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impact, baby, everybody. Welcome to impact Theory. Today's guest is the New York Times bestselling author of The International. Smash Hit. The subtle art of not
giving a fuck his book, which many
consider to
Be the generation-defining
self-help books sold. Millions of copies was translated into 25 languages, and absolutely dominated the bestseller list for a staggering amount of time. It's also been at or near the top of Amazons most Red List continuously
since the chart began and it remains one of
the most downloaded audio books of all time on Audible. He's also written for or been cited by some of the most prestigious outlets on the planet including time. CNN, BBC News business.
This Insider
Yahoo news, The Huffington Post and many, many
more additionally. He's published hundreds of blog articles which are viewed by millions of people. Every
month making him, one of the most
visible and studied authors of our time.
So please help me in welcoming the founder and CEO of
infinity squared media, the author of the recent book. Everything is fucked a book about Hope Mark Manson
That's a, that's a nice intro. I should have. You do my
PR? I'd be happy to do that. The
stats are staggering.
So putting something like that. Together is pretty easy. Yeah, it's I'm sure that kind of thing really took you by
surprise
but what you've done with it in terms of really giving some self-help that is
very direct and just sort of says it like it is in a voice that I think people can
relate to.
Is is really amazing and I'm super excited to have you here. And thanks
go into some of these topics. Yeah, it's good to be here, especially the new book. Yep, I think
is lovely, everything is fucked. That's a nice title. Certainly catches your attention. The thing that I found most interesting is the talk about values and like, how much
values begin to inform your identity? And basically, your values are essentially who you are. Yes, take us into that.
What does it mean? And then how much
malleability is there in values? Sure.
So my focus and my work has always been value focused. I feel like in the self-help and self-development world, there's so much focus on success you know 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 like is our definition of success valuable or not and I think especially
Is you know, crazy internet world where were exposed to everything, deciding what we're choosing to Define, as success is a more important question than ever before. So that's kind of what got me started on the whole value question in general. And then when I started investigating it and doing a lot of research and writing about it, I started to discover that like basically you know, if you think of like how you define a person in general
As humans, we tend to Define people by their choices, by their actions. But then what motivates their actions, well often, it's how they feel and what what motivates, how they feel about certain things, and it's their perception of what's valuable and what's not. And so that's kind of how I drilled down to, to this idea, that essentially, what we are is just an aggregation of what we choose the value in this world. If I value money more than anything else, that will come to Define me through my
As my behaviors, what? I invest my time and attention into. If I value family that will Define who I am because everything else will flow from that.
Yeah, the things I find interesting about values as people often act as if they are empirical truth, like money is valuable or family is valuable. And they don't realize that it was a choice often handed to them. By the way they grew up their parents with their parents instilled in them. And so stepping back and recognizing that all of this is a choice that you
Unconsciously decide what you're going to value and I'd love to hear your thoughts on how the process works of deciding to Value something. So if somebody finds themselves in a place where they feel totally fucked up, they don't like who they are and they buy into this notion that okay. A lot of this is being driven by values. How do they actually change that?
Yeah, it's funny because I'm not a huge fan of a lot of like kind of the typical self-help tropes, but the answer to this question I think is kind of classic visualization but it's not the visualization that
Usually hear about. So what I talk about in the book is that you like, let's say, let's say I'm just really superficial and I value money more than anything. Like I've got like a fleet of yachts and it's all I care about, you know, and then something happens in my life and I realized that that's pretty superficial, I should like grow up a bit and, you know, value something else and it's not as simple as just the siding like we've all had that experience in our lives where we wish we cared about something that we don't or vice versa.
We wish we didn't care about something that we do, and you can't just stop. And so the process that I described in the book is that essentially, before you can commit to a new value, you kind of have to like try them on like like it's like going to a store and try it on a bunch of pairs of clothes and the way you try on a new value is you need to sit down and visualize and you can even write it out if you want. But it's like, let's say all I care about is my fleet of boats and and I want to try
On a new value, like charity or something. I have to sit down and start asking myself. What would it mean for my life? What would it mean for me as a person if I didn't value those boats anymore and that's a very hard question. It really, it messes us up, because we realize that a lot of our relationships would probably fall apart a lot of our business. Commitments would probably fall apart a lot of our understanding of ourselves would be shaken up, or
Questioned and it's a very difficult thing to ask. And so you know, most of the times when you see visualization taught in the self-help industry, it's like they take a guy who wants a fleet of boats and they say visualize a fleet of boats. Now, go get it. And it's like, no, no. What you need to do is take a guy who wants a fleet of boats and say, visualize not wanting a fleet of boats, what would that say about you? Who would you be? If that thing you always desired was not your desire anymore.
