SOLVED with Mark Manson - (Q&A) Fear of Failure, Morning Routines, and... Manifesting?

Episode Date: May 1, 2024

A week ago, we hit 2M subs on YouTube and 10M podcast downloads, and I promised a special Q&A episode of the pod—which turned out to be more fun than I expected. Jump in on this celebratory episode, where I rapid fire through some of the most interesting questions sent in by you guys. Get all the goodness with AG1, if you use this link, they'll throw in a free one-year supply of Vitamin D3K2 and 5 AG1 Travel Packs: https://drinkag1.com/idgaf Try a free sample pack with any drink mix purchase, using my link: https://drinklmnt.com/idgaf Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hey guys, before we get into it, if you listen to the show, you probably consume a lot of personal growth content. The books, the podcasts, YouTube videos, all of it. And you've probably noticed the gap between knowing what to do and then actually going out and doing it. You've got the insights, but what you don't have is something that connects them to your actual life. That's why I built purpose. It's a personal development AI that learns you, your patterns, your blind spots, all the stuff that you keep circling back to over and over again. Instead of handing you another framework, it gives you specific personalized direction. So check it out. You can try it for free for seven days. Go to purpose.app. That is purpose.com. What's up everybody? Mark Manson here. And today

we have a very, very special episode for you. A couple weeks ago, we hit a milestone here at Mark Manson Enterprises, a very rare and special milestone. We hit 10 million podcast downloads in the first five months, which is absolutely insane. And concurrently, around the same time, we hit 2 million subscribers on the YouTube channel. So as a celebration, I decided to have an open Q&A solo podcast. So I asked everybody to submit questions, and we received, I think, about 1,200 questions from you guys. These questions are wide-ranging. They're going to cover tons and tons of different topics from my personal changes and beliefs recently

to some of my thoughts on things like manifestation, on social media, on how to get over a breakup. And we're also going to talk about new books, new movies, new plans, more podcasts, all the above. So let's get into it. First question, one of the best things about you, Mark, is how open you are to the ups and downs of your life, but it has always impacted me how much you share about your relationship. I guess this is my marriage. Could you share the top five to ten things that have helped you build and maintain such an

amazing relationship with your wife? So my wife and I have been married. Well, we've been together now for almost 13 years and we've been married for six and a half. Still very happy. Big thumbs up to a good marriage. Underrated. Marriage needs a new publicist.

It doesn't get enough positive attention these days. But to answer your question, I'd say the biggest keys to a good and healthy romantic relationship. First one is honesty and integrity. Like trust is everything. If you don't have trust, nothing else works. You can have like the crazy. date nights, amazing sex, really great conversations. But if you don't trust each other,

none of that stuff is really going to matter past like the immediate term. So trust just makes everything else work. Part of that too is both the willingness to take and give feedback to each other. I think that's huge. I think it's really important. And there's a lot of tactical things within that, right? Like they're good and bad ways to give your partner feedback. Some feedback just sounds like criticism, where some feedback is actually feedback, and it's important to kind of package and frame it as such. The next one I would say is don't try to change each other. I think this is a big mistake that a lot of couples make is that they see a way that their partner could be better or they see how their partner could solve a problem for themselves and they want to take it upon

themselves to be responsible for that problem or to make things better for them. In my experience, that kind of backfires. There's this old Jim Rome quote, which is like, I'm totally going to fuck this up. But the principle of the quote was like, you shouldn't try to be perfect for me and I shouldn't try to be perfect for you. We should both try to be perfect for ourselves together, something like that. And then finally, I'd say it's important to have lives outside of each other, right? Like my wife has a whole life.

She has a bunch of interests and friends and hobbies and stuff that she does without me. And I have friends, interests, and hobbies that I do without her. And then we have friends, interests and hobbies that we do together. And so I think it's important to, like, maintain your own independent identities. from each other, but then also be able to come together and have a shared identity together. So there's kind of like a dance that happens around that balance. Next question. When is the next book coming and what is it about?

About 20 of you asked this question. There is no book coming, and I have no fucking clue what it's about. I haven't started writing anything yet. Truth be told, I was under contract to do another book. It was technically due last year. I didn't write it, and the publisher canceled the contract. So I have no obligations for a book at the moment. And I'm going to be honest, from the time I wrote subtle art through the time that Will Smith's book came out, I did five books in six years and a movie.

That's a fucking lot. Like that's honestly, in hindsight, I think I kind of burnt myself out by going too hard. So I'm in a place now where I'm not writing a book and I feel really good about it. I don't feel like I have anything bookworthy inside me at the moment, but I'm sure that I will. again someday and when I do I'll start writing another one. What are three things that you learned in the past five years that you wish you knew years ago? It's a great question. You know, the first and most obvious, which I bang on about in podcast episodes all the damn time, is just how much I underestimated the mental and emotional benefits of getting my physical health in order. And this

This is one of those things that I feel very stupid for because I have seen in the research and literature for years and years and years that, you know, being in good shape grants mental clarity helps you emotionally regulate, you know, things like your diet have an effect on your mood, the quality of your sleep, the quality of your sleep has effect on your productivity at work the next day. I knew all of these things. Yet, for some reason, I just underestimated them for whatever reason. Not anymore. I'm fully on the physical health bandwagon, and I'm going to be one of those

obnoxious people who won't shut up about their morning smoothies. I guess the second one, the second big lesson from the last five years is I have come to the conclusion that I think traditional media is overrated and probably a dying industry. One of the reasons that I came back to doing internet content, and I'm investing so heavily into things like this podcast and the YouTube channel and the newsletter is I'm just extremely bullish on this creator economy, this internet media sector in general. I think this is the future. I think it's extremely exciting.

