This content summarizes Mark Manson's book, "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck," arguing that true fulfillment comes not from avoiding negative experiences or seeking constant happiness, but from choosing what struggles and values are worth caring about.
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what's up everybody mark manson here
number one new york times
best-selling author of the subtle art of
not giving a [ __ ]
it's funny i was actually looking around
youtube and google and i found that
dozens of people have posted summaries
of my book
well [ __ ] you if there's going to be a
summary of the book
it should come from the master
non-fucking himself
moi so gather round children prepare
yourselves as i take you chapter by chapter
chapter
through this modern self-help masterpiece
so before i actually get into the book
and kind of summarize each chapter in a
few minutes
i want to zoom out a little bit and just
tell you
briefly what my goal is by writing this book
book [Music]
[Music]
first of all contrary to most people's
perceptions the book is not about
not caring about things in fact it's
about the opposite of that
it's essentially it makes the argument
that you have to give a [ __ ] about something
something
therefore the most important question is
what are you giving a [ __ ] about
and why now that's a pretty cute little
concept on the surface and i think it's
why a lot of people bought the book or
enjoyed the book initially
but my goal with this book is that it's
essentially a book
about values i very intentionally wanted
to be
contrarian to the self-help industry
most self-help
takes for granted what your values are
it takes for granted what your
definition of success is
it assumes you want a big mansion and a
fancy car and
a perfect marriage with three and a half
kids in a guitar-shaped swimming pool
most self-help books just assume that we
all want the same thing
whereas in my book i wanted to point out
that a lot of these
cultural definitions of success a lot of
these cultural values
may not be the right fit for us and so
the real important question
of getting ahead in life or improving
our lives
is not necessarily figuring out how to
accomplish every single goal we have
it's more in asking what sorts of goals
should we have in the first place
what sorts of things should we give a
[ __ ] about so you'll see as we go
through it that there are a lot of
points in the book where i'm very
intentionally contradicting
most typical self-help advice part of
this i'm doing for effect
it's to grab people's attention and to
to make them
think a little bit more critically about
some of their assumptions
but some of it is legitimate some of it
i do
strongly believe uh is more correct
than the general self-help advice out
there so
without further ado let's get into it
chapter one
don't try i start the book off with a
story about charles bukowski he was a
very famous
fiction and poetry writer but he was a
total drunk
he was a low life he was in and out of prison
prison
he had drug problems he had prostitute problems
problems
i mean he was just he was a total mess i
actually wanted to open the book with him
him
because he is kind of a counter argument to
to
most of the examples that you see in
books like this you know you're used to
opening a
a book about how to improve your life
and seeing a story about like steve jobs or
or
elon musk or something like that and i
wanted to start with bukowski
because it shows that you can actually
become conventionally successful in life
despite yourself you can become successful
successful
while seemingly doing all the wrong
things and
committing all the biggest errors so
even beginning on the first page i'm
starting to undermine the reader's
assumed definition of what success is or
what is a good life or a desirable life
for themselves
now the big idea to take away from
chapter one and
this is the most underlying thing in the
book and
one of the most underlying things on
amazon kindle
ever is something called the backwards
law and the backwards law originally
comes from alan watts but i rephrase it
my own way and i say that the pursuit of
positive experience
is itself a negative experience and the
acceptance of a negative experience
is itself a positive experience so i go
on and give a number of examples of the
backwards law
i say that the idea is that the more
that you pursue feeling better all the
time the less satisfied you become as
pursuing something only reinforces the fact
fact
that you lack it in the first place the
more desperately you want to be rich
the more poor and unworthy you will feel
regardless of how much money you have
the more desperately you want to be sexy
and desired the uglier you will come to
see yourself
regardless of your actual physical
appearance the more you desperately want
to be happy and loved
the lonelier and more afraid you will
become regardless of those who surround you