Yeah, that to me is really interesting and you went through a pretty cool moment like that where you said ultimately this all comes down to choices and for a long time in your life you just always assumed you were going to be a musician that was like where you were headed and then choosing to do the writing instead. And the thing that really interested me in that was you said there was a period of mourning. Yeah. Why is there a period of mourning? You know, what's going on? Is we reshape ourselves?
So my background is a little bit Buddhist and I subscribe to the
If of no self essentially, that that our conception of who we are, is just kind of this arbitrary. Imagine thing in our brain. And so I think of our relationship with ourselves as being as basically functioning the same way as like our relationship with another human being, so when something, when you lose a part of yourself, so I spent pretty much all my my early life wanting to be a musician. That was my ambition. It was my hobby, my passion. How I spent all my time.
And I went to music school and I just got the shit kicked out of me and I was like, oh, this is not going to work anymore, and the process of letting go of that value was was very much similar to like a breakup. Like it felt like losing a girlfriend or losing a friendship, like this thing that gave all this meaning and emotion to my life was now unavailable to me and whenever you you lose something like that, you go.
Through the same emotional process which is that a prop that process of grieving or morning because the same way, you know, a breakup leaves. You grieving this beautiful thing in your life that no longer exists. When you lose an important value are an important part of yourself. You also grieve this beautiful thing that defines your life and no longer defines it.
Yeah. That I think is it's such a critical thing to understand how your identity begins to get tied up in all of this.
And I think a lot of this hinges on what you talked about, right off the top, which is how we define success. Yeah. So, how do you help people in that so that they don't succumb to a trap? I'm, I know you're the example that you gave and in one of your articles, I thought was so hilarious. Which is the being driven, being ambitious, towards something without taking a moment, to reflect in the morality of what you've decided to value. And you said, take Hitler, who's one of the most driven people and it had this tremendous impact.
Um, but was a psychopath. Yeah, so walk us through. Like you go pretty into like how we can sort of reason our way to really having a base understanding of heard you talk about Contin, like, morality it like a really deep level. Yeah, so how do we begin to get to a base level of like? Okay. Now I'm going to stack my belief system. My values on top of this base.
Sure. Just a little background on the Hitler thing. For our
viewers. You think you need to
clarify
I'm Stan know, I've I've wanted for so long. I've wanted, I had this idea with a friend. We got drunk and went paintballing, and and I, as you do, yeah, we're most of my ideas come from and I was talking to him. I was like, you know, it'd be amazing if you did like a feat. Did like a Tim Ferriss style podcast with like a fake Hitler and you're like, so eight off what's your morning routine. You know, like how do you rally the troops? How do you inspire millions of
Would it would just be this beautiful satire of kind of, like, like, focusing on that point of, like, if so, if you're not improving yourself for the right reasons, you could be damaging yourself. You know, the why behind everything everything you try to improve, or everything that you're driven towards is more important than actually. You know, how far you get. So for me, it's I see a very direct connection between
Self-improvement and ethics. I think if you, if you dig deep enough into these questions of what growth means or what Improvement means, you, inevitably run into what is better period? What is better or worse? Period? What makes a better life? What makes Humanity better. And so it's my goal has always been. I never want to be that guy on stage who's like, this is what you should do this.
How you do it? Here's my 5. Step method, blah, blah, blah. You know, I want to be the guy who doesn't? I don't want to give answers. I want to give better questions. I want to help people sort through these questions in themselves because ultimately, the these questions around values are so personal. There's, there's no way for me to answer any individual without inserting my values onto them. And when you do that, you robbed them of the ability to choose what matters for themselves choose.
Their own meaning in their life. So for me, it's just, it's all about, just pointing people in the right direction, pointing out, you know, little hypocrisies or little like kind of paradoxes and and trying to steer them towards finding their own
answers. So give me some of those better questions and what should we be asking ourselves?
But, you know, the classic thing is always like, you know, write down a list of goals or whatever. I would go past that I'd say, you know, write down your goals. And then ask yourself, why do I want each of these goals? What would it mean in my life? If I accomplish these goals? Similarly, you know, a common exercises like write down things, you're grateful for.