My experiences in traditional media kind of shows me I don't think they really know what they're doing. So it's good to be here. And then I'd say the third one is that, I mean, this is just like a fucking broken record throughout my life of not taking my relationship. seriously enough or maybe not investing enough in them. But I think I underestimated how much friendships and social relationships change as you age. And I think I took a lot of my friendships and social relationships for granted when I was younger. So, you know, if I could go back years and

years ago, I would slap my 25 year old self in the face and be like, invest in people. It'll pay off. Can you give some tough love to those of us who are beginners and online content space and struggle with comparing ourselves to people who are wildly successful. Okay. Yeah, here's some tough love. Fucking stop. It makes no sense. Imagine if there was a high school kid who was going home depressed every day from basketball practice because he wasn't as good as LeBron James. It makes no fucking sense. You should compare yourself to your peers. You should compare yourself to other beginners. You should compare yourself to other people in your industry or in your space or at most compare yourself to the people who are just a step ahead of you. That's who you

should be focusing on. Take inspiration from the big professional people, the people like me who have been doing this literally our entire adult lives for decades. Sure, be inspired by something, but don't compare yourself. Compare yourself to the person who's two steps in front of you. What are your thoughts on manifestation? Okay. You know, so the manifestation thing is it's becoming it's picking up steam again and I've written about this in a few places I had a section on it and subtle art and I've got a old article on the website called the staggering bullshit of the secret look here's the thing the concept of manifestation what it really is is it is a mental framework that leverages some cognitive biases in the expectation effect

to your advantage so there's a simple fact of human psychology which is that we tend to notice the things that we think about. So you probably pass by bicycles all the time throughout your life, but unless you are interested in bicycles, you don't notice them. But as soon as you're interested in bicycles, you're like, oh my God, there are bikes everywhere. Now, what manifestation tells you is like, this is the universe giving you what you want.

Well, that's not entirely true. The universe has always just been the universe. There's always been an infinite amount of stuff going on. What's happening is that you are choosing, the focus on something in your life. And because you're focusing on it, you're tending to notice things that relate to it more often, including opportunities that, you know, if you're focusing on a goal, those opportunities can help you achieve that goal. So really, manifestation is just very consciously leveraging your own cognitive biases in your favor. Now, what's wrong with that?

There's nothing wrong with that. That's actually a really good thing to do. I think it has really good outcomes for people. What worries me is that the narrative around the manifestation stuff of the universe is giving you what you want or giving you what you think about, it kind of promotes a little bit of a narcissistic tendency, which is to assume that the universe is revolving around you, that the universe gives a shit what you want or what you think about, which is just, it's not the case. And I think you can fall into a lot of traps around self-esteem and self-absorption if you're not careful. So does manifestation work?

Sure, it works. But I just think there's better ways to think about it or to go about it. Next question. How do we overcome our fear of failure? I mean, it's hard to get motivated without seeing the end goal, but it's hard to expect nothing and just start when potentially our efforts could end up being wasted. You never get over your fear of failure.

It's always going to exist. And I think you should get used to that. And failure is often incredibly useful. So I think you should look at your options and make a decision based on which failure is actually going to benefit me the most. Now, you might be saying, how can failure benefit me? Well, failure can benefit you a ton. So there's plenty of situations that failure can benefit you. I never planned on being a writer.

If I had never started writing because I was like, well, I'm probably going to fail at this. I wouldn't have a career right now. I started writing because I wanted to market some shitty websites. and of my first like 100 articles, maybe two of them were read by more than a couple dozen people. So if I sat around being like, well, I'm failing at writing, I never would have gotten anywhere. So you should change your orientation towards failure. Stop being afraid of it.

Look for the lessons that are found in it. And then that will help motivate you to pursue something despite it. Congratulations, Mark. What is your opinion on luck and being lucky? Well, so this ties in perfectly with the manifestation thing. Luck is super important. We all have to get, like, there's no success in this life without some degree of luck. I think what gets missed is that luck is always happening around you.

It's just you're not always acting on it. So to come back to the manifestation thing, let's say tomorrow I decide I want to be like a film actor. Like I wake up tomorrow morning and I'm like, oh my God, I've discovered my life's purpose. I'm going to be an A-list actor in Hollywood, you know, like everybody else in L.A. And I start walking around. I go to the same dinner parties. I go to the same events. I hang out with the same people. But oh my God, I just met another actor. I met a director. Oh, my God, this guy is, he's writing for a TV show. Suddenly all these people that like I was meeting before,

but I didn't really think about or care now because they're very right. relevant to what I want, I'm like, oh my God, what luck, what circumstance that I get to end up at the same dinner party as this prestigious screenwriter or director or whatever? So luck is a lot of luck is simply perception. It's coincidences are constantly happening in our lives. What we perceive as luck is when those coincidences line up with whatever we are interested in or what our values are at that particular moment. So to come back to the manifestation bit, the utility of manifestation is that it gets us to be consciously aware of our values and what our interests are.

And it gets us actively thinking about them so that when those coincidences do happen in our lives, we are ready for them. We're ready to take the opportunity and act on them. So yes. And I'll add to, I think luck is a skill. You can increase your luck through activity. Basically, activity increases the number of potential coincidences that can happen in your life. So like, let's say I want to be a famous Hollywood actor and I just sit at home all day and dream about being a famous Hollywood actor. Nothing's going to happen.

