The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F a Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

The Volume in Three Sentences

Finding something important and meaningful in your life is the nearly productive use of your fourth dimension and free energy. This is true because every life has problems associated with it and finding pregnant in your life volition assist you sustain the endeavor needed to overcome the particular problems yous face up. Thus, we can say that the key 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 Fine 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 Mark Manson. My notes are informal and often contain quotes from the book besides equally my own thoughts. This summary also includes key lessons and important passages from the volume.

• Conventional self-help communication which tells yous to visualize success and call back about the type of person you desire to be merely reinforces the idea that you are non that thing.
• Anybody wants yous to believe that the secret to a good life is to have a nicer task or a improve car or a prettier girlfriend.
• The fundamental to a adept life is non giving a fuck about more; it's giving a fuck about less, giving a fuck about only what is true and immediate and important.
• We are no longer facing a material crisis. We have plenty of resources: TVs and dress and goods that we don't need. The problem nosotros face is existential and spiritual. We have so much stuff and then many opportunities that we don't know what to requite a fuck well-nigh anymore.
• Considering there's an space amount of things we can at present see or know, in that location are also an space number of ways we tin detect that nosotros don't measure up, that nosotros're not practiced enough, that things aren't equally slap-up every bit they could be.
• The desire for a more positive feel is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one's negative experience is itself a positive feel.
• Pursuing something merely reinforces that you lack it in the offset place.
• Accepting your experience of life equally being dandy and wonderful is the single greatest thing you lot can exercise for your happiness.
• "You lot will never exist happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You volition never alive if you are looking for the meaning of life." -Albert Camus
• Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience.
• If you are able to not requite a fuck about the pain your goals require, then you go unstoppable.
• The moments when we don't give a fuck and take activeness are ofttimes the moments that near ascertain the course of our lives.
• You lot are going to die someday. Everyone you know is going to dice presently. And in your short life you only have a certain amount of fucks to give.
• Learning how to focus and prioritize your thoughts effectively based on finely honed personal values is possibly the greatest and almost of import struggle in life.
• Subtlety #1: Not giving a fuck is non most being indifferent. It just means you're comfortable with being dissimilar. Don't say fuck information technology to everything in life, but to the unimportant things.
• Subtlety #2: To non requite a fuck about adversity, y'all must commencement care about something more of import than adversity.
• Subtlety #three: Whether you realize it or non, you are always choosing what to give a fuck most. The fundamental is to gradually prune the things you intendance almost, and then that you only give a fuck on the most important of occasions.
• When a person has no problems, the mind automatically finds a way to invent some.
• I retrieve what about people — especially educated, pampered middle-form white people — consider "life issues" are really simply side effects of non having anything more important to worry about.
• Finding something important and meaningful in your life is perhaps the about productive use of your time and energy.
• It's okay for things to suck some of the fourth dimension.
• Practical enlightenment is the deed of becoming comfortable with the idea that some suffering is always inevitable.
• In that location is no value in suffering when it is done without purpose.
• Don't hope for a life without issues. Hope for a life with good problems.
• Problems never stop. They merely get exchanged or upgraded.
• Happiness is found in solving issues, non fugitive them.
• True happiness occurs merely when you find the problems you savor having and enjoy solving. Happiness is wanting the issues yous have and wanting to solve them.
• Emotions are merely biological signals designed to nudge you in the direction of benign change.
• Negative emotions are a sign that something is going unaddressed. They are a phone call to action. Positive emotions are the reward for taking the correct activeness.
• Nosotros should question our emotions because they are not always right.
• Don't ask yourself what you lot want out of life. It's easy to desire success and fame and happiness and great sex. Everybody wants those things. A much more interesting question to inquire yourself is, "What kind of hurting do I want?" What you are willing to struggle for is a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.
• You tin can't only be in love with the effect. Everybody loves the result. You have to love the process.
• The climb to the tiptop is a never-ending upwardly spiral with new problems always surfacing and new processes that yous must fall in dearest with. You are never immune to finish climbing because the entire point is to beloved the climb. If you always stop loving the climb, the results will never come.
• Cocky-esteem, by itself, is overrated. It doesn't help to feel good virtually yourself unless y'all take a skilful 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 get upset that those other viewpoints exist. This seems similar a logical tendency to me because before the internet and our hyper-connected modern globe, people didn't have as much likelihood of running into ideas that disagreed with their ain. Today, alternate ideas are far more likely to cross your radar screen.
• Almost of us are pretty average at most things we do. Even if you're exceptional at one matter, chances are you're average or beneath average at virtually other things.
• Our lives today are filled with information from the extremes of the bell curve of human feel. The best of the best, worst of the worst, and about upsetting of the upsetting. Nosotros but see the almost exceptional news stories because that'south what drives revenue. This is a real problem when it comes to comparison because yous tin can only exist infrequent in i affair thing and y'all're going to be beneath boilerplate in nearly everything else. That makes comparing a very unsafe game to play.
• The trouble is that the pervasiveness of technology and mass marketing is screwing upwards a lot of people's expectations for themselves.
• One of the nearly pervasive narratives about masculinity in our civilisation is that the nearly valuable thing a man tin attain is sex and it'southward worth sacrificing nearly anything to get it. (Interestingly, this corresponds to one of the dominant female narratives, which is that the greatest affair a woman can be is beautiful.)
