Book Review - The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

Do any of these people sound like someone you know?

A person who goes on a rant after the waitress messed up their lunch order.
Someone who can’t understand why the bagger at the grocery store put too many items in the same bag.
Someone who bases their success on the relative success of others.

I’m guessing if you had to rank them on a happiness scale, you’d rank them pretty low, wouldn’t you?

You can just hear these people droning on and on about the injustice/the slight/the betrayal they encountered.

The problem is that these people give a f*uck about too much. They’re choosing to be upset about these otherwise insignificant events.

The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

Mark Manson talks about topics like the one I just mentioned in his book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. He also talks about how to deal with the stresses of everyday life. The constant barrage of your friend’s perfect lives on social media, and how you don’t live up to that standard. Why failing is OK, and often time necessary. How the pursuit of happiness actually makes you unhappy, and how you should actually pursue the opposite.

I first heard of the book a few months ago while doing some self reflecting. During that time I was questioning if it was me who had a problem when I realized how little I cared about things that got others all riled up. When I heard of this book, I figured it would be worth a read to see if what I’m experiencing is normal.

Turns out it might not be normal, but it is healthy to not be consumed by every little thing. Instead, choosing what to give a f*uck about – rather, choosing to give a f*uck about what’s important to me – is what helps me stay happy.

Look, I could go on and on about this book, but I see how unhappy some people are, and it’s sad to watch. There is a better life out there. If you’re struggling with this at all, pick up a copy of the book. I highly recommend it.

