Mark Manson Quotes

The smallest dog barks the loudest

And I don't care how scientific you think you are or how many letters you have after your name, you're one of us, bucko. You're a crazy Feeling Brain-piloted meat robot just like the rest of us.

Despite dreaming about making a living through his art, the real potential of becoming An Artist Nobody Likes was far, far scarier than remaining An Artist Nobody's Heard Of. At least he was comfortable with and used to being An Artist Nobody's Heard Of.

There is no correct dogma or perfect ideology. There is only what your experience has shown you to be right for you - and even then, that experience is probably somewhat wrong too. And because you and I and everybody else all have differing needs and personal histories and life circumstances, we will all inevitably come to different "correct" answers about what our lives mean and how they should be lived.

We all love to take responsibility for success and happiness. Hell, we often fight over who gets to be responsible for success and happiness. But taking responsibility for our problems is far more important, because that's where the real learning comes from. That's where the real-life improvement comes from. To

You and everyone you know are going to be dead soon. And in the short amount of time between here and there, you have a limited amount of fucks to give. Very few, in fact. And if you go around giving a fuck about everything and everyone without conscious thought or choice - well, then you're going to get fucked.

People declare themselves experts, entrepreneurs, inventors, innovators, mavericks, and coaches without any real-life experience. And they do this not because they actually think they are greater than everybody else; they do it because they feel that they need to be great to be accepted in a world that broadcasts only the extraordinary. Our

Often the only difference between a problem being painful or being powerful is a sense that we chose it, and that we are responsible for it. 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.

If you feel crappy, it's because that's your brain telling you that there's a problem unaddressed or an issue unresolved. In other words, negative emotions are a call to action. When you feel them, it's because you're supposed to do something. Positive emotions, on the other hand, are rewards for taking proper action. When you feel them, life seems simple and there is nothing else to do but enjoy it. Then like everything else, positive emotions go away, because more problems inevitably emerge.

What you consider 'friendship' is really just your constant attempts to impress people.

The truth is that there's no such thing as a personal problem. If you've got a problem, chances are millions of other people have had it in the past, have it now, and are going to have it in the future. Likely people you know too. That doesn't minimize the problem or mean that it shouldn't hurt. It doesn't mean you aren't legitimately a victim in some circumstances

What determines your success isn't, "What do you want to enjoy?" the relevant question is, "What pain do you want to sustain?

Judges don't get to choose their cases. When a case goes to court, the judge assigned to it did not commit the crime, was not a witness to the crime, and was not affected by the crime, but he or she is still responsible for the crime. The judge must then choose the consequences; he or she must identify the metric against which the crime will be measured and make sure that the chosen metric is carried out. We

In the nineteenth century, Emile Durkheim, the founder of sociology and an early pioneer of the social sciences, ran a thought experiment in one of his books: What if there were no crime? What if there emerged a society where everyone was perfectly respectful and nonviolent and everyone was equal? What if no one lied or hurt each other? What if corruption did not exist? What would happen? Would conflict cease? Would stress evaporate? Would everyone frolic in fields picking daises and singing the "Hallelujah" chorus from Handel's Messiah?
Durkheim said no, that in fact the opposite would happen. He suggested that the more comfortable and ethical a society became, the more that small indiscretions would become magnified in our minds. If everyone stopped killing each other, we wouldn't necessarily feel good about it. We'd just get equally upset about the more minor stuff.
Developmental psychology has long argued something similar: that protecting people from problems or adversity doesn't make them happier or more secure; it makes them more easily insecure. A young person who has been sheltered form dealing with any challenges or injustices growing up will come to find the slightest inconveniences of adult life intolerable, and will have the childish public meltdown to prove it.

That my most important values are honesty, empathy, and intellectual curiosity. That I'm unwilling to tolerate women who don't make me happy, no matter how hot they are.