I'm never going to get lucky. But if I start going to every single event around L.A. And I start meeting all these interesting people that, like, give me opportunities. Suddenly, I've increased my luck because I'm taking action. I'm increasing my activity. The more activity, the more coincidences that happen, the more coincidences, the luckier you get. All right. What is your morning routine?

Have you put much thought into it? I do not put much thought into my morning routine. I think morning routines are maybe one of the most overrated things that get talked about all the time. But to answer your question, my morning routine is basically this. I wake up. I have no alarm. Generally, I wake up anywhere between 5.30 and 7. and I take a piss, drink some water, and go to my office, sit down on my computer and start working.

That's it. That's my entire morning routine. The only good morning routine is having things that you're excited to work on. That's it. If you have things that you're excited to work on, you don't need a morning routine. You're going to wake up excited, tons of energy, ready to go. If you're not excited for what you're doing that day, then you're going to need a routine to pick you up. Now, I can't bypass this topic without giving a shout out to nighttime routines.

I think nighttime routines, that's the real shit. That's the thing that nobody talks about. I take my nighttime routine very seriously. So I don't eat past 9 o'clock. I don't start a new show or a movie past 9 o'clock. Most of the lights in the house are out by 10. My wife and I were in bed by like 10, 10, 15. Do some light reading at night.

Nighttime routine, take that shit super seriously, get some good sleep. I honestly think if you get the nighttime stuff dialed in, the morning stuff takes care of itself. Next question. Is there such a thing as healthy shame? And if so, what the fuck is it? I just love how this is phrased. This is definitely a listener of mine. Great question.

So in the self-help world, shame is a purely negative evil thing that ruins our lives. I come from more of a scientific school of thought, which is that emotions evolved. to have a evolutionary utility. And so we have to ask ourselves, what is the evolutionary utility of shame? Why did shame evolve in the human species? Well, if you think about it, it actually makes sense. Shame is to deter us from doing things

that are harmful for others, right? Like, if your child steals money from somebody, it's most people's reaction is to shame them for doing that. And that shame prevents them from doing it again in the future. So that, I would argue, is an example of a healthy form of shame. I think where shame becomes unhealthy is when it is attached to things that are not necessarily bad or undesirable.

Like when you are shamed for how smart you are, or when you're shamed for having a goofy laugh, or when you're shamed for being interested in Pokemon or whatever. Like, those are completely irrelevant, morally neutral aspects of your personality that aren't necessarily good or bad. So shaming you for them is probably going to have terrible consequences. But if you're like a totally selfish prick and you're taking advantage of people and stealing from people and harming people, yeah, maybe you should be shamed for that. So if you disagree, hit me up in the comments.

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SuvW, German engineered for all. Amazon presents Jeff versus Taco Truck Salsa Whether it's Verde, Roja, or the orange one. For Jeff, trying any salsa is like playing Russian roulette with a flamethrower. Luckily, Jeff saved with Amazon and stocked up on antacids, ginger tea, and milk. Habaniero? More like habanier, yes. Save the everyday with Amazon. How are you able to give up drinking and be consistent with exercising?

I know all the benefits, and I know it's not meant to be enjoyable. Not true. Does energy come first, then exercise, or does exercise come first, then energy? Okay, I'm glad you asked this question. I am not a fitness and health guru, but I'm a former fat kid who likes exercising now. So let me speak from that experience. The simple answer is exercise comes first, but when you say this, it's not meant to be enjoyable. I disagree because you're not going to stick with things that you don't find a way

to enjoy. And this was like one of the first lessons I had to learn about exercise is that you have to find a way to enjoy it. And there are a lot of different ways you can do that. So doing it with friends, doing it with some sort of social group, finding workout buddies, creating goals or like gamification. Like one of the things that really was effective with me was when I started tracking my workouts, it actually made me more motivated to go back to the gym because I was excited to try to beat last week's number. That made it fun for me. That made it more interesting.

So I would say, think about how can you exercise in a way that's fun or interesting and start there and then start pushing yourself in the things that might be a little bit less enjoyable or a little bit more uncomfortable. I think the biggest mistake that people make, I definitely made this and I've seen a lot other people make it, is that they try to do too much too quickly. So, like, they decide, you know what, this year I'm going to get in the shape, and they go online, they do all this research. They find, like, some insane workout plan that was probably made by a guy who's like on steroids or something. And they're like, oh, I'll do that. That's the best thing. I'm

going to do that. And meanwhile, like, within five days, they're completely miserable. They're in so much pain. Their body's not used to it. They're not adaptive to it at all. Whereas, if you actually just start at something simple and kind of fun, you know, find a friend to go play tennis with, find a gym with like some nice classes with teachers that you like. Like, start there for six months. Get, develop the habit. And then once you've developed the habit, then push yourself to try some more difficult things. Now, with the drinking thing, it's similar, but in reverse.

So like, this is the hard thing about making content or talking about these sorts of subjects. Because it's easy for me to come on the podcast and be like, I quit. It's changed my life. What you don't see is the 18-month process that went into that quitting, right? So before I even attempted to quit, I was cutting back from probably like 15, 20 drinks a week to like four to five a week over the course of an entire year. And something interesting happened as I cut back, which was that my tolerance went down. So it used to be I could go out and crush a bottle of wine and feel completely fine and go

home like nothing was, nothing was out of the ordinary. As I cut back, a bottle of wine would fucking floor me. Like, it would ruin my day the next day, which was interesting because what happened is the less I drank, the less I wanted to drink. Because the less I drink, the more drinking affected me, the more noticeable the negative effects of the drinking was. So it actually created this momentum towards quitting as I cut back. The first time I quit, I only quit for a month, and then I went back to drinking. And then after maybe another month, two months, I decided to do three months. And then I went back to drinking.

