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

0:00Chime is changing the way people bank. Fee-free and smarter banking built for you. Join the millions who are already banking fee-free today. Head to chime.com slash confidence. That's chime.com slash confidence. 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 unique.

0:45I'm 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 close up. 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 Mark's, based on his global bestselling self-help phenomenon, The Subtle Art of Not Giving an F-bomb, is a cinematic documentary designed to help us become less awful people.

1:36Literally, 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 kind of funny thinking about all of the success, massive success as an author. I bow down to the millions and millions of books that you've sold. So impressive. So incredible. However, in your teachings, when you talk about quote unquote success, I'd love it if you could kind of share with everybody what that, you know, achieving millions of books being sold, if that related to happiness for you.

2:13That'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 change, they like take a new form, you know? So 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.

2:57I'm a one hit wonder. This is never going to happen again. How do I top this? And so 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 and sharing that because it makes me feel better about, you know, 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 know, 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 got to feel that that success has already happened.

3:32And 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, like 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. Like 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 like, what makes this movie successful? What makes this next project a success?

4:12And 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, you know, let other people talk about success. You know, 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.

4:48Yeah, my ego just was insatiable. So I had to start naming laws after myself. No, the Manson's Law of Avoidance says that that people will avoid experiences in proportion to how much it threatens their worldview and identity. And 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. You know, like that huge opportunity comes around and you kind of freak out and you blow it. Or, you know, 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 up or make up an excuse to not see them again.

5:33And I think most people have had this experience at some point in our lives and it doesn't make sense. We often like get upset and beat ourselves up like, wow, I'm such an idiot. Why would I do that? But if you look at it from an identity perspective, it actually makes a lot of sense. Like your ego's job is to keep things the same at all times. Like 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 kind of trick you into staying in the same spot and doing the same thing and believing the same things and feeling the same things.

6:10And so anytime you try to break out of that default state and change something in your life, it's gonna be accompanied with certain amounts of anxiety, 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 kind of developed this assumption that growth is this, it's like a weekend retreat. It's euphoric. You're going to be like singing and screaming and like hugging strangers when like, oh my God, my breakthrough finally happened.

6:49I'm a new person. like, let's throw a party. It doesn't work that way. It's usually any sort of like real growth or breakthrough. It is accompanied with a lot of insecurity and self doubt. And even when you're on the other side of that, there's, there's anxiety of like, well, what if I fall back? What if I screw up again? What if I relapse? You know, it's, it's not an easy process. And it doesn't always There are like it does feel great sometimes, but it also feels not great sometimes. And I think it's just useful to be realistic about that. Well, I mean, 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, you know, narrating this movie, you opening up your life to a whole new level.

7:36How were you able to let go during this process? So the book came out in 2016. We shot the film in 2021. so I had already had 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 almost like it was almost like practice for the film so 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.

8:21Like 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. Like, 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. It's, you know, my name's 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, you know, assume it's going to be great.

8:59And then, you know, as, as we started going through production and things started shaping up, I was like, okay, good. They know what they're doing. But, you know, early on, it was 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. I mean, my agent and I, we got we had meetings about sitcoms and reality shows and even a drama made out of like a teenage version of Mark, like just tons and tons of stuff, which, you know, when you take those meetings, it's very sexy and exciting.

9:38You're like, oh my God, this person in Hollywood wants to talk to me about like my idea. Like 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. Like I'm like a nerdy author who like 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. Like this is crazy. The younger you, the player could have been on the reality TV show for sure. Maybe, maybe, but that's not like, that's not what I want for myself, I guess, is what I'm saying.

10:21And I also felt like that's not the most, it doesn't honor the material the best. Like I really do believe in the ideas and concepts of the book. And so I told my agent, I said, you know, whatever we do with it, whatever, whoever we give the rights to or whatever, you know, I, to me, what's most important is that the ideas are transmitted in a good way, in a way that's like 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. you know, when they approached us and they said, look, we just want, 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.

11:10That just made sense to me. So it was more around your visions aligned and trusting them. Yeah, I think it was, you know, 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 just realized it's a great title and it's a great brand. And so you can just kind of milk a lot of attention straight off of that. I think a lot of people kind of took maybe the wrong lessons from the book. I think they saw the humor and the irreverence and kind of the crazy stories. And they're like, oh, we need to make a show out of that.

