– What’s up everybody, Mark Manson here,

number one New York Times Bestselling Author of
“The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*ck.”

It’s funny, I was actually looking around YouTube and Google and I found that dozens of people have posted summaries of my book.

Well, f*ck you.

If there’s gonna be a summary of the book,

it should come from the master non f*ck giver himself, moi.

So gather around children, prepare yourselves as I take you chapter by chapter through this modern self-help masterpiece.

So, before I actually get into the book and kind of summarize each chapter in a few minutes, I wanna zoom out a little bit and just tell you briefly what my goal is by writing this book. First of all, contrary to most people’s perceptions, the book is not about not caring about things. In fact, it’s about the opposite of that.

It’s essentially, it makes the argument that you have to give a f*ck about something. Therefore, the most important question is;

What are you giving a f*ck about and why?

Now, that’s a pretty cute little concept on the surface and I think it’s why a lot of people bought the book or enjoyed the book initially, but my goal with this book is that it’s essentially a book about values.

I very intentionally wanted to be contrarian to the self-help industry. Most self-help takes for granted what your values are, it takes for granted what your definition of success is. It assumes you want a big mansion, a fancy car, a perfect marriage with three and a half kids and a guitar shaped swimming pool.

Most self-help books just assume that we all want the same thing. Whereas in my book, I wanted to point out that a lot of these cultural definitions of success, a lot of these cultural values may not be the right fit for us and so, the real important question of getting ahead in life or improving our lives is not necessarily figuring out how to accomplish every single goal we have, it’s more in asking.

What sorts of goals should we have in the first place?

What sorts of things should we give a f*ck about?

So you’ll see, as we go through it, that there are a lot of points in the book where I’m very intentionally contradicting most typical self-help advice. Part of this, I’m doing for effect, it’s to grab people’s attention and to make them think a little bit more critically about some of their assumptions but some of it is legitimate. Some of it I do strongly believe is more correct than the general self-help advice out there.

So without further ado, let’s get into it.

Chapter one, Don’t Try.

I start the book off with a story about Charles Bukowski. He was a very famous fiction and poetry writer but he was a total drunk, he was a lowlife, he was in and out of prison, he had drug problems, he had prostitute problems. I mean, he was just a total mess.

I actually wanted to open the book with him because he is kind of a counter-argument to most of the examples that you see in books like this. You know, you’re used to opening a book about how to improve your life and seeing a story about like Steve Jobs or Elon Musk or something like that and I wanted to start with Bukowski because it shows that you can actually become conventionally successful in life despite yourself.

You can become successful while seemingly doing all of the wrong things and committing all of the biggest errors. So, even beginning on the first page, I’m starting to undermine the reader’s assumed definition of what success is or what is a good life or a desirable life for themselves.

Now, the big idea to take away from chapter one and this is the most underlying thing in the book and one of the most underlying things on Amazon Kindle ever is something called the backwards law and the backwards law originally comes from Alan Watts, but I rephrase it in my own way and I say that, the pursuit of positive experience is itself a negative experience and the acceptance of a negative experience is itself a positive experience.

So I go on and give a number of examples of the backwards law. I say that, The idea is that, the more that you pursue feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become, as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place. The more desperately you want to be rich, the more poor and unworthy you will feel, regardless of how much money you have.

The more desperately you want to be sexy and desired, the uglier you will come to see yourself regardless of your actual physical appearance. The more you desperately want to be happy and loved, the lonelier and more afraid you will become, regardless of those who surround you.

The more you wish to be spiritually enlightened, the more self-centered and shallow you become in trying to get there.

I then follow that up with,

“It’s like that one time I tripped on acid and it felt like the more I walked towards the house, the farther away the house got from me.” It was good times, good times.

So the backwards law introduces the central theme of the book, which is that negativity is actually the path to positivity.

Most people’s assumption is, they just want the positive experiences from life, but it’s actually the tolerance and acceptance of the negative experience that leads to the positive experience and I will end up spending pretty much the entire book expanding upon this.

So, I go on to finish chapter one by introducing the give a f*ck framework and I have three subtleties of not giving a f*ck.

So subtlety number one is, not giving a f*ck does not mean being indifferent, it means being comfortable with being different. One point that I make throughout the book and I dispel very early on is that, indifference is impossible. If you give a f*ck about nothing, then you are giving a f*ck about giving a f*ck about nothing.

