- What's up everybody? Mark Manson here. And today we have a very,
very special episode for you. A couple weeks ago we
hit a milestone here, at Mark Manson Enterprises, a very rare and special milestone. We hit 10 million podcast downloads in the first five months,
which is absolutely insane. And concurrently around the same time, we hit 2 million subscribers
on the YouTube channel. So as a celebration, I
decided to have an open Q&A solo podcast. So I asked everybody to submit
questions and we received, I think about 1200
questions from you guys. These questions are wide ranging. They're gonna cover tons
and tons of different topics from my personal changes
and beliefs recently to some of my thoughts on
things like manifestation on social media, on how
to get over a breakup. And we're also gonna talk
about new books, new movies, new plans, more podcasts,
all of the above. So let's get into it. First question, one of the
best things about you, Mark, is how open you are to the
ups and downs of your life. But it has always impacted me how much you share
about your relationship. I guess this is my marriage. Could you share the top five to 10 things that have helped you build
and maintain such an amazing relationship with your wife? So my wife and I have been married, well, we've been together
now for almost 13 years, and we've been married for six and a half. Still very happy. Big thumbs up to, to a good marriage, underrated marriage needs a new
publicist, needs new PR job. It doesn't get enough
positive attention these days. But to answer your question,
I'd say the biggest keys to a good and healthy
romantic relationship. First one is honesty and integrity. Like trust is everything. If you don't have trust,
nothing else works. You can have like the craziest
date nights, amazing sex, really great conversations, but if you don't trust each other, none of that stuff is
really gonna matter past like the immediate term. So trust just makes everything else work. Part of that too is both the willingness to take and give feedback to each other. I think that's huge. I think it's really
important and there's a lot of tactical things within that, right? Like there are good and bad ways to give your partner feedback. Some feedback just sounds like criticism where some feedback is actually
feedback and it's important to like kind of package
and frame it as such. The next one I would say is
don't try to change each other. I think this is a big
mistake that a lot of couples make is that they, they see
a way that their partner could be better or they
see how their partner could solve a problem for
themselves and they want to take it upon themselves
to be responsible for that problem or to make
things better for them. In my experience, that kind of backfires. There's this old Jim Rohn
quote, which is like, I'm totally gonna this up,
but the principle of the quote was like, you shouldn't
try to be perfect for me and I shouldn't try to be perfect for you. We should both try to be
perfect for ourselves together, something like that. And then finally, I'd say
it's important to have lives outside of each other. Like my wife has a whole life,
she has a bunch of interests and friends and hobbies and
stuff that she does without me. And I have friends interests and hobbies that I do without her. And then we have friends, interests and hobbies that we do together. And so I think it's, it's
important to like maintain your own independent
identities from each other, but then also be able to come together and have a shared identity together. So there's, there's kind of like a dance that happens around that balance. Next question. When is the next book
coming and what is it about? About 20 of you asked this question. There is no book coming and I have no clue what it's about. I haven't started writing anything yet. Truth be told, I was under
contract to do another book. It was technically due last year. I didn't write it and the
publisher canceled the contract. So I have no obligations
for a book at the moment. And I'm gonna be honest, from
the time I wrote "Subtle Art" through the time that Will
Smith's book came out, I did five books in six years and a movie that's a fucking lot. Like that's honestly in
hindsight, I think I kind of burnt myself out by going too hard. So I'm in a place now where
I'm not writing a book and I feel really good about it. I don't feel like I have
anything book worthy inside me at the moment, but I'm sure that I will again someday. And when I do, I'll start
writing another one. What are three things that you learned in the past five years that
you wish you knew years ago? It's a great question. The first and most obvious, which I bang on about in
podcast episodes all the time, is just how much I underestimated
the mental and emotional benefits of getting my
physical health in order. And this is one of those things
that I feel very stupid for, because I have seen in the
research and literature for years and years and years
that being in good shape grants mental clarity helps
you emotionally regulate, things like your diet have
an effect on your mood. The quality of your sleep. The quality of your sleep has
effect on your productivity at work the next day. I knew all of these
things yet for some reason just underestimated them
for whatever reason. Not anymore. I'm fully on the physical health bandwagon and I'm going to be one
of those obnoxious people who won't shut up about
their morning smoothies. I guess the second one,
the second big lesson from the last five years is
I have come to the conclusion that I think traditional
media is overrated and probably a dying industry. One of the reasons that
I came back to doing internet content and I'm
investing so heavily into things like this podcast and the YouTube channel and the newsletter, is
I'm just extremely bullish on this creator economy,
this internet media sector in general. I think this is the future. I
think it's extremely exciting. My experiences in traditional
media kind of shows me, I don't think they really
know what they're doing, so it's good to be here. And then I'd say the third one is that, I mean this is just like a
broken record throughout my life of not not taking my
relationships seriously enough or maybe not investing enough in them, but I think I underestimated
how much friendships and social relationships
change as you age. And I think I took a lot of my friendships and social relationships for
granted when I was younger. So, if I could go back
years and years ago, I would slap my 25-year-old
self in the face and be like, invest in people I'll pay off. Can you give some tough
love to those of us who are beginners in online
content space and struggle with comparing ourselves to people who are wildly successful? Okay, yeah. Here's some tough love. Fucking stop. It makes no sense. Imagine if there was a high
school kid who was going home depressed every day
from basketball practice because he wasn't as good as LeBron James. It makes no sense. You should compare yourself to your peers. You should compare yourself
to other beginners. You should compare yourself to
other people in your industry or in your space or at most,
compare yourself to the people who are just a step ahead of you. That's who you should be focusing on. Take inspiration from the
big professional people, the people like me who have
been doing this literally our entire adult lives for decades. Sure, be inspired by something,
but don't compare yourself. Compare yourself to the person who's two steps in front of you. What are your thoughts on
manifestation? Oh, okay. So the manifestation thing,
it's picking up steam again. And I've written about
this in a few places. I had a section on it in "Subtle Art" and I've got a old article on the website called "The Staggering of the Secret." Look, here's the thing, the
concept of manifestation, what it really is is it
is a mental framework that leverages some cognitive biases in the expectation
effect to your advantage. So there's a simple fact
of human psychology, which is that we tend to notice the things that we think about. So you probably pass by
bicycles all the time throughout your life, but
unless you are interested in bicycles, you don't notice them. But as soon as you're interested
in bicycles, you're like, oh my God, there are bikes everywhere. Now what manifestation tells you is like, this is the universe
giving you what you want. Well, that's not entirely true. The universe has always
just been the universe. There's always been an infinite
amount of stuff going on. What's happening is, is
that you are choosing to focus on something in your life. And because you're focusing on
it, you're tending to notice things that relate to it more often, including opportunities that,
if you're focusing on a goal, those opportunities can
help you achieve that goal. So really manifestation is just
very consciously leveraging your own cognitive biases in your favor. Now what's wrong with that?
