The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck a Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life Mark Manson

The Book in Three Sentences

Finding something important and meaningful in your life is the near productive use of your time and energy. This is truthful because every life has bug associated with it and finding meaning in your life will assist you sustain the endeavour needed to overcome the item bug you lot face up. Thus, we can say that the key to living a good life is not giving a fuck near more things, just rather, giving a fuck only most the things that align with your personal values.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck summary

This is my book summary of The Subtle Art of Non Giving a F*ck past Mark Manson. My notes are informal and frequently contain quotes from the book as well as my own thoughts. This summary also includes key lessons and important passages from the book.

• Conventional self-help advice which tells you to visualize success and think about the type of person you want to be only reinforces the idea that you lot are non that thing.
• Everyone wants you to believe that the hugger-mugger to a adept life is to have a nicer job or a amend car or a prettier girlfriend.
• The key to a skilful life is not giving a fuck about more; information technology's giving a fuck almost less, giving a fuck about only what is truthful and immediate and important.
• We are no longer facing a fabric crisis. We have plenty of resources: TVs and wearing apparel and goods that we don't need. The problem we face is existential and spiritual. We have so much stuff and and so many opportunities that we don't know what to give a fuck most anymore.
• Because there'south an infinite amount of things we can now come across or know, there are also an space number of ways we can discover that we don't measure up, that we're not skillful enough, that things aren't as great as they could be.
• The desire for a more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one's negative experience is itself a positive experience.
• Pursuing something only reinforces that you lack it in the get-go place.
• Accepting your experience of life as being great and wonderful is the unmarried greatest thing you can do for your happiness.
• "You will never exist happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You lot will never live if y'all are looking for the significant of life." -Albert Camus
• Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience.
• If y'all are able to not give a fuck nigh the pain your goals require, then you get unstoppable.
• The moments when we don't requite a fuck and accept activeness are oft the moments that most ascertain the course of our lives.
• You lot are going to die anytime. Anybody you know is going to die soon. And in your short life you only accept a certain amount of fucks to give.
• Learning how to focus and prioritize your thoughts effectively based on finely honed personal values is perhaps the greatest and virtually of import struggle in life.
• Subtlety #i: Not giving a fuck is not near beingness indifferent. It but means you're comfy with being different. Don't say fuck information technology to everything in life, just to the unimportant things.
• Subtlety #2: To not requite a fuck near arduousness, you must starting time care about something more of import than arduousness.
• Subtlety #3: Whether you realize it or non, yous are always choosing what to requite a fuck about. The central is to gradually prune the things you intendance about, so that you only give a fuck on the most important of occasions.
• When a person has no problems, the mind automatically finds a style to invent some.
• I think what almost people — especially educated, pampered middle-grade white people — consider "life bug" are really just side effects of not having anything more important to worry about.
• Finding something important and meaningful in your life is maybe the about productive use of your time and energy.
• It'due south okay for things to suck some of the time.
• Practical enlightenment is the act of becoming comfortable with the thought that some suffering is always inevitable.
• There is no value in suffering when information technology is done without purpose.
• Don't hope for a life without bug. Hope for a life with good bug.
• Issues never stop. They simply go exchanged or upgraded.
• Happiness is found in solving problems, not avoiding them.
• True happiness occurs but when you lot find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving. Happiness is wanting the issues you have and wanting to solve them.
• Emotions are just biological signals designed to nudge you in the direction of benign change.
• Negative emotions are a sign that something is going unaddressed. They are a telephone call to action. Positive emotions are the reward for taking the correct action.
• We should question our emotions because they are not always correct.
• Don't ask yourself what you want out of life. It's easy to want success and fame and happiness and great sex activity. Everybody wants those things. A much more than interesting question to ask yourself is, "What kind of pain do I want?" What you are willing to struggle for is a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.
• Y'all can't merely exist in dear with the result. Everybody loves the result. You have to love the process.
• The climb to the top is a never-ending upwardly spiral with new problems always surfacing and new processes that you must autumn in love with. You are never allowed to stop climbing because the unabridged betoken is to love the climb. If you e'er stop loving the climb, the results volition never come.
• Self-esteem, by itself, is overrated. It doesn't help to experience good most yourself unless you have a good reason for feeling that mode. The struggle makes self-esteem useful, not the participation bays.
• Your problems are not privileged in their severity or pain. You are non unique in your suffering.
• The more exposed we are to opposing viewpoints, the more we seem to get upset that those other viewpoints exist. This seems similar a logical trend to me considering before the internet and our hyper-connected modern earth, people didn't take as much likelihood of running into ideas that disagreed with their own. Today, alternate ideas are far more than likely to cross your radar screen.
• Most of united states of america are pretty average at nearly things we practise. Fifty-fifty if you lot're exceptional at one thing, chances are y'all're boilerplate or below average at most other things.
• Our lives today are filled with data from the extremes of the bell curve of human being experience. The best of the best, worst of the worst, and most upsetting of the upsetting. We simply see the nigh exceptional news stories because that's what drives revenue. This is a real trouble when information technology comes to comparing because yous can simply be infrequent in one thing thing and yous're going to be below boilerplate in nearly everything else. That makes comparison a very dangerous game to play.
• The trouble is that the pervasiveness of technology and mass marketing is screwing up a lot of people's expectations for themselves.
• 1 of the most pervasive narratives almost masculinity in our culture is that the most valuable thing a man can attain is sex and it's worth sacrificing nigh anything to get it. (Interestingly, this corresponds to one of the dominant female person narratives, which is that the greatest thing a woman can be is beautiful.)
