Book Trailer- THE SUBTLE ART OF NOT GIVING A FUCK by Mark Manson.

Following are the key learnings that I gained through this extraordinary book of my life. The whole intention of writing these notes, is to exhibit just a trailer of the book. Frankly speaking following are not my words but these are my notes, which should be prepared by every good reader, and I'm just sharing it with you.

• To not give a fuck is to stare down life’s most terrifying and difficult challenges and still take action.
• Self-improvement and success often occur together. But that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re the same thing. Our culture today is obsessively focused on unrealistically positive expectations.
• There’s a saying in Texas: “The smallest dog barks the loudest.” A confident man doesn’t feel a need to prove that he’s confident.
• The problem is that giving too many fucks is bad for your mental health. It causes you to become overly attached to the superficial and fake, to dedicate your life to chasing a mirage of happiness and satisfaction. The key to a good life is not giving a fuck about more; it’s giving a fuck about less, giving a fuck about only what is true and immediate and important.
• (Feedback loop from hell) but we humans have the luxury of being able to have thoughts about our thoughts, The Feedback Loop from Hell has become a borderline epidemic, making many of us overly stressed, overly neurotic, and overly self-loathing. We feel bad about feeling bad. We feel guilty for feeling guilty. We get angry about getting angry. We get anxious about feeling anxious. What is wrong with me?
• By not giving a fuck that you feel bad, you short-circuit the Feedback Loop from Hell; you say to yourself, “I feel like shit, but who gives a fuck?” And then, as if sprinkled by magic fuck giving fairy dust, you stop hating yourself for feeling so bad.
• Being open with your insecurities paradoxically makes you more confident and charismatic around others. Every-thing worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience
• The avoidance of suffering is a form of suffering. The avoidance of struggle is a struggle. The denial of failure is a failure. Hiding what is shameful is itself a form of shame.

·         So what does not giving a fuck mean? Let’s look at three “subtleties” that should help clarify the matter.

• You can’t be an important and life-changing presence for some people without also being a joke and an embarrassment to others. You just can’t.
• Essentially, we become more selective about the fucks we’re willing to give. This is something called maturity. It’s nice; you should try it sometime. Maturity is what happens when one learns to only give a fuck about what’s truly fuck worthy.
• But let’s just say that in that time the prince came to a number of profound realizations. One of those realizations was this: that life itself is a form of suffering. The rich suffer because of their riches. The poor suffer because of their poverty. People without a family suffer because they have no family. People with a family suffer because of their family. People who pursue worldly pleasures suffer because of their worldly pleasures. People who abstain from worldly pleasures suffer because of their abstention. Pain and loss are inevitable and we should let go of trying to resist them. The prince would later become known as the Buddha.
• It’s not always beneficial to avoid pain and seek pleasure, since pain can, at times, be life-or-death important to our well-being.
• “Don’t hope for a life without problems,” the panda said. “There’s no such thing. Instead, hope for a life full of good problems.”
• Unfortunately, for many people, life doesn’t feel that simple. That’s because they fuck things up in at least one of two ways: 1.Deial 2. Victim mentality
• Emotions are simply biological signals designed to nudge you in the direction of beneficial change.
  
  
  

 

•       A more interesting question, a question that most people never consider, is, “What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?” Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out. The path to happiness is a path full of shit heaps and shame.

• See: it’s a never-ending upward spiral. And if you think at any point you’re allowed to stop climbing, I’m afraid you’re missing the point. Because the joy is in the climb itself.

 

• Business and motivational seminars cropped up chanting the same paradoxical mantra: every single one of us can be exceptional and massively successful. But it’s a generation later and the data is in: we’re not all exceptional.

 

• The problem with the self-esteem movement is that it measured self-esteem by how positively people felt about themselves. But a true and accurate measurement of one’s self-worth is how people feel about the negative aspects of themselves.

• A person who actually has a high self-worth is able to look at the negative parts of his character frankly—“Yes, sometimes I’m irresponsible with money,” “Yes, sometimes I exaggerate my own successes,” “Yes, I rely too much on others to support me and should be more self-reliant”—and then acts to improve upon them.

 

• The deeper the pain, the more helpless we feel against our problems, and the more entitlement we adopt to compensate for those problems. This entitlement plays out in one of two ways:

 

1. I’m awesome and the rest of you all suck, so I deserve special treatment.

2. I suck and the rest of you are all awesome, so I deserve special treatment.

 

• Being “average” has become the new standard of failure. The worst thing you can be is in the middle of the pack, the middle of the bell curve. A lot of people are afraid to accept mediocrity because they believe that if they accept it, they’ll never achieve anything, never improve, and that their life won’t matter.
• People who become great at something become great because they understand that they’re not already great—they are mediocre, they are average—and that they could be so much better. All of this “every person can be extraordinary and achieve greatness” stuff is basically just jerking off your ego. “Your actions actually don’t matter that much in the grand scheme of things” and “The vast majority of your life will be boring and not noteworthy, and that’s okay.”
• If suffering is inevitable, if our problems in life are unavoidable, then the question we should be asking is not “How do I stop suffering?” but “Why am I suffering—for what purpose?”
• Self-awareness is like an onion. There are multiple layers to it, and the more you peel them back, the more likely you’re going to start crying at inappropriate times.
• Let’s say the first layer of the self-awareness onion is a simple understanding of one’s emotions.
• The second layer of the self-awareness onion is an ability to ask why we feel certain emotions.
• But there’s another, even deeper level of the self-awareness onion. And that one is full of fucking tears. The third level is our personal values: Why do I consider this to be success/failure? How am I choosing to measure myself? By what standard am I judging myself and everyone around me?
• Everything we think and feel about a situation ultimately comes back to how valuable we perceive it to be.
• It is hard to accept at first, but that’s fine. What is objectively true about your situation is not as important as how you come to see the situation, how you choose to measure it and value it. Problems may be inevitable, but the meaning of each problem is not. We get to control what our problems mean based on how we choose to think about them, the standard by which we choose to measure them.
• If you want to change how you see your problems, you have to change what you value and/or how you measure failure/success.
• Shitty Values:

1. Pleasure. It is great, but it’s a horrible value to prioritize your life around. Ask any drug addict how his pursuit of pleasure turned out.

2. Material success. It is the danger of prioritizing it over other values, such as honesty, nonviolence, and compassion

3. Always Being Right. It’s far more helpful to assume that you’re ignorant and don’t know a whole lot. This keeps you unattached to superstitious or poorly informed beliefs and promotes a constant state of learning and growth.

4. Staying Positive. It’s simple, really: things go wrong, people upset us, accidents happen. These things make us feel like shit. And that’s fine. Negative emotions are a necessary component of emotional health. To deny that negativity is to perpetuate problems rather than solve them. The trick with negative emotions is to 1) express them in a socially acceptable and healthy manner and 2) express them in a way that aligns with your values.

• When we force ourselves to stay positive at all times, we deny the existence of our life’s problems.
• Good values are 1) reality-based, 2) socially constructive, and 3) immediate and controllable. Bad values are 1) superstitious, 2) socially destructive, and 3) not immediate or controllable.
• The rest of this book is dedicated to five counterintuitive values that I believe are the most beneficial values one can adopt. All follow the “backwards law”. The first, taking responsibility for everything that occurs in your life, regardless of who’s at fault. The second is uncertainty: the acknowledgement of your own ignorance and the cultivation of constant doubt in your own beliefs. The next is failure: the willingness to discover your own flaws and mistakes so that they may be improved upon. The fourth is rejection: the ability to both say and hear no, thus clearly defining what you will and will not accept in your life. The final value is the contemplation of one’s own mortality; this one is crucial, because paying vigilant attention to one’s own death is perhaps the only thing capable of helping us keep all our other values in proper perspective.
• We don’t always control what happens to us. But we always control how we interpret what happens to us, as well as how we respond.
• A lot of people hesitate to take responsibility for their problems because they believe that to be responsible for your problems is to also be at fault for your problems.
• There’s a difference between blaming someone else for your situation and that person’s actually being responsible for your situation. Nobody else is ever responsible for your situation but you.
• This is because you always get to choose how you see things, how you react to things, how you value things. You always get to choose the metric by which to measure your experiences.
• The biggest problem with victimhood chic is that it sucks attention away from actual victims.
• 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.
• Many people become so obsessed with being “right” about their life that they never end up actually living it.
• It’s easier to sit in a painful certainty that nobody would find you attractive, that nobody appreciates your talents, than to actually test those beliefs and find out for sure.
• Certainty is the enemy of growth. Nothing is for certain until it has already happened—and even then, it’s still debatable.
• Our mind’s biggest priority when processing experiences is to interpret them in such a way that they will cohere with all of our previous experiences, feelings, and beliefs.
• The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.
• “Knowing yourself” or “finding yourself” can be dangerous. It can cement you into a strict role and saddle you with unnecessary expectations. It can close you off to inner potential and outer opportunities. I say don’t find yourself. I say never know who you are. Because that’s what keeps you striving and discovering. And it forces you to remain humble in your judgments and accepting of the differences in others.
• My recommendation: don’t be special; don’t be unique. Redefine your metrics in mundane and broad ways. Choose to measure yourself not as a rising star or an undiscovered genius. Choose to measure yourself not as some horrible victim or dismal failure. Instead, measure yourself by more mundane identities: a student, a partner, a friend, a creator.
• Life is about not knowing and then doing something anyway. All of life is like this. It never changes. Even when you’re happy. Even when you’re farting fairy dust. Even when you win the lottery and buy a small fleet of Jet Skis, you still won’t know what the hell you’re doing. Don’t ever forget that. And don’t ever be afraid of that.
• Don’t just sit there. Do something. The answers will follow.
• The thing about motivation is that it’s not only a three-part chain, but an endless loop: Inspiration → Motivation → Action → Inspiration → Motivation → Action → Etc.
• If you lack the motivation to make an important change in your life, do something—anything, really—and then harness the reaction to that action as a way to begin motivating yourself.
• The only way to achieve meaning and a sense of importance in one’s life is through a rejection of alternatives, a narrowing of freedom, a choice of commitment to one place, one belief, or (gulp) one person.
• 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.
• I asked him where I could find him later on. He smiled and said, “Seek the truth for yourself, and I will meet you there!” I nodded and made a serious face. “Okay, I’ll see you there,” I replied, as if everyone knew exactly where the truth was and how to get to it. It took scuba divers three hours to find Josh’s body at the bottom of the lake.
• But he said something like, “Why do you care that I’m dead when you’re still so afraid to live?” I woke up crying.
• The only way to be comfortable with death is to understand and see yourself as something bigger than yourself; to choose values that stretch beyond serving yourself, that are simple and immediate and controllable and tolerant of the chaotic world around you