It is impossible to not give a f*ck about something.

Therefore, the question is;
What do you give a f*ck about?

A kind of the conclusion that arises is that, if you give a f*ck about a few very important things, then the small thing cease to bother you so much.

Subtlety number two is, to not give a f*ck about adversity, you must first give a f*ck about something more important than adversity.

So if you’re always worrying about what people think about you, the problem is not what people think about you, the problem is you don’t have anything better to worry about. If you’re always worried about how much money you have, the problem is not how much money you have, the problem is that you don’t have anything better to worry about.

Subtlety number three, whether you realize it or not, you are always choosing what to give a f*ck about. This concept of choosing will come back in force in chapter five, pretty much the entire chapter is about it.

All right, so that’s chapter one, kind of lays the groundwork, starts off very contrarian, drops a lot of F bombs, a lot of people like that, some people don’t.

Chapter two is called, Happiness Is A Problem.

So chapter two opens up with the story of the Buddha and focuses on the central Buddhist doctrine of Dukkha or the fact that life is suffering, that no matter what you do, where you go, who you hang out with, what you pursue, there is some facet of suffering associated with it. Simply because our mind becomes attached to things and attachment leads to suffering.

But instead of kind of going down the Buddhist rabbit hole with it, I take it off in another direction and I explain, I say, you know, it’s not like we’re doomed to suffer, it’s that suffering has a certain evolution or usefulness to it. Like if you think about evolution over the course of hundreds of thousands of years, a creature that is happy all the time, that creature is not gonna survive.

It’s actually the creature that is a little bit dissatisfied all the time, a little bit anxious all the time, a little bit paranoid, a little bit pissed off at the people around them, like that’s the creature that’s gonna do the most work to actually survive and replicate. I think this modern idea that we shouldn’t have to feel bad ever is completely misguided.

Not only is it misguided, but it goes against our evolutionary nature, our genetic nature. Negative emotions have an inherent purpose to them and they help us and so, a lot of this chapter is describing how now a lot of the anxiety that we wish to escape from or the anger we wish to overcome, these emotions are actually signals within our body to do something.

They are important signals and if we ignore them or if we train ourselves to ignore them, then we are actually limiting ourselves in a lot of ways. I also talk about a psychology concept called the hedonic treadmill, this idea that happiness is, it’s like a treadmill.

It’s like, you know, you think, if I get a boat, I’ll be happy and then you get the boat and it’s like, you’ve got to pay docking fees and you’re like, man, if I could just find a better dock, I’d be happy and then you find a better dock. Then you realize that none of your friends want to drive out to that new dock. You’re like, man, if I could just have some friends to hang out on my boat, then I’d be happy and then you get friends on your boat but then they get too drunk and they fall overboard and you have to like throw in life preservers and save them and call the coast guard and you’re like, man, if I didn’t have to call the coast guard, then I’d be happy and it’s like, happiness. It’s like this carrot always dangling in front of you, no matter what you do.

So if the point of chapter one is to kind of undermine our expectations about positive and negative experience, chapter two’s point is to undermine our expectations about positive and negative emotion. Negative emotions have a lot of utility, they have a lot of purpose, they help us, they grant us meaning in a lot of situations and they signal to us that we have challenges or problems that must be overcome.

Happiness, happiness is great, we all wanna be happy. It’s not the only thing in life, there are bad forms of happiness. Doing cocaine all day, that’ll make you happy for a while, doesn’t mean you should go do it. The emotions themselves are not necessarily good or bad, it’s the context around them, it’s the meaning around them and so, I ended up kind of creating this framework where I say that, happiness comes from solving problems.

If you either pretend you have no problems in your life to solve, then you won’t be happy. But if you also have problems in your life that you feel you can’t solve, then you won’t be happy. So kind of the secret sauce is finding problems that you kind of want to have, or kind of enjoy having and that’s how I wrap up the chapter with a section called, Choose Your Struggle.

Now, I’ll actually read the first couple paragraphs of that section because it’s one of the most important sections of the book and it’s resonated with a lot of people.

So, “If I ask you,

What do you want out of your life?’

And you say something like, I want to be happy and have a great family and a job I like, your response is so common and expected that it doesn’t mean anything.

