The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck Book Description
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The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life is a generation-defining self-help guide, by a superstar blogger who cuts through the crap to show us how to stop trying to be ‘positive’ all the time so that we can truly become better, happier people.
Mark Manson is a self-help author, personal development consultant, entrepreneur, and blogger.
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck Book Review
The book deals with society’s pre-occupation with positive experiences and treating any negative experience as wrong, to be removed from life.
This pre-occupation with ‘positive experiences’ has created a generation of people having unrealistic expectations, who feel entitled and who have inadequate coping mechanisms to deal with failure and rejection, that is inevitable in life. The result is anxiety, a sense of failure and depression, even in those who are relatively doing quite well.
The trigger is the societal trends of consumerism, mass marketing, and social media, where ‘average,’ which by definition is the norm, is considered ‘failure.’ Mass media and social media are heavily biased towards reporting successes from the extremes of the bell curve, without highlighting the years, or even decades of grinding hard work, pain, struggle, and repeated failures suffered by those currently badged ‘successful.’
All of this is particularly visible in the Millennial generation, though by no means is this restricted to them.
The ‘conventional life advice—all the positive and happy self-help stuff we hear all the time—is actually fixating on what you lack,’ is not helping people.
Hence, this book by Mark Manson advises us to stop worrying about what others think, or measure themselves against an unrealistic yardstick. And that’s the reason for the title of the book, which is about ‘not giving a f*ck.’
Mark believes that ‘improving our lives hinges not on our ability to turn lemons into lemonade, but on learning to stomach lemons better.’
Key messages from the book are:
- Get comfortable with being different.
- Emotions are not a reliable indicator. We should develop the habit of questioning them.
- Most of us are not exceptional or unusual; we are quite average. The feeling that we are ‘entitled’ to something without doing anything generates unrealistic expectations in life and relationships.
- Most precious things in life take time and involve a journey involving struggle, hard work, and occasional failure. This journey is what makes life fulfilling and gives it meaning.
- Suffering, pain, and struggle are an integral part of life, and we need to develop coping mechanisms to deal with them. Instead of worrying, or considering it as something negative, we need to have a ‘Why’ that would make the suffering and struggle worthwhile.
- Choose your pain. For example, we need the pain of exercise and lifting weights for months and years to get that six-pack.
- Know yourself better. Understand your values and measure yourself with metrics that are internal to you instead of external metrics (jets, cars, holiday homes).
- The second half of the book talks about five values – taking responsibility for everything that happens to you, dealing with uncertainty, failure, rejection, and mortality.
I found the book a bit too long for the content. However, I believe the author used a ‘conversational style’ and language (more than hundred ‘f*ck’ words) to make the book accessible to its audience.
In my view, this is a must-read for the young generation just starting their careers and relationships. It is useful to others too.
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck Quotes
Let’s start with my favourite quote from the book.
Who you are is defined by what you’re willing to struggle for.
People who enjoy the struggles of a gym are the ones who run triathlons and have chiseled abs and can bench-press a small house. People who enjoy long workweeks and the politics of the corporate ladder are the ones who fly to the top of it. People who enjoy the stresses and uncertainties of the starving artist lifestyle are ultimately the ones who live it and make it.
Our culture today confuses great attention and great success, assuming them to be the same thing. But they are not.
Self-improvement and success often occur together. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the same thing.
The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.
Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience.
To be happy we need something to solve. Happiness is therefore a form of action; it’s an activity, not something that is passively bestowed upon you..
True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving.
Emotions evolved for one specific purpose: to help us live and reproduce a little bit better. That’s it. They’re feedback mechanisms telling us that something is either likely right or likely wrong for us—nothing more, nothing less. Emotions are simply biological signals designed to nudge you in the direction of beneficial change.
adversity and failure are actually useful and even necessary for developing strong-minded and successful adults.
Most of us are pretty average at most things we do. Even if you’re exceptional at one thing, chances are you’re average or below average at most other things. That’s just the nature of life. To become truly great at something, you have to dedicate shit-tons of time and energy to it. And because we all have limited time and energy, few of us ever become truly exceptional at more than one thing, if anything at all.
The pampering of the modern mind has resulted in a population that feels deserving of something without earning that something, a population that feels they have a right to something without sacrificing for it.
If you think about a young child trying to learn to walk, that child will fall down and hurt itself hundreds of times. But at no point does that child ever stop and think, “Oh, I guess walking just isn’t for me. I’m not good at it.” Avoiding failure is something we learn at some later point in life. I’m sure a lot of it comes from our education system, which judges rigorously based on performance and punishes those who don’t do well.
Accepting responsibility for our problems is thus the first step to solving them.
Growth is an endlessly iterative process. When we learn something new, we don’t go from “wrong” to “right.” Rather, we go from wrong to slightly less wrong.
Certainty is the enemy of growth.
Being wrong opens us up to the possibility of change.
When we let go of the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves, we free ourselves up to actually act (and fail) and grow.
…if it feels like it’s you versus the world, chances are it’s really just you versus yourself.
Improvement at anything is based on thousands of tiny failures, and the magnitude of your success is based on how many times you’ve failed at something.
“If you’re stuck on a problem, don’t sit there and think about it; just start working on it. Even if you don’t know what you’re doing, the simple act of working on it will eventually cause the right ideas to show up in your head.”
Action isn’t just the effect of motivation; it’s also the cause of it.
Healthy love is based on two people acknowledging and addressing their own problems with each other’s support.
…“immortality projects,” projects that allow our conceptual self to live on way past the point of our physical death. All of human civilization, he says, is basically a result of immortality projects…
Commitment makes decision-making easier and removes any fear of missing out
Without conflict, there can be no trust. Conflict exists to show us who is there for us unconditionally and who is just there for the benefits. No one trusts a yes-man.
If you make a sacrifice for someone you care about, it needs to be because you want to, not because you feel obligated or because you fear the consequences of not doing so.
It can be difficult for people to recognize the difference between doing something out of obligation and doing it voluntarily. So here’s a litmus test: ask yourself, “If I refused, how would the relationship change?”
…our proudest achievements come in the face of the greatest adversity.
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