Lesson 1 — It’s okay that life sucks

“It’s okay that life sucks,” it really is, because that’s part of life. I choose this as the first important lesson that you must understand.

Maybe you trick yourself into wishing for your life to be perfect all the time. This happens because we tend to create a biased definition of perfect based on fucked-up values — explained further — instead of thinking “perhaps it’s normal that life sucks now and then.”

When you get to understand this simple truth things don’t affect you the same way.

It’s important to understand that things will not always go the way you planned, events will go wrong, people will act against your expectations, bad things will happen, you’ll be unfairly beaten down too many times. But that’s normal!

Shit happens and suffering is inevitable.

Now there’s another problem besides trying to avoid suffering from unexpected situations, and that is when you try to hard to live a fairy tale life.

Accepting that there is no way to avoid suffering, you can’t possibly believe in the existence of a fairy tale life waiting for you. So the second thing is, you have to stop trying too hard for positive things to happen.

If you live in this illusion, first you’ll always be trying to deny the existence of suffering, and second, you will create more suffering when your positive expectations fail.

Mark puts it this way:

“The desire for more positive experience is for itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.”

Just like everyone, you’re constantly hearing bullshit about how a good life should be — positive — they tell. Like if positivity is the key to greatness. But it isn’t.

I also believe positivity can be good in a certain measure but, like in everything, too much of something and you’ll start seeing more harm than good.

Being too positive will make you believe that everything is supposed to go well, and when you see too much bad shit happening repeatedly, you’ll start getting overwhelmed. This because most of the times you won’t be able to see your desires fulfilled. You will keep trying, draining your energy, fighting for an unrealistic ideal that you may never reach and the only thing you’ll get is an ever-growing amount of frustration.

Congratulations! You just got a free ticket to an amazing experience of frustration.

So, you have to accept what you have and be grateful for that. Accept reality as it is and stop wanting more. When you desire things you don’t have and eventually can get them, you’ll start to want other things. It’s a never-ending dissatisfaction.

Mark says:

“The key to a good life is not giving a fuck about more; it’s giving a fuck about less, giving a fuck about what only is true and immediate and important.”

Eventually, living in denial will lead to something that Mark calls “the feedback loop from hell”.

That’s when you have a problem and your problem gets worse for thinking about the problem itself, and this bigger problem makes you feel even worse, and feeling worse will make you feel worse than what you were already feeling. And this cycle keeps going downhill like a “feedback loop from hell”.

Thus stop trying for things to go as you desired. Embrace failure and deception!

It’s when you stop trying that things will get to you. And even if they don’t, it won’t matter, since you are not living in denial anymore, you accepted your problems, and you are not killing yourself trying to achieve something that you’ll probably never get.

Lesson 2— You'll have less problems when you choose the things you want to give a fuck about

“The problem with people who hand out fucks like ice cream at a goddam summer camp is that they don’t have anything more fuck-worthy to dedicate their fucks to” — Mark Manson

If you don’t know what to care about you’ll start caring about a lot of unimportant shit and that’s when you start finding problems everywhere. So, even if you don’t want you are forced to choose what to give a fuck about.

You need to find something that gives meaning to your life and that implies finding problems that you can learn to appreciate dealing with.

Something to come only with maturity.

Let me tell you about a recent situation I went through.

I decided I was organizing this house party to which I invited a quite large amount of friends and possibly some strangers. I was excited about, planning everything thoroughly, and I had some positive expectations. As the party day was getting close I was not getting enough confirmations, a lot of people were quitting, or telling they couldn’t. I didn’t like it but I kept the party, thinking that it could still go more like a friend gathering. Only a few hours before the party did I receive more declines. In the end, there were only three survivors, counting with me, food and drinks in excess, and several cups that I had bought for the party. Something that many would call a failure.

But that day I didn’t see it that way. During the planning, my plans kept getting robbed so I was left with a bunch of problems. But I was self-conscious, I decided those were not that big problems since they were the ones I chose to deal with. I chose to care for that party, I mostly invited people that I cared for, so that was a fuck I had chosen for my life. We still spent some time together and were capable of having fun. I still felt fulfilled at the end.