And then I decided to do a year. And then I haven't gone back since. So what you hear is like this incredible story like, oh, I just quit drinking and blah, blah, blah. It's like, no, I was on the struggle bus for like a year, year and a half. and then even once I like had the conviction the stop, it was a slow going process. And then on the exercise thing, I mean, that's like a multi-year process of like failing,

fucking up, reverting, trying again, finding a new thing. So don't be misled when when people like me or people on Instagram or whatever, like, you know, or just like, oh yeah, I started doing this and it was great. It's like that simple sentence you just, heard is often like six to 12 months of struggling, ambivalence, failures, trying again, setbacks, whatever. Have patience with it.

You're supposed to fuck up. That's just part of it. Congratulations, Mark. My question is, how do I overcome envy? I really like, Naval Ravikon has a quote about this. I don't remember exactly what it is. But his take is basically, you can't just envy the good things about somebody. you have to envy all of the things about somebody, right?

So you can't just envy Bill Gates's money. You have to envy everything in his life. Bill Gates worked for 30 years without a day off and without a vacation. Do you envy that? Like, you can envy David Goggins, but do you envy all the shit that he went through? Like running on broken bones and suffering, going through seal training three times? Like, do you envy that? No.

So like you can't envy just the good things about a person. That's completely unrealistic because most good things that happen in people's lives come at a great sacrifice or cost that you're not seen. And so unless you envy that sacrifice or cost, then you don't actually envy the person. You're just you're just fantasizing. Congratulations, Mark. Your articles have helped me a lot. My question is, how do I fight my own insecurities? To which my answer is you don't fight them.

you embrace them, you own them, you befriend them. The truth is, is if you fight your insecurities, you're going to make them bigger and more powerful and they're going to have more control over you. If you embrace them, if you own them, you diminish them. I like to just laugh about them and just be very open about them. Like think about it this way. If you don't let your insecurities stop you, then what can stop you? Since you've launched it, what has been the most difficult aspect of building a YouTube channel and how does it compare to your early blogging days?

This is a great question. Little inside baseball here. So for those of you who don't know, before I wrote books, before I did anything you've known me for, I was a blogger. I started blogging in 2008, grew a big audience there, got my first book deal in 2015. That was subtle art not giving a fuck, and then the rest is history. So YouTube is very different from blogging in a few different ways. The hardest part about podcast and video is that it requires a team to do it.

A blog you can kind of do by yourself. Maybe you need a guy to help you with the website. Maybe you hire somebody to help you do research. But more or less, it's a one-man band type thing. To do anything video related, you need, like, minimum two or three people. So that introduces its own complexities and difficulties. Turn around is much longer. So when you're writing, I can have an idea on Monday.

write it on Tuesday and post it on Wednesday. And I know if it was a good idea or not by like Thursday. Whereas with a video, it's like from idea to recording is often multiple weeks. From recording to editing to posting is like another few weeks. And then once you post it, sometimes you don't know if it did well or not until like a month or two later. So the turnaround time on ideas is much longer, and the amount of investment and time into each individual idea is much longer as well.

So the consequence of that is that in video and podcasts, you really have to wait and sift for the really, really good ideas or what you think are the really, really good ideas. You have to be much more stringent about what you can pursue. And sometimes that's stressful because it's, it's. It's like, okay, you get only one or two shots on goal each month, and it's a shitload of work to take each of those shots. So you have to really, really, really believe that they're going to be good videos and good concepts. Whereas with blogs, it's kind of like, you know, I can be in the shower and have a random

thought and get out of the shower and go write it. And it's lower stakes, I guess, is what I'm trying to say. What advice would you give to aspiring writers or content creators who want to make a meaningful impact in their respective fields? Number one, differentiate yourself, especially these days, like with social media and all the algorithms and everything, there is an overabundance of content. And so much of that content is just same, same, same, same, same. So you need to think really, really hard.

What am I doing differently? What am I saying that's unique or important that nobody else is saying? How can I say it in a way that nobody else is saying it? And start from there. because that's what's going to really drive like 80% of your success in the long run. One of the questions I ask myself all the time is what needs to be said and nobody else is saying it. And then I try to go be the guy who says it. And then I think about that also in terms of how it's being said.

Who is it being said to? Like oftentimes in my industry, what I'll find is that there'll be a piece of advice that is really common in the business space, but nobody is saying it to, I don't know, college kids or middle-aged housewives, you know, so it's like, okay, if you can take something, a really good piece of advice that's being said to these people over here and then translate it and say it to those people over there, you're doing a really good service. You're helping spread the love. Do you own that chicken suit or do you just rent it? I own not one, but two chicken suits. Is social media addiction necessarily a bad thing?

