Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson - Book Review

I was driving back up from Dallas to Wichita after the New Year. My older brother lives down there. And on these long drives I really like listening to audiobooks. And one of the ones that I listened to on the way up this time was The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson.

And the reason why I wanted to do a video on it today is because it does a very good job on offering a different insight into how you live your life. Similar to the The Four Agreements book. This one has a lot of philosophy mixed in and I wanted to jump in and give you the three main points that I took away from this book and show you how you can implement them to improve your life. So let's jump into it.

Number one is we're all going to die soon. Mark talks about in the book, how when he was a kid he was hanging out with one of his friends and one of his friends decided to jump off this cliff. They were going cliff diving, but his friend jumped off in the middle of the night and didn't know how to swim. He was just super drunk and he decided to jump off this cliff and he ended up dying because of it.

And Mark internalized that hard when he realized that we're all gonna die soon and you can't really tell when you're going to die. The average age for male in the United States is 74 years old. My dad died when he was 61. I know a lot of people.

My older brother died when he was mid thirties. So a lot of people think they're gonna last for a really long time, but you're not going to last very long time and this book made me think about that. We're all going to die like fairly soon. Even if you do last till you're 70.

That's only what? If you're 20 right now. Five more decades. If you're 30, 4 more decades. We're all gonna die and the main takeaway here is it doesn't really matter then.

Right? Worst-case scenario - you try something and you fail at it, but you're gonna die either way so it doesn't really matter. Number two is you can only care about one or two things so make them the big things. His point here is people care about way too much stuff in their lives. For instance, let's say your sister is really bad with money and you're always thinking about it.

'Oh no. Why is she getting into so much debt? How can I help her out?' Mark Manson is saying that's outside of the realm of your control so you shouldn't worry about it. The example he gives in the book is one of his friend's sister was getting married and then the brother, his friend, didn't like the guy that she was getting married to so he was like constantly like talking up to the sister about how that was a bad idea, talking to the guy about how he shouldn't be getting married. And his point, Mark's point in this book was that it doesn't really matter.

Worst-case scenario or not even worse case scenario. Let's say the sister gets married to the guy the only thing that this guy gets from worrying about the marriage is now he's super stressed all the time because he said all this bad stuff to the boyfriend, now husband, and his sister doesn't like him.  His sister is mad because he's been shit talking the marriage the whole time. The better approach according to mark and I'm seeing the light in this as well is just to be hands-off.

Realize that you can only care about one or two things so the friend and really all of us should just care about making ourselves succeed and in best way we possibly can and not worry about whether all your friends are having kids and you're not or whether you're getting older or you're losing your hair or any of the stuff that we worry about. And then finally number three is if you only care about the goal and you don't love the work that means you don't want the goal. And this was freaking enlightening for me hardcore. I think Gary Vaynerchuk said something similar in one of his videos as well, but Mark said that he wanted to be a rock star in college.

He really wanted to be up onstage like John Mayer with a guitar playing and all the girls being super into him and then he realized that although he really wanted to be a rock star, like you wanted that life, he didn't want to practice as hard as he could. He didn't want to trudge through and do the small shows, he didn't want to do the marketing. All this small stuff that eventually becomes rock star and the takeaway he had based on that was if he doesn't love practicing, he doesn't love going through music theory or doing all that stuff to get to the final goal he doesn't actually want that goal it's actually just a dream for him. So he stopped wanting to be a rock star at that point and focus on being an author and a blogger because he liked blogging.

And that was enlightening for me and it made me think about all the stuff in life that I want to be, but I'm not actively working towards. So for instance one of the things that I really wanted to do for a long time was make horror films like scary movies, but I sat down two months ago to write a horror movie script and I got about 10 pages in and realized that I don't really want to right horror. I wasn't enjoying the process so actually I pivoted the whole script and now... I did actually finish the movie script about 92 pages long, but it switched from a horror movie to more of a drama, like a dark drama.

I might touch on what that is in the future video, but I liked writing that a lot more. So my dream of being the next Wes Craven or the next horror movie director kind of died that day when I realized I don't actually like writing horror movies. And it's something for you to think about as well. In your business.

Do you like the day-to-day? Are you a real entrepreneur? For me, I love this grind. I love sending cold emails. I love talking to customers on the phone. I love the feeling of when we make a sale.

I like managing people. I love the one-on-ones. I like the team that we're working with. All this stuff is super enticing.

Even more than the far-off goal of like selling the company or making X dollars, having X. Amount of dollars in the bank. Just the thrill of making enough money every month to support myself for my business is enough for me to keep me going. And that's the kind of thing that Mark is talking about in this book.

What in your life are you caring about that you shouldn't be? Leave that down in the comments and hopefully we can all start moving forward together. If you like this video feel free to give it a thumbs up. Subscribe to this channel for more B2B. Sales training and book reviews like this.

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