Ask yourself. Why are you grateful for them? What would happen to your life if you didn't have them? I mean, that's the crazy thing. Is that a lot of, a lot of times, the things were most grateful for are actually the things that were all fucked up about, you know, it's like it's if you had asked me when I was, you know, in one or like I had a series of very dysfunctional relationships, I was happy as a pig in shit, in the middle. As you know, I would be like, oh my girlfriend is the
Most beautiful
thing and you know and it's like no dude like your I was a mess and so we it's not just about questioning you know, the bad things in our life, you know, like why did this painful thing happen? You need to question the good things as well. Like why, why does this feel good? Is it doesn't feel good for a good reason because there are a lot of things that feel good that are actually hurting you.
Yeah, that's one of the things that I really want to dive into is
so how do we begin to establish? What we think is good? What does it mean to be better? And you come to this from an ethical place and I know that you don't want to like direct people so much and they believe this or whatever. But what are some jumping off points like is it go read philosophy. You said that you approach life is a Buddhist like, yeah. How can people begin to build that framework for themselves? Because what I'm really trying to get to is, I feel like you have to have a base belief of some kind upon, which thing stack, but I don't think people,
Think about that? Yes. And even just pointing them in a direction of how to start begin defining that for themselves. I think would be super
helpful. Yeah. So for me, I found that I talked about Kant in the book, I was very inspired by kant's moral philosophy. Basically, he has his principal called the formula of humanity, which is essentially, it's so simple, but it kind of explains everything. He says that always act in such a way that you never merely treat people a person as a means.
Yes. But always as an end and what that means is, like don't use people, you know, like anything you do the whole point of what you do, what you do, like the end goal of what you do, should always be a person. Whether it's yourself or somebody else. So like if you're like, kind of misleading, somebody or just saying something to somebody just to get them to like, I don't know, give you some money or, you know, make them like you a little bit.
You know, under that principle like that's that is not growth. That is not success. Any basic stuff, like lying cheating, stealing like all of those are examples of using people as a means to some other end rather than treating the person, as an end of themselves. So I, when I came across that principle it just for me, it kind of blew me back on. Just how Universal and powerful and useful. It was because
And, you know, I spent a lot of time writing about dating and relationships and and I was coming from a place where I, you know, My Philosophy around relationships was always like, the thing that screws relationships up is treating people as a means, is being transactional in your relationships. And so, when I found that con stuff, I was like, damn this dude gets. It is very
interesting and if you had to and look, you've urged people not to take you to seriously. And so I asked this,
Question. Knowing that. But, like, if you had to define success in a sentence, sure. How would you define it?
Who
I for me, success means
Creating a life and creating a world with better problems. That's interesting.
That reminds me of a quote of yours. I'm going to paraphrase but if you want purpose in your life, the most important thing you need to do is answer. Honestly the following question. What is your favorite flavor of shit sandwich? Which I thought was absolutely phenomenal. That is the absolute right question. But what do you mean by that?
It's basically anything you pursue like our mind plays this little trick on us.
Which is when we want something our our brain only shows us the good side of it. It doesn't show the sacrifice, the sacrifice required for it and everything. Every experience you have in life, there is a shit sandwich part of it. You know there's there's everything has its Associated problems but our brain doesn't think about that when we're pursuing it. And so for me like 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 know, it's something as simple as like, you know, people might see this show and I'm like, damn, I wish I had a badass show like that on YouTube, you know, it's like they don't understand like there's a whole crew here there's Logistics. There's like waivers. You got to get like clear through lawyers and all sorts of crap and it's like those are the problems you chose, you know. Those are the problems that you wanted to have and that's why it's a
This will show it's not just because it's like, oh damn I'm gonna show a be awesome you know like it's easy to just want something.
So your whole concept around struggle, I think is really powerful. You talk really interesting lie about emotions in the book. You go into the Newton's emotional laws so that were really interesting. Why is it so important? Especially as it relates to willpower to understand your emotions to leverage them, but at the same time,
Time. When you talk about emotions, there's an inherent sense of like don't always trust your emotions. Sure. So untangle, this emotional not
emotions are messy for a lot of reasons, but one of the key things that I talked about, is I use, I use this analogy of a car. If your Consciousness is a car, you have two brains in it, you have a feeling brain and a thinking brain. And most people's assumption is that
Thinking brain is the responsible one driving and the feeling brain is like the bratty little kid in the passenger seat screaming and pointing at stuff out the window. And it's like it's the job of your thinking, brain to like, keep two hands on the wheel and be like, shut up, shut up, trying to drive here, you know, and it's as a culture. We look at anybody who fails to control their impulses or their emotions. As somebody as somebody who's just fundamentally failing,
And to drive their own car. We see it as a failure of willpower and discipline, but the truth is, if you dig into all the psychological literature, it's the feeling brain is actually driving the car and he's a little bit crazy. He's like, I compare him to like an angry boyfriend. Who refuses to stop for directions, like he just wants to go wherever he wants to go, and he's not going to listen anything. And the thinking brain is actually in the passenger seat like our conscious mind.
