the Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck Mark Manson

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 truthful considering every life has issues associated with it and finding meaning in your life will help you sustain the attempt needed to overcome the particular problems y'all face. Thus, we can say that the fundamental to living a good life is not giving a fuck virtually more things, only rather, giving a fuck only about 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 Fine art of Not Giving a F*ck by Marking Manson. My notes are informal and frequently comprise quotes from the book also as my ain thoughts. This summary also includes fundamental lessons and important passages from the book.

• Conventional self-help communication which tells y'all to visualize success and think about the type of person you lot want to be only reinforces the idea that you are non that thing.
• Everyone wants you to believe that the cloak-and-dagger to a good life is to have a nicer job or a better machine or a prettier girlfriend.
• The primal to a good life is not giving a fuck most more; it's giving a fuck almost less, giving a fuck well-nigh only what is true and immediate and of import.
• We are no longer facing a material crunch. Nosotros have enough of resources: TVs and wearing apparel and goods that we don't need. The problem we face up is existential and spiritual. We have then much stuff then many opportunities that we don't know what to requite a fuck about anymore.
• Because there'due south an infinite amount of things nosotros tin can now see or know, at that place are also an space number of ways we can discover that we don't measure up, that nosotros're not good enough, that things aren't equally great as they could be.
• The desire for a more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the credence of one'south negative feel is itself a positive experience.
• Pursuing something just reinforces that y'all lack it in the outset place.
• Accepting your experience of life as being great and wonderful is the single greatest thing you lot can practise for your happiness.
• "You lot volition never exist happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. Yous will never alive if you are looking for the pregnant of life." -Albert Camus
• Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience.
• If yous are able to non requite a fuck almost the hurting your goals require, then you become unstoppable.
• The moments when we don't give a fuck and take action are often the moments that about define the course of our lives.
• You are going to die anytime. Everyone y'all know is going to die shortly. And in your curt life you merely have a certain amount of fucks to requite.
• Learning how to focus and prioritize your thoughts effectively based on finely honed personal values is mayhap the greatest and well-nigh important struggle in life.
• Subtlety #1: Non giving a fuck is not almost being indifferent. It just ways y'all're comfy with being different. Don't say fuck it to everything in life, just to the unimportant things.
• Subtlety #ii: To not give a fuck about adversity, you lot must beginning care about something more of import than adversity.
• Subtlety #3: Whether you realize it or non, yous are e'er choosing what to give a fuck about. The key is to gradually clip the things you lot care virtually, and so that yous simply give a fuck on the most important of occasions.
• When a person has no problems, the mind automatically finds a manner to invent some.
• I call up what most people — especially educated, pampered middle-grade white people — consider "life issues" are really just side effects of non having anything more important to worry about.
• Finding something important and meaningful in your life is perhaps the well-nigh 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 condign comfortable with the idea that some suffering is always inevitable.
• There is no value in suffering when it is washed without purpose.
• Don't hope for a life without problems. Hope for a life with skillful problems.
• Bug never cease. They but get exchanged or upgraded.
• Happiness is institute in solving issues, not fugitive them.
• True happiness occurs only when you detect the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving. Happiness is wanting the problems yous accept and wanting to solve them.
• Emotions are merely biological signals designed to nudge you in the direction of beneficial change.
• Negative emotions are a sign that something is going unaddressed. They are a phone call to action. Positive emotions are the reward for taking the correct action.
• Nosotros should question our emotions because they are not e'er right.
• Don't ask yourself what yous desire out of life. It'south easy to want success and fame and happiness and corking sex. 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 plough out.
• Yous can't merely be in love with the upshot. Everybody loves the result. Yous have to beloved the procedure.
• The climb to the top is a never-catastrophe upward spiral with new problems e'er surfacing and new processes that you must fall in love with. You lot are never immune to finish climbing because the entire indicate is to love the climb. If you lot ever finish loving the climb, the results will never come.
• Self-esteem, by itself, is overrated. It doesn't assistance to experience practiced about yourself unless y'all have a good reason for feeling that way. The struggle makes self-esteem useful, not the participation trophy.
• Your problems are not privileged in their severity or hurting. You lot are not unique in your suffering.
• The more exposed nosotros are to opposing viewpoints, the more we seem to get upset that those other viewpoints be. This seems like a logical trend to me because before the cyberspace and our hyper-connected modern world, people didn't take every bit much likelihood of running into ideas that disagreed with their own. Today, alternate ideas are far more likely to cantankerous your radar screen.
• Most of the states are pretty average at well-nigh things we exercise. Fifty-fifty if yous're infrequent at one thing, chances are y'all're boilerplate or below average at well-nigh other things.
• Our lives today are filled with data from the extremes of the bell curve of man feel. The best of the all-time, worst of the worst, and nigh upsetting of the upsetting. We just see the virtually exceptional news stories because that's what drives revenue. This is a real problem when information technology comes to comparison considering you lot tin can only be exceptional in one thing thing and you're going to exist below average in almost everything else. That makes comparison a very dangerous game to play.
• The problem is that the pervasiveness of applied science and mass marketing is screwing up a lot of people's expectations for themselves.
• One of the most pervasive narratives nigh masculinity in our culture is that the about valuable thing a man tin attain is sexual practice and information technology's worth sacrificing well-nigh anything to get it. (Interestingly, this corresponds to 1 of the dominant female person narratives, which is that the greatest matter a woman can exist is cute.)
• People who are infrequent become that mode by thinking they are boilerplate and focusing on improvement. You don't go exceptional by believing y'all are exceptional.
