Transcription
This is over 20 years of therapy summarized in the next 10 to 15 minutes. My name is Mark Manson. I'm a number one New York Times best-selling author, and for the last 15 years I've been teaching millions of people practical psychological tips to help them improve their lives.
And when you go to therapy, no matter what you go for, the first and most important lesson that has to get drilled into your brain is that nobody is coming to save you. And in fact, the fantasy of being rescued is itself the thing keeping you stuck. It's a way of outsourcing responsibility while still feeling noble and justified in your suffering. The most dangerous version of someone is going to save me is when you disguise it as a plan. Once I get the promotion, once I find the right relationship, once I move cities, then I'll finally be okay. Then things are going to start to go well.
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Meanwhile, every year you spend waiting for the right mentor, partner, or opportunity is a year that you volunteered to stay exactly where you are. Self-reliance is not some rugged individualism cliché. It's the moment you realize that even the people who love you will never want your life more than you do. Now imagine how much the people who don't love you give a [ __ ]. That's right. They don't.
The second lesson you learn in therapy is that not all of your problems are supposed to be fixed. You just learn to live despite some of them. We've been sold this idea that healing means arriving at some pristine emotional state where nothing hurts you anymore. But that's not healing. That's just denial with a [ __ ] fairy tale ending. The truth is that problems never really go away in life. They simply get upgraded for slightly better problems. And that's actually what growth is. That's what improvement is. Going from one problem to another slightly less shitty problem. The people who seem like they have it together haven't solved more problems than you. They've just stopped demanding that every problem be solvable.
This is particularly problematic in the self-help industry because what happens is that as soon as people start learning how to heal and solve some of their problems, they become almost addicted to it. They almost go searching for more problems that they can solve. They almost look forward to having a crisis that they can bring to a coach or a therapist. And ironically, this obsessive desire to improve everything can hold you back just as much as not wanting to improve at all. See, there's a strange piece that comes when you stop fighting something and just let it sit there. And what you discover is that most of the suffering was your resistance to the pain, not the pain itself.
Another big lesson that you will learn is that you are not afraid of failure. You're just afraid of being seen failing. And those are two very different things. Because ask yourself, if you could fail with total anonymity, with zero witnesses, zero consequences, you would try everything endlessly. Like you wouldn't give a [ __ ]. You'd just [ __ ] go. You'd do it. So, what that tells you is that the fear isn't necessarily about the success or failure or how good you are or how bad you are. It's about some imagined audience that you think will give a [ __ ]. Humans are so [ __ ] weird, man. Like we rehearse our humiliation in advance. We pretend the worst possible outcome is true before it actually is because of reasons. And when we do embarrass ourselves, we play it on repeat in our minds not for years, but for [ __ ] decades. The people you're afraid of not impressing, they're actually barely paying attention to you. They're too busy managing their own fear of being watched to actually give a [ __ ].
Another lesson you will learn is that your mind lies to you all the time. And so you have to learn to question it. See, evolutionarily speaking, your brain's job is not to show you reality as it is. It's job is to keep you alive. And those are two very different assignments. Depression lies to you. It tells you that nothing matters when it actually does. Anxiety lies to you. It tells you that everything is going to go wrong when it actually isn't. Insecurity lies to you. It tells you that you aren't good enough as you already are, despite the fact that you kind of are. But these ideas, they feel so real because they speak to you in your voice in your mind incessantly. And so, the fact is is that we have thousands of thoughts per day and our instinct is to treat every single one like a [ __ ] CNN breaking news alert. When most of them are just, honestly, commercials and spam. So, the skill is not learning how to think positive. It's actually just learning to catch yourself mid-story and asking, "Is this true? Or am I just on autopilot?"
Another thing you will learn is that no matter what you do, not everybody will like you. And this is actually a good thing. It took me a long time to figure this out, but the people who dislike you are actually doing you a bit of a favor. They're self-selecting themselves out of your life so that you stop pouring energy into relationships that were never going to work anyway. See, you need people to disagree with you. You need people to find you a little bit abrasive, who don't totally understand you. That friction is the proof that you stand for something, that you have an identity, that your life means something. Being universally likable is actually an invisible kind of prison. You're essentially outsourcing all of your self-worth to the world around you and then desperately trying to live up to everybody else's expectations instead of your own. The moment that you accept that some people are going to walk away, no matter what, you finally get permission to show up as who you are. And the people who stay, those are actually your people and you get to enjoy knowing that for sure.
Another thing you'll learn is that feelings are not facts, but they are still worth listening to. See, it's in our default nature to treat our emotions as some [ __ ] cosmic decree handed down by the gods and chiseled into stone. But not only is this wrong, it's actually the complete opposite. Your feelings are always transitory, often arbitrary, wholly self-serving, and occasionally misguided. Basically, feelings are data, but they are not directives. They are telling you something is happening that you might want to change or pay attention to, but not necessarily all the time. Your job is to simply consider them. What you decide to do with them is up to you. Me, personally, I kind of treat my feelings like the comment section on YouTube. It's good to look and see what's there, but I don't take it that seriously.