you
the more you wish to be spiritually
enlightened the more self-centered and
shallow you become in trying to get there
there
i then follow that up with it's like
that one time i tripped on acid and it
felt like the more i walked towards the
house the farther away the house got for me
me
good times good times so the backwards
law introduces
the central theme of the book which is
that negativity
is actually the path to positivity
most people's assumption is they just
want the positive experiences from life
but it's actually the tolerance and
acceptance of the negative experience
that leads to the positive experience
and i will end up spending
pretty much the entire book expanding
upon this so i go on to finish chapter
one by introducing the the give a [ __ ]
framework and i
i have uh three subtleties of not
giving a [ __ ] so subtlety number one is
not giving a [ __ ] does not mean being indifferent
indifferent
it means being comfortable with being
different one point that i make
throughout the book and i dispel
very early on is that indifference is impossible
impossible
if you give a [ __ ] about nothing then
you are giving a [ __ ] about giving a
[ __ ] about nothing
it is impossible to not give a [ __ ]
about something
therefore the question is what do you
give a [ __ ] about
and kind of the conclusion that arises
is that
if you give a [ __ ] about a few very
important things
then the small things cease to bother
you so much subtlety number two
is to not give a [ __ ] about adversity
you must first give a [ __ ] about
something more important than adversity
so if you're always worrying about what
people think about you
the problem is not what people think
about you the problem is you don't have anything
anything
better to worry about if you're always
worried about how much money you have
the problem is not how much money you have
have
the problem is that you don't have
anything better to worry about
subtlety number three whether you
realize it or not you are
always choosing what to give a [ __ ]
about this concept of choosing will come
back and enforce in uh chapter five
pretty much the entire chapter is about
it all right so that's chapter one
kind of lays the groundwork starts off
very contrarian
drops a lot of f-bombs a lot of people
like that some people don't
uh chapter two is called happiness is a problem
problem
so chapter 2 opens up with the story of
the buddha and
focuses on the central buddhist doctrine
of dukkha or
the fact that life is suffering that no
matter what you do
where you go who you hang out with what
you pursue there
is some facet of suffering associated
with it
simply because our mind becomes attached
to things and attachment leads to
suffering but
instead of kind of going down the
buddhist rabbit hole with it i take it off
off
in another direction and i explain i say
you know it's not
like we're doomed to suffer it's that
suffering has
a certain evolutionary usefulness to it
like if you think about evolution over
the course of
hundreds of thousands of years a
creature that is happy
all the time that creature is not gonna
survive it's actually the creature that is
is
a little bit dissatisfied all the time a
little bit anxious all the time
a little bit paranoid a little bit
pissed off at the people around him
like that's the creature that's gonna do
the most work to actually survive and replicate
replicate
i think this this modern idea that we
shouldn't have to feel bad
ever is completely misguided not only is
it misguided but it goes against
our evolutionary nature our genetic
nature negative emotions have an
inherent purpose to them
and they help us and so a lot of this
chapter is describing how
a lot of the anxiety that we wish to
escape from or the anger we wish to overcome
overcome
these emotions are actually signals
within our body
to do something they are important
signals and if we ignore them or if we
train ourselves to ignore them
then we are actually limiting ourselves
in a lot of ways
i also talk about a psychology concept
called the hedonic treadmill this idea that
that
happiness is it's like a treadmill it's
like you know
you think if i get a boat i'll be happy
and then you get the boat and it's like
you've got to pay docking fees you're
like man if i could just find a better
dock i'd be happy and then you find a
better dock
then you realize that none of your
friends want to drive out to that new
dock you're like man if i could just
have some friends to hang out on my boat
then i'd be happy and then you get
friends on your boat
but then they get too drunk and they
fall overboard and you have to like
throw in life preservers and save them
and call the coast guard and you're like man
man
if i didn't have to call the coast guard
then i'd be happy and it's like
happiness is
it's like this carrot always dangling in
front of you no matter what you do
so if the point of chapter one is to
