the Subtle Art of Not Giving a F a Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life

The Book in Three Sentences

Finding something important and meaningful in your life is the most productive use of your fourth dimension and energy. This is truthful because every life has problems associated with information technology and finding significant in your life will assist y'all sustain the effort needed to overcome the item problems you face. Thus, nosotros tin say that the key to living a expert life is not giving a fuck about more things, but rather, giving a fuck only about the things that align with your personal values.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck summary

This is my book summary of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Marking Manson. My notes are informal and often contain quotes from the volume as well as my ain thoughts. This summary also includes key lessons and important passages from the volume.

• Conventional cocky-help advice which tells you to visualize success and recall about the type of person you want to be simply reinforces the idea that yous are non that matter.
• Everyone wants you to believe that the secret to a good life is to have a nicer job or a better machine or a prettier girlfriend.
• The key to a good life is non giving a fuck nigh more; it's giving a fuck nearly less, giving a fuck virtually only what is true and firsthand and important.
• Nosotros are no longer facing a material crisis. Nosotros accept plenty of resources: TVs and wearing apparel and goods that we don't need. The problem we face is existential and spiritual. We have so much stuff and so many opportunities that we don't know what to requite a fuck virtually anymore.
• Because there's an infinite amount of things we can now see or know, there are also an infinite number of ways nosotros can discover that nosotros don't measure up, that we're not good plenty, that things aren't as great as they could exist.
• The desire for a more than positive experience is itself a negative feel. And, paradoxically, the credence of one'due south negative feel is itself a positive experience.
• Pursuing something only reinforces that you lack it in the starting time place.
• Accepting your experience of life every bit being dandy and wonderful is the single greatest thing you can do for your happiness.
• "You will never exist happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the significant of life." -Albert Camus
• Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative feel.
• If you are able to not give a fuck about the pain your goals require, then you go unstoppable.
• The moments when nosotros don't give a fuck and take action are often the moments that most define the course of our lives.
• You are going to dice anytime. Everyone you know is going to die before long. And in your short life you only have a certain corporeality of fucks to give.
• Learning how to focus and prioritize your thoughts finer based on finely honed personal values is perhaps the greatest and most important struggle in life.
• Subtlety #1: Not giving a fuck is not about being indifferent. It just means you're comfortable with beingness different. Don't say fuck it to everything in life, just to the unimportant things.
• Subtlety #2: To not give a fuck virtually adversity, you must first care most something more important than adversity.
• Subtlety #3: Whether you realize it or not, you are e'er choosing what to give a fuck about. The cardinal is to gradually clip the things you lot care about, and then that you just give a fuck on the about important of occasions.
• When a person has no problems, the heed automatically finds a way to invent some.
• I call up what most people — specially educated, pampered heart-class white people — consider "life problems" are really just side effects of not having annihilation more than important to worry near.
• Finding something important and meaningful in your life is perhaps the most productive apply of your fourth dimension and free energy.
• It's okay for things to suck some of the time.
• Applied enlightenment is the act of becoming comfortable with the idea that some suffering is always inevitable.
• There is no value in suffering when it is done without purpose.
• Don't promise for a life without problems. Hope for a life with good issues.
• Problems never stop. They only get exchanged or upgraded.
• Happiness is establish in solving bug, non avoiding them.
• Truthful happiness occurs only when y'all find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving. Happiness is wanting the problems yous have and wanting to solve them.
• Emotions are simply biological signals designed to nudge you in the management of beneficial alter.
• Negative emotions are a sign that something is going unaddressed. They are a telephone call to action. Positive emotions are the reward for taking the correct action.
• We should question our emotions because they are not always right.
• Don't ask yourself what yous want out of life. It's like shooting fish in a barrel to desire success and fame and happiness and great sex. Everybody wants those things. A much more interesting question to enquire yourself is, "What kind of hurting do I want?" What you lot are willing to struggle for is a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.