A passenger in our own behavior. Who is deluded himself into thinking that he's driving even though he's not. And what I talk about is that the power of the thinking brain is that we get to draw the map, the thinking brain, gets to decide what what the lay of the land is so even though we don't totally have control over,
What's pushing us forward, our actions, our emotions. All those things. We do have control over the meaning and the interpretation of those actions and emotions. And so what I talk about is that to develop a real sense of control in your life to feel that feel a sense of self discipline. It's not about beating your emotions in the into submission because that just causes greater neuroticism and compulsion. The trick is that you got to get the tube.
To talk to each other and it's hard because they speak different languages, you know. So it's instead of like just trying to get your feeling brain, the shut up. You need to ask your feeling great. Well, how does this make you feel? You know, it's like, oh, how does waking up at 5 a.m. and going to the gym, feel the feeling brains be like, oh, that feels awful, like, why would you ever do that? And then the thinking brain needs to be like, okay, okay, that's okay, you know, I hear you, but why does it feel bad? You know,
No, what about 6:00 a.m. if you and burns like? Well, that's not as bad, you know? And it would feel nice to work out I guess, you know. And so, you know, it becomes this like negotiation between the two sides of yourself. And and there are a lot of like, kind of mental tricks to coax to like kind of work with your emotions to leverage, your emotions, and get, get the feeling brain pointed in the direction you want it rather than just fighting it for your entire
life. What does that impact of this? Hope you guys are enjoying
Episode wanted to give a quick
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Think of willpower in terms of aligning with the things that are hard that you enjoy. And I think that your own example of I thought I wanted to be a musician, but writing was the thing that made me lose track of time. Like I feel like that does a great job of addressing
this. Yeah, I think
there are things in our lives, where we don't even, 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. So, for instance, to use to use the music. And the writing example, I remember when I was in a music school, I was practicing, I played guitar. So I was practicing like six hours a day. Just beating my head against the wall. Trying to learn all these different songs and stuff and I just I hated it.
Was a grind and it felt like a job. I was supposed to do. And I remember, actually, right before I quit, I there was a, there was a kid in the program who was like, you know, he was an All-Star, like he everybody knew he was going to make it, you know, and it's funny today, I think he has two or three Grammys. But so like I found him in the cafeteria and I sat down with them and I'm like, oh man, like I don't know. Like, how do you can you give me some advice, man? He's like, yeah, sure what's going on?
Like, how do you practice this much? Like, I'm practicing like 6 hours a day. You know, how much are you practicing? And he's like, yeah, six hours a day. I'm like, but yeah, that how do you like stay motivated? How do you like, what's your warm up? Like, you know, like how do you, how do you schedule your practice time? And he's just looking at me, like, I'm speaking Klingon. Like he's like, what are you talking about? Like, why? I just practice, like, I always practice. Like, whoa, it didn't even
For him and then I was like, okay I should probably quit, so Jump Ahead, like five six years I had started blogging and I would go to these like internet marketing conferences and stuff and people would start coming up to me and I'm like, oh man, I love your blog and like your articles are like 10, 20 pages long, you're posting like multiple each week and I'm like, yeah, thanks like, that's incredible. So,
You know what's your writing regimen? Like like how am I how do you get yourself motivated? You know it starts asking me all these questions and I'm like looking at him like what are you talking about? Like I just right, you know I just sit down and write you know I don't even have to think about it and
And it kind of like, rung, a bell in my head. I was like, wait a second, like, that's, that's, that's something that's like a, that's a signal that there's something special about this. Because for whatever reason, what seems to cause other people, a lot of stress and pain comes easily to me and what causes me a lot of stress and pain. You know came easily to to the guy who did make it through music school. And so I realized that it's not about
Like grit or willpower or just like wanting it enough. It's a lot of it too. It's just we're all masochists a little bit you know. Like we all there's some pain in the world that we all it gets us off a little bit and I found mine and and so yeah, I just you just, you just keep hitting that shit, like you just keep going and I think people when they're, when you're so focused on Pleasure and and pleasant
Words, you don't actually get to that question. You don't actually get to like, yeah. What's that pain that like, actually kind of gets me going, you know? And because we all have it and that's that's, that's the sweet spot when you can find it.
