Transcript of Confidence Classic: Stop Chasing Perfect and Start Living with Purpose with Mark Manson

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I actually find it a lot more liberating to remind myself of all the ways that I'm not special. Even if I accomplish something, success, however I choose to define it, 99% of my time each day is spent doing very, very average things, worrying about very, very average problems and messing up in very, very average ways. But I think when you focus on that 99% of the stuff that is like everybody else, it liberates you because you realize like, Oh, my problems are actually not that You need.

Come on this journey with me. Each week when you join me, we are going to chase down our goals, overcome adversity, and set you up for a better tomorrow.

I'm ready for my closeup.

Tell me, have you been enjoying these new bonus Confidence Classics episodes we've been dropping on you every week? We've literally hundreds of episodes for you to listen to, so these bonuses are a great way to help you find the ones you may have already missed. I hope you love this one as much as I do. Hi, and welcome back. I'm so excited to reintroduce you. We've had him on the show once before, but today we are revisiting Marks based on his global best-selling, Self-help phenomenon, The Subtle Art of Not Giving an F-Bomb, is a cinematic documentary designed to help us become less awful people. Literally, Mark Manson has a movie, and we're sitting down here today with him talking about it. Mark, thanks for making time to be with us today.

It's good to be back.

Okay, so let's get into it. First of all, it's funny thinking about all of the success, massive success as an author. I bow down to the millions and millions of books that you sold. So impressive, so incredible. However, in your teachings, when you talk about, quote, unquote, success, I'd love it if you could share with everybody what that achieving millions of books being sold, if that related to happiness for you.

That's a great question. I mean, it's funny because in the short run, yeah, for sure, it's exciting to see the sales numbers come in. It's exciting to see the money come in. But in the long run, it's amazing that the mind adjusts to the new normal so quickly. And those same anxieties and preoccupations and doubts and stuff still exist. It's just they take a new form. It's like before the book, I used to be anxious and insecure of like, Well, nobody's going to like my book. Nobody's going to buy it. And then when everybody bought the book, now my anxieties and insecurities is like, Well, nobody's going to like the next book. I'm a one-hit wonder. This is never going to happen How do I top this? The anxiety is the same. It's just the surface of your life shifts and changes underneath it.

Number one, thank you for being honest in sharing that because it makes me feel better about having those same fears and concerns and not having had that incredible success. So thank you for that. But what's interesting is in hearing that you're projecting, Oh, what if this isn't successful? So many of us have heard or have been taught, you've got to put out there what you're going to expect. You've feel that that success has already happened. How do you think that you have been able to achieve not only one success, but multiple successes in your career without having or leveraging that methodology?

I just think in terms of actions, worthwhile actions. I try not to label things too much of like, Okay, well, this makes me a successful person, and this makes me a successful author. I feel like the labels will just trip you up as much as they help you. Maybe they help you early on to get motivated, But as you're going, they can become traps. And so I try not to think so much about what makes this movie successful, what makes this next project a success. And I just try to focus on, Okay, let's make the best movie possible. Let's make the best book possible. What's the message that people need to hear that nobody's saying right now? Okay, let me go write that book. And then let other people talk about success. If I just leave that discussion out of my own brain as long as possible, things tend to go better, I find.

All right. Well, you're talking about not labeling things. And while you might not like to label things, you do like to have your own law, Manson's law of avoidance. So can you break that one down for us? Because I find that to be pretty entertaining.

Yeah, my ego just was insatiable, so I had to start naming laws after myself. No, the Manson's law of avoidance says that people will avoid experiences in proportion to how much it threatens their worldview and identity. I think that's really important because I think most people have had the experience before of, yeah, obviously you get anxious and avoid negative experiences, but a lot of us, we also get anxious and avoid positive experiences as well. That huge opportunity comes around and you freak out and you blow it. Or a person you really like, you finally meet somebody you really, really like and you think there's a lot of potential with and you find a way to screw it or make up an excuse to not see them again. I think most people have had this experience at some point in our lives, and it doesn't make sense. We often get upset and beat ourselves up like, Wow, I'm such an idiot. Why would I do that? But if you look When you get it from an identity perspective, it actually makes a lot of sense. Your ego's job is to keep things the same at all times.

