You don't need a productivity system, you need a bedtime. My name is Mark Manson. I'm the three-time number one New York Times bestselling author of the subtle art not giving a [ __ ] And over the past 20 years, I've helped tens of thousands of people.
And I've done it primarily by being brutally honest and saying what other people won't. For example, here's a harsh truth. 8 hours of sleep and a daily walk outside will solve as many of your problems as any online guru or coach will.
Now, this comes from a natural human tendency to assume that if something feels very difficult, it must be very complex to solve. And this makes sense because complex things tend to be very difficult. But there are also many difficult things that are not complex.
For example, breaking up with somebody, not very complex. You just sit down and say, "I don't want to see you anymore. " Incredibly emotionally difficult.
Now what happens often is that with these simple actions that are emotionally difficult, we invent complexity to justify the difficulty that we have with them. We decide that there must be like some six-step process that if you just understand the ins and outs of all social dynamics and that if you implement these exact body language tactics, it will somehow make breaking up with somebody you care about slightly easier. But that's not really the case.
And you see this all the time in the self-help industry. You take people who are experiencing extremely emotionally difficult problems and they are looking to buy complex solutions. They want the 20our seminar.
They want the 3-day course when really just get some [ __ ] sleep. They did a meta analysis recently where they looked at every type of intervention for depression. Everything from pharmaceuticals to every modality of therapy to meditation.
You know what came out on top? Exercise. That's right.
The most effective anti-depressant in the world is freely available to everybody 24/7 365. It's called go outside and walk around for an hour. So before you run out and try to learn some crazy method or an eight-part protocol, make sure you're getting the basics right.
Here's another one for you. If you don't choose your priorities in life, the world is going to choose them for you. Let's pretend this is you.
And these are all the things that you care about. looks like a little gumball machine. Now, what happens is if there's a vacuum in the things that you care about, the world will quickly show up and insert its own priorities in its place.
And so, if you don't decide what matters to you, the world is going to constantly be pressuring you and incentivizing you to care about the things that it cares about. And the worst part about this is that when you adopt the values of the world around you, you actually don't realize that it's not you. the things that you're paying attention to or that you're following or that you're invested in aren't actually the things that you care about.
And so one day you wake up when you're 40 and you realize that you've lived your entire life for somebody else and that you've spent every ounce of your being trying to impress others and win approval for others. And who are the others anyway? Because who the [ __ ] gives a [ __ ] what they think?
And why why did you go to med school? Why did you become a doctor? Oh my god, what am I doing with my life?
I think I'm going to go teach surfing in Costa Rica. Another way to think about this is that you have to develop the ability to be disliked in order to free yourself from the prison of other people's values and opinions. Eventually, you'll realize that it's better to be disliked for who you are and what you value than it is to be liked for who you're not and what you don't value.
In 1967, Muhammad Ali, who at the time was known as Cashes Clay, he was the world heavyweight champion of boxing. Then he got drafted to go to the Vietnam War and he refused to go. And what emerged was an immense social campaign on him to drop everything and go fight in the war that so many other Americans were fighting in.
But he refused. He was stripped of his title. He wasn't allowed to box anymore.
He lost his boxing license. And he even spent some time in jail. Now, what's amazing about the Muhammad Ali story is that your values aren't exemplified through what you pursue.
They're exemplified by what you're willing to give up. If you're not willing to lose something, if you're not willing to push back against society, to stand up for the things that you care about, do you really care about them at all? The definition of valuing something, the definition of who you are is very much determined by what are you willing to sacrifice for?
What are you willing to experience friction and be disliked for? And if the answer is nothing, then your gumballs are probably not your gumballs. Now, a lot of people hate this friction.
They hate the conflict. They hate being disliked or punished in any shape or form. And so they just go with the flow and they end up accepting what other people impose onto them.
So you have to develop the ability to be disliked in order to solidify your internal value system. Because here's another harsh truth. If saying no and standing on your own makes you feel guilty, then at some point in your life, you've probably been trained to neglect yourself.
See, what happens to a lot of us is when we're young, we are not encouraged to stand up for the things that we care about. we are encouraged to go along with what everybody else cares about. And when we're not encouraged to stand up for what we care about, when we're not supported, when we're in that friction with the people around us, then we never develop that muscle.
We never develop that skill to be willing to sacrifice for something. Now, if you're one of these people who's gotten pretty far into adulthood and you've never figured out how to stand up for something, start small. Find the little frictions, the little push back.