Yeah, that's really interesting. I love how much you sort of orbit around emotions and how people can really get in connection with what using my own language would be sort of the neurochemical reality of what you're doing. Yeah, walk us through the the three Newton's three laws of emotions.
On these to be really, really interesting. Speaking of gravitational, pull, I've
always found Newton's life super fascinating because not only was he like one of the smartest guys ever but when you read about his life like he was a total head case like had a very traumatic childhood suffered, a lot of abuse and just was very antisocial and emotionally dysfunctional is entire life. And so I thought it would be really cool to kind of use him and his life as an
Example, to demonstrate a lot of these topics that were talking about, you know, in terms of identity, growth self-discipline Etc. And so, I took his three laws of motion and I basic just created emotional analogs of those. So the first one was a, for every action, there's an equal and opposite, emotional reaction. And this is basically just the idea that every emotion, is simply a response to either pain or the absence of
So when you remove pain from Life, a positive emotion, emerges and reaction, and if you add pain and to life a negative emotion emerges, the second one, the second one. If I remember, right? Was our self-worth, equals the sum of our emotions over time. So you could even, you might even say, like identity equals our emotions over time. So,
Basically, let's say something traumatic happens in your childhood that that pain early on in your life, causes a lot of negative emotions. And one of the things that I talk about is that anytime we feel an emotion, it compels us to do what I call equalizing which is like if I'm angry at you, I'm going to continue to be angry at you until I either get you know retaliate or you apologize. Like
He needs to happen to make that anger go away. There needs to be some sort of like Equalization between us and if there is no Equalization that anger just kind of simmers it's there forever. And one of the reasons why childhood traumas are so debilitating for people is that essentially these extremely painful experiences occur to are feeling brains while our thinking brains are still undeveloped and don't know how to explain or
Create meaning around that pain. So let's say something really painful happen to me. Now I'd be like, oh well you know he meant well and you know, shit happens or whatever. But if I'm like a five-year-old, my explanation for it only gets as far as like I'm a bad. I'm a bad boy, I'm a bad person and the world hates me, you know, like that's and that will stick because it doesn't get equalized and I'll stick for the rest of my life. And the problem is is that we forget that, that painful thing happened. So
Just kind of go through life with this feeling of inferiority and pain that lingers that we can't really put an explanation to or explain away. And so the process of therapy is basically unraveling a lot of our experiences until we get back to that original experience and with our adult thinking brain, we can now put meaning to that pain. That is helpful to us essentially so that's the second law.
Oh, is that? Our identity is the sum of our emotions over time. And then, the third law is our identity will continue to be our identity until New Experience acts against us. So to use the music school example, I was a musician, I would introduce myself as a musician and then I got to second semester music school and and had my ass handed to me and suddenly I'm like, oh shit, I'm not a musician anymore, you know.
Now, I have to go around and it's like, I'm not a musician. I don't know what I am, but it required. There was some new contrary experience that was required to create that shift within me. And and this is why identity change by definition needs to be painful and uncomfortable. Because if it's not painful or uncomfortable nothing's changing nothing shifting there might be a perception of a change but ultimately the only way our values,
Change, is that life knocks us on her ass a little bit and causes us to question everything. We understand.
Yeah. The whole process of losing an identity morning that trying to find or create a new sense of self. I think is one very misunderstood. Yeah. And to really, really critical. You talk about, people breaking away and quote-unquote, finding themselves in a moment of
Isis. Walk us through that and I'd love to hear if that's what you were doing your so well traveled. Yeah,
60 plus countries, speak three
languages. Was that a part of that redefinition for you? Were you seeking experience? Like, how do you advise people, who are? They don't know. I don't know if I'm a writer. I don't know if I'm a musician and I don't know what should sandwich I enjoy like. Yeah, you know, how do you help people through that
process? I think there is an exploration phase.
