Mark Manson
Appearances
The School of Greatness
Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
It sounds like you had a... I mean, obviously, you were an athlete. You had a lot of confidence in the sports domain, right? So it's like even if a coach... I imagine there were plenty of coaches that chewed you out and told you you screwed up. But you knew you're like, I'm good at this. I'm a good athlete and I'm going to get better.
The School of Greatness
Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
Whereas if you've never had that evidence accumulate in your personal life, that you're a good person, that people love you, that people want to be friends with you, then yeah, that feedback is scary.
The School of Greatness
Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
It's funny. Early in my career... So I struggled a lot with social anxiety when I was younger. And it's funny because... for the people who've read my writing for a long time, like it's pretty incendiary, a little controversial, you know, like it definitely pokes at people's buttons to get pretty angry response sometimes. And early in my career, I kind of relish that.
The School of Greatness
Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
That's kind of how I made a name for myself is I would, I would like, I would poke people's buttons and kill sacred cows and say controversial things and try to get a lot of attention that way. And it's funny because I've spoken to so many writers and aspiring writers who are terrified of publishing something and making people upset. And it never bothered me. Why didn't it bother you?
The School of Greatness
Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
If you add everything together, it's like 330, 340 weeks.
The School of Greatness
Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
I don't know. I was just like, I'm right, whatever.
The School of Greatness
Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
So this is the whole point. I would write an article that I knew very well. I'm like, this is going to piss off thousands of people. I'm going to wake up tomorrow. I'm going to have 200 angry emails in my inbox. But it's fine because I think it's worth writing it. And I would do it. And then I would go to a party that night. And I'd be nervous to talk to the girl next to me.
The School of Greatness
Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
Because I'm like, well, what if she doesn't like me? Really? Yeah.
The School of Greatness
Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
What do you think that... I... The only thing I can come back to is it's like that evidence thing, right? Like, I... In my writing, I'm very aware that my writing is a better portrayal of me and my ideas than I guess my physical form is.
The School of Greatness
Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
But also, it's like I had accumulated a lot of evidence over many, many years that when I really put thought into something, whether it's blogging or posting on forums or posting on social media, when I put a lot of thought into something, it really lands for a lot of people. And I'm really good at this. Mm-hmm.
The School of Greatness
Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
Whereas in my personal life, like you, I grew up, didn't have a ton of friends, got rejected by all the girls in high school, was kind of bullied a little bit. So there was still that scar tissue there that was hard to work through.
The School of Greatness
Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
Yeah. So that's another skill, right? It's like knowing when to take feedback and when to ignore it. Because sometimes people don't get what you're about. Sometimes people don't understand what you're doing. Sometimes people project what they would do and try to get you to do what they would do, right? So it's, there's a certain amount of,
The School of Greatness
Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
wisdom and consideration that I think is required to notice those moments of like, okay, I know this person has my best interests at heart, but they also don't really get what I'm trying to do. They're doing what they would try to do. They're telling me to do what they would try to do. So it's tricky. I have this... I had an Instagram post that went viral.
The School of Greatness
Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
It said, if you wouldn't ask them for advice, then why the f*** do you care about their criticism? Yeah. That's good. I think what people... The mistake that a lot of people make is that they... They don't think about where the feedback or the advice is coming from. So true. So they're like, oh, this person doesn't like what I'm doing. They say I should be doing this better.
The School of Greatness
Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
And it's like, well, yeah, but do you respect where this person's coming from?
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
They don't. You know what's funny? This is actually, I'm glad you brought this up because the two most prominent negative reviews I've ever gotten, I actually feel kind of good about. Are they from writers?
The School of Greatness
Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
So the first one is, I think if you go to the Amazon page of Subtle Art and Not Giving a Fuck, the top negative review, I think it describes me as the guy in the bar who thinks he's smarter than he is. And who's lecturing you and thinks he's smarter than he is. And I was like... Yeah, that is kind of my vibe. I kind of am that guy. I've been to a lot of bars and I've been that guy quite a bit.
The School of Greatness
Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
And then the other one was my second book when it came out, The Sunday Times in London. It was like an 80-year-old guy reviewed it, which I don't know why they asked him to do it. He said... He said, the problem with Manson is that he's like the local drunk who spent too much time in the philosophy section. Oh my gosh, that's so funny, dude.
The School of Greatness
Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
Anyways. But I mean, well, my point there is that They're criticizing me for the thing that I think other people love me for. Yes, exactly. Which is like, I'm like a friend in the bar who's giving you advice, right? That's totally why my fans like me. And so when I see that criticism, I'm like, I'm on the right track. I'm not right for you.
The School of Greatness
Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
I've moved in the second.
The School of Greatness
Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
40.
The School of Greatness
Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
I, so the area of my life that I think I'm not killing it right now, and this is honestly, this is, this has been a struggle for a long time. It is, uh,
The School of Greatness
Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
reaching out to people staying connected to people it's kind of social life it's like non-romantic relationships right it's reaching out to friends checking in with people following up with people being like you know hey we sorry we missed each other last weekend we should hang out next weekend like i'm really bad about that i'm very passive and reactive and it's
The School of Greatness
Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
It's a bad habit that I've fallen into throughout my life. And it's funny because at the beginning of this year, my wife and I, we set intentions for the year. And one of my intentions was to be better about this. I think I got a little bit better, but I'm still bad at it.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
I'm terrible at it. And it's something that I've had to be very conscious about. And it's like, it's silly because it's the superficial stuff. Like when I'm in person, and you can attest to this, like when we're in front of each other, It's great. I can talk all day. We can hang out. Everything's good.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
But it's for some reason that connection, that texting, the calling, the responding, the emails, the scheduling stuff. I'm always really bad about that. And it seems silly because it's the superficial side of it. But I don't know. Part of it is just... you know, being busy, quote unquote, like we all are.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
But part of it, too, like sometimes I wonder if it's if it isn't a little bit of residue from like that social anxiety I was talking about. Sure. You know, if like I'm like, weekend's coming up. I want to do something with somebody, but I don't know who.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
I don't know what to invite them to. What if it's something lame? What if they don't want to come? They can say no. There's probably some really subtle residual stuff like that down there. Or maybe I just never developed the skill. Yeah, yeah.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
Yeah. That's another skill.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
I need to say no. So a lot of people struggle with this.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So what is like the first step?
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
Anyways. That's another, that's actually a great self-awareness point is that we all default to assuming that people do what we do or think the way that we think, right? That it's, and it's crazy because people are completely different. And it's interesting too because the say no thing It's funny because I probably have a very similar reaction that you have hearing my problem.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
Because when I'm hearing you talk, I'm like... It's so easy. Yeah. I'm like, well, yeah, you just say no to everybody. And then the people who are really your friends will stick around. And I'm like... And I'm like, it's solved, right? The problem's solved. But you probably hear my problem. You're like, yeah, just text everybody. And the people who want to see you will text back.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
Yeah. Did you have any fallout? Did you have any, like, people get... Yeah.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
But then you get to the other side. And I just feel like at peace.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
It's like... Pissing off 90% of people and being friends with the other 10.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
Well, this is the weird thing about... Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The School of Greatness
Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
I'd say the first one, first and foremost, is self-awareness. ultimately, if you're not aware of a problem in your life or a tendency in your life, you can't do anything about it. Right. And self-awareness is it's, it's people talk about it all the time. It's a very tricky thing. It's very slippery thing.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
Thank you.
The School of Greatness
Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
The School of Greatness
Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
Sometimes the more you try to grasp it, the more it slips out of your grasp because we're very good at tricking and deluding ourselves. You know, it's everybody kind of thinks like, well, I know what's going on in my life. Like I, I know why I did that. I know why I'm thinking this way. And it's
The School of Greatness
Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
Thank you.
The School of Greatness
Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
Thank you.
The School of Greatness
Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
It's actually the process of developing self-awareness is in some ways it should be an uncomfortable process. It should involve questioning your own assumptions, questioning your motivations. Like if you say you just had an argument with your partner, obviously you think you're right. Obviously you think you know what you're doing. But being able to step back and say, but what if I don't?
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So coming back to the self-awareness piece, like that's incredibly powerful when you realize like, Hey, the water I've been swimming in since I was a child is not normal water. Like this is, this is rocky waters. Yeah. This is, this is all splashing around and messed up. Like I'm not seeing, seeing clearly.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
What if I'm actually wrong? What if they're actually right? What would that mean? What would that suggest about me? What would that suggest about my view of the world? And actually being able to sit with that for a certain amount of time, like that is a skill. That is something that you practice and develop over a long period of time. And like most skills, it's when you're bad at it, it's not fun.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
So that, that was very, uh, very powerful for me. And, um, the second thing I remember, this was before I started my career or anything. I remember, uh, kind of once I got towards the end of the therapy and he and I started talking about ending it, he actually told me, he was like, you know, you'd be pretty good at this. I was like, really? He's like, yeah.
The School of Greatness
Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
If you're still thinking about careers, you should consider psychology. I was like, yeah, we'll see.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
You know, it's not so much that something should be ignored, but I do think there are a number of things that like tend to get overrated or maybe overrated at the moment. Like I think there are certain things that get a lot of traction on social media and so they just get spread everywhere and then people start kind of exaggerating what they are. Like I'll give you one example. is narcissism.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
I knew you were going to say that.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
It's everywhere. It's absolutely everywhere. I see it on a million accounts. I see like whenever I post anything about it it gets shared a million times and And I've been running into it, you know, in conversations with people and fans, like people start like, well, you know, I've had all these narcissists in my life and I had to cut them out. I'm like, whoa, OK, hold on time out. And.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
So most people avoid it.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
Like narcissism is a thing, obviously. It's a very bad thing. It's a very difficult thing to deal with. But it's not necessarily around every corner. And the problem with narcissism is that you need to have extended exposure to a person to properly diagnose it.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
You can't just be with somebody for a month or a few months or have them do one thing mean to you or be selfish in one way and be like, oh, well, they're a narcissist and I shouldn't have to ever deal with them again.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
And I think people are using it as an excuse to exit difficult situations and difficult relationships that in reality could probably be improved with a certain amount of patience and work. So I worry about that. There's a lot of statistics around... parents or kids cutting off their parents.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
And I think a lot of it is, you know, the narcissistic parents is kind of becoming the just or toxic parents is the justification for it. And it really makes me uncomfortable because you can have really terrible parents, but you can manage that relationship and manage your exposure to them in a way that you don't have to eliminate them from your life permanently. Yeah, you can create a boundary.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
Exactly. And I feel like people are just using narcissism as an excuse to not do the hard work of boundaries. Yeah.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
Well, I've got a whole rant about manifestation, which... My audience loves manifestation. I know they do.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
Mark's coming in on the manifestation. Let's hear it. It's not that it's wrong. Like it's, it is a thing, right? It's just, I don't like the explanation for it, which is, you know, it. What's the explanation you hear that you don't like?
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
The explanation I hear is very woo-woo and like, and also there's a little bit, speaking of narcissism, there's a little bit of kind of spiritual narcissism in it of like, of like, oh, if you really wish for something and you really focus on it, the universe is going to conspire to give it to you because, you know, there's energy in the world and it's all going to like coalesce. Like,
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
I'm like, come on, really? Look, as somebody, there are very well understood, well documented cognitive biases in psychology. Our minds are not 100% accurate. We perceive things inaccurately. One way to think about it is that there's a lot of information in the world, and our minds are not fully capable of processing all the information at all given times. And so our mind uses shortcuts to...
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
narrow in and focus on what matters. Your mind can't process everything that it's perceiving, right? So your mind takes shortcuts. And one of those shortcuts is something known as confirmation bias. And it's, confirmation bias is super simple, which is basically whatever you are thinking about, your perception will look for in your environment, right? So everybody's- Kind of like a placebo or no?
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
I mean, everybody's experienced this many times. So for example, let's say you're thinking about buying a new car. You probably go years without paying much attention to what other cars are on the highway. But as soon as you think to yourself, I'm going to buy a new car. I think I'm going to switch models. Suddenly, every day you're driving to work and you notice every single car around you.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
You're like, huh, I wonder what that one is. I wonder if that's expensive. That one looks nice. Maybe I'll get that. And like suddenly the because you've prioritized cars in your mind, you start noticing them in your environment in a way that you never noticed before. And this has a very noticeable effect.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
So like if if I tell you that the color orange is going to be very important in your life over the next week. You start seeing it everywhere. You probably see the color orange a million times a day, but you never care and you never think about it. But if I tell you that and you believe it, you'll start noticing orange in all these little things that you do all the time.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
So you can leverage cognitive bias in your favor, which is by focusing and thinking about your goals. It's like if I want to achieve something really important, If I focus and think about that day after day after day, I will start noticing opportunities or things that could help me achieve that in my environment, going about my day-to-day life.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
Now, those opportunities and things were always there. I just wasn't paying attention to them. Because I've been thinking about it regularly, now I notice them, right? So it's manifestation. There's nothing manifesting. It was already there. It was there the whole time. You just didn't prioritize it. So you never noticed. And so it's, this is what I mean when it's like, it's not wrong.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
It's just described poorly. Right. And I'm like, And I'm a science nerd, so I'm like, well, why can't we just call it leveraging cognitive bias? Well, that's not very catchy, and it doesn't sell a lot of books.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
Well, the first thing that comes to mind for me, the biggest thing for me is I historically was very avoidant in my relationships. I was the guy who would... find exit plans to every intimate relationship. When it's uncomfortable. Exactly. And well, every time things got too intimate, I would kind of freak out and like find an excuse to slip out or sabotage things.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
Absolutely.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
can call it whatever you want right it's just it's the explanation that drives me crazy you know it's like yeah it's when i hear the the flighty woo woo oh the universe is your energy is aligned with this and that i'm like i'm yeah i'm like whatever man yeah it works okay great you know you call it confirmation bias it's comfort it is like in psychology we've known it for 50 years that's a confirmation bias it's a thing you can totally leverage it in your favor i love it
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
And the explanation does matter because... Bad explanations, people can start making poor assumptions based on bad explanations. Let's say you set an intention for a certain goal and it doesn't work out. It ends up being harder than you expected or maybe you achieve it and it doesn't make you happy.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
Well, now you've got this cosmological conundrum of like, well, maybe the universe doesn't want me to be happy. No. No, it's just you thought you wanted a thing and you got it and now you actually realize it doesn't make you happy. Very human experience. Completely normal. Wow. That's good. I just have a natural allergy to the...