This is a great personal story about dealing with the problems I chose, but there’s a change that sometimes you’ll have to deal with problems that you did not exactly choose to deal with. Not completely true. You’ll see that you still have a choice to make. And that’s the choice of how you’ll react to that problem.

“Problems may be inevitable, but the meaning of each problem is not.” — Mark Manson

Here Mark also tells us about something very important: Values and Metrics.

We all have our values and they are the ones determining the metrics we choose to measure everything with. These determine our view of ourselves and the world around us.

Greats news! Values are not static. You can change your values, and the metrics you use to measure these new values, and so your opinion of everything will change.

With the right values, you can change the way you see your problems and redefine your perception of success and failure.

You probably have fucked up values, and that’s the root cause of all your bad decisions and wrong fucks you chose to give. As Mark writes:

“When we have poor values — that is, poor standards we set for ourselves and others — we are essentially giving fucks about the things that don’t matter, things that in fact make our life worse. But when we choose better values, we are able to divert our fucks to something better — toward things that matter, things that improve the state of our well-being and that generate happiness, pleasure, and success as side effects.”

One last important thing to retain is that:

Happiness too comes from solving problems.

Since problems will always exist and you are left with no other option but accepting them, eventually happiness will have to appear from those problems, an that is specifically, from solving them.

But, again, you still have a choice. You get to choose your problems in life.

When you redefine your priorities you’ll choose what really matters in your life. Those decisions will certainly bring another great amount of problems. But these other problems are the ones you chose to bring into your life. It’s in these problems that you’ll find your happiness.

I recently went to study abroad, for the first time. And I kept my expectations a little higher than I should. I kind of wanted things to go all rainbows and shit, and I thought I would be living a better life, but in reality, I ended crashing in another pile of problems. I soon realized that even though these problems were real, they were the problems that I consciously decided to give a fuck about. I ended finding my happiness in those problems and now I don’t want to avoid them.

Lesson 3— Suffering is essential to your growth

As I wrote before, the book teaches us how suffering is inevitable but better than that, is knowing that the same suffering you can’t avoid will have an important role in your growth. And the light it’s accepting that without that suffering growth is not possible.

Mark Manson explains how only through discomfort, suffering, and pain can you grow. This happens because the only discomfort will lead to seeking change. He writes:

“We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful. It is nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change”.

Pain will inspire change because it brings discomfort, and when you are feeling uncomfortable you’ll seek comfort, so, ultimately, you are seeking change.

So next time you’re feeling some form of pain, instead of seeing it as a bad thing and trying to get away from it, accept it, allow yourself to feel it, and be reassured that it exists for a valid reason. If you do this you’ll not only experience the pain becoming weaker, but you’ll also become more used to it. You’ll eventually be happy for its presence in your life.

Lessons 4— You are not different

This lesson is of most importance wouldn’t it be the case of people always feeling some type of entitlement.

During your life, you may be led to believe that you’re exceptional in some way, either by feeling that you’re better than everyone else or by feeling that you’re a victim and everything is against you.

Truthful news: you’re not exceptional, you’re not different in any way. You have your problems to deal with, just like anyone else.

It may happen that one or two people reading this story will be among the exceptional undermost amount of population. Even if that’s the case these people are not successful by the amount of positivism their self-esteem is created by.

When your self-esteem is at a high or low, you’re just being “entitled” — like Mark Manson likes to call — meaning that you’re just entitling yourself of being different in any aspect of your life. The self-confidence you show is just a delusion.

And why can’t entitlement work?

Because with entitlement you’ll need to feel good about yourself all the time and that will be an obstruction to the acceptance of your problems when you should be dealing with them instead.

“People who feel entitled view every occurrence in their life as either an affirmation of, or a threat to, their own greatness.” — Mark Manson

In reality, your true self-worth is measured by the way you choose to feel about the negative aspects of your life.

If you’re thinking that you should be extraordinary then everyone has the right to think the same. But if everyone were to be extraordinary, the concept would immediately cease to exist. Extraordinariness only exists amongst mediocrity.

But this doesn’t mean that you have to be average on purpose. You can and should still give a fuck at being better at the things you do, and aim at perfection. But do it, knowing that you’ll never reach it and probably never achieve something extraordinary either, but that’s okay.