• People who are infrequent get that way by thinking they are average and focusing on improvement. You don't go exceptional by believing you are exceptional.
• The more uncomfortable the respond, the more likely it is to be truthful.
• Bug are inevitable, simply what they mean is flexible. We get to control what our bug mean to us based on how we cull to think nearly them and how we choose to measure them. The way nosotros mensurate success influences how nosotros view the issues nosotros face.
• "Pleasure is a faux god. Research shows that people who focus their energy on superficial pleasures end up more anxious, more emotionally unstable, and more depressed. Pleasance is the nearly superficial course of life satisfaction and therefore the easiest to obtain and the easiest to lose."
• People who base their self-worth on being right virtually everything prevent themselves from learning from their mistakes.
• "One twenty-four hour period, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you lot as the near cute." -Sigmund Freud
• People who are terrified of what others retrieve about them are actually terrified of all the negative things they remember about themselves being reflected back at them.
• When nosotros feel that we're choosing our problems, nosotros feel empowered. When we feel that our problems are being forced upon u.s. against our will, we feel victimized and miserable.
• Nosotros don't always control what happens to u.s.. Simply we always control how we translate what happens to us, every bit well as how we respond.
• Accepting responsibility for our problems is the outset step to solving them.
• A lot of people hesitate to take responsibleness for their problems because they believe that to be responsible for your problems is also to be at error for your issues. This is not true. We are responsible for experiences that aren't our fault all the fourth dimension. This is part of life.
• People will oft fight over who gets to be responsible for successful and happiness. Simply taking responsibility for our problems is far more important because that's where real learning comes from.
• Growth is an incessantly iterative procedure. When we learn something new, we don't go from "wrong" to "right." Rather, we become from incorrect to slightly less wrong. We shouldn't seek to find the ultimate "right" answer for ourselves, just rather, we should seek to chip away at the means that we're wrong today so that we can be a fiddling less wrong tomorrow.
• Certainty is the enemy of growth.
• All beliefs are incorrect—some are just less wrong than others.
• Counterintuitive insight by Baumeister regarding evil: some of the worst criminals ofttimes felt expert about themselves. Low self-esteem was non always associated with evil acts.
• The more you lot try to go sure nigh a particular issue, the more than uncertain and insecure you lot volition feel.
• The more you cover being uncertain and non knowing, the more comfy you will feel in knowing what you don't know.
• The man who believes he knows everything learns nix.
• Manson's Law of Abstention: The more than something threatens your identity, the more y'all volition avoid it. The more something threatens how you view yourself, the more than y'all will avoid getting around to doing it.
• If I believe I'm a nice guy, I'll avoid situations that could potentially contradict that belief. If I believe I'one thousand an crawly cook, I'll seek out opportunities to prove that to myself over and over once more. The conventionalities always takes precedence.
• Manson'due south idea of "kill yourself" is similar to Paul Graham's idea of "keep your identity small." The central signal is that if you don't have an identity to protect, then modify becomes much easier.
• For whatsoever change to happen in your life, you must accept that yous were incorrect about something y'all were doing before.
• "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting information technology." -Aristotle
• If it feels like it's you versus the world, chances are it's really only you versus yourself.
• The magnitude of your success is tied to how many times you lot've failed at that thing.
• Goals are express in the amount of happiness they can provide in our lives considering they are finite. Once you accomplish the goal, information technology tin can no longer provide happiness because the finish line has been crossed. Paradoxically, then, past choosing processes as your focus, yous can increase your overall, lifelong happiness by focusing on the process and non the goal. Processes never end, which means happiness can continue indefinitely.
• Action isn't merely the outcome of motivation; it's as well the crusade of it. Do something and inspiration volition follow.
• How do you write a tons of books? Write "200 crappy words per day" and you'll find motivation often flows out of y'all.
• Manson'southward "practice something" principle sounds a lot like the philosophy backside the 2-minute rule. Practise something now, even if it's really small, and let good actions pour as a outcome.
• To truly appreciate something, you must confine yourself to it. There's a certain level of joy and pregnant that you reach in life but when you've spent decades investing in a unmarried relationship, a single craft, a single career. And you cannot achieve those decades of investment without rejecting the alternatives.
• The marking of an unhealthy relationship is when two people attempt to solve each other's problems in gild to feel good about themselves.
• Trust is the most important ingredient in any human relationship for the simple reason that without trust the relationship doesn't actually mean anything.
• Investing deeply in one person, one place, one task, one activity might deny us the latitude of experience we'd like, but pursuing a latitude of experience denies us the opportunity to enjoy the rewards of depth of feel.
• Commitment, in its own style, offers a wealth of opportunity and experiences that would never otherwise be available to y'all, no thing how many surface level experiences you pursued.
• Rejection of alternatives liberates u.s.. In a strange way, delivery to 1 matter offers more than freedom than annihilation else because it relieves yous of all the second guessing about what else is out there.
• If there is no reason to do annihilation, if life is pointless, then there is as well no reason to not exercise anything. What do you have to lose? You're going to die anyway, so your fears and embarrassments and failures don't hateful anything. You might besides try.
• All of the significant in our life is shaped by our innate desire to never truly die. Our physical bodies will die, merely we cling to the idea that we tin live on through religion, politics, sports, art, and technological innovation.
• The only way to be comfortable with expiry is to understand and see yourself as something bigger than yourself, to contribute to some much larger entity.
• It is the act of choosing your values and living by them that makes you great, not whatsoever effect or accomplishment.
• "We're all going to die, all of us. What a circus! That alone should brand us love each other, simply it doesn't." -Charles Bukowski

Reading Suggestions

This is a list of authors, books, and concepts mentioned in The Subtle Art of Non Giving a F*ck, which might be useful for future reading.

• The Deprival of Decease by Ernest Becker

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Marker Manson

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