Let me show you “How To Not Give A Fuck” and the virtues of doing so.

“Be who you are and say what you feel because those who mind don’t matter and those who matter don’t mind.” – Dr. Seuss

If you are wondering why I’m doing this, you´ll find out below, but one thing should be said – I´m at a point in my life where I can handle if some people think I´m crazy, laugh at me, judge me or even hate me, but what I can’t handle is regret.

I can´t handle the fact that there was a great opportunity and I let that go just because I was scared what a bunch of strangers might think of me. In other words, I don´t want to live my life thinking “what if?” all the time. And if you’re reading this, I’d guess you don´t either.

So what alternative do we have? If we are to live without regret, who will we aspire to be? The people who don´t give a fuck about adversity in the face of their goals; who don´t care about pissing some people off on their way to what feels right; who don´t give a fuck about failure or embarrassing themselves or even wetting the sheets a few times; the people who just laugh and then do it anyway.

Because they know it´s right. They know it´s more important than themselves, their own feelings or their pride. Those who reserve their fucks for what truly matters. Family. Friends. And an occasional lawsuit or two.

I´m going to start this sucker with an easy question.

Are you who people think you are? Or do you present yourself as a person crafted for likability? Do you tiptoe through life and accept the status quo for what it is because everyone else does?

Eventually our actions, words, and appearances become limited by how we think other people perceive us.

Who hasn’t had a moment where you’ve seen someone that could be the love of your life, and you were too scared to make a move, just because of what a bunch of strangers in the room might think about you?

Remember: those who hesitate – masturbate.



We don´t realise that we allow the opinions of strangers – who we will most likely never see again – to control our behaviours. Is this a healthy way of living? It transforms you into a spectator, a follower, and worst of all, it makes you become someone who doesn´t take a stand for anything.

WHERE DOES THIS BEHAVIOR COME FROM?

As with many things, we inherited this trait from our ancestors. Your brain is still wired to behave according to thousands of years of mental programming, when we were still small hunter-gatherer tribes, living in caves and discovering fire is hot. Members of the tribe knew each other and they had to work closely together to build their lives.

Survival and reproduction were all that mattered, so people naturally did whatever it took to stay alive. Fitting into the group was essential because status was valuable, authority was reserved and group cohesion trumped individuality.

Obsessing over every word and act was justified, because those who said or did the wrong thing could be ostracized from the group, which would be disastrous. Without the group, you were dead. The fear of public speaking, seeking approval from those with status, and the tendency to go along with the crowd are wired behaviours in our brain. Nowadays you can choose what tribes you want to belong to and what role you want to play. In the worst case you get kicked out of one group, which rarely affects your status in another. Additionally you have way more potential romantic partners to choose than your ancestors had; on average, you’ll see more people in one day than your ancestors saw in their entire lives.

HOW TO NOT GIVE A FUCK:

A little quick fix: just remember two things!

You live here and everywhere else is eternal emptiness. Compared to how long this place has already existed, you and everyone you know is going to die. Probably soon.

SO WHO GIVES A FUCK?

Seriously, if those two facts didn´t convert you, let´s dig a little deeper.



YOU HAVE AN INACCURATE SELF-IMAGE

If you care way too much what others think, you probably have an inaccurate self-image… at least that´s what I had.

You might think you care a lot about others, think you do good for the world. You have this image of your ideal self in your mind, but just having that image is not enough for you – you want validation. Your boss, your girlfriend, a random stranger on the street: everyone should validate your noble self-image.

In fact, there´s a lot of selfishness in this approach You try to tell yourself that you are this caring, altruistic person. Well, being empathetic and caring is by no means a bad thing, but watch out: caretaking has very little to do with caring.

CARETAKING CARING

Gives to others what the giver needs to give Gives to others what the receiver needs Comes from a place of emptiness within the giver Comes from a place of abundance within the giver Always has unconscious strings attached Has no strings attached

THE NEW ALTERNATIVE

Self-sacrifice and altruism < —————–> selfishness and narcissism

If on the one side there is a person that sets his own values aside in order to please everyone else and on the other side is someone who doesn´t give a fuck about anything but himself, we are going for the MIDDLE WAY.

The goal is to become grounded in your own values, completely independent of the GOOD or BAD opinions of others; that´s the middle way.

I´ll repeat that: the goal is to be completely grounded internally. Other opinions don´t matter because you are on your own path!

STOP THE PEOPLE PLEASING

When you are people pleasing, you let the opinions of others dishonour your own values and discourage you, while obstructing you from doing something good.