Everybody enjoys what feels good. Everybody wants to live a carefree, happy and easy life, to fall in love and have amazing sex and relationships, to look perfect and make lots of money and be popular and well-respected and admired. Everybody wants that, it’s easy to want that.

A more interesting question, a question that most people never consider is,

What pain do I want in my life?

What am I willing to struggle for?

Because that actually seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.

F**king sweet.

You Are Not Special. You’re not, nobody is.

All right, chapter three, one of my favorite chapters, You Are Not Special. You’re not, nobody is. So you are not special, it opens up with a story of a guy I knew named Jimmy. Jimmy is actually, he’s kind of a composite of two different people I knew, but Jimmy is basically, he’s a con man essentially, like a pathological liar, schemer, bullshit artist, 24/7 salesman.

I knew him for about a year in my mid twenties back when I was starting my first business and he was starting a number of businesses too and the dude, he was just a grifter. Total life, wasted money left, right and center and so, I tell this story about Jimmy and I use him as an example for a concept I introduce of entitlement. I define entitlement in the book as feeling as though you deserve to be happy without sacrificing for it.

It’s basically that idea of believing you deserve to have positive experiences without traversing the negative experiences to get there. I spend much of this chapter pointing out both from stories about Jimmy, but also stories of me being a dickhead in my own life, that it’s this belief that we shouldn’t have to go through the negative and only have the positive that causes us to adopt many destructive and selfish behaviors.

So, the middle of the chapter is the story about how I got arrested for selling drugs. If you wanna hear about that, you should buy the book.

So, here you go, there are two forms of entitlement. Form number one is, I’m awesome and the rest of you all suck.

Therefore, I deserve to have special treatment. Form number two is, I suck in the rest of you are awesome, so I deserve special treatment. So in the psychological research, this is known as grandiose narcissism versus victim narcissism and it’s basically, they seem to be opposites on the surface, like one person thinks he’s better than everybody and then the other person thinks he’s worse than everybody but the behavior ends up being the same because both people have delusional beliefs about their place in the status hierarchy.

One person thinks he’s at the top, one person thinks he’s at the bottom but the behavior ends up being the same. They end up being completely self-absorbed, they think everything in the world should be altered and catered to them and yeah, they just become unbearable to be around and so, I spend much of this chapter, probably the second half of this chapter describing how the growing culture of exceptionalism, particularly with social media, consumer culture, things like that, they’re always pushing us individually. Like if you think of beer commercials or like, the way Facebook algorithms are designed, like everything is designed to make you feel like you’re the most special f*cking person on the planet and my argument is that; that is actually mentally and socially unhealthy because that drives an attitude and a feeling of entitlement.

It creates delusional beliefs that you are somehow the exception, that the world owes you something, that everything should be rearranged to cater to your desires and your happiness, that you should be able to have positive experiences without accepting the negative.

I close out the chapter by using a metaphor that I really like, I’ll just read a couple of paragraphs. “All of this quote, ‘every person can be extraordinary and achieve greatness’ stuff is basically just jerking off your ego. It’s a message that tastes good going down but in reality, is nothing more than empty calories that make you emotionally fat and bloated, the proverbial Big Mac for your heart and your brain.

The ticket to emotional health, like that to physical health, comes from eating your veggies, that is accepting the bland and mundane truths of life. Truths such as, your actions actually don’t matter that much in the grand scheme of things and the vast majority of your life will be boring and not noteworthy, and that’s okay.

This vegetable course will taste bad at first, very bad, but once ingested, your body will wake up feeling more potent and alive.”

So, that was chapter three.

Chapter four, The Value of Suffering.

So in my mind, the book is actually kind of in two parts, even though I didn’t divide it into two parts. The first three chapters are very much about this desire for positive experience and unwillingness to sacrifice or go through the negative experience to get to the positive experience.

Starting with chapter four, the book becomes a lot more about values and it becomes more about what we are willing to sacrifice for it. So like, assuming you buy the arguments of the first three chapters, that we should sacrifice for something, that we should struggle for something, that that’s what actually makes life more meaningful and generates a more consistent sense of happiness,

The next question is;

What is worth struggling for?

What is worth valuing?

What is worth sacrificing for?

