The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F Mansons Law

The Book in Three Sentences

Finding something important and meaningful in your life is the most productive use of your time and energy. This is true considering every life has problems associated with information technology and finding meaning in your life will assistance y'all sustain the effort needed to overcome the item problems yous confront. Thus, nosotros tin can say that the cardinal to living a good life is not giving a fuck about more things, but rather, giving a fuck only about the things that marshal 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 by Mark Manson. My notes are informal and often contain quotes from the volume as well as my own thoughts. This summary also includes key lessons and of import passages from the volume.

• Conventional self-aid advice which tells you lot to visualize success and call back almost the type of person you want to be merely reinforces the idea that you lot are not that affair.
• Anybody wants you to believe that the secret to a good life is to accept a nicer job or a better motorcar or a prettier girlfriend.
• The key to a good life is non giving a fuck almost more than; it'southward giving a fuck about less, giving a fuck about only what is true and immediate and of import.
• We are no longer facing a material crisis. We accept plenty of resources: TVs and clothes and goods that we don't need. The problem we face is existential and spiritual. Nosotros have and then much stuff and then many opportunities that nosotros don't know what to give a fuck almost anymore.
• Because there's an infinite amount of things we can now meet or know, there are too an infinite number of ways we can detect that we don't mensurate upwardly, that we're not good 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 credence of one's negative experience is itself a positive feel.
• Pursuing something merely reinforces that y'all lack it in the first place.
• Accepting your experience of life as being peachy and wonderful is the unmarried greatest thing you lot can exercise for your happiness.
• "Yous volition never be happy if you lot go along to search for what happiness consists of. Yous will never live if you are looking for the pregnant 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 about the pain your goals crave, and then you become unstoppable.
• The moments when we don't requite a fuck and take action are ofttimes the moments that nigh define the form of our lives.
• You are going to die someday. Anybody you lot know is going to die soon. And in your brusk life you only have a sure amount of fucks to requite.
• Learning how to focus and prioritize your thoughts finer based on finely honed personal values is perchance the greatest and most of import struggle in life.
• Subtlety #ane: Not giving a fuck is not virtually existence indifferent. It just means you're comfortable with being different. Don't say fuck information technology to everything in life, only to the unimportant things.
• Subtlety #2: To not give a fuck virtually adversity, you must commencement care about something more important than adversity.
• Subtlety #3: Whether y'all realize it or non, you are ever choosing what to give a fuck about. The key is to gradually prune the things you lot intendance nigh, and so that you merely requite a fuck on the most of import of occasions.
• When a person has no problems, the mind automatically finds a way to invent some.
• I think what most people — especially educated, pampered center-class white people — consider "life problems" are actually just side effects of non having anything more important to worry about.
• Finding something important and meaningful in your life is maybe the most 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 comfy with the thought that some suffering is always inevitable.
• There is no value in suffering when it is done without purpose.
• Don't hope for a life without problems. Hope for a life with skillful problems.
• Issues never stop. They merely get exchanged or upgraded.
• Happiness is plant in solving issues, not avoiding them.
• True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving. Happiness is wanting the problems you have and wanting to solve them.
• Emotions are simply biological signals designed to nudge y'all in the direction of benign modify.
• Negative emotions are a sign that something is going unaddressed. They are a telephone call to activeness. Positive emotions are the advantage for taking the correct action.
• Nosotros should question our emotions because they are not ever right.
• Don't ask yourself what you want out of life. It's easy to want success and fame and happiness and dandy sex activity. Everybody wants those things. A much more interesting question to ask yourself is, "What kind of pain do I desire?" What y'all are willing to struggle for is a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.
• Yous can't merely exist in dearest with the effect. Everybody loves the result. You have to beloved the process.
• The climb to the superlative is a never-ending up spiral with new problems e'er surfacing and new processes that you must fall in dear with. You are never immune to stop climbing because the entire point is to honey the climb. If you lot ever stop loving the climb, the results will never come.
• Self-esteem, by itself, is overrated. It doesn't assist to feel good about yourself unless yous have a practiced reason for feeling that fashion. The struggle makes self-esteem useful, non the participation trophy.
• Your problems are not privileged in their severity or pain. You are not unique in your suffering.
• The more exposed we are to opposing viewpoints, the more we seem to become upset that those other viewpoints exist. This seems like a logical tendency to me because before the net and our hyper-connected modernistic globe, people didn't have equally much likelihood of running into ideas that disagreed with their own. Today, alternate ideas are far more than probable to cross your radar screen.
• Most of us are pretty average at most things we do. Even if you're exceptional at 1 thing, chances are you're boilerplate or below boilerplate at almost other things.
• Our lives today are filled with information from the extremes of the bell bend of human feel. The best of the best, worst of the worst, and nearly upsetting of the upsetting. We only encounter the most infrequent news stories considering that's what drives revenue. This is a real problem when it comes to comparison because you can merely exist infrequent in i matter thing and you're going to exist beneath average in nearly everything else. That makes comparison a very dangerous game to play.
• The problem is that the pervasiveness of engineering and mass marketing is screwing upwards a lot of people's expectations for themselves.
• One of the most pervasive narratives nearly masculinity in our culture is that the well-nigh valuable thing a man can attain is sex and it's worth sacrificing nearly annihilation to get information technology. (Interestingly, this corresponds to ane of the dominant female narratives, which is that the greatest thing a adult female can be is cute.)
• People who are exceptional become that way by thinking they are average and focusing on improvement. You don't go exceptional by believing you lot are exceptional.
• The more uncomfortable the answer, the more probable it is to be true.