My God, you guys are so smart. I love this question. Just because not necessarily because I think it's not a bad thing, but just because I think this is the sort of question we should be asking. First of all, I'm going to nitpick with a word. So the clinical definition of addiction is there's two qualifiers for an addiction. One is it's a compulsive behavior. And then two is it harms other areas of your life in a way that you feel powerless to prevent. Like, this is the funny thing is like you can technically have like a guy who drinks a six-pack

up here every single day. But if it doesn't affect the other areas of his life, you wouldn't necessarily diagnose him as an addict. So when you use the word addiction, by definition an addiction is something that is, it is harming the person's life. So I would change this too. Is social media binging necessarily a bad? thing. That's a very, very interesting question. And I think it's something that doesn't get asked enough, especially when you consider what the alternatives are. Is binging social media

worse or better than binging television? Is binging social media worse or better than binging video games or pornography or gambling? I don't know. I have not deep dive. Oh, my God, this is going to kill me. I have not dove and deep. I've not dove and deep into the research on all of these formats. But here's my understanding is that the data on people who watch tons of TV back in like the 90s, it's awful. It's really bad. The data on people who play tons of video games kind of mixed.

There are a small percentage of people who are. are probably video game addicts, but outside of that small percentage of people, it's actually not that bad. And in fact, there are some arguments that video games can be beneficial for people. Social media, it seems to really depend on the demographic. So when you go young, say under 16, it seems very clear that social media is a bad thing. Like, it probably shouldn't be available to kids. that seems to be pretty conclusive at this point.

It also seems to be worse for young girls and women than boys for variety of reasons. It also seems to be bad. Like if you are a person who is particularly predisposed to anxiety or depression, also probably not great. But if you are a full grown adult, you are in good mental health, the data is not bad at all. Which is weird. Like, we're not used to that. Usually it's like with forms of media, it's either like it's all good or all bad. Social media, it really depends on who's using it.

And I think the reason is is because it's social. It's like so much of it is driven by how you choose to use it. And so if you are a very young and immature person, you're probably going to end up using it in ways that are kind of harmful for your brain development. if you are a person who's very depressed or predisposed to depression, good chance you end up using it in a way that's not helpful for you. So I think ultimately the verdict around social media is a very mixed thing. But Jonathan Haidt's got this big book out right now and he's making the big argument that we should not let kids on before age 16 and that we should get phones out of schools. And both of those things seem completely common sense and very rational to me. My question is, how do you keep yourself consistent to push yourself to reach your goals?

And what opinions or guidelines do you use to evaluate your goals and make sure that they are in track with the life you want to live? It's a great question. We did a podcast about this around New Year's, and I think we're going to do a follow-up one. But I think most longtime listeners and readers know that I think goals are important, but I also think they're kind of overrated. Most goals that you set are kind of arbitrary. I can be like, I want to bench press 200 pounds this year. great. Is there some magical meaning behind 200 pounds? No, there's not. It's just a number that I made up. And so if I get to 195, does that mean I, like, I failed? Well, no, I got much stronger. So it's like the value and the goal is just, it's in the direction that it gives you. So I, for that reason, I think the most important thing when it comes to setting goals is making sure it aligns with your values and make sure it aligns with, the priorities in your life.

You know, at the beginning of the year, I set a goal to run a marathon, and I've been very open and transparent that I, after about two months of training, I gave up that goal. The primary reason I gave up that goal was simply that, A, it's a lot of fucking time. Like, running 25, 30 miles a week is insanely time-consuming, not just in the running, but in the recovery, in the prep, eating, hydration, all that stuff. and the energy levels that I was having during the training, like I'm in a growth mode in my business. I'm working pretty crazy hours at the moment.

I realized I'm like, this fitness goal doesn't align with the other values and priorities in my life, which is that I need to have plenty of energy to give to my business, trying to grow my team. I need to be able to like wake up and get out of bed easily, have a ton of energy. I need to like, if I need to stay late one day, I need to be able to stay late one day and not worry about like, oh, God, I'm going to miss my eight-mile run.

So yeah, it's just not a good time in my life for that goal. So I gave it up, which I think that is ultimately like what gets missed, is that goals should serve you, not the other way around. Next question. Is there an extreme side to everything? For example, in spirituality. Yes, everything can be taken to an extreme. I personally believe everything becomes toxic when taken to an extreme. spirituality is no exception.

If you look at religious cults, crazy fringe, new age movements, you see this all the time. Extremism within spirituality is just as corrupting and toxic as extremism anywhere else. Aristotle believed that happiness was at the balance between all extremes and all things, which is a really interesting concept. I personally prefer the way Oscar Wilde put it, which is he said, moderation and everything including moderation. How were you in high school in terms of academics? Oh boy. And what were your thoughts about your future goals in your freshman year of college? Okay, so here's a brief history of Mark Manson's academic achievements and aspirations. I was a very mediocre student in school.

I did not get great grades, not because I wasn't smart, but mainly just because I didn't try. I didn't really see the point in trying very hard. I was that kid who slept through class, Didn't do his homework and still like managed to scrape by with like a B minus or C plus just purely off of brains My freshman year of college I was actually in music school so I wanted to be a professional musician There I actually tried very hard, but music is such a competitive industry. It was very clear after a year it was very clear that like okay Out of my entire class of musicians Maybe three or four of us are gonna have a career in this industry and the real rest of us are going to be teaching band practice back at high school. So I was good. I would even say

I was like better than the average music student, but I realized I wasn't excellent. So I should probably gotten out. I transferred to a normal university, started studying normal things. And there I actually, I took it seriously because once I was able to choose the classes that I was actually interested in and pursue a lot of the ideas and subject matters that I cared about, then I became a very good student. So I actually, I graduated a magnum cum laude at Boston University. I had really good grades. I fucking love school. I didn't want to leave. I could have, fuck, I could have stayed in college until it's 35 if they let me. I don't know what the point of this question is. So there you go. Well, I guess maybe the person asked about my future goals. I think the important point here is that

I didn't really know what I wanted to be until I was like 27 or 28. So I graduated from school. I thought I was going to go into finance. I went in the finance. I hated it. Got out of finance. I tried to start a bunch of e-commerce businesses. Failed at those.