There's nothing wrong with that. That's actually a really good thing to do. I think it has really
good outcomes for people. What worries me is that the narrative around the manifestation
stuff of the universe is giving you what you want or giving you what you think about it kind of promotes a little bit of a narcissistic
tendency, which is to assume that the universe is revolving around you. That the universe gives
a shit what you want or what you think about,
it's not the case. And I think you can
fall into a lot of traps around self-esteem and self-absorption if you're not careful. So does manifestation work? Sure it works, but I just
think there's better ways to think about it or to go about it. Next question, how do we
overcome our fear of failure? I mean, it's hard to get motivated without seeing the end goal,
but it's hard to expect nothing and just start when
potentially our efforts could end up being wasted. You never get over your fear of failure. It's always gonna exist. And I think you should get used to that. And failure is often incredibly useful. So I think you should look at your options and make a decision based on which failure is actually gonna benefit me the most. Now you might be saying,
how can failure benefit me? Well, failure can benefit you a ton. So there's plenty of situations that failure can benefit you. I never planned on being a writer, if I had never started writing. 'Cause I was like, well I'm
probably gonna fail at this. I wouldn't have a career right now. I started writing because I
wanted to market some websites and of my first like a hundred articles, maybe two of them were read by more than a couple dozen people. So if I sat around being like,
well, I'm failing at writing, I never would've gotten anywhere. So you should change your
orientation towards failure. Stop being afraid of it. Look for the lessons that are found in it and then that will help motivate you to pursue something despite it. Congratulations Mark, what is your opinion on
luck and being lucky? Well, so this ties in perfectly with the manifestation thing. Luck is super important. There's no success in this life
without some degree of luck. I think what gets missed is that luck is always happening around you. It's just you're not always acting on it. So to come back to the
manifestation thing, let's say tomorrow I decide I
want to be like a film actor. Like I wake up tomorrow morning
and I'm like, oh my God, I've discovered my life's purpose. I'm gonna be an a-list actor in Hollywood, like everybody else in LA
And I start walking around, I go to the same dinner parties,
I go to the same events, I hang out with the same
people, but oh my God, I just met another actor. I met a director. Oh my god, this guy is,
he's writing for a TV show. Suddenly all these people that
like I was meeting before, but I didn't really think about or care now because they're very
relevant to what I want. I'm like, oh my god, what
luck, what circumstance that I get to end up at
the same dinner party as this prestigious screenwriter
or director or whatever. So a lot of luck is simply perception. It's coincidences are constantly
happening in our lives. What we perceive as luck is
when those coincidences line up with whatever we are interested
in or what our values are at that particular moment. So to come back to the manifestation bit, the utility of manifestation
is that it gets us to be consciously aware of our values and what our interests are and
it gets us actively thinking about them so that when
those coincidences do happen in our lives, we are ready for them. We are ready to take the
opportunity and act on them. So yes, and I'll add to,
I think luck is a skill. You can increase your
luck through activity. Basically activity increases
the number of potential coincidences that can happen in your life. So like, let's say I wanna
be a famous Hollywood actor and I just sit at home
all day and dream about being a famous Hollywood actor. Nothing's gonna happen.
