The world is constantly telling you that the path to a better life is more, more, moreâbuy more, own more, make more, fuck more, and be more. This causes you to become overly attached to the superficial and fake, to dedicate to chasing a mirage of happiness and satisfaction. The key to a good life is not giving a fuck about more; itâs giving a fuck about less, giving a fuck about only what is true and immediate and important.
A backward law: The desire for a more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of oneâs negative experience is itself a positive experience.*
The pain you pursue in the gym results in better all-around health and energy. The failures in business are what lead to a better understanding of what’s necessary to be successful. Being open with your insecurities paradoxically makes you more confident and charismatic around others. The pain of honest confrontation is what generates the greatest trust and respect in your relationships. Suffering through your fears and anxieties is what allows you to build courage and perseverance.
Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience.
* Similar to Ray Dalio’s Life Principle: Weighing second- and third-order consequences.
Most of us struggle throughout our lives by giving too many fucks in situations where fucks do not deserve to be given. We care too much, and we worry too much. Because when you give too many fucksâwhen you give a fuck about everyone and everythingâyou will feel that youâre perpetually entitled to be comfortable and happy at all times, that everything is supposed to be just exactly the fucking way you want it to be. This is a sickness. And it will eat you alive. You will see every adversity as an injustice, every challenge as a failure, every inconvenience as a personal slight, and every disagreement as a betrayal. You will be confined to your own petty, skull-sized hell, burning with entitlement and bluster, running circles around your very own personal Feedback Loop from Hell, in constant motion yet arriving nowhere.
It is okay to fail. It is good to fail as it will be a positive experience.
When most people envision giving no fucks whatsoever, they imagine a kind of serene indifference to everything, a calm that weathers all storms. They imagine and aspire to be a person who is shaken by nothing and caves into no one.
Subtlety #1: Not giving a fuck does not mean being indifferent; it means being comfortable with being different.
The question, then, is, What do we give a fuck about? What are we choosing to give a fuck about? And how can we not give a fuck about what ultimately does not matter?
Know itâs more important than they are, more important than their feelings and their pride and their ego. They say, âFuck it,â not to everything in life, but rather to everything unimportant in life. They reserve their fucks for what truly matters.
Care what is important; do not care what is unimportant.
Subtlety #2: To not give a fuck about adversity, you must first give a fuck about something more important than adversity
If you find yourself consistently giving too many fucks about trivial shit that bothers youâyour ex-boyfriendâs new Facebook picture, how quickly the batteries die in the TV remote, missing out on yet another two-for-one sale on hand sanitiser â chances are you donât have much going on in your life to give a legitimate fuck about.
Focus on the important stuff and stop caring about what is not.
Subtlety #3: Whether you realize it or not, you are always choosing what to give a fuck about.
When weâre young, everything is new and exciting, and everything seems to matter so much. Therefore, we give tons of fucks. As we get older, with the benefit of experience (and having seen so much time slip by), we begin to notice that most of these sorts of things have a little lasting impact on our lives.
Essentially, we become more selective about the fucks weâre willing to give. This is something called maturity. Maturity is what happens when one learns to only give a fuck about whatâs truly fuckworthy. As we grow older and enter middle age, something else begins to change. Our energy level drops. Our identity solidifies. We know who we are and we accept ourselves, including some of the parts we arenât thrilled about. We no longer need to give a fuck about everything. Life is just what it is. We accept it, warts and all.
This book will help you think a little bit more clearly about what youâre choosing to find important in life and what youâre choosing to find unimportant. The idea of not giving a fuck is a simple way of reorienting our expectations for life and choosing what is important and what is not. This book will not teach you how to gain or achieve but rather how to lose and let go. It will teach you to close your eyes and trust that you can fall backwards and still be okay. It will teach you to give fewer fucks.
Happiness is not a solvable equation. Dissatisfaction and unease are inherent parts of human nature and, as weâll see, necessary components to creating consistent happiness.
We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful. It is natureâs preferred agent for inspiring change. We have evolved to always live with a certain degree of dissatisfaction and insecurity because itâs the mildly dissatisfied and insecure creature thatâs going to do the most work to innovate and survive. We are wired to become dissatisfied with whatever we have and satisfied with only what we do not have. This constant dissatisfaction has kept our species fighting and striving, building and conquering. Pain, in all of its forms, is our bodyâs most effective means of spurring action.