kind of undermine our expectations about
positive and negative experience
chapter two's point is to undermine our
expectations about positive and negative emotion
emotion
negative emotions have a lot of utility
they have a lot of purpose
they help us they grant us meaning in a
lot of situations
and they signal to us that we have
challenges or problems that must be overcome
overcome
happiness happiness is great we all want
to be happy it's not the only thing in
life there are bad forms of happiness
doing cocaine all day that'll make you
happy for a while doesn't mean you
should go
do it serial killers seem to be very
pleased with themselves while they're
killing people
over and over again doesn't mean they
should do it the the emotions themselves
are not necessarily good or bad it's the
context around them it's the meaning
around them and so i end up kind of
creating this framework
where i say that happiness comes from solving
solving
problems if you either pretend you have
no problems in your life to solve
then you won't be happy but if you also
have problems in your life that you feel
you can't solve
then you won't be happy so kind of the
secret sauce is finding problems
that you kind of want to have or kind of
enjoy having
and that's how i wrap up the chapter
with a section called choose your struggle
struggle
now i'll actually read the first couple
paragraphs of that section because it's
it's one of the most important sections
of the book in it and it's it's
resonated with a lot of people
so if i ask you what do you want out of
your life and you say something like
i want to be happy and have a great
family and a job i like
your response is so common and expected
that it doesn't mean anything
everybody enjoys what feels good
everybody wants to live a carefree
happy and easy life to fall in love and
have amazing sex and relationships
to look perfect and make lots of money
and be popular and well respected and admired
admired
everybody wants that it's easy to want
that a more interesting question
a question that most people never
consider is what pain do i want in my life
life
what am i willing to struggle for
because that actually seems to be a
greater determinant of how our lives
turn out
[ __ ] sweet all right chapter three
one of my favorite chapters
you are not special
you're not nobody is
so you are not special it opens up with
a story
of a guy i knew named jimmy jimmy is
actually he's a
kind of a composite of two different
people i knew but jimmy is basically
he's a con man essentially like
pathological liar
schemer [ __ ] artist 24 7 salesman
i knew him for about a year in my in my
mid-20s back when i was starting my
first business and
and he was starting a number of
businesses too and the dude
he was just a grifter total low life
wasted money left right and center
and so i tell this story about jimmy and
i use him as an example
for a a concept i introduce of entitlement
entitlement
i define entitlement in the book as
feeling as though you deserve to be happy
happy
without sacrificing for it it's
basically that idea
of believing you deserve to have
positive experiences without
traversing the negative experiences to
get there i spent much of this chapter
pointing out
both from stories about jimmy but also
stories of me being a [ __ ] in my own life
life
that it's this belief that we shouldn't
have to go through the negative
and only have the positive that causes
us to adopt
many destructive and uh selfish behaviors
behaviors
so the middle of the chapter is the
story about how i uh i got arrested
for selling drugs if you want to hear
about that you should buy the book
so here here you go there are two forms
of entitlement
form number one is i'm awesome and the
rest of you all suck
therefore i deserve to have special
treatment form number
two is i suck and the rest of you are awesome
awesome
so i deserve special treatment so in
psychological research
this is known as grandiose narcissism
versus victim narcissism and it's basically
basically
they seem to be opposites on the surface
like one person thinks he's better than
everybody and then the other person
thinks he's worse than everybody
but the behavior ends up being the same because
because
both people have delusional beliefs
about their place in the status
hierarchy one person thinks he's at the
top one person thinks he's
at the bottom but the behavior ends up
being the same they end up being
completely self-absorbed
they think everything in the world
should be altered and catered to them
and yeah they just become unbearable to
be around and so i spend
much of this chapter probably the second
half of this chapter
describing how the growing culture of exceptionalism
exceptionalism
particularly with social media consumer
culture things like that
they're always pushing us individually
like if you think of beer commercials or like
like
you know the way facebook algorithms are
designed like