I'm never gonna get lucky. But if I start going to
every single event around LA and I start meeting all
these interesting people that like give me opportunities,
suddenly I've increased my luck because I'm taking action, I'm increasing my activity. The more activity, the more
coincidences that happen, the more coincidences,
the luckier you get. Alright, what is your morning routine? Have you put much thought into it? I do not put much thought
into my morning routine. I think morning routines are maybe one of the most overrated things that get talked about all the time. But to answer your question, my morning routine is basically this. I wake up, I have no alarm. Generally I wake up anywhere
between 5:30 and seven and I take a piss, drink some
water and go to my office, sit down on my computer and start working. That's it. That's my
entire morning routine. The only good morning
routine is having things that you're excited to work on. That's it. If you have things that
you're excited to work on, you don't need a morning routine, you're gonna wake up excited,
tons of energy ready to go. If you're not excited for
what you're doing that day, then you're gonna need a
routine to pick you up. Now I can't bypass this topic
without giving a shout out to nighttime routines. I think nighttime routines,
that's the real shit. That's the thing that nobody talks about. I take my nighttime routine very seriously so I don't eat past nine o'clock. I don't start a new show or
a movie past nine o'clock. Most of the lights in
the house are out by 10. My wife and I we're in
bed by like 10, 10:15, do some light reading at night. Nighttime routine, take
that super seriously, get some good sleep. I honestly think if you
get the nighttime stuff dialed in, the morning
stuff takes care of itself. Next question. Is there such a thing as healthy shame? And if so, what the is it? I just love how this is phrased. This is definitely a listener
of mine. Great question. So in the self-help world,
shame is a purely negative evil thing that ruins our lives. I come from more of a
scientific school of thought, which is that emotions evolved to have a evolutionary utility. And so we have to ask ourselves, what is the evolutionary utility of shame? Why did shame evolve in
in the human species? Well, if you think about
it, it actually makes sense. Shame is to deter us from doing things that are harmful for others, right? Like if your child steals
money from somebody, it's most people's
reaction is to shame them for doing that and that
shame prevents them from doing it again in the future. So that I would argue is an example of a healthy form of shame. I think where shame becomes
unhealthy is when it is attached to things that are not
necessarily bad or undesirable. Like when you are shamed
for how smart you are, or when you're shamed
for having a goofy laugh or when you're shamed for
being interested in in Pokemon or whatever, like those
are completely irrelevant, morally neutral aspects
of your personality that aren't necessarily good or bad. So shaming you for them is probably gonna have terrible consequences. But if you're like a totally selfish prick and you're taking advantage of people and stealing from people
and harming people, yeah, maybe you should be shamed for that. So if you disagree, hit
me up in the comments. Tell me why I'm wrong. How are you able to give up drinking and be consistent with exercising? I know all the benefits
and I know it's not meant to be enjoyable, not true. Does energy come first then exercise? Or does exercise come first, then energy. Okay, I'm glad you asked this question. I am not a fitness and health guru, but I'm a former fat kid
who likes exercising now. So let me speak from that experience. The simple answer is exercise comes first, but when you say this, it's
not meant to be enjoyable. I disagree because you're
not gonna stick with things that you don't find a way to enjoy. And this was like one of the first lessons I had to learn about
exercise is that you have to find a way to enjoy it. And there are a lot of
different ways you can do that. So doing it with friends,
doing it with some sort of social group, finding workout buddies, creating goals or like gamification, like one of the things that
really was effective with me was when I started tracking my workouts, it actually made me more
motivated to go back to the gym because I was excited to try
to beat last week's number. That made it fun for me, that
made it more interesting. So I would say think about
how can you exercise in a way that's fun or interesting and start there and then start pushing
yourself into things that might be a little bit less enjoyable or a little bit more uncomfortable. I think the biggest
mistake that people make, I definitely made this and
I've seen a lot of other people make it, is that they try
to do too much too quickly. So like they decide, you know what, this year I'm gonna get into shape. And they go online, they
do all this research, they find like some insane workout plan that was probably made by a
guy who's like on steroids or something and they're
like, oh, I'll do that. That's the best thing I'm gonna do that. And meanwhile, like within five days they're completely miserable. They're in so much pain,
their body's not used to it. They're not adaptive to it at all. Whereas if you actually just
start at something simple and kind of fun, find a
friend to go play tennis with, find a gym with like some
nice classes with teachers that you like, like start
there for six months, develop the habit and then once
you've developed the habit, then push yourself to try
some more difficult things. Now with the drinking thing,
it's similar but in reverse. So this is the hard thing
about making content or or talking about
these sorts of subjects because it's easy for me
to come on the podcast and be like, I quit drinking,
it's changed my life. What you don't see is the 18 month process that went into that quitting, right? So before I even attempted to quit, I was cutting back from probably
like 15, 20 drinks a week to like four to five a week over the course of an entire year. And something interesting
happened as I cut back, which was that my tolerance went down. So it used to be I could go out and crush a bottle of wine and feel completely fine and go home like nothing
was out of the ordinary. As I cut back a bottle
of wine would floor me, like it would ruin my day the next day. Which was interesting
because what happened is the less I drank, the
less I wanted to drink because the less I drank, the
more drinking affected me, the more noticeable the negative effects of the drinking was. So it actually created this momentum towards quitting as I cut back. The first time I quit,
I only quit for a month and then I went back to drinking. And then after maybe
another month, two months, I decided to do three months. And then I went back to drinking and then I decided to do a year and then I haven't gone back since. So what you hear is like
this incredible story like, ah, I just quit drinking
and blah, blah blah. It's like, no, it, I
was on the struggle bus for like a year, year and a half. And then even once I like
had the conviction, the stop, it was a slow going process. And then on the exercise thing, I mean that's like a multi-year process of like failing, fucking
up, reverting, trying again, finding a new thing. So don't be misled when when people like me or people on Instagram or whatever are just like, oh yeah, I started doing this and it was great. It's like that simple
sentence you just heard is often like six to 12 months
of struggling, ambivalence, failures, trying again, setbacks, whatever, have patience with it. You're supposed to up.
