A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck (2016) is your guide to living a calm, happy life. These blinks explain how to use suffering to boost your success, define your values and purpose and live a fulfilling life in every moment.



Who should read these blinks?



  • Ambitious people feeling overwhelmed by choice and comparison

  • Aspiring entrepreneurs looking for ways to forge their own path and image



Who wrote the book?



Mark Manson is best known as a famous blogger, but he’s also an author and internet entrepreneur. His work focuses on self-development and is based on his personal experience living around the world.


What’s in it for me? Learn to focus on the important things in life – screw the rest!



We live in an era of opportunity. Whether we want to choose a career, a partner or a favored news source, we have a multitude of options available to us. So why isn’t it pure bliss to be alive? Why are so many of us stressed and unfulfilled? We should have everything we want!

It’s because we’re trying to do it all. We have so many options open to us, we end up concentrating on all our different choices and opportunities, all the time. So what can we do instead? As these blinks show, we need to find out what is important to us, and concentrate on doing that. Everything else? Well, we shouldn’t give a fuck about it! By limiting what we do, we will be happier and better people.
In these blinks, you’ll also discover


  • why death shouldn’t be feared;

  • how to find your purpose in life; and

  • how to fully embrace failure.



Suffering serves a purpose and thinking we’re special causes us to miss out on it.



Most people go through life trying to avoid pain and suffering, which might seem like the obvious and correct approach. But in reality, it’s not a great idea.

Suffering is essential to human happiness. This odd fact is a result of the key biological role that pain and suffering play in detecting when something isn’t working. For instance, when a child puts his hand on a hot stove, the pain he feels tells him that he should change his behavior and never do that again.

If you live your life solely in search of pleasure, you’ll actually end up living a life full of mistakes. Conversely, if you experience the occasional instance of suffering, you’ll be equipped to lead a better, happier life.

But that’s not to say that all pain and suffering should be welcomed with open arms; instead, only take up the struggles you consider worthwhile.

So, if you’re wholly committed to learning a new instrument, you should accept that practicing hard will mean pain, whether it’s an aching arm or missing out on socializing with friends. But, if you’re only going to learn how to play one song, it’s probably not worth the sacrifice.

However, even when you can make calculated decisions about what suffering to endure, welcoming pain isn’t easy. The first step to overcoming this difficulty is to accept that you’re not special.

This is important because people are constantly inundated by advertisements or schooling that instills the idea that they’re better than everybody else and therefore shouldn’t have to experience the pain that others do.

This delusion can lead people to avoid such pain, which, as you now know, is inadvisable. But beyond that, this line of thinking is just plain incorrect. No matter what you might think, you’re not special; you’re normal, the same as everyone else.

This also means that you have to experience the same suffering as others, and you’ll be much better off if you can accept this and learn from it.
Remember, nobody who is actually happy has to stand in front of a mirror and tell himself that he's happy."


Turning suffering into happiness requires focusing on your purpose and your values.



You now know that happiness comes from overcoming suffering. But that doesn’t mean you should try to stop your suffering. Rather, you should ask yourself “for what purpose do I suffer?”

Every person has a purpose, whether it’s to be the best sibling, a great leader or to be generous. Unfortunately, such purposes tend to get obscured by the human desires to build careers and make money.

If you want to live a happy life, it’s important to uncover your purpose. Doing so will help you focus your energy and determine what you should “give a fuck” about.

To figure out your purpose, begin by honestly asking yourself why you do things. For instance, if you’re working hard to earn money, you might ask yourself why you want the money in the first place. Do you want it to provide for your family or to donate it to charity?

By questioning your motives, you’ll come closer to discovering what your true purpose is.

Then, to be sure that you’re acting, and suffering, in ways that will advance your purpose, it’s essential to maintain the correct values. You can think of these values as the metrics by which you measure your actions.

Values are a crucial part of the equation because they’ll let you know whether you should take a particular action or whether you should suffer to improve a particular skill. To make sure you have the right ones, it’s first helpful to know which values are bad.

Essentially, bad values are those that you don’t have control over. Think of things like fame, which is entirely dependent on what others think; if you focus too much on values like these, you’ll end up giving a fuck about way too much.

Instead, find the values that’ll truly help you reach your purpose, and over which you do have control. For example, doing good and giving to others are great values, since they’re things you have the power to influence and which will help you lead a good life.


The right values can help you work through failures while learning valuable lessons.



How your life plays out is not always in your hands – but when problems arise, you cantake responsibility for dealing with them.

After all, some things – a sudden flood, for instance, or a partner who leaves you for a wealthier companion – are completely beyond your control. But what will always be in your power is how you deal with such events. For instance, if your partner left you, you could mope around feeling sorry for yourself after getting dumped, or you could utilize the experience to improve your life.

