The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach To Living A Good Life — Book Notes

Mark Manson

Published: 2016

What This Book Is About:

This book will turn your pain into a tool, your trauma into power and your problems into slightly better problems. This book will not teach you how to gain and achieve, but how to lose and let go.

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Big Lessons (or tl;dr version):

• Life is about prioritizing what to give fucks about, and what not to give fucks about.
• The desire for more positive experience is in itself a negative experience and vice versa — because the more you pursue something better, the more you are fixated on what you lack.
• Happiness is not an end-state, but a result of solving good problems.
• Instead of searching for what feels good, you should ask yourself, “What are you willing to struggle for?”
• You are not special and your problems have been faced by someone in the past, presently or in the future. Thinking otherwise is entitlement.
• The media constantly bombards us with the message that being average is failure — it’s not. We are mostly average anyway.
• To live a better life and to find good stuff to give a fuck about, you need to choose the right values and metric.
• There are shitty values and good values. Shitty values are focused on external circumstances, where good values are process-oriented and focused on the internal.

The 5 values Mark encourages you to have:

• Choosing to be responsible for whatever happens in your life, even if it’s not your fault (you can choose how you respond to things.)
• You are always wrong, and growth comes from being a little less wrong each day.
• Embrace failure because success is based on how many times you’ve failed at something. You only learn when you fail.
• Say NO; commit to something (an activity, person, place etc.). To truly appreciate something, you must commit yourself to it.