Problems are a constant in life. Happiness comes from solving problems. Happiness is a constant work-in-progress, because solving problems is a constant work-in-progress â the solutions to todayâs problems will lay the foundation for tomorrowâs problems, and so on. True happiness occurs only when you find the problems you enjoy having and enjoy solving. Whatever your problems are, the concept is the same: solve problems; be happy. Unfortunately, for many people, they fuck things up in at least one of two ways:
- Denial. Some people deny that their problems exist in the first place. They constantly delude or distract themselves from reality. This may make them feel good in the short term but it leads to a life of insecurity, neuroticism and emotional repression.
- Victim Mentality. Some choose to believe that there is nothing they can do to solve their problems, even when they in fact could. They seek to blame others for their problems or blame outside circumstances. This may make them feel better in the short term but it leads to a life of anger, helplessness and despair.
People deny and blame others for their problems for the simple reason that itâs easy and feels good while solving problems is hard and often feels bad.
Happiness requires struggle. It grows from problems. What determines your success isnât, âWhat do you want to enjoy?â The relevant question is, âWhat pain do you want to sustain?” The path to happiness is a pat of shitheaps and shame. You have to choose something. You can’t have a pain-free life. Most people like the results but do not like the process. They want the reward and not the struggle. They like the victory and not the fight.
Who you are is defined by what you are willing to struggle for. People who enjoy the struggles of a gym are the ones who run triathlons and have chiselled abs. People who “enjoy” long workweeks and the politics of the corporate ladder are the ones who fly to the top of it. People who “enjoy” the stresses and uncertainties of the starving artist lifestyle are ultimately the ones who live it and make it.
No pain, no gain. Our struggles determine our success.
A true and accurate measurement of oneâs self-worth is how people feel about the negative aspects of themselves. The true measurement of self-worth is not how a person feels about her positive experiences but how she feels about her negative experiences. A person who has high self-worth is able to look at the negative parts of his character frankly — “Yes, sometimes I’m irresponsible with money,” “Yes, sometimes I exaggerate my success,” “Yes, I rely too much on others to support me and should be more self-reliant” and then acts to improve upon them. But entitled people, because they are incapable of acknowledging their problems openly and honestly, are incapable of improving their lives in any lasting or meaningful way. They are left chasing high after high and accumulate greater and greater levels of denial. But eventually, reality must hit and the underlying problems will once again make themselves clear. It’s just a question of when, and how painful it will be.
Being âaverageâ has become the new standard of failure. A lot of people are afraid to accept mediocrity because they believe that if they accept it, theyâll never achieve anything, never improve and that their life wonât matter. This sort of thinking is dangerous. Once you accept the premise that life is worthwhile only if it is truly notable and great, then you accept the fact that most of the human population (including yourself) sucks and is worthless. And this mindset can quickly turn dangerous, to both yourself and others.
The rare people who do become truly exceptional at something do so not because they believe theyâre exceptional. On the contrary, they become amazing because theyâre obsessed with improvements. And that obsession with improvement stems from an unerring belief that they are, in fact, not that great at all. Itâs anti-entitlement. People who become great at something become great because they understand that theyâre not already greatâthey are mediocre, they are averageâand that they could be so much better.
Most of us are just average — hard work, determination and a growth mindset that creates improvements will turn average to become exceptional. Keep grinding.
Self-awareness is like an onion. There are multiple layers to it, and the more you peel them back, the more likely youâre going to start crying at inappropriate times.
- Letâs say first layer of the self-awareness onion is a simple understanding of oneâs emotions.
- The second layer of the self-awareness onion is the ability to ask why we feel certain emotions. This layer of questioning helps us understand the root cause of the emotions that overwhelm us. Once we understand the root cause, we can ideally do something to change it.
- The third level is our personal values: Why do I consider this to be success/failure? How am I choosing to measure myself? By what standard am I judging myself and everyone around me?
Honest self-questioning is difficult. It requires asking yourself simple questions that are uncomfortable to answer. The more uncomfortable the answer, the more likely it is to be true.
The question is not whether we evaluate ourselves against others; rather, the question is by what standard do we measure ourselves? Our values determine the metrics by which we measure ourselves and everyone else. If you want to change how you see your problems, you have to change what you value and/or how you measure failure/success.
