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This is the art of charm.
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Learn everything you need to know to crush it in business, love, and life.
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Welcome to the Art of Charm.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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Today we re talking with my friend Mark Manson.
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He s an author of the new book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck.
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Whoops, yes, this episode has a little profanity in it, not my fault, blame the title.
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You should listen to this, because we talk about how conventional life advice, all that positive, happy, self-help stuff we hear all the time, is actually fixating on what you lack, possibly making you pretty unhappy.
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We ll also talk about something called the feedback loop from hell, and how that s making you miserable.
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and how we can use something called the backwards law to get out of the vicious cycle of comparing ourselves to others.
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Something else called the self-awareness onion and how it can lead us to greater understanding of ourselves and our relationships.
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This is a value-packed episode with some really practical and fascinating concepts, so enjoy this one with Mark Manson.
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And with that, welcome to the Art of Charm.
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We bring together the best thought leaders, teachers, and exceptional individuals to teach you how to be a top performer in life, in your relationships, and at work.
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If you re new to the show, we d love to send you some top episodes and the toolbox where we discuss things like body language and nonverbal communication, persuasion, networking, negotiation, mentorship, and everything else we teach here at AOC.
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In the US, just text charmed to 33444.
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That s C-H-A-R-M-E-D to 33444.
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Everywhere else, go to theartofcharm.com.
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We may not have all the answers, but we definitely have all the right questions.
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All right, here s Mark Manson.
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One of the reasons that I wanted to talk to you is that, I should say our brand, because even though we don t have the same brand, it s very similar, of self-help, personal growth, whatever you want to call it.
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Both terms are kind of sticky and gross right now because of everything that s going on with them.
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It does fixate on what you lack.
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and we ve got all these kind of different contradictory stories, especially in the United States and the West, where we ve got our Bukowski stories, right, never give up, persevere, and when you see these successful athletes and actors and things like that, a lot of what they say, since they can t really explain how they got where they got, they just say things like never give up on your dreams, which is actually terrible advice, it only worked for them, and they re ignoring a lot of other factors.
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Right, I ve actually, I ve wanted to write an article forever, maybe this will be the impetus to actually sit down and write it about survivor bias and how like for every Steve Jobs or Michael Phelps, there s thousands and thousands of people who worked just as hard, made the exact same sacrifices and just came up short or didn t make it and a lot of times we re so attached to that narrative of like, oh yeah, this guy believed he could be the best and he worked hard and he made it
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that we don t account for just the role of chance in life, like being in the right place at the right time, like simple, small decisions that you got right and it has this kind of like butterfly effect that spreads down to everything else you do.
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It s not a pleasant thing to think about, like, oh, I could work my ass off and do everything right for the next 10 years and not be the next Mark Zuckerberg.
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People don t like to hear that, but that is,
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actually a realistic view of how things work.
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where a bunch of like, seduction, and I love that term because it s so disgusting.
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People are talking about marketing and all this stuff.
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And I remember AJ, original founding member of AOC, he said something like, look, Jordan, unsubscribe from that list, man.
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You ve got some guy on here.
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talking about how you set up your YouTube, how you start a blog.
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There s so many people on here doing really remedial stuff, and a lot of the people there were kind of shady, as you may or may not recall.
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And so we bounced.
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And it s funny, because the reason I remember that particular example was because he was talking about a post that you had put on there, like, hey guys, I m thinking about just putting my writing on a blog instead of trying to constantly market my stuff as an e-book.
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And everyone s like, no, you need a YouTube channel, you need this, you need that.
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And I was just like, ugh, I m stressed out for you right now, I m unsubscribing.
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but you did it anyway, you just started writing, and again, this was a long time ago, and I remember thinking with AJ, like, yeah, you never know, but I mean, if you re figuring you re gonna publish your stuff online for free, and everyone s telling you not to do that, this is the wrong crowd for us, because our whole business model is make this show for free, and give it away, dot, dot, dot, some people will like it, some people won t, right?
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And you did that, but your blog is enormous now, so F everyone else, right?
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Exactly, with that group, and I think just a lot of people in general, is they get caught, and they have what worked for them,
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and they can t imagine any other way for anybody else.
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So if somebody else comes along and says, well, hey, I want to try it a little bit differently, their immediate reaction s like, no, no, no, that doesn t work, because it didn t work for them.
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Don t try to reinvent the wheel, Mark.
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Everybody knows that you re gonna have to create a great Facebook fan page and drive traffic to your Facebook fan page and market your eBooks with little countdown clocks and sales letters.
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I mean, that s what they think, and that stuff is quickly dying.
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And it s funny for you and I to sit here and laugh about it, right?
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At every stage of the game, what we have to be asking ourselves, and tell me whether you agree, is to what extent am I those people on that email list laughing or telling other people not to reinvent the wheel, and then some kid s like, I just think you re wrong because you re outmoded or whatever, and then they come up with the next Snapchat type thing that I still think is stupid.
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Yeah, I mean, it s funny.
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I did another interview a few days ago, and somebody asked me, they said, like, if somebody is going to become the next Mark Manson, if they re going to have a platform that s going to explode in the millions of people, like, what do they need to do today?
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And I told him, I was like, I have no clue.
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And that s probably the whole reason
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that they re gonna blow up is because somebody s gonna realize something that nobody else has seen.
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They re gonna see some new platform, whether it s Snapchat or video or whatever, and they re gonna do something unique that nobody else has done yet, and it s just gonna take off.
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And in hindsight, we re all gonna look back and be like, oh yeah, that was really obvious.
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But when it s happening, you just have no clue.
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You just have to go with what feels right.
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Yeah, it took us a long time to get our shows uploaded to YouTube and they re still just, you know, audio with images over it.
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And a friend of mine said, you know, this solution would have been really obvious to you if you were like 19.
