Your suffering is a compass. Here’s how to read it.

Most people are trying to solve the wrong problem, optimizing for happiness when happiness isn't actually a goal, it's a byproduct. 
Mark Manson, author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, argues that the entire self-help industry has been selling ephemeral highs: affirmations, visualizations, the relentless pursuit of feeling good. The research doesn't support it, and more importantly, neither does lived experience.

MARK MANSON: My name is Mark Manson. I am the author of the subtle art of not giving a fuck, as well as some other works. I'm a YouTuber, podcaster, and my work focuses primarily on the importance of values. This is Big Think, and today I'm going to be talking about how to grow into an emotionally mature adult. How to develop a healthy sense of hope. How to improve your life by changing your values. And how to find success through failure. Chapter 1. Becoming an emotionally healthy adult. One of my spicier arguments is that I think happiness is greatly overrated in today's age. I think people focus on it way too much. I think they're focused on it backfires pretty consistently. But worst of all, I think people have started confusing comforts and highs for the same thing as happiness. It's interesting if you look at the ancient world, Aristotle actually argued that there are two versions of happiness. There's hedonia, which is kind of pleasure, comforts, short-term satisfactions, and then there's eudaimonia, which is kind of a deeper, purpose-driven. This is a meaningful way to live my life kind of feeling. And I think the modern age has been very optimized to promote as much hedonia as possible. Everything is designed to make us as comfortable as possible, to give us quick dopamine hits all the time, to make us feel good all the time, and to promise us really simple superficial happiness all the time. But the problem is that what actually drives life satisfaction is that sense of eudaimonia, that sense of my life was worth living. I have zero regrets. Everything I've suffered or struggled through was worth the trouble. One thing to keep in mind in all this is an idea that comes from Alan Watts that I call the backwards law. And basically the backwards law is that the more you chase a positive experience, that chasing in and of itself is a negative experience. And the more you accept a negative experience, the more that acceptance itself is a positive experience. So you see this show up in all sorts of different areas of life, different ways. The more you try to impress people, the less impressive you're always going to feel. The more beautiful that you want to be, the uglier you will constantly see yourself. The more money you want to make, the more you will feel too poor and inadequate, like you don't have enough stuff. The more love you feel like you need, the more lonely and isolated you will feel. The more spiritually enlightened you want to become, the more self-centered and narcissistic you'll likely end up being. The more you try to be happy all the time, the more easily you'll be upset. Whereas if you just accept that sometimes life is hard and shit goes wrong, the more happy and easy going you'll become. So the significance of the backwards law is important because so much of what we're exposed to on a day-to-day basis is kind of selling us these benefits of self-perception. Hey, look at this by this product. You'll become more beautiful. You'll become happier. This will solve your confidence issues. Hey, we can fix your health in 30 days or your money back. All of these things, they sound very enticing, but what you discover as you start to go down that road is that you actually increase the likelihood of your negative experiences because you are constantly chasing that positive. So what I tell people is I say, instead of asking yourself what's going to make me happy, ask yourself, what am I willing to struggle for? What are the problems I actually kind of like having in my life? Sometimes when I give talks, I ask the audience, what kind of masochist are you? What's like the pain that you secretly enjoy that most other people don't? Because it's in that pain, that special relationship that you have with that struggle, that's actually probably where most of the meaning and purpose in your life is going to be found. It's going to be found in the struggles that you kind of relish having and in the challenges that you are most proud of overcoming. And this comes back to that backwards law and that when you're constantly chasing the positive experiences, you end up on this experience of like a treadmill and that every day and every moment you're looking for the next hit, the next high to keep you going. Whereas when you find the negative experiences that you're happy to accept, that you're willing to embrace, that embracing of that negative experience is actually what's going to generate a much longer and sustained positive experience. Because this is the sneaky truth that most people don't understand is that happiness is not something that you pursue and achieve in and of itself. It's the natural side effect of finding something more meaningful and purposeful in your life. If you find something that feels important, that's worth giving a fuck about, the happiness will happen on its own anyway. I think another common affliction today is this idea that we are each special and unique. And because we're so special and unique, we deserve special treatment, special results, a special place in the world. Ultimately, what this breeds is a sense of entitlement. It's a sense that we deserve certain outcomes without having to put in the effort or the work. And I think this comes from two different places. I think one was very well-intentioned, which was our parents raised us, telling us that we were special and amazing and unique, and that we had unique gifts to share with the world. And they simply did this because the self-esteem research at the time said this is what you're supposed to tell your kids. Of course, nowadays, we realize that that's not the case. When you raise children telling them that they're special and they deserve to have everything, you're not raising a human with high self-esteem, you're raising a little narcissist who thinks that they deserve all the benefits without any of the costs. Now, what most people don't realize is that there's two flavors of narcissism. Now, when most people think of an entitled narcissist, they think of what's known as a grandiose narcissist, which is the person who believes that they are bigger and better than everyone else, that they are amazing and unique. They're amazing and perfect and the best and they deserve special treatment because they're so superior. But there's a flavor of narcissism that most people haven't heard of, and that's the vulnerable narcissist. The vulnerable narcissist defines themselves as a special, unique victim. Everything has gone wrong. Everything is unfair. They've been treated uniquely poorly. And because of all those things, they deserve special treatment. And what's interesting is that grandiose narcissists and vulnerable narcissists, while having completely opposite attitudes and justifications for their selfish behavior, the result is exactly the same. Everyone should pay attention to me. Everybody should stop everything they're doing for me. Everybody should give everything I want to me. I think the second cause is just the nature of how the internet has evolved itself, is that everything is personalized. It's catered exactly for you. You get online and everything in your news feed is perfectly curated for your interests and the things that you care about and the things that you want to know about. All of the ads are directed at how special you are and how much you deserve this outcome and how if you just buy this product, then you are going to live up to it. And we're going to live up to all the potential that you always knew that you had. I think this messaging has become the water that we all