There are a handful of common values that create really poor problems for people:
- Pleasure
Pleasure is great but it is a horrible value to prioritize your life around. It is a false god. Pleasue is not the cause of happiness; rather it is the effect. If you get the other stuff right, then pleasure will naturally occur as a by-product. - Material success
Many people measure their self-worth based on how much money they make or what kind of car they drive.
Research shows that once one can provide for basic physical needs (food, shelter, and so on), the correlation between happiness and worldly success quickly approaches zero.
The other issue with overvaluing material success is the danger of prioritizing it over other values, such as honesty, nonviolence, and compassion. When people measure themselves not by their behaviour, but by the status symbols theyâre able to collect, then not only are they shallow, but theyâre probably assholes as well. - Always being right
The fact is people who base their self-worth on being right about everything prevent themselves from learning from their mistakes. They lack the ability to take on new perspectives and empathize with others. They close themselves off from new and important information. - Staying positive
The truth is, sometimes life sucks, and the healthiest thing you can do is admit it. Constant positivity is a form of avoidance, not a valid solution to lifeâs problemsâproblems which, by the way, if youâre choosing the right values and metrics, should be invigorating and motivating you.
Things go wrong, people upset us and accidents happen. These things make us feel like shit. Negative emotions are a necessary component of emotional health. To deny that negativity is to perpetuate problems rather than solve them.
The trick with negative emotions is to 1) express them in a socially acceptable and healthy manner and 2) express them in a way that aligns with your values. Emotions are just feedback.
Some of the greatest moments of one’s life are not pleasant, not successful, not known and not positive.
Good values are 1) reality-based, 2) socially constructive, and 3) immediate and controllable. They are achieved internally.
Bad values are 1) superstitious, 2) socially destructive, and 3) not immediate or controllable. Bad values are generally reliant on external events. They are generally reliant on external events.
Examples of good, healthy values are honesty, innovation, vulnerability, standing up for oneself, standing up for others, self-respect, curiosity, charity, humility, creativity
Examples of bad, unhealthy values are dominance through manipulation or violence, indiscriminate fucking, feeling good all the time, always being the centre of attention, not being alone, being liked by everybody, being rich for the sake of being rich, sacrificing small animals to the pagan gods.
When we have poor valuesâthat is, poor standards we set for ourselves and othersâwe are essentially giving fucks about the things that donât matter, things that in fact make our life worse.
This, in a nutshell, is what âself-improvementâ is really about prioritizing better values and choosing better things to give a fuck about. Because when you give better fucks, you get better problems. And when you get better problems, you get a better life.
The rest of the book is dedicated to five counterintuitive values that the author believes are the most beneficial values one can adopt. These values follow the backwards law and require confronting deeper problems rather than avoiding them through highs.
- Responsibility: Taking responsibility for everything that occurs in your life regardless of who’s at fault
- Uncertainty: The acknowledgement of your ignorance and the cultivation of constant doubt in your beliefs
- Failure: The willingness to discover your flaws and mistakes so that they may be improved upon
- Rejection: The ability to both say and hear no, thus clearly defining what you will and will not accept in your life
- The contemplation of one’s mortality — paying vigilant attention to one’s death is perhaps the only thing capable of helping us keep all our values in proper perspective
1. Responsibility
Often the only difference between a problem being painful or being powerful is a sense that we chose it, and that we are responsible for it. When we feel that weâre choosing our problems, we feel empowered. When we feel that our problems are being forced upon us against our will, we feel victimized and miserable.
We donât always control what happens to us. But we always control how we interpret what happens to us, as well as how we respond.
The real question is, What are we choosing to give a fuck about? What values are we choosing to base our actions on? What metrics are we choosing to use to measure our life? And are those good choicesâgood values and good metrics?
We are responsible for experiences that arenât our fault all the time. This is part of life.
There’s a difference between blaming someone else for your situation and that person’s being responsible for your situation. Nobody else is ever responsible for your situation but you. Many people may be to blame for your unhappiness, but nobody is ever responsible for your unhappiness but you. This is because you always get to choose how you see things, and how you react to things, how you value things. You always get to choose the metric by which to measure your experiences.
We all love to take responsibility for success and happiness. But taking responsibility for our problems is far more important because this is where real-life improvement comes from. To simply blame others is only to hurt yourself.