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YouTube would have been the first thing and then you would have spun your podcast off from that.
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And I remember thinking, yeah, you re probably right.
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And then looking at iTunes at some of those top YouTubers and seeing how they have
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shows that are twice as large as Art of Charm because people watch them bake their birthday cake on YouTube and instantly subscribed to their podcast.
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And I was just like, wow, okay, we did this backwards.
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But we wouldn t have thought of that at my age.
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And what I saw in your book that I thought was interesting was there s a lot of emphasis, as there should be, on not just going, ah, I won in this area, I got this, or we got that, or this worked for me, and this didn t.
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It s where am I going wrong right now as per a perspective that maybe I haven t quite even found yet.
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We re looking for ways to look at ourselves that are different, otherwise we can t grow.
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Does that make sense?
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Right.
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The chapter you re referring to is titled Why I m Wrong About Everything and So Are You.
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Yes.
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The perspective that I talk about in that chapter is that our mind s natural tendency is to always fall into what we believe is right.
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It s like we were just talking about.
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These other people started businesses five, 10 years before us.
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They did it a certain way.
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So then they turned around and told us, this is the way it s done, this is the right way, this is how you make money, this is how you grow a platform.
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Our mind is just constantly looking to solidify itself in its certainties and its biases and its beliefs that support everything that we ve already experienced.
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And what I say is that we should come at it from the other angle, an intensely skeptical angle of,
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always assume that you re wrong.
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From a purely philosophical point of view, we are always wrong about whatever we believe.
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Knowledge is always moving forward, and if you think about things you used to believe 10 years ago or five years ago, it embarrasses you now.
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And the things that you hold dear and hold to be true today are likely gonna embarrass you in 10 or 20 years from now.
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So if we use that as our starting point,
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we can just start now by deciding that all of our assumptions are flawed in some way and then start asking ourself, well, if I am wrong about this, what does that mean?
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What does that mean for my career?
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What does that mean for my relationship?
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What if I m wrong in this fight that I just had with my wife?
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What if she s actually more right than I am?
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What if I have a blind spot and I can t see my emotions in this way?
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To me, it just, if you build that habit into your brain, it creates a much more grounded, healthy, and flexible individual.
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The title of the book, though, I gotta say, stands out a little bit, you know, the subtle art of not giving a fuck.
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You re gonna have problems with that on store shelves, I imagine, but that s maybe something you don t give a fuck about, possibly.
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Yeah, let s hope not.
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I mean, it is what it is.
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For me, I m just like, that s what people say when they re like, a bunch of bad decisions stacked up, consequences.
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My defense of it is, at least the way that I say it, I use it in situations where it s out of my control, and so I m not gonna stress myself trying to control it.
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only worrying at this point?
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Yeah, or I m choosing not to worry that ship sailed.
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I can t affect it anymore.
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Right, choosing not to worry, well said.
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Okay, I get that.
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I just, I feel like when most people use it, it s, I don t want to solve this problem, so, dot, dot, dot.
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It could definitely be used as a form of avoidance.
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some problems with traditional self-help, personal growth that I also share.
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I agree that self-help really does laser in on what you perceive your shortcomings and failures to be and then just kind of highlights those things.
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And I think that that s important to realize because Jason and I were talking about this before, it s so easy to just feel like crap.
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crap, consuming too much self-help stuff.
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So what we do at Art of Charm is try to not just be, I m good enough, I m smart enough, and doggone it, people like me, but give people tools so that they don t need to take a break from us because of their mental health, right?
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If you re constantly having to read books to tell you how to be happy, then you re unconsciously reinforcing the idea that you re not already happy.
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And when it comes to a lot of this stuff, happiness, confidence, success, so much of it is determined by how you re choosing to see things.
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So on the one hand, while very well-intentioned, like going to a seminar or something to learn how to be happy,
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There s a very innocent intention behind that, a desire to improve how you feel.
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There comes a certain point, there s probably a tipping point somewhere in there where it s just reinforcing that original feeling of dissatisfaction over and over again.
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And so it can almost become this addictive thing.
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I remember reading years ago,
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that the average self-help consumer buys, I think, like seven or eight books.
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That s a horrible statistic for the industry because it s technically, if a book works, you know, you should read it and you re like, cool, problem solved.
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Got it, handled, yeah.
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If you keep returning to the self-help section over and over and over again, that s an indication that something might be up.
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Whenever something is about happiness, plain and simple, it s very, very tough to get concrete tools.
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We ve done some really good shows on the subject with experts that talk about things that are proven, like literally clinically tested to increase long-term happiness.
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Things like getting better experiences, deeper relationships with people.
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But you re right, I think the books that come out are often, all they serve to do, very often, is cause you to compare, contrast this ideal that s in your head with who you should be,
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which is superficial and fake, dedicated your life to essentially chasing that mirage, as you put it, of happiness and satisfaction, and causing you to care about everything.
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And we see what you call the feedback loop from hell with online social media, and we ve discussed this before on the show as well, with social media creating a false reality that you don t share, and therefore are unhappy by comparison.
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I have a concept in the first chapter called the feedback loop from hell, and it s basically this idea that people
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often judge their own negative emotions.
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So let s say you feel really socially anxious at a party or something, and then because you feel anxious, you identify that anxiety, and because you feel anxious, you start telling yourself, wow, I m such a loser for being so anxious.
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I can t even come to this party and talk to somebody.
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Well, that makes you just feel even more anxious.
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Now you re feeling anxious about feeling anxious.
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And it just starts compounding upon itself.
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The same thing can happen with anger.
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People get angry at the fact that they re angry all the time.
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Or people start feeling guilty for the fact that they feel guilty all the time.
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And it just perpetuates itself.
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And it amplifies itself.
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And one of the points that I make is that I think with
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the nature of social media and just the internet in general, we re constantly exposed to the 0.1% most extraordinary information that s going on at any point.