And so, I open up the book with a World War II story about a Japanese soldier who, it’s super interesting, there was a number of Japanese soldiers in World War II, like they got stranded on random islands in the Pacific and nobody told them the war was over. So, they continued to fight the war into the 1950s, 60s and even 70s and so, the last soldier who was still fighting World War II I think he finally surrendered in like 1973 or something like that, I’d have to look here.

Anyway, his name was Hiroo Onada and I wrote his story here and I used him as an example of how, like, it doesn’t matter how disciplined you are, it doesn’t matter how motivated you are, it doesn’t matter how strong you are, how intelligent you are, how much support you have, if you have the wrong goal, you’re f*cked.

If you have the wrong value, then all of that other stuff, it’s just gonna hurt you and I use Onada as an example of that. He spent 27 years fighting a war that didn’t exist, literally killing people, he was on an obscure island in the Philippines.

He was shooting at people, killing people, hiding in the jungle for 27 years and obviously, he was doing an amazing job but he was like Don Quixote, he was like chasing windmills, right?

So the chapter opens up with that and it uses that to kind of introduce this topic of values. So if we agree that we should sacrifice;

What is worth sacrificing for?

I talk about Dave Mustaine from Megadeath and Metallica as an example of good and bad values and then I kind of finished the chapter up with my attempt at defining what are good and bad values and I just lay out a few principles.

So, good values tend to be one reality-based, two, socially constructive and three, immediate and controllable.

Bad values tend to be one, superstitious, two, socially destructive and three, not immediate or controllable.

I go on to say, “Honesty is a good value because it’s something that you can have complete control over, it reflects reality and it benefits others, even if it’s sometimes unpleasant.”

There’s a whole section kind of diving into what makes a value good or bad and then I finish this section by saying, the rest of this book, the last five chapters of this book, so chapters five through nine, I’m going to propose five kind of classes of values or things to give a f*ck about that are a little bit counterintuitive but I have found to be very important and that’s where chapter five picks up.

chapter five, You Are Always Choosing.

All right, chapter five, You Are Always Choosing. In my opinion, this is maybe the most important chapter. I would say two, five and nine are the most important chapters. Two is the one kind of challenging notions of happiness, five is about responsibility and then nine will be about death.

So you are always choosing, I open up the chapter with a story about William James and then I kind of offer the reader a thought experiment and I say, imagine like a mafia guy kidnaps your family and then puts a gun to their head and says,
if you don’t run a marathon tomorrow, I’m going to kill your family and you’re out of shape, you haven’t gotten off the couch in a week, this would be horrible, it would be absolutely traumatic, it’d be terrifying.

Arguably, the worst experience of your life. Now, imagine training for nine months, hiring a coach, buying a bunch of gear, practicing, getting ready for a marathon, running the marathon, having your family attend to cheer you on, crossing the finish line and then going and celebrating with everybody you care about and love in your life.

That would be one of the best experiences of your life. Now, what’s interesting is that the actual pain of running the marathon isn’t any different. The only thing that’s changed is the context and what I argue in this chapter is that, what has actually changed is the perception that you chose to run the marathon or not.

For whatever reason, when we feel as though we are choosing our struggles or we are choosing what problems we have in our life, they seem much more acceptable and easier for us to deal with. When we feel as though our problems and our struggles are thrust upon us without our control, that’s when we suffer, that’s when we feel completely powerless.

The big kind of epiphany of this chapter is that, you are always choosing, whether you realize it or not. There’s no such thing as a situation where you are not choosing your struggle or not choosing your problem.

The only thing that changes is whether you admit it to yourself or not. People don’t like hearing this point, they don’t like hearing the idea that every problem in their life, they chose it and the second section of this chapter, the reason why is, I point out, that we tend to conflate responsibility and fault.

We assume that if you are responsible for something, it means that it’s your fault but these are two completely different things. You know, it’s like if I get cancer, it’s not my fault that I got cancer, but it is absolutely my responsibility to deal with the cancer.

You know, if somebody leaves a newborn baby on my doorstep, that’s not my fault that somebody left it there but it is absolutely my responsibility, I have to do something about it and every moment of life is this way.

Even if the mob boss kidnaps your family, makes you run a marathon, you are choosing to run the marathon. You are choosing for the lives of the people you care about to be more important than the pain of the marathon. The thing you are choosing from moment to moment is how to value each experience.

So even if I like, let’s say I go to a baseball game and I’m bored to tears, I’m choosing to be bored.