That's just part of it. Alright, before the next question,
let's take a quick break. This episode is brought to you by LMNT. I love LMNT. Not only do I drink it, but
if I could shower in it, I probably would. LMNT is as simple as zero sugar, zero additive electrolyte drink. You simply add it to water and
it is the most effective way to hydrate yourself. I drink at least one a day
and if I have a hard workout or I spend a lot of time
outside, I'll have a second one. Hydration is probably the
most overlooked factor of our health and we don't realize how much it improves our day-to-day life, proper hydration helps alleviate
headaches, cramps, fatigue, and even brain fog. LMNT is trusted by the best. From the Navy seals to FBI
snipers to Olympic athletes, it's the exclusive hydration choice of the US weightlifting team. You can try a free sample
pack with any drink mix purchase at drinkLMNT.com /idgaf. That's LMNT which is L-M-N-T and I-D-G-A-F short for
I don't give a fuck. Also, if you hate the product, there's a no questions
asked refund policy. So what do you have to lose? Go to drinkLMNT.com/idgaf
to get that free sample pack and stay salty motherfuckers. Congratulations Mark. My question is, how do I overcome envy? I really like Naval Ravikant
has a quote about this, I don't remember exactly what it is, but his take is basically, you can't just envy the
good things about somebody. You have to envy all of the
things about somebody, right? So you can't just envy Bill Gates' money, you have to envy everything in his life. Bill Gates worked for 30
years without a day off and without a vacation. Do you envy that? Like you can envy David
Goggins, but do you envy all the that he went through,
like running on broken bones and suffering, going through
seal training three times? Like do you envy that? No. So like you can't envy just
the good things about a person that's completely unrealistic
because most good things that happen in people's lives
come at a great sacrifice or cost that you're not seeing. And so unless you envy
that sacrifice or cost, then you don't actually envy the person. You're just fantasizing. Congratulations, Mark, your
articles have helped me a lot. My question is how do I
fight my own insecurities? To which my answer is
you don't fight them, you embrace them, you own
them, you befriend them. The truth is, is if you
fight your insecurities, you're gonna make them
bigger and more powerful and they're gonna have
more control over you. If you embrace them, if you
own them, you diminish them. I like to just laugh about them and just be very open about them. Like think about it this way. If you don't let your
insecurities stop you, then what can stop you? Since you've launched it, what
has been the most difficult aspect of building a YouTube channel and how does it compare to
your early blogging days? This is a great question,
little inside baseball here. So for those of you who don't
know, before I wrote books, before I did anything you've
known me for, I was a blogger, I started blogging in 2008,
drew a big audience there, got my first book deal in 2015. That was "Subtle Art," not giving a fuck. And then the rest is history. So YouTube is very different from blogging in a few different ways. The hardest part about podcasts and video is that it requires a team to do it. A blog you can kind of do by yourself, maybe you need a guy to
help you with the website, maybe you hire somebody
to help you do research, but more or less it's a
one man band type thing. To do anything video related, you need like minimum two or three people. So that introduces its own complexities and difficulties. Turnaround is much longer. So when you're writing, I
can have an idea on Monday, write it on Tuesday and
post it on Wednesday and I know if it was a good
idea or not by like Thursday. Whereas with a video, it's
like from idea to recording is often multiple weeks from
recording to editing to posting is like another few weeks. And then once you post it, sometimes you don't know if it did well or not until like a month or two later. So the turnaround time
on ideas is much longer and the amount of investment and time into each individual idea
is is much longer as well. So the consequence of that
is that in video and podcasts you really have to wait and sift for the really, really good ideas or what you think are the
really, really good ideas. You have to be much more stringent about what you can pursue. And sometimes that's
stressful because it's like, okay, you get only one or
two shots on goal each month and it's a load of work to
take each of those shots. So you have to like really,
really, really believe that they're gonna be good
videos and good concepts. Whereas with blogs it's kind of like, I can be in the shower
and have a random thought and get outta the shower and go write it and it's lower stakes I guess
is what I'm trying to say. What advice would you
give to aspiring writers or content creators who wanna
make a meaningful impact in their respective fields? Number one, differentiate yourself. Especially these days,
like with social media and all the algorithms and everything, there is an overabundance of content and so much of that content is just same, same, same, same, same. So you need to think really, really hard. What am I doing differently? What am I saying that's unique or important that nobody else is saying? How can I say it in a way
that nobody else is saying it, and start from there
because that's what's gonna really drive like 80% of of
your success in the long run. One of the questions I
ask myself all the time is what needs to be said and
nobody else is saying it. And then I try to go be
the the guy who says it and then I think about that also in terms of how it's being said. Who is it being said to? Like oftentimes in my
industry what I'll find is that there'll be a piece of advice that is really common
in the business space, but nobody is saying it to, I don't know, college kids or middle-aged housewives. So it's like, okay, if
you can take something, a really good piece of advice
that's that's being said to these people over here
and then translate it and say it to those people over there, you're doing a really good service. You're helping spread, spread the love. Do you own that chicken
suit or do you just rent it? I own not one but two chicken suits. Is social media addiction
necessarily a bad thing? My God, you guys are so smart. I love this question just
because not necessarily because I think it's not a bad thing, but just because I think
this is the sort of question we should be asking. First of all, I'm gonna
nitpick with a word. So the clinical definition of addiction is there's two qualifiers
for an addiction. One is it's a compulsive
behavior and then two is it harms other areas
of your life in a way that's you feel powerless to prevent. Like this is the funny thing
is like you can technically have like a guy who who drinks a six pack of beer every single day,
but if it doesn't affect the other areas of his life, you wouldn't necessarily
diagnose him as an addict. So when you use the word
addiction, by definition of addiction is something that
is harming the person's life. So I would change this too, is social media binging
necessarily a bad thing? That's a very, very interesting question and I think it's something
that doesn't get asked enough, especially when you consider
what the alternatives are. Is binging social media worse or better than binging television? Is binging social media