Which route you take depends entirely on your purpose and your values. If you hold the value to “do something,” you’ll be forced to act, even when you’re in pain. If your partner leaves you, your value to do something will prevent you from wallowing in self-pity and might instead compel you to get out and start dating again.

But to be able to take action after suffering, you need to remember that there’s nothing to fear about failure; it’s actually a helpful tool for self-improvement.

Every time you fail, you learn a bit more about how to do things right the next time. Just take writers, who rarely knock it out of the park with their first draft. Instead, they absorb lots of feedback from others who can point out flaws in their writing before they turn out a refined, finished product.

Holding the right values will even keep you on track to learn from failure in the long run. For instance, if you value getting lots of money at all costs, you’ll almost certainly give up on what could be a difficult but rewarding project after a period of persistent failure, moving on to other, easier and less fulfilling ways of making money.

However, if you value doing good for others, you’ll be compelled to keep pushing forward despite the many failures you might face.


Being right is an illusion and the real trick is to keep growing and learning.



From an early age, kids are taught the difference between right and wrong. But in reality, the only way you’ll ever improve your life is to throw into doubt what you already know.

The problem is that most people never so much as consider questioning their beliefs; they accept them as fact and move on. After all, it’s a lot easier to “know” that you’re unattractive than to go out and meet people.

It’s in precisely this way that certainty hampers growth. If you’re totally sure about something, you’ll never try to improve it. Furthermore, being certain actually leads to insecurity, as other ideas come along to contradict your own.

So, embracing uncertainty is key. To do so, just reject the idea that you know anything for sure. You’ll start to feel more comfortable and ready for change. Even if you consider yourself unattractive, you can go out into the world and find the people who will love you exactly the way you are.

And you shouldn’t stop at challenging one preconceived notion – you should continuously question all of your values.

This is easier said than done, since the human brain is designed to assimilate new information to fit with our preexisting beliefs. If you “know” you’re ugly and someone asks you on a date, your brain might make you believe that the other person is actually teasing you or trying to play a joke, rather than simply accepting the fact that he might think you’re attractive.

To overcome this hardwiring, and to enable yourself to question your values, you need to use new tactics. One is to consider how you feel and compare that to the world around you. If your brain is working hard to convince you of something and you realize that it’s unacceptable to the rest of the world, it’s a pretty good sign that your brain is distorting your reality.

After all, if people keep asking you out and you still think you’re unattractive, who’s wrong? You or all those other people?

Well, the odds certainly lean in one direction: it may well be time to reconsider what you believe.
If it feels like it's you versus the world, chances are it's really just you versus yourself.


To live a happy life, practice saying “no” and accept that death is inevitable.



The modern world offers people just about everything they can dream up. Every choice you make, whether it’s picking a career or deciding what you should read next, opens up a never-ending list of options. While this variety might seem appealing, it can actually be quite stifling.

Real freedom is about narrowing things down and committing to what you truly want. When you reject all the other options that don’t fill your life with meaning and happiness, you can start giving a fuck about those things that do. However, rejecting the right things requires taking responsibility for making that choice, and nobody but you can decide what matters.

This also means letting others take responsibility for their own decisions. In a relationship, for example, it’s essential to balance the elements you want to focus on with those that your partner wants to invest in. Both of you should maintain the freedom to say “no” when you want to.

All of this might seem contradictory in our consumerist society – but despite what you’ve been told, more isn’t better. In fact, research has found that people are much happier with fewer choices.

Finally, if you want to enjoy your life in the present, it’s important to recognize that you won’t be alive forever. Regardless of what anyone says, every human is afraid of dying and, to keep their memory alive after death, people create a conceptual self.

This is essentially a compilation of projects and actions that will preserve a person’s memory long after she has passed away. You might be driven to work hard to produce great art just to ensure that you’ll be famous and remembered long after your death.

But this notion of a conceptual self creates serious problems. Specifically, it prevents you from living in the present or doing the things that make you, and those around you, happy right now. So, instead of creating art to become famous, you might want to find ways to make art that bring you and your loved ones joy in the present moment.


Final summary


The key message in this book:


Life is full of choices, and while there are some things that are beyond our control, we are free to choose what we care about. The more we abide by this principle, the more freedom and happiness we’ll feel. Exercising this control requires establishing clear values and priorities that guide our actions.



Actionable advice:

Take responsibility and avoid blaming others.


Although blaming another person for a failure might offer temporary respite or relief, it doesn’t last. People can actually get addicted to feelings of moral superiority or being victimized, but in the end it’s up to you to take responsibility for your actions in order to live the life you really want.



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