swim in and it's terrible for our mental and emotional health. Most conventional self-help techniques are really just focused on these sugar highs of making you feel a little bit happier for a moment or making you feel special for a moment. The idea that you should stand and look in the mirror and tell yourself that you're beautiful or you're smart or that people are going to like you. Ultimately, the research shows that that's not that effective. In fact, what the research finds is that a lot of these techniques, like visualizations and affirmations and gratitude practices, they work better for the people who don't need them. So if you already feel good about yourself, then yeah, standing in the mirror is going to make you feel a little bit better. But if you feel like crap about yourself, the only thing that standing in the mirror reciting lines to yourself reminds you of is that you feel crap about yourself, that you are the type of person who needs to stand in front of a mirror and say affirmations to yourself. It just makes you feel more pathetic. So a lot of these techniques, they are sold and marketed as solutions to feeling happy and fulfilled and satisfied every day of your life. But really, they're just amplifying what's already there. So when I was in my 20s, I developed a really intense fascination with developmental psychology, like most 20 year olds. And I started reading a lot of really brilliant and famous researchers from Jean Piaget to Lawrence Kohlberg to Robert Keegan, Erik Erikson. And they all have these amazing frameworks of just how people develop throughout their lives. And the early developmental psychologists like Piaget, they began an early childhood and they kind of looked at how an infant develops basic logical reasoning and rational skills and can identify the difference between self and other. And then other psychologists came along later and they continued by looking at how adults develop and how different moral frameworks arise at different parts of our lives and how there are different tensions at different ages that really define how we see the world. So I just kind of became obsessed with this with a bunch of these theories and frameworks and I eventually kind of simplified everything into a framework that I think really ties together a lot of what we're trying to achieve in our lives. So I broke it down into three really simple categories. There's childhood, there's adolescence, and there's adulthood. Each is defined by something very simple, but the progress from one stage to the next is not necessarily guaranteed. So the child sees the world in the simplest of ways, which is, I want a thing, do I get the thing or not? You know, the child wants ice cream, it reaches for the ice cream. The child wants a cookie, it reaches for the cookie. All it understands is, I want this thing and I either get it or I don't get it. If I get it, I'm happy, if I don't get it, I'm unhappy. After being upset enough times, I start developing a theory of the world that explains why I don't always get a cookie when I want it. Well, it turns out mom gets to decide whether I get a cookie or not. And it also turns out that mom has a different experience and perspective than I do. Oh, that's actually really interesting. There are other people who have their own perspectives of how the world works and they have their own desires. They want their own cookies or they don't want their own cookies. And sure enough, when you look at a lot of studies, young children, they don't have a concept of self yet. They don't understand that other people have different perspectives than themselves. They're not able to empathize like older humans are able to empathize. They're not able to understand social status or social signaling or cultural standards or anything like that. And so once the child develops these theories of mind, they enter the adolescent stage, which I kind of think of as like the transactional stage of life. If you think back to high school, essentially what high school is is everybody's trying to barter with each other for social status, right? It's like, oh, if I wear this jacket, maybe they'll think I'm cool. If I wear the right shoes, then maybe I'll fit in and they'll be friends with me. If I say the funny thing in class, then maybe the cute girl will pay attention to me. Everything is conditional. It's tit for tat. If I do this, it will get that reaction out of that person. And this is very logical, right? Because once you understand it, like, okay, every other person has their own perspective, then what is the behavior that I need to do that is most likely going to make them allow me have my cookie? Now, this carries over into the real world. In fact, there's a lot of relationships in the real world that function this way that are very conditional. Like, you know, the coffee shop I went to this morning, I have a conditional relationship with the barista. I don't really care who they are or where they went to school or where they grew up. I just want them to give me my coffee and give it to me quick, right? And that's fine. That's fine in very small, marginal situations. So what you start noticing as you go through life is that this constant conditional interaction with people, it's exhausting. It feels inauthentic. It feels like you're performing all the time. And even when you get people to like you, it's very unsatisfied. And so what you eventually start to realize is that the only way to truly be happy with other people and be happy in the world is to behave unconditionally, is to find something in your life that matters so much to you. That you're willing to be disliked for it. That you're willing to suffer disapproval. You're willing to not get the cookie because you found something more important than the cookie. And this is what adulthood is. It's finding the things that really you're willing to plant your flag in and say, "This is who I am, take it or leave it. And if I'm not for you, that's totally fine. I get it. Live and let live." But I'm going to go look for the people that are right for me and that share in these values. Now the tricky thing is that I think a very large percentage of people get stuck in that adolescent mindset, that they're stuck bartering with the world performing for approval all the time. And I think a big reason for that is that the modern world is more transactional. It is more you're exposed to so many different people in so many different ways and there's so many different opportunities that you feel like you should be performing all the time to get what you want. And so if you never watch that performance fail enough times to start living virtuously, then you'll never cross over into that adult framework of living. And if you don't cross over into that, if you don't find the thing that you're willing to be disliked for, then you're never going to have a stable, happy relationship in the world. If we zoom out, like philosophically speaking, the reason we want to get to adulthood is because living that way makes us anti-fragile. Like the adolescent mindset, the childlike mindset, they're very fragile. They're easily disrupted. If things don't go your way, if you don't say the right thing, if you don't do the right thing at the right moment, everything falls apart. Whereas with the adult mindset, if you just have something that you stand for and you're willing to struggle for and you're willing to suffer through being disapproved for, any hardship or setback actually makes you stronger. It actually shows you, it helps you adapt to new circumstances. It helps you find new ways and reasons to work towards the thing that you believe in or stand for the thing that you care about. And the funniest thing about all this too is, you know, I went down this like deep modern psychological rabbit hole. And when I got to the bottom of it, I just found Aristotle. This is basic ancient Greek, Aristotelian philosophy 101. His whole argument was, third basic virtues. These are things that you can practice in each and every single