Why?

Because I’m choosing not to be interested in the baseball game. Sure, I could sit there and blame the baseball game, like, oh, you’re so f*cking boring;

Why don’t you entertain me more?

Well, why don’t I change my definition of entertainment?

Why don’t I change what I find interesting?

Why don’t I develop the ability to pay more attention or appreciate the subtleties of throwing a curveball or something?

In each experience in life, there is a component of choice embedded in it and we tend not to be aware of that choice but as soon as we become aware of it, two things happen.

One, we become way more comfortable with pain and two, we actually get off our ass and f*cking do something because now, we don’t care whose fault it is anymore, we don’t care if it’s boring or tedious or unfair.

You f**king do something. You realize in every moment, you have a choice, to do something or not do something, to blame somebody else or take responsibility yourself and once you develop that habit or that value of constant responsibility, everything fucking changes.

So this whole chapter, I kind of lay that argument out in the first couple of pages and literally, the entire chapter is just knocking down objections to it. So, I knocked down the responsibility, I call it the responsibility fault fallacy, I talk about genetics, I talk about life situation, I talk about surviving trauma, I talk about cultural pressures.

There’s no f**king excuse.

I mean, if there’s anything that I’m like an extremist about it’s responsibility. All right, well before I start sounding too self-important.

Chapter six, Why You’re Wrong About Everything, But So Am I.

Chapter six, Why You’re Wrong About Everything, But So Am I. This chapter starts out with another fun little thought experiment and I actually can’t take full credit for this, this thought experiment was kind of brought to my attention by a friend of mine named Lydia.

She wrote some cool stuff about it, but basically it says, think back 500 years ago, like what seemed cutting edge and scientifically true five years ago and I point out that like, people thought, you know, the Earth was flat, they didn’t even know the Western Hemisphere existed, they thought fire was made of a thing called phlogiston and then I kind of pull that out to a personal level.

I say, you know, think about what you thought was true 10, 20 years ago and then I mentioned a few stupid things I thought was true when I was a kid and then, from there I say, now imagine everything you think is true today and imagine how ridiculous that’s gonna look

20 years from now or 500 years from now. Like, everything we think is so true and important today is gonna be absolutely ridiculous to us at some point and that’s actually a good thing. Like, we should hope that our present day beliefs look ridiculous to us because that means that we’ve grown and become smarter. Like, I experience this all the time with my own writing. I go back and look at stuff I wrote 10 years ago and I cringe, I’m like, this is awful, like, I can’t believe I’ve published this but then I remember, I’m like, that’s great, it means I’ve become a better writer.

So, this thought experiment is kind of setting us up to think a little bit more about beliefs and uncertainty and being, I guess, a little bit open-minded for lack of a better term. From there, I go into a little bit on the research of belief formation and how arbitrary it is and then, I talk about the dangers of certainty and, oh, this is one of the more fun sections of the book. I actually had a cyberstalker for a number of years. She was non-violent, thank God. What was remarkable about her was that, she had this unbelievable certainty, like absolutely unshakable certainty in completely bat shit, crazy beliefs.

I mean, she literally told me to my face that angels told her that we were supposed to be together, that God said that our relationship was going to cure death. These were things that she said to me and whenever I tried to kind of poke holes in them or point out that maybe that didn’t make a lot of sense, it had absolutely no effect. She met my wife, to no effect, and didn’t change her mind at all.

To me, it was fascinating in that, maybe one of the most troubled people I’ve ever known in my life was also probably the most certain and unshakable person I’ve ever met in my life and so, I use her as an example of the binds that certainty can get us into and then I use a number of examples, you know, from my own life and from other people’s lives and then I kind of trot out the benefits of uncertainty.

It opens up space for you to learn and improve. It helps guard you against extremist ideology or just becoming like a crazy zealot for some cause. It opens room for dialogue with people, to learn from other people, to make other people feel more heard, which improves relationships.

I’ve got a section in here that I call Manson’s law of avoidance, which I decided to be cheeky and name a law after myself. But Manson’s law of avoidance says that, the more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it and I bring this up in terms of, what are the pieces of information that we protect ourselves from ’cause ultimately, like grasping onto some sense of certainty, it’s a means of protecting our ego from perceived threats and so, Manson’s law basically says that, like the more threatening something is, the more we will become certain in things that will help us avoid dealing with that truth.