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
The cosmological woo-woo explanations because I think it can get people into trouble down the road.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
I don't know. It's... I don't know. Maybe you're in the same spot. But, like, it's actually... I was talking to a friend about this just a couple days ago. How early in my career, you know, I was messed up. I was still working through a lot of shit, right? And so... there was a certain like energy and fire to my work because it was also my therapy.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
Like, you know, it's like I, like my relationships are falling apart and I've got all this self-doubt and insecurity in these areas of my life. And it just, it like fueled a very passionate output. And I really do feel like I've reached a point in my life where Most areas of my life I'm pretty satisfied with.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
Like there's obviously always things I could do better and there's some areas that I think I could get better at. But ultimately, all in all, I'm like, I'm in a really good place and I feel like I've figured out a lot of my crap. And it's interesting being in this industry now because it's like some of that fire's gone or that edge has been taken off, you know?
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
I'm peaceful. Like, I'm good, man. I don't need to get angry about stuff. Interesting.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
Yeah. And also it's... You're just enjoying it all now?
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
And when I was younger, I basically torpedoed a bunch of good relationships for no good reason.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
Is, is not like being, just being, being, you know, like not feeling like I need to go conquer more stuff. And, uh, And I feel like I really, especially in the last year or two, like I really feel like I'm kind of arriving at that place where it's like I've got a bunch of business goals, but it's just fun. Like I'm just doing it because it's awesome and fun.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
And I have goals in my personal life and my health and my relationships. But it's really just because it's just good. It's just fun. It's like good for me. It's good for the people around me. There's nothing. I'm not trying to prove anything. I'm not trying to like win anything or anything. It's just it's a great place to be and I just really hope I can stay here.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
I don't get like sucked You know captivated by some chasing chasing some rat race somewhere, you know so I think that's really interesting you say that because There's a lot of people Most people don't have that skill.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
And at the time when I was doing it, I thought, Like everybody, I thought I was justified and rational and being reasonable and everything. But as the years went on, I realized when I look back, I was like, yeah, that was kind of selfish. That was a little bit unjustified. That was a little bit irrational. I was definitely being triggered. Some baggage was being triggered.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
I don't know. Maybe I'm naive, but I feel like a lot of older folks reach this place kind of naturally, you know? And it's... I don't know, what you just described... that feeling of enough. To me, that feels like the best definition of success that you could possibly have is having enough. So I don't know if I'm quite there, but this is definitely the closest I've ever been in my life.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
And I, and I'm definitely in a place too, where, uh, I'm not wanting for anything. I'm not, you know, I've got a great relationship. I've got friends, I've got hobbies. My health's good. My business is great. You know, so as long as nothing deteriorates.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
100%.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
Check out Mark Manson on YouTube. I'm on all the social accounts. I'm on everything. Check out my podcast. I'm everywhere. You can't escape me, man.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
And so when I met my wife... I kind of went into it with more self-awareness around this. I was like, okay, clearly I'm an avoidant attachment type. I clearly get triggered around intimacy and have irrational reactions and want to escape and want to run away. And I made a deal with myself is I said, look, you can always break up with her. That's always on the table. You're never trapped.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
Instagram. Check me out on Instagram.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
It's unrealistic to expect that you're going to connect or see eye to eye with every single person that you ever meet. You actually don't want everybody to be your friend because then you don't really stand for anything, right? Ooh, that's interesting.
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But you're only allowed to break up with her for a good reason. It can never be over something stupid. It can never be over like a dumb fight you started over who loaded the dishwasher wrong. It's always gotta be a real reason, like a values difference or a communication problem or a breach of trust or something. It can never be over something really dumb because that's what I had done
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consistently throughout my previous relationships.
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Totally. Which I think people don't realize like, I mean, avoidance in particular, it's a very irrational reaction and it happens when you're not aware of it, it happens unconsciously. It's almost like a knee jerk type thing. You get too close to somebody. It gets a little bit too intimate. You feel vulnerable. That freaks you out.
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And so your mind starts tricking you and it starts convincing you things that aren't true, right? It's like, oh, she's probably lying to you. Or, you know, oh, she never actually liked you that much. She's just doing this because she wants something from you. You know, it starts feeding all these stories and narratives in your brain that are completely made up.
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And they're completely based in your trauma response. But if you're not aware of that pattern within yourself, you assume it's true. And you assume it's right. And then you start a dumb fight over something completely inconsequential.
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It's a really good question. I think one of the biggest things is simply, I don't know if the right word is acceptance or non-judgment, but it's I guess the best way I'd describe it is not feeling compelled to change the other person.
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A little bit. A little bit. Yeah, for sure. And she probably tried to change me a little bit. Really? I just feel like when I look at the trends, at this point, my wife and I, we've been together, it will be 13 years next month that we've been together. And when I look at the different kind of trajectories in the relationship over that time,
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Definitely one of the biggest ones is it feels like every year that goes by, the more we just kind of live and let live. Like we just, you love who's in front of you. You don't love who they might be, who they could be, who you wish they could be. You love who's in front of you, right? And that's, ultimately that's the choice you have to make.
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And if you choose not to, if you choose to love some imagined version of your partner, some potential version of your partner, I just think you're setting yourself up for a lot of pain
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You basically become a slave to your unconscious, right? You've got all these patterns. Harville Hendricks calls them love maps. But you have all these patterns that were imprinted on you as a child. And if you're like most people, like everybody, you know, your parents weren't perfect. So your parents had baggage and issues and they kind of imprinted some of that baggage and issues on you.
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And so if you never develop any awareness around yourself, you're essentially a slave to that baggage. Like you're always just gonna assume that any impulse or emotion that arises is true without questioning it, without wondering if you're being irrational or not. Maybe you're being unfair. Maybe you're being selfish. You know, these are all human things. We all do them. And
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There's a lot of statistics around kids cutting off their parents, and it really makes me uncomfortable because you can have really terrible parents, but you can manage that relationship and manage your exposure to them in a way that you don't have to eliminate them from your life permanently. You create a boundary. Exactly.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
So I think there are some thought exercises you could go through. And you could do this in a journal. You could do this with a therapist. You could do it with a friend. I think the first one is take your relationship situation and imagine it's two other people.
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and switch around who the people are, switch around the genders, switch around the age, the, you know, who the people are and see if the dynamics, see if it still feels true to you. Ask yourself if this, if my best friend was in this If my best friend's partner was doing the thing to them that I'm doing to my partner, how would I feel about it? And I think that can be very illuminating.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
Ask people close to you. Yeah. Feedback. Feedback. And this is the tricky thing is that a lot of people don't have people around themselves that will give them honest feedback.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
Well, and that just made me think of a good point, too, is that generally people who are in bad relationships, bad romantic relationships, probably also have bad relationships with friends, with family. They're just bad at relationships in general, right? So finding somebody who... is capable of giving you honest, critical feedback. Saying like, hey man, I think you're in the wrong on this one.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
Like, I think, I think she's got a point. You know, you want to find somebody in your life who is capable of saying that to you and then ask them for their honest opinion. And, You know, it's like a doctor, right? Like, you want to get multiple... If it's a serious issue, you want to go get multiple opinions. Yes.
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I've got a whole rant about manifestation, which... My audience loves manifestation, so it's going to trigger everyone.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
Very hard. Right? Like, it's... You feel... It's hard not to take it personally. It's hard to... And I think it's because sometimes people, there are people in the world who their feedback is critical and judgmental, right? It's like they're not trying to help you. They're trying to cut you down. Hurt you, yeah. Yeah.
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Mark Manson: The Psychological Skills To Master For Fulfilling Relationships, Inner Peace & Abundance
And it's so finding people who can give you free feedback, but they're giving it for your own benefit is really good. You also bring up something that's super interesting about all of this, which is
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these emotional skills they're very domain specific like i i meet people all the time who are emotional geniuses in their professional work life and then they go home and in front of their kids they just melt down right and like can't handle anything right and then there are other people who are the complete opposite like they're just amazing family members and friends and then they go to work and they just get walked over by everybody
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You assume that the way people socialize is the same everywhere in the world, that the way people show respect is the same way everywhere in the world, that the way people show interest or affection is the same everywhere in the world. And it's not at all. It's completely different. everywhere you go.
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And being thrown into these environments where the social norms and values change constantly, I think it taught me that it's the values that actually drive everything, which is essentially what subtle art of not giving a fuck is about. Ultimately, it's you have to choose what you make important in your life, and then everything else flows from that.
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And if you choose the wrong thing, it doesn't matter how hard you work, how smart you are, how well you network, what school you went to, you're going to end up in the wrong place. And if you choose the right things to care about, you can actually stumble through hungover and end up in the right spot, right? So that initial directional choice is so, so massively important.
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There's a chapter in my book called Happiness is Overrated. I still stand by that statement. The irony with happiness is that the more you think about and worry about happiness, the more you remove it from yourself. It's almost like happiness happens when you're not worried about being happy.
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Ultimately, like every emotion, happiness, it's a psychological feedback mechanism that we evolved to help us survive and procreate, right? So when you're happy, it generally means that you've succeeded in some way in achieving your basic wants and needs. And when you're not happy, it's because you're lacking some of your basic wants and needs.
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Happiness is overrated. The more you think about and worry about happiness, the more you remove it from yourself. People get causation backwards. So the assumption is like, well, if I just find what I love, then I'll get really good at that thing. It's actually the other way around. People tend to fall in love with the thing they're really good at.
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I think when people try to elevate happiness and put it on a pedestal and try to make themselves be happy all the time, you're like missing the point. Happiness is not the cause of a good life. It's the side effect of living a good life. And living a good life requires you to sometimes struggle and become frustrated and deal with problems that you don't necessarily want to deal with at the moment.
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That's all part of it.
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I think the problem with purpose is that people go about it the wrong way. They approach purpose as if it's hiding under a rock somewhere. People are like, oh, I got to find my purpose and then sign up for a yoga class thinking that purpose is magically going to appear in the yoga class. And Purpose is not found, it's created through action that feels useful.
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And you can have useful action doing the most mundane stuff. You can have useful action doing the same stuff that you've done for 20 years. A lot of it is just simply how you choose to think about it and the value you choose to perceive in it. So I think purpose is something that's fostered and created through finding useful and meaningful reasons and motivations behind the things that you do.
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And you don't necessarily have to like go explore the world to find your purpose. Sometimes it's actually right in front of you and you've just been neglecting it.
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The only real dating advice is self-improvement. Marriage is supposed to limit your freedom, right? But I found that it was completely liberating because that's the magic sign. That's the sign of like, this has legs. This is going to last for a long time.
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It's funny because I think I got the purpose question correct before Subtle Art, and I think that's part of why Subtle Art was so successful. So the mission that I decided on around that time in my career was that the self-help industry sucked. and I wanted to make it better, make it more realistic, make it more practical, and make it more appealing for more people.
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And I do think I widely succeeded at that over the 2010s. Looking at myself personally, I think I actually lost track of that because when you experience a meteoric rise like I did, people are accustomed to things compounding gradually, right? This year, you want your business to be 10% better than last year. Next year, you want it to be 10% better than it was this year.
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And our expectation is that things just incrementally get better like that. Well, whenever something comes along and there's a thousand percent improvement in like six months, it breaks your brain. You don't really know how to conceptualize that and what you should be doing.
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And so suddenly I found myself with all these opportunities and invitations coming in that were so surreal and not in my reality six months prior. And my default was just to say yes to everything. You know, this might be my 15 minutes. Cool, let's go have dinner with a congressman. Why not, right? When is this ever going to happen again? So my de facto response was just yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
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That's cool in that it gave me a lot of great experiences and cool opportunities, and it also made a lot of money. But as anybody who's said yes to too many things knows, the consequence of that is that A, you get spread too thin, so you start doing a lot of things and none of them very well. You get burnt out because you're just overdoing it. You're overexerting yourself.
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And then third, you lose track of what matters to you, right? If the default is yes to everything, then you're not really prioritizing anything over anything else. So after about four or five years, I started to feel the repercussions of all of that. I felt extremely burnt out. I became very unhealthy. I was no longer excellent at anything. I was good or above average at a lot of things.
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And I lost track of what drove me, what motivated me. So my 30s, I think, was... very much getting a lot of clarity on what I stand for, what I want to do with my life. Because when you're young, when you're in your 20s, you think about missions and purpose and all these goals and dreams you have, right? And it's all very exciting and it's all in the future, right? I've got plenty of time.
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I'm going to work my ass off for years and decades and all this stuff. I think once you get to your mid or late 30s, you start realizing that how long and how difficult it is to accomplish one dream or goal. And you realize you really don't have enough bandwidth to do more than one or two more of those in your whole life. Suddenly your mortality becomes a lot more real.
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I really just need to pick the one hill I'm willing to die on because life is short. And that's all I'm going to have the energy and the mental power for. So my 30s was very much just getting a lot of clarity and focus. It's like, okay, I accomplished all these things. What do I want to use this stuff for? What is the point of all of this? What's the point of selling 20 million books?
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What's the point of having millions of readers? What are we driving towards over the next 20 years? Because after that, I'm probably done. I'm on a beach somewhere playing pickleball.
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It's funny, when you look at the psychological research on passion and enjoying your job, what they find is that people get causation backwards. So the assumption is like, well, if I just find what I love, then I'll get really good at that thing. But it's actually the other way around. People tend to fall in love with the thing they're really good at or the thing they're really rewarded for.
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So it's actually what you should be looking for is what do you have a talent for? What do you have a knack at? What do you find that people actually compliment you on or note that you're really good at? And then if you start focusing there, you'll start to fall in love with it. In a lot of ways, humans are just very, we're very narcissistic. We want to be great at something, right?
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And so when we do find something we're good at, our psychology is kind of wired to start making us feel emotionally satisfied.
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Yes, I think by definition, growth requires breaking or losing some aspect of your former self. And by definition, breaking or losing an aspect of yourself is painful and uncomfortable. And in many cases, there's actually a component of grief to it, right? I quit drinking a couple of years ago. And while I don't want to drink anymore, I don't want to drink again.