moment that you can practice when people love you and when they hate you, that you can practice when you're broke and when you're rich, that you can practice when things are going well and when things are a total fucking dumpster fire. They're in your control at any given time. And they are always socially constructive, regardless of where the political fault lines are that week or that month. And if you prioritize them, if you make them your highest values, you can pursue them in every moment. You can live unconditionally. You can be anti-fragile. You can gain from failure and rejection. You don't have to perform for others. You don't have to chase status or accolades. You don't have to prove anything to anybody. It's this basic virtue ethic that has been sitting in front of us for the entirety of Western history. And I found myself staring at it in the face in between scrolling on TikTok and Instagram being like, "Oh, this was the answer all along." And so I think ultimately it's we are all developing towards an adulthood that is just reflective of what some of the wisest minds in history called out all along. That just pursue virtue, just value the timeless things that are good for everybody. And don't get lost in the hedonic treadmill of chasing more likes or chasing a couple more bucks or getting the next car or getting the next date. Because that's temporary. It's just a high and it's just going to create more suffering than it alleviates. So I guess we're back at the start. Chapter two, developing a healthy sense of hope. So there's something I call the uncomfortable truth of life and it's not fun to hear or think about. And that is basically that you and everyone you know are going to die and that basically nothing we do is going to matter in the grand scheme of things. That in the infinite expanse of the universe, we're just insignificant microscopic dust milling about. And none of this matters. And while that sounds very dark and fatalistic, I do think there is an optimistic view of that and that we get to create and construct meaning for ourselves. We get to decide what matters in our lives and they sustain us through hardship and challenges and when things go wrong. Our hope keeps us getting up in the morning and moving forward. But there's a dangerous side of hope as well, which most people don't think about. And that is that we defend our hopes often violently that we cling to our hope because it sustains us so much emotionally. And so if we hope for the wrong things or if we hope for things that are unrealistic, we can end up painting ourselves into a corner where living a fulfilling life is simply impossible. So I break our hopes down into three component parts and these component parts are largely based on self-determination theory, which is the predominant framework for understanding motivation and psychology. So the first one is, do you have a sense of autonomy? Do you feel like you control your future? Do you feel like you're able to make decisions for yourself? The second component is, do you have something that you feel like is more important than yourself? Is there something in your life that you're willing to struggle for or sacrifice for? And then the third is, do you feel like you belong to something? Do you feel like you have a tribe of people around you who share your values or support your values as you pursue them? And if you have all three of those things, then you can develop a healthy sense of hope. But as we'll see, each one of those three things gets very complicated. So the first complication comes around autonomy and self-control. And that is essentially that self-control is an illusion. What psychology shows us is that we are fundamentally irrational actors. We are very emotionally driven and then we rationalize our emotional decisions after the fact. And so a lot of what we think about in terms of self-discipline, habits, goal-setting, self-control, these are largely dictated by our emotional impulses. And so paradoxically, the way to develop more control and discipline in your life is not to implement rigid structures and just brute force everything with willpower. It's actually to develop a better relationship with your own emotions. Because once you get in touch with your emotional impulses, you can start directing them in more productive directions. Plato characterized it as a chariot and a horse. And the rational thinking part of ourselves is the chariot with the whip and the reins trying to control the horses of our instincts and making sure that we go where we actually want to go. So imagine that we have two brains. We have the thinking brain and the feeling brain. And imagine that our consciousness is a car. Most of us assume that the thinking brain is driving the car. And the feeling brain is in the passenger seat being this noisy child screaming, looking at stuff out the window, getting excited or upset about various things. But the truth is that it's actually the opposite. The feeling brain is driving the car and the thinking brain is sitting in the passenger seat and trying to act as the navigator. So the job of the thinking brain is to effectively communicate to the feeling brain to kind of almost like a dog tame the feeling brain into going where it should go. Because if you don't, then the feeling brain is just going to drive over the median and the oncoming traffic, follow whatever shiny object that it wants to chase after. So the struggle and tension between our thoughts and emotions is ever-present. And really what it boils down to is developing a healthier relationship with ourselves, an understanding of our emotions without suppressing them, a comfort experiencing various emotions without overindulging them, and learning how to direct some of our impulses and cravings without overdoing them. In my book, Everything is Fock the Book about Hope, I write a full chapter about Isaac Newton as kind of an allegory of understanding how our emotions and our identity interact with each other. In that story, I create Newton's three laws of emotion. The first one is that for every action, there will be an equal and opposite emotional reaction. So every action that we take in our life or every experience that we have in our life, whatever its impact on our identity, how we identify ourselves, there will be an emotional reaction that is proportional to how we perceive that experience to interact with our identity. So let's say I have a large identity as an author and I run into somebody on the street who says like, "Wow, you're a terrible hand model." Well, I don't identify as a hand model. It's not a core part of how I see myself. So I'll probably just kind of laugh and be like, "Wow, that's really weird." But if I run into somebody on the street who stops me and says, "Oh, wow, I read your books. You're a terrible author." Since that's such a core part of my identity, I will probably have a proportional emotional response to that experience. And I'll probably get very upset, embarrassed, confused, angry, whatever it is. But the emotional response will be directly proportional to how much the action is taking effect on my identity. Newton's second law of emotion is that your identity is the sum of all of your emotional experiences throughout your life. So if you have consistently felt bad around yourself, you will start to develop an identity of somebody who is bad. Somebody who just fails at things is incapable of doing things nobody's ever going to like you and so on. Whereas if you experience a large sum of positive experiences throughout your life, you'll develop an identity around those positive experiences. And ultimately, this is why we adopt certain identities. I adopt an identity as an author because I have intense positive experiences trying to be an author. I adopted an identity as bad at cooking because I have pretty much nothing but negative experiences every time I try to cook. And a Newton's third law is that there's an inertia to your identity, that your identity will continue to be your identity until