• The more uncomfortable the answer, the more likely it is to exist true.
• Problems are inevitable, but what they mean is flexible. Nosotros get to control what our problems mean to u.s.a. based on how nosotros cull to call back well-nigh them and how we cull to measure them. The way we measure success influences how nosotros view the problems we face.
• "Pleasure is a fake god. Enquiry shows that people who focus their free energy on superficial pleasures stop upward more than anxious, more emotionally unstable, and more depressed. Pleasance is the most superficial form of life satisfaction and therefore the easiest to obtain and the easiest to lose."
• People who base their self-worth on existence right most everything forbid themselves from learning from their mistakes.
• "Ane day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the nearly beautiful." -Sigmund Freud
• People who are terrified of what others call back virtually them are actually terrified of all the negative things they think virtually themselves being reflected back at them.
• When nosotros feel that nosotros're choosing our problems, we feel empowered. When we feel that our issues are beingness forced upon u.s.a. against our will, we experience victimized and miserable.
• Nosotros don't always control what happens to us. Just we e'er control how we interpret what happens to u.s., besides as how we respond.
• Accepting responsibleness for our problems is the first step to solving them.
• A lot of people hesitate to have responsibility for their problems because they believe that to exist responsible for your problems is likewise to be at fault for your problems. This is not true. Nosotros are responsible for experiences that aren't our mistake all the time. This is office of life.
• People will often fight over who gets to be responsible for successful and happiness. Only taking responsibility for our problems is far more than of import because that's where real learning comes from.
• Growth is an endlessly iterative process. When we learn something new, we don't get from "incorrect" to "right." Rather, we go from wrong to slightly less wrong. We shouldn't seek to notice the ultimate "right" answer for ourselves, merely rather, we should seek to flake away at the ways that nosotros're incorrect today so that we can be a little less wrong tomorrow.
• Certainty is the enemy of growth.
• All behavior are wrong—some are merely less wrong than others.
• Counterintuitive insight past Baumeister regarding evil: some of the worst criminals often felt good about themselves. Low cocky-esteem was not always associated with evil acts.
• The more you lot try to become sure about a particular upshot, the more uncertain and insecure you will feel.
• The more you embrace beingness uncertain and non knowing, the more comfortable you will experience in knowing what you don't know.
• The human who believes he knows everything learns nothing.
• Manson's Law of Avoidance: The more than something threatens your identity, the more you lot volition avert information technology. The more than something threatens how you view yourself, the more you lot 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'm an awesome cook, I'll seek out opportunities to evidence that to myself over and over once more. The belief ever takes precedence.
• Manson's idea of "kill yourself" is similar to Paul Graham's idea of "keep your identity small-scale." The central point is that if you don't have an identity to protect, then change becomes much easier.
• For whatever change to happen in your life, you lot must accept that you were wrong most something you were doing earlier.
• "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a idea without accepting information technology." -Aristotle
• If it feels like it's you versus the world, chances are it's actually but yous versus yourself.
• The magnitude of your success is tied to how many times you've failed at that affair.
• Goals are limited in the amount of happiness they can provide in our lives because they are finite. Once you accomplish the goal, information technology can no longer provide happiness because the stop line has been crossed. Paradoxically, then, by choosing processes as your focus, you tin can increase your overall, lifelong happiness by focusing on the process and not the goal. Processes never end, which means happiness can proceed indefinitely.
• Action isn't merely the upshot of motivation; it'due south also the cause of it. Do something and inspiration will follow.
• How do y'all write a tons of books? Write "200 crappy words per day" and you lot'll notice motivation ofttimes flows out of y'all.
• Manson's "do something" principle sounds a lot like the philosophy behind the 2-minute rule. Do something now, even if it's really small, and let good actions cascade as a issue.
• To truly capeesh something, you must confine yourself to it. There's a certain level of joy and meaning that you reach in life simply when you've spent decades investing in a single relationship, a unmarried craft, a single career. And you cannot achieve those decades of investment without rejecting the alternatives.
• The mark of an unhealthy relationship is when ii people attempt to solve each other's bug in order to feel good about themselves.
• Trust is the most important ingredient in any relationship for the simple reason that without trust the relationship doesn't really mean anything.
• Investing deeply in one person, i place, one job, one activeness might deny us the breadth of feel we'd similar, but pursuing a breadth of feel denies usa the opportunity to enjoy the rewards of depth of experience.
• Delivery, in its own way, offers a wealth of opportunity and experiences that would never otherwise exist bachelor to you, no matter how many surface level experiences you pursued.
• Rejection of alternatives liberates us. In a strange mode, commitment to one matter offers more than freedom than anything else because it relieves you of all the second guessing about what else is out in that location.
• If there is no reason to do anything, if life is pointless, and so there is also no reason to not practise annihilation. What do you have to lose? You're going to die anyhow, so your fears and embarrassments and failures don't mean anything. You lot might as well try.
• All of the pregnant in our life is shaped past our innate desire to never truly die. Our concrete bodies will dice, merely we cling to the idea that we tin can live on through religion, politics, sports, art, and technological innovation.
• The only style to be comfortable with death is to understand and come across yourself as something bigger than yourself, to contribute to some much larger entity.
• It is the act of choosing your values and living past them that makes y'all great, not any issue or achievement.
• "Nosotros're all going to dice, all of u.s.a.. What a circus! That alone should make united states 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 Not Giving a F*ck, which might exist useful for future reading.

• The Deprival of Death past Ernest Becker

The Subtle Art of Non Giving a F*ck past Marker Manson

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

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