Because it's if you have this identity you have this perception of who you are and then suddenly that's yanked away from you. There's kind of just this void there. And so I think there needs to be an exploration to find basically find your shit sandwich essentially. And and it's it takes time, it takes patience and I think there,
Probably the most helpful thing you can do is just be okay with not knowing,
let's talk about building resilience. You said something early that I found really interesting, which is that you have a relationship with
yourself the way
that you have with somebody else.
Yeah, just really fascinating. Tell
me about that. Like what do you mean by that? And and then like the whole notion of I forget the exact words you use but you
said I approach this like a Buddhist. The self is an illusion. I don't think you said that but it was like, it made me feel that way. Yes, yes yes I said it's
An arbitrary construct which yeah illusion. I think. So our relationship with ourselves, like essentially what self-esteem is or self-worth is basically let me back up for a second.
The feeling brain. So the thinking brain thinks in terms of like logic cause and effect, correlations things like that, the feeling brain thinks in terms of importance, it thinks in terms of values. So some things are very valuable and worthy of our being pursued. And other things are very varied, not valuable. And there you, they should be avoided.
And the feeling brain kind of designates, you know, almost a value score for everything, every experience, every potential experience that we can consider including ourselves. So our idea of what our self is is just another idea. The same way, you know, being living in New York is an idea. And I there is a certain value. I place on that and that that
DIA has logical connections to all sorts of things. That who I am is, Mark Manson is simply a constructed idea. In my mind. And as a constructed idea, my feeling brain has either positive or negative, valuations, and feelings for Mark Manson. When people have a low valuation of themselves, when they have, when they're feeling brain thinks that their identity is not valuable and have
Negative emotions about it. We call that low self-esteem and when are the idea of our self had are feeling brain has a high valuation of it and has positive feelings for it. We call that high self-esteem. And so a lot of like therapeutic work for many decades was kind of almost obsessed of like just trying to get people peoples, this relationship between you're feeling brain and your conception of your identity, to get it to get the needle to move from negative to positive.
Because there are all sorts of, you know, positive repercussions of that. But ultimately,
that your concept of yourself is built out of the narratives that we create out of our experience. So all of the experiences that I've had are all the experiences that you have, you know, your idea of Tom is just this vast collection of narratives that you've constructed around your own experiences. And it's layer on top of layer, on top of layer, on top of layer and you're feeling, brain has a certain
You know, valence for those experiences. And so if you want to change how you feel about yourself, you have start peeling back, those layers of narrative, and in start getting down into the deepest, earliest ones, because those are often the most impactful and influential.
Well, you can't leave us with just that. So, how do we begin peeling back those layers man? Like, I'm so with you on that. Yeah, and the way that people construct their sense of self and beliefs
and values and it's like there's just
crazy.
Rat's, Nest of unidentified unexplained beliefs feelings reactions long-held wounds that have never been dealt with from your childhood. I mean, it's but, but that act of peeling that stuff back, I think is also an act of rewriting. Yeah.
So it's like, I've
identified this narrative now. What narrative do I change it
to? Yeah. And so, going back to your
driving analogy, you've got this thinking brain, whose job is to, basically rewrite,
The map of a past experience. Yeah. How do you help people take control of that? Or do you have thoughts around how they can take control of that are there? Like I would say, I have a very strong thesis about whatever you rewrite. Like the guiding principle should not be a guiding principle of objective truth because I think people are atrocious at figuring out what is actually objectively true. Sure. So if you could, that would be amazing. But since you can't focus entirely on what's empowering. So using your language, what moves the needle?
Something positive. Yeah, do you have a guiding principle that you tell people to utilize when thinking about that rewriting process?
I think so everybody's a little bit different and this is how I see like therapy meditation journaling, like a lot of these therapeutic practices like
I see them. They're all different versions of what you just said is like peeling that layer back. Looking at it being like huh maybe that's not true. What what if this idea was true instead, like trying on new narratives and stories that Define ourselves? So everybody, you know, everybody kind of has their own
You know, practice that will resonate with them more but it's in terms of like how to actually go about it. I think the first step is to just decide that you don't actually know who you are against the Buddhist thing. It's like the selfs an illusion. It's an arbitrary construct that you've spun up over the course of your life. And so, it's just this thing. It's just this idea, it's a subjective, it's a subjective idea and it can be
Anything you want. Now you don't that doesn't mean you necessarily like want to become delusional and decide that you're Spider-Man and and you're going to be president of Ukraine. Like it's you want to be you want to be Tethered to reality. But also understand that you don't like you said you never know for certain who you actually are. You don't actually know what's true. You don't know if you're a good person or a bad person, you don't know if you're a musician or an author I could label, might label myself anything. So
So, I think when we start to realize that how kind of lose that certainty about who we are, what we think we know about ourselves, that kind of like, it starts to loosen the glue of that, that ball that ball of yarn of stories that we've told ourselves. And once that glue is loose, and you can more easily, pull, pull threads out and start to see like, oh well yeah, that's that's definitely not.
