Mark Manson on Important Lessons in Life

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Mark Manson. It's far more pleasurable to sit on the couch and eat cheetahs and watch Baywatch we runs, but running a marathon it rings far more happiness and fulfillment. Welcome to the one you feed Throughout time, great tinkers have recognized the importance of the thoughts we have. Quotes like garbage in, garbage out, or you are what you think ring true. And yet for many of us, our thoughts don't strengthen or empower us. We tend toward negativity,

self pity, jealousy, or fear. We see what we don't have instead of what we do. We think things that hold us back and dampen our spirit. But it's not just about thinking. Our actions matter. It takes conscious, consistent, and creative effort to make a life worth living. This podcast is about how other people keep themselves moving in the right direction, how they feed their good wolf. Thanks for joining us. Our guest on this episode is Mark Manson,

author and personal development consultant. His writing is a different take on the self help genre. He calls it self help from a first person perspective. Mark has been published and quoted by CNN, Huffington Post, Business Insider, Yahoo News, The Sydney Morning Herald, in a variety of other publications. He is also the CEO and founder of Infinity Squared Media LLC. Hi, Mark, Welcome to the show. Hey Eric, thanks for having me. I'm really excited to have this

conversation with you. Your writing is really a combination of Ay, it ties very closely to a lot of the things I think about um, so it's, you know, aligned with it philosophically. I think it's very well done and it's usually pretty funny, and that is a great combination when all those three can come together for me. So I'm looking forward to this. But we'll start like we always do, with the parable. There's a grandfather who's talking to his grandson.

He says, in life, there are two wolves inside of us that are always at battle. One is a good wolf, which represents things like kindness and bravery and love, and the other is a bad wolf, which represents things like greed and hatred and fear. And the grandson stops and he thinks about it for a second, and he looks up at his grandfather and he says, well, grandfather, which one wins? And the grandfather says, the one you feed.

So I'd like to start off by asking you what that parable means to you in your life and in the work that you do. Well, in the work that I do, I write a lot about these kinds of subjects, so I kind of automatically interpreted. I've heard the parable before, but it's probably been ten or twelve years since I've heard it, But hearing it now, I immediately interpreted through kind of the lens of UM a lot of the way I frame things and talk about things in my

own articles. UM. Basically, for me, what it always comes back to is is we are always choosing what to find important. And I think everybody realizes to a certain extent that everybody makes choices around, uh, around what they find important, But I don't think everybody realizes that they

actually choose what they find important. And UM, the parable brings that up for me that it's it's a very subtle uh in level of awareness that I think it's very very important for people to get to, at least it was very important for me to get to personally, and and that being taken the time to really consider what you think is important, not just focusing on orienting around what you sort of think is important, but taking time to make sure that that what really is important

to me question is answered right exactly. So, for instance, in my own life, there were times where I would dedicate years of time and energy and effort, uh, towards pursuing some goal let's say, um, building a business and making a lot of money, or being really popular and well accepted among my peers. And if you had asked me at the time in my feeding the good wolf from the bad wolf, I would have said, obviously, I'm feeding the good wolf like I'm trying to be a

great guy. I'm trying to be successful. Um. But it's looking back at those periods, I don't think I was like the yardstick. I was using them to measure Uh, myself was not the right one. I wasn't choose mean what to find important very well. Um, so for me, yeah, it's for me, it it And and if you read through my archive This comes up over and over and over again because it's been so crucial in my own

my own development. But it's looking at what I'm choosing to find important and then asking myself whether that should actually be important or not right. And one of the things that you you spend a lot of time talking about is is opportunity cost is the idea that you know, when we choose something, there are other things that we can't choose, which is something that I think I certainly

wrestled with I still do occasionally. Right, there's just so many things to do, but you're you're very um straight to the point on that about making those choices and then sticking with them. So talk to me a little

