A Counterintuitive Approach To Living A Good Life

Synopsis:

In this generation-defining self-help guide, a superstar blogger shows us that the key to being stronger, happier people is to handle adversity better and stop trying to be “positive” all the time.
Manson makes the argument that human beings are flawed and limited. As he writes, “not everybody can be extraordinary – there are winners and losers in society, and some of it is not fair or your fault.” Manson advises us to get know our limitations and accept them – this, he says, is the real source of empowerment. Once we embrace our fears, faults, and uncertainties – once we stop running from and avoiding, and start confronting, painful truths – we can begin to find the courage and confidence we desperately seek.
“In life, we have a limited amount of fucks to give. so you must choose your fucks wisely.” Manson brings a much needed grab-you-by-the-shoulders-and-look-you-in-the-eyes moment of real-talk, filled with entertaining stories and profane, ruthless humor. This manifesto is a refreshing slap in the face for all of us, so that we can start to lead more contented, grounded lives.

About The Author:

Mark Manson is a blogger, online businessman, author, philosopher (maybe that’s because he read too many philosophical books). He was from Austin, Texas and now he lives in New York city. He traveled like 60 countries and explored many cultures. He read many books of philosophy, psychology, self help (mostly non-fiction I guess). He wrote three books – The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life, Models: Attract Women Through Honesty, Everything is Fucked: A Book About Hope. To know more about him click here (Do visit his blog because it’s so cool and interesting).

My Review:

Firstly, the author is very handsome. OK! now I’ll stop there 😝. Let’s talk about the things that I have decided to add to my priority list (Do I really have a list?🤔). Now you may think like this, “why the hell she wants to talk about her choices instead of how was the book!” Don’t panic, I am not bringing my dramas into my blog. Or not yet! Here, what I mean to say is, this book made me think of the choices that I have made, the choices that I have to make and the things which are important to me and which are not. I used to have an assumption that ‘always be positive then everything around you will appear positively.’ But I was completely wrong about it. Mark emphasises an important point regarding positiveness and happiness. These two are not always be with us and if they do then definitely we are internally suffering a lot which we are hiding it with a smile on our face (we are a pro in that). Here, the point is, it’s ok to be negative sometimes. If any bad or abnormal thing happened, IT’S OK! because we can’t control everything that happen to us but the only thing we have to look into is how we take this negativity and deal with it. For example, when you accept the negativity and face your problems and find a conclusion for that, then that happiness gives us more pleasure than the short term happiness you get from ignoring that situation. Now it’s in our hands to decide what to do.

Now let’s talk about the FEEDBACK LOOP. We don’t even know that whatever our brain thinks is a feedback and it plays with us by creating an infinite loop of feedbacks. Did you ever get pissed off about something and became angry and felt anger in you for being angry and you were anger at yourself for getting angry about being angry? I am not talking bullshit. It’s the real thing happening in our brains. The only thing is we didn’t realize that till now (at least I) and that’s what Mark brought into light for us.

Why sometimes we worry about everything? The simple answer is we have more time or we can say, we make time for it and it’s because we are not so sure about our priorities. My father used to say “Idle mind is devil’s den.” When I was a young girl and whenever I heard that from him, I immediately started doing something though I don’t know why I was doing that. Here, in order to keep us busy, it doesn’t mean we can worry about anything. There are only certain things in life that needs our attention. Our duty is to identify what really matters to us.

We often fear about facing pain and suffering. But we never try to confront them and even if we try, we immediately back off if something goes wrong or we assume something bad may happen. Just remember, if you want something in life then you have to choose which pain you have to sustain to have what you want in life. There is a favorite line of mine from this book:

Suffering through your fears and anxieties is what allows you to build courage and perseverance

We may think “Do we really need to feel the pain and suffering when we are trying to lead our life happily?” If you want to taste the real happiness, then the answer is definitely YES. Listen, happiness, pleasantness are not products, they’re by-products which we can feel when we are truly focusing on our real shit that makes us suffer. This gave me a clarity that a true happiness can’t be find everywhere.

Mark said a thing which hits everyone very hard. YOU’RE NOT SPECIAL. we should shout it out loud that we are not at all a special person. We’re ordinary or sometimes sucks too. One thing is real, this world only shows the success of a person and ignores the struggle he faced to reach that point. I observed this in many schools that teachers always say to their kids that they’re special and unique. But I guess it should be stopped because we are making these innocent kids (who learned walking even when they fell many times) in to a person who either become like one who always worry about they are not special or become a narcissist and can’t spend a second without imagining themselves as a rockstar (sometimes this can be stopped by their parents influence too). If this continues from the root level, then definitely when they grow up they end up setting some wrong values to measure themselves.

Thank god I read this book before getting into any relationships. Mark gave very good references for healthy, unhealthy/toxic relationships. Trust and Commitment are two important things in a relationship. One can test whether they are having a healthy relationship or not by asking themselves “Whether they are transparent in their relationship or not?” After all being loyal to our partner will itself creates trust in between us. We have to struggle for what we want in life, it can be either a partner or a career. When we are not clear about what we want, then instead of sitting idly we have to DO SOMETHING (not anything) whatever it maybe either going out and meeting new people and understanding them or trying a new course/ learning a new thing. Even if we fail in that, we learn something from that or gain a new experience that’s it.

Look, it’s ok to be wrong, it’s ok to allow negativity, it’s ok to suffer the pain, but what we are responsible for is choosing the metrics that we are measuring ourselves with. I want to say that a single book can’t change the life of a person just like that. It needs lots of experiences, lessons, failures etc to know what we really want from life (even after all this struggle, if we can’t find the complete answer for that then that’s ok). My point is, these self-help books will show us our progress in our journey, they sometimes appreciates us and also sometimes makes us realize our missing point in our struggle.

I definitely recommend this book not only to millennials or generation X or Z but also to everyone.

Happy reading guys 🙂 and again sorry for the GIANT post 🙏