everything is designed to make you feel
like you're the most special [ __ ]
person on the planet
and my argument is that that is actually
mentally and
socially unhealthy because that drives
an attitude and a feeling of entitlement
it creates
delusional beliefs that that you are
somehow the exception that
the world owes you something that's
everything should be rearranged to cater
to your desires and your happiness
that you should be able to have positive
experiences without accepting the negative
negative
i close out the chapter by using a
metaphor that that i really like
i'll just read a couple paragraphs all
of this quote every person can be
extraordinary and achieve greatness stuff
stuff
is basically just jerking off your ego
it's a message that tastes good going
down but in reality it's nothing more
than empty calories
that make you emotionally fat and
bloated the proverbial big mac for your
heart and your brain
the ticket to emotional health like that
to physical health
comes from eating your veggies that is
accepting the bland and mundane truths
of life
truths such as your actions actually
don't matter that much in the grand
scheme of things
and the vast majority of your life will
be boring and not noteworthy
and that's okay this vegetable course
will taste bad at first
very bad but once ingested your body
will wake up feeling more
potent and alive so that's chapter three
chapter four
the value of suffering so in my mind the book
book
is actually kind of in two parts even
though i didn't divide it into two parts
the first three chapters are very much about
about
this desire for positive experience and
unwillingness to sacrifice or
go through the negative experience to
get through the positive experience
starting with chapter four
the book becomes a lot more about values
and it becomes more about
what are we willing to sacrifice for so
like assuming you
buy the arguments of the first three
chapters that we should
sacrifice for something that we should
struggle for something that that's what
actually what makes
life more meaningful and generates a
more consistent
sense of happiness the next question is
what is worth struggling for
what is worth valuing what is worth
sacrificing for
and so i i opened up the book with a
world war ii story about a japanese soldier
soldier
who it's super interesting there was a
number of japanese
soldiers in world war ii like they got
stranded on random islands in the pacific
pacific
and nobody told them the war was over so they
they
they continued to fight the war into the
1950s 60s and even 70s
and so the last soldier who was still
fighting world war ii
i think he finally surrendered in like 1973
1973
or something like that i'd have to look
here anyway his name was hiro nada
and i wrote his story here and i used
him as an example of how like
it doesn't matter how disciplined you
are it doesn't matter how
motivated you are it doesn't matter how
strong you are how intelligent you are
how much support you have
if you have the wrong goal you're [ __ ]
if you have the wrong value then
all of that other stuff it's just going
to hurt you and i use onada as an
example of that
he spent 27 years fighting a war
that didn't exist literally killing
people he was on a
obscure island in the philippines he was
still shooting at people
killing people hiding in the jungle for
27 years
and obviously he was doing an amazing job
job
but he was like don quixote he was like
chasing windmills right
so the chapter opens up with that and it
uses that to kind of introduce this
topic of values so if we agree that we
should sacrifice what is worth
sacrificing for
i talk about dave mustain from megadeth
and metallica
as an example of good and bad values and
then i kind of finish the chapter up with
with
my attempt at defining what are good and
bad values and i
i just lay out a few principles so good
values tend to be
one reality based two socially
constructive and three immediate and controllable
controllable
bad values tend to be one superstitious
two socially destructive and three
not immediate or controllable i go on to
say honesty is a good value because it's
something you can have complete control over
over
it reflects reality and it benefits
others even if it's sometimes unpleasant
there's a whole section kind of diving
into you know what makes a value good or bad
bad
and then i finished this section by
saying the rest of this
book the last five chapters of this book
so chapters five through nine
i'm going to propose five kind of
classes of values or things to give a
[ __ ] about
that are a little bit counterintuitive
but i have found to be very important
and that's where chapter five picks up
all right chapter five
you are always choosing in my opinion
this is
maybe the most important chapter i would
say two five and nine
are the most important chapters two is
the one
kind of challenging notions of happiness
five is about responsibility and then