• Problems are inevitable, but what they mean is flexible. We become to control what our issues mean to us based on how nosotros choose to think about them and how we choose to measure them. The way we measure success influences how we view the problems we face.
• "Pleasure is a false god. Inquiry shows that people who focus their energy on superficial pleasures stop up more anxious, more than emotionally unstable, and more depressed. Pleasure is the most superficial form of life satisfaction and therefore the easiest to obtain and the easiest to lose."
• People who base their cocky-worth on beingness right nigh everything foreclose themselves from learning from their mistakes.
• "I day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you equally the most beautiful." -Sigmund Freud
• People who are terrified of what others recollect about them are really terrified of all the negative things they think about themselves being reflected back at them.
• When nosotros feel that we're choosing our issues, we feel empowered. When we feel that our bug are beingness forced upon us against our will, we feel victimized and miserable.
• We don't always control what happens to us. But we always control how we interpret what happens to u.s.a., every bit well every bit how we answer.
• Accepting responsibleness for our problems is the first step to solving them.
• A lot of people hesitate to take responsibility for their problems because they believe that to exist responsible for your problems is too to exist at fault for your problems. This is not true. We are responsible for experiences that aren't our fault all the time. This is part of life.
• People will frequently fight over who gets to be responsible for successful and happiness. But taking responsibility for our problems is far more than important because that'southward where real learning comes from.
• Growth is an endlessly iterative process. When we learn something new, we don't go from "wrong" to "right." Rather, we become from wrong to slightly less wrong. We shouldn't seek to find the ultimate "right" answer for ourselves, merely rather, we should seek to chip away at the means that we're wrong today so that we tin be a piddling less incorrect tomorrow.
• Certainty is the enemy of growth.
• All beliefs are wrong—some are merely less wrong than others.
• Counterintuitive insight by Baumeister regarding evil: some of the worst criminals oftentimes felt good about themselves. Depression self-esteem was non e'er associated with evil acts.
• The more y'all try to become certain nearly a detail consequence, the more uncertain and insecure yous will feel.
• The more you embrace beingness uncertain and not knowing, the more comfortable you will feel in knowing what you don't know.
• The man who believes he knows everything learns goose egg.
• Manson'due south Law of Avoidance: The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it. The more something threatens how you view yourself, the more you will avoid getting around to doing it.
• If I believe I'm a squeamish guy, I'll avert situations that could potentially contradict that belief. If I believe I'g an awesome cook, I'll seek out opportunities to testify that to myself over and once more. The belief always takes precedence.
• Manson'due south thought of "kill yourself" is similar to Paul Graham'southward thought of "keep your identity small." The primal point is that if you don't have an identity to protect, then alter becomes much easier.
• For any change to happen in your life, you must accept that you were wrong nigh something you were doing before.
• "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a idea without accepting information technology." -Aristotle
• If information technology feels similar it's you versus the world, chances are it's really just you versus yourself.
• The magnitude of your success is tied to how many times you lot've failed at that thing.
• Goals are limited in the amount of happiness they can provide in our lives because they are finite. Once you lot achieve the goal, it tin can no longer provide happiness because the finish line has been crossed. Paradoxically, then, by choosing processes as your focus, y'all tin can increase your overall, lifelong happiness past focusing on the process and non the goal. Processes never terminate, which means happiness can go along indefinitely.
• Activity isn't but the event of motivation; it's as well the cause of it. Exercise something and inspiration will follow.
• How do you write a tons of books? Write "200 crappy words per day" and you'll observe motivation oft flows out of you.
• Manson'due south "practise something" principle sounds a lot like the philosophy behind the 2-minute rule. Do something at present, even if it'south really small, and allow expert deportment pour as a result.
• To truly appreciate something, you must confine yourself to it. There's a sure level of joy and meaning that you accomplish in life simply when you've spent decades investing in a single relationship, a single craft, a single career. And y'all cannot reach those decades of investment without rejecting the alternatives.
• The mark of an unhealthy human relationship is when two people try to solve each other'southward issues in order to feel skillful about themselves.
• Trust is the most important ingredient in whatever relationship for the simple reason that without trust the relationship doesn't actually hateful annihilation.
• Investing deeply in i person, one identify, one job, i activity might deny usa the breadth of experience nosotros'd similar, but pursuing a latitude of feel denies us the opportunity to bask the rewards of depth of experience.
• Delivery, in its ain mode, offers a wealth of opportunity and experiences that would never otherwise be bachelor to you lot, no matter how many surface level experiences you pursued.
• Rejection of alternatives liberates u.s.a.. In a strange fashion, commitment to i thing offers more than liberty than anything else because it relieves yous of all the second guessing almost what else is out there.
• If in that location is no reason to do anything, if life is pointless, then there is also no reason to not do anything. What exercise you have to lose? Yous're going to die anyhow, and then your fears and embarrassments and failures don't mean annihilation. Yous might as well try.
• All of the meaning in our life is shaped by our innate desire to never truly die. Our physical bodies volition die, but we cling to the idea that we tin live on through religion, politics, sports, art, and technological innovation.
• The only manner to be comfortable with death is to sympathize and see yourself as something bigger than yourself, to contribute to some much larger entity.
• Information technology is the act of choosing your values and living by them that makes you great, not any outcome or accomplishment.
• "We're all going to die, all of us. What a circus! That alone should make united states of america dearest each other, but it doesn't." -Charles Bukowski

Reading Suggestions

This is a list of authors, books, and concepts mentioned in The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, which might be useful for future reading.

• The Deprival of Death by Ernest Becker

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

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Source: https://jamesclear.com/book-summaries/the-subtle-art-of-not-giving-a-fck

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