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

The Book in Three Sentences

Finding something important and meaningful in your life is the most productive utilize of your time and energy. This is true because every life has problems associated with it and finding meaning in your life will help you sustain the effort needed to overcome the item problems you face. Thus, nosotros 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 align with your personal values.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck summary

This is my volume summary of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson. My notes are breezy and ofttimes contain quotes from the book as well as my own thoughts. This summary likewise includes key lessons and important passages from the book.

• Conventional self-help advice which tells you to visualize success and retrieve most the type of person y'all desire to be simply reinforces the idea that you are not that affair.
• Anybody wants you to believe that the underground to a good life is to have a nicer task or a improve car or a prettier girlfriend.
• The key to a good life is not giving a fuck about more than; information technology's giving a fuck about less, giving a fuck about just what is truthful and immediate and important.
• We are no longer facing a material crisis. We have plenty of resources: TVs and clothes and goods that nosotros don't demand. The problem we confront is existential and spiritual. We take so much stuff and then many opportunities that we don't know what to give a fuck about anymore.
• Considering in that location's an infinite corporeality of things nosotros can now see or know, there are also an space number of ways we tin discover that nosotros don't measure up, that we're not good enough, that things aren't as great as they could be.
• The desire for a more than positive feel is itself a negative feel. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one'due south negative experience is itself a positive experience.
• Pursuing something only reinforces that you lot lack it in the get-go identify.
• Accepting your experience of life as being keen and wonderful is the unmarried greatest thing you can practise for your happiness.
• "You will never exist happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life." -Albert Camus
• Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience.
• If y'all are able to non give a fuck most the pain your goals require, then you become unstoppable.
• The moments when we don't requite a fuck and take action are often the moments that about ascertain the course of our lives.
• Y'all are going to die someday. Everyone you know is going to die shortly. And in your short life yous merely have a certain amount of fucks to requite.
• Learning how to focus and prioritize your thoughts finer based on finely honed personal values is perhaps the greatest and most important struggle in life.
• Subtlety #one: Non giving a fuck is non nearly being indifferent. Information technology just means you're comfy with being different. Don't say fuck information technology to everything in life, only to the unimportant things.
• Subtlety #two: To non give a fuck about adversity, yous must beginning intendance nigh something more of import than adversity.
• Subtlety #3: Whether you realize it or not, you are ever choosing what to give a fuck near. The key is to gradually prune the things y'all care about, so that you but give a fuck on the most of import of occasions.
• When a person has no problems, the heed automatically finds a way to invent some.
• I recollect what nigh people — peculiarly educated, pampered center-grade white people — consider "life problems" are really only side effects of not having anything more important to worry well-nigh.
• Finding something important and meaningful in your life is perhaps the well-nigh productive use of your time and free energy.
• It's okay for things to suck some of the time.
• Practical enlightenment is the human activity of becoming comfortable with the thought 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. Promise for a life with good issues.
• Problems never stop. They merely become exchanged or upgraded.
• Happiness is found in solving problems, not avoiding them.
• True happiness occurs but when you lot find the issues y'all savour having and relish solving. Happiness is wanting the issues you lot have and wanting to solve them.
• Emotions are simply biological signals designed to nudge you in the direction of benign alter.
• Negative emotions are a sign that something is going unaddressed. They are a call to action. Positive emotions are the reward for taking the correct activity.
• Nosotros should question our emotions considering they are non always right.
• Don't enquire yourself what you desire out of life. It'due south piece of cake to want success and fame and happiness and great sex. Everybody wants those things. A much more than interesting question to inquire yourself is, "What kind of hurting do I want?" What you lot are willing to struggle for is a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.
• You tin can't merely be in love with the result. Everybody loves the result. You have to dearest the procedure.
• The climb to the acme is a never-ending up spiral with new problems always surfacing and new processes that y'all must autumn in love with. You lot are never allowed to finish climbing because the entire signal is to love the climb. If you ever stop loving the climb, the results will never come.
• Self-esteem, by itself, is overrated. It doesn't help to feel good most yourself unless you lot have a adept reason for feeling that way. The struggle makes self-esteem useful, non the participation trophy.
• Your problems are not privileged in their severity or hurting. You are not unique in your suffering.
• The more than exposed we are to opposing viewpoints, the more nosotros seem to get upset that those other viewpoints be. This seems like a logical tendency to me because earlier the internet and our hyper-connected modern world, people didn't have every bit much likelihood of running into ideas that disagreed with their ain. Today, alternate ideas are far more than probable to cross your radar screen.
• Most of the states are pretty average at most things we practise. Fifty-fifty if you're exceptional at ane thing, chances are y'all're boilerplate or below average at most other things.
• Our lives today are filled with information from the extremes of the bell curve of human experience. The best of the best, worst of the worst, and most upsetting of the upsetting. We but encounter the well-nigh exceptional news stories because that's what drives revenue. This is a real problem when information technology comes to comparing considering you lot tin can only be exceptional in i thing affair and you're going to be beneath average in nearly everything else. That makes comparing a very dangerous game to play.
• The trouble is that the pervasiveness of engineering science and mass marketing is screwing upward a lot of people's expectations for themselves.
• One of the most pervasive narratives about masculinity in our civilization is that the about valuable thing a man can attain is sex activity and information technology's worth sacrificing virtually anything to become it. (Interestingly, this corresponds to one of the dominant female narratives, which is that the greatest thing a adult female can be is beautiful.)
