Mark Manson on Embracing Pain for Personal and Professional Growth | Human Behavior | YAPClassic

25:24The more you put yourself in pain with working out, the more you're able to keep working out and kind of like build that strength. and everything is pain. When you're happy, it's just like your pain is alleviated. When you're sad, your pain is amplified. So let's talk about anti-fragility. This is a really cool concept that you have. And basically it means that we need to kind of, like you said, choose our suffering and be okay with choosing pain and not avoiding it. Can you tell us more about that? So anti-fragility comes from Nassim Taleb. it's a really cool idea where he talks about how the opposite of fragility or being fragile, it's not necessarily being robust.

26:08It's actually being anti-fragile, which is you gain from pain or disorder in your life. And so if you look at things like the human body or the human mind, the human body and human mind are actually, they're not resilient, they're anti-fragile. The reason you get stronger at the gym is because you are breaking your muscles down and making them stronger. The reason that you get better after failure is because you are breaking down a lot of your assumptions and beliefs and your fears and building up better experiences over them. And so in that sense, by actually inviting certain amounts of pain and struggle into your life, you make yourself a stronger individual with far more potential.

26:53And one of the big arguments of the book and what I fear is that in our culture, it's becoming so taken for granted that we're all supposed to be happy and we all deserve to be happy and we all deserve to have a great, easy life and nobody should suffer and all this stuff. Yes, we should try to get rid of injustice. We should try to get rid of people who are predatory or people who are evil. But you shouldn't try to get rid of suffering because suffering is necessary for growth. It's necessary for making people stronger, more resilient, more mature human beings. And so what I fear is that as our culture kind of has turned towards this obsession with positivity and feeling good all the time, we are losing that ability to grow from our pain and our failures.

27:52And I think you say this in the book. You say that everything you do, everything you are, everything you care about is a reflection of your choice, your relationships, health, work, emotional stability, your integrity, your breadth of your life experience. if any of these things are fragile in your life, it's because you've chosen to avoid pain. I think that's so powerful because it's so true. The way that you grow is through pain. Let's stick on that a little bit. Tell us about how pain helps you grow and how if you don't choose to accept pain and if you avoid pain, how you kind of stay as an adolescent and you don't ever really grow up to be an actual adult.

28:31Tell us about that. So I think for me, and I define this in the book, but what defines an adult or just being a mature, healthy individual is that ability to understand what is worth suffering for and when is it worth suffering for it. In the simple example of, say, a romantic relationship, for that relationship to grow, you have to understand when a fight needs to happen. Some people, and I think younger, more idealistic people, their idea of a good relationship is a relationship where you just never fight. But it's like that's not a healthy relationship because that means you're hiding things, you're pretending things are not happening.

29:09And that makes you more fragile as a couple. Whereas if you get very good at noticing the things that need to be addressed and being able to address them, even though you know you're going to fight about it, you know it's going to be painful, you know you're going to be angry at each other for a day or two, if you're able to do that, you actually become a stronger unit. Yeah, your bond is stronger. For it. It's the same thing in business. You know, if you've got employees that are messing up, like you can't pretend they're not messing up. Yeah. You have to say something. Or if you've got a coworker that's screwing around, like you have to say something.

29:49Totally. So there's so many instances, you know, everywhere you kind of look in life, there's like a skill set of understanding what pain is necessary for growth to occur and then having the ability to step into that pain. I loved the fact that you brought up how like pain can strengthen relationships. So just to relate to that a little bit, my listeners don't really know this. I haven't really shared this, but I shared it on LinkedIn, but not on my podcast. I actually went home to take care of my whole family who got coronavirus. So like my mom, my dad, my brother, and my brother was home from California and, you know, we haven't spent that much time together in a long time, you know, and it was such a hard time, but now I feel so close to my brother and my mom and everything because it's like, we like went through that crazy time together and we'll never forget that.

30:42And it sucked. It was horrible. But at the same time, like my relationship, particularly with my brother is like so strengthened because we went through this horrible experience together. So it's just, it's funny how like, even if it's a horrible experience, there's always some silver lining and actually like that kind of pain can can grow a really big bond absolutely and it's i talked about this in my first book subtle art i said that if you think about the most important experiences of your life probably three out of four of them were negative experiences very like a breakup a death losing a job like these all they're they're horrible in the moment but like When you look back on them years and years later, you're like, wow, I'm so glad that happened.

31:27I'm such a better person for that happening. So you say that living well does not mean avoid suffering. It means suffering for the right reasons. So tell us, what do you suffer for? What suffering do you do to provide value in your life? Well, I stay inside. That's one way I suffer for the right reasons. I think there are a few fronts. one I think the most obvious example is just my career so it's writing is I mean it's fun a lot of times but a lot of times it's suffering I'm finishing up another book right now and I went back to revise a chapter that I hadn't looked at in a few months and I just looked at it and I'm like this is terrible this is absolutely terrible and it's just it's like almost heartbreaking like I had to take the rest of the afternoon off because to have something that you've been working on for over a year and you think you're almost done and then you go look at an early part of it and you're like, wow, I can't publish that.