bit more about opportunity cost. So I think there's there's a lot of tendency to think, uh these days, people who are very goal oriented or gold driven, um, you know, they kind of have this vision in their mind of Okay, this is the perfect work situation that I want to achieve, and this is the perfect uh family or love life situation I want to achieve, and this is the social

life situation I want to achieve. And we all kind of have this vision for ourselves and when we're pursuing these goals we we when we're so focused on kind of achieving these goals or these these things that we hold important, we aren't aware of the sacrifices that are involved, the things that we have to give up. And I think one of the things that most people eventually learned the hard way is that everything requires giving something up

in return. There's nothing nothing is free. Nothing is nothing comes uh freely through work. You you it's not just working for something. You have to be willing to to give up other um, other hopes and dreams and aspirations and in time that you could be spending doing other things with the other people. Um. And that that's a really hard pill to swallow, I think for a lot of people, especially kind of when you're um, super ambitious or maybe young and starry eyed and you know, I

think the world can be your oyster. It's it's a it's a little bit of a rude awakening when you wake up at thirty and you realize that there's all these things that you wanted to do, but it it there's no practical way you're ever going to be able to do them. Yeah, I mean, you talk about that most people look at it as a work life balance or you know, I'm always too busy. And then you say, and I'm just going to read it because I think it's you say it very well. But what if the

answer isn't to do more? What if the answer is to want less. What if the solution is simply accepting our bounded potential, our unfortunate tendency as humans to inhabit only one place in space and time. What if we recognize our life's inevitable limitations and then prioritize what we care about based on those limitations. What if it's a simple a stadium, this is what I choose to value more than everything else, and then living with it. Yeah, this is why I'm a writer, Eric, Because that's like

ten times better than than what I just said. Now, I I totally get it. Um. I first was introduced to you with a post that I don't know what your most popular post ever is, but I'm going to guess this was one of them, which was the subtle art of not giving a fuck? That is the most popular one. Yeah, I was. I was going to say it's a you know, it's done certainly in a humorous style. I think you use the that word as many times as you can fit into it, so it's very entertaining,

but it is also incredibly insightful. And you basically talk about UM A couple of subtleties to not giving a fuck, and one is UM. I guess I've said it enough at this point. There's no reason to hold back now that the episode was going to explicit, So all right, listeners, if you don't want to hear it against fast forward thirty seconds. All right. You say, to not give a funk about adversity, you must first give the funk about

something more important than adversity. And then you also say, we all have a limited number of funds to give pay attention to where and who you give them too. Yes, I think what I talked about in the article is that I think there's this misconception that UM people, as we sometimes colloquially say, who do not give a fuck, who we perceive to be particularly bold or confident or resilient in some way. I think the perception is generally that these people are that way because they're not phased

by problems, Like things just don't seem to bother them. Uh, they do what they want to do, and they kind

of disregard everything else. And I actually think this is a really really bad and almost dangerous misconception of what confidence is because people who behave that way, who just do what they want and are completely the woid of any sentiment for the way they're affecting the people around them, Like this is actually it's very it's sociopathic behavior, and it's actually it's something that we don't really uh, we

shouldn't be encouraging in people. And so I actually I struggled for a long time in my writing, how can I describe this in such a way that, uh, like, how can I describe what what's really going on, like what a confident person actually is, um in a really succinct way that there is also catchy and interesting. And for me, the conclusion I came to is is basically, people who are confident or resilient, it's not that they don't they don't care about the problems that they face

or the struggles that they go through. It's just that they choose to care about something even more, uh, they choose two find something else more important. That article was was great um for a bunch of reasons. The fact that It has a picture of bunk Moreland from the wire, a picture of him sitting there saying bunk Moreland not giving a fun since two thousand and two was almost the best part of it, because that guy cracks me up. Yeah,