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Sometimes I look back at my former lifestyle and I miss it. I get nostalgic. I'm like, oh man, remember, like, God, those parties were so much fun. And there's like a little bit of sadness that comes along with it. But that's also one of the most profound transformational growths that's happened to me in the last couple of years, right?
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So generally speaking, most growth comes from some aspect of loss. Not all the time, but most of the time.
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Yes, because the way our mind works is that however you choose to define yourself, you are going to start defending that definition. So if you define yourself differently poorly or superficially, you're gonna end up spending a lot of energy and effort defending a really poor or superficial definition of who you are.
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Generally speaking, I think it's useful to think of yourself in the broadest and most ambiguous terms. I'll give you an example. I think I suffered quite a bit because I adopted the identity of I am a best-selling author. That became what I was known for that became what I had been most successful at.
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And this happens to all of us, is that when we become successful at something or when people start recognizing us for something, we just assume that that's who we are. And I spent many years feeling a lot of pressure and a lot of anxiety. And anytime I went to write a book or write something, it put a lot of pressure on myself. Well, I'm supposed to be this big best-selling author guy.
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This is supposed to be what I'm amazing at. And it took something that used to be fun and felt kind of low stakes, and it turned it into something that felt very high stakes and very anxiety-ridden. And then... Something happened a few years ago, which is I took some time off. And then I kind of realized, I'm like, wait a second. Before all this author stuff, I was an entrepreneur.
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And I built an online business. And that was a ton of fun. And I actually missed that a lot. And I was like, you know, just because being an author was the thing I was most successful at doesn't mean I have to be an author. I can be an entrepreneur who happens to write books. And they happened to sell really well.
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And that simple shift in my head, it just gave me so much internal freedom, unstifled me in so many ways. So yeah, you really want to be careful how you define yourself because no matter what you choose, you're almost choosing a mental prison for yourself. So make sure you choose a very broad and easily navigable prison.
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I think if you think about all of the worst relationship decisions you've made chances are you were either drunk or you were madly in love with somebody. And you probably used that love to justify the horrible decision. I think the truth is that romantic love is great. It feels amazing. It's very powerful. But it doesn't necessarily fix relationship problems.
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In fact, if the relationship is unhealthy, then romantic love can actually make that relationship feel even worse. Romantic love actually just amplifies whatever relationship already exists underneath. So if it's a healthy relationship and it's a very loving, respectful relationship, then the romantic love will make it feel even better.
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It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
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But if it's a disrespectful relationship, it doesn't have trust, and the people don't treat each other well, then the romantic love will actually make that relationship worse. So be very, very careful around romantic love. And very much like a drug, romantic love it short-circuits your ability to be rational. Your decision-making gets worse.
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So the same way you wouldn't drive when you're drunk, don't make any too big decisions while you're in the throes of romantic love.
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Marriage has been fantastic. When I was younger, I didn't even know if I would ever get married. I had very little desire to get married. Even when I met my wife, I was still on the fence of whether marriage even made sense as a concept or an institution. Now that I am married, and actually even very quickly after I got married, I've become a very big proponent of marriage.
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The reason is actually pretty simple. There's a lot of value in constraints. And coming back to talking about clarity and focus, right? Like knowing what's worth caring about. The value of a marriage is that it solves so many of those questions for you theoretically, for the rest of your life.
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Sometimes the way I describe it is that before I was married, even when I was in relationships, a percentage of my brain was always running this piece of software and the software was called, where's the hot girl in the room and does she like me? And I think most males could definitely relate to this software, but I don't know, maybe women too.
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But it was kind of the same way if you leave Photoshop on your computer and it just slows everything else down. It was like this program was running in the back of my brain. I'm just always looking around being like, oh wow, she's really cute. I wonder if she'd like me. It was just this pattern in the back of my head that went nonstop.
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As soon as I got engaged, it was like closing that piece of software. And suddenly like 20% of my brain's bandwidth was freed to think about more important things. And It was actually incredibly liberating, which I found very fascinating because by definition, marriage is supposed to constrain you. It's supposed to put limits on you. It's supposed to limit your freedom, right?
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But I found the actual psychological experience was that it was completely liberating because I never had to worry about all of these things I used to worry about all the time. And just the comfort and the ease that comes with that, I think can't be overstated. And then on top of that, the trust that you build with somebody over a long period of time, the stability that you build with them,
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you can't put a value on it. It's incredibly powerful and energizing knowing that no matter what happens in my business, no matter what happens in my personal life, there's always somebody that I care about who's got my back, who's always going to be supportive, who can always give me advice, who can always tell me if I'm bullshitting myself or screwing up. It's priceless.
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I definitely think getting off the apps, if you can, is useful. I think the apps unintentionally filter for the wrong things. Unfortunately, I was single before the apps. But when I think back to my dating life, I can't tell you how many times I met a woman and I wasn't initially that interested in her. But say over the course of the evening or...
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meeting her a couple times, the attraction slowly grew. And it was all these intangible things. It's like, oh, she's got this quirky sense of humor. And like, oh, wow, she said this really interesting thing. And there's a chemistry that happens. And next thing you know, it's like, wow, she's actually really hot. That's cool.
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And I think the apps, they rob everybody of the opportunity of having that experience. We're very unconscious of most of the things that draw us to another person and most of the things that will make us happy in a relationship. And most of the things that we think will make us happy in a relationship actually won't. They're like very superficial or inconsequential.
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And so, yeah, I think the apps are just filtering for the wrong things. And I think if you have ways to meet people in the real world, you should absolutely lean into that.
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The other piece of advice I give to single people all the time is sit down, write down a list of all the things you want in a partner, and then take that list, prioritize that list from most important to least important with the absolute top two or three items should be kind of non-negotiables. Like, I'd rather be single than date a person without these traits.
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Mark whatever is non-negotiable to you and then delete the rest of the list. and only look for the things that are non-negotiable. Because what I see over and over again these days, and again, it ties into the perception of so many options, is that people will meet somebody great
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They'll check all of the non-negotiable boxes, but then there's some very superficial thing, quote unquote, wrong with them. That's like number 12 on the list. It's like, oh, well, you know, their parents are from this state and I don't want to have to travel there on holidays. And they're done. It's ridiculous.
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People break up with each other, stop dating each other for the stupidest, most inconsequential, unimportant reasons. So... Find your list of non-negotiables. Delete everything else off the list. Those are all nice to haves. They're not must-haves. And understand that even if you find the perfect partner, they're still going to drive you crazy like 10% of the time. That's just life. That's humans.
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Humans are annoying. Every single human on this earth is annoying 10% of the time at least. So accept that fact and good luck.
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Absolutely. Absolutely. So that's a trait that I always tell people who are in a new relationship. So I often get the question of people like, hey, I met this amazing person. We've been dating for three months. What should I be looking out for? What are the signs that we're really good for each other long term? And the answer I always give is no.
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when you have your first fight, really pay attention to how it goes. Because if you fight well, meaning if you make up quickly, forgive each other quickly, compromise quickly, move on quickly, and there's no bad blood, people don't resent each other, people aren't bringing up an argument from four months ago to score a point against each other.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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If you fight well, if the fights are productive and relatively quick, That's the magic sign. That's the sign of like, this has legs. This is going to last for a long time. Because every couple fights, every couple disagrees about dumb stuff. The question is, are you able to move beyond the dumb stuff and not take it personally and not escalate things?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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Oh my God, I love that metaphor. Here you go. It's like buying a single stock and holding it for 30 years is going to give you much better returns than buying and selling stocks every single day. Not only because you're probably going to buy and sell the wrong ones, but the friction costs, all the fees, the carry costs and the brokerage fees and everything, it's going to eat your portfolio alive.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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There's just something about arbitrary ages that I think it's useful to take stock of your life, how much you've progressed, how much things have changed. And just the decade years, 20, 30, 40 are probably useful years to do it. I don't think there's anything necessarily special about them, but I don't know, it's switching over to a new decade.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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So yeah, buy and hold.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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It's funny because I wrote a dating book early in my career. And I think one of the first things I say in that dating book is that the only real dating advice is self-improvement. Everything else is either a detail or a distraction. I still believe that. The best thing you can do as a single person to increase your opportunities...
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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is to simply improve yourself, to develop better social skills, better social awareness, meet more people, improve your career, develop confidence, independence, all those things. The problem is sometimes you run into people who feel like they are amazing themselves, but they're not meeting amazing people. And in those situations, it's generally one of two problems.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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One is you're deluding yourself. You think your market value is much higher than it actually is, in which case it's a reality check. But the second issue is sometimes you do have amazing people, but they're just looking in the wrong places. They're not thinking clearly about who is going to make them happy, who they're probably going to naturally be compatible with, and...
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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what demographic of dating they're going to have the least amount of friction with. I'll draw another business analogy in here. When you're building a business and you're going to launch a product, you do tons of research on your target market. You get a really clear understanding of, okay,
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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What are the age, demographic, geographics of the people who are going to buy this product, the ones that are going to use it the most, the most profitable customers, right? People don't apply that same thinking to dating. They just spray and pray. They just send out 50 messages to people on apps and just hope, right? They don't think really... hard about like, okay, who am I going to appeal to?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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What is my lifestyle going to appeal to? If you're really religious, why are you trying to meet somebody in a club? Go to church. If you are a high achiever and very driven professionally... Why are you hanging out at football parties trying to meet somebody? Go to business networking events. Go to industry events. Try to meet somebody at work.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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It's basic common sense stuff like that that I'm like shocked how many people miss it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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I don't think it's harder for them to date. I think it's harder for them to commit because you run into a concept called paradox of choice, which is that the more options you have, the less satisfied you generally feel when you choose one. So you get this situation where you always feel like you could probably do a little bit better if you just kept looking.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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And that can get you in the trouble, right? Because at some point, you just have to buy and hold.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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So it makes sense to like take a little bit of extra time, take stock of your life and consider what's changed.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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The best way to decide is to simply find a person who, you naturally stop wanting to see other people. For example, when I met my wife, I was dating like three other girls. And the first date with her went amazing, but I still saw the other girls. And then the second date was also amazing.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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And I noticed after that second date, when I went back out with some of the other girls, I was kind of like sitting there being like, yeah, she's all right, but man, this other girl, I'd kind of rather be hanging out with her. And so like there was like this natural, the desire to see other people just started to kind of naturally fade over the course of like a month, month and a half.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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And I just kind of naturally wanted to see her more and more.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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Absolutely. There really is a chemistry thing that happens and you do have to filter and look for that. In your case, you know, I would say, when did you start dating again? Like how long have you been dating?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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Oh, okay. So you're like, you're fresh back on the market, basically. At this phase, what I would do is just really try to pay attention. The men that you go on dates with, just really try to pay attention to like the things you like and the things you don't. And be honest with it too, because there's probably, I imagine there's probably guys you go on dates with
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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There are things you like about them that you didn't really expect to like. And there's things you didn't like about them that you also didn't really expect to not like. Like, just try to learn your own preferences in this period because you're still just fresh back on the market. There's no rush. I would just use this as data collection.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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Like, just try to understand what you're feeling and what you're drawn to and then start filtering for those types of men.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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My 20s, I very much optimized for novelty, experimentation, and self-discovery, which I think are good things for young people in general to optimize for. I probably went a little bit too hard on all that stuff. I spent most of my 20s living as a nomad. I spent most of those years living abroad. I was never nailed down in a specific city, country, relationship.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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It's changed a lot over the years. But 2024, it's probably like... 40 to 50% books, 20 to 25% courses, and then 25 to 35% brand deals and ad revenue. And then there's a little bit of speaking in there. I don't do a ton of speaking, but I'd say 5% speaking fees.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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Podcasts and newsletter primarily, but we also do some YouTube brand deals.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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Ooh, I do not.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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I'll stick to nonfiction because fiction is kind of its own thing. But in the nonfiction world, the typical business model for like a nonfiction author is you The book is actually a lead magnet for their speaking fee. So you write a book, I don't know, you pick like some sort of business concept, like some sales tactic, right? You write a book about it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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That defines you as the expert on B2B sales in this industry. That gets you invited to all sorts of industry events. Bunch of companies want to bring you in to consult. That's actually where most of your revenue comes from. Because that, you know, you're probably charging 25K a speaking fee. You're doing... 10, 20K per consulting gig. You do 20 of those a year. That's a low six-figure income.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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Whereas the book itself, you're probably making 25 to 50K total off of the book. So most nonfiction authors, that's the model is they get really clear. They want to target a specific industry or define expertise for a specific industry. They write the book to be the lead gen for that industry. And then they actually go get paid on speaking and consulting.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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I was traveling around the world partying a lot. That had both benefits and drawbacks. The benefits was that it exposed me to a very wide variety of experiences and people at a very young age. I think I probably got ahead of the curve in terms of understanding myself and understanding people and understanding culture. And I think that will play into some of the success of the books.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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Correct. So I'm self-help, which is a very broad audience. And also it's less B2B, it's B2C, right? So it's high volume, low price point and towards the top of the market in terms of volume. So I'm published, I think in 75 different languages. I've hit number one, I think in 13 or 14 different countries. And then subtle artists just had this insane staying power.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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So book royalties continue to be a huge part of my income. And speaking is a relatively minor part of my income. It's funny because I don't actually charge that much more than kind of a general nonfiction author for speaking, just because I don't have like a super business friendly message that's gonna improve sales by 20% in the next quarter or anything like that.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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I'm just kind of, I'm the not give a fuck guy, right? So it's, I'm usually just coming in for general motivation and to shake hands with everybody. So speaking is not a huge part of my model.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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I really do think it actually worked out very much in my favor that I started as an entrepreneur because I always approached my writing as an entrepreneur differently. It's funny because a lot of things I was saying about the dating market, I very much see my books as just products, right?
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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And it's like looking for product market fit, understanding customer demographics, ideal customer, target audience. Like these are all the same concepts, but most authors don't think about that. Actually, a very common piece of advice that I give to aspiring writers is to study copywriting. And when I tell them that, they, like, wince and get really uncomfortable.