Values underlie everything we are and do. If what we value is unhelpful, if what we consider success/failure is poorly chosen, then everything based upon those values - the thoughts, the emotions, the day-to-day feelings - will all be out of whack. Everything we think and feel about a situation ultimately comes back to how valuable we perceive it to be. Most

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. A rich woman doesn't feel a need to convince anybody that she's rich.

As a result, we've built a culture in which most technological "innovation" is merely figuring out how to scale diversions in new, more efficient (and more intrusive) ways. As the venture capitalist Peter Thiel once said, "We wanted flying cars, instead we got Twitter.

While most people whittle their days chasing another buck, or a little bit more fame and attention, or a little bit more assurance that they're right or loved, death confronts all of us with a far more painful and important question: What is your legacy? How will the world be different and better when you're gone? What mark will you have made? What influence will you have caused? They say that a butterfly flapping its wings in Africa can cause a hurricane in Florida; well, what hurricanes will you leave in your wake?

Disappointment Panda would be the hero that none of us would want but all of us would need. He'd be the proverbial vegetables to our mental diet of junk food.

Because there's an infinite number of things we can now see or know, there are also an infinite number of ways we can discover that we don't measure up, that we're not good enough, that things aren't as great as they should be.

I see every rejection simply as some form of incompatibility. Whether she thinks I'm a total creep, or she's crazy about me but we live on different continents, or she's in a horrible mood when I ask her out, or she thinks I'm cute but has different values and interests than me - whatever the reason, if a woman ever rejects me, it's because she's not compatible with me. It may be a permanent incompatibility. It may be a temporary incompatibility. But the point is that if she liked me enough, she'd be willing to work at making it happen with me. And if she doesn't, then that just means it's wrong person - or right person, wrong time. And that's fine.

Certainty is the enemy of growth.

Our most radical changes in perspective often happen at the tail end of our worst moments.

Today's tyranny is achieved by flooding people with so much diversion, so much bullshit information and frivolous distraction, that they are unable to make smart commitments.

We are defined by what we choose to reject. And if we reject nothing we essentially have no identity at all

Many people measure their self-worth based on how much money they make... once one is able to provide for basic physical needs (food shelter, and so on), the correlation between happiness and worldly success quickly approaches zero.

If Jane has to choose between 2 boxes of cereal, and Mike can choose from 20 boxes, Mike does not have more freedom than Jane. He has more variety. <...> Variety is not freedom.

Our culture today confuses great attention with great success, assuming them to be the same thing, but they are not. You are great, already. Whether you realize it or not. Whether anybody else realizes it or not. And it's not because you launched an iPhone app, or finished school a year early, or bought yourself a sweet ass boat. These things do not define greatness. You are already great because in the face of endless confusion and certain death, you continue to choose what to give a fuck about and what not to.

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.
Opposite mindset on the outside, but the same selfish creamy core in the middle.

Because here's something that's weird but true: we don't actually know what a positive or negative experience is. Some of the most difficult and stressful moments of our lives also end up being the most formative and motivating. Some of the best and most gratifying experiences of our lives are also the most distracting and demotivating. Don't trust your conception of positive/negative experiences. All that we know for certain is what hurts in the moment and what doesn't. And that's not worth much. Just

Democracy can exist only when you are willing to tolerate views that oppose your own, when you're willing to give up some things you might want for the sake of a safe and healthy community, when you're willing to compromise and accept that sometimes things don't go your way.

People who are entitled delude themselves into whatever feeds their sense of superiority. They keep their mental facade standing at all costs, even if it sometimes requires being physically or emotionally abusive to those around them. ...Entitled people, because they are incapable of acknowledging their own problems openly and honestly, are incapable of improving their lives in any lasting or meaningful way. They are left chasing high after high and accumulate greater and greater levels of denial.

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. (p.183)

But then there are those people who overidentify with their emotions. Everything is justified for no other reason than they felt it. "Oh, I broke your windshield, but I was really mad; I couldn't help it." Or "I dropped out of school and moved to Alaska just because it felt right."
Decision-making based on emotional intuition, without the aid of reason to keep it in line, pretty much always sucks.
You know who bases their entire lives on their emotions? Three-year-old kids. And dogs. You know what else three-year-olds and dogs do? Shit on the carpet.