But I think what's really interesting about that. I mean, some of it is about, you know, knowing what you control, what you can control, and what you can't control, and if you if you can't control something, then you know to use the language you're using. You know, giving a funk about something you can do nothing about is a complete waste of energy and takes away your ability to apply that energy to something that you do care about. It's like a very vulgar and fancy way of saying,

why cry over spilt milk? Click? You can't Sometimes things in life just suck, Like even if you achieve a lot of things, like a lot of your goals and dreams, like, there's shitty aspects of even the best things in life. And so I think there there's a really hard and unpopular lesson in coming to terms with that and accepting that that is um spread throughout your writing, and I think probably in listening to this show, it's spread throughout

there also, which is that there aren't easy answers. There's not permanent happiness. There's not a point which you you achieve enough or do enough, or learn enough or grow spiritual enough that you're done and life doesn't isn't challenging,

or isn't painful, that day is not coming. You've got a lot of information about relationships, and one of the things that you talk about, You've got some characteristics of good relationships, bad relationships, and things to look for in a partner, some things to not look for in a partner. One of the oldest pieces of relationship advice is you and your partners should be best friends, but you look at it in the negative. What do you mean by that?

Specifically with the friendship tests. You know, most people think, well, my my wife or my husband or my partner, Uh, they should be like my best friend. And oh they are like my best friend. I spend so much time with them, and we go see movies together, and we talk a lot, and you know, we buy each other gifts and whatever. Yeah, of course they're like my best friend. Those are all like the good things about a friendship.

Nobody looks at the bad about a friendship and then ask themselves if their intimate relationship is actually a friendship but not so. Basically, what I say with the friendship test is ask yourself if you're having relationship problems, that you're having relationship problems with your your husband or your wife. Basically, ask yourself, would you tolerate the same behavior and your

best friend. Um, So, if your husband is hanging up on you and refusing to take your calls for days at a time and calling you a bit, would you accept that behavior and your best friend? The answers usually no and um. This Usually it shocks people, and in fact it's it's really funny. Eric. I've gotten emails over the last year of people saying, hey, I decided to divorce my wife. Thanks, and I like, all right, way to go, happy to help, Like I guess Mark Manson

loves executioner. Yes, it's one of those things where people if you can just get people to see things in a certain light, suddenly, uh, what should have always been obvious it becomes obvious. I think in romantic relationships, because there's so much emotional attachment involved, we're we're very biased about them, like we're very clouded in our judgment about

our own relationships. Um. And so one thing that I try to do and a lot of my writing is give people like little logical like logic tweaks like that, UM to kind of break them out of that cloud.

Because you know, most people when they go through relationship problems that they're so caught up in the well he said this, but then I did this and will and I'm not going to call him back because blah blah blah, and you you just need something that will pull them out of that um and get them to look at it objectively, just for a few seconds, uh, so that they can make a better decision about what they're doing exactly.

So one of the things on the show that I talked about a lot is positive thinking, and we talked about how it's not in a lot of cases the right tool for the job, you know. I mean I asked people a lot, you know, when is it positive thinking? And when is it you know, being delusional? And um, you you talk about that a lot. And You've got a great article railing and against a book that I also have real challenges with, which is the secret? Tell

me what what your problems are with that book? In under thirty minutes, and with less than fifteen I'm saying it was just I was just gonna say, can I keep saying fuck? Because because you might just unload. I mean, this is the thing about the secret is it's easy. It's easy to rip on the secret. But um, what it says is not really anything new. I mean what it says has been around for um hundreds of years at this point, which is it's basically i ollusional positivity,

similar to what you call it. And it's it's basically it's teaching people. It's basically taking miserable people like people who have real challenges and frustrations in their lives, and instead of teaching them how to solve those challenges and frustration and how to empower them to uh take responsibility and and overcome those challenges or maybe even just live better with those challenges, um, it basically teaches them how to detach from reality and delude themselves into believing something

that doesn't exist. Um. And I just I think that's a horrible, horrible way to go about it because and yeah, sure it does make some people happier, and it does work out for some people. I don't deny that. I just I think if you apply that strategy to everything, Like, you can really run into some some really questionable and