• People who are exceptional become that style past thinking they are average and focusing on improvement. You don't become exceptional past believing you are exceptional.
• The more uncomfortable the answer, the more likely it is to be truthful.
• Bug are inevitable, but what they mean is flexible. Nosotros become to control what our bug mean to u.s. based on how we choose to think about them and how we choose to mensurate them. The way we mensurate success influences how nosotros view the problems we confront.
• "Pleasure is a fake god. Research shows that people who focus their free energy on superficial pleasures end upward more than anxious, more emotionally unstable, and more depressed. Pleasure is the near superficial form of life satisfaction and therefore the easiest to obtain and the easiest to lose."
• People who base of operations their self-worth on beingness right about everything forbid themselves from learning from their mistakes.
• "One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle volition strike you as the about beautiful." -Sigmund Freud
• People who are terrified of what others think about them are actually terrified of all the negative things they call up about themselves being reflected back at them.
• When we feel that nosotros're choosing our issues, we feel empowered. When we experience that our problems are being forced upon united states against our will, we feel victimized and miserable.
• We don't ever control what happens to us. Simply we ever control how nosotros interpret what happens to us, equally well equally how we answer.
• Accepting responsibility 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 be responsible for your issues is also 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 oft fight over who gets to exist responsible for successful and happiness. But taking responsibleness for our bug is far more important because that's where existent learning comes from.
• Growth is an endlessly iterative process. When nosotros acquire something new, we don't go from "wrong" to "right." Rather, nosotros go from incorrect to slightly less wrong. Nosotros shouldn't seek to notice the ultimate "right" reply for ourselves, merely rather, we should seek to chip away at the ways that we're wrong today then that we can be a little less wrong tomorrow.
• Certainty is the enemy of growth.
• All beliefs are wrong—some are just less wrong than others.
• Counterintuitive insight past Baumeister regarding evil: some of the worst criminals often felt expert about themselves. Depression cocky-esteem was not e'er associated with evil acts.
• The more you try to become sure virtually a detail issue, the more than uncertain and insecure you will feel.
• The more than you embrace being uncertain and not knowing, the more comfortable you volition experience in knowing what you don't know.
• The homo who believes he knows everything learns naught.
• Manson'due south Constabulary of Avoidance: The more something threatens your identity, the more you volition avoid it. The more than something threatens how you view yourself, the more you will avert getting around to doing it.
• If I believe I'm a nice guy, I'll avert situations that could potentially contradict that belief. If I believe I'k an awesome cook, I'll seek out opportunities to evidence that to myself over and over once again. The belief e'er takes precedence.
• Manson's idea of "kill yourself" is like to Paul Graham's thought of "keep your identity small." The central point is that if you don't have an identity to protect, and so alter becomes much easier.
• For any change to happen in your life, yous must have that y'all were wrong about something you lot were doing before.
• "It is the marking of an educated mind to exist able to entertain a thought without accepting it." -Aristotle
• If it feels like information technology'due south y'all versus the earth, chances are it'due south really just yous versus yourself.
• The magnitude of your success is tied to how many times you've failed at that thing.
• Goals are limited in the amount of happiness they can provide in our lives considering they are finite. Once yous achieve the goal, it can no longer provide happiness considering the cease 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 finish, which means happiness can continue indefinitely.
• Action isn't just the effect of motivation; information technology's as well the cause of it. Do something and inspiration will follow.
• How do you write a tons of books? Write "200 crappy words per solar day" and yous'll discover motivation often flows out of yous.
• Manson'south "do something" principle sounds a lot like the philosophy backside the two-minute dominion. Do something now, fifty-fifty if it'due south really small, and permit good actions cascade as a consequence.
• To truly appreciate something, you lot must confine yourself to information technology. There's a certain level of joy and meaning that you lot reach in life only when you've spent decades investing in a single relationship, a single arts and crafts, a unmarried career. And you cannot attain those decades of investment without rejecting the alternatives.
• The marking of an unhealthy relationship is when ii people try to solve each other's issues in order to feel skillful nearly themselves.
• Trust is the almost important ingredient in any relationship for the simple reason that without trust the relationship doesn't actually mean anything.
• Investing deeply in one person, one place, one task, one activeness might deny us the breadth of experience we'd like, but pursuing a latitude of experience denies usa the opportunity to enjoy the rewards of depth of experience.
• Delivery, in its ain mode, offers a wealth of opportunity and experiences that would never otherwise exist bachelor to you, no thing how many surface level experiences you pursued.
• Rejection of alternatives liberates usa. In a strange fashion, delivery to one matter offers more freedom than anything else considering it relieves y'all of all the 2d guessing about what else is out in that location.
• If there is no reason to do anything, if life is pointless, then there is also no reason to not do anything. What practice you have to lose? You're going to die anyhow, so your fears and embarrassments and failures don't mean annihilation. You might as well try.
• All of the meaning in our life is shaped by our innate want to never truly dice. Our concrete bodies will die, but we cling to the thought that we can live on through religion, politics, sports, art, and technological innovation.
• The only way to exist comfy with death is to understand and see yourself as something bigger than yourself, to contribute to some much larger entity.
• It is the act of choosing your values and living past them that makes yous smashing, not any effect or accomplishment.
• "We're all going to dice, all of u.s.a.. What a circus! That alone should brand u.s.a. dearest each other, but information technology doesn't." -Charles Bukowski

Reading Suggestions

This is a listing 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 past Mark Manson

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