We have always wondered about finding meaning in life or find the thing that is more valuable to us. Living through rejections, struggles, failures and still finding meaning in life to live through and keep pushing is a valuable lesson. Sometimes we decide we had enough and not give a f*ck about anything, but to really live a life with content we need to give a f*ck about something. Why not give a f*ck about that thing that gives you value, and that makes you wake up every day, gives you the strength to fight against all the odds to be something. Here is a short summary of the book ” The subtle art of not giving a F*ck”
- Self-improvement and success often occur together but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are the same thing. All the conventional self-help ideas focus on your shortcomings. But that doesn’t mean you have a short-coming on that thing that empathizes you. Fixating on positives and successful habits doesn’t mean you already are not what you want to become.
- A confident man doesn’t need to prove to anybody he is confident, a happy person doesn’t need to prove to anybody that they are happy. They are just happy.
- The majority of them want you to think that a nicer life is about having a good job, a bigger car, and a pretty girlfriend. The world is constantly trying to tell you the answer for your life is “more”. Earn more, buy more, etc.
- Constantly bombarded by the thought of giving a f*ck about everything is good for business, growth, etc. Always giving a f*ck about everything to be better than others, but rather it should be giving a f*ck about what is really important and valuable to you.
- Worrying about everything, feeling guilty all the time about everything you do, often getting sad about thinking how lonely you are. Makes you feel like a loser, stop feeling like one and give less F*ck about it.
- Places we spend time more like social media makes us feel having a good life is about getting married, having more good things. So issues like anxiety, fear, anger are considered negative. These things may make you think your life sucks.
- We have become victims of our own success. Stress issues, anxiety disorders, and depression have skyrocketed despite having all the materialistic comforts. we are lacking existential and spiritual well-being.
- The desire for a more positive experience is itself a negative experience, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.
- Allan watts used to refer to this as backward law ” the idea that the more you pursue all the time the less satisfied you become.”
“You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of. You will never live if you are looking for the meaning of life.”
Albert Camus
- Understanding failures teach you how to do things better. which is actually a positive experience.
- Suffering through pain gives you courage and perseverance.
- Avoiding and denials are all the same thing, if you try and avoid things or deny things it is itself a failure.
- Living through pain and not giving a f*ck about pain makes you unstoppable.
- Moments of non-F*ckery are moments that most define our life.
- Giving too many f*cks about everything is an actual struggle. You are going to die one day, and if you are going to go around and give too many f*cks before the short period you are going to live, then you are going to actually get f*cked.
- Choosing what matters to you and what doesn’t matter to you based on personal values is a difficult and worthy struggle one can undertake in life.
- Subtelty1: Not giving a fuck doesn’t mean being indifferent, it means being comfortable being different. just don’t give a f*ck about unimportant things. Reserve the fucks for the big things that matter.
- Subtelty2: To not give a f*ck about adversity, you must first care about something more important than adversity.
- Subtlety3: Whether you realize it or not, you are always choosing what to give a f*ck about. The key is to gradually prune the things you care about so that you only give a f*ck on the most important of occasions.
- When a person doesn’t have a problem the mind finds automatically to invent some.
- Finding something important and meaningful in your life is perhaps the most productive use of your time and energy.
- Maturity is what happens when one learns to only give a f*ck about what truly f*ckworthy.
- Life goes on whether you give a f*ck or not, all the petty things we gave a f*ck about become meaningless as we grow.
- It is okay for life to suck sometimes.
- The idea of not giving a f*ck is a simple way of reorienting our expectations for life and choosing what is more important and what is not.
- Developing disability is a kind of practical enlightenment. Practicable enlightenment here is the act of becoming comfortable with the idea that some suffering is always inevitable.
- Get comfortable with all the shit life throws at you, and it does show a lot of shit. The only way to overcome pain is to know how to bear it.
- Pain and loss are inevitable and we should let go of trying to resist them.
- The greatest truths in life are always the ones that will be unpleasant to hear.
- Disappointment is essential in life, it will make our lives better despite making us feel worse, it makes us stronger by tearing us down and brighten our future by showing us the darkness.
- Suffering is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change.
- We are wired to become dissatisfied with what we have and satisfied by what we do not have.
- The negative psychological pain is a calling to take some action and move forward. So avoiding the negative pain is like avoiding or recognizing the problems.
- Problems don’t fade away, they just get improved. They get exchanged or getting upgraded.
- Happiness comes by solving problems. If you are avoiding your problems or if you think you don’t have any problems, you are making your life miserable. If you feel like you have problems you can’t solve will likewise make your life miserable.
- You can’t merely be in love with the result. Everybody loves the result. You have to love the process.
- The Denial: Some people deny that their problem exists in the first place, they constantly delude or distract themselves from reality. This only makes them feel good for the short-term.
- Victim mentality of blaming others or circumstances for the problem even though they could solve their problem.
- Emotions are overrated. Emotions are simply biological signals that nudge towards the direction of beneficial change. They are just part of the equations of our lives but not the entire equation.
- Sometimes do not trust your own emotion and create a habit of questioning them. They are just feedback mechanisms that don’t reveal any truth.
- Decision-making based on emotional intuition without the aid of reason to keep it inline pretty much always sucks.
- Everything comes with an inherent sacrifice, whatever makes us feel good will inevitably make us feel bad.
- The idea of eliminating the problem entirely and living happily ever after never happens.
- The most important question you need to ask yourself is not how rich you want to become, it is rather what pain do you want? what are you willing to struggle for? these questions will be a better determinant of how your life turns out.
- What determines your success isn’t something you wanna enjoy.