What exactly is the value of another person’s opinion of you? It´s just a thought in somebody else’s head. You are letting this figment of somebody else’s imagination control your life. Think about that.

It´s another thing to care about the opinions of someone you respect: your father, your mother or someone else you look up to, but most people get trapped caring about the figment of a complete stranger’s mind.

So what you need to do is to admit that the strategy you used just doesn´t work…

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.” – Henry Ford

When you are on your path and people come and praise you, its ok, it won´t change you, and when people laugh at you and criticize you, guess what? That’s ok, too.

IT IS OK:

… FOR SOMEONE TO THINK YOU’RE AN ASSHOLE

… IF SOMEONE THINKS YOUR WORK IS CRAP

… IF SOMEONE THINKS YOU’RE UGLY

… IF YOU DON’T GET THE COMPLIMENT YOU WANTED

YOU GOTTA OWN YOUR SHIT.

If you´re challenging the status quo you will be clashing with the opinions of a lot of people and there will be tension. And that´s fine.

A lot of times when people think or say something bad to or about you, it´s not even about you but about the other person. Just remember the last time you were in a shitty mood and you got stuck in traffic, or got called by a telemarketer, or bumped into on the sidewalk; maybe you weren’t always the friendliest person in those moments.

EXPRESSION NOT IMPRESSION

By trying to be fake all the time just to avoid the tension, you lose everything that’s unique and authentic about you and that´s what people really don´t like. Self-expression is the most important thing that you sacrifice as a people-pleaser.

Attacking it from the logical side doesn´t really work…

Whenever you are concerned what others think, your behaviour changes. You become stifled ,you can’t connect genuinely with other people, you becomeless expressive. So the more you care, the worse it gets.

When you’re not trying to impress people, it opens up a real chance to authentically connect with another human being.

REALISE YOUR CORE VALUES

“A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people’s business.” – Eric Hoffer

Once you find your values and you know yourself and what you go for, it becomes way less important what others might think of you. When you know your values, you have something to stand up for – something to believe in.

An important lesson I had to learn in my life was that you don´t need everybody to like you. You can have safe interactions and have everybody like you as an acquaintance, or you can say what you want to say and make the jokes that you find funny and have some people that dislike you and some people absolutely loving you.

ACKNOWLEDGE THE FACT THAT NO ONE REALLY CARES

Believe it or not, were not that special.

“You wouldn’t worry so much about what others think of you if you realized how seldom they do.” ― Eleanor Roosevelt

As much as you obsess over yourself, you´re not the first thing on everyone else’s mind. In fact, you’re often the last, if you enter their mind at all.

They´re worried about other things: what you think about them and more importantly, what they think about themselves. They are their own centre of their world; you only play a microscopic part in the thoughts they run through every day.

Like my grandmother once said, your opinions are always valid, unless it´s some crap you´re being shitty about, then go fuck yourself.

Alright, she never actually said that but fuck it, let´s pretend like she did.

IT GETS BETTER

Another famous piece of advice says that while we are in our twenties and thirties we care about what others think of us, in our forties and fifties we stop caring about what they think and in our sixties and seventies we realize that they were never thinking about us in the first place.

Essentially when we grow older we realise that not everything is worth giving a fuck about and we learn togive a fuck about only those things that are actually fuckworthy in the first place. This is called “maturity.” It sounds pretty nice, I guess I´ll try it someday.

As we progress, we develop a feeling of what our real self-image is and we no longer have a desire to change what´s inevitable in our lives.

Eventually, it gets easier and we stop giving a fuck about everything. Life is just what it is and once you start to accept that, you’ll realize that you will probably never have your face between Mila Kunis’ tits. And that´s OK.

You can now reserve your fucks for the most truly fuckworthy things in life: your family, your friends and your badass ability to get kicked in the crotch without hurting yourself.

Note to myself: Practise more ancient arts like Steel Crotch Kongfu.

THE REAL DEAL – ACTION

So you know you should change something? Great, you made the first step and acknowledged the fact that this is a completely useless and limiting behavior, but now it´s time to really do something about it and tackle this sucker.

Here’s where my life completely changed…

One of the first stepping stones was, as stupid as it sounds, to simply lay down in the middle of the street. I stumbled upon this idea for the first time in “The 4-Hour Workweek” from Timothy Ferriss, described as a “comfort challenge”.

PRACTICAL DISCOMFORT

Here is the original explanation of this so-called “practical discomfort” from Tim Ferriss himself.

The benefit of practicing discomfort is to realize that the worst case scenario isn’t as bad as you would imagine.

