay for things to suck sometimes.
• life itself is a form of suffering.
• Happiness is not a solvable equation.
• the greatest truths in life are usually the most unpleasant to hear.
• We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful. It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change.
• Pain is what teaches us what to pay attention to when we’re young or careless.
• Problems are a constant in life.
• Problems never stop; they merely get exchanged and/or upgraded.
• Happiness comes from solving problems. The keyword here is “solving.”
• The secret sauce is in the solving of the problems, not in not having problems in the first place.
• To be happy we need something to solve. Happiness is therefore a form of action; it’s an activity, not something that is passively bestowed upon you, not something that you magically discover in a top-ten article on the Huffington Post or from any specific guru or teacher.
• True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving.
• Whatever your problems are, the concept is the same: solve problems; be happy.
• Some people deny that their problems exist in the first place. And because they deny reality, they must constantly delude or distract themselves from reality.
• Some choose to believe that there is nothing they can do to solve their problems, even when they in fact could. Victims seek to blame others for their problems or blame outside circumstances.
• 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.
• Remember, nobody who is actually happy has to stand in front of a mirror and tell himself that he’s happy.
• Emotions evolved for one specific purpose: to help us live and reproduce a little bit better. That’s it.
• Emotions are simply biological signals designed to nudge you in the direction of beneficial change.
• if you feel crappy it’s because your brain is telling you that there’s a problem that’s unaddressed or unresolved.
• In other words, negative emotions are a call to action. When you feel them, it’s because you’re supposed to do something.
• Positive emotions, on the other hand, are rewards for taking the proper action. When you feel them, life seems simple and there is nothing else to do but enjoy it.
• Whatever makes us happy today will no longer make us happy tomorrow, because our biology always needs something more.
• Because happiness requires struggle. It grows from problems.
• Real, serious, lifelong fulfillment and meaning have to be earned through the choosing and managing of our struggles.
• Who you are is defined by what you’re willing to struggle for.
• This is the most simple and basic component of life: our struggles determine our successes.
• we’re not all exceptional.
• 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.
• Entitled people exude a delusional degree of self-confidence.
• 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.
• This entitlement plays out in one of two ways: 1.   I’m awesome and the rest of you all suck, so I deserve special treatment. 2.   I suck and the rest of you are all awesome, so I deserve special treatment.
• 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.
• Most of us are pretty average at most things we do. Even if you’re exceptional at one thing, chances are you’re average or below average at most other things. That’s just the nature of life.
• To become truly great at something, you have to dedicate shit-tons of time and energy to it. And because we all have limited time and energy, few of us ever become truly exceptional at more than one thing, if anything at all.
• We’re all, for the most part, pretty average people. But it’s the extremes that get all of the publicity.
• 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.
• The vast majority of life is unextraordinary, indeed quite average.
• It has become an accepted part of our culture today to believe that we are all destined to do something truly extraordinary.
• Being “average” has become the new standard of failure. The worst thing you can be is in the middle of the pack, the middle of the bell curve.
• The rare people who do become truly exceptional at something do so not because they believe they’re exceptional. On the contrary, they become amazing because they’re obsessed with improvement. And that obsession with improvement stems from an unerring belief that they are, in fact, not that great at all. It’s anti-entitlement.
• 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.
• Humans often choose to dedicate large portions of their lives to seemingly useless or destructive causes.
• 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.
• We all have emotional blind spots.
• It takes years of practice and effort to get good at identifying blind spots in ourselves and then expressing the affected emotions appropriately. But this task is hugely important, and worth the effort.
• Values underlie everything we are and do.
• Everything we think and feel about a situation ultimately comes back to how valuable we perceive it to be.
• 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.
• Honest self-questioning is difficult. It requires asking yourself simple questions that are uncomfortable to answer. In fact, in my experience, the more uncomfortable the answer, the more likely it is to be true.
• What is objectively true about your situation is not as important as how you come to see the situation, how you choose to measure it and value it.
• We’re apes. We think we’re all sophisticated with our toaster ovens and designer footwear, but we’re just a bunch of finely ornamented apes. And because we are apes, we instinctually measure ourselves against others and vie for status.
• The question is not whether we evaluate ourselves against others; rather, the question is by what standard do we measure ourselves?
• Our values determine the metrics by which we measure ourselves and everyone else.
• 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.
• Research shows that once one is able to provide for basic physical needs (food, shelter, and so on), the correlation between happiness and worldly success quickly approaches zero.
• 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.
• It’s far more helpful to assume that you’re ignorant and don’t know a whole lot.
• While there is something to be said for “staying on the sunny side of life,” the truth is, sometimes life sucks, and the healthiest thing you can do is admit it.
• It’s simple, really: things go wrong, people upset us, accidents happen. These things make us feel like shit. And that’s fine.
• Negative emotions are a necessary component of emotional health.
• The trick with negative emotions is to 1) express them in a socially acceptable and healthy manner and 2) express them in a way that aligns with your values.
• Problems add a sense of meaning and importance to our life. Thus to duck our problems is to lead a meaningless (even if supposedly pleasant) existence.
• Good values are 1) reality-based, 2) socially constructive, and 3) immediate and controllable. Bad values are 1) superstitious, 2) socially destructive, and 3) not immediate or controllable.
• Values are about prioritization.
• 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.
• 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 there’s a problem you have no ability to solve, a problem that was somehow thrust upon you without your choosing.
• There is a simple realization from which all personal improvement and growth emerges. This is the realization that we, individually, are responsible for everything in our lives, no matter the external circumstances.
• 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.
• The more we choose to accept responsibility in our lives, the more power we will exercise over our lives.
• Accepting responsibility for our problems is thus the first step to solving them.