Think of it like a conflict muscle. The same way you wouldn't go into the gym and try to lift 400 lb on the first day. You wouldn't try to like go to jail for your your convictions on the first conflict that you have.
It could be as simple as saying no to something you don't want to do. It could be as simple as not taking responsibility for somebody else's feelings or somebody else's problems. It could be declining an invitation or telling someone that you don't actually like doing an activity that they think you like doing.
Now, when you start simple like this, it's good for a number of reasons. One is it's just easier than saying no to the big hard things. But two, something happens, which is people push back a little bit, and what they expect is an equal and opposite push back from the world.
But funny thing, nobody gives a [ __ ] about your problems as much as you do. So, what usually happens is there's no push back. And you realize it's much easier to go much further than you thought was possible.
In fact, what I tend to notice with people when they first start standing up for themselves for the first time is they have this feeling of like, "My god, why didn't I do this 10 years ago? I could have saved myself so much pain and struggle. " And generally, it's not until the second or third or fourth push back that then the world shows up and the conflict emerges.
And at that point, that's fine, cuz you're still so much farther than where you began. Most people aren't actually stuck because their life is too hard. They're actually stuck because the distractions feel safer than the solutions do.
Now, distractions are problematic in two different ways. The first one is that they actually distract you from doing this push back. They lead you down these weird paths of like, "Oh, cool.
Look at this Tik Tok. " Or like, "Oh my god, maybe I should like go read this book over here and that'll teach me something. " But the second and more egregious problem is that they complicate what you should be caring about.
You may have a strong sense of like this is what I want to do. This is what I want to work on. this is how I want to get better.
And then you go read a bunch of books and watch a bunch of videos and and take a seminar and suddenly it's like raised all these like five other possibilities of what you could be paying attention to or caring about. And that's just as problematic as the fact that you probably just spent a week not working on the thing you want to work on. The trickiest thing about distractions, too, is that these days there is a very fine line between what is a distraction and what's not.
A lot of what appears to be productivity is just procrastination and a business suit. One of the things that I like to say is that learning more is a smart person's favorite way to procrastinate. It's a favorite way to avoid dealing with the inevitable conflict, dealing with standing up and saying those small nos, standing up for what you care about.
It's easier to just bury your head in another book and try to learn another process. But here's the other thing, too, is that social media is pretty much always telling us do everything everywhere all at once. Be everything to everybody.
Whereas if you look at reality, if you look at what the science says about mental health and psychological well-being, it says focus on doing one or two things extremely well, do them in one place very consistently with a small group of people over a long period of time. That's pretty much anothetical to like everything that exists in our culture these days. This is why cutting out distractions is such an important component of figuring out what you give a [ __ ] about.
Let's go back to my little gumball metaphor. Let's say this is you. These are the things you care about or you think you care about, but you're not really sure.
And you've got a bunch of empty space here. And the world is doing the world's thing. It's bombarding you with distractions and sexy time and oh my god, did you see the thing on Twitter?
Oh, holy [ __ ] the world's ending. It's just bombarding you 24/7 with [ __ ] Now, the importance of removing these distractions is that it actually creates enough space for you to decide what you actually care about, for you to actually dig deep and ask yourself, if nobody knew what I was working on, if nobody knew I cared about this, if I was stranded on a desert island and had access to all the resources and all the opportunities that I have today, is this the thing that I would choose to focus on? Are these the people that I would pay attention to?
These are important questions to ask yourself and you really don't get an accurate sense of what those things are until you block out the noise effectively. The other thing that happens when you eliminate all the distractions is you start noticing the things you stop caring about. Suddenly that thing that you thought was so important when you're not being exposed to some [ __ ] Instagram account, it doesn't feel important anymore.
that one cause or group that you thought was such a huge part of your social life. You know, you spend a week or two without them and you realize, you know what, I actually don't miss them and I think I'm kind of happier without them. It becomes a way of surfacing which of these gumballs were yours to begin with and which of them were implanted in you by the world.
Now, obviously, all this stuff that we're talking about is like it's scary. There's a certain amount of fear that's tied up in it. But here's another harsh truth.
Confidence and fear both require believing in something that hasn't happened yet. And at a certain point, you just have to realize that you're choosing to be scared. Our minds are really just prediction machines.
Our minds take old experiences, we write narratives around them, and then we use those narratives to predict what might happen in the future. Now, anxiety and confidence are both narratives about the future that we've just made up in our minds. Let's say I have a big public speaking gig and I'm going to go talk to like 3,000 people or something.