An extension of Manson’s law of avoidance is that, we should define ourselves as loosely and ambiguously as possible because the less defined yourself is, the less we need to cling to defense mechanisms or faulty ideas to protect ourselves. This is fundamentally a Buddhist idea, the idea of no self, you know, if there is no such thing as self, then there’s nothing to protect and there’s nothing that you need to be certain about in the first place.

Finally, I finish up the chapter with a few questions to help you become more uncertain in your life.

Question number one is;

What if I’m wrong?

Question number two is;

What would it mean if I were wrong?

Question number three is;

Would being wrong create a better or worse problem than my current problem, both for myself and others?

And that’s chapter six.

Chapter seven, Failure Is The Way Forward.

Chapter seven, Failure Is The Way Forward. This is actually, probably the most kind of like run of the mill self-help chapters. If you’ve made it this far in the book, it’s not gonna surprise you that a book that’s just spent 150 pages arguing that negative experience is the path to positive experience, that a willingness to sacrifice prevents entitlement, a willingness to be uncertain prevents crazy beliefs, that we’re now gonna argue that failure is actually a huge component of success.

So, this chapter is just a series of stories about all the ways Picasso failed, talk about a little known psychologist named Kazimierz Dabrowski who’s from Poland. He had some great theories from studying Holocaust survivors and then the real big Jim of this chapter or the thing that everybody seems to love is something that I call the Do Something principle and I actually made a humorous little video about it a few weeks back, if you wanna check it out on the channel, but the Do Something principle is very simple and it comes from one of the great gurus of all time, my high school math teacher and my high school math teacher, his name is Mr. Packwood, shout out to Mr. Packwood, what’s up.

Whenever we were taking a test, he used to always tell us, he’d say, if you don’t know what to do, rewrite the problem because when you rewrite the problem, it will help your mind find the next step and it was crazy ’cause it worked, like you’d look at a question, and you’d be like, oh, I’m so f*cked, I have no idea what to do, but then you’d start copying out the problem and you’d be like, well, I can do this one little thing here and then you do the second step and then something about it, it just made you see the next thing and when I went off to university,

I noticed that this worked for all sorts of things. You know, like if I was stuck on a term paper, I’d be like okay, let’s just write the next paragraph and I’d write a paragraph and sure enough, the rest of the paper would come or if I needed to study for an exam, you know, it was like, all right, well, let’s just study this chapter tonight and I’d study that chapter and next thing I know, I’ve studied three chapters and so, I kind of just adopted this little mini personal philosophy of like, do something, just f**king do it, like take the smallest thing and do it.

I remember when I suffered from a lot of social anxiety, I used to tell myself, just walk towards the person you want to talk to. That was it, that was all I had to do, just walk towards them and then what would end up happening is I would walk towards them and I would keep walking and keep walking and next thing I know, I’m standing in front of this person and it’s like super awkward ’cause I’m standing there and not saying anything and so to prevent the awkwardness, I would say something and next thing I know, I’m like talking to somebody and I make a new friend.

This principle just kind of applies universally, it applies all over the place. It’s one of those like just real special simple pieces of advice that you can take and use anywhere.

One of the things I point out in the book too is that most people assume that you need motivation to have action but I point out that it’s the other way around, action actually leads to motivation and that’s the Do Something principle.

The Importance of Saying No.

Chapter eight is The Importance of Saying No. This is kind of the relationship chapter of the book. Again, it logically follows that, if you’re willing to traverse the negative to get to the positive, if you’re willing to take responsibility for your struggles, if you’re willing to accept failure on the way to success, then being able to say no to people, being able to manage conflict, that’s probably a good thing to have for your relationships and sure enough, that’s pretty much how I would define a healthy relationship, is two people, actually, I do define it in here as two people who are comfortable saying and hearing no from each other.

I have a section in here called Rejection Makes Your Life Better, which on a more philosophical note, if you think about this project of choosing what you value, in order to value one thing, you have to reject the other things. You know, it’s like, if I want to value my career over all else, I need to be able to sacrifice other things.

That means I need to be able to reject other things. That means I need to reject my dream of becoming a pro gamer or reject the idea that I’m going to become a software engineer or reject the idea that I’m gonna go live on a beach somewhere.