worse or better than binging video games or pornography or gambling? I don't know. I have not deep dive deep. Oh my god, this is gonna kill me. I have not dove in deep. (mark laughing) I've not dove in deep
into the the research on all of these formats,
but here's my understanding is that the data on people
who watched tons of TV back in like the nineties,
it's awful, it's really bad. The data on people who play tons of video games kind of mixed. There are a small percentage of people who are probably video game addicts, but outside of that small
percentage of people it's actually not that bad. And in fact there are some
arguments that video games could be beneficial for people. Social media, it seems to really
depend on the demographic. So when you go young, say under 16, it seems very clear that
social media is a bad thing. Like it probably shouldn't
be available to kids. That seems to be pretty
conclusive at this point. It also seems to be worse
for young girls and women than boys for a variety of reasons. It also seems to be bad,
like if you are a person who is particularly predisposed
to anxiety or depression, also probably not great, but
if you are a full grown adult, you are in good mental health,
the data's not bad at all, which is weird. Like we're not used to that. Usually it's like with forms of media, it's either like it's all good or all bad. Social media really
depends on who's using it. And I think the reason
is because it's social, it's like so much of it is driven by how you choose to use it. And so if you are a very
young and immature person, you're probably gonna
end up using it in ways that are kind of harmful
for your brain development. If you are a person who's very depressed or predisposed to depression, good chance you end up using it in a way that's not helpful for you. So I think ultimately the verdict around social media is a very mixed thing. But Jonathan Haidt got
this big book out right now and he's making the big ar
argument that we should not let kids on before age 16 and that we should get
phones outta schools. And both of those things
seem completely common sense and very rational to me. My question is how do you
keep yourself consistent to push yourself to reach
your goals and what opinions or guidelines do you use
to evaluate your goals and make sure that they're in track with the life you wanna live? It's a great question. We did a podcast about
this around New Year's and I think we're gonna
do a follow-up one, but I think most longtime
listeners and readers know that I think goals are important, but I also think they're
kind of overrated. Most goals that you set
are kind of arbitrary. I can be like, I want to bench
press 200 pounds this year. Great, is there some magical
meaning behind 200 pounds? No, there's not. It's just
a number that I made up. And so if I get to 195, does
that mean I like I failed? Well no, I got much stronger. So it's like the value
in the goal is just, it's in the direction that it gives you. So for that reason, I think
the most important thing when it comes to setting
goals is making sure it aligns with your values and make sure it aligns with the priorities in your life. At the beginning of the year
I set a goal to run a marathon and I've been very open
and transparent that after about two months of
training and I gave up that goal, the primary reason I gave up
that goal was simply that a, it's a lot of fucking time. Like running 25, 30 miles a
week is insanely time consuming. Not just in the running but
in the recovery and the prep, eating, hydration, all that
stuff and the energy levels that I was having during the training. Like I'm in a growth mode in my business. I'm working pretty crazy
hours at the moment. I realized I'm like this
fitness goal doesn't align with the other values and
priorities in my life, which is that I need to
have plenty of energy to give to my business. I'm trying to grow my team. I need to be able to like wake
up and get out of bed easily, have a ton of energy I need to, like, if I need to stay late one day, I need to be able to stay
late one day and not worry about like, oh God, I'm
gonna miss my eight mile run. So yeah, it's just not a good
time in my life for that goal. So I gave it up, which I
think that is ultimately like what gets missed is
that goals should serve you not the other way around. Next question, is there an
extreme side to everything? For example, in spirituality? Yes, everything can be
taken to an extreme. I personally believe
everything becomes toxic when taken to an extreme. Spirituality is no exception. If you look at religious
cults, crazy fringe, new age movements, you
see this all the time. Extremism within spirituality
is just as corrupting and toxic as extremism anywhere else. Aristotle believed that
happiness was at the balance between all extremes and all things, which is a really interesting concept. I personally prefer the
way Oscar Wilde put it, which is he said moderation and everything including moderation. How were you in high school
in terms of academics? Oh boy. And what were your thoughts
about your future goals in your freshman year of college? Okay, so here's a brief
history of Mark Manson's academic achievements and aspirations. I was a very mediocre student in school. I did not get great grades,
not because I wasn't smart, but mainly just 'cause I didn't try, I didn't really see the
point in trying very hard. I was that kid who slept through class, didn't do his homework, and
still like managed to scrape by with like a B minus or c plus
just purely off of brains. My freshman year of college I
was actually in music school, so I wanted to be a professional musician. There I actually tried very hard, but music is such a competitive industry. It was very clear after a year
it was very clear that like, okay, out of my entire class of musicians, maybe three or four of us
are gonna have a career in this industry and the rest of us are gonna be teaching band
practice back at high school. So I was good. I would even say I was like better than the average music student, but I realized I wasn't excellent, so I should probably have gotten out. I transferred to a normal university, started studying normal
things and there I actually, I took it seriously because
once I was able to choose the classes that I was actually
interested in and pursue a lot of the ideas and subject
matters that I cared about, then I became a very good student. So actually, I graduated magnum
laude at Boston University. I had really good grades, I loved school. I didn't wanna leave, I
could've stayed in college till I was 35 if they let me. I don't know what the
point of this question is. So there you go. Well, I guess maybe the person
asked about my future goals. I think the important point
here is that I didn't really know what I wanted to be
until I was like 27 or 28. So I graduated from school, I thought I was gonna go into
finance, I went into finance, I hated it, got outta finance,
tried to start a bunch of e-commerce businesses,
failed at those, hated that. Started blogging the market,
the e-commerce businesses, started writing dating advice for people, started selling courses and
consulting around dating advice. Didn't really like dating
advice, but it was the only thing that I'd been successful
at up to that point. So I kept doing it and then it
wasn't until like four years in that I was like, you know what? I think I can pivot this into
more just general broad life advice and I could start
writing about stuff that I really care about and I bet if I really put a hundred