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Anytime you get on Facebook, you never see people talking about the crappy sandwich they had for lunch or the annoying thing their coworker said.
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boring, nobody wants to see that.
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The stuff that you see is like people s weddings, somebody s vacation, this amazing beach, like somebody just bought a new car, or whatever, and it subconsciously kind of conditions us to raise our expectations that that is supposed to be what s always happening.
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in one s life, and so that creates this judgment.
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It kind of spurs on this feedback loop that, you know, it s like, oh, well, I feel really crappy today, and then I get on Facebook, or I turn on the news, and there s some 16-year-old that was just bought a Ferrari for her birthday, and like, you re like, God, I never got a Ferrari.
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Like, what s wrong with me?
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Why can t I have a Ferrari?
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And then you start feeling bad about feeling bad, and then,
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you start looking around and you re like, well, nobody else feels bad, so obviously there s something wrong with me that I feel so bad, and so you feel even worse, and it just kind of keeps going and going, and one of my big goals with this book is I wanna make it okay to feel like shit.
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Negativity needs to be okay in our culture again, otherwise we re just gonna keep perpetuating all this anxiety and neuroticism that s growing.
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I ll tell you, I suffer from this sometimes as well, where I ll be complaining about something, and Jen s like, look, you literally have nothing to complain about, and she ll list off all these things going right in our life, and I m thinking to myself, yeah, how did I get into this headspace?
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And it almost always has to do with,
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something I saw online.
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Not that this happens every single day, and I logically know better than to allow these things to affect my mood, but that s the thing, is it doesn t really matter what you know.
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It only matters how you feel, the logical brain versus the emotional brain here.
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So when you see something online, like you said, a 16-year-old that bought a Ferrari and never has to work again, you re just like,
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There s nothing I can do here that s positive if you start comparing yourself, which is, by the way, human nature, completely evolutionary.
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So we have to be able to do that without feeling bad or beating ourselves up about doing it, but it s very hard.
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I mean, simply put, there s something to be said for perhaps we re just not evolved to see what s happening with 5,000 people at one time, any time we want to, any time of the day.
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Our brains aren t there.
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Yeah, absolutely, and I m pro-technology, I m pro-social media, I think internet s the best thing that s ever happened to humanity, but at the same time, if you look throughout history, every time there s a new revolution in technology or media, it brings with it a whole new...
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set of problems that the culture needs to sort itself out and kind of deal with.
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I think this is our generation s problem.
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I think these are the problems that the internet brings with it, is that it drastically skews our expectations and our standards of what success is, what our life should be, and what a good life is.
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I spend a lot of time trying to reign people back in, calm them down, be like, wait a second, let s get back to reality.
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You said it brilliantly in the book, which is that the desire for more positive experience is in itself a negative experience.
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And paradoxically, the acceptance of one s negative experience is itself a positive experience.
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Can you explain that?
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Because this is brilliant.
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Did you make that up, by the way?
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Because that s friggin  awesome.
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I made it up, but I m not the first person to come up with that idea.
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I m stealing it then.
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Yeah, to me that s essentially the core behind what the entire book is about.
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And I go on to kind of list some examples.
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And the whole thing here is that positivity has become so celebrated and almost like worshiped in a way that I think people have kind of lost sight of
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how important negative experience is to the human condition.
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I talk about in chapter two how pain evolved for a very, very important purpose, and if we try to remove all pain from our life, then we re gonna essentially remove our ability to function well in life.
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But the examples I give there is that once you accept the pain, say, of exercising and working out, that s when you reap the benefits of building a healthy body.
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When you accept the pain of screwing up in business or trying to start a company, that s when you learn the lessons that builds the success that you have later on.
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It s when you accept the pain of
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a breakup or relationship problems that you re finally able to learn and deal with what happens with your partner and communicate with them and build on things from there.
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So it s everything good that happens, I mean, if you think about it, by its very definition, growth means
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doing something that is new and uncomfortable.
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So pain is a necessary part of that process.
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And I spend much of the beginning of the book trying to get people into that mindset where it s like pain isn t an icky word anymore.
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Like negativity s not an icky word.
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It s actually, it s a useful tool and it s important to confront it and face it.
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Now, back to the show.
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You mentioned Alan Watts and the backwards law, the idea on that same token, the more you put into feeling better all the time, the less satisfied you become as pursuing something only reinforces the fact that you lack it in the first place.
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That s great, I get it, right?
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We shouldn t just be obsessed with self-improvement and being happy all the time.
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But where s the line?
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I mean, should we not seek to improve ourselves?
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Because if I know that I don t know Chinese and I m learning Chinese, that s obviously a good thing, right?
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I m not gonna imply that you re arguing that it isn t.
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But where s the difference between I wanna shore up a skill set versus, well, I don t have this, wah.
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I think it comes from the intention.
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So if you re learning Chinese because you feel like a loser and Chinese is going to be the one thing that makes you feel smart enough to be satisfied with yourself.
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Damn, nailed it.
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you re just setting yourself up for more disappointment, whereas if learning Chinese is genuinely adding value to your life, it s bringing joy, the process of learning is satisfying in and of itself, then that s great.
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In fact, that is an example of the negative producing the positive, because Chinese is fucking hard, and if you re actually putting your brain through the stress of
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digging into it, learning about it, improving at it, that improvement will create a sense of satisfaction and a sense of happiness, but it all starts with, I guess, the why that is causing it.
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Right, and that s a good point, because I see this a lot.
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There s a lot of folks, I saw Gary Vaynerchuk the other day when I was in New York, and whenever we see each other where he s not giving some kind of talk or something like that,
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a very intense guy, as you know, and he s intense on stage as well.
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It s just different when you re really close to him, I think.
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And I see a lot of people who are really just like obsessed with it.