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Like, they don't like hearing that, right? Because every aspiring writer has this romantic vision of being, like, the next Hemingway or whatever. Virginia Woolf or something. And it's when you tell them to go study advertising and copywriting because ultimately the business you're dealing in is attention and words command attention and certain word combinations are much more powerful than others.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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Most writers don't think of it in those terms. And I think I've gained quite a bit from thinking in those terms. I also think when I look at the traditional self-help industry, say of like the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, it was very America-centric. It was very boomer-centric.
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Like it was very just, hey, all these people in midlife crisis, go to this seminar and find your potential and you'll live up to your purpose and all this stuff. And I think I was one of the first who tapped into the international market And a lot of that is just because I came up on the internet, right?
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So it's like, I found the message that not only appealed to Americans, but it appealed to people in India, it appealed to people in Taiwan and South Africa and Egypt and Brazil. And so that's relatively new as well.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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It's a great question. So the way I look at it is that we live in this world now where it's a multi-platform business. We're on all the different social platforms where I'm podcasting, I've got YouTube videos, I've got newsletters, I've got blogs. And the strengths and weaknesses of every platform is different.
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It got me a little bit behind the curve in terms of I was out drinking and partying a lot. And I wasted a lot of time on some silly and stupid things and probably didn't work as hard as I could have or should have at certain points. It's one of these weird things. It's impossible to know if that trade-off was worth it.
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Some platforms are very good at discovery and finding new audience, but they're not great at monetizing. Other platforms are great for monetizing, but it's harder to grow. And different platforms also attract different types of people. So What I've really been focusing on the last couple of years is trying to lean into the strength of each platform and not worry about the weakness.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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For example, YouTube is great at discovery and audience building. It's not so great at monetization. So I don't really worry a whole lot about making YouTube profitable. I just want it to grow the audience as much as possible. And then I'll just funnel those people into the newsletter or into the podcast or something else like that. As you know, podcasts are great business models.
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It's a great business to be in. So with the podcast, it's all about just maximizing engagement, monetization, making sure the listeners are happy, making sure there's some consistency, and not worrying so much about growth and discovery and, oh, is this going to get caught by the algorithm and all that stuff? So that's how I've been thinking about it.
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In terms of LTV or monetization, I'm in a transition phase at the moment in that my monetization is very much, like all my courses and everything, They were built and launched in the 2010s, and they did really, really well back then, but now they're out of date.
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So my team and I were actually in the process of, we're going to redo my entire backend, top to bottom, and we should hopefully start launching that stuff next year or this year, 2025. 2025 and 2026 will be the process of relaunching the backend and building out a new funnel, just because what I have now is old and... and out of date.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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I've had my newsletter for a long time. I think I actually started my first one in like 2010. For most of my career, my approach to the newsletter has just been, oh, this is just where the super fans are and these are probably, these are the people that are most likely to buy something. I never thought about the newsletter as a product itself or as a platform itself, that's relatively new.
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I think that's something that's developed just the last few years. So my newsletter just kind of went along as a companion to my blog or the rest of my business. And it grew steadily, but I never put too much emphasis on it. And then I'd say probably 2022, 21, 22, when all newsletters really started to take off in a big way and monetization became much better with them.
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And we've been focusing really hard on growing the newsletter since then. And so, yeah, now it's a huge part of the business. It's a big moneymaker for us. It's a huge audience and it's very, very engaged. So it's like anything I launch or any book I do or whatever I promote there, it's going to send a lot of juice.
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But as a 40-year-old now, I look back at my 25, 26-year-old self, and I'm like, bring it down a notch, right? Do you really need to go out on a Wednesday night? There's probably better things you could have done. But ultimately, I think because of the nature of the industry that I'm in, which essentially is...
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And if you're on a platform, you don't control distribution and you also don't control the list. With a newsletter, you own the list. So even if your email service provider kicks you off their service, you can just go sign up for another one and import your list and send all the same people.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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My spiel about goals is that I think most of the value of a goal is that it actually gets you off the couch and doing something. And the actual achieving of the goal itself is less important. So I always advise people to set goals and intentions that are achievable and practical. And don't get so worried if you don't actually hit the arbitrary number that you set for yourself.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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The point is to just motivate yourself to start taking action in the right direction. So if you decide you want to lose 20 pounds and you only lose 15, who cares? You got off your ass, you did something, you accomplished something. That's what matters. So goals, it's all about direction and not the destination.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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Write down all of the stuff that you are doing today. and look at what is the least useful. I find this with myself. I make myself do this pretty regularly. There's always something that I'm doing on a weekly basis that there's no reason for me to be doing it. It's just habit, and I should be outsourcing it. I should be hiring somebody to do it, or it just shouldn't be done at all.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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It's very difficult. Generally speaking, the easiest way to make progress is not by adding a new activity. It's by eliminating something that's not bringing a lot of value.
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observing and commenting on human nature, noticing psychological concepts, cultural trends, being able to appeal and address a wide international audience. I do think that lifestyle ended up kind of inadvertently helping me quite a bit in my career for those reasons. I did technically meet all my career goals at 32.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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I would say, and it's funny because this is going to be paradoxical with the word profit, but both in business and in life, when in doubt, just give more value because eventually it will come back to you in some shape or form.
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I'm everywhere. I'm doing everything. Check out the podcast, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck podcast with Mark Manson. We're actually rebranding, relaunching the show soon. That's a whole nother conversation, but definitely check it out on all your podcast feeds. YouTube channel is just Mark Manson. And then on every platform, my books are in every store. You can't escape me.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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Thank you.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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Part of that is that I think the success of my book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, just vastly outstripped any expectation I ever had. And part of that too is that I was probably thinking too small at the time. And I guess we could get into each of those things individually if you want. But that's my 20s in a nutshell, I think.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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It was a very different time back then. So just to give a little background, I started blogging in 2007. By 2009, I'd eked out a very small full-time income. And by 2012 or 13, I'd grown a pretty significant audience online. So by the time my stuff really started to take off, I was five or six years in. I'd been scraping by. I'd been living in a lot of countries that were very cheap to live in.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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And suddenly I find myself, I have a bunch of articles going viral on Facebook and Twitter at the time. And I find myself with millions of readers. And back then, what's known today as the creator economy didn't really exist back then.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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So back then, the roadmap was just build an audience online and then that can get your foot in the door to go make a TV show or get a book published or make an album, right?
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I was 27.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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So when the agents and editors started coming knocking, right? And they're like, hey, some of these articles are great. We think we could get you a book deal. What do you think about that? It was very exciting. And as somebody who
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never studied writing or journalism in school, who had never held down a real job in his life, who didn't even do well in English class as a student, the idea of me publishing a book was just so, oh my God, I can't believe this is happening.
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So when I entered into that world, I set what I thought at the time were pretty ambitious goals, which was I want to be a New York Times bestseller at some point in my life. And over the course of my career, I'd like to sell a million books.
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And at the time, I think because I overestimated the prestige and the power and the size of the traditional publishing industry, those things felt pretty impossible. They felt like things I would have to work towards for 10, 20 years to accomplish. And
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What I didn't realize is that I had actually unwittingly tapped into the most powerful distribution system in the world, which was social media, and already amassed an audience much larger than most New York Times bestselling authors. I just didn't know that yet. That wasn't obvious to me, and I don't think that was obvious to people in the publishing industry either.
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So when the book came out and it started doing really well, it sold a million copies, I think, within six or eight months. And it was still in the New York Times.
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It was everywhere. And so... I think the combination of my maybe irrationally low expectations and just the suddenness of the success, I didn't know what to do with myself. I hit this point where I'm like, well, okay, that's done. I, what now? Right? Like, how do you follow that up? And by the way, I never planned for anything after this in my life or my career.
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and I'm only 32 years old, so what the hell am I supposed to do next? And I actually struggled with that for a number of years.
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I struggled with that for sure. Because it felt, I don't know, in a lot of industries, publishing being one of them, the marginal improvement of a product that's 10% better is 10 times the result, right? There are plenty of books that were 95% as good as mine, but they sold 1% as many copies. And that's just the way that creative industries work.
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It's like the very, very top 0.1% do 99% of the sales. And I think that's just a hard concept for us to wrap our heads around to begin with. But certainly at the time, it was very difficult for me to wrap my head around. So it very much felt like, did I do this? What the hell did I do?
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And it's actually funny because even to this day, a lot of aspiring authors or people who just wrote their first book and it's about to come out, they'll come to me for advice on book launches and book marketing and book promotion. And inevitably, they're incredibly disappointed because I have nothing interesting to say. I didn't do anything special.
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You just need to write an amazing book that people want to go talk about and buy for their friends and buy for their family members. But that's the answer that nobody wants to hear. Everybody wants to know that there's some hack or some formula or some promotion that I did that moved the needle. And the fact is, there really wasn't.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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Yes, that's actually a really good point. I would say the majority of the marketing and promotion was done before I wrote it, which was sitting down and deciding what I should write in the first place and why. Because at that point, a lot of the ideas that ended up in the book had been viral blog posts. I had really thought deeply about why they went viral.
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And what you just described is a big reason. In a large self-help market full of touchy-feely, woo-woo stuff, this was pretty gritty and raw and realistic. And internally to my team, I used to say, I write self-help for people who hate self-help. That was the target market. So yeah, it was...
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Choosing the target audience, understanding the market segmentation, how I was going to differentiate myself, and figuring the branding out. That was the stuff that put gasoline on the fire. The email sequence and how many book tour events I did, that was all just completely inconsequential.
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Yeah, it was really funny, actually. I remember when I was pitching Subtle Art to publishers, I had all my newsletter followers and my Facebook followers, all the numbers were in the pitch. And none of the publishers cared about that. All they wanted to know was which celebrities I knew or which celebrities I thought I could talk to to get promoted. They were very, very concerned about that.
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And I was like, yeah, I don't really, I don't know. It's actually very funny looking back in hindsight.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
I made some good decisions. But looking back, at the time, I did not fully understand why they were good decisions. So I had chosen a particular lifestyle. That lifestyle, I think, had perhaps put me ahead of the curve in terms of understanding life. a number of topics and issues that a lot of people were interested in.
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Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
And through experimentation with my writing online, I discovered that I was really good about writing those topics and that I could generate a very large audience on those topics. I never put all those things together. I never understood that this weird wayward lifestyle that I had was also fueling this ability to look at human nature and personal growth in completely different novel ways.
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Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
But I think looking back, I'm glad I figured out how to capitalize on it.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
For example, like 2011, I spent a couple months in the UK, half of which was sleeping on a couch in London. From there, I managed to get a visa into Russia. I spent six months in Russia, mostly in St. Petersburg, studying Russian and dating Russian girls. And then that visa expired, so then I went to Ukraine. And then from there, I met up with a friend from home. By then it was summer.
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Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
I write self-help for people who hate self-help. My book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, it sold a million copies, I think, within six or eight months. I never planned for anything after this in my life, and I'm only 32 years old, so what the hell am I supposed to do next?
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Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
So we did a whole backpacking trip across Europe, ended in Ibiza. I partied in Ibiza for a week, then flew to Amsterdam to meet a client. That was like the first half of my 2011 journey. All of that's living out of a suitcase. All of that is running my business from my laptop. Wi-Fi was often horrendous in half the places I went. But it was very much just like a lush, degenerate lifestyle.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
It was a ton of fun. But looking back, I think what was very educating about it was being in all those different countries and really enmeshing myself with those cultures, what you start to notice is When you just live in your own country, you take for granted, you assume that your values and your assumptions and beliefs are universal.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Sure. So the consciousness car is, you know, if you think about the two aspects of our minds, kind of the emotional side of the mind and then the more rational side of our mind, most of us operate under the assumption that the rational side of our mind is like, the adult in the car who's driving and is in charge.
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And the emotional side of our mind is like the obnoxious kid in the passenger seat who just like won't shut up and is like demanding ice cream all the time. And a lot of what we understand as being like a disciplined, mature human being is like teaching that kid and that the emotional side of our brain to just shut the up.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
for like 40% of the time so that the adult, the rational part of our brain can get to work and do the right things and be a functioning human being. But what's interesting is that if you look at psychological research, it turns out that we're all very driven. It's actually the emotional side of our brain is the one that's driving the car. And the thinking part of our brain is very good at
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explaining our emotional impulses in a way that sound very reasonable and rational. they aren't necessarily. And so really we are very impulsive creatures. We all make most of our decisions based on our emotions, based on our feelings.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
And if we're not aware that we're doing that, then the rational side of our brain is kind of enslaved by our emotions to always just justify whatever we feel about ourselves. And so what I argue in that part of the book is that Instead of trying to work against our emotions or suppress our emotions or deny our emotions, we need to work with our emotions.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
We need to understand the role that each part of our mind plays. Because the emotional side of our brain is incredibly important. It determines our motivation. It determines our inspiration. It determines... where we feel value and significance in our lives.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
And so if we deny that part of ourselves and just try to be rational all the time, then we're kind of gutting ourselves of the meaning in our lives. So what I argue is that we should get the two sides of our brains talking to each other and listening to each other, which is difficult because they kind of speak different languages. But in my opinion, that's kind of what
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
emotional, or I would say even mental health is.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Having the rational side of our brain and the emotional side of our brain interacting with each other and understanding each other.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Right, so if you feel like you should be working out, but you're not, we've all experienced that before. And most of us, we judge ourselves. We're like, man, I'm such a loser. I can't get out of bed and go to the gym. And we see it as a failure of willpower. We see it as a failure of our rational side of our mind.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
But the fact of the matter is, until we are emotionally motivated to go to the gym, until we enjoy going to the gym, to some extent, we're not going to go. We're always going to find a reason not to go. And so in that sense, it's an emotional problem. It's not a problem of knowledge. It's not a problem of willpower or whatever.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
So if we understand that, what we can do, instead of trying to will ourselves to the gym constantly, what you can do is you can set up your environment in such a way in that you make it enjoyable to go to the gym. So maybe you find a friend who goes to the gym with you. And that way, if you wake up and you're supposed to meet your friend at the gym at 8 a.m.,
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The fear of embarrassment of not being there, like your friend arriving and you not, that is an emotional motivation that will get you out of bed and going to the gym. Another way to do it is to hire a trainer and be like, well, I spent all this damn money And I'm going to feel awful if I don't use it.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
So it's using your rational mind to create parameters and circumstances that make something emotionally enjoyable to do.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Totally.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Well, the thinking brain is always you're always trying to envision some sort of better future for yourself. So whether that's like you as an individual or if it's the world being a better place or impressing your parents or whatever, like it's we all need some sort of carrot dangling in front of us to. to give ourselves direction and purpose in our lives.