- Who you are is defined by what are you willing to struggle for. Our struggles determine our successes.
- You are not special. Thinking that you are special doesn’t give you anything you want to achieve. Your pain or severity of the pain doesn’t make you entitled, unique or privileged.
- Self-esteem should not be measured based on how positively people feel about themselves, the true measurement is about how people feel about the negative aspects of themselves.
- If you are going to feel absolutely great 99.9% of the time despite your life is falling apart, how can that be a valuable metric to measure self-esteem?
- Entitlement is impervious, people who feel entitled delude themselves to whatever feeds their superiority. It’s a failed strategy, it’s not happiness.
- The deeper the pain the more helpless we feel against our problems, and the more entitlement we adopt to compensate those problems.
- Most of us are pretty average in most things we do, even if you are exceptional in one thing chances are you are average or below average at other things.
- Our lives today are filled with information with extremes of the bell curve of the human experience. The best of the best, the worst of the worst, the 99.9%, the scariest thing ever, the greatest, the funniest, the most upsetting. yet the vast majority of life lies in the middle. The vast majority of life is unextraordinary. indeed quite average. We don’t have to be extreme to get noticed. But that’s what media feeds you.
- Being average has become the new failure. People who become exceptional believe in rigorous improvement. They are obsessed with improvement because they believe that they are not great at all and just average.
- The majority of your life will be long and boring, and that’s okay.
- In large portions of our lives, humans always dedicate it to useless or destructive causes.
- If what we value is unhelpful or poorly chosen then every day we live by those values, the emotions we undergo, the day-to-day life won’t make sense. So asking yourselves your values is important.
- The most uncomfortable the answer, the most likely it’s to be true.
- It’s far more helpful to assume you are ignorant and don’t know a whole lot. This keeps unattached to superstitious or Poorly informed beliefs and promotes a constant state of learning and growth.
- Meaningful habits include pain, struggle, anger, and despair yet when we accomplish it we all get happy about sharing it with someone we love.
“One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
Sigmund Freud
- We can’t always control what happens to us, but we can control how to interpret what happens to us. To respond better.
- The more you embrace being uncertain and not knowing, the more comfortable you will feel in knowing what you don’t know.
- All beliefs are wrong—some are just less wrong than others.
- Counterintuitive insight by Baumeister regarding evil: some of the worst criminals often felt good about themselves. Low self-esteem was not always associated with evil acts.
- The more you try to become certain about a particular issue, the more uncertain and insecure you will feel.
- The more you embrace being uncertain and not knowing, the more comfortable you will feel in knowing what you don’t know.
- The man who believes he knows everything learns nothing.
- Manson’s Law of Avoidance: The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it. The more something threatens how you view yourself, the more you will avoid getting around to doing it.
- If I believe I’m a nice guy, I’ll avoid situations that could potentially contradict that belief. If I believe I’m an awesome cook, I’ll seek out opportunities to prove that to myself over and over again. The belief always takes precedence.
- Manson’s idea of “kill yourself” is similar to Paul Graham’s idea of “keep your identity small.” The central point is that if you don’t have an identity to protect, then change becomes much easier.
- For any change to happen in your life, you must accept that you were wrong about something you were doing before.
- “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.” -Aristotle
- If it feels like it’s you versus the world, chances are it’s really just you versus yourself.
- The magnitude of your success is tied to how many times you’ve failed at that thing.
- Goals are limited in the amount of happiness they can provide in our lives because they are finite. Once you achieve the goal, it can no longer provide happiness because the finish line has been crossed. Paradoxically, then, by choosing processes as your focus, you can increase your overall, lifelong happiness by focusing on the process and not the goal. Processes never end, which means happiness can continue indefinitely.
- Action isn’t just the effect of motivation; it’s also the cause of it. Do something and inspiration will follow.
- How do you write tons of books? Write “200 crappy words per day” and you’ll find motivation often flows out of you.
- Manson’s “do something” principle sounds a lot like the philosophy behind the 2-minute rule. Do something now, even if it’s really small, and let good actions cascade as a result.
- To truly appreciate something, you must confine yourself to it. There’s a certain level of joy and meaning that you reach in life only when you’ve spent decades investing in a single relationship, a single craft, a single career. And you cannot achieve those decades of investment without rejecting the alternatives.
- The mark of an unhealthy relationship is when two people try to solve each other’s problems in order to feel good about themselves.
- Trust is the most important ingredient in any relationship for the simple reason that without trust the relationship doesn’t actually mean anything.
- Investing deeply in one person, one place, one job, one activity might deny us the breadth of experience we’d like, but pursuing a breadth of experience denies us the opportunity to enjoy the rewards of the depth of experience.
- Commitment, in its own way, offers a wealth of opportunity and experiences that would never otherwise be available to you, no matter how many surface-level experiences you pursued.
- Rejection of alternatives liberates us. In a strange way, commitment to one thing offers more freedom than anything else because it relieves you of all the second-guessing about what else is out there.
- If there is no reason to do anything, if life is pointless, then there is also no reason to not do anything. What do you have to lose? You’re going to die anyway, so your fears and embarrassments and failures don’t mean anything. You might as well try.
- All of the meaning in our life is shaped by our innate desire to never truly die. Our physical bodies will die, but we cling to the idea that we can live on through religion, politics, sports, art, and technological innovation.
- The only way to be comfortable with death is to understand and see yourself as something bigger than yourself, to contribute to some much larger entity.
- It is the act of choosing your values and living by them that makes you great, not an outcome or accomplishment.
- “We’re all going to die, all of us. What a circus! That alone should make us love each other, but it doesn’t.” -Charles Bukowski