To truly appreciate something, you must confine yourself to it. There'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 cannot achieve those decades of investment without rejecting the alternatives.

We can be truly successful only at things we are willing to fail at.

The common cultural narratives would tell me that I somehow failed myself, that I'm a quitter or a loser, that I just didn't "have it," that I gave up on my dream and that maybe I let myself succumb to the pressures of society. But the truth is far less interesting than any of these explanations. The truth is, I thought I wanted something, but it turns out I didn't. End of story.

Being open with your insecurities paradoxically makes you more confident and charismatic around others. The pain of honest confrontation is what generates the greatest trust and respect in your relationships. Suffering through your fears and anxieties is what allows you to build courage and perseverance. Seriously,

So, instead of looking for hope, try this:
Don't hope.
Don't despair, either.
In fact, don't deign to believe you know anything. It's that assumption of knowing with such blind, fervent, emotional certainty that gets us into these kinds of pickles in the first place.
Don't hope for better. Just be better.
Be something better. Be more compassionate, more resilient, more humble, more disciplined. [...]
Be a better human.

To not give a fuck about adversity, you must first give a fuck about something more important than adversity. Imagine

Because pain is the universal constant of life, the opportunities to grow from that pain are constant in life. All that is required is that we don't numb it, that we don't look away. All that is required is that we engage it and find the value and meaning in it.

When we deny ourselves the ability to feel pain for a purpose, we deny ourselves the ability to feel any purpose in our life at all.

Travel is a fantastic self-development tool, because it extricates you from the values of your
culture and shows you that another society can live with entirely different values and still function and
not hate themselves.

Evolution rewards the most powerful creatures, and power is determined by the ability to access, harness, and manipulate information effectively.

Everybody on this planet shares a handful of universal emotional realities: ambition, shame, alienation, loneliness, achievement, regret, hardship, friendship, love, heartbreak. We've all experienced it. The facts change, the feelings are the same.

Unhealthy love is based on two people trying to escape their problems through their emotions for each other - in other words, they're using each other as an escape. Healthy love is based on two people acknowledging and addressing their own problems with each other's support.

Ultimately, we are moved to action only by emotion. That's because action is emotion.

Who you are is defined by the values you are willing to struggle for.

Because when you give too many fucks - when you give a fuck about everyone and everything - you will feel that you're perpetually entitled to be comfortable and happy at all times, that everything is supposed to be just exactly the fucking way you want it to be. This is a sickness. And it will eat you alive. You will see every adversity as an injustice, every challenge as a failure, every inconvenience as a personal slight, every disagreement as a betrayal.

I believe that today we're facing a psychological epidemic, one in which people no longer realize it's okay for things to suck sometimes.

Happiness is a constant work-in-progress, because solving problems is a constant work-in-progress - the solutions to today's problems will lay the foundation for tomorrow's problems, and so on. True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving. Sometimes

What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?

YOUR values determine your behavior, not what you think she wants, not what you think others want, but what is best for you and best for the relationship.

The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.

That's simply reality: if it feels like it's you versus the world, chances are it's really just you versus yourself.

The fact is, people who base their self-worth on being right about everything prevent themselves from learning from their mistakes. They lack the ability to take on new perspectives and empathize with others. They close themselves off to new and important information. It's

Yes, breadth of experience is likely necessary and desirable when you're young - after all, you have to go out there and discover what seems worth investing yourself in. But depth is where the gold is buried. And you have to stay committed to something and go deep to dig it up. That's true in relationships, in a career, in building a great lifestyle - in everything.

Self-improvement and success often occur together. But that doesn't necessarily mean they're the same thing.

All day, every day, we are flooded with the truly extraordinary. The best of the best. The worst of the worst. The greatest physical feats. The funniest jokes. The most upsetting news. The scariest threats. Nonstop.