I can think about that and I can pull up a narrative of all the horrible things that can go wrong, all the ways I can embarrass myself on stage. You know, maybe I fall and face plant in front of thousands of people and it ends up on the nightly news and that can terrify me. Or I can pull the narrative that will lead to confidence.
I can practice my talk, get really clear about what I'm going to say, and develop a lot of confidence in my ability to deliver a lot of value. Both of these narratives are completely made up in my head. They're both invented out of thin air, but I can train myself to buy into one narrative more than the other.
Now, the funny thing is is that the emotion stays the same. The emotion is just uncertainty. It's just a a general feeling of like, oh my god, what's going to happen?
And this is a big misconception that people have. In fact, if you look at research around anxiety, if you look at, say, research on athletes that perform extremely well under pressure versus athletes that completely crumble under pressure, there's not a difference in anxiety. Both the athletes that perform well and the athletes that don't experience the same amount of stress and anxiety.
The only difference is that the athletes that perform well believe in a narrative that they're going to step up and perform up to the occasion, whereas the athletes who believe they're going to crumble are the ones who actually do. Now, this kind of internal narrative management is itself a little bit of a skill. And if we've come from a background of a lot of trauma and stress and had a lot of people hurt us in our past, it makes sense that our narrative is going to be, oh, if I stand up for myself or if I say I don't like something, then I'm going to be punished and nobody's going to appreciate me.
It makes sense that that would generate a lot of fear and you would dread it and you would have a lot of anxiety around it. But again, this is the emotional side of what we just talked about. Growth requires failure the same way that gaining strength requires pain.
You have to break it down and then grow back slightly stronger each and every time. See, there's a funny cognitive bias that happens around failure and dread that is really interesting and also just completely inaccurate. If you think about somebody who has an unhealthy relationship with failure, let's say they have a goal.
The goal is here and they're starting here. Now, the person with an unhealthy relationship, the failure, thinks, "I'm going to shoot for the goal, and then if I fail, I'm going to crash and burn and it's going to be a disaster. " This is completely inaccurate.
This is not what happens at all. Somebody who has a healthy relationship with failure understands that you shoot for the goal. Something's not going to go quite right and you're going to fail.
But you're going to fail at a higher level than you started because you will have learned things. You will have gotten some experience. You will have met certain people.
You will have gotten over the first initial jitters of of trying in the first place. So when you give it a second try, you're working off a stronger base and then something else goes wrong. But you're still once again further.
Now you've gone from here to here and here to here. And then let's say it's like finally you make it. All of life is like this.
It's like a stock chart. No stock just goes up and to the right. Everything is like, you know, doing this thing.
And so even though it feels like failure is going to be cataclysmic and it's actually going to leave you in a worse place than when you began, the truth is is that you're going to end up in a slightly better place than where you began. And you simply have to tolerate enough failures to condition that into yourself. Because ultimately the only difference between a successful person and an unsuccessful person is the successful person has just tolerated more failures over a longer period of time.
the strongest person you know, they've felt all the same fear, the same doubt, the same insecurity that you do. They've just learned to act despite it. Again, this is the biggest misconception when it comes to doing great things in the world.
You don't get rid of the anxiety. You don't get rid of the self-doubt. You just learn how to develop the ability to act despite it.
Abraham Lincoln struggled with severe depression his entire life. He was widely hated and judged throughout his presidency. He used to be stuck in bed for days at a time, unable to get out and he journaled to himself that he was going to be the biggest failure in American history, that he was going to be the reason that the country collapsed.
Deep, deep, deep, profound insecurities. It's just that the difference between Abraham Lincoln and say you is that Lincoln went through so many of these failures on his ascent up to being president that he's getting depressed about this over here while you're still getting depressed about the thought of being here. The thing to understand is that this is what growth actually looks like.
Growth is not getting rid of the self-doubt. It's not getting rid of the fear. It's simply being fearful of bigger and better things.
It's doubting yourself for greater and greater achievements. Because happiness is not a lack of problems. Happiness is having better problems.
Success is having better failures. Discipline is in a way having better addictions. So you don't really get rid of the struggle.
You simply learn to upgrade it. All right, that's it for this video. If you love the harsh truths and you want to see 40 of them delivered in rapid fire, check out my video, 40 harsh truths that I know at 40 that I wish I knew at 20.
It's a banger. I'll see you over there.