We all get dealt cards. Some of us get better cards than others. And while itâs easy to get hung up on our cards, and feel we got screwed over, the real game lies in the choices we make with those cards, the risks we decide to take, and the consequences we choose to live with. People who consistently make the best choices in the situations theyâre given are the ones who eventually come out ahead in poker, just as in life. And itâs not necessarily the people with the best cards.
The responsibility/fault fallacy allows people to pass off the responsibility for solving their problems to others. This ability to alleviate responsibility through blame gives people a temporary high and a feeling of moral righteousness.
The biggest problem with victimhood chic is that it sucks attention away from actual victims. The more people there are who proclaim themselves victims over tiny infractions, the harder it becomes to see who the real victims are.
2. Uncertainty
Growth is an endlessly iterative process. When we learn something new, we donât go from âwrongâ to âright.â Rather, we go from wrong to slightly less wrong. We are always in the process of approaching truth and perfection without ever reaching truth or perfection.
We shouldn’t seek to find the ultimate “right” answer for ourselves but rather, we should seek to chip away at the ways that we are wrong today so that we can be a little less wrong tomorrow.
Certainty is the enemy of growth. Instead of striving for certainty, we should be in constant search of doubt. Being wrong opens us up to the possibility of change.
Being wrong brings the opportunity for growth.
We do not know what a positive or negative experience is. Some of the most difficult and stressful moments of our lives also end up being the most formative and motivating. Some of the best and most gratifying experiences of our lives are also the most distracting and demotivating.
Certainty is illusional, but the pursuit of certainty often breeds more (and worse) insecurity. Many people have an unshakable certainty in their ability at their job or in the amount of salary they should be making. But that certainty makes them feel worse, not better. They see others getting promoted over them, and they feel slighted. They feel unappreciated and underacknowledged.
It is the backwards law again: the more you try to be certain about something, the more uncertain and insecure you will feel. The converse is true as well: the more you embrace being uncertain and not knowing, the more comfortable you will feel in knowing what you donât know. The only way to achieve these things is to remain uncertain of them and be open to finding them out through experience.
Uncertainty is the root of all progress and all growth. As the old adage goes, the man who believes he knows everything learns nothing. We cannot learn anything without first not knowing something. The more we admit we do not know, the more opportunities we gain to learn. This openness to being wrong must exist for any real change or growth to take place.
Mansonâs Law of Avoidance: The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.
That means the more something threatens to change how you view yourself, how successful/ unsuccessful you believe yourself to be, and how well you see yourself living up to your values, the more you will avoid ever getting around to doing it.
We all have values for ourselves. We protect these values. We try to live up to them and we justify and maintain them, Weâre unfairly biased toward what we already know, what we believe to be certain. If I believe that I am a nice guy, I will avoid situations that could potentially contradict that belief. If I believe that I am an awesome cook, I will seek opportunities to prove that to myself. The belief always takes precedence.
Until we change how we view ourselves and what we believe we are and are not, we cannot overcome our avoidance and anxiety. We cannot change.
Be a little less certain of yourself.
Questioning ourselves and doubting our thoughts and beliefs is one of the hardest skills to develop. Here are some questions that will help you breed a little more uncertainty in your life.
- Question #1: What if Iâm wrong?
The goal is merely to ask the question and entertain the thought at the moment, not to hate yourself.
As a general rule, weâre all the worldâs worst observers of ourselves.
Itâs worth remembering that for any change to happen in your life, you must be wrong about something. If youâre sitting there, miserable day after day, then that means youâre already wrong about something major in your life, and until youâre able to question yourself to find it, nothing will change. - Question #2: What would it mean if I were wrong?
Many people are able to ask themselves if theyâre wrong, but few are able to go the extra step and admit what it would mean if they were wrong.
Aristotle wrote, âIt is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.â Being able to look at and evaluate different values without necessarily adopting them is perhaps the central skill required in changing oneâs life in a meaningful way. - Question #3: Would being wrong create a better or a worse problem than my current problem, for both myself and others?
The goal here is to look at which problem is better.
That’s simply reality: if it feels like it’s you versus the world, chances are it is really just you versus yourself.
3. Failure
Improvement at anything is based on thousands of tiny failures, and the magnitude of your success is based on how many times youâve failed at something. If someone is better than you at something, then itâs likely because she has failed at it more than you have. If someone is worse than you, itâs likely because he hasnât been through all of the painful learning experiences you have.
