Week 8 - The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

Ronan read The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck - so you didn't have to...

Fast Facts

Week: 8

Title : The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

Author: Mark Manson

Rating: 8/10 

Adapted from Ronan's LinkedIn newsletter 08/03/2023 - 
Books I've Read For You

Summary

I didn’t think I’d enjoy this book because I thought the title was deliberately controversial but the book has numerous life lessons and ways of seeing our faults and biases, together with techniques to improve them.

One Key Takeaway or Insight

Process

You need to be in love with the process, not the results. Responsibility vs fault, self-awareness framework.

Video version of Book Review

Too lazy to read the summary? Watch instead.

* Common Sense Events has rebranded to Uncommon Experiences

Introduction

If you're ready to challenge some of your deeply held beliefs and gain a deeper understanding of your emotions, this book is a must-read. Self-improvement and success often go hand in hand, but they are not synonymous.

Traditional life advice tends to focus on your shortcomings and failures, emphasizing what you lack. In contrast, this book advocates for a shift in perspective: caring less about what is trivial and more about what is truly important and immediate. 

It offers a refreshing take on personal development by highlighting the significance of solving problems, embracing unpleasant truths, and valuing the process over the results. 

Prepare to explore a variety of concepts from the nature of emotions and the pitfalls of superficial values to the empowering distinction between responsibility and fault. This book is filled with valuable insights and practical techniques for fostering self-awareness and personal growth.

 

Read this book if you want to examine some of the beliefs you hold or are interested in better understanding your emotions.

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

Conventional life advice is actually fixating on what you lack, your perceived personal shortcomings and failures, and emphasizing them for you.

The key to a good life is not giving a f*ck about more; it’s giving a f*ck about less, giving a f*ck about only what is true and immediate and important.

If you find yourself consistently giving too many f*cks about trivial shit that bothers you, chances are you don’t have much going on in your life to give a legitimate f*ck about.

The greatest truths in life are usually the most unpleasant to hear.

Life is essentially an endless series of problems. The solution to one problem is merely the creation of the next one.  Happiness comes from solving problems.

Emotions are simply biological signals designed to nudge you in the direction of beneficial change.

You need to be in love with the process,

not the results.

 

The more exposed we are to opposing viewpoints, the more we seem to get upset that those viewpoints exist. 

Our lives today are filled with information from the extremes of the bell curve of human experience. We are flooded with the truly extraordinary. The best of the best. The worst of the worst. These can drive us to feel pretty insecure and desperate because clearly, we are somehow not good enough.

 

Self-awareness

Simply understanding one’s emotions.

The ability to ask why we feel certain emotions.

By what standard am I judging myself and everyone around me?

Our values determine the nature of our problems, and the nature of our problems determines the quality of our lives.

Everything we think and feel about situations ultimately comes back to how valuable we perceive it to be.

Most self-help gurus ignore the deeper level of self-awareness, instead giving advice on how to make more money, whilst ignoring important value-based questions: How are you choosing to measure success/failure for yourself?

Trying to make people feel good in the short term while the real long-term problems never get solved.

The question is not whether we evaluate ourselves against others; rather, the question is by what standard do we measure ourselves?

Shitty Values:

  1. Superficial pleasure

  2. Material success

  3. Always being right

 

Defining Good and Bad Values

Good Values
Bad Values
Reality-based  Superstitious 
Socially Constructive  Social Destructive 
Immediate and Controllable  Not Immediate or Uncontrollable 

When we feel that we’ve chosen our problems, we feel empowered. When we feel that our problems are being forced upon us against our will we feel victimised and miserable.

We don’t always control what happens to us. We always control how we interpret what happens to us, as well as how we respond.

 

 

Responsibility vs Fault

We are responsible for experiences that aren’t our fault all the time. This is part of life.

Fault is a past tense. Responsibility is present tense. Fault results from choices that have already been made. Responsibility results from the choices you’re currently making. 

Many people may be to blame for your unhappiness, but nobody is ever responsible for your unhappiness but you.

Many of the relationships in your life were built around the values you’ve been keeping, so the moment you change those values, your turnaround will reverberate out though your relationships, and many of them will blow up in your face.

 

Growth is an endlessly iterative process, we go from wrong to slightly less wrong.

 

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

Once we create meaning for ourselves, our brains are designed to hold on to that meaning. Even if we see evidence that contradicts the meaning we created, we often ignore it and keep on believing anyway.

 

Every new piece of information is measured against the values and conclusions we already have.

Every new piece of information is measured against the values and conclusions we already have.

This is why people are often so afraid of success - for the exact same reason they’re afraid of failure; it threatens who they believe themselves to be.

Many people are able to ask themselves if they're wrong, but few people are able to go the extra step and admit what it would mean if they were wrong.

 

At some point, most of us reach a place where we’re afraid to fail. 

We need to reject something. Otherwise, we stand for nothing. Avoiding rejection gives us short-term pleasure by making us rudderless and directionless long term.

 

Rejection actually makes our relationships better and our emotional lives healthier.

There is an abundance of economic opportunity - so much that it has become far more valuable to present yourself in a certain way, even if that is false than to actually be that way. As a result of this trust has lost its value.

This is why people learn to pretend to be friends with people they don’t actually like, and to buy things they don’t actually want. The economic system promotes such deception.

 

Summary:

I didn’t think I’d enjoy this book because I thought the title was deliberately controversial but the book has numerous life lessons and ways of seeing our faults and biases, together with techniques to improve them.

 

1 Key Takeaway/Insight:

You need to be in love with the process, not the results. Responsibility vs fault, self-awareness framework.

 

 

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