some force acts against it and redirects it. And so when you're trying to change who you are or try to change your understanding of yourself, the only way you can actually do that is to go have contrary experiences, go out into the world and do things that act against the identity that prove your self-definition wrong in some way. Now the lesson to take on all of this is that ultimately you want to identify with things that are beyond yourself. As long as your emotional stability is based on how you perceive yourself and others perceive you, it's going to fluctuate wildly and you're going to lose control of your own actions. But if you have something outside of yourself that you identify with, that you really give yourself to, then that grants you a certain amount of stability in your life because it's no longer about you. It's like if you give your life to raising a family, then it's you no longer care if people criticize you for being a bad author or a bad cook. It doesn't matter to you. It's this more important thing outside of yourself that you can tether your hopes to that provides more emotional stability and a greater amount of self-control. And finally, the third complication comes around community. So when we find something outside of ourselves, we develop like an emotional gravity and that we attract people with similar values as our own. And we repel people with opposite values of our own. So when you start to value something outside of yourself, you will naturally start to coalesce with other people around similar shared values. And eventually you develop a community. Now communities are amazing. They're great. They're absolutely fundamental to our mental health. We're very much wired as social creatures. Our relationships are probably the highest correlated thing to our happiness and well-being out of everything that we've ever measured in psychology. So developing a community around shared values is amazing. It's incredible. The problem is that humans have a tendency to not just create a benign community and celebrate something. Once they've got the community, they like to play politics. They like to start thinking, "You know what? Our little community is better than that community." I think our community should have more access than that community. I think our community should maybe be in charge of that community over there. And this is where hope can turn dangerous because if your hopes hinge completely on your community having more access or power or resources over that community, then your hope essentially hinges on gaining power and gaining control over others. It starts to hinge on something that is by definition exclusionary and antagonistic to the rest of the world around it. And I think an unintended side effect of the modern world by making it so accessible and possible for people to form communities around shared values, we've unintentionally amplified the ability to create strife and conflict around each other's hopes. All of these perspectives and ideas that I've been talking about, they're not fun. They're not exciting, but they're good for you, and they make you a better functioning human being. So in this sense, I think of them like psychological vegetables. Nobody likes eating vegetables, but we all know we need to eat our vegetables. And vegetables are boring. They're everywhere. They're ever present. They're in every meal, but they're always the least exciting part of the meal. But the thing is, is that when we have a diet that's predominantly vegetables, we end up becoming healthier, we're more energized, we have more ability to focus, we have more ability to act in the world. It's ultimately what's good for us. Whereas chasing the highs of happiness, believing that everybody should like you all the time, believing that you're special and you deserve special treatment, these are like the sugar and desserts of our psychological diet. They feel good for a brief moment, but they always come with a hangover, and they always make us deeply unhealthy in the long run. Chapter three, how to fix your life by changing your values. I think a lot of people discount my work simply because of the profanity. They think that it's juvenile, that I'm kind of pandering to my audience by making them giggle. And I think what a lot of people miss about my work is that the whole not giving a fuck thing, it's really just a bit of a Trojan horse for discussion of values. Because if you think about it, we all have to care about something, we all have to give a fuck about something. The question is, what are we choosing to give a fuck about? And what we choose to give a fuck about, what we give our attention to or what we choose to focus on. Ultimately, that is a reflection of our values, of what we are prioritizing in our lives, what we find most important to ourselves, and that prioritization that we do internally and probably unconsciously ultimately has an effect on everything that we do. It becomes kind of the filter or the lens in which we see everything. And so I think the big blind spot in the self-help industry, it's not how do I become happier, or how do I become richer, or how do I become more successful. It's why do you want to be happier, why do you want to be richer, why do you want to be more successful? Like, what is success, how are you measuring that? How are you defining that? Because if you're defining it in a really terrible way, if the underlying value is just bad, then achieving that success is actually going to be a bad thing for you. You can waste years of your life chasing this thing that's ultimately not going to make anything better. So this raises the question, what should you give a fuck about? What is a good value? What's a good thing to focus on? Well, I think there's a few principles that can help us figure this out. So the first principle is, are you giving a fuck about something that is immediate and controllable? Is it something that you can control within your own environment? So for example, the reason people pleasing is a terrible value is not because it's bad to be liked. We all want to be liked. The problem is that you can't control what other people feel. And in fact, when you try to control what other people feel, that makes you an asshole. You're interfering with their agency. But when you focus on what you can control, your own behavior, your own honesty, your own vulnerability, that will make your relationship stronger. But it won't necessarily make you liked by everyone. The second principle of having good values is valuing something that is reality-based. Something that you can verify and know to a certain degree is true. We tend to get very caught up in fantasies and invent a lot of ideas in our head about what's true about the world, the way other people should be, different beliefs about how society should work. And it's unavoidable that we're going to be wrong about something some of the time, but we should always be working towards some reality-based version of truth. Simply because believing in illusions ultimately is going to make us suffer. Being attached to the illusion that everybody should say hi to me on Saturday morning is just going to piss me off every Saturday, because it's unrealistic and it's based in this fantasy version of the world. This principle is particularly tricky because it requires us to constantly evaluate the ways that we might be wrong. The ways that we might be believing in a fantasy or have some false assumption about ourselves or other people or the way that the world should work. And then the third principle for having good values is that it should be socially constructive. Now this sounds very obvious and simple, but it gets very complicated because yes, you should be nice to people. You should be helpful. You should believe in things and care about things that are good for society. I think we all, the vast majority of us, believe in something like that. The problem is that we all have a tendency to delude ourselves into thinking that what's good for us is actually good