Hated that. Started blogging the market, the e-commerce businesses. Started writing dating advice for people. Started selling courses and consulting around dating advice. Didn't really like dating advice, but it was the only thing that I'd been successful at up to that point. So I kept doing it. And then it wasn't until like four years in that I was like, you know what, I think I can pivot this into more just general broad life advice. And I could start writing about stuff that I really care about. And I bet if I really put 100%

of my effort into writing really well, I could probably make it a career. And yeah, I was like 27, 28 when I did that. So if you're one of the many, many, many young people who's like 22 and failing and don't know what you want to do with your life and think your life's over, it's not. Every night's sleep is like a brain reset to me. No matter how ambitious I got the night before or how much planning I've done, I wake up not feeling it. My question is, what's your advice on this repetitive condition? I can't stick to what I said I was going to do and my self-esteem would suffer because of that. First thought, you're probably sleeping very poorly. And my God, if you're one of these people who's like trying to wake up at 4.30 and be like Jocko Willink

and like go to the gym for three hours and stare at the sun, dude, just fucking stop. Just be a normal person. This comes back to the morning routine question. The best morning routine is having shit you're excited to work on. That's it. If you have that, you don't need a morning routine. I'm also getting a morning routine. I'm also getting a little bit of a sense here. What happens to a lot of people is that maybe you're focusing on what you think you should focus on rather than what you actually want to focus on. So what I see happen a lot is that people get a little bit obsessed with optimization and they're like, oh my God, for my life to be awesome, I got to do all these things. I got to wake up. I got to drink

a liter of water. I got to be up before the sun. I got to do my yoga poses. I got to say thank you to the cloud goddess. I got to go stare at light and be like Huberman and drink green shit. And you don't actually care about any of that. If you don't care about any of that, it's never going to be fun. You're never going to want to get out of bed.

So stop approaching discipline as like this punishment towards yourself and get aligned with something you're excited about that find the thing that you're going to wake up in the morning. You can't wait to get out of fucking bed for. And then once you found that, throw a few healthy habits on top of it. What's some bad life advice that you followed for a long period of time? Also, what's your favorite Iron Maiden song?

Oh my God, that's a great question. And then I'll get to the bad life advice. Favorite Iron Maiden? I mean, it's hard to not say Number of the Bees. That whole album is like flawless. But I also just feel like that's the predictable answer. I'm going to go with Can I Play With Madness? That's like fucking 80s arena rock.

Sometimes that comes on when I'm running and I'm just like, fuck yeah. I feel like I've got like a mullet. It's awesome. So I definitely, when I was younger, I definitely bought into this belief of being completely attachment-free, minimalist, optimizing my life for freedom in every shape or form. So I had as few possessions as possible. I was nomadic. I had no regular home.

I lived in all these different countries. trees, all my businesses were online. It was like everything was just completely unattached all the time. And don't get me wrong, it was a lot of fun. But what I learned through that experience is that commitments actually are the things that make life meaningful. Like it's, it's the fact that you give up alternatives that makes the thing meaningful. And if you're just optimizing your life for always having as many alternatives as possible, you gain. optionality and you gain excitement and fun and a lot of dopamine, but you lose a deeper sense of meaning and you lose that joy that comes from investing in something or someone for a long

period of time and the trust and the comfort that comes with it. So I've actually come to kind of the counterintuitive conclusion that we actually need to be weighted down by things to a certain extent. It's good for us. Congratulations. Your books, articles, and podcasts have helped me a lot. My question is, how do you stay humble while being ambitious? A lot of times it happens that I get overwhelmed and behave like I know everything and end up fooling and embarrassing myself. Oh, you too, huh? Okay. While at other times, I become too self-conscious to make any decision. How do I fix this? Well, first of all, let me start off by saying, congratulations. You are human. And if you ever figure out how to fix this, let me know. Because it's a fucking story of my life.

Look, to me, the root of this question is humble while ambitious. I think a lot of people assume that to be ambitious, you have to be self-aggrandizing. You have to kind of like puff out your chest a little bit and pretend like your shit doesn't stink. I don't think that's true. I actually think probably like the healthiest and most realistic form of ambition is being ambitious about things you know are going to be hard and difficult. Right. So it's like, I know to achieve this project, I'm going to have to eat shit 10 times a week for the next 100 weeks. Right.

Like, that's just part of it. Like, if I start another book, I know going into it, this is going to be painful. This is going to fucking hurt. It's going to be really hard. There's going to be entire months where I question my life and what I'm doing. That's just part of it. That's what you're signing up for. So that's how I approach it.

It's just like understanding the shit sandwich that you just ordered on the menu and not complaining while you eat it. Am I missing out on important things if I'm not on social media? I'm in my 20s and I don't feel like it's made for me, but somewhere my heart tells me that it's an excuse to not talk to people or take efforts to maintain friendships. I have friends, but constantly keeping up with their lives on social media is very tiresome. I feel like it's too late to start. Will this affect my networking opportunities and job in the future? Maybe.