It doesn't matter if things could be better, it doesn't matter if they could be worse. If they're different, that is scary and uncomfortable. And so your mind is always trying to trick you into staying in the same spot and doing the same thing and believing the same things and feeling the same things. And so anytime you try to break out of that default state and change something in your life, it's going to be accompanied with certain amounts of anxiety, anger, sadness, insecurity. It's just part of the process. And I think this is really important to understand because it's a credit to, I guess, self-help marketing over many decades that I think a lot of people have developed this assumption that growth is this... It's like a weekend retreat. It's euphoric. You're going to be singing and screaming and like, hugging strangers when, oh, my God, my breakthrough finally happened. I'm a new person. Let's throw a party. It doesn't work that way. It's usually any real growth or breakthrough. It is accompanied with a lot of insecurity and self doubt. Even when you're on the other side of that, there's anxiety of like, well, what if I fall back?

What if I screw up again? What if I relapse? It's not an easy process, and it doesn't always It does feel great sometimes, but it also feels not great sometimes. I think it's just useful to be realistic about that.

Well, it's interesting that we're talking about this at the same time we're talking about you entering into this new era in your career, you creating and narrating this movie, you opening up your life to a whole new level. How were you able to let go during this process?

The book came out in 2016. We shot the film in 2021. I had about five years of doing interviews about the book, and so I had talked about all the stories and concepts a million times. In a way, it was almost like practice for the film. When it got time to sit down and actually narrate and talk through the film, that wasn't such a hard part. The hardest part for me was, I don't know... Can I curse on this podcast? Sure. Awesome. All right. I don't know a damn thing about filmmaking, and that was apparent very quickly. My first meeting with the director, he started asking me all these questions, and I was like, whoa, I have no fucking clue what you're talking about, dude. You're the director. You figure it out. And so there was a lot of trust and letting go that I had to go through of like, this is my baby. My name is going to be on it. My face is going to be on it. But these other people, the director, the producer, the editor, they're actually making it. And that was very scary at first. And it took a lot of like, okay, just trust them, go with it, assume it's going to be great.

Then as we started going through production and things started shaping up, I was like, okay, good. They know what they're doing. But early on, it was a little bit terrifying.

But this wasn't the first time you had been pitched on the concept of turning your book into a movie, right?

No, I was pitched multiple times and all sorts of stuff. My agent and I, we had meetings about sitcoms and reality shows and even a drama made of a teenage version of Mark. Just tons and tons of stuff, which when you take those meetings, it's very sexy and exciting. You're like, Oh, my God, this person in Hollywood wants to talk to me about my idea. That's a very seductive thing. But what I realized once I actually got into these meetings, what I realized, I'm like, this makes no sense. I'm a nerdy author who sits in gym shorts most days each year alone in an office typing words onto a word document. I'm not going to be on a reality TV show. This is crazy.

We said the younger you, the player could have been on the reality TV show for sure.

Maybe, but that's not what I want for myself, I guess, is what I'm saying. I also felt like that's not the most... It doesn't honor the material the best. I really do believe in the ideas concepts of the book. And so I told my agent, I said, Whatever we do with it, whoever we give the rights to or whatever, to me, what's most important is that the ideas are admitted in a good way, in a way that's going to land with people. And so when GFC approached us, they've done dozens of documentaries, they've done multiple documentaries based on books. When they approached us and they said, Look, we just want to take the book and turn it into a visual medium and stay very, very loyal to the ideas and concepts within the book because we think they're powerful, that just made sense to me.

So it was more around your visions aligned and trusting them?