percent of my effort into writing really well, I could probably make it a career and yeah, that I was like
27, 28 when I did that. So if you're one of the
many, many, many young people who's like 22 and failing and don't know what you wanna do with your life and think your life's over, it's not. Every night's sleep is
like a brain reset to me. No matter how ambitious
I got the night before or how much planning I've
done, I wake up not feeling it. My question is, what's your advice on this repetitive condition? I can't stick to what
I said I was gonna do and my self-esteem would
suffer because of that. First thought, you're
probably sleeping very poorly. And my God, if you're one of
these people who's like trying to wake up at 4:30 and
be like Jocko Willink and like go to the gym for three hours and stare at the sun, dude, just stop. Just be a normal person. This comes back to the
morning routine question. The best morning routine is having shit you're excited to work on. That's it. If you have that, you don't
need a morning routine. I'm also getting a little
bit of a sense here. What happens to a lot of people is that maybe you're
focusing on what you think you should focus on rather than what you actually wanna focus on. So what I see happen a lot is
that people get a little bit obsessed with optimization
and they're like, oh my god, for my life to be awesome,
I gotta do all these things. I gotta wake up, I gotta
drink a liter of water, I gotta be up before the sun. I gotta do my yoga poses. I gotta say thank you to
the the cloud goddess. I gotta go stare at light
and be like huberman and drink green shit. And you don't actually
care about any of that. If you don't care about any of that, it's never gonna be fun. You're never gonna want to get outta bed. So stop approaching discipline
as like this punishment towards yourself and get
aligned with something you're excited about that find the thing that you're gonna wake up in the morning, you can't wait to get out of bed for. And then once you've found that, throw a few healthy habits on top of it. What's some bad life
advice that you followed for a long period of time? Also, what's your
favorite Iron Maiden song? Oh my god, that's a great question and then I'll get to the bad life advice. Favorite Iron Maiden. I mean it's hard to not
say "Number of the Bees," that whole album is like flawless, but I also just feel like
that's the predictable answer. I'm gonna go with "Can
I Play with Madness" that's like eighties arena rock. Sometimes that comes on when I'm running and I'm just like, fuck yeah, I feel like I've got like a mullet. It's awesome. So when I was younger, I
definitely bought into this belief of being completely
attachment free, minimalist, optimizing my life for freedom
in every shape or form. So I had as few possessions as possible. I was nomadic, I had no regular home. I lived in all these different countries. All my businesses were online. It was like everything was just completely unattached all the time. And don't get me wrong,
it was a lot of fun. But what I learned through that experience is that commitments
actually are the things that make life meaningful. It's the fact that you
give up alternatives that makes the thing meaningful. And if you're just optimizing your life for always having as many
alternatives as possible, you gain optionality and
you gain excitement and fun and a lot of dopamine, but
you lose a deeper sense of meaning and you lose that
joy that comes from investing in something or someone
for a long period of time and the trust and the
comfort that comes with it. So I've actually come to
kind of the counterintuitive conclusion that we actually
need to be weighted down by things to a certain extent. It's good for us. Congratulations, your books, articles and podcasts have helped me a lot. My question is, how do you stay humble while being ambitious? A lot of times it happens
that I get overwhelmed and behave like I know everything and end up fooling and
embarrassing myself. Oh, you too, huh? Okay. While at other times I
become too self-conscious to make any decision, how do I fix this? Well first of all, lemme start off by saying congratulations, you are human and if you ever figure out
how to fix this, let me know because it's a story of my life. Look, to me the the root
of this question is humble while ambitious. I think a lot of people
assume that to be ambitious you have to be self-aggrandizing. You have to kind of like puff
out your chest a little bit and pretend like your doesn't stink. I don't think that's true. I actually think probably
like the healthiest and most realistic form of
ambition is being ambitious about things you know are
gonna be hard and difficult. So it's like, I know to
achieve this project, I'm gonna have to eat shit 10 times a week for the next a hundred weeks. Like that's just part of it. Like if I start another
book, I know going into it, this is gonna be painful,
this is gonna hurt, it's gonna be really hard. There's gonna be entire months where I question my
life and what I'm doing. That's what you're signing up for. So that's how I approach it, is just like understanding the sandwich that you just ordered on the menu and not complaining while you eat it. Am I missing out on important things? If I'm not on social
media, I'm in my twenties and I don't feel like it's made for me, but somewhere my heart
tells me that it's an excuse to not talk to people or take efforts to maintain friendships. I have friends, but constantly keeping up with their lives on social
media is very tiresome. I feel like it's too late to start. Will this affect my
networking opportunities and job in the future? Maybe it totally might. I think if you're gonna make the decision to stay off social media, which I don't necessarily
think is a bad decision, it's probably the right
decision for a lot of people. I think you just have to go into it with a real understanding
of the trade off. The trade off is if you're
not on social media, you're gonna be out of the
loop on certain things. There's gonna be certain
current events, trends, conversations, things
your friends are doing that you're just not gonna be aware of, and you need to be okay with that. On the other hand,
you're also gonna remain more tethered to reality. You're probably gonna be a little bit more emotionally stable. You're gonna have a lot more free time to do productive things. So it's a trade off and it
sounds like you've tried it and not liked it. And instead of trying to pick the thing that's gonna make you the happiest, try to pick the thing that's
going to suck the least, is being on social media less
sucky than not being on it or is not being on it less
sucky than being on it. Choose your suck. In other words. Hi Mark, I'm a 24-year-old music
producer from South Africa. Not yet recognize beside the fact that I've been doing this for a decade, is it safe for me to keep going or should I explore other paths? This is a really interesting question. So this also hits a
little bit close to home. As somebody who's an
aspiring musician myself, I will say this, music is as an industry, music is brutal. And I went to music school. I was more talented I think, than maybe the average
person at music school, but I was not in the top tier. And the brutal thing about music is that really only like the top 0.0001% of the people make it as a career. And so you can be in the top 1%, you can be in the top 0.1%, and you could be so
good that you're better than almost every other person
