Author: Mark Manson
The sub-title sums it up pretty well and I viewed it as a “counterintuitive approach to living a good life”. Mark grabs your attention with the gratuitous use of profanity and at times, I felt he was going for shock value. After a while, he settles down into more of a philosophical debate. Clearly Mark has read a lot and is trying to distill his wisdom in a few chapters and not so few f*cks. Here’s a sampling of points I wrote down. Instead of looking to be right all the time, we should be looking for how we are wrong all the time. Because we are. Being wrong opens up to the possibility of change. Being wrong brings the opportunity for growth. I couldn’t agree more with the author on the importance of failure in our learning process. “Failure is the way forward. If we are unwilling to fail, then we are unwilling to succeed.”
There are many more nuggets of wisdom spread out through the book . We are inundated with information highlighting success, that we believe that “exceptionalism is the new normal”. He says “weathering the shit storm“ builds emotional resilience, much like exercise and physical pain is required to develop stronger muscles.
He tells a rather candid story of a woman “Erin” who is trolling him and making his life miserable. A little sleuthing on Google will tell you that this is about Erika Awakening and she is spouting some pretty harsh stuff about Mark. He tells the intro to the story, but falls short of making any conclusions. The best he has to offer is “Evil people never believe that they are evil; rather, they believe that everyone else is evil.”
I found the book to be fairly deep philosophically, especially when Mark talks about death and the meaning of the life we live. He refers to a life on this world as “immortality projects”. He credits Becker with this characterization and makes an interesting argument that “wars and revolutions and mass murder occur when one group of people’s immortality projects rub up against another group's.”
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