nine will be about death
so you are always choosing i i open up
the chapter with a story
about william james and then i i kind of
offer the reader a thought experiment
and i say
imagine like a mafia guy kidnaps your family
family
and then puts a gun to their head and
says if you don't run
a marathon tomorrow i'm gonna kill your family
family
and you're out of shape you haven't
gotten off the couch in a week
this would be horrible it would be
absolutely traumatic it'd be terrifying
arguably the worst experience of your
life now imagine
training for nine months hiring a coach
buying a bunch of gear
practicing getting ready for a marathon
running the marathon
having your family attend cheer you on
crossing the finish line
and then going and celebrating with
everybody you care about and love in
your life
that would be one of the best
experiences of your life now what's
interesting is that the actual
pain of running the marathon isn't any different
different
the only thing that's changed is the
context and what i argue in this chapter
is that what has actually changed
is the perception that you chose to run
the marathon or not
for whatever reason when we feel as
though we are choosing
our struggles or we are choosing what
problems we have in our life
they seem much more acceptable and
easier for us to deal with
when we feel as though our problems and
our struggles are thrust upon
us without our control that's when we suffer
suffer
that's when we feel completely powerless
the big kind of epiphany of this chapter
is that you are always choosing whether
you realize it or not there's no such
thing as a situation
where you are not choosing your struggle
or not choosing your problem
the only thing that changes is whether
you admit it to yourself or not
people don't like hearing this point
they don't like hearing the idea that
every problem in their life
they chose it and the second section of
this chapter
the reason why is i point out that we
tend to conflate
responsibility in fault we assume that
if you are responsible for something it
means that it's your fault
but these are two completely different
things you know it's like
if i get cancer it's not my fault that i
got cancer
but it is absolutely my responsibility
to deal with the cancer
you know if somebody leaves a newborn
baby on my doorstep
that's not my fault that somebody left
it there
but it is absolutely my responsibility i
have to do something about it
and every moment of life is this way
even if the mob boss kidnaps your family
makes you run a marathon
you are choosing to run the marathon you
are choosing for the lives of the people
you care about to be more important than
the pain of the marathon
the thing you are choosing from moment
to moment is how to value
each experience so even if like let's
say i go to a baseball game and i'm
bored to tears
i'm choosing to be bored why because i'm
choosing not to be interested in the
baseball game sure i could sit there and
blame the baseball game like oh you're
so [ __ ] boring why don't you
entertain me more
well why don't i change my definition of
entertainment why don't i
change what i find interesting why don't
i develop the ability to
pay more attention or appreciate the
subtleties of throwing a curveball or something
something
in each experience in life there is a
component of
choice embedded in it and we tend not to
be aware of that choice
but as soon as we become aware of it two
things happen
one we become way more comfortable with
pain and two
we actually get off our ass and [ __ ]
do something because now we don't care
whose fault it is anymore
we don't care if it's boring or or
tedious or unfair
you [ __ ] do something you realize in
every moment you have a choice
to do something or not do something to
blame somebody else
or take responsibility yourself and once
you develop that habit or that
value of constant responsibility
everything [ __ ] changes so this whole chapter
chapter
i kind of lay that argument out in the
first couple pages
and literally the entire chapter is just
knocking down
objections to it so i you know i knocked
down the the responsibility i called the
responsibility fault fallacy
um i talk about genetics i talk about
life situation i talk about surviving
trauma um i talk about cultural pressures
pressures
it's there's there's no [ __ ] excuse
i mean if there's if there's anything
that i'm like an extremist about
it's responsibility all right well
before i start sounding too self-important
self-important
chapter six why you are wrong about everything
everything
but so am i this chapter starts out with
another fun little thought experiment
and i actually can't take full credit
for this this thought experiment was
kind of brought to my attention by a
friend of mine named lydia she
wrote some cool stuff about it but um
basically it says
think back 500 years ago like what
seemed cutting edge and scientifically true
true