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And so the thinking brain's job is to kind of come up with those sorts of things, is to figure out that equation of if I do X, then I will be happy or whatever.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Well, generally people, you know, people like to avoid pain. But the problem with avoiding pain is that we only value things in our lives in proportion to how much we feel we have to give up for it. So like if you think about like a spoiled child, like a child that's just given everything he or she wants.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
The reason these spoiled kids grew up to be like awful human beings is because they never... understand the value of anything. Everything is just a frivolous thing for them to experience from moment to moment. It's only when you're able to go through some sort of challenge or hardship that you are able to understand what is worth sacrificing for and what is not.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
It's only once you've lost something that you understand how valuable, how meaningful it was in your life. And so I just, through all my work and all my books, I consistently make the argument that pain and suffering is important.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
And not only is it impossible to get rid of pain and suffering, but like, We need to have pain and suffering because psychologically it is kind of like the fuel that generates our sense of meaning and importance in the world.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
And so it's not a question of getting rid of pain. It's like choosing better pain. Totally.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
So anti-fragility comes from Nassim Taleb. It's a really cool idea where he talks about how the opposite of fragility or being fragile, it's not necessarily being robust. It's actually being anti-fragile, which is you gain from pain or disorder in your life. And so if you look at things like the human body or the human mind,
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
The human body and human mind are actually, they're not resilient, they're anti-fragile. The reason you get stronger at the gym is because you are breaking your muscles down and making them stronger. The reason that you get better after failure is because you are breaking down a lot of your assumptions and beliefs
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
and your fears and building up better experiences over them and so in that sense by actually inviting certain amounts of pain and struggle into your life you make yourself a stronger individual with far more more potential and one of the big arguments of the book is is what i and what i fear is that you know in our culture there's been such a
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
It's becoming so taken for granted that we're all supposed to be happy and we all deserve to be happy and we all deserve to have a great, easy life and nobody should suffer and all this stuff. Yes, we should try to get rid of injustice. We should try to get rid of
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
people who are predatory or people who are evil, but you shouldn't try to get rid of suffering because suffering is necessary for growth. It's necessary for making people stronger, more resilient, more mature human beings.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
And so what I fear is that as our culture kind of has turned towards this obsession with positivity and feeling good all the time, we are losing that ability to grow from our pain and our failures.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
So I think for me, and I define this in the book, but like what defines an adult is or just being a mature, healthy individual is that ability to understand what is worth suffering for and when is it worth suffering for it. In the simple example of like say a romantic relationship, For that relationship to grow, you have to understand when a fight needs to happen.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Some people, and I think kind of younger, more idealistic people, their idea of a good relationship is a relationship where you just never fight. But it's like that's not a healthy relationship because that means you're hiding things, you're pretending things are not happening. And that makes you more fragile as a couple. Whereas if you...
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
get very good at noticing the things that need to be addressed and being able to address them. Even though you know you're going to fight about it, you know it's going to be painful, you know you're going to be angry at each other for a day or two. If you're able to do that, you actually become a stronger person.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
It's the same thing in business. If you've got employees that are messing up, you can't pretend they're not messing up. You have to say something. Or if you've got a co-worker that's screwing around, you have to say something. There are so many instances. Everywhere you kind of look in life,
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
There's like a skillset of understanding what pain is necessary for growth to occur and then having the ability to step into that pain.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Absolutely. And I talked about this in my first book, Subtle Art. I said that if you think about the most important experiences of your life, probably three out of four of them were negative experiences. Like a breakup, a death, losing a job. These all, they're horrible in the moment, but when you look back on them years and years later, you're like, wow, I'm so glad that happened.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
I'm such a better person for that happening.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Well, I stay inside. That's one way I suffer for the right reasons. I think there are a few fronts. One, I think the most obvious example is just my career. So it's writing is... I mean, it's fun a lot of times, but a lot of times it's suffering.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
I'm finishing up another book right now and I went back to revise a chapter that I hadn't looked at in a few months and I just looked at it and I'm like, this is terrible. This is absolutely terrible. And it's almost heartbreaking. I had to take the rest of the afternoon off because to have something that you've been working on for over a year and you think you're almost done...
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And then you go look at an early part of it and you're like, wow, I can't publish that. That is awful. It just flattens you. And I think... Writing has its emotional struggles that a lot of people just don't. I seem to be constituted for it. I like being alone. I like working by myself. I don't mind rewriting something like eight different times.
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And so that's a form of suffering that I'm well adapted to and that I even get a little bit of a sick pleasure out of. And so that's kind of why it's become my life is, you know, one thing I always say in my talks is that it's not being good at something that's not because you enjoy it necessarily. Being good at something is you enjoy the sacrifices that are involved in it.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
In a way, it's the thing you end up best at is just the pain you can tolerate better than most other people.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
It's good to be here. Thanks for having me.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Yeah, it's, Even if you're in your dream job, like your dream job is going to suck about 30% of the time. Like there's just no such thing. Like we all have to do taxes. Like there's just no such thing as a job that is fun every single day.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Yeah.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Sure. So when I go through this, I'm summarizing. There's a field called developmental psychology, and so I'm kind of just summarizing this entire field. But basically, the human mind develops in a series of stages. We don't just come out of the womb knowing how to drive a car.
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send an email. So when we're kids, we're generally very, everything we understand about the world and understand about life is very much just derived from pleasure and pain. Toys make us happy. Candy makes us happy. falling off the bed makes us sad. We don't really think past that. Kids aren't able to think about the future. They aren't really able to reason about the past.
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They aren't able to think about other people's feelings or what other people might do. It's just all they know is this is fun, this is not fun. I want to do the fun thing. As we get older, though, we start to realize things. We start to realize that Sometimes something is pleasurable now, but it causes pain later. So maybe it feels good to eat
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a pound of candy right now, but when I'm like sick in six hours, you know, last time I did that I got sick and I felt awful. And so kids start to understand that there are repercussions for things. They start to understand that there's cause effect. They understand that other people have thoughts and feelings that are affected by their actions as well.
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It was kind of an accident. See, I graduated from college in the last crisis we had, which was the financial crisis in 2008. And there was like zero job market. And I kind of bounced around a few odd jobs. I lived on a friend's couch for a while. And I started doing freelance web design. And around the same time, I read Tim Ferriss' 4-Hour Workweek article.
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And so around late childhood or early adolescence, maybe around ages like eight, nine, 10, kids start to figure out that the world is very transactional. Like if I agree to do what mom says today, she will reward me tomorrow.
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And so the adolescent phase is very much built off of a life of managing transactions, of understanding that if I behave in these certain ways, people will be nice to me and I will get good things that I want. Now the transactional approach to life is fine. We all need to be able to do it. We all need to be able to think through those things.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
But the problem is that it kind of objectifies everything. So if your approach to all of your relationships is, well, I'm going to say this to Hala because I know she likes to hear that. So if I say this, she'll like me.
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That's great if I'm trying to get a favor from you, but if I'm trying to be a friend or if I'm a family member, that's a really crappy way to have a personal relationship with somebody. Everything they say to you is based on what they think you want. You can't really operate in life that way. You run into the same thing if you look at businesses, for instance.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Some people are very good at the transactional game of, okay, if I put this product out or market it this way, I'll get a lot of money. That's one way to play that game. But at a certain point, you have to ask yourself, okay, maybe this will make me a lot of money, but... am I willing to screw over my customers or am I willing to break a law to add profit to my bottom line?
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You start running into situations like that. It's only when you get to adulthood that you understand that sometimes you simply have to willingly take on pain for no other reason than it's the right thing to do. That it's better for you in the long run, it's better for society in the long run, it's better for the people you care about in the long run.
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And so a lot of kind of like the highest virtuous concepts that we've had throughout human history, things like honesty, charity, compassion, these are all things that can really only be attained in adulthood. I have to be willing to sacrifice myself for my family or willingly sacrifice myself or give up potential profits to make sure my employees are taken care of.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Those sorts of actions and behaviors can only occur once you've kind of transcended this transactional view of the world. And so that's the adult view.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Yes, the unconditionality. Yeah. And the thing about adulthood, I mean, I go kind of hardcore on it, but I think people should understand that it's like an ideal. And I even mentioned that often this kind of ideal, this like selflessness of adulthood is something that's been canonized and crystallized in religious myths and heroes and stories and things like that.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Like none of us are actually like fully that way all the time.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
impossible we've all still got like our inner child that like just wants to drink ice cream for the next three hours you know and then we've all got the adolescent in us who's like maybe I can scheme a little bit and get a little bit more for myself like it's those things never you never completely leave those things
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Yeah, I feel like this is very important art in this day and age, especially in the U.S. I think if you look historically, the idea of freedom and liberty is not what we traditionally think of it today. Today, we think of freedom and liberty as simply being able to do whatever the hell we want when we want to do it without being constrained by any sort of outside force whatsoever.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
which talked about building online businesses and automating them and how you could work four hours a week and go live and play in Argentina or whatever. I was like, hell yeah, I'm in. That sounds perfect. And so I spent the next couple of years trying to actually build e-commerce sites and affiliate marketing sites. And it turned out that like, I was kind of bad at it.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
In my opinion, this is a very childlike entitled version of freedom. This idea that it's like, I should be able to do whatever the hell I want and you if you don't like it. That is like an angry child sitting on the floor of a grocery store demanding that he can eat as much candy as he wants. The truth is that we all live in a society.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
We all have to make compromises because we are all better off for it. And the truth as well is that when you do indulge everything you want, it makes you more fragile. It makes you a weaker human being. It makes you a more susceptible individual to outside forces.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
In chapter eight of the book, I spend that whole chapter kind of arguing that we need to redefine freedom the same way that the philosophers and the Greeks and Romans understood it, which is that freedom is the ability to choose what to give up. Freedom is choosing what you will sacrifice. And so freedom is not... sitting on the couch, eating whatever the hell you want for the rest of your life.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Freedom is actually getting up at six in the morning and going to the gym because by building up your body, you are actually giving yourself more options for the future. By limiting options today, by choosing which options you're going to limit today, by choosing not to eat Cheetos, you are Giving yourself more options in the long run.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
And so freedom is actually, it's a personal form of discipline. It's a constant choice of what sacrifice am I going to bring into my life and what is going to be important to me. And so in that sense, I see things like... And I just have to bring this up because we're in the middle of it now.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
There are people protesting during this coronavirus thing saying that the government shouldn't tell me to stay home, I shouldn't have to stay home, blah, blah, blah. And it's like... It's like, guys, you're okay if the government tells you you can't smoke next to a pregnant person or you can't smoke in a restaurant. You're fine if the government tells you you can't scream fire in a theater.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
How is this any different? At some point you have to You have to accept that it's not about what you, freedom is not about what you individually want, it is about what you are individually capable of sacrificing and giving up, both for yourself and for the greater good.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Well, first I would argue that it's not even the future, really. It's already happening. I think AI runs the world better than humans in many ways already. You know, the last chapter is a little bit tongue-in-cheek. It's a little bit just me being a little bit crazy and being like, you know what, let's see how far I can take this.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
One of the more tragic things I talk about in the book is that ultimately we do have to hope for something, but our hopes...
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
inevitably end up causing everything to be you know it's everything is which is why we need hope but then it's our hopes are what cause everything to be so it's kind of like this vicious vicious cycle that keeps happening yeah and it's it's just kind of an inherent part of our psychology it's there's not really any way around it and so really the message of the book is like
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
I'm not a natural salesman or marketer. But the funny thing was, was at the time, blogs were kind of like all the rage back then.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
since we can't get rid of hope, we have to just be very, very careful about what we hope for. And the last chapter is kind of my very, very careful, slightly facetious hopes, which is just that I personally think one of the cornerstones of my personal philosophy and kind of all my work in general is that humans suck. Like we are just, we're not... Yeah.
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The human mind is not very well equipped to handle global, ethical, moral questions. If you look at human history, it's just full of violence and screw-ups and disasters. So my starting point is like, if there's any way we're going to kind of save ourselves from ourselves, it's going to happen... via science and technology in some form.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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So that is the thing, the one thing I dare to hope for, although I am also very skeptical of my own hopes.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Secret of Profiting in Life. I think if you just make it a habit to give more value than you consume, good things will happen everywhere. It'll happen with people and relationships. It'll happen in business. It'll happen in your own life. It's just build a habit of give more than you take.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
I started blogging in 2008. And so if you wanted people to come to your website, if you wanted the rank on Google, if you wanted, there wasn't much sharing on social media back then.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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Thanks for having me.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
It was, you had to be blogging. You had to be posting articles and coming up with stuff. And so that's actually how I ended up blogging. Originally it was just to like promote these crappy affiliate sites I had. And it turned out I was much better at blogging than I was e-commerce.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
And by 2011, 2012, it was blogging was all I was doing.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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I definitely think blogging is in a tough spot. I... What happened with blogging is just that all of the smaller and medium-sized websites, they either couldn't monetize anymore or they got eaten up by larger networks and large websites. So people went to Huffington Post or writing for Huffington Post or Business Insider or whatever.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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So it's a tough spot to start and I don't want to discourage anybody from blogging but If you're looking to build a content business, blogging is probably one of the worst options right now.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
If I was starting today, I would start a podcast or a YouTube channel. Those are the spaces that are still growing very quickly. Those are the spaces where there's still a lot of opportunity. You know, like the big media companies haven't totally figured out what works or how to do it. And so those are always going to be the spaces where young hustlers have an advantage.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Well, it's funny talking about this now when actually there is a real crisis happening. Because I think we so easily forget that I feel like that period of 2017, 2018, 2019... there was kind of like a fever pitch in our culture where everything felt like a crisis but nothing was actually a crisis. People were always freaking out over everything that happened.