Yeah, I think it was... We wanted the same thing out of it, I think. With some of the other pitches that we heard, a lot of it revolved. I think a lot of people would just realize it's a great title and it's a great brand, and so you can just milk a lot of attention straight off of that. I think a lot of people took maybe the wrong lessons from the book. I think they saw the humor and the irreverence and the crazy stories, and they're like, Oh, we need to make a show out of that. Whereas with the documentary, Matthew, the producer, he came to me and he said, I love these ideas. We need to get these ideas in front of more people. And that is what resonated with me.

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If anything, we get to see a whole 'nother side of you now in the movie, which to me, it made you much more relatable as a person. I'll tell you the beginning of the movie opening essentially around the story of when you're 13 years old and watching a young 13-year-old, what you went through getting arrested at school. I mean, the drugs, I'm a mother of a 15-year-old. Immediately, I mean, I was heartbroken watching that and then hearing right after that your parents divorce. I mean, I did not get that from the book. So it was immediately, as a viewer, pulled me right into to that story, and it was so powerful. I think that's got to be so relatable for everybody watching this.

Yeah, and that was very much part of our early discussions. The book is about 220 pages, and If you're going to turn a book into a movie, the first question is, okay, just to read this book out loud, it's probably about six hours to get through the whole thing. And we got to get that down to 90 minutes, maybe 100 minutes at most. So we immediately have to cut out 70 to 80% of this and figure out what are we going to keep. And one of the first things that Matthew said is he said, look, in a book, people sit with you. A book is a very different experience. When you're sitting and reading over a long period of time, the author is able to take you down these side trails and explain concepts and say, researchers discovered this in these experiments in the 1950s, and this is how this relates to this concept that talked about earlier. He said, in a movie, that doesn't really work. In a movie, people need a person to sympathize with and to relate to. And so he was the one who was like, We need to put you front and center and make your story the central focus of the film.

Because in the book, it's like I use my own stories as a way to... As examples for the concepts I'm talking about. Whereas in the movie, it's the other way around. We start with my story, we get the concepts and lessons and pull them out of that story. So it's inverted in a way, if that makes sense.

Yeah. And for everyone listening, the best analogy I can give is I'm not someone who sits around and necessarily reads the Bible every night. However, There is a show out right now called The Chosen, which is incredible and has just reactivated me and captured me in a way that simply reading wasn't able to do. For anyone who's already read the book, you're going to love the movie. But if you haven't read the book, this is such a different way to access the content. You're going to get the same messaging, but in such a different way that if you are a visual learner, I really think it's going to pull people in. They did an incredible job with how differently this movie is cut up.

Yeah, visually, it's a very eclectic wild ride. And that was mostly Nathan, the director. He and I had a lot of good conversations about why the book worked. I think one of the reasons why people like the book so much is that it broke convention a lot. For decades, people, if you bought a self-help book, you knew exactly what you were going to get. It was going to be a lot of feel-good, fluffy, nice stories about success and happiness, and here are the three steps to achieve this and that. And the book just spit in the face of all that. It very intentionally messed with people's expectations, was very irreverent, was very funny, had some very difficult stories, challenging stories, but also some very light and funny stories mixed in. It's fast-paced, and it's always changing up what the reader is expecting. Nathan and I had conversations about doing that with the film because there's a lot of documentaries, especially documentaries based on books. It's almost like a dry academic interpretation of, Well, here, this is what Chapter 3 said, and now we're going to show it, and this is what Chapter 4 said, and now we're going to show it.

He and I, we very consciously were like, We want it to be a little bit crazy, a little bit weird, definitely funny, and we want to mix formats. We want to have animations and B-roll and hire some actors to do some crazy stuff and then have me talking for a while and just always keep the audience on their toes of not knowing what's going to happen next.

Yeah, and incorporating the bombing in Japan. I mean, there's so many things going. You're getting pulled in so many different directions that it really keeps you so focused on the film. Again, like I said, I'm someone who's read the book, so you think, is this going to be... It's very different. However, again, to the messaging, it definitely hits home. All right, so some of the key points for people who haven't read the book yet and are thinking, why would I want to watch this film, I wanted to get into this whole idea that is not the popular belief out there that not everybody's special, in fact, are really any of us special, and you diving into that.

