You only get so many f*cks to give. That’s the idea in one line, and Mark Manson spends a whole book making you take it seriously.
Manson is the guy behind the blog post that asked what your favourite flavour of sh*t sandwich is, and whether it comes with an olive. It sounds daft. He gets straight to the point, and so does the book.
His point is that everything you want comes with a pile of rubbish attached. Want to be fit? You’re signing up for early starts and sore legs. Want your own business? Say hello to cash flow worries and difficult conversations. Every dream comes with its own sandwich. You just get to pick which one you’re happy to eat.
“Who you are is defined by what you’re willing to struggle for.”
Wanting is easy. Everybody wants the result. The better question is what you’ll put up with on the way there, because that shows you what you really care about. What do you care about so much that you’ll take all the rubbish that comes with it?
I went from thinking I couldn’t run to finishing 107 miles. Nobody gets anywhere near that distance without choosing that particular sandwich, over and over. Early mornings, sore legs, the long boring miles nobody sees. If you don’t care about the finish line, you’ll never put up with the rest.
Don’t let the title put you off. The swearing gets your attention, and then the book gets surprisingly thoughtful. Manson writes about values, about the idea that you aren’t as special as you’ve been told, and about death. Even at its bluntest, it reads like a mate who cares enough to stop nodding along.
Most self-help tells you to think positive and want more. Manson goes the other way. Life is full of problems, he says, so the trick is picking good ones. Happiness comes from solving problems you actually care about.
He also points out that chasing good feelings tends to backfire. The more desperately you want to feel confident, the more aware you are that you don’t. The more you need to be liked, the less likeable you get. Accepting the uncomfortable stuff is what makes room for the good stuff.
He’s got a name for the trap most of us fall into: the feedback loop from hell. You feel anxious, then you feel anxious about being anxious. You feel low, then you feel bad for feeling low when you’ve got so much to be grateful for. Round and round it goes. Manson’s way out is to stop caring so much about feeling bad. Feeling rubbish sometimes is part of being alive. Accept that, and the loop loses its grip.
Spending the budget
The budget is how I always explain it. Imagine you have a budget, and you can only give so many f*cks. Who and what are you spending them on?
Most of us are overspending. We spend it on the driver who cut us up, a comment on a post, what the neighbours might think. By the time we get to the people and the work that matter, the account’s empty. You can’t care about everything. If you try, you end up caring about nothing very much.
There’s a useful way of sorting values in there too. Good ones are things you control, like honesty or creativity. Bad ones depend on things you can’t control, like being liked by everyone. If your sense of worth rests on the second kind, you’ll be anxious forever.
Manson also splits fault from responsibility. Something might not be your fault, and what you do next is still your responsibility. That’s close to an idea in my own book, Done Beats Perfect. I call it being response-able. You can’t always control what happens, and you can always choose how you respond.
And there’s what he calls the do something principle. Action comes first and motivation follows it. You don’t wait until you feel like it. You start, and the feeling catches up. I wrote a whole book about getting things done, so you can guess how I feel about that one. Plenty of good ideas die in a notebook while someone waits to feel ready.
I’ve read it twice now. It’s one of the books I’d hand to someone who’s spreading themselves too thin and wondering why they’re tired. What it’ll help you do is care properly about fewer things.
If you like your books with the nonsense taken out, there are 49 more in my free guide, 50 Books That Shaped Me.
Maybe it’s time you had a look at where your budget’s going.