for society. And so most of the harms that we cause on the world are well-intentioned and also ignorant. So if we're trying to live a life where we don't give a fuck, and by that I mean we're trying to live a life where we're giving our attention or our focus in the right places, there are three subtleties that come along with that. So the first one is that not giving a fuck is actually about being comfortable, being different. It's being comfortable with the fallout or repercussions of having a different opinion or having a different point of view or caring about something that other people don't care about. The irony is that the people who want to stop giving a fuck the most, they are the people who are trying not to be different in any way, shape, or form. They're the ones who are trying to make everybody happy all the time. They're the ones who are trying to just blend in with the crowd. And ultimately that becomes very stressful because they don't stand for anything. They don't have anything that they get to own and call their own. Which brings us to the second subtlety, which is that the way to stop giving a fuck about adversity is to give a fuck about something more important than adversity. And basically the way to stop giving so many fuck what everybody thinks all the time is to find something more important than what everybody else thinks all the time. It's this idea that you have to find something in your life that you're willing to struggle for, that you're willing to stick your neck out for, that you're willing to plan a flag end and say, "This is mine. This is what I care about. This is what I stand for. And if you don't like it, fuck it. Deal with it." Like not giving a fuck, it doesn't get rid of adversity, it just makes the adversity okay. And then finally the third subtlety is the realization that you are always giving a fuck in every moment. You're always choosing something to give a fuck about, right? Like if you're choosing to try to not give a fuck about what anybody else thinks, that is giving a fuck about what everybody else thinks because you're trying to not give a fuck about it. So it's giving a fuck is not optional. It is something that is very much hardwired into our psychology. It is something that is always operating and dictating what we focus on and what we don't focus on. And so the question is, what are you choosing to focus on and what are you choosing to not focus on? What are you choosing to suffer for and what are you choosing to not suffer for? Where are the yeses in your life and where are the noes in your life? That ultimately is the important question. So the tricky thing about our values is that we often lie to ourselves about what we actually value. We say to ourselves and others, "Oh, I really care about honesty and then we turn around and lie to somebody." Or we say that we really care about our health but we are binging cheesecake on a random Thursday afternoon. So even getting an accurate sense of what we are prioritizing, what we are giving a fuck about is often a difficult process. But there are two techniques that I am going to share with you that can help you figure out your values in the next 20-30 minutes. So the first one is what I call a time audit and it is pretty simple. You take out a sheet of paper, you write down what you spend your time on throughout the week and try to be as honest as possible. And if you want to get really hardcore about it, you can actually track for five days how much time did you spend on the computer? How much time did you spend watching Netflix? How much time did you spend talking to friends? Just doing that time audit often surprises people. They think in their head, they are like, "Oh, I am spending a lot of time at work." But then they realize they are not doing a whole lot of work. Or they think that they are spending a lot of time keeping in touch and connecting with family. But they are actually not talking to their family nearly as much as they thought they were. So when you do the time audit, you get a clear picture of how many hours are going into each activity in your life. And then you can also gauge those in terms of how much you actually value them. And you start to realize, "Oh, this thing that I barely value at all, I am spending 15, 20 hours a week doing it." Whereas the thing that I really value and I feel like I lack in my life, I am only investing two hours a week into it. The second technique you can do is a classic stoic practice known as Memento Mori, which is you imagine your own death. You imagine that you are on your deathbed and you are looking back at your life and you ask yourself, "What was worth doing and what was a complete waste of time?" And this practice is incredibly powerful because I think nothing gives us real clarity on the value of the things in our life. The way imagining our own death does. Because most of the things that we care about on a day to day basis are not going to matter anymore once we are dead. And only a few things are. And what you realize when you do this exercise is that those few things that are potentially going to matter long after you are dead, those are actually the things that you wish you were spending more of your time on. And as humans, we instinctually avoid thinking about our own death. It's not fun. It's very uncomfortable. But I think it's so useful for this reason. And there's a lot of different ways you can do it. You can project into the future. Imagine when you are 80 and you are on your deathbed and you are looking back at your life. You can do it that way. Another way to do it is imagine if you have one year left to live, what would you spend the next year doing? Another way to do it is what Steve Jobs did when he was alive, which is every morning he would look in the mirror and he'd say, "If this was the last day I was going to be alive, would I be happy with what I'm doing today?" And if he said no too many days in a row, then he would make a major change in his life. So there are a lot of different ways to attack it, to approach it. But what's important is that you develop some sort of regular habit of at least thinking about it. I think we resist not giving a fuck about things because we feel like if we let go of something, it's going to go wrong. It's going to fall apart. It's going to fail. But the problem is that any sort of growth or development comes from a feeling of uncertainty, comes from not knowing what you're doing, comes from the willingness to be unsure about what's right and what's wrong. One of the fundamental Buddhist principles is this idea of attachment, that all suffering is ultimately rooted in being attached to whether it's an idea, a feeling, a view of the world. And I really see that as kind of an indictment on certainty and not doubting yourself. And actually the experience of not giving a fuck about something is it's actually quite liberating. Like narrowing your focus to just a handful of things that really matter in your life, it's you're not actually limiting yourself, you're freeing yourself from having to dedicate mental bandwidth to dozens and dozens of things that ultimately don't matter. You know, it's funny, when I was dating my wife, like a lot of men I agonized over whether I should propose to her or not. I spent months and months and months thinking about it and talking to friends and family and just like weighing all the pros and cons. And I'm trying to like project into the future, like understand like a clairvoyant, like, "Is this the woman for the rest of my life? Am I making the biggest mistake ever?" And it was funny because the second that I proposed, all of the doubts and uncertainty, it just melted away because all that mattered was that commitment. It's like, "Do I know if she's the right person for me for the rest of my life?" No, I don't. But I do know that I have control over how much I commit to trying to make her the right person for the rest of my life. And because I narrowed my focus to the one thing I had control of, it allowed me to turn off, it