• People who are exceptional become that way by thinking they are average and focusing on improvement. You don't get exceptional past believing y'all are infrequent.
• The more than uncomfortable the answer, the more likely it is to exist truthful.
• Bug are inevitable, just what they hateful is flexible. We get to control what our issues mean to us based on how we choose to remember about them and how we choose to measure them. The way we measure success influences how we view the problems nosotros face.
• "Pleasure is a faux god. Enquiry shows that people who focus their energy on superficial pleasures end upwards more anxious, more than emotionally unstable, and more depressed. Pleasure is the most superficial form of life satisfaction and therefore the easiest to obtain and the easiest to lose."
• People who base their cocky-worth on being correct about everything prevent themselves from learning from their mistakes.
• "I day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful." -Sigmund Freud
• People who are terrified of what others think about them are actually terrified of all the negative things they call back about themselves beingness reflected dorsum at them.
• When we feel that we're choosing our problems, we feel empowered. When we experience that our problems are being forced upon us against our volition, nosotros feel victimized and miserable.
• We don't always control what happens to us. Simply we always control how we interpret what happens to u.s.a., also as how we respond.
• Accepting responsibility for our issues is the first footstep to solving them.
• A lot of people hesitate to take responsibility for their problems because they believe that to be responsible for your bug is as well to be at fault for your problems. This is non true. We are responsible for experiences that aren't our fault all the fourth dimension. This is part of life.
• People will often fight over who gets to be responsible for successful and happiness. But taking responsibleness for our problems is far more than important because that's where real learning comes from.
• Growth is an endlessly iterative process. When we larn something new, we don't go from "wrong" to "right." Rather, we go from wrong to slightly less incorrect. We shouldn't seek to notice the ultimate "right" answer for ourselves, but rather, we should seek to chip away at the means that we're wrong today so that we can be a little less wrong tomorrow.
• Certainty is the enemy of growth.
• All beliefs are wrong—some are but less wrong than others.
• Counterintuitive insight past Baumeister regarding evil: some of the worst criminals frequently felt good most themselves. Depression self-esteem was not e'er associated with evil acts.
• The more you try to become certain about a item issue, the more uncertain and insecure you lot volition feel.
• The more you embrace being uncertain and non knowing, the more comfortable you will feel in knowing what you lot don't know.
• The homo who believes he knows everything learns nothing.
• Manson's Law of Abstention: The more something threatens your identity, the more than y'all will avoid it. The more than something threatens how you view yourself, the more you will avoid getting effectually to doing it.
• If I believe I'm a overnice guy, I'll avoid situations that could potentially contradict that belief. If I believe I'thousand an awesome melt, I'll seek out opportunities to show that to myself over and again. The belief e'er takes precedence.
• Manson's idea of "kill yourself" is similar to Paul Graham's idea of "go along your identity small-scale." The cardinal point is that if y'all don't have an identity to protect, then alter becomes much easier.
• For any alter to happen in your life, y'all must accept that y'all were wrong almost something you were doing before.
• "It is the marker of an educated listen to be able to entertain a thought without accepting information technology." -Aristotle
• If information technology feels like it's you versus the world, chances are information technology'south really merely you versus yourself.
• The magnitude of your success is tied to how many times you've failed at that matter.
• Goals are limited in the corporeality of happiness they can provide in our lives because they are finite. Once you attain the goal, information technology can no longer provide happiness because the finish line has been crossed. Paradoxically, then, by choosing processes every bit your focus, yous can increment your overall, lifelong happiness past focusing on the process and not the goal. Processes never end, which means happiness can continue indefinitely.
• Activity isn't only the effect of motivation; it's too the cause of it. Exercise something and inspiration will follow.
• How do you lot write a tons of books? Write "200 crappy words per day" and yous'll find motivation oft flows out of you.
• Manson's "exercise something" principle sounds a lot similar the philosophy behind the 2-minute rule. Practise something at present, even if information technology'south actually small-scale, and allow good actions cascade every bit a effect.
• To truly appreciate something, you must confine yourself to it. There's a certain level of joy and meaning that you reach in life just when you've spent decades investing in a single human 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 2 people try to solve each other's problems in order to feel proficient about themselves.
• Trust is the near important ingredient in whatsoever relationship for the uncomplicated reason that without trust the human relationship doesn't actually mean anything.
• Investing deeply in one person, one identify, one job, i activity might deny u.s. the breadth of experience we'd similar, but pursuing a breadth of experience denies us the opportunity to bask the rewards of depth of experience.
• Commitment, in its own style, offers a wealth of opportunity and experiences that would never otherwise be available to you, no matter how many surface level experiences you pursued.
• Rejection of alternatives liberates u.s.a.. In a strange style, commitment to one thing offers more liberty than anything else because it relieves you lot of all the second guessing almost what else is out in that location.
• If there is no reason to do anything, if life is pointless, then at that place is also no reason to not do anything. What practice you take to lose? You're going to dice anyhow, so your fears and embarrassments and failures don't mean annihilation. You might as well endeavour.
• All of the pregnant in our life is shaped past our innate desire to never truly die. Our physical bodies volition die, merely nosotros cling to the idea that we can alive on through religion, politics, sports, art, and technological innovation.
• The simply fashion to be comfy 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 you lot great, not any outcome or achievement.
• "We're all going to die, all of us. What a circus! That lone should make us love each other, merely 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 futurity reading.

• The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson

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

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