• You tin can't merely exist in honey with the result. Everybody loves the result. You have to beloved the process.
• The climb to the top is a never-ending upward spiral with new problems always surfacing and new processes that you must autumn in dear with. You lot are never allowed to stop climbing because the entire bespeak is to love the climb. If y'all ever stop loving the climb, the results will never come up.
• Cocky-esteem, by itself, is overrated. Information technology doesn't help to feel adept nigh yourself unless you take a adept reason for feeling that way. The struggle makes self-esteem useful, non the participation trophy.
• Your problems are not privileged in their severity or pain. Y'all are not unique in your suffering.
• The more exposed we are to opposing viewpoints, the more we seem to get upset that those other viewpoints exist. This seems like a logical trend to me because before the net and our hyper-connected modern world, people didn't have as much likelihood of running into ideas that disagreed with their own. Today, alternate ideas are far more than probable to cross your radar screen.
• Most of u.s. are pretty average at most things we do. Fifty-fifty if y'all're exceptional at ane thing, chances are you're boilerplate or below average at nearly other things.
• Our lives today are filled with information from the extremes of the bell curve of human experience. The best of the best, worst of the worst, and nigh upsetting of the upsetting. We only run into the almost exceptional news stories because that's what drives revenue. This is a existent problem when it comes to comparison considering you tin can merely be exceptional in ane thing thing and you're going to be below average in nigh everything else. That makes comparison a very dangerous game to play.
• The problem is that the pervasiveness of applied science and mass marketing is screwing up a lot of people's expectations for themselves.
• I of the most pervasive narratives about masculinity in our civilisation is that the most valuable thing a man can achieve is sex and it's worth sacrificing near anything to get it. (Interestingly, this corresponds to one of the ascendant female narratives, which is that the greatest thing a woman tin be is beautiful.)
• People who are exceptional become that way by thinking they are average and focusing on improvement. You lot don't go exceptional by believing you are exceptional.
• The more uncomfortable the answer, the more than likely information technology is to be truthful.
• Problems are inevitable, but what they hateful is flexible. We get to control what our issues mean to us based on how we cull to recollect about them and how we cull to measure them. The mode we measure success influences how nosotros view the problems we face up.
• "Pleasure is a faux god. Research shows that people who focus their energy on superficial pleasures end upwards more broken-hearted, more than emotionally unstable, and more than depressed. Pleasure is the most superficial form of life satisfaction and therefore the easiest to obtain and the easiest to lose."
• People who base their cocky-worth on being right about everything preclude themselves from learning from their mistakes.
• "Ane day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you every bit the nearly beautiful." -Sigmund Freud
• People who are terrified of what others call up about them are actually terrified of all the negative things they think virtually themselves being reflected back at them.
• When we feel that nosotros're choosing our problems, we feel empowered. When we experience that our bug are beingness forced upon us against our volition, we feel victimized and miserable.
• Nosotros don't always control what happens to usa. Just nosotros always control how nosotros interpret what happens to united states, every bit well every bit how we respond.
• Accepting responsibility for our problems is the first pace to solving them.
• A lot of people hesitate to accept responsibility for their problems considering they believe that to be responsible for your problems is also to be at fault for your problems. This is non truthful. We are responsible for experiences that aren't our mistake all the time. This is office of life.
• People will often fight over who gets to exist responsible for successful and happiness. Simply taking responsibility for our problems is far more important considering that'southward where real learning comes from.
• Growth is an endlessly iterative process. When nosotros learn something new, we don't become from "wrong" to "right." Rather, we go from incorrect to slightly less wrong. Nosotros shouldn't seek to find the ultimate "right" answer for ourselves, but rather, we should seek to bit abroad at the ways that we're incorrect today and so that nosotros tin can be a niggling less incorrect tomorrow.
• Certainty is the enemy of growth.
• All beliefs are wrong—some are but less wrong than others.
