EVERYTHING we’ve been told about how to improve our lives is wrong, according to blogger Mark Manson.
In his new, somewhat direct book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k, Manson cuts through the crap and tells us what we need to do to get it right.
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I believe that today we’re facing a psychological epidemic, one in which people no longer realise it’s okay for things to suck sometimes. I know that sounds intellectually lazy on the surface, but I promise you, it’s a life/death sort of issue.
Because when we believe that it’s not okay for things to suck sometimes, then we unconsciously start blaming ourselves. We start to feel as though something is inherently wrong with us, which drives us to all sorts of overcompensation, like buying 40 pairs of shoes or downing Xanax with a vodka chaser on a Tuesday night or shooting up a school bus full of kids.
This belief that it’s not okay to be inadequate sometimes is the source of the growing feedback loop from hell that is coming to dominate our culture.
The idea of not giving a f*** is a simple way of reorienting our expectations for life and choosing what is important and what is not. Developing this ability leads to something I like to think of as a kind of “practical enlightenment.”
No, not that airy-fairy, eternal bliss, end-of-all-suffering, bullsh*tty kind of enlightenment.
On the contrary, I see practical enlightenment as becoming comfortable with the idea that some suffering is always inevitable — that no matter what you do, life is comprised of failures, loss, regrets, and even death.
Because once you become comfortable with all the s*** that life throws at you (and it will throw a lot of s***, trust me), you become invincible in a sort of low-level spiritual way. After all, the only way to overcome pain is to first learn how to bear it.
The Failure/Success Paradox
When Pablo Picasso was an old man, he was sitting in a cafe in Spain, doodling on a used napkin. He was nonchalant about the whole thing, drawing whatever amused him in that moment — kind of the same way teenage boys draw penises on bathroom stalls — except this was Picasso, so his bathroom-stall penises were more like cubist/impressionist awesomeness laced on top of faint coffee stains.
Anyway, some woman sitting near him was looking on in awe. After a few moments, Picasso finished his coffee and crumpled up the napkin to throw away as he left.
The woman stopped him.
“Wait,” she said.
“Can I have that napkin you were just drawing on? I’ll pay you for it.”
“Sure,” Picasso replied.
“Twenty thousand dollars.”
The woman’s head jolted back as if he had just flung a brick at her.
“What? It took you like two minutes to draw that.”
“No, ma’am,” Picasso said.
“It took me over 60 years to draw this.”
He stuffed the napkin in his pocket and walked out of the cafe.
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 someone is better than you at something, then it’s likely because she has failed at it more than you have. If someone is worse than you, it’s likely because he hasn’t been through all of the painful learning experiences you have.
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.
At some point, most of us reach a place where we’re afraid to fail, where we instinctively avoid failure and stick only to what is placed in front of us or only what we’re already good at.
This confines us and stifles us.
We can be truly successful only at something we’re willing to fail at. If we’re unwilling to fail, then we’re unwilling to succeed.
A lot of this fear of failure comes from having chosen sh*tty values. Sh*tty values involve tangible external goals outside of our control. The pursuit of these goals causes great anxiety. And even if we manage to achieve them, they leave us feeling empty and lifeless, because once they’re achieved there are no more problems to solve.
Better values are process-oriented. Something like “Express myself honestly to others,” a metric for the value “honesty,” is never completely finished; it’s a problem that must continuously be re-engaged.
Every new conversation, every new relationship, brings new challenges and opportunities for honest expression. The value is an ongoing, lifelong process that defies completion.
Picasso remained prolific his entire life. He lived into his nineties and continued to produce art up until his final years. Had his metric been “Become famous” or “Make a buttload of money in the art world” or “Paint one thousand pictures,” he would have stagnated at some point along the way. He would have been overcome by anxiety or self-doubt. He likely wouldn’t have improved and innovated his craft in the ways he did decade after decade.
The reason for Picasso’s success is exactly the same reason why, as an old man, he was happy to scribble drawings on a napkin alone in a cafe.
His underlying value was simple and humble. And it was endless. It was the value “honest expression.”
And this is what made that napkin so valuable.
— This is an edited extract from The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson, published by Macmillan, available now.
— Author Mark Manson has spent a number of years studying the academic research on things such as happiness, passion goals and relationships. Mark shares his philosophy through articles on his wildly popular blog markmanson.net.
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