I mean morally questionable issues, you know. So for instance, like let's say I'm I'm a single guy, and I go on a date with a woman and she doesn't you know, have a lot of interest in me, and she doesn't call me back. But I read the secret and I decided that, hey, you know, if I just dream about being with this woman and keep pursuing that dream,

then I'll make that a reality. And you can it's very easy to connect the dots there to see how that could be taken by somebody to to mean that they should start harassing a person or uh, start doing

some really shady and creepy stuff. I think I think you actually see this a lot more in the business world, Um, I've run into a lot of entrepreneurs, particularly internet entrepreneurs, who kind of buy into the same thinking of of of you know, if I if I just dream about you know, having my my online income and doing this or that, uh, then it will come true and I

deserve this. And as soon as you enter into that world of like I deserve to make this money or I deserve to have this a friend or I deserve to have this sort of happiness. I think that kind of short circuits people's moral judgment. Um, they start becoming okay with like lying in the marketing, or they start becoming okay with uh, you know, doing like creepy and shady things with people that are around, and so yeah, it's it's I I think I I understand why, uh

it benefits some people. But the argument that I make is essentially that it's a short term benefit at a long term cost. It removes people's ability to make proper judgments. Um, And basically it removes their ability to interpret reality in a in an accurate way, which is always harmful in the long run. Right, Yeah, I mean I agree. I think there is, um, there is something to that idea. There's a reason that there are some results to uh, the law of attraction. But I don't think there because

the reason people think they are. I don't think it's a magic thing. But I think if you generally approached the world with a little bit more positivity and a little bit more openness, better things are going to happen to you. Um. But I agree with you that idea of you know, never allowing negative you know, you can't

have negative thoughts about things. If you have negative thoughts about things, then you're not gonna get what you want to be sort of like going, well, I'm just never I'm I'm never gonna get cancer, so I'm never gonna get to the doctor, even if you've got lots of symptoms of it, and just going well, I'm not I don't have it. I'm not going to get it, you know, um, because if I think about having it, then I'm attracting

it to myself. The other dubious, uh moral problem with that, which you have a great video on your post about it that features Dave Chappelle basically uh talking about the same thing. Is this idea that then if people who are in really bad circumstances, you know, did they attract that? You know, did did the starving? You know, all these refugees right now, you know, to use a timely crisis trying to find a safe haven. Is is that what they have attracted? And it's I just I get hung

up on it too. Yeah. Absolutely. I often say that you sometimes you can't think your way into right action. You have to act your way into right thinking. And um, you actually have something similar where you say action isn't just the effective motivation but also the cause of it. Yes, So I call this and I actually I really like that you have to act in the right action I call my version of that. I call it to do

something principle UM. And basically the big discovery I found in my own life, which is that I found that, you know, most people, like most people, I would always wait for an inspiration to occur to me before I took action. And like most people, I would kind of sit around being like, well, crap, where's my inspiration? Like why am I not? Why don't I feel inspired to pursue anything or do anything? Like what's my life purpose?

And eventually, at some point something clicked and I realized that inspiration doesn't just cause action, it's also the effect of action. So what I started to notice is that even by doing something that I don't particularly like or I'm not particularly good at, this would generate some sort of like emotional reaction in me. You know, I would go out and try something new and do horribly at it, and I would be like wait a second, like I can get good at this, and next thing I know,

I'm spending weeks like getting good at this new thing. Um, but that never would have happened if I hadn't just like blindly gone out and done something. So I called to do something principle because it's essentially, when in doubt,

you just shut up and do something. And it doesn't matter what it is you it could be anything, it could be seemingly the most silly and and significant thing, because the idea is that by doing that small and insignificant action, it's going to create kind of a snowball effect of of generating inspiration and further action. I couldn't agree more. I mean, I think that I always try and encourage people to be biased towards action, for you know, a bunch of reasons that you just listed there. I mean,