Our lives today are filled with information from the extremes of the bell curve of human experience, because in the media business that's what gets eyeballs, and eyeballs bring dollars. That's the bottom line. Yet the vast majority of life resides in the humdrum middle. The vast majority of life is unextraordinary, indeed quite average.

It's worth remembering that for any change to happen in your life, you must be wrong about something. If you're sitting there, miserable day after day, then that means you're already wrong about something major in your life, and until you're able to question yourself to find it, nothing will change.

Being wrong opens us up to the possibility of change. Being wrong brings the opportunity for growth.

Commitment makes decision-making easier and removes any fear of missing out; knowing that what you already have is good enough, why would you ever stress about chasing more, more, more again?

Acts of love are valid only if they're performed without conditions or expectations.

You are going to be incompatible with most

No truly happy person feels the need to stand in front of a mirror and recite that she's happy. She just is.

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.

When we say "Damn! Watch out! She doesn't give a fuck", we don't mean that she doesn't care about anything. On a contrary we mean that she does care about adversity in the face of her goals. She doesn't care about pissing some people off to do what is right

Life is essentially an endless series of problems. The solution to one problem is merely the creation of another.

every second I spend sitting around feeling distant from my true desires, avoiding the world and being afraid to engage it, is a second that I'm forfeiting the biggest gift of all: my time here in this life.

Freedom itself demands discomfort. It demands dissatisfaction. Because the freer a society becomes, the more each person will be forced to reckon and compromise with views and lifestyles and ideas that conflict with their own. The lower our tolerance for pain, the more we indulge in fake freedoms, the less we will be able to uphold the virtues necessary to allow a free, democratic society to function.

Yet, in a bizarre, backwards way, death is the light by which the shadow of all of life's meaning is measured. Without death, everything would feel inconsequential, all experience arbitrary, all metrics and values suddenly zero.

If I'm ever able to hope for nothing, it will be for the simple reason that I'm already with you.

We are actually often happier with less. When we're overloaded with opportunities and options, we suffer from what psychologists refer to as the paradox of choice. Basically, the more options we're given, the less satisfied we become with whatever we choose, because we're aware of all the other options we're potentially forfeiting.

I have both some good news and some bad news for you: there is little that is unique or special about your problems. That's why letting go is so liberating.

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.

To be happy we need something to solve. Happiness is therefore a form of action;

But the truth is far less interesting than any of these explanations. The truth is, I thought I wanted something, but it turns out I didn't. End of story. I wanted the reward and not the struggle. I wanted the result and not the process. I was in love with not the fight but only the victory. And

I wanted the reward and not the struggle. I wanted the result and not the process. I was in love not with the fight but only the victory.
And life doesn't work that way.

You get anxious about confronting somebody in your life. That anxiety cripples you and you start wondering why you're so anxious. Now you're becoming anxious about being anxious. Oh no! Doubly anxious! Now you're anxious about your anxiety, which is causing more anxiety. Quick, where's the whiskey?
Or let's say you have an anger problem. You get pissed off at the stupidest, most inane stuff, and
you have no idea why. And the fact that you get pissed off so easily starts to piss you off even more.
And then, in your petty rage, you realize that being angry all the time makes you a shallow and mean person, and you hate this; you hate it so much that you get angry at yourself. Now look at you: you're angry at yourself getting angry about being angry. Fuck you, wall. Here, have a fist.
Or you're so worried about doing the right thing all the time that you become worried about how much you're worrying. Or you feel so guilty for every mistake you make that you begin to feel guilty about how guilty you're feeling. Or you get sad and alone so often that it makes you feel even more sad and alone just thinking about it.
..Welcome to the feedback loop from hell.

The only true form of freedom, the only ethical form of freedom, is through self-limitation.

I try to live with few rules, but one that I've adopted over the years is this: if it's down to me being screwed up, or everybody else being screwed up, it is far, far, far more likely that I'm the one who's screwed up. I have learned this from experience. I have been the asshole acting out based on my own insecurities and flawed certainties more times than I can count. It's not pretty.

