Mark Manson
@IAmMarkManson
34 Tweets • 2024-03-09 • See on
rattibha.com
Today is my 40th birthday. Here are all the things that
I know at 40 which I wish I knew at 20.
Starting with…
1. Your relationship with others is a direct reflection of
your relationship with yourself. If you treat yourself
poorly, then you will unconsciously seek out and
tolerate others who treat you poorly. If you treat
yourself with dignity and respect, then you will only
tolerate others who treat you with dignity and respect.
Get right with yourself. Get right with the world.
2. The only way to feel better about yourself is to do
things worth feeling good about. Respect is earned,
not given.
3. The only failure is not trying. The only rejection is
not asking. The only mistake is not risking anything.
Success and failure are fuzzy concepts that only exist
in your brain before you do something, not after. After
the fact, everything will have some mixture of both
success and failure within them. And the only real
failure is doing nothing.
4. No one is coming to save you. No single thing will
solve all of your problems. No goal, no achievement,
no relationship will ever fix you. You will always feel
mildly inadequate, and somewhat dissatisfied with
your life. Nothing is wrong with you for feeling this
way. On the contrary, it may be the most normal thing
about you.
5. Be the partner you want to have. If you want a
healthy, fit partner, then be healthy and fit yourself. If
you want an honest and loyal partner, then be honest
and loyal yourself. Put another way, would you date
yourself? If not, then that’s a fucking problem.
6. The most valuable things in life compound over a
long period of time. I’m talking about health, wealth,
knowledge, confidence, and relationships. These
things will frustrate you when you are young—but if
you start building them from a young age and don’t
stop, by the time you get to your 30s and 40s, you’ll
have an incredible life.
7. The most sexy and exciting things in life are the
opposite—they start out extremely fun but then have
diminishing returns. When you’re young, these things
distract you and occupy a lot of your time. This applies
to casual sex, drugs, alcohol, video games, gambling,
vacations, and blowjobs. The first time is incredible.
The second time is almost as good. But then it’s all
downhill from there. Be sure to experience all of these
things a little bit—enough to get your fill—but then
quickly move on. Well, except for blowjobs… don’t
move on from the blowjobs.
https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/176
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8. If you aren’t turning down things that excite you,
then you’re not focused enough on something that
matters. Our world is overflowing with stimulation and
opportunity. If you aren’t struggling to turn down
options, then you haven’t correctly prioritized what
matters to you.
9. Taking responsibility for all your problems alleviates
more suffering than it generates. Most people assume
that if you take responsibility for all of the pain in your
life, you will feel worse about it. But the opposite is
true. The more responsibility you take, the more you
empower yourself to actually do something about that
pain.
https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/176
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10. That’s because you give power to who you blame.
When you blame someone else for your problems,
you are giving them power over you. You are allowing
them to define and dictate your happiness and well-
being. This is completely stupid and not worth it.
11. If you have to tell someone you’re that, then you’re
not that. A rich man doesn’t feel a need to show
people he’s rich. A smart man doesn’t feel a need to
tell people he’s smart. A confident person doesn’t feel
a need to convince anyone that they’re confident.
Don’t say it; be it.
12. Motivation is not the cause of action, but the effect.
If you want to feel motivated to do something, take the
smallest action towards doing it, then let the
momentum carry you forward.
13. Love is not the cause of commitment, but the
effect. You don’t wait until you have the perfect
relationship to commit to a person—you commit to the
person in order to create the perfect relationship.
14. Passion is not the cause of good work, but the
effect. You don’t wait until you find something you love
doing—you learn to do something well, and the
process of developing competence and agency will
cause you to become passionate about it.
15. The person you marry is the person you fight with.
The house you buy is the house you repair. The
dream job you take is the job you stress over.
Everything comes with an inherent sacrifice. Whatever
makes us feel good will inevitably make us feel bad.
16. A happy life is not a life without stress, it’s a life of
meaningful stress.
17. Don’t view exercise as an exchange for something
—you don’t work out to lose a few pounds or “earn”
that burger and ice cream—with this mindset you will
lose motivation and quit. Instead, view it as an
investment. For every unit of energy you put in, you
will receive multiple units of energy back. The catch is
that these units of energy will be spread out over the
following weeks, months and years. This is why
exercising hardcore occasionally is far inferior than
exercising a little bit every day.
18. Trust people. Most of them are good and while you
might get hurt or embarrassed occasionally, the
alternative of distrusting everyone is far worse.
19. There’s no such thing as a life without problems.
Warren Buffett has money problems. A homeless guy
has money problems. Buffett’s money problems are
way more desirable than the homeless guy’s.
Problems don’t disappear—they merely get
exchanged and upgraded for better problems as you
grow. The solution to today’s problem will be the seed
of tomorrow’s. Set expectations accordingly.
20. Growth is rarely accompanied by joy and
celebration. On the contrary, growth is usually painful
to some degree. That’s because growth requires loss
—a loss of your old values, your old behaviors, your
old loves, your old identity. Change always has a
component of grief to it. So be sure to let yourself
grieve.
21. Statistically speaking, a “normal person” is
physically unhealthy, emotionally anxious/depressed,
socially lonely, and financially in debt. Fuck being
normal.