Avoiding failure is something we learn at some later point in life. Iâm sure a lot of it comes from our education system, which judges rigorously based on performance and punishes those who donât do well. Another large share of it comes from overbearing or critical parents who don’t let their kids screw up on their own often enough and instead punish them for trying anything new or not preordained.
We have all the mass media that constantly expose us to stellar success after success, while not showing us the thousands of hours of dull practice and tedium that were required to achieve that success. At some point, most of us reach a place where weâre afraid to fail, where we instinctively avoid failure and stick only to what is placed in front of us or only what weâre already good at. We can be truly successful only at something weâre willing to fail at. If weâre unwilling to fail, then weâre unwilling to succeed. A lot of this fear of failure comes from having chosen shitty values. Better values, as we saw, are process-oriented.
Pain is part of the process. Our proudest achievements come in the face of the greatest adversity. Our pain often makes us stronger, more resilient, and more grounded.
Our most radical changes in perspective often happen at the tail end of our worst moments. Itâs only when we feel intense pain that weâre willing to look at our values and question why they seem to be failing us. We need some sort of existential crisis to take an objective look at how weâve been deriving meaning in our life, and then consider changing course. You could call it âhitting bottomâ or âhaving an existential crisis.â I prefer to call it âweathering the shitstorm.â Choose what suits you.
Life is about not knowing and then doing something anyway.
Donât just sit there. Do something. The answers will follow.
Action isnât just the effect of motivation; itâs also the cause of it.
The thing about motivation is that itâs not only a three-part chain but an endless loop: Inspiration â Motivation â Action â Inspiration â Motivation â Action â Etc.
If you lack the motivation to make an important change in your life, do somethingâanything, reallyâand then harness the reaction to that action as a way to begin motivating yourself.
If we follow the âdo somethingâ principle, failure feels unimportant. When the standard of success becomes merely actingâwhen any result is regarded as progress and important, when inspiration is seen as a reward rather than a prerequisiteâwe propel ourselves ahead. We feel free to fail, and that failure moves us forward.
4. Rejection
Rejection makes your life better. Rejection is an important and crucial life skill.
The difference between a healthy and an unhealthy relationship comes down to two things: 1) how well each person in the relationship accepts responsibility, and 2) the willingness of each person to both reject and be rejected by their partner.
5. The contemplation of one’s mortality
Death scares us. It is inevitable. Without death, everything would feel inconsequential, all experiences arbitrary, all metrics and values suddenly zero.
Living beyond our death
In the book, The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker, one of his premises is that there are two “selves”. The first self is the physical self. The second is our conceptual self — our identity, or how we see ourselves.
Our physical self will eventually die. In order to compensate for our fear of the inevitable loss of our physical self, we try to construct a conceptual self that will live forever. This is why people put their names on buildings, on statutes, on books, spending time on their children in hopes that our influence (our conceptual self) will last way beyond our physical self. That we will be remembered and revered and idolised long after our physical self ceases to exist. Beckers call these efforts our “immortality projects”.
Our immortality projects are our values. They are the extension of our physical self and a barometer of meaning and worth in our life.
People’s immortality projects can be the problem, not the solution. People should question their conceptual selves and become more comfortable with the reality of their death. Death is inevitable. Hence, we should not avoid this realisation but rather come to terms with it as best we can. Because once we become comfortable with the fact of our death, we can then choose our values more freely, unrestrained by the illogical quest for immortality and freed from dangerous dogmatic views.
Confronting the reality of our mortality is important because it obliterates all the crappy, fragile, superficial values in life. While most people whittle their days chasing another buck, a little more fame and attention, or a little bit more assurance that they are right or loved, death confronts all of us with a far more painful and important question: What is your legacy? How will the world be different and better when youâre gone? What mark will you have made? What influence will you have caused?
As Becker pointed out, this is arguably the only true question in our life. Yet we avoid thinking about it. One, because it is hard. Two, because it is scary. Three, because we have no clue what we are doing.
As we avoid this question, we let trivial and hateful values hijack our brains and take control of our desires and ambitions. The superficial will appear important and the important become superficial. Death is the only thing we can know with any certainty. Hence, it must be the compass by which we orient all our values and decisions. It is the correct answer to all of the questions we should ask but never do. The only way to be comfortable with death is to understand and see yourself as something bigger than yourself, that is simple and immediate and controllable and tolerant of the chaotic world around you. This is the basic root of all happiness.
