Mark Manson
In our culture, many of us idealize love. We see it as some lofty cure-all for all of life's problems. Our movies and our stories and our history all celebrate it as life's ultimate goal, the final solution for all of our pain and struggle. And because we idealize love, we overestimate it. As a result, our relationships pay a price.Collection: History
One of the problems of modern society, or the post-Internet age, is that there are so many things bombarding us that we could care about. I think it's more important than ever to really get clear and focus on what's worth caring about and what's just noise or distraction.Collection: Society
Like anything worth doing in life, happiness takes time and patience and consistency.Collection: Happiness
Everything has an opportunity cost, and the big things we want in life - like happiness and healthy relationships and wealth - they all have big opportunity costs.Collection: Happiness
When most people set out to change their lives, they often focus on all the external stuff, like a new job or a new location or new friends or a new romantic prospects and on and on. The reality is that changing your life starts with changing the way you see everything in your life.Collection: Change
At some point, most of us reach a place where we're afraid to fail, where we instinctively avoid failure and stick only to what is placed in front of us or only what we're already good at. This confines us and stifles us.Collection: Failure
True love - that is, deep, abiding love that is impervious to emotional whims or fancy - is a choice. It's a constant commitment to a person regardless of the present circumstances.Collection: Love
By itself, love is never enough to sustain a relationship.Collection: Relationship
How do I control my emotions? How do I stop getting angry so often, or how do I stop being sad? And I think there's a really important distinction to understand is that you can't completely control your emotions. What you control is your reaction to your own emotions. And a lot of people don't ever make that separation for what goes on with them.Collection: Sad
I started my blog back in 2009 because every Internet business and marketing seminar I watched at the time told me I had to. I had been trying to get a business started selling dating and life advice and was struggling.Collection: Dating
Approaching people looking for something in return isn't a relationship, it's a transaction.Collection: Relationship
Many people get into a relationship as a way to compensate for something they lack or hate within themselves. This is a one-way ticket to a toxic relationship because it makes your love conditional - you will love your partner as long as they help you feel better about yourself.Collection: Relationship
Every new conversation, every new relationship, brings new challenges and opportunities for honest expression.Collection: Relationship
'War and Peace' may be the most epic thing ever created by a human being.Collection: Peace
Romantic love is a trap designed to get two people to overlook each other's faults long enough to get some babymaking done. It generally only lasts for a few years at most.Collection: Romantic
Improvement at anything is based on thousands of tiny failures, and the magnitude of your success is based on how many times you've failed at something.Collection: Success
Happiness is not something you achieve. It's not something you do or someplace you get to. Happiness is something you inhabit.Collection: Happiness
If someone is better than you at something, then it's likely because she has failed at it more than you have. If someone is worse than you, it's likely because he hasn't been through all of the painful learning experiences you have.Collection: Learning
I think people who become compulsive about fitness or eating right, a lot of the time it's out of fear that they're going to lose control or that they're not good enough, so I think anything done out of fear or motivated by fear is often unhealthy.Collection: Fitness
People want to start their own business or become financially independent. But you don't end up a successful entrepreneur unless you find a way to love the risk, the uncertainty, the repeated failures, and working insane hours on something you have no idea whether will be successful or not.
Life is a never-ending stream of problems that must be confronted, surmounted, and/or solved.
People complain not because something sucks. People complain because they're looking for empathy and to feel connected with those around them. Unfortunately, complaining is maybe the least useful way to connect with other human beings.
I speak four languages, and I've seen some of the most spectacular locations in the world and met hundreds of fascinating people.
Self-publishing provides more freedom and control, but it also provides more risk. Publishing provides more credibility and promotion, but your vision can also get lost in the bureaucratic machinery of the business. It's a tough decision to make.
At the core of all human behavior, the good feelings we all want are more or less the same. Therefore, what we get out of life is not determined by the good feelings we desire but by what bad feelings we're willing to sustain.
I think humility - which I think is a very good value to adopt - is basically an extension of understanding your own ignorance.
The motivation to do anything - like change your entire life around - doesn't just come from some magical, mystical place within you. Action is both the effect of motivation and the cause of it.
If I ask you, 'What do you want out of life?' and you say something like, 'I want to be happy and have a great family and a job I like,' it's so ubiquitous that it doesn't even mean anything. Everyone wants that.
You can't have a pain-free life. It can't all be roses and unicorns.
If everybody just stops caring about politics, we're going to lose the reins on our government.
The problem with idealizing love is that it causes us to develop unrealistic expectations about what love actually is and what it can do for us.
The truth is, I do some of my best writing at 3 A.M. while blasting 'Every Time I Die' into my ear drums.
Seeking approval and people pleasing forces you to alter your actions and speech to no longer reflect what you actually think or feel.
I'm your typical highly educated, progressive white dude. I've lived my life resisting racism both within myself and in the society around me.
The first step in making better choices is to simply be brutally honest about your own behavior to yourself. What are the choices you are making? How are you spending your time? What are you neglecting that you shouldn't?
Death is important for a couple reasons. The first is that death creates scarcity in our life, which therefore gives our decisions meaning and value. From a practical point of view, it therefore makes sense that we keep our own deaths in mind when deciding how to use our time.
There's a paradox with self-improvement, and it is this: the ultimate goal of all self-improvement is to reach the point where you no longer feel the need to improve yourself.
Be motivated by something beyond simply money or glory.
For whatever reason, when it came out in 1995, 'Infinite Jest' became a cultural event. It was the massive book that was 'cool' for all the Gen Xers to read.
What's interesting about emotions is that the more you try to control them or to bottle them up, the stronger they get. So, the more I try to stop being sad, the sadder I'm going to get.
In 2008, after holding down a day job for all of six weeks, I gave up on the whole job thing to pursue an online business. At the time, I had absolutely no clue what I was doing, but I figured if I was going to be broke and miserable, I might as well be while working on my own terms.
That first morning that I woke up self-employed, terror quickly consumed me. I found myself sitting with my laptop and realized, for the first time, that I was entirely responsible for all of my own decisions, as well as the consequences of those decisions.
There's nothing wrong with having goals, but obsessing over them is often counterproductive because, in reality, achieving a goal isn't always what it's cracked up to be.
Success is self-defined. You can choose what you think success is, and you can always change your mind.
We usually think of improving our life by adding stuff - like more things, more success, more friends. I think the starting place should be removing stuff - try a month without Instagram; try a week without looking at fashion pictures. See how that affects your life, your friendships, and your ability to focus on other things.
The American Dream is simple: it's the unwavering belief that anybody - you, me, your friends, your neighbors, grandma Verna - can become exceedingly successful, and all it takes is the right amount of work, ingenuity, and determination.
Obviously, we all want to feel pleasure. It can't be one of our highest priorities because, simply put, anything worthwhile in life is going to be un-pleasurable at times. Pleasure is the type of thing that if you get the other stuff right, pleasure will happen on its own.
Ultimately, I think, as humans, we all care deeply about our life's legacy, and contemplating our own mortality is the only real way to approach that question of legacy honestly.
The first and perhaps most important thing to realize about being happier in life is to stop trying to be so happy in life.
Here's a pro-tip: there's no such thing as a 'gym person.' There are just people who go to the gym. Similarly, there's no such thing as a 'productive person.' There are just people who do productive things fairly often.