32:30That is awful. It just flattens you. And I think writing has its emotional struggles that a lot of people just don't. I seem to be constituted for it. I like being alone. I like working by myself. I don't mind rewriting something like eight different times and so that's a that's a form of suffering that I'm well adapted to and that and that I I even get a little bit of a sick pleasure out of and so it's that's kind of why it's become my life is is you know one thing I always say in my talks is that it's not being good at something that's not because you enjoy it necessarily being good at something is you enjoy the sacrifices that are involved in it totally in a way it's the thing you end up best at is just the pain you can tolerate better than most other people happy new year yap gang i just love the unique energy of the new year it's all about fresh starts and fresh starts not only feel possible but also feel encouraged and if you've been thinking about starting a business this is your sign there's no better time than right now 2026 can be the year that you build something that is truly yours the year where you take control over your career, and it starts with Shopify.

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38:13I'm obsessed with this model. So if you guys want to take the Working Genius assessment and get 20 % off, you can use code profiting. Go to workinggenius.com. Again, that's workinggenius.com. Stop guessing. Start working in your genius. Totally. And that's kind of like back to like you're in your dream job. Not every job is perfect. It's like what job do you enjoy the most? even the shitty parts of the job can you tolerate the most. That's how you find your dream job. It's not something that you like all the time and you're always happy doing it. It's just the parts that do suck, are you able to manage that suffering enough?

38:47Even if you're in your dream job, your dream job is going to suck about 30 % of the time. There's just no such thing. We all have to do taxes. There's just no such thing as a job that is fun every single day. So I do want to talk about the difference between a child, an adolescent, and an adult. You say it's not how old they are or what they do, but why they do something. Can you unpack that for us? Sure. So when I go through this, I'm summarizing. There's a field called developmental psychology, and so I'm kind of just summarizing this entire field. But basically, the human mind develops in a series of stages.

39:28We don't just come out of the womb knowing how to drive a car and send an email. So when we're kids, everything we understand about the world and understand about life is very much just derived from pleasure and pain. Toys make us happy. Candy makes us happy. Falling off the bed makes us sad. We don't really think past that. kids aren't able to think about the future. They aren't really able to reason about the past. They aren't able to think about other people's feelings or what other people might do. It's just all they know is like, this is fun. This is not fun. I want to do the fun thing. As we get older, though, we start to realize things.

40:13We start to realize that sometimes something is pleasurable now, but it causes pain later. you know so maybe it feels good to eat like a pound of candy right now but when i'm like sick in six hours you know last time i did that i got sick and i felt awful and so kids start to understand that there are repercussions for things they start to understand there's cause effect they understand that other people have thoughts and feelings that are affected by their actions as well. And so around late childhood or early adolescence, maybe around ages like eight, nine, 10, kids start to figure out that the world is very transactional.

40:54Like if I agree to do what mom says today, she will reward me tomorrow. And so the adolescent phase is very much built off of a life of managing transactions, of understanding that if I behave in these certain ways, people will be nice to me and I will get good things that I want. Now the transactional approach to life is fine. We all need to be able to do it. We all need to be able to think through those things. But the problem is that it kind of objectifies everything. So if your approach to all of your relationships is, well, I'm going to say this to Hala because I know she likes to hear that.

41:33So if I say this, she'll like me. That's great if I'm trying to get a favor from you. But if I'm trying to be a friend or if I'm a family member, that's a really crappy way to have a personal relationship with somebody that everything they say to you is based on what they think you want. You can't really operate in life that way. And you run into the same thing. If you look at businesses, for instance, some people are very good at the transactional game of, okay, if I put this product out or market it this way, I'll get a lot of money. That's one way to play that game. But at a certain point, you have to ask yourself, okay, maybe this will make me a lot of money, but am I screwing over my customers?

42:16Am I willing to screw over my customers or am I willing to break a law to add profit to my bottom line? You start running into situations like that. And so it's only when you get to adulthood that you understand that sometimes you simply have to willingly take on pain for no other reason than it's the right thing to do. that it's better for you in the long run, it's better for society in the long run, it's better for the people you care about in the long run. And so a lot of kind of like the highest virtuous concepts that we've had throughout human history, things like honesty, charity, compassion, these are all things that can really only be attained in adulthood.

42:57I have to be willing to sacrifice myself for my family or willingly sacrifice myself or give up potential profits to make sure my employees are taken care of. You know, those sorts of actions and behaviors can only occur once you've kind of transcended this transactional view of the world. And so that's the adult view. Yeah, and if I remember correctly from your book, to think and act like an adult, you need to endure pain, you need to abandon hope, and you need to let go of the desire for more pleasant and fun things. And you have to act unconditionally. That's something else that I remember.

43:35The unconditionality. Yeah. And the thing about adulthood, I mean, I go kind of hardcore on it, but I think people should understand that it's like an ideal. And I even mentioned that often this kind of ideal, this like selflessness of adulthood is something that's been canonized and crystallized in religious myths and heroes and stories and things like that. Like none of us are actually like fully that way all the time. Yeah, it's impossible. We've all still got our inner child that just wants to drink ice cream for the next three hours. And then we've all got the adolescent in us who's like, maybe I can scheme a little bit and get a little bit more for myself.