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Whereas you look out the window and everything's great and job market's best it's been in 50 years and economy's doing great and all the metrics in terms of life expectancy and health and education are all-time highs. Meanwhile, you go on Twitter and you would think that the apocalypse was happening. The book was... very much written to address that.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
What is it about not just our culture today, but our generation that we get so worked up about things and trying to put those things in perspective.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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And it's ironic because one of the things that I talked about in the book is that there's a little bit of a paradox where when things are great, you kind of have to make up problems to be upset about because it's by being upset about things that you give your life a sense of meaning or a sense of hope.
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And when things are actually f***ed up, as they are right now, you don't have to go searching for a crisis. You don't have to go searching for problems. The problem's right there in front of you. So in a weird way, crises are almost psychologically easier for us to bear because we know exactly what to hope for.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
I define hope as some sort of vision of the future that we believe will be better. There are a couple of things that are interesting about, I guess, that definition of hope. One is just simply that if we don't have some vision of our future that is better, that's when we fall into depression or despair.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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It's one of the things I talk about in chapter one is that the opposite of happiness is not sadness or anger. The opposite of happiness is hopelessness, is the sense that Nothing we do matters. Nothing that we do will affect any sorts of change.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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But the other thing about that vision of a better future is that paradoxically that it's easier to have hope when times are bad and it's more difficult to find hope when things are good and comfortable. And so for me, that's, I present, there's a lot of statistics like, you know, suicide is the highest and the wealthiest and safest countries in the world.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
People who, once they reach middle class or upper middle class, you, you see things like depression, anxiety, mental health issues start to start to increase. And That doesn't really make sense, but when you look at it in terms of the difficulty it comes with hoping for something better in the future, it kind of explains that.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Sure. The uncomfortable truth is that, you know, in the grand scheme of things, the vast majority of the things that we say and do are not going to matter. Yeah. You know, it reminds me like when I was at school, I remember taking an astronomy course and like just learning how vast the universe is and how like long the history of the earth is and how many billions of people have come before.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
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And it's just like that feeling of smallness and insignificance, you know, it's like. It's like, wow, and I was really upset over what my mom said this morning. It just seems so trifling by comparison. So the uncomfortable truth is just this realization that the vast majority of the things that you spend your time and energy caring about are not going to matter in the long run.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
And on the one hand, that can be a very depressing realization, but on the other hand, it can be a very liberating realization because it allows you to let go of those things. Yeah.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Well, I think we all spend a lot of our energy avoiding that truth. So we convince ourselves that some little project in our life is like life and death important or something we say to another person is like, if we embarrass ourselves in front of somebody, it's like, oh my God, our lives are over. It's the uncomfortable truth. It's a scary thing that we avoid accepting.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
But if you are able to accept it, it it shows you that most of the things that stress you out are actually not that significant. It's a little bit of a double-edged sword. It can make everything feel meaningless, but at the same time, if most of the things that you say or do or pursue are meaningless, then that means you're completely free to do what matters to you.
Young and Profiting (YAP) with Hala Taha
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
There's no excuse to not embarrass yourself or to not fail at something or to not pursue a dream or to not tell somebody that you love them. Because we're all going to die anyway, so you might as well live each moment to its fullest.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
I write self-help for people who hate self-help. My book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, it sold a million copies, I think, within six or eight months. I never planned for anything after this in my life, and I'm only 32 years old, so what the hell am I supposed to do next?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
You assume that the way people socialize is the same everywhere in the world, that the way people show respect is the same way everywhere in the world, that the way people show interest or affection is the same everywhere in the world. And it's not at all. It's completely different everywhere you go. And being thrown into these environments where
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
the social norms and values change constantly, I think it taught me that it's the values that actually drive everything, which is essentially what subtle art of not giving a fuck is about. Ultimately, it's you have to choose what you make important in your life, and then everything else flows from that.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
And if you choose the wrong thing, it doesn't matter how hard you work, how smart you are, how well you network. what school you went to, you're going to end up in the wrong place. And if you choose the right things to care about, you can actually stumble through hungover and end up in the right spot, right? So that initial directional choice is so, so massively important.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
There's a chapter in my book called Happiness is Overrated. I still stand by that statement. The irony with happiness is that the more you think about and worry about happiness, the more you remove it from yourself. It's almost like happiness happens when you're not worried about being happy.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
Ultimately, like every emotion, happiness, it's a psychological feedback mechanism that we evolved to help us survive and procreate, right? So when you're happy, it generally means that you've succeeded in some way in achieving your basic wants and needs. And when you're not happy, it's because you're lacking some of your basic wants and needs.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
I think when people try to elevate happiness and put it on a pedestal and try to make themselves be happy all the time, you're like missing the point. Happiness is not the cause of a good life. It's the side effect of living a good life. And living a good life requires you to sometimes struggle and become frustrated and deal with problems that you don't necessarily want to deal with at the moment.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
That's all part of it.
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Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
Happiness is overrated. The more you think about and worry about happiness, the more you remove it from yourself. People get causation backwards. So the assumption is like, well, if I just find what I love, then I'll get really good at that thing. It's actually the other way around. People tend to fall in love with the thing they're really good at.
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Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
I think the problem with purpose is that people go about it the wrong way. They approach purpose as if it's hiding under a rock somewhere. People are like, oh, I got to find my purpose and then sign up for a yoga class thinking that purpose is magically going to appear in the yoga class. And Purpose is not found, it's created through action that feels useful.
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Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
And you can have useful action doing the most mundane stuff. You can have useful action doing the same stuff that you've done for 20 years. A lot of it is just simply how you choose to think about it and the value you choose to perceive in it. So I think purpose is something that's fostered and created through finding useful and meaningful reasons and motivations behind the things that you do.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
And you don't necessarily have to like go explore the world to find your purpose. Sometimes it's actually right in front of you and you've just been neglecting it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
The only real dating advice is self-improvement. Marriage is supposed to limit your freedom, right? But I found that it was completely liberating because that's the magic sign. That's the sign of like, this has legs. This is going to last for a long time.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
It's funny because I think I got the purpose question correct before Subtle Art, and I think that's part of why Subtle Art was so successful. So the mission that I decided on around that time in my career was that the self-help industry sucked. and I wanted to make it better, make it more realistic, make it more practical, and make it more appealing for more people.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
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And I do think I widely succeeded at that over the 2010s. Looking at myself personally, I think I actually lost track of that because when you experience a meteoric rise like I did, people are accustomed to things compounding gradually, right? This year, you want your business to be 10% better than last year. Next year, you want it to be 10% better than it was this year.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
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And our expectation is that things just incrementally get better like that. Well, whenever something comes along and there's a thousand percent improvement in like six months, it breaks your brain. You don't really know how to conceptualize that and what you should be doing. And so suddenly I found myself with all these opportunities and invitations and
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
coming in that were so surreal and not in my reality six months prior. And my default was just to say yes to everything. You know, this might be my 15 minutes. Cool. Let's go have dinner with a congressman. Why not, right? When is this ever going to happen again? So my de facto response was just yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
That's cool in that it gave me a lot of great experiences and cool opportunities, and it also made a lot of money. But as people Anybody who's said yes to too many things knows the consequence of that is that A, you get spread too thin. So you start doing a lot of things and none of them very well. You get burnt out because you're just overdoing it. You're overexerting yourself.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
And then third, you lose track of what matters to you, right? If the default is yes to everything, then you're not really prioritizing anything over anything else. So after about four or five years, I started to feel the repercussions of all of that. I felt extremely burnt out. I became very unhealthy. I was no longer excellent at anything. I was good or above average at a lot of things.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
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And I lost track of what drove me, what motivated me. So my 30s, I think, was... very much getting a lot of clarity on what I stand for, what I want to do with my life. Because when you're young, when you're in your 20s, you think about missions and purpose and all these goals and dreams you have, right? And it's all very exciting and it's all in the future, right? I've got plenty of time.
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I'm going to work my ass off for years and decades and all this stuff. I think once you get to your mid or late 30s, you start realizing that how long and how difficult it is to accomplish one dream or goal. And you realize you really don't have enough bandwidth to do more than one or two more of those in your whole life. Suddenly your mortality becomes a lot more real.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
I really just need to pick the one hill I'm willing to die on because life is short. And that's all I'm going to have the energy and the mental power for. So my 30s was very much just getting a lot of clarity and focus. It's like, okay, I accomplished all these things. What do I want to use this stuff for? What is the point of all of this? What's the point of selling 20 million books?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
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What's the point of having millions of readers? What are we driving towards over the next 20 years? Because after that, I'm probably done. I'm on a beach somewhere playing pickleball.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
It's funny, when you look at the psychological research, on passion and enjoying your job, what they find is that people get causation backwards. The assumption is like, well, if I just find what I love, then I'll get really good at that thing. It's actually the other way around. People tend to fall in love with the thing they're really good at or the thing they're really rewarded for.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
So it's actually what you should be looking for is what do you have a talent for? What do you have a knack at? What do you find that people actually compliment you on or note that you're really good at? And then if you start focusing there, you'll start to fall in love with it. In a lot of ways, humans are just very, we're very narcissistic. We want to be great at something, right?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
And so when we do find something we're good at, our psychology is kind of wired to start making us feel emotionally satisfied.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
Yes, I think by definition, growth requires breaking or losing some aspect of your former self. And by definition, breaking or losing an aspect of yourself is painful and uncomfortable. And in many cases, there's actually a component of grief to it, right? I quit drinking a couple of years ago. And while I don't want to drink anymore, I don't want to drink again.
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Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
Sometimes I look back at my former lifestyle and I miss it. I get nostalgic. I'm like, oh man, remember, like, God, those parties were so much fun. And there's like a little bit of sadness that comes along with it. But that's also one of the most profound transformational growths that's happened to me in the last couple of years, right?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
So generally speaking, most growth comes from some aspect of loss. Not all the time, but most of the time.
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Yes, because the way our mind works is that however you choose to define yourself, you are going to start defending that definition. So if you define yourself poorly or superficially, you're going to end up spending a lot of energy and effort defending a really poor or superficial definition of who you are.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
Generally speaking, I think it's useful to think of yourself in the broadest and most ambiguous terms. I'll give you an example. I think I suffered quite a bit because I adopted the identity of I am a best-selling author. That became what I was known for. That became what I had been most successful at.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
And this happens to all of us is that when we become successful at something or when people start recognizing us for something, we just assume that that's who we are. And I spent many years feeling a lot of pressure and a lot of anxiety, and any time I went to write a book or write something, it put a lot of pressure on myself. Well, I'm supposed to be this big, best-selling author guy.
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This is supposed to be what I'm amazing at. And it took something that used to be fun and felt kind of low stakes And it turned it into something that felt very high stakes and very anxiety ridden.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
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And then something happened a few years ago, which is I took some time off and then I kind of realized I'm like, wait a second, before all this author stuff, I was an entrepreneur and I built an online business and that was a ton of fun. And I actually missed that a lot.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
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And I was like, you know, just because being an author was the thing I was most successful at doesn't mean I have to be an author. I can be an entrepreneur who happens to write books and they happen to sell really well. And that simple shift in my head, it just gave me so much internal freedom, unstifled me in so many ways.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
So yeah, you really want to be careful how you define yourself because no matter what you choose, you're almost choosing a mental prison for yourself. So make sure you choose a very broad and easily navigable prison.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
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I think if you think about all of the worst relationship decisions you've made, chances are you were either drunk or you were madly in love with somebody. And you probably used that love to justify the horrible decision. I think the truth is that romantic love is great. It feels amazing. It's very powerful. But it doesn't necessarily fix relationship problems.
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Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
In fact, if the relationship is unhealthy, then romantic love can actually make that relationship feel even worse. Romantic love actually just amplifies whatever relationship already exists underneath. So if it's a healthy relationship and it's a very loving, respectful relationship, then the romantic love will make it feel even better.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
But if it's a disrespectful relationship, it doesn't have trust, and the people don't treat each other well, then the romantic love will actually make that relationship worse. Thank you.
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It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
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Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
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There's just something about arbitrary ages that I think it's useful to take stock of your life, how much you've progressed, how much things have changed, and just the decade years, 20, 30, 40, are probably useful years to do it.
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I don't think there's anything necessarily special about them, but I don't know, it's switching over to a new decade, so it makes sense to take a little bit of extra time, take stock of your life, and consider what's changed.
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So you're like, you're fresh back on the market, basically. At this phase, what I would do is just really try to pay attention. The men that you go on dates with, just really try to pay attention to like the things you like and the things you don't. And be honest with it too, because there's probably, I imagine there's probably guys you go on dates with
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
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There are things you like about them that you didn't really expect to like. And there's things you didn't like about them that you also didn't really expect to not like. Like, just try to learn your own preferences in this period because you're still just fresh back on the market. There's no rush. I would just use this as data collection.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
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Like, just try to understand what you're feeling and what you're drawn to and then start filtering for those types of men.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
My 20s, I very much optimized for novelty, experimentation, and self-discovery, which I think are good things for young people in general to optimize for. I probably went a little bit too hard on all that stuff. So I spent most of my 20s living as a nomad. I spent most of those years living abroad. I was never nailed down in a specific city, country, relationship.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
It's changed a lot over the years. But 2024, it's probably like... 40 to 50% books, 20 to 25% courses, and then 25 to 35% brand deals and ad revenue. And then there's a little bit of speaking in there. I don't do a ton of speaking, but I'd say 5% speaking fees.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
Podcasts and newsletter primarily, but we also do some YouTube brand deals.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
Ooh, I do not.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
I'll stick to nonfiction because fiction is kind of its own thing. But in the nonfiction world, the typical business model for like a nonfiction author is... The book is actually a lead magnet for their speaking fee. So you write a book, I don't know, you pick like some sort of business concept, like some sales tactic, right? You write a book about it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
That defines you as the expert on B2B sales in this industry. That gets you invited to all sorts of industry events. Bunch of companies want to bring you in to consult. That's actually where most of your revenue comes from. Because that, you know, you're probably charging 25K a speaking fee. You're doing...