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They got the Gary V fever or whatever, and they re really interested in blowing up this and blowing up that.
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And I see that a lot with these internet gurus.
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They re catering, in large part, to a wide swathe of people, but that also includes a swathe of people that really wants
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I need a million Facebook followers.
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I need tons of Twitter followers.
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I need tons of fans on this.
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And whenever I do any kind of consulting or mentorship or anything like that, mastermind if you will, I always ask why.
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And I find that a lot of the people that really want these huge followings, they often want it because it validates them or it validates their idea.
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They have no plan to monetize it effectively.
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They don t need a million.
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They could do fine with a thousand, but they d rather have the million, and they ll dedicate resources, time, and effort to get the million, because then they can fill in the blank.
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My mom will think I m finally successful.
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My wife will approve of this business idea.
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My brother will stop making fun of me for leaving the family business.
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There s always something that goes in that blank.
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Even for me, and I would say everyone has this, we have to look at our motivations and go, why am I actually upset right now?
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Am I just jealous because this celebrity started a podcast and it s got more downloads than Art of Charm?
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Yeah, that s it.
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Okay, well then I can get over myself now, right, and continue to pursue the craft.
2
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Because in every single category of your life, unless you re Michael Phelps and it s a certain type of swim stroke right now and not later when he gets beat by somebody else, you will always be second to someone else, right?
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So even if you re a world champion, you still have limited time on the top of that totem pole,
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So it s a really, it s a losing proposition to always compare yourself in those same categories to different people, right?
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You can easily fall down the trap of comparing your social media following to Gary Vaynerchuk, comparing your speaking skills to Tony Robbins, and also comparing your popularity of your program to Oprah.
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Since all three of them can t meld together and form one person, you re totally screwed if you re trying to do that in yourself.
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Right, and this gets into a lot of the concepts I talk about later in the book, which is which yardstick are you using to measure yourself?
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How are you defining success for yourself?
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Because a lot of these questions, there s nothing wrong with wanting to start a big, successful business.
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There s nothing wrong with having hundreds of thousands of followers or millions of followers.
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Where you run into trouble is what meaning you ascribe to those different things.
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And actually, I used to know a guy who moved out to Silicon Valley.
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this guy was jumping in the startup after startup, and he was legitimate, and in this guy s head, he needed to cash out with at least nine figures before he was 40, or else he had failed.
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And he s incredibly smart, but he s one of the most stressed out, high-strung, kind of neurotic guys that I ve ever hung out with.
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It s just because he had this lofty, insane definition of success that
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Ironically, even if he hits that, even if he does cash out for nine figures, he s probably not gonna be very satisfied with himself, because as soon as you hit nine figures, well, there s people at 10 figures, and it never ends.
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Yeah, when are you gonna buy an island and a jet?
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Well, you know, there s no islands for sale.
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Well, you re a loser.
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You know Derek Sivers as well, right?
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He s probably been on here.
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I was talking to him once, and as you know, he sold his business for tens of millions of dollars, and he s a really interesting guy, and I remember talking to him once about this subject in terms of money and how people define success, and he said that he believes that luxury is a trap.
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He said, I have friends who are worth 10 times as much money as me, 100 times as much money as me, but he said that
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If they want to fly from LA to New York and they don t get the first row first class seat, they get really pissed off and they throw a fit.
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He said he actually watched a friend who was worth over a billion dollars lose his mind and scream at an airline representative for not giving him
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the front row first class seat.
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And Derek was like, the day that I scream over something like that, somebody shoot me, I m gonna fly coach.
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Because it s just, the higher your standards get in terms of luxury and pleasure and how important you feel, the more confined you become to your expectations.
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I love that.
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And it ties in completely into this, which is picking the right ways to measure yourself, picking the right ways to define what a good person is, what a successful person is.
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I agree, and how do we pick the right yardstick?
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Because it is very easy, oh man, there s a great expression, I think it s a luxury once enjoyed becomes a necessity.
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Have you heard this?
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It s exactly what you were just talking about.
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It s super true, and I m very cognizant of this in my life because
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Well, I bought a house, right?
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So I m like, oh, it s great.
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I own a house.
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And I actively try not to get too excited about it, which isn t great.
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I mean, you re supposed to enjoy things, but I actively try not to get that excited about stuff or think about what I could have instead of this one.
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You know, sure, would I like the Tony Stark house on the ocean with all the future computer stuff that s all CG?
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That d be cool.
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but I try not to think about what I have in relation to other people because then you literally stop enjoying what you have and you start realizing, I can t even function without a three-story house with two roof decks or whatever.
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Why would I drive anything but a Tesla P85D or whatever?
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It will drive you to the point where Derek Ziver s friend was where he can t fly internationally first class because he s seated behind somebody else.
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It s ridiculous, and it s sad.
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I mean, how do we pick a yardstick and stick with it, right?
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Because that s the problem.
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And maybe it is that we re using the wrong yardstick, but it s certainly that we re using one yardstick in our personal life, and then another one for our health, and then another one for our bank account, and another one for our business, and then another one for the prestige that we have online, and you re constantly switching.
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You re constantly comparing your blooper reel to someone else s highlight reel by switching the yardstick.
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Right, we measure ourselves differently
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different parts of our life.
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What I define in the book is the difference between a good yardstick and a bad yardstick.
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A good one is it s realistic, it s pro-social, and it is something that you can control yourself.
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An example of a really bad yardstick would be spamming 100 million people on the internet to make a million dollars.
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whoever the guy is that invented that, like, Google pays me $500 an hour from home, click here, and then you just get completely scammed out of all this money.
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Whoever that guy is, that s a perfect example of the result of a bad yardstick for yourself, making that kind of money.
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online through those sort of scammy tactics.
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And the reason is is it s not pro-social.
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It s not something you completely control.
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You can t control the money that comes to you all the time.