22. If you can’t say no, then your yes’s mean nothing.
We are defined by what we give up, what we sacrifice,
and what we reject. If you sacrifice nothing and reject
nothing, then you have no identity. You are merely a
reflection of the preferences and demands of the
people around you. In other words, if you don’t decide
who you are—everyone else will decide for you.
23. Be careful how you define yourself. Your identity is
a self-constructed mental prison—confining you to a
life of desperately seeking and finding things to
validate whatever you’ve chosen to become. Define
yourself as loosely and ambiguously as possible. You
will feel less defensive towards the world and be
willing to change when necessary.
https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/176
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24. Don’t make assumptions about people. You have
no fucking idea what they’ve been through. Don’t
make assumptions about yourself either—chances are
you massively inflate some things about yourself and
are completely oblivious to others.
25. Nobody thinks about you as much as you think
about yourself. Whatever you are insecure about,
chances are 99% of the people around you haven’t
even noticed it. This is because everybody else is too
busy thinking about themselves too. This may strike
you as depressing, but it is actually liberating. It
means you will be judged far less than you think.
https://video.twimg.com/ext_tw_video/176
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26. Confidence does not come from an expectation of
success—it comes from a comfort with failure. There’s
a word for someone who feels a need to succeed at
everything—a fucking narcissist. Don’t be a narcissist.
Embrace flaws. Embrace failure.
27. Develop a willingness to be disliked. It will grant
you the freedom to do what needs to be done, even if
it’s unpopular. Also…
28. You cannot be a life-changing presence to some
people without also being a complete joke to others.
Part of the price of having impact is some hate—and
usually that hate is proportional to the impact…
usually.
29. Floss. And wear sunscreen. Every day. I know, I
know, it sounds stupid, but trust me on this one. You’ll
thank me in 20 years.
30. Extraordinary results come from repeating ordinary
actions over an unordinary amount of time. Any
overnight success is the result of quietly working in
obscurity for years or even decades. Attempting to
achieve extraordinary results immediately is a recipe
for colossal failure.
31. Choosing a partner isn’t just about romance—
you’re also choosing a confidant, counselor, career
advisor, therapist, investor, teacher, travel buddy,
roommate, best friend, and business partner. And no,
I’m not saying you should try to make your partner all
these things—I’m saying whether you want to or not,
your partner will eventually become all of these things.
So choose fucking wisely.
32. Don’t overestimate love. Love doesn’t fix
relationship problems. It doesn’t make trust issues go
away. The truth is: Love can harm as much as it heals
—it is an amplifier: it makes a good relationship better
and a bad relationship worse. Don’t get me wrong.
Love is great. Love is beautiful. But for a healthy
relationship, by itself, love is not enough.
33. Trust is the currency of all relationships. Every
good relationship is built off the back of years of trust.
Every failed relationship fails because of broken trust.
Therefore, honesty and integrity are the backbone of a
life of healthy relationships and happiness. Dishonesty
and a lack of integrity might be a shortcut in the short
term, but you are completely fucking yourself in the
long term.
34. Speaking of which, if all of your relationships have
the same problem, newsflash: you’re the fucking
problem.
35. There’s no such thing as a bad emotion, only a
bad response to an emotion. Every emotion can be
used constructively or destructively. One of the most
useful things you can do in your life is learn how to
channel your negative emotions constructively.
36. My whole life, I promised myself that I’d never be
that boring old guy who went to bed at 9PM on a
Friday. But now that I’m 40, I’m wondering: why did I
wait so long? Look kids, I know you think you’re cool
with all your glowy neon lights at 5AM and everything.
But uncle Mark is here to tell you: waking up at 5AM,
now that’s the real shit.
37. You don’t have to prove anything to anyone,
including yourself. The only way to win status games
in the long run is to simply stop playing them.
38. Life advice is like clothing. Try it on and if it doesn’t
fit, discard it and try something else. Like clothing, the
worst advice will become useless within weeks, while
the best advice can last you a lifetime.
39. Nothing meaningful in life is easy. Nothing easy in
life is meaningful. We think we’d like to have
everything handed to us, but the truth is that we don’t
appreciate or enjoy things we don’t struggle for. So
stop avoiding difficult things and instead find the
difficult thing you enjoy.
40. Finally, it’s never too late to change. A friend of
mine once told me a story about his grandmother. He
said that when her husband died, she was 62, and for
the first time in her life, she began to take piano
lessons. For weeks, she practiced all day, every day.
At first, the family thought it was a phase, a way for
her to process her grief. But months went by and she
continued to play every day. People started to wonder
if she was crazy or something was wrong. They told
her to give it up. To go back to her life. To face reality.
By the time she was in her 90s, she had been playing
piano every day for 30 years—longer than most
professional musicians have been alive. She had
mastered all of the classics: Mozart, Beethoven, Bach,
and Vivaldi. Everyone who heard her play swore she
must have been a concert pianist in her youth. No one
believed her when she said she took her first lesson in
her sixties.
I love this story because it shows that even at an
impractical old age in life, you still have more time left
to learn something than most professionals at that
thing have even been alive.
I didn’t start writing until I was 27. I didn’t start this
YouTube channel until I was 36. In every phase of my
life, I’ve started five to ten years later than most
people. Yet, it didn’t matter.
It’s never too late. There’s always time. The only
question is how long we’re going to make excuses and
pretend there’s not.
Hope these can help you no matter what life stage you
are at.
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