was like turning off 100 television screens in my mind of like all these alternative realities, all these like ideas of like other people I could date and other lives I could live and like what would happen if this happened or that happened? It all just got shut off. And suddenly my mind went silent and there was just this resulting piece as a result. So it comes back to this original Buddhist idea that it's what we cling to that determines our suffering. We all have a natural instinct to crave certainty in our lives. And I think the more chaotic the world seems, the more confusion we have around what to do, the more we crave knowing something for sure. I think most of our suffering comes from our certainties about ourselves, about how the world should be, how people should treat us, about ideas other people should have. When we cling on to those things and refuse to let go, that's what causes all of detention and conflict, both within ourselves and with others. And so I actually think that we should embrace more uncertainty. I think we should know less. I think people should have fewer opinions and hold them more loosely. Because the way our identities work is that the more I believe myself to be something, the more I'm going to defend it with everything that I've got. In my book, I have this concept called Manson's Law of Avoidance, which states that the more something potentially threatens your identity, threatens your certainty of who you are, the more you will find ways to avoid it. And what's interesting about the law of avoidance is that it applies to both good things and bad things. I think everybody's had an experience of avoiding something that could be harmful or upsetting or uncomfortable for us. We find excuses to not go to the gym, we find reasons to not have a difficult conversation with a colleague. But a lot of us have also had experiences where we avoid things that are good for us, that we sabotage our own opportunities, that we mess up good relationships. And I think at our core, that happens for the exact same reason, that the good thing in our lives also challenges our notion of who we are. It also potentially threatens our certainty of how we see the world. And so our instinct is to resist it and to act against it. And so I think the looser you can hold your identity, the less sure you can be about yourself or who you are, the less you can find yourself. The more open you are to all of the experiences that are going on around you, and the more objective you can be as you choose to move through the world. So one way to actually look at this in yourself is to do a little journaling exercise. So if you take something in your life that you're struggling with and take kind of the core belief behind that conflict or that struggle, and just sit down and ask yourself three questions. The first one is, what if I'm wrong? And take a minute and write out all of the ways that you could potentially be wrong. You're not necessarily saying you are wrong, but we just want to think through all the possibilities of maybe you're mistaken somewhere, maybe you're missing something, maybe there's a perspective you haven't considered yet. Then the second question is, what would it mean if I'm wrong? What would that say about me? What would that say about my life? What would that say about the world? And this is where you actually start to uncover a lot of the deep core sensitivities that you're probably avoiding dealing with, right? It's like, well, if I'm wrong about this, then that probably means that I don't know what I'm talking about. Or if I'm wrong about that, then that means I'm actually the problem in my relationship. What you start to uncover are a lot of implications that you probably instinctively avoid. And finally, ask yourself the third question, which is, would being wrong give me a better or worse problem than being right? I think a lot of people would be surprised that being wrong, although very painful in the short term to accept, gives them a much better problem in their life than holding on to being right. But as soon as we let it go, the experience that we have is a liberation, a liberation from all of the things that we don't have to care about. It's funny because a lot of people, they hear this and they say, "Well, that's easy for you to say, Mr. Big, successful author. You didn't grow up like I did or you haven't been through what I've been through." And what's funny about this is that I think the more hardship you've gone through in your life, the more important this is, right? If you think about somebody who's very wealthy, like a trust fund kid or something, they can afford to not figure out their values. They can afford to kind of drift through life aimlessly and not worry about anything. Whereas like, if you've grown up in poverty, if you had a lot of tough shit handed to you throughout your life, you don't have that luxury. You have to get focused. It is 100 times more important that you know what you're spending your time and attention on because you don't have the luxury of being able to waste your attention away on things that don't matter. And the other irony here is that I actually think it's easier the harder your life circumstances are. If you think about like a subsistence farmer in India, they don't have many options. They wake up. There's one thing to do. You go out and farm. There's no question. There's no like, "Oh, what am I doing with my life? Is this what I'm meant to be? Have I found my purpose?" No, they go out and farm because if they don't farm, they're not going to eat. It's that simple. So any question of purpose or what they're valuing or what they're prioritizing, it's already solved. They don't even have to think about it. Whereas if you're like a typical upper middle class young person in the United States or Europe, you have grown up with so many options, so many opportunities, so many different paths in life that you could potentially take, that it's petrifying to consider these things. That you probably feel completely adrift because you can envision 20 different versions of your own future. And because you can imagine 20 different versions of your own future, it is terrifying to pick one because that means you have to kill the other 19. I think this is why this message is resonating so much in this day and age, and particularly with these younger generations, because these are the first generations that are growing up with this much optionality, with this much exposure to all the different lives. All the different life paths that they could take. That's when you need values the most is when you could see all of these different options and opportunities, but you only have access to take one. Ultimately, in all of this, the important thing to remember is that the quality of your life is determined by the quality of your values. And the quality of your values is determined by the quality of the problems that come with those values, because no matter what you choose to care about, no matter what you give a fuck about, it's going to create problems in your life. There are going to be struggles associated with that thing that you care about. And so you want to care about the things that bring the right problems, that bring the problems into your life that you are happy to have, that feel worth having. Because that ultimately is what's going to create that long term sense of happiness, that eudaimonic happiness. Chapter four, achieving the right kind of success. Today, we live in a success obsessed culture. People feel like if they can just make enough money, if they can just have the right car or buy the right house, if they can find the right partner, then everything's going to be fixed and fine. And what's tricky is that I think we tend to be kind of bad at defining success for ourselves. We don't think very hard about how are we measuring success? What is the metric by which we determine if whether we're making progress or not? And a lot of this comes back to understanding our own motivations, right? Like a