The Truth About Success | Mark Manson EP 524

0:00Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.

0:11what is the thing that you've learned the most since the rise of your success through books and everything you've done i think early in my career i was so driven and just set on like i had some really moonshot goals in my head and i was just so set on them and so driven to achieve them that I never really stopped and asked myself, like, what after that? Like, you know, let's say you get there. Now what? Then what? Thought never even crossed my mind. I think there was just kind of this implicit assumption that, like, once I get there, everything's going to be gravy, so why worry about it? And the irony is that a huge part of that book is saying exactly the opposite of that, which is you never get away from problems in life.

0:58if you just upgrade your problems, right? It's like success isn't the elimination of problems. Success is just getting better problems. So once my career really took off and I hit a bunch of those moonshot goals that I had dreamed about, I looked around and I still had problems. In fact, I had like bigger problems. In a lot of ways, bigger problems. And that just messed with me. Really? Yeah, it just, it really messed with me. How did it make you feel or what did it tell you about life? What did it teach you? It's not so much that I like believe things before in that weren't true. It's just, there were, there were things that I didn't account for or think about.

1:35And one of those two was that the higher on the mountain you get, the larger the stakes are. Right. So it's like, if nobody knows who your name is and you post an article online and people hate it, nobody cares. Yeah. Three people. So yeah. You just delete the account, open a new one, start over. Right. Like nobody will ever know. So, you know, if you've sold 10 million books and you post an article online and people don't like it, like suddenly there's repercussions to that. Did you ever experience that? I've never been like canceled, right? You had some criticism or negative feedback? Yeah, I definitely had some pieces.

2:14Really? Oh, yeah. They got a lot of blowback, especially back in 2020. Really? Like what was the topic? It's funny because now in hindsight, I can recognize it. Like everybody was just so. hypersensitive oh my god everything like you could say anything and it was it wouldn't have anything that wouldn't have anything to do with politics or vaccines or COVID and nothing like nothing to do with it and people find a way to construe it and be like oh you're one of those and like blah blah blah yeah so there were there were a few moments like in that period that I just got ravaged by a percentage of my audience.

2:53Right. Maybe just because I got lumped in with some sort of cause or political group or ideology or whatever, and they assumed that I was part of that and they just went to pound on me. How does that make you feel though, once you're at that level of success? Oh, it sucks. I can honestly say writing newsletters in 2020 is the least fun my job has ever been. I remember talking to my team and it was like, writing a newsletter every week in 2020, it It was like, it's like being in a boxing ring and getting knocked down and like getting up and knowing you're about to get knocked out again. Wow. Because it's just, it felt like you couldn't say anything that you just wouldn't get ripped apart for.

3:32I think this is one of the things that most people don't understand about having, you know, a goal be achieved on some level greater than where you're at. Let's say you don't really have that much or no one follows you. Not that many people know about you, except for your inner circle of friends and family. And then all of a sudden, a thousand times more people are aware of you. A million times more people are aware of you within a period of a year or a couple of years. And it grows. I don't think people understand that there's a whole different level of pressure that can come with that. There's a lot of privilege and opportunities and amazing things.

4:04But it's like people don't know that you have to deal with a different type of pressure. Yes. Can anyone get away from that pressure with having some type of success? I don't think so. So by definition, success is doing something extraordinarily rare, something that 99.99 % of other people either haven't done or can't do, right? And once you've kind of reached that level of uniqueness, there's a lot of expectation that's put on you. You have an audience of millions now, so you're supposed to say something more empathetic or interesting or intelligent or whatever. the other thing that happens too and i think this is particularly inherent with our line of work which is having audiences is that when your audience is relatively small like let's say a thousand people or even 10 000 people that's usually it's going to be a pretty homogenous group right like when i started my career i specifically wrote dating advice for young men and so my first 10 000 people in my audience it was all 24 year old guys dudes in their 20s like And so it's, you know, what's going to piss them off and you know, what's not.

5:12And once you reach kind of the level where we're at, where, where it's your audience is measured in millions, there's such a massive amount of diversity that it kind of feels like there's landmines everywhere. I can see by the look on your face, you, you relate to what I'm saying. You have to be cautious about what you're putting out there. Totally. Jokes that in your head are completely innocuous. Right, right. Like didn't even thought for two seconds about it. you know, there's somebody somewhere in some country that you've never even been to or thought of that is like extremely offended. And you get that email and you're like, Oh, all right.

5:47I'll make that joke again. You know? And I always feel a little awkward, like getting into this subject because it's, I never want to look like, you know, the whining. Right. Oh, what was me? Yeah. The whining million. Like it's, I wouldn't trade anything. Like I wouldn't go back again. If I I could go back to myself, say, six months before everything blew up or took off. What would you have said or what do you wish you would have known to prepare yourself? I wish I would have known or what I would say to myself is like, you need to start thinking about contingency plan. You know, it's like, what if this thing does 10x your expectations?

6:29What if you do hit that moonshot and you're 32? Then what? What are you going to do? Right? Think about the expectations that are going to be put on you. Think about the pressures that are going to be put on you.

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