If I choose one value to prioritize over everything else, that means by definition, I must be willing to reject other things. If I’m not willing to reject those things, then I’m not able to actually prioritize what’s important in my life and so, this is why people who struggle to say no, they often feel very lost and they don’t know what they want from themselves. I talk about this, you know, saying no is kind of like the fundamental basis of boundaries in relationships.

How, if you wanna have a healthy marriage or a healthy romantic partnership, you need to be able to say no to each other, tell people what you don’t like, tell people what your values are, be willing to disappoint the other person and trust that they’re gonna stick with you because if you are never willing to disappoint your partner, then you never actually developed trust for them.

You never actually know if they’re gonna stick with you when shit hits the fan. So, this is why couples that never fight, eventually end in a very toxic place.

Finally, I finish the chapter by talking about commitment and how there’s kind of a hidden freedom of commitment, of finding that one thing or one or two things in your life that are more important than anything else and committing full-heartedly to them.

On the surface, it sounds limiting and I think a lot of people, particularly in my generation, we avoid those sorts of commitments. You know, it’s like, I wanna go everywhere, I wanna do all the things, I wanna date all the people. It’s like this constant effort to always keep your options open. But as soon as you limit yourself to a few things in your life that you truly care about, there’s a new form of freedom that happens on a very subtle level, which is that, I don’t have to give a f*ck about this stuff,

I don’t have to give a f*ck about who I’m gonna date, I don’t have to give a f*ck about what my gaming friends think about me.

These are the things I care about,

these are the way I’m gonna measure my life, that’s what I’m gonna pursue and there’s just this abundance of inner mental freedom to pursue it.

chapter nine, And Then You Die.

All right, so finally, chapter nine, And Then You Die. This chapter is maybe my favorite thing I’ve ever written. It’s about death obviously, and I open up talking about a friend of mine who died at a party when I was 19 and it was incredibly shocking and traumatic, upsetting.

I spent pretty much that entire summer dealing with depression. As the months went on, it actually ended up being a very transformative experience for me, had maybe one of the most important experiences of my life. So this chapter is about how death is actually the thing that most crystallizes what matters in life.

It’s only when you confront death or come close to death, that it’s most clear to you what you should be giving a f*ck about and therefore, it makes sense and this kind of goes back to the Stoics, that we should regularly question our own mortality, we should regularly think about our own death and this is just something I’ve kind of instinctually done for a lot of my life is, I’ve wondered, you know, if I died a year from now, what would I do with my last year?

If I died tomorrow, or if I got diagnosed with cancer tomorrow, like, would I have any regrets?

Would I feel like I wasted time?

If so, what was the time I wasted?

This is a very important project for us or an exercise for us to do and throughout the chapter, I talk about one of my favorite philosophers and scholars, his name is Ernest Becker and then I use a little vignette of, I have this weird fetish, I guess you could call it, when I visit high places.

I kind of have like the opposite of a fear of heights, I have like an attraction to heights. I tell a story about when I was at the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa, it’s just this massive cliff over the ocean that you can literally just walk up to the edge and you know, the wind blows the wrong way, you just fall off and I have this weird fetish for like walking to the edge of these things and it drives everybody in my life crazy, people wonder if I’m okay.

It wasn’t until I started writing this chapter that I kind of realized why. For one, it forces me to confront a lot of fear in doing it.

But two, when you are walking up to the edge of a cliff with no intention of jumping, it forces you to reckon with the question of, what if I do trip and fall?

This could be it right now, this could be it. There’s something a little bit intoxicating for me about that thought, not that I want to trip and fall but in that, it forces me to think about my life in a way that feels very profound to me.

So, that’s what I try to communicate to the reader in that last chapter and you know, I just, I tie up all the major concepts of the book. You know, I come back to tolerating negative experience, taking responsibility, being uncertain, tolerating failure, the willingness to say and hear no, and kind of just like wrap it all up in this nice little bow about death and how death elucidates everything that is meaningful in life.

So, that’s the book.

That’s what all the hype’s about.

If you like this summary, please check out the book. I have a particular style, I use a lot of humor, I use a lot of profanity. Some people love that, some people don’t, which is fine, but if you like that and you like these ideas, I encourage you to check out the book.

If you’ve read the book and this was kind of a refresher, I appreciate that and you know, please send this to somebody who you think would enjoy the book or find it meaningful.