lot of people, maybe they want to have a really fancy car or really nice house or live in a certain part of town. And they think that's actually what they want, but really what they want is respect or approval or attention, not realizing that there are way easier ways to go about getting respect, approval and attention in your life than having to go spend a million dollars in a house on the other side of town. If we don't question how we're measuring success, then we're going to be unclear on what we're willing to give up to get there. And if we're not willing to give anything up to get there, then we're basically guaranteeing that we're never going to be successful in the first place. In these days, people are particularly obsessed with extraordinary success, like massive outlier success, multi-multi-billionaire type success. And people want to replicate that, but I don't think people are paying attention to the right thing. I don't think they realize what is actually involved. Because if you want to achieve massive extraordinary amounts of success, you have to do three things well. And people tend to ignore or overlook two of them. The first one is, is that you have to have a contrarian take. This is just basic logic. If you want to capitalize on an opportunity that is greater than 99.9% of other opportunities, then you have to be willing to look somewhere that 99.9% of other people are not willing to look. You have to find an idea that 99.9% of people think is a stupid idea. You have to be willing to consider it. And the irony is that this willingness to be contrarian, this willingness to look at ideas that other people think are ridiculous, usually goes completely against why people want to be extraordinarily successful. People imagine that if they're extraordinarily successful, they're going to be celebrated and everybody's going to love them. Everybody's going to want to hang out with them and be friends with them. And it's like, no, actually, the thing that's going to make you that successful is going to make you a pariah. It's going to make you look ridiculous. You're going to sound stupid. People are going to be like, that guy is crazy. What is he on about? Step number two is you have to be right about that contrarian idea. Most contrarian ideas are contrarian for a reason because they're horrible ideas. They're ridiculous. They're wrong. They're stupid. So you have to find that rare contrarian idea that everybody else is overlooked and everybody else is wrong about. And then step number three is you have to have enough conviction on that idea to execute on it massively. And this is where everybody gets tripped up because they look at somebody like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, whoever, name your famous super successful person, and they look at like, okay, what was their morning routine? How many hours a day were they working? What did they do with their weekends? Completely missing the fact that this person took an idea that everybody else thought was ridiculous and then completely rearranged their life to optimize for that idea. The optimization itself is completely secondary. Whether you wake up at 4am or 6am or work 13 hours a day or 12 hours a day, it doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter. What matters is you found the right contrarian idea. You're correct about it where most other people are incorrect and then you invested massively into it. Like one of the things Warren Buffett said himself is that over the course of a career that has spanned nearly 80 years, the vast majority of his success could be boiled down to roughly a dozen correct bets. And the truth is that almost nobody will do this because A) they're probably not going to have a contrarian idea to begin with because they're too dependent on the people around them to dictate what they think. B) even if they have a contrarian idea, they're probably not going to be right about it. And then C) even if they're right about it, they're probably going to be too scared to drop everything else they're doing and go all in on it. And even if you do get to the other side of it, even if you do get all the money and the accolades and the fame, now you're in a situation where everybody who comes to you, you don't know why they're there. Are they there to get something from you? Are they there because they want something from you? Are they trying to take advantage of you in some way? And you start asking yourself, where were these people before I was famous? What you realize is that that extraordinary success, it creates conditions for people to be attracted to you that undermines the benefits of having them in your life, that it complicates your relationships, it complicates your lifestyle. It makes you consider all sorts of repercussions and motivations that you never had to consider before. I see this misalignment all the time with people who come to me with questions. Obviously, I hear from a lot of aspiring writers and authors who come to me for advice. And it's funny because so many people come and they're like, "I want to be a writer, I want to do what you do. I've got all these great ideas. How do I get there?" And my answer to them is always, "Go publish 50 articles and then come back and ask me again." And I say this for two reasons. One is, it determines who's willing to actually do the work from the ones who just want to fantasize. But the other reason is that by actually writing 50 pieces and publishing them and getting feedback on them, that in and of itself is probably going to solve 90% of the person's questions. They're going to learn everything that they would have asked me. They're going to find out anyway. And it's funny because I've been giving this answer to people for almost two decades. I've probably told multiple hundreds of people to do this at this point, and only two people ever did it. And what that tells me is that people want the result. They don't want the process. People want the benefits. They don't want the cost. And if you don't want the cost of something, then I would argue you don't actually want the thing. I went through this myself when I was younger. Before I was a writer, I attended music school, and I wanted to be a professional musician. And it's funny because when I was in high school, I was the music guy. I'd bring my guitar to parties and I'd sing and play songs. And it was kind of a social identity. And I loved it. It kind of defined my whole adolescence. But when I got to music school and I actually tried to be a professional musician, I realized something, which is that the experience of the music. The experience of playing music for people and hearing applause and being seen as this really talented guy on stage, that's like less than 1% of what the experience of being a musician is. 99% of the experience is practicing and rehearsing by yourself alone in a room, being celebrated by nobody. And I hated that experience. I didn't enjoy any aspect of it. And it took me about 2 years in music school to finally accept to myself that I don't actually like being a musician. That because I'm not willing to sit in a room by myself for 5 hours a day, practicing songs, I'm also not willing to do what it takes to be the guy on stage. So I think people need to stop separating the process from the outcome. They need to realize that being a successful best selling author is posting hundreds and hundreds of articles online. It's having your writing ridiculed. It's having people trash you in the comments. It's having people misunderstand you constantly. That is what the process is. That is what the reality is. The benefits are just 1% of it. The other problem of focusing so much on the outcome instead of the process is that it can paralyze you. It seems too big. It seems impossible. Like this gigantic mountain that you have to climb and surmount. And so I think people just lose motivation and they become too afraid to start. One of the most important life lessons I ever learned was actually from my high school math teacher. His