You can train yourself by taking challenges with increasingly levels of discomfort that have no other downside than embarrassment. An example is Keto from the stoic philosophy (described as the perfect Stoic). He would wear a tunic with a ridiculous colour for which he would get ridiculed, in order to train himself to only be embarrassed about the things that matter in life.

The modern example: Lying down on the street in a public area, as a way to inoculate yourself against succumbing to peer pressure about stupid things or holding off making important decisions, or having uncomfortable conversations because of the irrational fear of this massive downside.

You repeatedly train with challenges like that to get to a certain level of calmness where you realize that the worst case scenario is almost never that bad.

JUST DO IT… AT LEAST I THOUGHT SO

I thought that sounds like a great idea, because what´s a better way to stop caring what others think than to purposely make a fool out of yourself in public. Let´s give it a shot.

When I stood on the most crowded street of the city I went to school in, I simply couldn´t do it. Some stupid excuse, I don´t even remember anymore. So I postponed the challenge, the good old reliable dreamkiller: “I´ll do it tomorrow.”

Of course I didn´t do it the next day, nor the day after, so I forgot about it. Why? Because I was just overwhelmed by all the fucks I gave at that time. Almost a year later when I read all this “new year, new me” bullshit, I remembered there´s something left for me to do.

So on December 23rd , probably one of the most crowded days on this street, while doing some Christmas-shopping, I finally put all my shit together and laid down on the cold street, in the middle of all these “judging” people. At least that’s how I saw them at the time.

Surprisingly every second I laid there I got more and more comfortable. I was watching all these people staring at me, thinking I´m a weirdo and I began to love it. After a minute I got up, walked on as nothing happened and had the best feeling ever.

You embarrass yourself in front of hundreds of people and life just goes on. I didn’t die, I still had all my limbs. And that little grumpy grandmother that walked past me probably forgot about my existence in the next three seconds after she walked past me, because even she has better shit to do and so should you. Like practicing your invulnerability to being kicked in the crotch. (Seriously, how do they do that?)

The only person who really came back to see what was going on was a little kid. When I got up I gave her a little smile and received a smile back. This left me wondering at which point in our life we transform from dreaming, risk-taking and exploring children, to these fearful wimps we are today.

That photo actually became one of my screensavers, to walk me through a lot more challenges.

From this point on I said to myself that I will do this until I reach the point where I don´t give a fuck anymore. Since almost two years I´ve been laying on the street and have done all kinds of other crazy challenges. Whenever I find myself caring too much again I know what to do. I take a comfort zone challenge.

NOW IT´S TIME FOR YOUR ACTION

Don´t be discouraged if a challenge seems too hard, I´ve been there. It took me about a year from reading about the idea to actually executing. Everyone starts at a different level.

To save you some time, I came up with a nice little project for you, it´s called: “THE ART OF NOT GIVING A FUCK” – One week of structured missions and surprises to get you going. I´d be happy to send them over and make your inbox smile. Just sign up below.

Email Address First Name FUCK YEAH! Iu00b4m in.

My friends and I have had tremendous success with these exercises, and I hope you do too. Most of all I want to see if you can make it through.

If you can make it, and I think you can, I have a surprise present for you. It´s a surprise because I don´t know what it is yet, but give me one week.

Hope you’re in. Anyway, last but not least:

TRAVELLING ALONE

If you’re looking for an ultimate challenge, travelling alone is a great achievement. Personally, it helped me a great deal to get closer to what and who I want to be. Travelling with friends is great fun for sure, but only once you’re alone do you have to truly push yourself outside of your comfort zone.

You will be immersed in different social cultures, break language barriers and face social norms you didn’t even know existed and you will be forced to get out of your bubble every step of the way.

One backpack is all you need. You will see how few material things you need in your life. Plan nothing, take a destination you’ve always wanted to visit and figure out the rest once you get there. Ask locals and other travelers, you will be surprised by the things you end up exploring, or, as a buddy I met on the road once said in a bit of a fucked up situation: “Now you don´t feel like a tourist anymore, do you?”

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Being comfortable with the uncomfortable and not giving a damn what others think about you is an endless journey, but you can always improve yourself. I struggle with it every day and so do others. But the time to start is today, the world is already too full of people who obey the status quo, too afraid to be anyone else as they are expected to be. Let´s be fearless as if we were children again.

And what would be the end of an article without a quote from Fight Club.

“It’s only after we’ve lost everything that we’re free to do anything.”

You got this my friend.

DGAF.

I’m curious, what have you tried so far to stop giving a fuck? Let me know in the comments below.

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This article was inspired by: Tim Ferriss, Mark Manson, Leo Gura, Dr. Robert Glover, Till.H.Groß