The subtle art of not giving a f**k

By Mark Manson. This book can be found here. Mark talks about how to give our limited f**ks to only where they matter the most and thereby showing us a way to leader happier lives.

Summary

  • backwards law
  • Wanting positive experience is a negative experience; accepting negative experience is a positive experience.
  • Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience.
  • Any attempt to escape the negative, to avoid it or quash it or silence it, only backfires.
  • The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering.
  • The avoidance of struggle is a struggle.
  • The denial of failure is a failure.
  • Hiding what is shameful is itself a form of shame.
  • not giving a fuck doesn't mean being indifferent, it means being comfortable with being different.
  • to not give a fuck about adversity, one must first have something more important than this adversity to give a fuck about.
  • maturity is what happens when you decide to give a fuck to only things that are fuckworthy.
  • the only way to overcome pain is first to learn how to bear it.
  • happiness is not a solvable equation. Dissatisfaction, suffering and uneasiness are inherent parts of our lives.
  • there's no life without problems. Thus, hope for a life with good problems.
  • we find happiness by solving problems. Thus happiness is an action.
  • 2 main ways we fuck our lives are via: denial and victim-mentality.
  • negative emotions mean a call to action. Positive ones are an indication of something done right. But that doesn't mean the emotions are always correct. We should make a habit of questioning our emotions.
  • whatever makes us feel good will also inevitably make us feel bad.
  • nobody asks themselves "what pain do they want in their life? For what cause are they willing to struggle?". The answer to this question is typically the determinant of one's life.
  • solution to pain and suffering is the acceptance of it and not their denial.
  • who you are is defined by what you are willing to struggle for.
  • true measurement of one's self-worth is not based on how one feels about one's positive experiences, but how they fell about their negative ones.
  • under negative experiences, many folks become entitled: either they are special and everybody is stupid or everybody's smart and they are stupid. In both cases they are the special ones.
  • vast majority of life is unextraordinary. However, media always bombards us with those exceptional ones (good or bad) only. This leads to entitlement issues.
  • people become exceptional because they are obsessed with improvement and beacuse they believe that they are not that great currently. It is actually anti-entitlement!
  • living a normal life, making friends, reading a good book, spending time with your family. These are all ordinary things. But maybe they are ordinary beacuse these are the ones we actually want.
  • self-awareness is like an onion. The more you peel the more you start crying at inappropriate times.
  • we control what our problems mean by choosing the standard we use to measure them
  • we will eventually compare ourselves with others. So, the real question is by what standard are we going to compare ourselves to others and also what values to use to set this standard?
  • the following values create really poor problems for people:
    • pleasure
    • material success
    • always being right
    • always staying positive
  • because these things are really just the side effects of having good values. They by themselves are just empty highs.
  • set good values/metrics for yourselves. This helps you give fucks only where it matters. Thus in turn gets you to a state of well-being whose side effects are happiness, pleasure and success.
  • depending upon whether we chose the problems or it was forced down upon us, we will feel empowered or miserable.
  • we cannot control what happens to us. But we can always control how we interpret it and respond to it.
  • accepting responsibility for our problems is the first step in solving them.
  • we are responsible for experiences which are not our fault at all. This is life.
  • no one else is responsible for your situation but you.
  • fault is past tense. Responsibility is present and future tense.
  • others can be blamed for how we feel, but they can't be held responsible for how we feel.
  • growth is an endlessly iterative process. When we learn something new, we go from wrong to slightly less wrong.
  • analogy to ML!
    • our values are optimisation functions
    • our actions = fwd prop
    • resulting emotions and thoughts = bwd prop
    • life itself = weights to be optimised
  • nothing is certain until it has already happened and even then it's debatable. So, certainty is enemy of growth.
  • all beliefs are wrong. Some are just less wrong than others.
  • remember how the telephone game works? (whisper what you heard into next person's ears) our memories are just like that!
  • our beliefs are malleable and our memories are horribly unreliable.
  • uncertainty removes the need to judge others (as well as ourselves!) and to have biased views.
  • unless we are uncertain about how successful we'll be, we won't be able to strive towards it
  • the openness to being wrong must exist in order for us to grow or change ourselves.
  • Manson's law of avoidance: the more something threatens your identity, the more you'll avoid it.
  • how to breed a little uncertainty in us:
    • what if I'm wrong?
    • what would it mean if I were wrong?
    • would being wrong create a better or worse problem than the current one for myself and others?
  • as kids we fall many times while trying to walk. But we just get up and try again. However, as adults we somehow end up learning to avoid failures!
  • if someone is better than us at something, then he has failed at it more times than we are.
  • if we are unwilling to fail then we'll also be unwilling to succeed.
  • for many of us, our proudest moments come at the face of greatest adversity.
  • rather than numbing it out, learn to withstand the pain you've chosen.
  • action isn't just the effect of motivation, it's also the cause of it. So always "do something".
  • motivation-loop: inspiration -> motivation -> action -> inspiration ...
  • we are defined by what we choose to reject
  • part of becoming honest is to develop the ability to say and receive 'no'
  • acts of love are valid only if they're performed unconditionally and without expectations
  • without conflict there can be no trust
  • breadth helps realize what is worth your faculty. Depth is where the gold is buried. You've to commit yourself and dig deeper to find it. This applies to relationships, careers and life in general.
  • death is the light by which the shadow of all of life's meanings are measured
  • death is inevitable. If we come to terms with it, then we suddenly become free to choose greater values to measure ourselves against.
  • without the acknowledge of the presence of death, superficial will seem important and important will seem superficial.
  • death is the correct answer to all the important life questions we never dare asking