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You can influence it, but it s not the stock market could crash tomorrow or somebody could sue you or whatever.
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And then on top of that, it s not based in reality.
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It doesn t actually exist.
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So examples of good yardsticks to measure yourself by are the ones that I come back to repeatedly throughout the book and also in my own life.
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are kind of just general life principles such as honesty, responsibility, developing skills is a really good one.
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So, you know, one piece of advice I give quite often is that instead of shooting to like reach some rung on the career ladder, you know, instead of trying to be like regional vice president for your company or whatever, focus on becoming a really excellent leader, becoming an expert in your particular field, like the most knowledgeable,
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These are things that you can control directly within yourself and so even if some unpredictable thing happens, your company just shuts down or you get fired or you get transferred to Venezuela or whatever, you can take those skills that you ve developed with you, you can still achieve your goals and continue to validate yourself through what you re doing regardless of all the stuff that s happening around you.
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What about the idea, though, that dissatisfaction, unease, are just inherent parts of human nature.
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We re evolved to have this to survive and to create things that help us survive.
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Totally.
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Right, do you agree?
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I mean, it s biologically useful, right?
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It s nature s agent to get us to do stuff.
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So it s not a, as you say in the book, it s not a bug of human evolution, it s a feature.
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However, it s now, would you argue then that it s just now out of control compared to what it used to be?
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So yeah, as humans, we re biologically programmed to constantly be mildly dissatisfied with whatever s going on in our life.
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So there s two questions that come from that.
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A is, what is dissatisfying us?
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And B is, what do we do about it?
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I think what has happened, one side effect of having all this technology and media that s constantly in front of our face all the time is that it s become incredibly profitable to scratch that dissatisfaction on people.
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For instance, if you watch commercials or look at advertisements that pop up online, pretty much every single one of them is poking at a certain insecurity.
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Beer is poking at men s insecurity around women.
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Truck commercials are poking at men s masculinity.
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Makeup commercials are poking at women s insecurity about their own beauty.
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This happens just for the simple fact that it s the best way to make money.
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If you can make people feel insecure about themselves and then offer, propose a solution, they ll go buy that solution in droves.
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So that drives capitalism, but what happens when that reaches a scale where people are just constantly being poked in their insecurities all day, every day, everywhere they go?
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What it does is it creates some problems where people need to become much more aware of what information and influences they re allowing into their life and what they re not.
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As I say in the book, the solution here is not to just get rid of Facebook and throw your television out and go live like a monk somewhere.
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The solution is the population needs to catch up to the technology.
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Our awareness and understanding of how all this information influences us, how our biases operate, how our assumptions operate, it needs to catch up to what the media is doing to our brains.
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But how is that different than being some sort of unemotional psychopath?
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I mean, we have to care about something, right?
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It s in our nature.
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Can you explain the subtle art of not giving a fuck and how we re actually kind of secretly giving one just only to the right things?
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Right, the whole not giving a fuck thing.
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It s really, it s just, it s a linguistic tool to get people to start paying attention to what they care about and what they find important.
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I state in the first chapter that it s impossible to not give a fuck about anything.
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Like you said, it ll turn you into a sociopath.
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We all have to give a fuck about something.
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We all care about something.
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And the question is, is what are we deciding to care about?
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And is that benefiting us or not?
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Is that improving our life or is it harming our life?
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One thing I thought was super interesting in the book was the idea that emotions, of course, being part of our lives, but not the entire equation.
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And I talk about this a lot.
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here on the show, and we talk about it a lot at AOC boot camps and things like that, is just because something feels good doesn t mean it is good.
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Just because something feels bad doesn t mean it s bad.
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That emotions are essentially signals and not reality.
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Can you speak to that?
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Because you did a great job detailing this in the book.
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I m sure any biologist would cringe if they read my summary of how emotions evolve, but emotions exist for a very specific purpose, and they were designed to help us survive and reproduce.
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And that doesn t mean that our emotions aren t important.
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They do matter.
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You don t want to be feeling anxious or angry all the time.
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Obviously, we want to feel good.
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But it s important that our emotions don t become the primary focal point of our life.
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It s important that all of our decision making is not defined by how something makes us feel or how we feel in that moment.
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What we need is we need kind of higher level principles that we re able to follow regardless of how we re feeling in that moment.
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It s admitting your partner is right even though you re pissed off and you feel like an idiot.
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like sucking it up and being willing to not take the credit at work because it s gonna be better for the whole team.
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It s things like that, and it s kind of these classic life lessons that you learn about when you re a kid, and essentially what they come down to in a developmental sense is just learning how to detach your decision-making,
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in your behaviors from how you feel.
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In some ways, it s like the defining skill of being a mature human being.
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And it s something that we all struggle with, and it s something that takes constant work and practice, but it s one of the most important things, I think, for anybody to learn how to do.
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You pretty much nailed it when you said, decision-making based on emotional intuition without the aid of reason to keep it in line pretty much always sucks.
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You know who bases their entire lives on emotions?
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Three-year-old kids and dogs.
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You know what else three-year-old kids and dogs do?
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They shit on the carpet.
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And I think that s super apropos here because it s very easy to rely on what we consider emotion or intuition or put those two things together and kind of feel that whatever I m feeling is the reality when really,
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you should be questioning that.
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How do we successfully question our emotions?
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I mean, how do we stop ourselves in the moment and go, wait a second, what s actually happening here?
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How do we do that?
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How do we cultivate that habit?
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It s like anything else, you start by doing, but I mean, there s probably easier situations to do it than others.
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I mean, when you re caught up in the moment, particularly like a very extreme moment,
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It s very hard to do that.
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What happens to most of us is that we get lost in our emotions.
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It feels like that they re just carrying us.
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It s almost like people who do really horrible things, they get angry and punch somebody or they break something, they often describe it as watching themselves do it.
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They describe it as losing control.