• A lot of people hesitate to take responsibility for their problems because they believe that to be responsible for your problems is to also be at fault for your problems.
• Responsibility and fault often appear together in our culture. But they’re not the same thing.
• 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.
• Nobody else is ever responsible for your situation but you. Many people may be to blame for your unhappiness, but nobody is ever responsible for your unhappiness but you. This is because you always get to choose how you see things, how you react to things, how you value things.
• 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.
• Pain of one sort or another is inevitable for all of us, but we get to choose what it means to and for us.
• 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.
• Right now, anyone who is offended about anything—whether it’s the fact that a book about racism was assigned in a university class, or that Christmas trees were banned at the local mall, or the fact that taxes were raised half a percent on investment funds—feels as though they’re being oppressed in some way and therefore deserve to be outraged and to have a certain amount of attention.
• People get addicted to feeling offended all the time because it gives them a high; being self-righteous and morally superior feels good.
• We should prioritize values of being honest, fostering transparency, and welcoming doubt over the values of being right, feeling good, and getting revenge.
• 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. It really is that simple. It’s just not easy.
• Growth is an endlessly iterative process.
• We are always in the process of approaching truth and perfection without actually ever reaching truth or perfection.
• Many people become so obsessed with being “right” about their life that they never end up actually living it.
• Being wrong opens us up to the possibility of change. Being wrong brings the opportunity for growth.
• Don’t trust your conception of positive/negative experiences.
• Our brains are meaning machines. What we understand as “meaning” is generated by the associations our brain makes between two or more experiences.
• Our minds are constantly whirring, generating more and more associations to help us understand and control the environment around us.
• Many or even most of our values are products of events that are not representative of the world at large, or are the result of a totally misconceived past.
• Most of our beliefs are wrong. Or, to be more exact, all beliefs are wrong—some are just less wrong than others.
• Every new piece of information is measured against the values and conclusions we already have. As a result, our brain is always biased toward what we feel to be true in that moment.
• Our mind’s biggest priority when processing experiences is to interpret them in such a way that they will cohere with all of our previous experiences, feelings, and beliefs.
• 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.
• the more you try to be certain about something, the more uncertain and insecure you will feel.
• 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. The more we admit we do not know, the more opportunities we gain to learn.
• 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.
• The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.
• 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.
• I have both some good news and some bad news for you: there is little that is unique or special about your problems. That’s why letting go is so liberating.
• My recommendation: don’t be special; don’t be unique. Redefine your metrics in mundane and broad ways. Choose to measure yourself not as a rising star or an undiscovered genius. Choose to measure yourself not as some horrible victim or dismal failure. Instead, measure yourself by more mundane identities: a student, a partner, a friend, a creator.
• The narrower and rarer the identity you choose for yourself, the more everything will seem to threaten you. For that reason, define yourself in the simplest and most ordinary ways possible.
• Questioning ourselves and doubting our own thoughts and beliefs is one of the hardest skills to develop.
• Question #1: What if I’m wrong?
• As a general rule, we’re all the world’s worst observers of ourselves.
• It’s worth remembering that for any change to happen in your life, you must be wrong about something.
• Question #2: What would it mean if I were wrong?
• Question #3: Would being wrong create a better or a worse problem than my current problem, for both myself and others?
• That’s simply reality: if it feels like it’s you versus the world, chances are it’s really just you versus yourself.
• Failure itself is a relative concept.
• 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.
• We can be truly successful only at something we’re willing to fail at. If we’re unwilling to fail, then we’re unwilling to succeed.
• For many of us, our proudest achievements come in the face of the greatest adversity. Our pain often makes us stronger, more resilient, more grounded.
• Our most radical changes in perspective often happen at the tail end of our worst moments.
• These are VCR questions. From the outside, the answer is simple: just shut up and do it.
• VCR questions are funny because the answer appears difficult to anyone who has them and appears easy to anyone who does not.
• Life is about not knowing and then doing something anyway. All of life is like this. It never changes.
• Don’t just sit there. Do something. The answers will follow.
• Action isn’t just the effect of motivation; it’s also the cause of it.
• 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.
• Action is always within reach. And with simply doing something as your only metric for success—well, then even failure pushes you forward.
• Freedom grants the opportunity for greater meaning, but by itself there is nothing necessarily meaningful about it.
• Travel is a fantastic self-development tool, because it extricates you from the values of your culture and shows you that another society can live with entirely different values and still function and not hate themselves.
• 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.
• Rejection is an important and crucial life skill.
• The difference between a healthy and an unhealthy relationship comes down to two things: 1) how well each person in the relationship accepts responsibility, and 2) the willingness of each person to both reject and be rejected by their partner.
• People in a healthy relationship with strong boundaries will take responsibility for their own values and problems and not take responsibility for their partner’s values and problems.
• People can’t solve your problems for you.
• The mark of an unhealthy relationship is two people who try to solve each other’s problems in order to feel good about themselves.
• Acts of love are valid only if they’re performed without conditions or expectations.
• Conflict exists to show us who is there for us unconditionally and who is just there for the benefits. No one trusts a yes-man.
• For a relationship to be healthy, both people must be willing and able to both say no and hear no.
• But more is not always better. In fact, the opposite is true. We are actually often happier with less.
• When you’re pursuing a wide breadth of experience, there are diminishing returns to each new adventure, each new person or thing.
• 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.
• Death scares us. And because it scares us, we avoid thinking about it, talking about it, sometimes even acknowledging it, even when it’s happening to someone close to us.
• Humans are unique in that we’re the only animals that can conceptualize and think about ourselves abstractly.
• Confronting the reality of our own mortality is important because it obliterates all the crappy, fragile, superficial values in life.
• Our culture today confuses great attention and great success, assuming them to be the same thing. But they are not.