037: Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck // STREAM OF CONSCIOUSNESS

I recently finished reading The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson.

I started the book last year and couldn’t get through the first few pages because of the tone I was reading it in. It initially felt condescending and obvious.

After seeing it around a little more this past month, I decided to give it another go. This time, I chose to listen to it as an audiobook. This was a much better choice.

I ended up buzzing through the thing in less than a day*

While it was not the most groundbreaking self-help book I have ever read, it still managed to change my perspective on quite a few things and I’m already noticing a difference in my responses to things.

After some processing, here are the lessons from the book that have stuck with me on a personal level**:

1. Who you are is defined by what you’re willing to struggle for.
2. It’s not about not giving a fuck, it’s about changing your perspective to only give a fuck about the things that really matter, instead of all the other bullshit.
3. We all have problems. It’s a human condition. It’s just about creating better problems.
4. Happiness is not an ending, it’s merely a side-effect of solving good problems. (Thus, problems are actually critical to us being happy.) It becomes about finding problems you enjoy solving.
5. Being the best at something is an outlier and a nearly impossible thing to strive for. Embrace mediocrity.
6. The more you fail at something, the more successful you become in that thing. Embrace failure.
7. You are always going to be wrong. That’s what growth is. Real success is found in becoming a little less wrong every day.
8. Every problem in history has been had before and will be had again. Maybe not the specific circumstances, but the particular feelings you are feeling has been felt before. You are not special. This should be comforting! It means you’re never alone and historically people know how to rock this problem! It also means you can always seek out some help.
9. You are responsible for everything that has happened to you in you’re life. You get robbed? Whether you hand your purse over, or run, or choose to do nothing. You are responsible for it. You may not be to blame for the robbery but you are burdened with the responsibilities of the repurcussions. That’s just what life is. It is a series of responsibilities thrust upon our shoulders. How we react and adapt and grow is the only thing we should worry about.
10. The person you marry is the person you will have to argue with. Problems are inevitable. You can control who you choose to face them with.
11. There’s a power in just starting. You want to live a better life? Start reading self help books for 10 minutes a day. Commit yourself to give a fuck about the things that can support the life you want to create.

After reading this book, I found out I needed new brakes on my car which was quite the unexpected blow on my bank account. My first thought was, “well it’s a good problem to have, because at least I have a car!” So, maybe this book was a little more ground-breaking than I thought.

I highly recommend speeding through the damned thing because I am sure you’ll get far more from the structured novel a human spent months working on as opposed to a blog post a hungover woman spent 15 minutes on in the notes section of her phone while her brakes got repaired.

Either way, our happiness is more in our control than we like to think. We are ultimately the only ones capable of creating a better quality of life for ourselves. This means that we have to actually want to change for the better and put in a little legwork to get there.

Once we commit to working for our best selves, the possibilities are endless.

*Props to that weird Tinder date that taught me how to watch/listen to things on 2x speed.

**It has been a whirlwind of a weekend since I finished the book and there are absolutely more cohesive articles out there.