This is a
chapter-by-chapter summary of a book by Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to
Living a Good Life (2016) series. One chapter, one article. Read this
summary, buy the book. Enjoy!
“You can become your own source of
inspiration. You can become your own source of motivation. Action is always
within reach. And with simply doing something as your only metric for success –
well, then even failure pushes you forward”
(Mark Manson)
Manson considers himself
extremely fortunate that he graduated college in 2007, right before the job
market tanked. After all, if he had never hit rock bottom, he would never have
had the courage to start his own online business. Many would have considered
freshly graduated Manson to be a failure, but Manson had his own metric of
success: for him, giving up on his dreams and accepting a ‘safe’ job would have
meant failing. Struggling for a few years with no money was not failing.
Just as there is no happiness without problems, there
are no improvements without thousands of tiny failures. After all, children fall thousands of times when
learning to walk, but they get back up and try again. Avoiding failure is a
learned behaviour, and it is one that we must break ourselves of in order to
move forward and improve. Again, this depends on setting good values for
ourselves (see previous article) – actions that we take every day to improve
our lives.
Embracing failure will
often mean suffering pain and discomfort and fear. Manson gives this advice for
dealing with fear of failure; when you are stuck on a problem, don’t just sit
there. Do something. The answers will follow. Action is not just the effect of
motivation, but also the cause of motivation.
Accept that
failure and pain are inherent components
of an active
life.
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