five years ago and i point out that like
people thought you know the earth was flat
flat
they didn't even know the western
hemisphere existed they thought fire was
made of a thing called phlogiston
and then i kind of pull that out to a
personal level i say you know think
about what you thought was true
10 20 years ago and then i mentioned a
few stupid things i thought was true
when i was a kid
and then from there i say now imagine
everything you think is true today
and imagine how ridiculous that's going
to look 20 years from now
or 500 years from now like everything we
think is so true and important today
is going to be absolutely ridiculous to
us at some point and that's actually a
good thing like we should
hope that our present day beliefs look
ridiculous to us
because that means that we've grown and
become smarter like i experience this
all the time with my own writing
i go back and look at stuff i wrote 10
years ago and i cringe i'm like this is
awful like i can't believe i published
this but then i remember i'm like
that's great it means i've become a
better writer so this thought experiment
is kind of setting us
up to think a little bit more about
beliefs and uncertainty
and being i guess a little bit
open-minded for lack of a better term
from there i i go into a little bit on
the research of
belief formation and how arbitrary it is
and then i talk about
the dangers of certainty and uh oh this
is one of the
the more fun sections of the book i
actually had
a cyber stalker for a number of years
she was non-violent
thank god what was remarkable about her
was that she had this
unbelievable certainty like absolutely
unshakeable certainty and completely
batshit crazy beliefs
i mean she literally told me to my face
that angels
told her that we were supposed to be
together that god said that
our relationship was going to cure death
these were things that she
said to me and whenever i tried to kind of
of
poke holes in them or point out that
maybe that
didn't make a lot of sense it had
absolutely no effect
she met my wife no effect didn't change
her mind
at all to me it was fascinating in that
maybe one of the most troubled people
i've ever known in my life was also
probably the most certain and unshakable
person i've ever met in my life
and so i use her as an example of the
binds that certainty can get us into
then i use a number of examples you know
from my own life and from other people's
lives and then i kind of trot out the
benefits of uncertainty
it opens up space for you to learn and
improve it helps guard you against like
extremist ideology or just becoming like
a crazy
zealot for some cause it opens room for
dialogue with people to learn from other
people to make other people feel more heard
heard
which improves relationships i've got a
section in here
that i call manson's law of avoidance
which i decided to be
cheeky and name a law after myself but
manson's law of avoidance says that the
more something threatens your identity
the more you will avoid it and i bring
this up
in terms of what are the pieces of
information that we protect ourselves
from because ultimately like
grasping onto some sense of certainty
it's a means of protecting
our our ego from perceived threats
and so manson's law basically says that
like the more threatening something is
the more we will become certain in
things that will help us avoid dealing
with that truth an extension of manson's
law of avoidance is that we should
define ourselves as
loosely and ambiguously as possible
because the
the less defined our self is uh the less
we need to cling to
defense mechanisms or faulty ideas
to protect ourselves this is
fundamentally a buddhist idea the idea
of no self
you know if there is no such thing as
self then there's nothing to protect and
there's nothing that you need to be
certain about
in the first place finally i finish up
the chapter with a few questions to help you
you
become more uncertain in your life
question number one is what if i'm wrong
question number two is what would it
mean if i were wrong
question number three is would be wrong
create a better or worse problem than my
current problem
both for myself and others and that's
chapter six
chapter seven failure is the way forward
this is actually probably the most kind
of like
run-of-the-mill self-help chapters
if you've made it this far in the book
it's not going to surprise you that a
book that's
just spent 150 pages arguing that
negative experience is the path to
positive experience
uh that a willingness to sacrifice
prevents entitlement
a willingness to be uncertain prevents
crazy beliefs
that we're now going to argue that
failure is actually a huge component of
success so this chapter is just a series
of stories
about all the ways picasso failed talk about
about
you know a little-known psychologist
named kasamir dabrowski who's from poland
poland
he has some great theories from studying
holocaust survivors