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
10, 20K per consulting gig, you do 20 of those a year, that's a low six-figure income, whereas the book itself, you're probably making 25 to 50K total off of the book.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
So most nonfiction authors, that's the model, is they get really clear, they want to target a specific industry or define expertise for a specific industry, they write the book to be the lead gen for that industry, and then they actually go get paid on speaking and consulting.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
Correct. So I'm self-help, which is a very broad audience and also it's less B2B, it's B2C, right? So it's high volume, low price point and towards the top of the market in terms of volume. So I'm published, I think, in 75 different languages. I've hit number one, I think, in 13 or 14 different countries. And then Subtle Artists just had this insane staying power.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
So I was traveling around the world, partying a lot. And that had both benefits and drawbacks. The benefits was that it exposed me to a very wide variety of experiences and people at a very young age. So I think I probably got ahead of the curve in terms of understanding myself and understanding people and understanding culture. And I think that will play into some of the success of the books.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
So book royalties continue to be a huge part of my income. And speaking is a relatively minor part of my income. It's funny because I don't actually charge that much more than kind of a general nonfiction author for speaking, just because I don't have like a super business friendly message that's going to improve sales by 20% in the next quarter or anything like that.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
I'm just kind of, I'm the not give a fuck guy, right? So it's, I'm usually just coming in for general motivation and to shake hands with everybody. So speaking is not a huge part of my model.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
I really do think it actually worked out very much in my favor that I started as an entrepreneur because I always approached my writing as an entrepreneur differently. It's funny because a lot of things I was saying about the dating market, I very much see my books as just products, right?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
And it's like looking for product market fit, understanding customer demographics, ideal customer, target audience. Like these are all the same concepts, but most authors don't think about that. Actually, a very common piece of advice that I give to aspiring writers is to study copywriting. And when I tell them that, they wince and get really uncomfortable. They don't like hearing that, right?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
Because Every aspiring writer has this romantic vision of being like the next Hemingway or Virginia Woolf or something. And it's when you tell them to go study advertising and copywriting because ultimately the business you're dealing in is attention and words command attention and certain word combinations are much more powerful than others. Most writers don't think of it in those terms.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
And I think I've gained quite a bit from thinking in those terms. I also think when I look at the traditional self-help industry, say of like the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, it was very America-centric. It was very boomer-centric. Like it was very just, hey, all these people in midlife crisis, go to this seminar and find your potential and you'll live up to your purpose and all this stuff.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
And I think I was one of the first who tapped into the international market. And a lot of that is just because I came up on the internet, right? So it's like, I found the message that not only appealed to Americans, but it appealed to people in India. It appealed to people in Taiwan and South Africa and Egypt and Brazil. And so that's relatively new as well.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
It's a great question. So the way I look at it is that we live in this world now where it's a multi-platform business. We're on all the different social platforms. I'm podcasting. I've got YouTube videos. I've got newsletters. I've got blogs. And the strengths and weaknesses of every platform is different.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
Some platforms are very good at discovery and finding new audience, but they're not great at monetizing. Other platforms are great for monetizing, but it's harder to grow. And different platforms also attract different types of people. So what I've really been focusing on the last couple of years is trying to lean into the strength of each platform and not worry about the weakness.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
It got me a little bit behind the curve in terms of I was out drinking and partying and a lot. And I wasted a lot of time on some silly and stupid things and probably didn't work as hard as I could have or should have at certain points. So it's one of these weird things. It's impossible to know if that trade-off was worth it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
So for example, YouTube is great at discovery and audience building. It's not so great at monetization. So I don't really worry a whole lot about making YouTube profitable. I just want it to grow the audience as much as possible. And then I'll just funnel those people into the newsletter or into the podcast or something else like that. As you know, podcasts are great business models.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
It's a great business to be in. So with the podcast, it's all about just maximizing engagement, monetization, making sure the listeners are happy, making sure there's some consistency, and not worrying so much about growth and discovery and, oh, is this going to get caught by the algorithm and all that stuff? So that's how I've been thinking about it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
In terms of LTV or monetization, I'm in a transition phase at the moment in that My monetization is very much, like all my courses and everything, they were built and launched in the 2010s, and they did really, really well back then, but now they're out of date.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
So my team and I were actually in the process of, we're gonna redo my entire backend, top to bottom, and we should hopefully start launching that stuff next year or this year, 2025. 2025 and 2026 will be the process of relaunching the backend and building out a new funnel. Just because what I have now is old and out of date.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
I've had my newsletter for a long time. I think I actually started my first one in like 2010. For most of my career, my approach to the newsletter has just been, oh, this is just where the super fans are and these are probably, these are the people that are most likely to buy something. I never thought about the newsletter as a product itself or as a platform itself, that's relatively new.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
I think that's something that's developed just the last few years. So my newsletter just kind of went along as a companion to my blog or the rest of my business. And it grew steadily, but I never put too much emphasis on it. And then I'd say probably 2022, 21, 22, when all newsletters really started to take off in a big way and monetization became much better with them.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
And we've been focusing really hard on growing the newsletter since then. And so, yeah, now it's a huge part of the business. It's a big moneymaker for us. It's a huge audience and it's very, very engaged. So it's like anything I launch or any book I do or whatever I promote there, it's going to send a lot of juice.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
But as a 40-year-old now, I think back, I look back at my 25, 26-year-old self and I'm like, bring it down a notch, right? Do you really need to go out on a Wednesday night? Like, there's probably better things you could have done.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
And if you're on a platform, you don't control distribution and you also don't control the list. With a newsletter, you own the list. So even if your email service provider kicks you off their service, you can just go sign up for another one and import your list and send all the same people.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
My spiel about goals is that I think most of the value of a goal is that it actually gets you off the couch and doing something. And the actual achieving of the goal itself is less important. So I always advise people to set goals and intentions that are achievable and practical. And don't get so worried if You don't actually hit the arbitrary number that you set for yourself.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
The point is to just motivate yourself to start taking action in the right direction. So if you decide you want to lose 20 pounds and you only lose 15, who cares? You got off your ass. You did something. You accomplished something. That's what matters. So goals, it's all about direction and not the destination.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
Write down all of the stuff that you are doing and... Look at what is the least useful. I find this with myself. I make myself do this pretty regularly. There's always something that I'm doing on a weekly basis that there's no reason for me to be doing it. It's just habit. And I should be outsourcing it. I should be hiring somebody to do it. Or it just shouldn't be done at all.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
But ultimately, I think because of the nature of the industry that I'm in, which essentially is observing and commenting on human nature, noticing psychological concepts, cultural trends, being able to appeal and address a wide international audience, I do think that lifestyle ended up kind of inadvertently helping me quite a bit in my career for those reasons.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
But it's very difficult. Generally speaking, the easiest way to make progress is not by adding. a new activity, it's by eliminating something that's not bringing a lot of value.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
I would say, and it's funny because this is going to be paradoxical with the word profit, but both in business and in life, when in doubt, just give more value because eventually it will come back to you in some shape or form.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
I'm everywhere. I'm doing everything. Check out the podcast, the Subtle Art Not Giving a Fuck podcast with Mark Manson. We're actually rebranding, relaunching the show soon. That's a whole nother conversation, but definitely check it out on all your podcast feeds. YouTube channel is just Mark Manson. And then on every platform, my books are in every store. You can't escape me.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
Thank you.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
I did technically meet all my career goals at 32. Part of that is that I think the success of my book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, just vastly outstripped any expectation I ever had. And part of that too is that I was probably thinking too small at the time. And I guess we could get into each of those things individually if you want. But that's my 20s in a nutshell, I think.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
It was a very different time back then. So just to give a little background, I started blogging in 2007. By 2009, I'd eked out a very small full-time income. And by 2012 or 13, I'd grown a pretty significant audience online. So by the time my stuff really started to take off, I was five or six years in. I'd been scraping by. I'd been living in a lot of countries that were very cheap to live in.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
And suddenly I find myself, I have a bunch of articles going viral on Facebook and Twitter at the time. And I find myself with millions of readers. And back then, what's known today as the creator economy didn't really exist back then.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
So back then, the roadmap was just build an audience online and then that can get your foot in the door to go make a TV show or get a book published or make an album, right?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
I was 27.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
So when the agents and editors started coming knocking, right? And they're like, hey, some of these articles are great. We think we could get you a book deal. What do you think about that? It was very exciting. And as somebody who never studied writing or journalism in school,
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
who had never held down a real job in his life, who didn't even do well in English class as a student, the idea of me publishing a book was just so, oh my God, I can't believe this is happening. So when I entered into that world, I set what I thought at the time were pretty ambitious goals, which was I want to be a New York Times bestseller at some point in my life.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
And over the course of my career, I'd like to sell a million books. And at the time, I think because I overestimated the prestige and the power and the size of the traditional publishing industry, those things felt pretty impossible. They felt like things I would have to work towards for 10, 20 years to accomplish. And
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
What I didn't realize is that I had actually unwittingly tapped into the most powerful distribution system in the world, which was social media, and already amassed an audience much larger than most New York Times bestselling authors. I just didn't know that yet. That wasn't obvious to me, and I don't think that was obvious to people in the publishing industry either.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
So when the book came out and it started doing really well, it sold a million copies, I think, within six or eight months. And it was still in the New York Times.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
It was everywhere. And so I think the combination of my maybe irrationally low expectations and just the suddenness of the success, I didn't know what to do with myself. I hit this point where I'm like, well, okay. That's done. What now, right? How do you follow that up? And by the way, I never planned for anything after this in my life or my career. And I'm only 32 years old.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
So what the hell am I supposed to do next? And I actually struggled with that for a number of years.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
I struggled with that for sure. Because it felt, I don't know, in a lot of industries, publishing being one of them, the marginal improvement of a product that's 10% better is 10 times the result, right? There are plenty of books that were 95% as good as mine, but they sold... 1% as many copies. And that's just the way that creative industries work.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
It's like the very, very top 0.1% do 99% of the sales. And I think that's just a hard concept for us to wrap our heads around to begin with. But certainly at the time, it was very difficult for me to wrap my head around. So it very much felt like, did I do this? What the hell did I do?
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
And it's actually funny because even to this day, a lot of aspiring authors or people who just wrote their first book and it's about to come out, they'll come to me for advice on book launches and book marketing and book promotion. And inevitably, they're incredibly disappointed because I have nothing interesting to say. I didn't do anything special.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
You just need to write an amazing book that people want to go talk about and buy for their friends and buy for their family members. But that's the answer that nobody wants to hear. Everybody wants to know that there's some hack or some formula or some promotion that I did that moved the needle. And the fact is, there really wasn't.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
Yes. That's actually a really good point. I would say The majority of the marketing and promotion was done before I wrote it, which was sitting down and deciding what I should write in the first place and why. Because at that point, a lot of the ideas that ended up in the book had been viral blog posts. And I had really thought deeply about why they went viral.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
And what you just described is a big reason. In a large self-help market full of touchy-feely woo-woo stuff, This was pretty gritty and raw and realistic and Internally to my team, I used to say, I write self-help for people who hate self-help. That was the target market.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
So yeah, it was choosing the target audience, understanding the market segmentation, how I was going to differentiate myself, and figuring the branding out. That was the stuff that put gasoline on the fire. The email sequence and how many book tour events I did, that was all just completely inconsequential.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
Yeah, it was really funny, actually. I remember when I was pitching Subtle Art to publishers, I had all my newsletter followers and my Facebook followers, all the numbers were in the pitch. And none of the publishers cared about that. All they wanted to know was which celebrities I knew or which celebrities I thought I could talk to to get promoted. They were very, very concerned about that.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
And I was like, yeah, I don't really, I don't know. It's actually very funny looking back in hindsight.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
I made some good decisions. But looking back, at the time, I did not fully understand why they were good decisions. So I had chosen a particular lifestyle. That lifestyle, I think, had perhaps put me ahead of the curve in terms of understanding life. a number of topics and issues that a lot of people were interested in.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
And through experimentation with my writing online, I discovered that I was really good about writing those topics and that I could generate a very large audience on those topics. I never put all those things together. I never understood that this weird wayward lifestyle that I had was also fueling this ability to look at human nature and personal growth in completely different novel ways.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
But I think looking back, I'm glad I figured out how to capitalize on it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
For example, like 2011, I spent a couple months in the UK, half of which was sleeping on a couch in London. From there, I managed to get a visa into Russia. I spent six months in Russia, mostly in St. Petersburg, studying Russian and dating Russian girls. And then that visa expired. So then I went to Ukraine. And then... From there, I met up with a friend from home. By then, it was summer.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
So we did a whole backpacking trip across Europe, ended in Ibiza. I partied in Ibiza for a week, then flew to Amsterdam to meet a client. That was like the first half of my 2011. All of that's living out of a suitcase. All of that is running my business from my laptop. Wi-Fi was often... horrendous in half the places I went. But it was very much just like a lush, degenerate lifestyle.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342
It was a ton of fun. But looking back, I think what was very educating about it was being in all those different countries and really enmeshing myself with those cultures, what you start to notice When you just live in your own country, you take for granted, you assume that your values and your assumptions and beliefs are universal.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Sure. So the consciousness car is, you know, if you think about the two aspects of our minds, kind of the emotional side of the mind and then the more rational side of our mind, most of us operate under the assumption that the rational side of our mind is like,
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
the adult in the car who's driving and is in charge and the emotional side of our mind is like the obnoxious kid in the passenger seat who just like won't shut up and is like demanding ice cream all the time and a lot of what we understand as being like a disciplined mature human being is like teaching that kid and that the emotional side of our brain to just shut the f**k up
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
for like 40% of the time so that the adult, the rational part of our brain can get to work and do the right things and be a functioning human being. But what's interesting is that if you look at psychological research, it turns out that we're all very driven. It's actually the emotional side of our brain is the one that's driving the car. And the thinking part of our brain is very good at
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
explaining our emotional impulses in a way that sound very reasonable and rational. they aren't necessarily. And so really we are very impulsive creatures. We all make most of our decisions based on our emotions, based on our feelings.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
And if we're not aware that we're doing that, then the rational side of our brain is kind of enslaved by our emotions to always just justify whatever we feel about ourselves. And so what I argue in that part of the book is that Instead of trying to work against our emotions or suppress our emotions or deny our emotions, we need to work with our emotions.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
We need to understand the role that each part of our mind plays. Because the emotional side of our brain is incredibly important. It determines our motivation. It determines our inspiration. It determines... where we feel value and significance in our lives.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