you ever meet in your life, but you're still not
good enough to make it. And I actually saw this
with a lot of people that I went to school with, guys who are much more
talented than I was. And I almost feel like
it was worse for them because they were so good
that it was easier for them to feel like they were
closer than they were. Like I wasn't good enough
to get caught in that trap. I was just bad enough
that I was like, okay, I'm probably not gonna be one
of these people that makes it. Whereas there were a bunch
of guys I went to school with that were so fucking good, but
they still didn't quite crack that like one in a million, they were like one in 10,000 talent. And because they were
one in 10,000 talent, they kept going and they kept going and they kept going thinking that it was just around the corner. But because they weren't
a one in a million, they they never broke through. So it's almost like being in
that super insanely high level but not top level. That like second level is
almost more dangerous in music because you can kind of convince yourself that it's just one more year
away, one more tour away, one more album away. All that said, you're 24
so you're still young. I will say this too, your peers probably don't have much of an advantage over you. They probably haven't started
much of careers themselves, but that's gonna change soon. I would guess you probably
have 2, 3, 4 years left before not having started a normal career is gonna start disadvantaging you. So personally, I would set
a deadline for yourself. You hear this a lot with people who like aspiring actors and musicians. They like set a date. They're like, I've got until end of the year 2026 or whatever. And if I'm making a
full-time living great, and if I'm not, I'm put putting it down and going and getting a job. What is the best practical way for us to stop comparing ourselves to others? There's not, you're not gonna stop comparing yourself to others. Really the challenge is making
sure that you're comparing yourself to others for good reasons and you're comparing to good people. We're humans, we're
mammals, we're monkeys. Like social comparison
is very much ingrained into our minds, into our brains. And you're never gonna
train that out of yourself. Actually, no, that's a lie. So there is potentially one type of person who doesn't compare themselves to others, and that's like a sociopath. So you don't wanna be that, you do want to compare yourself to others because you want to be a better person, you want to do good things
and you wanna be inspired by people who are very inspiring and do great things in the world. That is a form of social comparison. When you look at somebody
that is a hero to you and are inspired by that person, that's a form of social comparison. So the trick is to not compare
yourself to dumb people or compare yourself for dumb reasons. Big question. Should you stay with someone
if your values are different? And is it true if I'm questioning if I love them that I don't? Oof. It depends on the values. Some values you don't have to align on. Like my wife and I, we
enjoy very different things and that's totally fine. You can have different
beliefs about things, that's totally fine. You can want to go on different vacations, you can have different values around how clean the kitchen should be. Like most value differences
can be negotiated or compromised in some way. So some values you really can't
compromise on a whole lot. And if you do compromise on 'em, there's not much wiggle room. And in my opinion, those
values really come down to how you see your future
and how you see your lives. So values around managing
money, around life aspirations oftentimes around religion. If one person's very
religious and the other's not, that is often just insurmountable. Basically it's like if
you take both people and you ask them what is
their ideal life 10, 20 years from now and their answers
aren't in the same ballpark, you're gonna have a bad time. It's gonna be really, really difficult to deal with that over the long run. So that's the values question. If I'm questioning if I love them, then does that mean I don't? My gut is, yeah, then you don't. Best case scenario, you love them, but the relationship's not good for you and it's not making you happy because it's like even
in a good relationship, you can have the worst fight, but you never question
your love for each other. If the the love is coming in the question in the first place, then that's a sign that
something might be broken. Congrats on your achievement, Mark. Can you show how to get over your ex? It seems this question
has not been brought up. Oh, it's been brought up all right, I just haven't answered it in a long time. So here are kind of the five bullet points of getting over an ex and I
think these are roughly order. So number one, if you are
unable to talk to them without getting like worked up emotionally in some shape or form, don't talk to 'em. Number two, invest in yourself. What that means is improve yourself. So take all this hurt, all
this anger, all this confusion, channel that into a gym membership. Go lift some heavy weights.
Go run on a treadmill. Go take that cooking
class you've talked about taking for three years and
never took fix up that bedroom in your house that you've been
neglecting for for 10 years. Do whatever. All of those things
that you've always said that you were gonna do for yourself but you never got around to doing, now's the time to do them. Number three is explore hobbies. Try new things, especially hobbies. If you lost touch of like if
you were really into basketball before you got into this relationship, go back and play basketball again. Find the activities that
make you feel like yourself. Number four, reconnect
with old friends and family and definitely make it a priority to spend more time with
friends and family. People who love you, who
care about you, who know you, who are gonna have your best interests. It's just good emotional
sustenance in this this time. And then finally, number five, don't date until you are genuinely excited to date. That's kind of self-explanatory. A lot of people feel
pressure on themselves. They put pressure on themselves
to start dating again and it's like, dude, just chill. Alright, we're gonna answer more questions after a quick break. Today's podcast is sponsored by AG1. AG1 has been part of my
personal wellness journey for nearly six years now. Since drinking AG1 daily,
I've had more energy, more consistent focus, and
really I just feel good. That's because AG1 is a
foundational nutrition supplement that supports your body's universal needs, like gut optimization, stress management, and immune support. Since 2010, AG1 has led the
future of foundational nutrition continuously refining their
formula to create a smarter, better way to elevate
your baseline health. With AG1, you get more
than a mere multivitamin. Each serving is packed with
prebiotics, probiotics, digestive enzymes, all designed
to optimize your gut health and ensure you start
the day feeling amazing. I've had friends that were skeptical about trying supplements
and they gave ag one a shot. And what do you know? They love it. Now they're as enthusiastic
and energetic as I am, and their poops are just as beautiful. Ready to revolutionize your health. Visit drinkag1.com/idgaf to get started, with your first purchase
they'll throw in a free one year supply of vitamin D3 K2 and five AG one travel packs. Explore more at drinkag1.com/idgaf.
