Book Club Review
Happy Friday!
It's a holiday in the state of Victoria today. The holiday is because it's the Friday before the AFL Grand Final. Kind of a weird reason for a day off but I'll take it. I'm actually writing this post real time on Friday morning with a cup of tea. It's a nice way to start my day and reminds me of when I started this blog before I was working.
Today's post is a review of the book my friends read for book club, although I don't know if they actually ended up reading and discussing haha.
Here are my thoughts on The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life by Mark Manson.
These are some of the points from the book I connected with:
The key to a good life is not giving an F about more; it's giving an F about less, giving an F about only what is true and immediate and important.
We have so much effing stuff and so many opportunities that we don't even know what to give an F about anymore.
What determines your success isn't, "What do you want to enjoy?" The relevant question is, "What pain do you want to sustain?" Do you want the reward and not the struggle? Do you want the result but not the process?
Who you are is defined by what you're willing to struggle for.
Improvement at anything is based on thousands of tiny failures and the magnitude of your success is based on how many times you've failed at something.
Self-improvement is really about prioritizing better values, choosing better things to give an F about. Because when you give better Fs, you get better problems. And when you get better problems, you get a better life.
Everything worthwhile in life is won by surmounting the associated negative experience.
To try to avoid pain is to give too many Fs about pain. In contrast, if you're able to not give an F about the pain, you become unstoppable
Emotions are simply biological signals designed to nudge you in the direction of beneficial change
Negative emotions are a call to action. If you feel crappy it's because your brain is telling you that there's a problem that's unaddressed or unresolved
Growth is an iterative process. When we learn something new we don't go from "wrong" to "right". Rather we go from wrong to slightly less wrong, and then to even less wrong than that, and so on.
I guess what he was trying to say was that the less you care, the less you have to lose, and the more you are willing to risk to get what you want. The goal isn’t to have no problems, it’s to have better problems. Don’t waste time caring about stuff you don’t really care about. Find something you actually give an F about and put energy into that instead. You have to fail first to be successful at anything.
Truth Time
I still give an F. I get what he was saying and when I re-read my notes for this blog post I realized there was actually a lot of good stuff in that book. But when I was reading the book I feel like the overall message got lost. I loved the little stories and examples throughout the book and there are definitely some learnings I can apply to real life but I wanted the chapters to tie back into the main message more obviously. At one point he says this is not like every other self improvement book. But towards the end I felt like definitely was and I was lost at how what I was reading was supposed to make me give less Fs.
Final Thoughts:
I recommend you start by reading an excerpt from the book on Mark Manson's blog here. And then if you want to explore that more, read the book. But the excerpt is the best and most convincing part so you can probably stop there.
Have a great weekend! Happy Reading :)