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The emotion just took over and their body behaved in an automatic way.
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Learning how to do it in the moment itself, I think is actually like, it s the end point, the mastery level, or the achievement unlock.
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Where you need to start, I think, is just taking time, sitting down every week.
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This is something that therapy is fantastic for.
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Even doing it at home, like journaling or just sitting.
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laying in bed, thinking about it.
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Think about situations, conflicts that are going on, problems that are going on in your life, people you re frustrated with.
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Try to honestly look at how you re feeling about it, and then force yourself, and if you have to, even write the question down in your journal, or hopefully a good therapist would say this to you, is ask.
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Why does that emotion feel true?
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What if that emotion wasn t true?
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What if there is no reason to feel sad in this situation?
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What if the reasons that you feel sad, what if those are incorrect?
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What if you re wrong about that?
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What would that mean for your life?
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What would the effects on your relationships be?
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And just learn how to mentally hold that,
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in your brain and think about it.
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Just consider it.
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You re not deciding that you re wrong about everything.
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You re just, you re questioning, you re wondering.
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And the more you do that on your own time, or with the help of somebody, the better you ll get at it.
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And it ll eventually get to the point where you feel like you re able to, even when something bad happens.
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It s funny, actually, yesterday,
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spilled water all over my laptop.
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I sat there and I felt like a kid that was watching a car crash or something.
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I just stood there with my mouth open watching the screen go black and watching everything, just the water go everywhere.
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And it took me like 10 seconds to react.
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And I remember
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I started to get really freaked out and angry.
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I took the laptop, I started walking down to the repair shop, and I remember just thinking to myself, I m like, you know what?
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I ve been using my laptop probably 12 hours a day for the last 10 years.
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This was going to happen at some point.
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And I don t have to get angry about this.
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I can just accept that this was part of my decision to work on a laptop all day, every day.
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It took years for me to get to that point.
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Probably five years ago, I would have been screaming and freaking out.
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drinking a bunch of whiskey and complaining to my friends.
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But it s like today, it s like, you know what?
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Horrible things happen sometimes.
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It doesn t necessarily mean anything.
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I don t need to spin it into a positive.
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I don t need to release it.
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I don t need to justify it.
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It s just like bad things happen.
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Okay.
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And like, being okay with that, just simply moving on, taking it to the repair shop and just moving on with my life.
4
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Thanks for listening and supporting the Art of Charm.
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For a list of all of the amazing sponsors and discount codes, visit theartofcharm.com slash advertisers.
4
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Now, back to the show.
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Speaking of feeling bad and having negative feelings or feeling about negative aspects of yourself, you defined the self-esteem movement in a really interesting way.
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And you said, the problem with the self-esteem movement is that it measured self-esteem by how positively people felt about themselves.
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But a true and accurate measurement of one s self-worth is how people feel about the negative
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aspects of themselves.
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Can you explain that?
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Because that sounds true, but I m also like, wait, why is that a more accurate description or measurement of self-worth, how I feel about the negatives?
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Why would I focus on that?
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Because there s tons of people out there, and I m sure everybody listening here knows somebody like this,
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thinks pretty damn highly about themselves, thinks that they re amazing at work or brilliant or beautiful or whatever, but is really just like a walking train wreck.
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In clinical terms, it s kind of like it s a form of narcissism, people who just have this diluted, grandiose vision of themselves.
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Part of that is the big criticism of the self-esteem research and the self-esteem movement is that it doesn t account for that.
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I think one of the big controversial findings was that a researcher actually went to a prison
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and surveyed murderers and rapists and things like that, and found that they, on average, actually had extremely high self-esteem.
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They thought very highly of themselves.
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They thought they were smart, good-looking, cool, people liked them, et cetera, et cetera.
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The difference, though, is that a narcissistic person, when something goes wrong, when they fail at something, they re not able to handle it.
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They freak out, they blame everybody around them, they throw a big fit, they cry and scream and break things, whereas if you think of the ideal of an extremely confident person,
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they re usually very cool and calm, even through adversity and failure.
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That s the end point we wanna get to, is that somebody who knows how to handle failure gracefully, knows how to bounce back from it quickly and easily, is kind of like an emotional rock when things are going wrong.
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They re stable and you can rely on them.
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And purely measuring self-esteem doesn t account for that.
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In fact, it s often those extremely confident people who
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are very comfortable and calm when things go wrong.
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If you survey them, they actually don t think that highly of themselves.
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The reason is because they re very humble.
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They think, oh, well, I m okay, but I m not anything special.
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So this is like this whole pursuit of self-esteem of making people feel good about themselves all the time.
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And of course, in the book, I make fun of the participation trophies and gold stars for showing up and things like that.
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it doesn t necessarily drive people towards this more calm, grounded sense of confidence.
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It drives people more towards just grandiosity, a sense of narcissism of like, oh, I m awesome, even though they haven t had the life experiences to prove it.
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So people are so fixated on feeling good about themselves, they manage to delude themselves into believing that they re accomplishing great things, even when they re not.
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If they re not deluding themselves, they start to feel like, uh-oh, I m not up to snuff with everybody else s amazing, special, snowflake accomplishments.
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And I can definitely understand why there s people in prison that have delusionally high self-esteem.
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That seems like almost a prerequisite for some of the things that we see in terms of crime as well.
4
SPEAKER_00
Totally, I mean, you have to be a little bit disconnected from reality to do awful things like that.
4
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You have to have an unrealistic perspective of yourself and how great you are compared to everybody else to justify killing somebody or harming somebody horribly.
4
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You got kind of a great tangent here about entitled people, and that s what happens when we take the self-esteem movement to its extreme conclusion is we end up with people who are entitled, therefore incapable of acknowledging their own problems openly,
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incapable of improving their lives in any lasting, meaningful way because they re not willing to look at their shortcomings and actually admit them and then work on them.