I don't give a fuck . What are your thoughts about
no fap, pornography, and lust? So for those of you who
don't know, no fap is, it's a, I guess like a
community or a movement of men who abstain from masturbation
for various reasons. I guess women too. I think there's some
women in that community. It's mostly men though, let's be honest. I personally think that there are some
practical benefits to no fap. If anything, it increases energy. It makes you more sexually interested in people that you date. I experimented with this when I was single before I met my wife. And I personally noticed
that it made my... The things that I was
attracted to in women became much more realistic. So I found, like when I stopped porn and I stopped jerking off, I would find all these like little idiosyncrasies and nuances in the women I
met like super, super hot. And that was really cool. It was like suddenly I'm
not like looking for like a Barbie doll everywhere I went and I'm actually like
I'm finding the beauty in each individual person
I got in touch with, I got in touch with my
passion for all the dudes listening to this like, oh fuck, I gotta get back on the porn. I don't wanna sound like
that, but seriously, I felt like I had a healthier
relationship with my sexuality and with the women I was dating
when I experimented with it. That said, I do think
sometimes the benefits get oversold a little bit. I think the guys who tend
to benefit drastically from it tend to be guys
who are addicted to porn. And so my experience is, if
you're not super addicted to porn, the benefits
are nice and marginal. If you're addicted to porn, then they're probably gonna be drastic. Next question. How did
you find Witold Pilecki? I didn't know people in the
US knew about him. They don't. Most people don't. So for those of you
listening, Witold Pilecki is the most badass World War II hero. Like, I don't even know how to explain how much of a badass this guy was. He is the only person
ever known the volunteer to go into Auschwitz. So first of all, he was an
officer in the Polish Army. He started acting as a
spy against the Nazis and part of his espionage,
he volunteered to go to Auschwitz, and then
once he was in Auschwitz, he built a spy network inside
Auschwitz was the first person to relay information of the
Holocaust as it was occurring out of Auschwitz to the alliance. The alliance got his intel read it, said, there's no way that's true. He's exaggerating. Finally, after like
two years of him trying to alert the world to the Holocaust, and nobody believing him, he decided, well, I guess I should escape. He's one of, I think like 35 people to ever escape a concentration camp. He escaped, and then once outside, then he went and told everybody, Hey dude, they're killing
millions of people here. Then they finally started believing him. Just unbelievable story. I wrote about him in the first chapter of "Everything is Fucked,
A Book About Hope" and just, yeah, not enough
people know about 'em. How do you balance having fewer opinions and working on your own
with not being a bystander and speaking up when people are treated unfairly or unjustly? Are there any rules of thumb here? So in this day and age, I
would just be extremely careful on defining what unjust or unfair is, because my observation
is that the definition of both of those terms
has expanded drastically and can get manipulated very
easily through social media and the news cycles. And so what genuinely feels very unjust or unfair in the moment often what happens is two or three years later,
you look back and you realize that it was distorted, that there was like a distorted moment, and you got swept up in it. So as a personal rule for myself, I have moved the bar for
what I deem unjust or unfair to an extremely high mark. In that way, when something
does cross that mark, there's no ambiguity for me. There's no hesitation. It's like, this is a bad thing, I need to say something about it. But it's just as somebody
whose whole life and career has been online for 15 plus years now, I've seen this game play
out many, many, many times, and I've embarrassed myself
many, many times over the years by thinking I was taking a stand for like, oh, this is so wrong. And then like three years later realizing, once all the information comes
out and once greater context is discovered, feeling like an idiot. So I would also be careful
because there's a tendency these days with all the groupthink online and all the outrage porn that
happens online to overreact. So even if something is
objectively unjust or unfair, it's extremely easy to overreact to it. So I would also be careful there. Hey Mark, thanks for everything you do. I'm just wondering what fuels
your soul and keeps you going? Caffeine and blow jobs in that order. It's honestly, it's the only way I can get out of bed in the morning. So with that, everybody
we're gonna have to turn out, I'm not even halfway
through the questions. And these are just the questions that we pulled from the over
a thousand that were asked. So thank you everybody
who submitted questions. We'll do more of these when
we hit more milestones. Be sure to subscribe to the show. Follow the show, leave
a review for the show. It helps us out immensely.
I'm having a blast. This podcast is way overdue. It's something that I've
talked about or people have talked to me about
creating for years now, and now that I have it, I'm
like, why did I wait so long? So we've got a lot of
exciting stuff planned over the next six months. We've got a brand new studio, this is the first time you're seeing it. We're gonna have more amazing guests. We're probably gonna move
to two episodes per week. We're gonna more, drew, we got
a lot of fun stuff coming up. So thank you for listening.
Thank you for watching. Thank you for subscribing,
and I will see you next week. (upbeat music)