– Before I get started with this video, I just want to have a quick disclaimer to let you know that I’ll probably use a few colorful words. I might swear a few times in this video. If that’s not your thing, not your cup of tea, or whatever, feel free to pause it, turn it off now, whatever. It’s just going to be the nature of this video. It’s not something I do all the time, but just happens to kind of fit in with the subject that I’m going to be talking about. Also doing another thing that I don’t usually do, and if you know me, you know that I don’t read a whole lot. It’s not that I can’t read, or that I’m slow, or anything like that, it’s just, it’s not something I do a whole heck of a lot. But in this video, I’m doing a book review of a book titled, hopefully you’ve turned this off by now, if you are not one who likes to hear any kind of swear words, or not-nice language, but the book title is The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. There you go. Now you know why I’m going to be using that word, and words like it, in this particular video. So I first heard about this book a few months ago. It’s a book by Mark Manson. And at the time that I had first heard about this book, I was doing a little bit of self reflection. There’s lots of stuff that I was seeing other people getting all worked up about that I don’t really seem to care about. Politics. Not that I don’t care about politics. I do, I have political opinions, but I don’t flip my lid over things. People are getting all worked up over the Democrats taking the house, or the Republicans being in the White House, or whatever the case might be. I don’t tend to get so worked up over these things the way other people tended to. Sports is another thing. Some people are all, oh, my team is the best, and they need to win, and they spend their entire weekend following their team. They spend all this time, and all this money, and all this energy following their team. Don’t get me wrong, I like to watch some sports from time to time, but I don’t go crazy about it, either. I’m not following my team all over the country. I’m not paying for expensive cable subscriptions, just so I can watch the show all the time. As a matter of fact, I watch very few sports events, at all. I might watch the World Series, or some other championship-type games, but outside of that, I don’t really care. Sounds weird. And I thought to myself, am I the weird one, here? Is this something that it’s unique to me? And then I heard about this book, and I was like, you know what? This sounds a lot like me. It sounds like I just don’t give a fuck about a lot of things. And to me, it felt weird. And I was like, I got to read this book and see, is this something that I should be concerned about? Is this something I should, maybe I’m doing the right thing, and maybe everyone else is wrong. Or maybe the opposite. Maybe I’m the only one who’s screwed up, and I need to get my head put on straight, or whatever. So I don’t want to give too much away from this book, but I do want to hit on a couple points that really made me say, yeah, you know what? I’m not the weird one, at least, not for the things that I do or don’t care about. So going to the book, a lot of times, people struggle by giving too many fucks, as the author puts it. For example, like when the bagger at the grocery store puts too many items in your bag, or your favorite TV show gets canceled, or someone cuts you off on the highway, it ruins your entire day. You come home, and you’re talking about it. You go to work, you’re, I can’t believe this person did this thing to me, and all this, and you care so much about it, and it just, it consumes you, and it prevents you from doing the other things that you should be focusing on, the things that you should be caring about. But the negative things that happen in life, the real negative things that happen in life, that really matter, we tend to ignore or avoid altogether. Like maxing out our credit cards, or our children’s grades in school, or talking to our spouse about what’s really bothering them, things like that. So the goal that the author talks about in this book is to learn how to focus and prioritize your thoughts effectively, the things that you really care about. You should pick and choose what matters to you and what doesn’t based on your own personal values. Now, your personal values and my personal values are going to be two different things. That’s what makes them personal. I might care more about veteran-related issues than you might, and that’s okay. Those are things that I care about. I might care more about how my kids are doing than how my favorite sports team is doing, and that’s my choice. That’s my personal value. You might have different values, where you might care more about something different. When you give a fuck about everything and everyone all the time, you fool yourself into thinking that you can be comfortable and happy all the time. But we know that’s not the case. But we tend to tell ourselves that it is. We tend to tell ourselves that it should be that way. Anything that stands in our way sometimes becomes that sources of unhappiness. Every challenge that we meet is seen as a failure, and every disagreement we have is looked at as a betrayal, somehow. But we can disagree on things. Doesn’t mean that we’re betraying each other. You have your beliefs, your views, I have mine. It’s cool. The book talks about a guitarist in the early ’80s, who was kicked out of his band, and it tore him up inside. And maybe out of spite, I don’t know what the real reason was, but he decided that he was going to start his own band. His own band was going to be better than the other band. His band was going to sell more albums, he was going to play in bigger stadiums. It was going to be the most successful band, ever. The band he ended up forming was Megadeth, which went on to sell over 25 million albums. So by all accounts, I would say he made it. He did what he set out to do. He sold tons of albums. He played in stadiums around the world. He has thousands of fans all over the place. He did it, kudos to him. Unfortunately, the band he was kicked out of was Metallica, which went on to sell over 180 million albums. By some accounts, they’re one of the greatest rock bands of our time. They sold countless millions more albums than Megadeth. They were more successful, more popular, had more fans. And so this guitarist from Megadeth considered himself a failure, despite all the accomplishments he had. In his mind, the measure that he was, or the success metric, or whatever, that he was measuring himself against, was how successful he was compared to Metallica. And to him, he was a failure. To you and me, someone with millions of dollars, thousands of fans, famous around the world, would be pretty successful. And him getting all sobby over whether he was better than another band seems kind of ridiculous. It does to me, anyways. But it’s because what we value is different from what he valued. What I might value is how many albums could I sell? Could I sell 25 million albums? That’s great! That’s sweet. I’d love to be able to sell that many albums, and have that many fans, and all that kind of stuff. I’m not that musically talented, so I never would, but if I were, that would be an awesome goal to hit, is to be that successful. But by the metric of being more successful than Metallica, which was his metric, he was a complete failure. The thing this book did for me was reinforce that my belief that you can’t care about everything. There’s just some things that are out of your control. No matter how good the guitarist was, it’s not going to change the fact that Metallica was just better. And it wasn’t a change effect that they were going to be as successful as they were, so why even worry about that? On the other hand, there are some things that are 100% in your control, or at least partially in your control. And if they can move the needle towards success, or towards failure, in one way or the other, those are the things that are worth giving a fuck about, using the author’s language. The book put into words the way I felt, and it kind of made me, it was kind of reaffirming, to me, that it’s okay to not care about everything. It’s okay to have a few handful of things that you actually do care about, and just focus on those. Inside the book jacket cover, there’s a quote from the book, and I just wanted to read it real quick. It says, “In life, we have a limited amount “of fucks to give, so we must choose our fucks wisely.” Sounds almost poetic. “This book brings you a much-needed “grab-you-by-the-shoulders moment “of real talk, filled with entertaining stories, “and profane, ruthless humor. “It’s a slap in the face for all “of us, so that we can start to lead “more content and grounded lives.” I agree with that, 100%, and I highly recommend reading this book. If you ever feel yourself being so stressed out, and bombarded with all the crap that goes on in this world, whether it’s politics, or sports, or religion, or family, or whatever it is, pick up this book. Read it, give it a try. It’s not that long. It’s a what? 200-something-page book, 212-page book. You can read it in a weekend, and it might just help get over some of that stuff that you’re dealing with. I’d highly recommend it.