and then the the real big gem of this
chapter or the thing that everybody
seems to love
is something that i call the do
something principle and i actually made
a humorous little video about it
a few weeks back if you want to check it
out on the channel but the do something
principle is very simple and it comes from
from
one of the great gurus of all time my
high school math teacher
and my high school math teacher his name
is mr packwood shout out to mr packwood
what's up
whenever we were taking a test he used
to always tell us he'd say
if you don't know what to do rewrite the problem
problem
because when you rewrite the problem it
will help your mind find the next step
and it was crazy because it worked like
you'd look at a question you'd be like
oh i'm so [ __ ] i have no idea what to
do but then you'd start copying out the problem
problem
and you'd be like well i can do this one
little thing here
and then you do the second step and then
something about it it just made you see
the next thing
and when i went off to university i
noticed that this worked for all sorts
of things you know like if i was stuck
on a term paper i'd be like
okay let's just write the next paragraph
and i'd write a paragraph and
sure enough the rest of the paper would
come or if i was
needed to study for an exam you know it
was like all right well let's just study
this chapter tonight and i'd study that
chapter and next thing i know i've
studied three chapters
and so i kind of just adopted this
little mini personal philosophy of like
do something just [ __ ] do it like
take the smallest thing
and do it i remember when i was when i
suffered from a lot of social anxiety i
used to tell myself
just walk towards the person you want to
talk to that was it that was all i had
to do just walk towards him
and then what would end up happening is
i would walk towards them and i would keep
keep
walking and keep walking and next thing
i know i'm standing in front of this person
person
and it's like super awkward because i'm
standing there and not saying anything
and so to prevent the awkwardness i
would say something and next thing i
know i'm like talking to somebody and
i'm have like i make a new friend
this principle just kind of applies
universally it applies all over the place
place
it's one of those like just real special
simple pieces of advice that you can uh
take and use anywhere one of the things
i point out in the book too is that most
people assume that
you need motivation to have action but i
i point out that it's the other way around
around
action actually leads to motivation and
that's to do something in principle
chapter eight is the importance of
saying no
this is kind of the relationship chapter
of the book again it logically follows that
that
if you're willing to traverse the
negative to get to the positive if you're
you're
willing to take responsibility for your
struggles if you're willing to
accept failure on the way to success then
then
being able to say no to people being
able to manage conflict
that's probably a good thing to have for
your relationships
and sure enough that's pretty much how i
would define a healthy relationship
there's two people actually
i do define it in here as two people who
are comfortable
saying and hearing no from each other i
have a section in here called rejection
makes your life better
which on a more philosophical note if
you think about this
project of choosing what you value in
order to value one thing you have to
reject the other things
you know it's like if i want to value my career
career
over all else i need to be able to
sacrifice other things that means i need
to be able to reject other things
that means i need to reject my dream of
becoming a pro gamer
or reject the idea that i'm going to
become a software engineer or reject the
idea that
i'm gonna go live on a beach somewhere
if i choose one value to prioritize over
everything else that means
by definition i must be willing to
reject other things if i'm not willing
to reject those things
then i'm not able to actually prioritize
what's important in my life
and so this is why people who struggle
to say no
they often feel very lost and they don't
know what they want
from themselves i talk about this uh you
know saying no is kind of like the fundamental
fundamental
basis of boundaries and relationships
how if you want to have a healthy
marriage or a healthy
romantic partnership you need to be able to
to
say no to each other tell people what
you don't like tell people what your
values are
be willing to disappoint the other
person and trust that they're going to
stick with you
because if you are never willing to
disappoint your partner
then you never actually develop trust
for them you never
actually know if they're gonna stick
with you when [ __ ] hits the fan so this
is why couples that never fight
eventually end up in a very toxic place
finally i finished the chapter by