This is when I'm the turd in the punch bowl. I very much bang on the drum of this idea that we're not special. I understand why we tell ourselves and tell each other that we're special. Look, if you're a mom or a dad, obviously your kids are the most special thing in the world to you. And to you, they're these perfectly unique, amazing human beings. But I think in terms of understanding our relationship with ourselves and our relationship with the world, I actually find it a lot more liberating and helpful to remind myself of all the ways that I'm not special. That even if I accomplish something great, the accomplish, quote, unquote, success, however I choose to define it, 99% of my time each day is spent doing very, very average things, worrying about very, very average problems, and messing up in very, very average ways. I think so much of our culture, and I don't know if I don't think it's driven by social media or television or whatever, but so much of our culture revolves around the extremes. It revolves around finding the thing, the outlier, the thing that you are either incredibly good at or incredibly bad at and focusing on that, and ignoring the 99% of the stuff that you are pretty much like everybody else.

But I think when you focus on that 99% of the stuff that is like everybody else, it liberates It's great to because you realize, Oh, my problems are actually not that unique. Everybody struggles with insecurities like this. Every family has problems. Every job has frustrations in parts and periods that you don't like and you don't know if you're going to get through. Everybody deals with loss at some point. To me, that's a very powerful concept because I think one of the things, one of the problems that we all have is that when we're very hurt or upset about something, we trick ourselves in the thinking that nobody else can understand, that we're the only ones that feel that way, and therefore we're weird. So you don't say anything because then other people will know you're weird. But when you realize, no, actually, everybody has that problem, and everybody also has the problem of not saying anything about it because they think that they're going to be weird if they say something, it just liberates everybody to start talking about it.

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Jimmy was a party friend, which is very different than a friend friend.

Thank goodness.

Yeah, right. Yeah, I think there's just a general sense these days that people feel entitled to not only things, but entitled to feel good all the time. I think those two things are actually very connected because if you look at... To catch everybody up, my friend Jimmy that I talk about in the book, he's a little bit of a con man, like a low-level con man, like a cheesy guy at the nightclub con man. He was taking shares in stocks from companies and advising them when he had never advised any companies.

He's a total con man.

Yeah, okay. Yeah, he was a con man. But funny story about Jimmy. So the director of the movie, he was like, Hey, can you look? Are you still in touch with this guy? I was like, Absolutely not. And he was like, Can you show me a picture? I just want to get a sense of who is this guy? What does he look like? I went started digging around Facebook to find this guy. I hadn't talked to him in 10 years. And sure enough, I find him. I find his Facebook profile and I click on it. And the top thing on his Facebook profile is a video of him standing on a runway in front of a private jet, telling everybody that if they sign up now, they'll be able to join his exclusive platinum club and join him on his jet. I'm watching it and I'm like, watching it, I'm like, okay, I know him well enough to know that that's not his jet. He just drove to a runway somewhere and is standing in front of it, convinced somebody to let him stand in front of it. And I was like, wow, the dude has not changed a bit.

So anyway, back to entitlement. So I think people who do stuff like Jimmy, Jimmy doesn't think he's a bad guy. He thinks he's a good guy. There's a great quote that I love from David Foster-Wal else. He says, Evil people don't think they're evil. They think everyone else is evil. And so Jimmy, he doesn't think he's a bad guy. He thinks everything he does, all the shady, creepy stuff he does is worth it. It's like a means to an end. But the thing that causes him to feel that way is this sense of entitlement of like, well, of course, I should be able to stand in front of a private jet. That's who I am. I'm going to be a private jet guy. That's what I believe. I'm going to be a super rich I'm a jet guy. And so I'm just going to sneak onto a runway and film a video and tell everybody it's my jet, even when it's not. They start convincing themselves that they deserve these things without actually going through the sacrifice and the struggle to get there. I think That's an extreme example of just this unwillingness to face pain in one's life, this unwillingness to sit with a struggle and actually work through it rather than finding a way to avoid it and run from I appreciate you sharing that behind the scenes that Jimmy is still where we left him, because I think it's interesting in that you are not.

