The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck By Mark Manson (Quick Summary)

Feeling distracted, running on auto-pilot code or carried away by the fast paced life?

The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A Fuck by Mark Manson is a great read for anyone looking for practical advice on how to determine what is worth your precious time, mental, and emotional energy and what you should just stop giving a fuck about. There are a ton of great lessons throughout the book related to self-confidence, life optimization, efficient decision making, and the power of choice 

It's a refreshing book on a counterintuitive approach to living a good life. I enjoy a dose of raw, refreshing, honest truth that is sorely lacking today. The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F**k is his antidote to the let’s-all-feel-good and be positive mindset. Instead, there's an emphasis that improving our lives hinges not on our ability to turn lemons into lemonade, but on learning to stomach lemons better.

From How to accept yourself (Haemin Sunim book review), acceptance is a key to peace. Manson advises us to get to know our limitations and accept them. Once we embrace our fears, faults, and uncertainties, once we stop running and avoiding and start confronting painful truths, we can begin to find the courage, perseverance, honesty, responsibility, curiosity, and forgiveness we seek.

There are only so many things we can give a f**k about so we need to figure out which ones really matter. While money is nice, caring about what you do with your life is better. After health, follows wealth which enables you to enjoy experiences.

Fundamental principles

• Living a good life means giving only giving f*ck to selective things - what is immediate & important.
• Wanting a positive experience is a negative experience in itself. The more you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become.
• Accepting a negative experience is a positive experience
• Don't reinforce what you lack
• Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience
• To try to avoid pain is to give too many f*ck about pain.
• Accept that everything is not necessarily going to be exactly the way you want it to be.
• Learn how to focus and prioritize your thoughts effectively. This means that you need to pick and choose what matters to you and what don't.
• You don't need to give a f*ck about everything & everyone.
• Be comfortable about being different.
• Find something important & meaningful in life so you won't give a f*ck to meaningless/ frivolous and trivial things.
• Happiness comes from solving problems.
• Comparison is a thief of joy
• Choose your struggle
• Joy is in the process, not the result
• Don't be fixated on what you lack

Find something worthwhile

• Giving too many f*ck is bad for mental health. It's like feeling that you are entitled to happiness etc and everything is supposed to be how you want it
• Have something meaningful, bigger than life to not be affected by stupid things
• Have something worthy to dedicate myself to.
• Give less f*ck. Only do it for what is true, important and immediate.
• You will never be happy if you continue to search for what happiness consists of
• You will never live if you're looking for the meaning of life
• Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience
• Focus & prioritize your thoughts to give f*ck to necessary things

Concepts

• Self improvement: prioritize better values, choose better things to give a f*ck about so you have better problems. Equating to better life.
• Responsibility: take responsibility for everything in my life
• Uncertainty: acknowledge my ignorance & cultivation of constant doubt in my own beliefs
• Failure: willingness to discover my own flaws and mistakes so they may be improved upon on
• Rejection: ability to both say or hear no. Thus, defining what you will or will not accept in life
• Mortality: keep things in proper perspective

You are always choosing. Know that you have a choice. While you can't control what happen to you, you are always in control of your interpretation and response.

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