talking about commitment
and how there's kind of a hidden freedom
of commitment of
finding that one thing or one or two
things in your life that are more
important than anything else
and committing full-heartedly to them on
the surface it sounds limiting and i think
think
a lot of people particularly in my
generation we avoid those sorts of
commitments you know it's like i want to go
go
everywhere i want to do all the things i
want to date
all the people it's like this constant
effort to always keep your options open
but as soon as you limit yourself to a
few things in your life that you truly
care about
there's a new form of freedom that
happens on a very subtle level
which is that i don't have to give a
[ __ ] about this stuff i don't have to
give a [ __ ] about
who i'm gonna date i don't have to give
a [ __ ] about what my
my gaming friends think about me these
are the things i care about
these are the ways i'm gonna measure my
life that's what i'm gonna pursue
and there's just this abundance of inner
mental freedom to pursue it
all right so finally chapter nine
and then you die uh this chapter is
maybe my favorite thing i've ever
written it's about death obviously
um and i open up talking about a friend
of mine who died at a party
when i was 19. and it was incredibly shocking
shocking
and traumatic upsetting
i spent pretty much that entire summer
dealing with depression as the months
went on it
actually ended up being a very
transformative experience for me
maybe one of the most important
experiences of my life so this chapter
is about how
death is actually the thing that most
crystallizes what matters in life
it's only when you confront death or
come close to death that it's most clear
to you
what you should be giving a [ __ ] about
and therefore
it makes sense and this kind of goes
back to the stoics that
we should regularly question our own
mortality we should regularly think about
about
our own death this is just something
i've kind of instinctually done for a
lot of my life is
i've wondered you know if i died a year
from now
what would i do with my last year if i
died tomorrow or if i
got diagnosed with cancer tomorrow like
would i have any regrets
would i feel like i wasted time if so
what was the time i wasted
this is a very important project for us or
or
exercise for us to do and throughout the
chapter i talk about one of my favorite
philosophers and scholars his name is
ernest becker and then i use a little
vignette of i
i i have this weird fetish i guess you
could call it
when i visit high places i kind of have
like the opposite of a fear of heights i
have like an attraction to heights
i i tell a story about when i was at the
tape of good hope in south africa
it's just it's this massive cliff over
the ocean that you can literally just
walk up to the edge and
you know the wind blows the wrong way
you just fall off and i have this weird
fetish for like walking to the edge of
these things
and it drives everybody in my life crazy
people wonder if i'm okay it wasn't
until i started writing this chapter
that i kind of realized
why for one it forces me to confront a
lot of fear
in doing it but two when you are
walking up to the edge of a cliff with
no intention of jumping
it forces you to reckon with the
question of what if i do trip and fall
this could be it right now this could be
it there's something
a little bit intoxicating for me about
that thought not not
that i want to trip and fall but in that
it forces me to think about my life in a way
way
that feels very profound to me so that's
what i try to communicate to the reader
in that last chapter
and uh you know i just i i tie up all
the major concepts of the book
you know i come back to tolerating
negative experience taking responsibility
responsibility
being uncertain tolerating failure the
willingness to say and hear no
and kind of just like wrap it all up in
this in this nice little
bow about death and how
death elucidates everything that is
meaningful in life
so that's the book that's what all the
hype's about
if you like this summary please check
out the book
i have a particular style i use a lot of humor
humor
i use a lot of profanity some people
love that
some people don't which is fine but if
you like that
and you like these ideas i encourage you
to check out the book
if you've read the book and this was
kind of a refresher i appreciate that and
and
you know please send this to somebody
who you think would enjoy the book or
find it meaningful
and please subscribe to the channel i do
weekly videos with life advice and i
talk about all sorts of different
concepts philosophers psychologists
basically just practical [ __ ] that makes
your life better
subscribe below like this video if you
love the book
definitely like this video if you have
any thoughts about the book leave it in
the comments
so until next time everybody this is
mark manson
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