It totally might. I think if you're going to make the decision to stay off social media, which I don't necessarily think is a bad decision, it's probably the right decision for a lot of people. I think you just have to go into it with a real understanding of the tradeoff, right? The tradeoff is, if you're not on social media, you're going to be out of the loop on certain things. There's going to be certain current events, trends, conversations, things your friends are doing that you're just not going to be aware of.

And you need to be okay with that. On the other hand, you're also going to remain more tethered to reality. You're probably going to be a little bit more emotionally stable. You're going to have a lot more free time to do productive things. So it's a tradeoff. And it sounds like you've tried it and not liked it. And instead of trying to pick the thing that's going to make you the happiest, try to pick the thing that's going to suck the least.

Is being on social media less sucky than not being on it? it or is not being on it less sucky than being on it. Choose your suck, in other words. Hi, Mark. I'm a 24-year-old music producer from South Africa, not yet recognized beside the fact that I've been doing this for a decade. Is it safe for me to keep going or should I explore other paths? This is a really interesting question. So this also hits a little bit close to home as somebody who's an aspiring musician myself. I will say this. Music is, as an industry, music is brutal. and I went to music school. I was more talented, I think, than maybe the average person at music school, but I was not

in the top tier. And the brutal thing about music is that really only like the top 0.001% of the people make it as a career. And so you can be in the top 1%, you can be in the top 0.1%. And you can be so good that you're better than almost every other person. and you ever meet in your life, but you're still not good enough to make it. And I actually saw this with a lot of people

that I went to school with guys who are much more talented than I was. And I almost feel like it was worse for them because they were so good that it was easier for them to feel like they were closer than they were. Like I wasn't good enough to get caught in that trap. I was just bad enough that I was like, okay, I'm probably not going to be one of these people that makes it. Whereas there were a bunch of guys I went to school with that were so fucking good, but they still didn't quite crack that like one in a million. They were like one in 10,000 talent.

And because they were one in 10,000 talent, they kept going and they kept going and they kept going thinking that it was just around the corner. But because they weren't a one in a million, they never broke through. So it's almost like being in that that super insanely high level, but not top level, that like second level is almost more dangerous in music because you can kind of convince yourself that it's just one more year away, one more tour away, one more album away. All that said, you're 24. So you're still young. I will say this too. Your peers probably don't have much of an advantage over you. They probably haven't started much of careers themselves, but that's going to change soon.

I would guess you probably have two, three, four years left before not having started a normal career is going to start disadvantaging you. So I personally, I would set a deadline for yourself. You hear this a lot with people who like aspiring actors and musicians. They like set a date. They're like, I've got until end of the year, 2026 or whatever. And if I'm making a full-time living, great.

And if I'm not, I'm putting it down and going and getting a job. What is the best practical way for us to stop comparing ourselves to others? There's not. You're not going to stop comparing yourself to others. Really, the challenge is making sure that you're comparing yourself to others for good reasons and you're comparing yourself to good people. We're humans, we're mammals, we're monkeys. Like, social comparison is very much ingrained into our minds, into our brains, and you're

never going to train that out of yourself. Actually, no, that's a lie. So there is potentially one type of person who doesn't compare themselves to others, and that's like a sociopath. So you don't want to be that. You do want to compare yourself to others because you want to be a better person. You want to do good things and you want to be inspired by people who are very inspiring and do great things in the world. That is a form of social comparison.

When you look at somebody that is a hero to you and are inspired by that person, that's a form of social comparison. So the trick is to not compare yourself to dumb people or compare yourself for dumb reasons. Big question. Should you stay with someone if your values are different? And is it true if I'm questioning if I love them that I don't? It depends on the values. Some values you don't have to align on, right? Like my wife and I, we enjoy very different things.

And it's, that's totally fine. You can have different beliefs about things. That's totally fine. You can want to go on different vacations. You can have different values around how clean the kitchen should be. Like most value differences can be negotiated or compromised in some way. So some values, you really can't compromise on a whole lot. And if you do compromise on them, there's not much wiggle room.

And in my opinion, those values really come down to how you see your future and how you see your lives. So values around managing money, around life aspirations, oftentimes around religion. If one person's very religious and the other's not, that is often just insurmountable. Basically, it's like if you take both people and you ask them, what is their ideal life 10, 20 years from now, and their answers aren't in the same ballpark, you're going to have a bad time. It's going to be really, really difficult to deal with that over the long run. So that's the values question. If I'm questioning if I love them, then does that mean I don't?

My gut is, yeah, then you don't. Best case scenario, you love them, but the relationship's not good for you and it's not making you happy because it's like even in a good relationship you can have the worst fight but you never question your love for each other. If the love is coming in the question in the first place, then that's a sign that something might be broken. Congrats on your achievement, Mark. Can you show how to get over your ex? It seems this question has not been brought up. Oh, it's been brought up all right. I just haven't answered it in a long time. So here are kind of the five bullet points of getting over an X. And I think these are roughly in order. So number one, if you are unable to talk to them without getting like worked up emotionally in some shape or form,

don't talk to them. Number two, invest in yourself. What that means is is improve yourself, right? So take all this hurt, all this anger, all this confusion, channel that into a fucking gym membership, go lift some heavy weights, go run on a treadmill, go take that cooking class you've talked about taking for three years and never took. Fix up that bedroom in your house that you've been neglecting for for 10 years. Do whatever. All like all of those things that you've always said that you were going to do for yourself, but you never got around the doing. Now's the time to do them. Number three is explore hobbies, try new things, especially hobbies if you lost touch, like if you were really into basketball before you got into this relationship, go back and play basketball

again. Find the activities that make you feel like yourself. Number four, reconnect with old friends and family and definitely make it a priority to spend more time with friends and family. People who love you, who care about you, who know you, who are going to have your best interest. It's just good emotional sustenance in this time. And then finally, number five, don't date until you are genuinely excited to date. That's kind of self-explanatory. A lot of people feel pressure on themselves. They put pressure on themselves to start dating again. And it's like, dude, just chill. What are your thoughts about no-fap pornography and lust?

