Quotes By Author: Mark Manson

“If someone is better than you at something, it is likely that they have failed at it more times than you have.”

“Many people measure their self-worth based on how much money they make… once one is able to provide for basic physical needs (food shelter, and so on), the correlation between happiness and worldly success quickly approaches zero.”

“Improvement at anything is based on a thousand of tiny failures, …and the magnitude of your success is based on how many times you’ve failed at something.”

“Wanting positive experience is a negative experience; accepting negative experience is apositive experience.”

“Many people measure their self-worth based on how much money they make… once one is able to provide for basic physical needs (food shelter, and so on), the correlation between happiness and worldly success quickly approaches zero. …The other issue with overvaluing material success is the danger of prioritizing it over other values, such as honesty, nonviolence, and compassion.”

“Pleasure is a false god. Research shows that people who focus their energy on superficial pleasures end up more anxious, more emotionally unstable, and more depressed. Pleasure is the most superficial form of life satisfaction and therefore the easiest to obtain and the easiest to lose. But pleasure, while necessary in life (in certain doses), isn’t, by itself, sufficient. Pleasure is not the cause of happiness; rather, it is the effect.”

“The ticket to emotional health, like that to physical health, comes from eating your veggies – that is, accepting the bland and mundane truths of life: truths such as “Your actions actually don’t matter that much in the grand scheme of things” and “The vast majority of your life will be boring and not noteworthy, and that’s okay.” This vegetable course will taste bad at first. Very bad. You will avoid accepting it. But once ingested, your body will wake up feeling more potent and more alive.”

“What if that failure wasn’t really a failure? What if you’ve been looking at it the wrong way?”

“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.”

“What pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for?” Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.”

“I wanted the reward and not the struggle. I wanted the result and not the process. I was in love with not the fight but only the victory. And life doesn’t work that way. Who you are is defined by what you’re willing to struggle for.”

“Once you become comfortable with all the shit that life throws at you (and it will throw a lot of shit, trust me), you become invincible in a sort of low-level spiritual way. After all, the only way to overcome pain is to first learn how to bear it.”

“And this pain, as much as we hate it, is useful. Pain is what teaches us what to pay attention to when we’re young or careless. It helps show us what’s good for us versus what’s bad for us. It helps us understand and adhere to our own limitations.”

“Everything comes with an inherent sacrifice – whatever makes us feel good will also inevitably make us feel bad. What we gain is also what we lose. What creates our positive experiences will define our negative experiences.”

“Our culture today confuses great attention and great success, assuming them to be the same thing. But they are not. You are great. Already. Whether you realize it or not. Whether anybody else realizes it or not.”