44:16You never completely leave those things. It's like what point of the spectrum are you on? Totally. So one of the other topics, there's so much content in your book. I'm actually having a hard time trying to grab everything that I need to talk about. This is definitely one of the hardest interviews that I've had in terms of that, of tying everything together. But one thing that I wanted to talk about is fake freedom versus real freedom. I thought this was really important for my listeners to understand your perspective on. Can you talk to us about that? Yeah, I feel like this is very important in this day and age and especially in the U.S.

44:51I think if you look historically, the idea of freedom and liberty is not what we traditionally think of it today. Today, we think of freedom and liberty as simply being able to do whatever the hell we want when we want to do it without being constrained by any sort of outside force whatsoever. In my opinion, this is a very childlike, entitled version of freedom. This idea that it's like, I should be able to do whatever the hell I want and you if you don't like it. Like that is like an angry child sitting on the floor of a grocery store demanding that he can eat as much candy as he wants. The truth is, is that we all live in a society.

45:31We all have to make compromises because we are all better off for it. And the truth is as well is that when you do indulge everything you want, it makes you more fragile. It makes you a weaker human being. It makes you a more susceptible individual to outside forces. In chapter eight of the book, I spend that whole chapter kind of arguing that we need to redefine freedom the same way that the philosophers and the Greeks and Romans understood it, which is that freedom is the ability to choose what to give up. Freedom is choosing what you will sacrifice. And so freedom is not sitting on the couch eating whatever the hell you want for the rest of your life.

46:15Freedom is actually getting up at six in the morning and going to the gym because by building up your body, you are actually giving yourself more options for the future. By limiting options today, by choosing which options you're going to limit today, by choosing not to eat Cheetos, you are giving yourself more options in the long run. And so freedom is actually, it's a personal form of discipline. It's a constant choice of what sacrifice am I going to bring into my life and what is going to be important to me. And so in that sense, I see things like, and I just have to bring this up because we're in the middle of it now.

46:55There are people protesting during this coronavirus thing saying that the government shouldn't tell me to stay home. I shouldn't have to stay home, blah, blah, blah. You know, and it's like, it's like, guys, you can't like, you're okay if the government tells you you can't smoke next to a pregnant person or like you can't smoke in a restaurant. You know, you're fine if the government tells you you can't scream fire at a theater. How is this any different? At some point you have to, you have to accept that it's not about what you, freedom is not about what you individually want. It is about what you are individually capable of sacrificing and giving up both for yourself and for the greater good.

47:35And also because I think you talk about this in your book that if freedom is variety or, you know, unlimited experiences, like you'll never be satisfied. You'll never actually be free because you'll never be satisfied. There'll always be something else that you're trying to attain. And so you'll never really be free. You say that freedom isn't what you can experience. It's what you can limit yourself to. I think that's really powerful stuff. Okay, so the last question I'm going to ask, it's on the last chapter of your book. You ask us to abandon hope all throughout the book, but when I was reading your last chapter, it's clear that you have hope in science and technology and AI.

48:14And you imagine the world in the future where AI has taken over humans and ultimately does a better job of running the show than we do. and that's terrifying but then it's oddly hopeful. So talk to our listeners about this world that you imagine in the future with AI. Well first I would argue that it's not even the future really. It's already happening. I think AI runs the world better than humans in many ways already. You know the last chapter is a little bit tongue in cheek. It's a little bit just me being a little bit crazy and being like you know what let's see how far I can take this. I kind of, one of the more tragic things I talk about in the book is that ultimately we do have to hope for something, but our hopes inevitably end up causing everything to be f***ed.

49:06You know, it's everything is f***ed, which is why we need hope, but then it's our hopes are what cause everything to be f***ed. So it's kind of like this vicious cycle that keeps happening. And it's just kind of an inherent part of our psychology. There's not really any way around it. And so But really the message of the book is like, since we can't get rid of hope, we have to just be very, very careful about what we hope for. And the last chapter is kind of my very, very careful, slightly facetious hopes, which is just that I personally think, you know, one of the cornerstones of my personal philosophy and kind of all my work in general is that humans suck.

49:49Like we are just, we're not. Yeah. The human mind is not very well equipped to handle global, ethical, moral questions. If you look at human history, it's just full of violence and screw ups and disasters. So it's my starting point is like, if there's any way we're going to kind of save ourselves from ourselves, it's going to happen via science and technology in some form. So that is the thing, the one thing I dare to hope for, although I am also very skeptical of my own hopes. Yeah, well, I hope our AI masters are nice to us. Exactly. They're not evil. Okay, cool. So the last question I ask all my guests is, what is your secret to profiting in life?

50:42Secret of profiting in life? I think if you just make it a habit to give more value than you consume, good things will happen everywhere. It'll happen with people and relationships. It'll happen in business. It'll happen in your own life. Like it's just build a habit of give more than you take. I love that. That reminds me of David Meltzer. Thank you so much, Mark. You have such great content. Your books are amazing. I would highly recommend everybody to go get your latest book. Everything is f***ed. You can find it everywhere. And thanks so much for your time today. Thanks for having me. Thank you.