This video is sponsored by Brain.fm. So, here's something that therapy teaches you pretty early on, that your brain is terrible at sticking to what you wanted to do. The problem, of course, as always, is focus. The fact of the matter is that we live in a distracting world and our brains don't just fall into line because we want them to. We have to put them in the right environment too. And that's where Brain.fm comes in. It's actually music built with audio engineered specifically to shift your brain waves into focus states. It uses functional neuroscience to get you locked in faster and keep you there longer. Now, I've been using it quite a bit when I write. I used it to help me write the script for this video. I mean, it works really well. Not only do they have a team of PhDs crafting the soundscapes for you, but they recently had a study published in Nature verifying Brain.fm's effectiveness. Brain.fm has been doing this for over a decade. Millions of sessions, peer-reviewed research behind the tech. It is the lowest-friction, highest-ROI cognitive tool that I've ever come across, and you can try it 1 month for free by going to brain.fm/idgaf. That's brain.fm/idgaf. Stands for I don't give a [ __ ]. Or, just check out the link in the description.
Another thing you'll learn is that sometimes the best thing you can do is let a dream die. Holding on to the wrong dream is like staying in a dead marriage. It itself may not make you miserable, but it will definitely prevent you from finding happiness. The truth is that most of the things we hope for for ourselves at 20, we will figure out that they are completely impractical, unrealistic, or flat-out misguided by the time that we're 40. I mean, when I think about the [ __ ] that I wanted to do when I was 20, thank god I let that stuff go. I wouldn't be here right now if I was doing the stuff I wanted to do at 20. And that's okay. Like there's nothing wrong with that. That's actually how life is supposed to go. I don't know when we romanticize this idea that when you have a dream, you're just supposed to like [ __ ] run yourself into the ground trying to achieve it. That might work for a very few select people of exceptional talent, but for most of us, we're going to have to jump around three or four times throughout our lives to actually figure out where we belong. And if you matured any reasonable rate, you will be [ __ ] thankful you did not become the person you hoped to be at 20. But I think people avoid this because they often feel like they've invested so much in a dream. They've already done so many things. They spent so much time and energy. But that sunk cost fallacy, it will eat your entire life if you let it. Ultimately, grief is the price of letting a dream go. And most people would rather stay miserable and stuck than to have to feel that grief.
You will also eventually learn that your limitations are actually good for you. This is the affliction of our age. Infinite options creates infinite paralysis, not freedom. The person with 10,000 choices and the person with zero choices end up in the same place, not doing a [ __ ] thing. The truth is constraints force creativity. Every great artist, entrepreneur, and thinker produce their best work inside of a box, not outside of it. Saying no to 95% of the things in your life is what gives the remaining 5% significance. So a life without limits is ultimately a life without depth. An ocean a thousand miles wide and an inch deep. Your mortality is a limitation. Your energy is a limitation. Your time is a limitation. Your lack of talent is a limitation. Your upbringing is a limitation. These are not faults. They are the entire reason anything you do matters. Ask yourself, what are you going to do with them?
You will also eventually learn that your parents did their best and still [ __ ] it up. Both of those things can be true at the same time. This is where most people get stuck. They think they have to choose between their compassion for their parents and the honesty about how [ __ ] up their childhood was. You don't. They did their best does not necessarily mean their best was good. It just means they tried. And let's be honest, trying matters. It means something. One way I sometimes think about it is that if they gave 100% and it only ended up being 50% of what you needed, that is not either of your faults. It sucks, it's unfortunate, and it probably hurts, and you've probably been carrying around that [ __ ] trauma backpack for a long time, but it's not necessarily anybody's fault. Forgiving your parents isn't really about letting them off the hook. It's about letting you off the hook. It's about stopping the bleed so you can move forward with your life. It is selfish in the best way. And by the way, your parents were also raised by supremely [ __ ] up people, who also happened to do their best and it was not nearly enough. I remember right after I finished college, I I got really mad at my dad for something and was kind of giving him a bunch of grief about like not being there enough or something. A week later, he told me this story about how his parents, my grandparents, didn't even attend his graduation. They just gave him a phone call and said, "Good job, son." And then hung up.
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I was like, "Okay, yeah, this was an improvement. Thanks, Dad."
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And finally, you will learn that only a few people in your life will matter in the long run. Over the course of your life, you will probably meet thousands of people, and hundreds of them will strike you as really interesting or fun to hang out with or fun to get to know, and you will over index on the opinions of those few hundred people. But the truth is is that only a handful, maybe a dozen people at most, will actually meaningfully change the trajectory of your life. And so, when you find those people, you really have to prioritize them. Because all those others that you think care about whatever the [ __ ] you're doing, they're just background noise. As a rule, we tend to over-invest in the quantity of our relationships because intimacy is difficult and terrifying. Knowing five people deeply means five people can actually really hurt you. Therefore, it's easy to distract ourselves with fake friends, more contacts, more networking opportunities, you know, friends of friends, cool parties, awesome events to [ __ ] Instagram ourselves at, and of course, keeping all of our options wide open. But on your deathbed, you will not think about your follower count. You will not think about your networking contacts, and you will not think about anybody who liked a single post you ever put online. You will probably think about five or six faces. So, act accordingly now.