Lesson 5— We are 100% responsible for our life events

Yes, 100%, you read right! Ultimately we are responsible for our choices and that determines how you choose your values and how you chouse to react to certain situations.

It’s all about accepting responsibility for your life. It’s about assuming that you own your life, choosing to be responsible for it, at the end also choosing to be responsible for your problems.

This is the most important step in solving problems. As soon as you understand this, you’ll stop avoiding your responsibility and act upon your problems. Because they’re yours! They don’t just appear and disappear out of thin air.

This concept of responsibility is important but it’s also important that you don’t mistake responsibility for fault. Even though they may sometimes be used together, they are different.

Imagine you are walking on the sidewalk and you are hit by a car. It’s probably not your fault that you were hit by the car but it’s still your responsibility because you chose to walk on that sidewalk at that time of the day. If that doesn’t convince you, you’re still left with one responsibility. The one to choose how you’ll react to that situation. Now picture another situation, in which you decided to jump to the middle of a road and get hit by a car. Here you had both the responsibility and the fault for that action.

So you can be either responsible and have the fault, or have no fault but you’re still responsible.

Ultimately we choose our problems by choosing how we react to them.

“Often the only difference between a problem being painful or being powerful is a sense that we choose it, and that we are responsible for it.” — Mark Manson

It’s from this awareness that the true improvement can emerge because even if you can’t control a specific problem that appears in your life, you still know you can control your reaction to it.

In reality, everything we do in life results from a choice. So try to imagine the number of choices you have made in your life until this moment. And now imagine the choices you are still to make. It means that choosing lies behind your responsibility and so everything that happens in our life.

It’s also by choice that your values and metrics are created. You have the freedom to choose your values and the metrics you use to measure them.

Thus understanding this possibility of choosing everything that succeeds in your life, you also have the power in your hands. This power is the first weapon for correctly dealing with all your problems.

Lesson 6— You can, should and will be wrong

People usually don’t like to be wrong, but if you look back in time, you’ll find out that most of the individual and collective certainties that existed were to be found wrong later. For their time, groups of people could have believed they reached some kind of universal truth, but even then not everyone believed in that universal truth. And since we, humans, can remember we have evolved as different ideas came to birth and died.

The first thing here is that you will always be wrong in everything you do and believe in. Of course, you can be more or less wrong but nothing will ever be completely true. You need to experience things to find it, knowing that even experience will be wrong somehow.

Nothing is perfect, nothing is absolute. You’ll be wrong.

Thus understanding that this process of being wrong is important for growth you can also be wrong “on purpose”, in a sense that you become open to being wrong. But you don’t have to accept this wrongness so that you keep making the same mistakes all the time. No. It has a different meaning. You accept it, so each time you can learn with your mistakes and make them smaller and less frequent.

That’s how you should be wrong.

And with this in mind, you probably already understood that there is no growth without error. We evolved through multiple errors. You must accept that being wrong is part of life. It’s okay to be wrong, “you can” be wrong because if you feel you can’t then you’re just being closed.minded. And that’s the number-one condition to keep living your shitty values.

Mark puts it this way:

“Certainty is the enemy of growth. Nothing is for certain until it has already happened — and even then, it’s still debatable. That’s why accepting the inevitable imperfections of our values is necessary for any growth to take place.”

So being wrong is a “necessary evil”.

But how do you aspire to be wrong?

“in constant search of doubt” — Mark writes.

If you accept that you’ll always be somewhat wrong, you start to put doubt in everything you do.

Mark also explains how you can practically take better advantage of this fact, but that’s something I’ll leave up to you to read in the book.

So far, the most important thing to retain is:

Improvement can only come from failure.

Mark refers to improvement as collecting of “tiny failures”, and writes:

“the magnitude of your success on how many times you failed at something.”

This also relates to something that you’ve read before:

Pain.

Most of the times you’ll avoid doing things that can bring you to failure to avoid pain. But this will be the first cause of inaction in your life. It will stop you from doing the things you should be doing.

You can fear to do something because you fear failure, and you fear failure for fearing pain.

But once again, suffering is inevitable and you must accept it. If you accept it to be part of your growth you’ll also accept failing, and you’ll end up doing things that you were afraid of at the beginning. It can be hard at first, but with time it gets easier and it will make you happier in the long term.