4
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But what I really liked was the fact that not only are entitled people entitled on that side of the spectrum, but you end up with this, and we should think of a term for this, because you ve got this other side of entitled where you get some real traumatic event in your life, and you start to unconsciously feel as though you ve got these special problems, no one can ever solve them, and I see this a lot in my email inbox.
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No, you don t understand.
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This is crazy how different this situation is than anything you ve ever seen before.
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And it s always, if the next following three paragraphs are generally something that I see every day.
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It s just that the person who s writing it really, really has some kind of sweat equity, emotional equity in feeling that this assumed inability to solve the problem and their misery that s attached to it is something that s part of their identity at this point.
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I ve actually, I tried really hard to find a way to describe that in the book.
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I described later in that chapter, I say entitlement comes in two forms.
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One form is people say, I m better than everybody, therefore I deserve special treatment.
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And the other form is, I m worse than everybody, therefore I deserve special treatment.
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And both are actually pretty much never true.
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I do have a term that I use later, kind of discussing more how this sort of entitlement plays out in our culture right now.
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I call it victimhood chic.
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It s basically this idea of like, the more victimized you are, the cooler you are.
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And so people start just
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pulling the victim card on absolutely everything, and if you pull the victim card back, they re like, oh, well, my victimization is actually worse than yours, so I deserve priority.
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I think it s a really toxic way to go about promoting social justice and all these good causes.
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Yeah, and we see this play out in the entrepreneur sphere, in the business sphere, in whatever, even your social media or your personal sphere, and that the rare people who do truly become really, really good at something, they rarely do that because they think, wow, I m great, I m predetermined to be amazing.
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They actually do it because they re obsessed with the improvement itself, so they re more focused on those negatives
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or at least those areas where they need work, that obsession with improvement comes from the belief that they aren t just entitled to success.
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Bill Gates, to Michael Jordan, to everybody.
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If you look at interviews, they always say, they re like, I m not really that great.
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I still could improve so much more.
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I could still be better.
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I need to work harder.
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And it s not like they re not down on themselves.
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They re just like, they still see all the gaps in their ability to do things.
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And so, it s not that they re dissatisfied or they don t think they re good enough.
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It s just their whole conception of good enough, it doesn t even exist.
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They re not measuring success the same way the rest of us are.
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They re measuring success by
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Are they improving?
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Are they working harder?
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Are they trying new things?
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Are they taking risks?
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While the rest of the world is looking at him and saying, holy crap, look at his bank account, or look how many championships he has.
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That s successful.
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One thing I loved in the book that we do often at our AOC workshops, and we don t call it the same thing, but we totally should, and I love the term, is the self-awareness onion.
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Can you explain this?
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This is an amazing exercise that, honestly, I find myself doing this all the time.
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One of the ways we came up with it for the curriculum in the first place was just the fact that I think this was my neurotic way of handling my own issues back in the day, but I still find myself doing it, and I love it.
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I used to call this the why game.
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Essentially what it is is you start with a feeling or a problem and you say, okay, why do I have this problem?
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And then you have your surface level reason and then you ask yourself, okay, why does that problem, do I believe that that s the problem?
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And then you kind of find the underlying value or principle.
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As I was writing this book and I was writing this section, I came up with the joke that self-awareness is like an onion.
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There are multiple layers that you need to peel back, and the more you peel back, the more likely you are to start crying spontaneously.
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And so I just decided
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I had to call it the self-awareness onion, but it s basically the first layer is what I was saying, is that surface level emotion of like, okay, I m angry because my boss doesn t respect me.
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And then you kind of, you identify that, and surprisingly, a lot of people are just, they re bad at even identifying this surface level, like, I m angry for X reason.
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A lot of people, it takes a lot of work, especially if you came from a family background where it was inappropriate to express certain emotions.
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It can take a lot of work just to gain that awareness of how you re feeling in a certain situation.
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So then once you have that first level, the next level is, okay, what are my assumptions that are causing me to feel that way?
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What do I believe that is true that is causing me to feel that way?
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So you could say that, well, if my boss respected me, he would give me more time off or whatever.
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and then you have that whole belief that is underlying everything and then you get to ask if that s true or not and why do you have that belief and why is that the standard that you ve decided upon, et cetera.
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And then the last layer that few people ever reach that takes a lot and a lot of kind of introspection and work is how are you measuring success or failure that determines that belief?
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So if your belief is that your boss doesn t respect you because he s not,
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giving you enough time off, what is the measurement of success there that is determining that belief?
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And the example I just gave is pretty crappy because it s actually very superficial, but if you get into things like, I think in the book I used an example of a problem with my brother, I felt like very,
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kind of upset that he wasn t very responsive with me a lot of times.
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And what I discovered doing the self-awareness onion is that I had this measurement of success or failure as a brother based on how many texts I receive, which once you kind of see that, you realize how ridiculous that is.
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you realize you can still have a good relationship with your brother or a family member even if they don t text you as often as you like.
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That s a pretty poor metric to measure the quality of a family relationship.
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And so I kind of play with the idea in the chapter of well maybe I can measure the quality of my relationship based on
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if there s mutual respect, or maybe I could measure it based on if there s trust and we can depend on one another, even if we only talk two or three times a year.
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Who says that brothers need to be close at all?
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Who says that they need to talk all the time?
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That s a standard that I completely invented in my head or that I had just adopted from whatever I had seen in other people.
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I can definitely identify with that, not the brother thing per se, but there s always something that we ve invented, an invisible yardstick in our own head that measures some sort of form of success, or usually failure, and then we never question, what is it based on?
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Is it based on, well, in all the movies I ve seen, this is how it works.
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And how does that make sense to apply to your situation as well?
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An example that I went through with a client recently as well was he had come home and he had started a fight with his girlfriend and she was like, what s the deal?