So for those of you who don't know, no-fap is, it's a, I guess, like a community or a movement of men who abstain from masturbation for various reasons. I guess women, too. I think there's some women in that community. It's mostly men, though. Let's be honest.

I personally think that there are some practical benefits to no-fap. If anything, it just increases energy. It makes you more sexually interested in people at you date. I experimented with this when I was single before I met my wife. And I personally noticed that it made me, it made my, like, the things that I was attracted to and women became much more realistic. So I found like when I stopped porn and I stopped jerking off, I would find all these like little idiosyncrasies and nuances in the women I met like super, super hot. And that was really

cool. It was like, suddenly I'm not like, looking for like a Barbie doll everywhere I went. And and I'm actually like finding, I'm finding the beauty in each individual person. I got in touch with, I got in touch with my passion for all the dudes listening to this like, oh, fuck, I got to get back on the porn. I don't want to sound like that. But seriously, I felt like, Like, I had a healthier relationship with my sexuality and with the women I was dated when I experimented with it. That said, I do think sometimes the benefits get oversold a little bit. I think the guys who tend to benefit drastically from it tend to be guys who are addicted

to porn. And so my experience is that if you're not super addicted to porn, the benefits are nice and marginal. If you're addicted to porn, then they're probably going to be drastic. Next question. you find Vitol Paleski? I didn't know people in the U.S. knew about him. They don't. Most people don't. So for those of you listening, Vitol Paleski is the most badass World War II hero. Like, I don't even know how to explain how much of a badass this guy was. He is the only person

ever known the volunteer to go into Auschwitz. So first of all, he was a, he was an officer in the Polish army. He started acting as a spy against the Nazis. And part of his, espionage, he volunteered to go to Auschwitz. And then once he was in Auschwitz, he built a spy network inside Auschwitz, was the first person to relay information of the Holocaust as it was occurring out of Auschwitz to the alliance. The alliance got his intel, Reddit, said, there's no way that's true. He's exaggerating. Finally, after like two years of him trying to alert the world to the Holocaust and nobody believing him, he decided, well, shit, I guess I should escape. He He's one of, I think, like 35 people to ever escape a concentration camp.

He escaped. And then once outside, then he went and told everybody, hey, dude, they're fucking killing millions of people here. Then they finally started believing him. Just unbelievable story. I wrote about him in the first chapter of Everything is Fuck, the book about hope. And just, yeah, not enough people know about him. How do you balance having fewer opinions and working on your own shit with not being a bystander

and speaking up when people are treated unfairly or unjustly, are there any rules of thumb here? So in this day and age, I would just be extremely careful on defining what unjust or unfair is. Because my observation is that the definition of both of those terms has expanded drastically and can get manipulated very easily through social media and the news cycles. And so what genuinely feels very unjust or unfair in the moment, often what happens is two or three years later, you look back and you realize that it was distorted, that there was like a distorted moment and you got swept up in it. So as a personal rule for myself, I have moved the bar for what I deem unjust or unfair

to an extremely high mark. And that way, when something does cross that mark, there's no ambiguity for me. There's no hesitation. It's like, this is a bad thing. I need to say something about it. But it's just, as somebody whose whole life and career has been online for 15 plus years now, I've seen this game play out many, many, many times. And I've embarrassed myself many, many times over the years by thinking I was taking

a stand for like, oh, this is so wrong. and then like three years later, realizing, you know, once all the information comes out and once greater context is discovered, feeling like an idiot. So I would also be careful because there's a tendency these days with all the group think online and all the outrage porn that happens online to overreact. So even if something is objectively unjust or unfair, it's extremely easy to overreact to it. So I would also be careful there. Thanks for everything you do. I'm just wondering, what fuels your soul and keeps you going?

Caffeine and blowjobs in that order. It's honestly, it's the only way I can get out of bed in the morning. So with that, everybody, we're going to have to turn out. I'm not even halfway through the questions. And these are only, these are just the questions that we pulled from the over a thousand that we're asked. So thank you, everybody who submitted questions. We'll do more of these when we hit more milestones. Be sure to subscribe to the show, follow the show, leave a real.

review for the show. It helps us out immensely. I'm having a blast. This podcast is way overdue. It's something that I've talked about or people have talked to me about creating for years now. And now that I have it, I'm like, fuck, why did I wait so long? So we've got a lot of exciting stuff planned over the next six months. We've got a brand new studio, which is this is the first time you're seeing it. We're going to have more amazing guests. We're probably going to move to two episodes per week. We get more Drew. We've got to be a more Drew. We've got to We've got a lot of fun stuff coming up. So thank you for listening.

Thank you for watching. Thank you for subscribing. And I will see you next week. The Madamy Holmes Bike for Brain Health supporting Baycrest returns on May 31st for its fifth anniversary with a new start and finish at the Aga Khan Museum. Join thousands of cyclists as we take over the DVP and Gardner Expressway in support of dementia research and brain health.

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