one is, obviously, the momentum just builds on itself. If you can get moving, you can make a lot of you know, a lot of progress. And the other one is a lot of times we're trying to figure out something that's a ways down the path, and sometimes if you just take five steps down the path, you can see further down the path then you could five steps before, and so you're in a much better place if you just start moving. But if you sit there kind of staring down the path hoping to be able to see

around the corner, it's not going to happen. Happiness is not the same as pleasure. What do you mean there? One example I used to straight this often is if you imagine somebody running a marathon and nearly killing themselves to say, break a three hour marathon, something they've been training for for years. There's nothing pleasurable about that experience. Uh. It's far more pleasurable to sit on the couch and eat cheetahs and watch Baywatch reruns. But running a marathon

it brings far more happiness and fulfillment. It's a great life achievement. And I think a lot of people mistake happiness for pleasure, happiness for feeling good. I think a lot of times happiness, UM doesn't actually feel good. It's actually it's painful or distressful. UM. I think back to some of the happiest times in my life, and a lot of them involved, you know, working twelve hours a day on some project that I really really cared about and thought was really important and wanted to do a

good job at. UM. Some of the happiest days of my life were staying up until five in the morning three days in a row with a bunch of friends. Just because something it feels good doesn't mean it is good. And something just because something feels bad doesn't mean it is bad. And and I think I true happiness is derived from a meaning of an experience. It's it's it's derived from again, what importance we ascribed to a certain experience.

I think generally, when you look at people who are always struggling to be happy in their life, um, the issue isn't pleasure. In fact, it's ironic that generally people who struggle the most with happy happiness in their life, they tend to have a very pleasurable life. They have a comfortable home, and they have all sorts of diversions, you know, like video games and television and movies and stuff.

They sleep in a comfortable bed. Um, they don't have to worry about, you know, any sort of like kind of existential things. What they lack is meaning. What they lack is a sense of importance, a sense that like

anything they do matters. Um. And so I guess this kind of comes full circle back to the wolf thing, and that, uh, they haven't yet learned to choose what's important in their life, or perhaps they choose chose pleasure and comfort to be the most important thing in their life, which, in my opinion is a is a pretty shitty choice. It backfires on people. Yeah, it's amazing how I think all of us know that on some level, and yet

how hard it is to step away from that. I think it's because pleasure works for a little bit, right, It has its it has its moments um where it is pleasurable. I think that where I, you know, where I run into trouble or places of my life where I've struggled is when it's the only source of happiness for me. Like if I'm not having a pleasurable experience

of some sort, there's no happiness. If I'm not eating something that's good or and that's kind of an ugly place to be in and then taken to its extreme, it leads to um, you know, it's it's insatiable, right, And I've been that down that road with with drugs and different things of there's there's just not enough of it. There's never enough to satiate you. An example I I use sometimes as well as Yeah, like a cocaine addict

has plenty of pleasure going on. You know, that doesn't necessarily mean that you would trade trade places with him. You know, one of the things that you say about happiness is that you say it's the perpetual pursuit of fulfilling our ideal selves, which grants us happiness. What do you mean by pursuing our ideal selves? It's solving problems, um, in our lives. It's it's having some sort of ah goal or or ambition to look forward to. UM. I think people you see this a lot with people who

have like midlife crises. Um. You know, they get to be thirty five, forty years old, and they've got the house, they've got the dog, they've got the kids. Um, they've got the nice job, they're taking vacations to where they wanted to vacations, and they fall into this like really sort of like existential malaise because there's a real sadness that comes with achieving all of your dreams, because then

you you don't know what to look forward to anymore. UM. I think I very specifically in that sentence that you read, the perpetual pursuit of your ideal self, like pursuit is I think the most important word there. It's it's like that old Buddhist cliche, you know, the journey is more important than the destination or whatever it says. Um. I think it's it's happiness comes from this constant feeling of improvement,

from this constant feeling of solving problems. And if you ever run into a point in your life where you either a I feel like you can't solve your problems, then that's going to make you miserable. But be if you also feel like you don't have any problems in your life, I think that also brings a certain kind of depression or misery as well. I think there's there's this need to always have feel as there is something more important to be striving for, just always needing to