You know, that's probably not the most helpful narrative that I could create for myself.
So I guess I guess that would be the second step, you know, first step lose the certainty. Second step is to actually like pull on some of these threads and then and then question, you know what, if that wasn't true, like, what if, what if music school didn't kick my ass? What if I just
What if I just didn't try hard enough, you know like it could be true. What would that mean about me? It's useful to sit down and think think through those things because it's by doing that enough that you start to stumble upon a epiphanies. And like big realizations about what you've been telling yourself your whole life, we have to understand that
Our identities are are not logically constructed. They are emotionally constructed and they are emotionally constructed based on our feelings. And they are, they have an inertia to them to bring it back to the Newton's Laws, our identities, have an inertia to them. That is extremely difficult to stop or reverse and you definitely can't do it, just through logical arguments or you know, punishing
somebody what does that impact of this? Hope you guys are enjoying this episode.
Wanted to give a quick
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So how the hell do we put ourselves in those difficult situations? Like how do we seek them
out? I think
I think it's it's it's just a healthy Habit to develop the desire to challenge yourself in every sense, physically, mentally emotionally. You know, one thing I definitely started trying to do especially recently given like the political climate that's been going on is I seek out articles and news sources that I disagree with, because I see,
the the bubbles that everybody's in and the tribal lines that everybody's drawing and I am
I'm horrified by it, but I also want to try my best to not succumb to that myself. And so, yeah, I read sources. I read books of things I disagree with and, and it's, and it changes me. It really does it. Softens me. Sometimes I'll finish the book and I'm like, well, I still don't agree with them but damn, I respect them now. Like that's a smart person.
And so that let that's one way I do it intellectually, but I think it's, you know, that carries over into all areas of life. I mean, it's simple as
You know, if you go to the gym, it's like challenge yourself to do something, new to take a class that, you know, like my wife just at the age of 37 decided. She want to learn how to swim and she's like, mortified of it, you know, but I'm like hell yeah, go do it. You know like that's because it's not just about swimming it's about just developing that consistent habit of like stepping into your discomfort, I love that.
Who was, who was it? That you quoted them. They said either did
Daughter or niece was a famous writer. I
think that the
whole idea of getting better at life's about surrounding yourself, with people that disagree with you or don't think, like, you think I'm putting you on the spot here, but I thought that was such an interesting idea about getting yourself around, disconfirmation, getting yourself around
people that shake you out of your cognitive biases. Think that's really powerful and I
really think in this book, you're on to some of the most fundamental and important things that a human being can do.
To change who they are. I think it is super powerful and way extraordinary. I have
no doubt that the author had author identity is a good identity of, where can people find you? Where can they get the book? So website is Mark Manson dotnet, there's hundreds of articles there, encourage people to check it out. Book is available everywhere every store you can imagine. It should be there. So, go check it out and I will
Doing a speaking tour across u.s. Canada and hopefully Australia and UK. So you can learn about that, go to either go to my Facebook page, which is Facebook's lash Mark minutes and net or Mark Manson dotnet / book - tour. Nice.
All right, what's the impact that you want to have on the
world? I want to expand and I basically I just want to challenge people.
I want to challenge people to find New Perspectives and to keep, I think if you look at what human progress is, it's ultimately rooted in the the search and the discovery and the testing of New Perspectives and taking the same experience and rewriting the meaning around it. And so I see my work very much as training brains to do that better.
I like that a lot. My man, thank you so much for coming on the show.
The extraordinary guys if you haven't already be sure to subscribe and until next time my friend's be legendary take care brother, that was amazing. Okay good shit everybody. Thank you so much for listening and if this content is delivering value to you, please go to iTunes. Go to Stitcher rate and review us that helps us build this community, and that is what we are all about right now. Building this community, as big as we can, to help as many people as we can deliver as much value as possible. And you guys rating, and
Viewing really helps with that. All right, guys, thank you again so much and until next time my friends, you legendary, take care.
