#122 Mark Manson On How Your Concept Of Who You Are Is F*cking You Up

In the self-help and self-development world, there's so much focus on success—getting ahead in your career, starting a business, making more money, having better relationships—but nobody's actually standing back and defining what success is. Is our definition of success valuable or not?

If you're not improving yourself for the right reasons, you could be damaging yourself. The why behind everything you try to improve or everything that you're driven toward is more important than actually how far you get.

For me, success means creating a life and creating a world with better problems.

I think the things that we tend to be passionate about, we don't even realize we're passionate about them because they seem so normal and obvious to us.

For me, one of most powerful heuristics is to simply, instead of thinking about what benefits I want in my life, I try to think about what problems do I want my life.

...You don't actually know who you are ... The self's an illusion. It's an arbitrary construct that you've spun up over the course of your life ... It's just this idea ... It's a subjective idea, and it can be anything you want.

I think it's just a healthy habit to develop the desire to challenge yourself in every sense—physically, mentally emotionally.

A lot of times, the things were most grateful for are actually the things that were all fucked up about.

Our idea of what our self is is just another idea.