Mark Manson TELLS ALL: Money, Dating, & The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck

The good advice is boring ... This is true with personal development, it's true with social skills, true with diet, nutrition, everything—the stuff that works is boring. It's not the information that's hard; it's simply doing it; it's implementing consistently over a long period of time. That's the hard part.

The pickup industry, by like 2009/2010, I had really, really become burnt out on just the toxicity of it. I really felt that there were kind of two strains of dating/relationship advice for men: One was, basically, promoting narcissism selfishness, power dynamics. And sure, that stuff can get you laid a lot, but it's at the expense of preventing any sort of happy or joyous long-term relationship or intimacy with any female, ever.

Everybody in the publishing industry were like, 'Oh, you're like the new phenom debut author, overnight success. I'm like, overnight success. I've been fucking grinding on a blog 10 years. What do you mean overnight success?

I used to get asked all the time, 'How do I start a blog? How do I grow a blog? Make a living as a blogger?' My answer was always the same, which is write 100 blog posts, come ask me again.

The real '4-Hour Workweek' is work 16 hours a day so you can make money while you sleep.

The pickup line is just the excuse to kind of get you through your anxiety to give you the courage to actually go say something. It doesn't really matter what you're saying.

There's no form of therapy that is successful, like produces positive outcomes, more than 50% of the time.

I don't think Hollywood's gonna die, but I imagine it's going to be very similar to kind of what's happened with newspapers and Twitter ... The real intellectual debate and substance and the stuff that drives culture happens on Twitter and Substack.

Today, you can still make a living off a blog. It's just, you've got to have your niche figured out. You gotta, like, really be tuned into them. And you're probably never going to scale an audience past, like, low six figures.