Many people, when they feel some form of pain or anger or sadness, drop everything and attend to numbing out whatever they're feeling. Their goal is to get back to "feeling good" again as quickly as possible, even if that means substances or deluding themselves or returning to their shitty values. Learn to sustain the pain you've chosen. When you choose a new value, you are choosing to introduce a new form of pain into your life. Relish it. Savor it. Welcome it with open arms. Then act despite it.

If people cheat, it's because something other than the relationship is more important to them. It may be power over others. It may be validation through sex. It may be giving in to their own impulses.

The percentage of women who are Receptive to you will increase proportionally to the quality of your lifestyle, your social status and your looks. The percentage of women that you're able to move from Neutral to Receptive will be proportional to how good your "game" is, or how well you're able to communicate and express yourself with women. And your ability to sort through each type of women and meet as many as possible will be determined by how fearless and bold you are when it comes to meeting women.

Why don't we do things we know we should do? Because we don't feel like it. Every problem of self-control is not a problem of information or discipline or reason, but, rather, of emotion. Self-control is an emotional problem. Laziness is an emotional problem. Procrastination is an emotional problem. Underachievement is an emotional problem. Impulsiveness is an emotional problem. This sucks, because emotional problems are much harder to deal with than logical ones.

If the pursuit of happiness pulls us all back into childishness, then fake freedom conspires to keep us there. Because freedom is not having more brands of cereal to choose from, or more beach vacations to take selfies on, or more satellite channels to fall asleep to. That is variety. And in a vacuum, variety is meaningless. If you are trapped by insecurity, stymied by doubt, and hamstrung by intolerance, you can have all the variety in the world. But you are not free.

The problem here is that most people who get caught cheating apologize and give the 'It will never happen again' spiel and that's that, as if penises fell into various orifices completely by accident. Many cheatees accept this response at face value, and don't question the values and fucks given by their partner (pun totally intended); they don't ask themselves whether those values and fucks make their partner a good person to stay with. They're so concerned with holding on to their relationship that they fail to recognize that it's become a black hole consuming their self respect.

If people cheat, it's because something other than the relationship is more important to them. It may be power over others. It may be validation through sex. It may be giving in to their own impulses. Whatever it is, it's clear that the cheater's values are not aligned in a way to support a healthy relationship. And if the cheater doesn't admit this or come to terms with it, if he just gives the old 'I don't know what I was thinking; I was stressed out and drunk and she was there' response, then he lacks the serious self-awareness necessary to solve any relationship problems.

When we let go of the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves, we free ourselves up to actually act (and fail) and grow.

Remember that in order to feel hope, we need to feel there's a better future out there (values); we need to feel as though we are capable of getting to that better future (self-control); and we need to find other people who share our values and support our efforts (community).

Because the only thing that can ever truly destroy a dream is to have it come true.

If you feel okay only when life is happy and easy-breezy-beautiful Cover-Girl, then guess what? You are not free. <...> You are the prisoner of your own indulgences, enslaved by your own intolerance, crippled by your own emotional weakness. You will constantly feel a need for some external comfort or validation that may or may not ever come

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.

But the problem with entitlement is that it makes people need to feel good about themselves all the time, even at the expense of those around them. And because entitled people always need to feel good about themselves, they end up spending most of their time thinking about themselves. After all, it takes a lot of energy and work to convince yourself that your shit doesn't stink, especially when you've actually been living in a toilet. Once

Science is arguably the most effective religion because it is the first religion that is able to evolve and improve upon itself.

intentions are always speaking ten times louder than your actual words. What are they saying?

Like physical pain, our psychological pain is an indication of something out of equilibrium, some limitation that has been exceeded. And like our physical pain, our psychological pain is not necessarily always bad or even undesirable.

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.

An obsession and over-investment in emotions fails us for the simple reason that emotions never last.

Happiness comes from solving problems. [...] Happiness is a constant work-in-progress. The solutions to today's problems will lay the foundation for tomorrow's problems.