• Counterintuitive insight by Baumeister regarding evil: some of the worst criminals frequently felt skilful nearly themselves. Depression self-esteem was non always associated with evil acts.
• The more y'all try to become certain about a particular effect, the more uncertain and insecure you volition feel.
• The more you embrace being uncertain and not knowing, the more than comfortable you will feel in knowing what you don't know.
• The man who believes he knows everything learns nothing.
• Manson's Law of Avoidance: The more than something threatens your identity, the more than you will avert it. The more than something threatens how you lot view yourself, the more you volition avert getting around to doing it.
• If I believe I'chiliad a nice guy, I'll avoid situations that could potentially contradict that conventionalities. If I believe I'k an awesome cook, I'll seek out opportunities to show that to myself over and over once more. The belief e'er takes precedence.
• Manson's idea of "kill yourself" is similar to Paul Graham's thought of "keep your identity small." The primal point is that if you don't accept an identity to protect, then modify becomes much easier.
• For whatsoever change to happen in your life, you must accept that you were wrong well-nigh something y'all were doing before.
• "It is the marker of an educated heed to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it." -Aristotle
• If it feels like information technology's you lot versus the globe, chances are information technology's really but you lot versus yourself.
• The magnitude of your success is tied to how many times you've failed at that thing.
• Goals are express in the amount of happiness they tin provide in our lives because they are finite. Once you attain the goal, information technology can no longer provide happiness because the finish line has been crossed. Paradoxically, and so, past choosing processes as your focus, you can increase your overall, lifelong happiness past focusing on the process and not the goal. Processes never stop, which ways happiness can continue indefinitely.
• Action isn't just the issue of motivation; it's as well the cause of it. Do something and inspiration will follow.
• How practice you write a tons of books? Write "200 crappy words per day" and y'all'll notice motivation often flows out of you.
• Manson's "do something" principle sounds a lot similar the philosophy behind the 2-minute rule. Exercise something now, even if it's actually small, and let adept deportment cascade every bit a consequence.
• To truly capeesh something, y'all must confine yourself to it. In that location's a certain level of joy and meaning that you reach in life only when you've spent decades investing in a single relationship, a single craft, a single career. And you lot cannot attain those decades of investment without rejecting the alternatives.
• The mark of an unhealthy human relationship is when two people try to solve each other's issues in order to feel adept virtually themselves.
• Trust is the nigh important ingredient in any relationship for the simple reason that without trust the relationship doesn't actually hateful anything.
• Investing securely in one person, one place, i job, 1 activity might deny usa the breadth of experience we'd like, but pursuing a breadth of experience denies us the opportunity to enjoy the rewards of depth of experience.
• Commitment, in its own manner, offers a wealth of opportunity and experiences that would never otherwise be available to you, no thing how many surface level experiences you pursued.
• Rejection of alternatives liberates us. In a strange fashion, delivery to one affair offers more freedom than anything else because it relieves you of all the second guessing about what else is out in that location.
• If there is no reason to do anything, if life is pointless, then at that place is likewise no reason to not practise anything. What do you have to lose? You're going to die anyhow, and then your fears and embarrassments and failures don't mean anything. Y'all might likewise try.
• All of the meaning in our life is shaped by our innate desire to never truly die. Our physical bodies volition dice, but we cling to the idea that we tin can alive on through religion, politics, sports, fine art, and technological innovation.
• The only way to be comfortable with decease is to sympathise and encounter yourself as something bigger than yourself, to contribute to some much larger entity.
• It is the deed of choosing your values and living by them that makes you bang-up, non any issue or accomplishment.
• "Nosotros're all going to die, all of u.s.a.. What a circus! That lone should brand us dear each other, only it doesn't." -Charles Bukowski

Reading Suggestions

This is a list of authors, books, and concepts mentioned in The Subtle Fine art of Non Giving a F*ck, which might be useful for future reading.

• The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker

The Subtle Fine art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson

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Source: https://jamesclear.com/book-summaries/the-subtle-art-of-not-giving-a-fck

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