What that says to me is people have the ability to change if they become self-aware or ought to, to stay on that same path. And again, no judgment. People need to do what works for them. I'm on the wanting to change journey. But one of the things that you highlight in the movie that I really connected with was that story of you dating and at first you're thinking, what's wrong with them? And then when you get cheated on, then suddenly you're heartbroken and you start this journey of looking within and noticing these patterns. Can you share a little bit about what you teach that?

Yeah, this is a good example of... I had my heart broken by my first girlfriend in a pretty extravagant way. I think a lot of young, immature people, rather than at myself and asking the difficult questions of, Well, why was I so attracted to this person? Why did I ignore so many red flags? Why did I tolerate these sorts of behaviors? What did I do to contribute to this relationship? What could I have done better? Instead of asking those difficult mature questions, I did the immature easy thing, which is I'm like, Well, clearly women are just evil, just selfish. It's clearly it's the women's fault. So it's a perfect example of evil people don't think they're evil. Evil people think everybody else is evil. And because I protected myself with these irrational beliefs around relationships and women and sex, I became an asshole. I became a really bad boyfriend who cheated on people. And it took a number of years of patterns repeating for it to dawn on me of like, Hey, wait a There's only one thing that all these relationships have in common, and that's me. Obviously, I'm contributing something to these patterns.

It wasn't until that point that I was able to look back at that early relationship, that first relationship, and realize, wow, I wasn't such an angel after all. I was a bad boyfriend, and I was selfish in a lot of ways that I didn't realize at the time. There were a lot of problems in the relationship that I was too immature, naive to address or deal with. And so, of course, she left me. It's actually not surprising in hindsight that she left me. I think that's just it's I have an example of how, again, coming back to how growth is not a weekend retreat. Growth is it's usually slower than we want, and it's not as linear as we want. It comes in fits and spurts and plateaus. And then it's also it doesn't feel good, right? It doesn't feel good to look back and realize, Oh, that really heartbreaking thing that happened to me. I was partially responsible for that. I have blame there as well. And that takes a lot of work to swallow that, especially when you've been feeding yourself these narratives for many years that you were this perfect angel that was wronged by this horrible, horrible woman.

Well, for everybody right now who's having a visceral reaction to this because you've been cheated on, know that Mark is not like Jimmy. He has changed, he is married, and he's actually repping for his wife right now in a Brazil sweatshirt. So shout out there. Okay, there's two things I need to get to before I let you go, and I know I only have nine minutes left with you. All right, You were a hard metal rocker growing up, and you were a big fan of Metallica, and you share an amazing story and the power that pain can have to help someone and hurt someone. I'm hoping you share a little bit about that now.

This actually ties in really well with be careful how you define success. A lot of people don't know, but the original lead guitarist of Metallica was a guy named Dave Mustane. He was right before Metallica recorded their first album, he was kicked out of the band. No reason was given. They just handed him a bus ticket and sent him home. And he basically fumed all the way home. He was really heartbroken, upset. Similar age to how I was, similar reaction, It's like, Those guys are assholes. I'm going to show them. And he went and formed a new band called Megadeath. And Megadeath went on to sell, God, I don't know, 100 million records, toured stadiums around the world. I mean, they're huge. They're arguably the second biggest heavy metal band of all time behind Metallica. But it's fascinating because if you jump ahead 20 years, there was an amazing documentary about Metallica called Some Monster. And they actually went interviewed Dave Mustane in that documentary. And it was the first time that Dave had sat down with the Metallica guys and talked very openly about what had happened. And to everybody's surprise, all the Metallica guys thought like, Oh, of course, he started Megadef.

He's fine. His life's great. In that interview, Dave broke down in tears and he said, I've always felt like a failure because no matter what I do, I'm always the guy who got kicked out of Metallica. And to me, it's just It's such a fascinating story of you can rack up all the external accolades in the world. You can break all sorts of records, put up huge numbers. But if your internal definition of success is off, you can feel like a loser the entire time. To me, it's a cautionary tale of beware of how you define success for yourself because maybe it helps early on, and I'm sure it did help him early on. It helped him start Megadeath and make it a better band. But be careful because it can turn into a trap later. Hold those definitions lightly.