11:45Whereas 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. Meet a different guest each week. I love the Chime! Confidence creator. Chime is changing the way people bank. Fee-free and smarter banking built for you, not like old school banks that charge you overdraft and monthly fees. This is built for you, not the one person. Chime isn't just another banking app. They unlock smarter banking for everyday people with products like MyPay, giving you access to up to$500 of your paycheck anytime and getting paid up to two days early with direct deposit.

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14:47Well, I'll tell you as a reader and as someone who saw the movie, I agree. 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 you, I mean, 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 divorced. I mean, I did not get that from the book.

15:26So it was immediately as a viewer pulled me right into that story. And it was so powerful. And I think that's got to be so relatable for everybody watching this. Yeah. And that was very much part of our early discussions. So I mean, the book is about 220 pages. And the first, you know, 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 like 90 minutes, maybe 100 minutes at most. So we've immediately have to cut out like 70 to 80 % of this and figure out what are we going to keep.

16:04And one of the first things that Matthew said is he said, look, like, on a book in a book, like people sit with you, a book's a very different experience. Like when you're sitting and reading over a long period of time, the author is able to kind of take you down these side trails and explain concepts and say, like, researchers discovered this in these experiments in the 1950s. And this is how this relates to this concept that we talked about earlier. He said in a movie, it's that doesn't really work in a movie. People need a person to sympathize with and to relate to. And so he, he was the one who was like, we need to put you front and center and make your story kind of the central focus of the film.

16:50Because 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 kind of 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 kind of 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.

17:24So 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 and get 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, it's visually, it's a very eclectic kind of wild ride. And that was mostly Nathan, the director. He and I had a lot of good conversations about like why the book worked. And I think one of the reasons why people like the book so much is that it broke convention a lot.

18:03Like for decades, people, if you bought a self-help book, you kind of knew exactly what you were going to get. Like it was going to be a lot of feel good, fluffy, nice stories about success and happiness. And, you know, here are the three steps to achieve this and that. And the book kind of just spit in the face of all that, like it, it very intentionally messed with people's expectations, was very irreverent, was very funny, had some very difficult stories, like challenging stories, but also some very like light and funny stories mixed in. It's like fast paced and it's, it's always kind of changing up what the reader is expecting.

18:43And so 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 kind of academic interpretation of, well, here, this is what chapter three said, and now we're going to show it. And this is what chapter four said, and now we're going to show it. And so he and I had, 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 like animations and B-roll and hire some actors to do some crazy stuff and then have me talking for a while and just kind of always keep the audience on their toes of like not knowing what's going to happen next.

19:20Yeah. And incorporating the bombing in Japan. I mean, there's so many things going on. You're getting pulled in so many different directions that it really, it keeps you so focused on the film. And again, like I said, I'm someone who's read the books. 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 want to get into this whole idea that is, you know, not the popular belief out there that not everybody's special.

19:52In fact, are really any of us special and you diving into that? This is when I'm kind of like 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. And look, like 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 like 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.

20:35That even if I accomplish something great, 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. and I think so much of our culture and I don't know if this is, I don't think it's driven by social media or television or whatever, but like so much of our culture revolves around the extremes. It revolves around the finding the thing, like 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.

21:23But 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 unique. Like everybody struggles with insecurities like this. Every family has problems. Every job has frustrations and 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. And so it's, 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 kind of trick ourselves into thinking that nobody else can understand.

22:07That like, we're the only ones that feel that way. And therefore we're weird. And so you don't say anything because then other people will know you're weird. But when you realize like, no, 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. Meet a different guest each week.

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26:10I mean, you're claiming he was your friend, but this guy, Jimmy is wow. I mean, this guy is incredible, but you set it up. So basically saying, listen, there was this error of, you know, we were telling everyone they were so special and they're so amazing and you're going to get an award for doing nothing and then suddenly we have an entire generation of of your friend jimmy jimmy was a party friend which is very different than a friend friend thank goodness yeah right uh yeah i i think you know there's just a general sense these days that people feel entitled to not only things, but entitled to feel good all the time.

26:54And I think those two things are actually very connected because if you look at, so 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 and 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 comment but um funny story about jimmy so the the director of the movie he was like hey can you can you look like are you still in touch with this guy i was like absolutely not and uh he was like can you like show me a picture of like i just want to get a sense of you know who who is this guy what does he looked like.