be growing or challenge to the next thing. Basically yeah, and and I think as we go through our life, the nature of that growth or challenge changes a lot, you know. So when you're young, a lot of it is determined by, uh, figuring out what you're good at, figuring out what kind of people are going to be close to in your life, figuring out um, you know, making a lot of important some of the first major decisions with your life. I think as you get older,

some of those challenges change. You know, maybe they become more about um, being a good parent, or being a good friend, or being a good partner, UM, about achieving some sort of stability, long term stability, making sure your future is secure, your children's futures secure. So these things evolved as as time goes on, and you see them play out and people in different stages of their life.

But UM, I think what matters is that there's always something there that you feel is more important than yourself UM or your current self rather UM, something that you're always working towards. Excellent, And we're getting near the end of time. But I'd like to quickly ask you. You wrote a very long article about Ken Wilbur. Um, first, could you tell us who Ken Wilbur is. I joke in the article is sad Ken Wilbur is the smartest

man you've never heard of. Um, So, Ken was a American intellectual slash or I shouldn't say was he is. He stopped writing, but he's still alive. Um. He is an American intellectual slash philosopher slash kind of mystic. You know. He he really gets the spirituality, particularly Eastern spirituality. UM. And his whole deal is that, starting in the eighties, he decided that he wanted to try to integrate all fields of human knowledge into like one unifying theory. Um.

And that sounds kind of crazy. But when you read him, even if you don't really think he did it, um, and I actually kind of don't think he did it, it's pretty amazing what he did. UM. Like what he comes up with his grand theory of everything, which by the nineties came together and was pretty solidified. Ah, it's pretty incredible. And the breath of his knowledge is incredible. And his ability to tie seemingly completely unrelated fields of knowledge. Um.

You know. So he'll have chapters in his books that will discuss UH spiritual states of in Hinduism and tie that into Freudian psychology and relate that to UH nineteenth century industrial development. You know. And it's like he does it in a way that makes sense. Um. I I read all of his books in my early twenties, UM, And I I just felt myself getting smarter the more I read them. I read a bunch of his work also, and I agree with you the things he says. You're

just sort of staggered by this seems so incredibly smart. Um, you know, and you feel smarter. Um. You you came to a point with it. It sounds similar to the point that I did. After I read it all, I was sort of like, now what, Like I wasn't quite sure how a lot of it applied in life. Be on like you talk about in certain cases, um, feeling like people who have this mindset are smarter than other people. But you go on to talk about kind of what

happened to him and some lessons that you drew from that. Yeah, I basically the big lessons I drew from him is that it doesn't matter how how smart you are or how evolved your thinking is like that nobody's immune. I mean, we're all humans at the end of the day, and we're all biased and we're all flawed, um, and we all kind of cave to these natural tendencies to form these in groups who judge themselves as superior to to

the out groups. And um, even when the people are extremely well meaning and compassionate and worldly like, these things happen and unintentionally they're there human nature. And for me watching him and going through my experience, you know, I I had the same experience, which is I read all of his book, so I was blown away, and I had this huge excitement of like, all right, you know, let's change the world or whatever, and there was just no application of it at the end of the day.

It was a lot of theorizing. It was a lot of kind of armchair this is how humanity is and unfortunately or fortunately you know, life and humanity is experienced, you know, in our data day actions, and um I just found that as interesting as his ideas and theories were, they didn't really inform or change my life in any significant way. And when I look at his career, I feel like his big downfall was choosing to believe that they could exactly Well, Mark, thank you so much for

taking the time to talk. It's been a pleasure. I really enjoy your writing. We'll have links in the show notes to where people can find you and read more of your stuff. Thanks Eric, it was a pleasure being here. Okay, take care, all right. Thank you. If what you just heard was helpful to you, please consider making a monthly donation to support the One You Feed podcast. When you join our membership community with this monthly pledge, you get

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