Yeah, I think the word you used in the movie was a prison. I like that word and that visual that it provided. But this guy, maybe he wasn't really in all that much pain. Maybe he's just really good at guilt-tripping people, and he got the last laugh on them. I don't think that you're giving him full credit. Okay, so I said earlier that the movie opened with you as a 13-year-old boy, and that's not actually true. The movie opens and you're talking about death. I wanted to get into this story, which was a really transformational story for you, and I I love the lesson from it about losing a good friend when you were young and that powerful dream and how it's impacted you, if you could share that.

One of the most personal and powerful stories of the book and the film is when I was 19, I was at a party and a friend of mine named Josh suddenly drowned right in the middle of the party. It was very unexpected, very shocking, quite traumatic at the time. It really put me into a tailspin. But it was interesting because I went through a depression for a number of months in a grieving process, but it was also a little bit of a wake-up call. It taught me a very important lesson, which was as such a young person and with somebody Nobody so close to me who had passed away, it was the first time that I really was exposed to my own mortality and the consideration of like, Oh, my God, this could be over tomorrow. This could be over. That could have been me. It could have been anybody. Everybody. And it forced me to reevaluate a lot of the things that I was doing with my life. At the time, I was a lazy stoner kid, didn't put much effort in at school, was very insecure, smoked a lot of pot, did a bunch of drugs.

And it made me really, really think about, dude, if you go tomorrow, are you going to be happy with this? What are you doing? There's a time limit here, and you're not using that time well. It ended up being an incredibly transformational experience for me in a lot of ways. It was the first experience I ever had in my life that lit a fire under my ass and said, Dude, you only get one shot. Get up and take it. I quit doing drugs. I started studying in school. I transferred to a better college, got my life together. Pretty powerful. The concept I talk about in the book is how returning to this conversation about how growth is not always pleasant, I think thinking about your own death is actually one of the most useful ways to get a sense of what's worth pursuing and what's not worth pursuing. I think most people have an experience at some point in their life of either they have a scare in their own life or somebody close to them has a scare or somebody close to them passes away, and it forces them to think about this of like, Oh, my God, half of the stuff that I worry about on a day-to-day basis is completely pointless, does not matter, will not care if I go.

So what's the 50% of things that does matter and I do care about. Actually, a cool story related to that is when I was originally pitching Subtle Art to a bunch of different publishers back in 2015, my agent and I were driving around New York. We were taking all these meetings at different editors, and some of them went well, some of them didn't go so well. I went to Harper Collins and met with my editor, Luke Dempsey. I think he showed up to the meeting a couple of minutes late. But my agent and I were sitting in the office or in the conference and he just walked in. He put the manuscript on the table and he said, I'm a cancer survivor. It's the best thing that ever happened to me. I'm going to publish your book. I don't care what it takes. I was like, That's my guy. He gets it. He totally gets it.

It's so true and so powerful. Mark, for everybody who's read the book, you've got to watch the movie. If you haven't read the book, I highly suggest watching the movie. Where can people find the movie?

The movie is available on demand on streaming platforms, so Amazon Prime, YouTube, iTunes, et cetera, et cetera. And you can go to, I believe it's subtileartmovie. Com to find all that information.

Well, I watched it on Apple TV. Definitely go to your digital provider and check it out. Mark, where can everybody find you?

Markmanson. Net. And then obviously all over social media.

All over social media. Bringing the heat, bringing the humor. Mark, thank you so much for all the work that you're doing.

Thanks, Heather.

All right, guys. Until next week, keep creating your confidence.

I decided to change that dynamic.

I couldn't be more excited for what you're going to hear. Start learning and growing. Inevitably, something will happen. No one succeeds alone. You don't stop and look around once in a while.

You could miss it.

I'm on this journey with me.