name was Mr. Packwood. I remember we were sitting in class. We were taking an exam. And I guess most of us were having trouble with it because we were just sitting there staring at the page, not writing anything. And I remember he stopped the class and he said, "Can I say something really quick?" He said, "Let me give you a piece of advice." He said, "If you're stuck on a problem, just rewrite the problem and try to find the first step." He said, "Don't worry about solving the entire problem. Just rewrite it and find step one because there's something magical in the process of just writing step one. That steps two, three, four, and five will start to reveal themselves." And sure enough, it was crazy. I remember sitting there writing out the problem, writing out like the most basic step, and then suddenly seeing the problem differently and realizing what steps two, three, and four were. And as I got to university and adulthood, I realized that this applied to so many things in life. Like if I had a term paper and I didn't know how to start it, I'd pull back and I'd say, "You know what? Let's just write two sentences. Let's just write one sentence." And sure enough, in the process of writing that one sentence, I could see the whole first paragraph. And then in the process of writing that paragraph, I would see the whole introduction. I saw this in my social life. I'd go to a party, I'd see a cute girl, I didn't know what to say to her. Just walk up and say, "Hi." And in the process of saying, "Hi," I'd find the next thing to say. And then in the process of saying that, I'd find the next thing to say. And next thing you know, you're in a 20-minute conversation. Eventually, when I started writing, I codified this and I called it the "do something principle," which is basically when you want something in your stuck, just do something. Find the minimum viable action. Find the action that feels doable in this moment. And just go do it. Because in the process of doing it, you will generate the motivation and inspiration to keep going. And I think this is actually one of the most profound realizations that I've had in my life, which is that inspiration is not the cause of action. It's the effect of action. The action comes first. And then once you've done the action, you get the inspiration to keep going. You don't magically feel motivated one day on the couch and then go get up and go to the gym. You get up and go to the gym and the fact that you're there motivates you to actually do something. And so when you're stuck in life, look for that minimum viable action. Look for the simplest thing you can do in this moment. Because just in the act of doing it, you will generate the motivation to keep going. The other reason people don't take action is a simple fear of failure and rejection. They don't want to embarrass themselves. They don't want to make a fool of themselves. And it's funny because if you zoom out and you think about this a little objectively, this is very irrational. Because what is rejection? Rejection is you signaling to the world. This is what I'm about. This is what I care about. And it is a certain percentage of the world looking at that and being like, "No, not for me." And that's great because now you don't have to deal with a bunch of people who weren't going to make you happy anyway. This is something that is very true, I think, in dating that applies to everything, which is that rejection is secretly a good thing because it is the sorting mechanism of the universe for removing all of the things that are not going to make you happy. The other way failure and rejection benefits you is that it's information. It shows you what you're good at, what you're not good at. It shows you how you can do things better. It's part of the learning process. It's those failures that generate the information and feedback that allow you to become great at it. Nobody became great the first time they did anything. So once you start seeing failure as part of the process, you see rejection as part of the natural filtration of your life. Not only do you stop being afraid of it, but you actually start leaning into it. So it's funny, in my own career, I quit my job in finance in 2009 to start blogging. And everybody around me thought I was insane. But I just had this conviction, "You know what? Content on the Internet. It's going to be a thing. This is really going to go somewhere. There's going to be opportunities." And so I was publishing every single day. I was writing articles all week, every week. I was working around the clock. And for a few years, I was struggling to get by. But what I didn't realize at that time is that I was market testing my ideas. I was finding different perspectives that worked with people, that connected with people. And I was getting reps that most other writers in the world weren't getting. Most other writers at that time, they would publish once a month or once a week or once every other year if they were writing a book. So they didn't get that market feedback from the reader. They didn't have that immediate relationship. And so because I got all those reps and because I wrote all of those bad articles and because I got to see what all my good ideas were and all my bad ideas were, when I did get my first book deal, I had a much clearer sense of what I wanted to say and what I thought was going to resonate and what people connected with when I talked about it. And all three of my books were massive. Smash hits. And it's funny because by that point, I had spent seven years being on this island, going home at Christmas, having everybody in my family look at me and be like, "What do you do for work again?" And me trying to explain to them what a blog was and why, no, thousands of people read this, I promise. They're just kind of shaking their head and being like, "Who? How do you make money?" And then suddenly being this huge number one New York Times bestseller, "My book is in every airport, it's in every bookstore, it's on TV, it's on the radio." And seeing the way people's disposition changed and seeing how suddenly different people started taking a different attitude towards me, different aspects of my life started changing. And don't get me wrong, success is great. Money's great. Like, I wouldn't take it back. But it does complicate things and it doesn't play out as cleanly or smoothly as it does in your fantasies. And what really surprised me is that after my books took off and I found myself with all of this publishing success, I went through a bit of a period of depression because I didn't know what the hope for anymore. I didn't have dreams anymore. Like basically everything I had dreamed of since I was 20 years old had come true. And while that was amazing, it was amazing for a few months, maybe a year. But then after that, I woke up, I was the same guy, had the same problems, dealt with the same bullshit, and I had nothing to look forward to. It was like, "Oh wow, everything, the best things I could have imagined for myself are in my past. So what do I have to look forward to? Why do anything?" And it was a surprisingly hard period to work through, especially because nobody wants to shed any tears for a depressed multimillionaire. Nobody sympathizes with the guy whose book is number one everywhere. It is like, "I'm sad. I don't know what to do with my life." And so you find yourself in this very odd, lonely position that really the only people that relate or understand are other people who have experienced sudden astronomical success. It taught me a lot about what is actually meaningful and important in our lives. And I'm extremely proud of the books and I'm extremely proud of the success. But it showed me the importance of having things to look forward to outside of my work, having dreams that exist outside of my own achievements. And be always maybe caring about something that can't be achieved, that isn't worldly or material. Want to support the channel? Join the Big Think Members community where you get access to videos early, ad-free.