And so if we deny that part of ourselves and just try to be rational all the time, then we're kind of gutting ourselves of the meaning in our lives. So what I argue is that, you know, we should get the two sides of our brains talking to each other and listening to each other, which is difficult because they kind of speak different languages. But in my opinion, that's kind of what
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
emotional, or I would say even mental health is.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Having the rational side of our brain and the emotional side of our brain interacting with each other and understanding each other.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Right, so if you feel like you should be working out but you're not, we've all experienced that before. And most of us, we judge ourselves. We're like, man, I'm such a loser. I can't get out of bed and go to the gym. And we see it as a failure of willpower. We see it as a failure of our rational side of our mind.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
But the fact of the matter is, until we are emotionally motivated to go to the gym, until we enjoy going to the gym, to some extent, we're not going to go. We're always going to find a reason not to go. And so in that sense, it's an emotional problem. It's not a problem of knowledge. It's not a problem of willpower or whatever.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
So if we understand that, what we can do, instead of trying to will ourselves to the gym constantly, what you can do is you can set up your environment in such a way in that you make it enjoyable to go to the gym. So maybe you find a friend who goes to the gym with you and that way if you wake up
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
and you're supposed to meet your friend at the gym at 8 a.m., the fear of embarrassment of not being there, like your friend arriving and you not, that is an emotional motivation that will get you out of bed and going to the gym. Another way to do it is to hire a trainer and be like, well, I spent all this damn money And I'm going to feel awful if I don't use it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
So it's using your rational mind to create parameters and circumstances that make something emotionally enjoyable to do.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Totally.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Well, the thinking brain is always you're always trying to envision some sort of better future for yourself. So whether that's like you as an individual or if it's the world being a better place or impressing your parents or whatever, like it's we all need some sort of carrot dangling in front of us to succeed. to give ourselves direction and purpose in our lives.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
And so the thinking brain's job is to kind of come up with those sorts of things, is to figure out that equation of if I do X, then I will be happy or whatever.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Well, generally people, you know, people like to avoid pain. But the problem with avoiding pain is that we only value things in our lives in proportion to how much we feel we have to give up for it. So like if you think about like a spoiled child, like a child that's just given everything he or she wants. Yeah.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
The reason these spoiled kids grew up to be like awful human beings is because they never... understand the value of anything. Everything is just a frivolous thing for them to experience from moment to moment. It's only when you're able to go through some sort of challenge or hardship that you are able to understand what is worth sacrificing for and what is not.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
It's only once you've lost something that you understand how valuable, how meaningful it was in your life. And so I just, through all my work and all my books, I consistently make the argument that pain and suffering is important. And not only is it impossible to get rid of pain and suffering, but like,
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
We need to have pain and suffering because psychologically it is kind of like the fuel that generates our sense of meaning and importance in the world.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
And so it's not a question of getting rid of pain. It's like choosing better pain. Totally.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
So anti-fragility comes from Nassim Taleb. It's a really cool idea where he talks about how the opposite of fragility or being fragile, it's not necessarily being robust. It's actually being anti-fragile, which is you gain from pain or disorder in your life. And so if you look at things like the human body or the human mind,
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
It's good to be here. Thanks for having me.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
The human body and human mind are actually, they're not resilient, they're anti-fragile. The reason you get stronger at the gym is because you are breaking your muscles that down and making them stronger. The reason that you get better after failure is because you are breaking down a lot of your assumptions and beliefs and your fears and building up better experiences over them.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
And so in that sense, by actually inviting certain amounts of pain and struggle into your life, you make yourself a stronger individual with far more potential. And one of the big arguments of the book is what I, and what I fear is that, you know, in our culture, there's been such a
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
It's becoming so taken for granted that we're all supposed to be happy and we all deserve to be happy and we all deserve to have a great, easy life and nobody should suffer and all this stuff. Yes, we should try to get rid of injustice. We should try to get rid of
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
people who are predatory or people who are evil, but you shouldn't try to get rid of suffering because suffering is necessary for growth. It's necessary for making people stronger, more resilient, more mature human beings.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
And so what I fear is that as our culture kind of has turned towards this obsession with positivity and feeling good all the time, we are losing that ability to grow from our pain and our failures.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
So I think for me, and I define this in the book, but like what defines an adult is or just being a mature, healthy individual is that ability to understand what is worth suffering for and when is it worth suffering for it. In the simple example of like say a romantic relationship, For that relationship to grow, you have to understand when a fight needs to happen.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Some people, and I think younger, more idealistic people, their idea of a good relationship is a relationship where you just never fight. But that's not a healthy relationship because that means you're hiding things, you're pretending things are not happening. And that makes you more fragile as a couple. Whereas if you...
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
get very good at noticing the things that need to be addressed and being able to address them. Even though you know you're going to fight about it, you know it's going to be painful, you know you're going to be angry at each other for a day or two. If you're able to do that, you actually become a stronger person.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
It's the same thing in business. If you've got employees that are messing up, you can't pretend they're not messing up. You have to say something. Or if you've got a co-worker that's screwing around, you have to say something. There are so many instances. Everywhere you kind of look in life,
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
There's like a skill set of understanding what pain is necessary for growth to occur and then having the ability to step into that pain.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
It was kind of an accident. See, I graduated from college in the last crisis we had, which was the financial crisis in 2008. And there was like zero job market. And I kind of bounced around a few odd jobs. I lived on a friend's couch for a while. And I started doing freelance web design. And around the same time, I read Tim Ferriss' 4-Hour Workweek article.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Absolutely. And I talked about this in my first book, Subtle Art. I said that if you think about the most important experiences of your life, probably three out of four of them were negative experiences. Like a breakup, a death, losing a job. These all, they're horrible in the moment, but when you look back on them years and years later, you're like, wow, I'm so glad that happened.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
I'm such a better person for that happening.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Well, I stay inside. That's one way I suffer for the right reasons. I think there are a few fronts. One, I think the most obvious example is just my career. So it's writing is... I mean, it's fun a lot of times, but a lot of times it's suffering.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
I'm finishing up another book right now and I went back to revise a chapter that I hadn't looked at in a few months and I just looked at it and I'm like, this is terrible. This is absolutely terrible. And it's almost heartbreaking. I had to take the rest of the afternoon off because to have something that you've been working on for over a year and you think you're almost done
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
And then you go look at an early part of it and you're like, wow, I can't publish that. That is awful. It just flattens you. And I think... Writing has its emotional struggles that a lot of people just don't. I seem to be constituted for it. I like being alone. I like working by myself. I don't mind rewriting something like eight different times.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
And so that's a form of suffering that I'm well adapted to and that I even get a little bit of a sick pleasure out of. And so that's kind of why it's become my life is, you know, one thing I always say in my talks is that it's not being good at something that's not because you enjoy it necessarily. Being good at something is you enjoy the sacrifices that are involved in it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
In a way, it's the thing you end up best at is just the pain you can tolerate better than most other people.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
which talked about building online businesses and automating them and how you could work four hours a week and go live and play in Argentina or whatever. I was like, hell yeah, I'm in. That sounds perfect. And so I spent the next couple years trying to actually build e-commerce sites and affiliate marketing sites. And it turned out that I was kind of bad at it.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
I'm not a natural salesman or marketer. But the funny thing was, was at the time, blogs were kind of like all the rage back then.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
I started blogging in 2008. And so if you wanted people to come to your website, if you wanted the rank on Google, if you wanted, there wasn't much sharing on social media back then. You had to be blogging. You had to be posting articles and coming up with stuff. And so that's actually how I ended up blogging. Originally it was just to promote these crappy affiliate sites I had.
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Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
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Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
,,,,,,
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
And it turned out I was much better at blogging than I was e-commerce.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. seg. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. in and I. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. P. sitting on the couch, eating whatever the hell you want for the rest of your life.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
And by 2011, 2012, it was blogging was all I was doing.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Freedom is actually getting up at six in the morning and going to the gym because by building up your body, you are actually giving yourself more options for the future. By limiting options today, by choosing which options you're going to limit today, by choosing not to eat Cheetos, you are Giving yourself more options in the long run.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
And so freedom is actually, it's a personal form of discipline. It's a constant choice of what sacrifice am I going to bring into my life? what is going to be important to me. And so in that sense, I see things like... And I just have to bring this up because we're in the middle of it now.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
There are people protesting during this coronavirus thing saying that the government shouldn't tell me to stay home, I shouldn't have to stay home, blah, blah, blah. And it's like... It's like, guys, you're okay if the government tells you you can't smoke next to a pregnant person or you can't smoke in a restaurant. You're fine if the government tells you you can't scream fire at a theater.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
How is this any different? At some point you have to You have to accept that it's not about what you, freedom is not about what you individually want, it is about what you are individually capable of sacrificing and giving up, both for yourself and for the greater good.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Well, first I would argue that it's not even the future really. It's already happening. I think AI runs the world better than humans in many ways already. The last chapter is a little bit tongue-in-cheek. It's a little bit just me being a little bit crazy and being like, you know what, let's see how far I can take this.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
One of the more tragic things I talk about in the book is that ultimately we do have to hope for something but our hopes inevitably end up causing everything to be f***ed. Everything is f***ed, which is why we need hope, but then our hopes are what cause everything to be f***ed. So it's kind of like this vicious cycle that keeps happening. And it's just kind of an inherent part of our psychology.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
There's not really any way around it. So really the message of the book is like, since we can't get rid of hope, we have to just be very, very careful about what we hope for. And the last chapter is kind of my very, very careful, slightly facetious hopes, which is just that I personally think one of the cornerstones of my personal philosophy and kind of all my work in general is that humans suck.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Like we are just, we're not... Yeah. The human mind is not very well equipped to handle global, ethical, moral questions. If you look at human history, it's just full of violence and screw-ups and disasters. So my starting point is like, if there's any way we're going to kind of save ourselves from ourselves, it's going to happen... via science and technology in some form.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
So that is the thing, the one thing I dare to hope for, although I am also very skeptical of my own hopes.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Secret of Profiting in Life. I think if you just make it a habit to give more value than you consume, good things will happen everywhere. It'll happen with people and relationships. It'll happen in business. It'll happen in your own life. It's just build a habit of give more than you take.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Thanks for having me.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
I definitely think blogging is in a tough spot. I... What happened with blogging is just that all of the smaller and medium-sized websites, they either couldn't monetize anymore or they got eaten up by larger networks and large websites. So people went to Huffington Post or writing for Huffington Post or Business Insider or whatever. So it's a tough spot to start.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
I don't want to discourage anybody from blogging, but if you're looking to build a content business, blogging is probably... one of the worst options right now.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
If I was starting today, I would start a podcast or a YouTube channel. Those are the spaces that are still growing very quickly. Those are the spaces where there's still a lot of opportunity, you know, like the big media companies haven't totally figured out what works or how to do it. And so those are always going to be the spaces where young hustlers have an advantage.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Well, it's funny talking about this now when actually there is a real crisis happening because I think we so easily forget that I feel like that period of 2017, 2018, 2019, there was kind of like a fever pitch in our culture where everything felt like a crisis but nothing was actually a crisis. People were always freaking out over everything that happened.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Whereas you look out the window and everything's great and job market's best it's been in 50 years and economy's doing great and all the metrics in terms of life expectancy and health and education are all-time highs. Meanwhile, you go on Twitter and you would think that the apocalypse was happening. The book was... very much written to address that.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
What is it about not just our culture today, but our generation that we get so worked up about things and trying to put those things in perspective.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
And it's ironic because one of the things that I talked about in the book is that there's a little bit of a paradox where when things are great, you kind of have to make up problems to be upset about because it's by being upset about things that you give your life a sense of meaning or a sense of hope.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
And when things are actually f***ed up, as they are right now, you don't have to go searching for a crisis. You don't have to go searching for problems. The problem's right there in front of you. So in a weird way, crises are almost psychologically easier for us to bear because we know exactly what to hope for.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
I define hope as some sort of vision of the future that we believe will be better. There are a couple of things that are interesting about, I guess, that definition of hope. One is just simply that if we don't have some vision of our future that is better, that's when we fall into depression or despair.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
It's one of the things I talk about in chapter one is that the opposite of happiness is not sadness or anger. The opposite of happiness is hopelessness, is the sense that nothing we do matters, nothing that we do will affect any sorts of change.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
But the other thing about that vision of a better future is that paradoxically that it's easier to have hope when times are bad and it's more difficult to find hope when things are good and comfortable. And so for me, that's, I present, there's a lot of statistics like, you know, suicide is the highest and the wealthiest and safest countries in the world.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
People who, once they reach middle class or upper middle class, you, you see things like depression, anxiety, mental health issues start to start to increase. And That doesn't really make sense, but when you look at it in terms of the difficulty it comes with hoping for something better in the future, it kind of explains that.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Sure, the uncomfortable truth is that in the grand scheme of things, the vast majority of the things that we say and do are not gonna matter
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
period um you know it's it reminds me like when i was at school i remember taking an astronomy course and like just learning how vast the universe is and how like long the history of the earth is and how many billions of people have come before and just and it's just like that feeling of smallness and insignificance you know it's like
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
It's like, wow, and I was really upset over what my mom said this morning. It just seems so trifling by comparison. So the uncomfortable truth is just this realization that the vast majority of the things that you spend your time and energy caring about are not going to matter in the long run.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
And on the one hand, that can be a very depressing realization, but on the other hand, it can be a very liberating realization because it allows you to let go of those things.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
Well, I think we all spend a lot of our energy avoiding that truth. So we convince ourselves that some little project in our life is like life and death important or something we say to another person is like, if we embarrass ourselves in front of somebody, it's like, oh my God, our lives are over. It's the uncomfortable truth. It's a scary thing that we avoid accepting.
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
But if you are able to accept it, it it shows you that most of the things that stress you out are actually not that significant. And so it kind of has a, it's a double, a little bit of a double-edged sword. It can, it can make everything feel meaningless, but at the same time, if most of the things that you
Young and Profiting with Hala Taha (Entrepreneurship, Sales, Marketing)
Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic
say or do or pursue are meaningless, then that means you're completely free to do what matters to you. There's no excuse to not embarrass yourself or to not fail at something or to not pursue a dream or to not tell somebody that you love them. Because we're all going to die anyway, so you might as well live each moment to its fullest.