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And he says, yeah, I do this a lot.
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And I told her, you know, I just had a stressful day at work.
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The copier was broken or something like that.
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But I always find that these things that are happening at work end up coming home with me.
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How do I leave my problems at work?
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And I realized after going through the exercise with him,
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over the phone here, it was, okay, well, you re angry at your girlfriend because you re actually angry at somebody else, right?
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You re not angry at the copier, or the copier was broken, or whatever problem it was.
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It was more, you re actually angry about the fact that you have to work in a place that you feel like you re too good to be working in,
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And the reason, the way that manifests is with the people, but also in the crappy equipment you have that s always failing, the people that are apathetic to the fact that everything is broken around the office, you resent that and you bring that home with you.
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So you gotta identify what it is that you re resentful of or whatever it is your baggage is, you have to identify it before you can.
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decide not to bring it home.
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Because if you just think, I m gonna be less stressed out, or I m gonna leave my stress at work, you re not really gonna do that if you can t even identify the real cause of it.
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And I ll add something to this as well, not to that same example, but for example, the one you gave with your brother,
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One thing you can do that I find, for me, helps alleviate a lot of anger while I m trying to solve this, is think of other reasons for the occurrence that don t have to do with me.
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Because us as humans, we re kind of like children, right?
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Everything that happens is our fault.
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That s why kids who are young blame themselves for parents  divorce and stuff like that, because we re the cause and effect in our own world, and I believe as adults, we never really grow out of that.
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It s still, that programming s in there somewhere.
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Something bad happens, somehow that s our fault, right?
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If we can look for other reasons, like maybe your brother s not responsive, and it doesn t matter why, but you can literally invent anything you want.
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Well, you know, he doesn t like talking to people, or he s embarrassed to talk to us because we had a weird falling out a few years ago, or he s just not a person who likes to text.
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Maybe he s better on email or chat, or maybe I should just call him.
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Some of these reasons are valid, some of them aren t.
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And I m not saying you should believe them.
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But I am saying, once you come up with alternate explanations for why something might be the case, other than because he doesn t love me, it becomes a lot easier to figure out and solve the problem.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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Now something you brought up in the book, which I love, I love that you got to name your own law.
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Manson s Law of Avoidance.
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The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it.
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Let s talk about that.
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I think everyone we know is guilty of this in some way.
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Yeah, it s a law, so of course they are.
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Yeah, of course, yeah, now it is.
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So yeah, Mads  law of avoidance, you will avoid things in proportion to how much they threaten to change your identity.
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It s basically, it actually comes from, if you want to get super nerdy for all the nerds out there, there s a theory in psychology called self-determination theory, and it basically, the idea is that
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our conception of ourselves, our minds will look for ways to constantly reaffirm or prove what we already believe to be true about ourselves.
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And I actually think this has some pretty big implications just in terms of like,
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normal life decisions.
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One is that we re gonna resist things that threaten to change how we see ourselves.
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And the interesting thing about that is it s not just negative things.
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So, you know, we all know that like we get nervous, you know, public speaking.
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We get nervous about it, you know, because we think like, well, if we fail, everybody s gonna think we re an idiot.
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moving to a new city or a new country, we get very anxious about it.
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There s a lot of uncertainty with that.
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We don t know if we re gonna enjoy it, or if people there, we re gonna make friends there, or if we re gonna be the same person when we re there.
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But interestingly, this also applies in extreme positive situations.
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People listening to this, they ve probably had experiences where something incredibly good has happened to them that has also made them incredibly anxious.
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You know, like a big job promotion, or suddenly having the opportunity to make a bunch of money, or if, you know, in the art world, it s like, if somebody, like a musician, suddenly gets interest from, you know, a record company for a big record deal, a lot of people in these situations, they ll find ways to sabotage themselves and to prevent that success from ever happening.
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And it s for the exact same reason, is like, they want to maintain their sense of self, they want to maintain the way they see themselves, whether consciously or unconsciously.
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And so we unconsciously end up sabotaging ourselves because we don t really want the success, we d rather have the comfort.
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We essentially, we avoid both the good and the bad.
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Because extreme positive changes in our life, they also threaten our identity.
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They also threaten to change who we are, who we believe ourselves to be, just as much as extreme negative situations.
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And so, we will find ways to avoid both of them, pretty much proportionally to how much they threaten our sense of self.
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Why is it so important to realize that our problems are not unique, we re just like everyone else?
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Why is that such a key insight from the book?
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Because when we feel like our problems are only our own and that nobody else has experienced them, we start to falsely believe that nobody else can understand them and nobody else can help us solve them.
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And the truth is actually the opposite, is that there really are no unique problems.
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There s pretty much nothing that you can go through or experience that millions of other people haven t also gone through and experienced before.
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Once you realize that, you realize that it kind of frees you to open up and start talking about it and start connecting with other people about it and relating to them.
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Because ultimately I think a lot of the trauma and baggage that we carry around, most of the negative effects of it isn t so much the pain from what happened itself, it s the shame.
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It s the feeling that nobody will understand us or nobody will like us if they knew what was true about us.
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And so once you kind of lift that shame by understanding that
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Everybody else has crap like this going on with themselves too.
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Once you kind of take that first leap, start connecting with other people with similar issues, in my opinion, that s half the battle right there.
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Excellent.
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Is there anything that I haven t asked you that you want to make sure you convey to the AOC family here?
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I don t know, man.
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Probably.
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I feel like we ve gone through the whole book.
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Yeah, I mean, look, I ll leave us with something then from your book as well.
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I thought this was a really cool insight and something I definitely agree with and share.
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As a general rule, we re all the world s worst observers of ourselves.
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When we re angry or jealous or upset, we re oftentimes the last ones to figure it out.
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And the only way to figure it out is to put cracks in our armor of certainty by constantly questioning how wrong we might be about ourselves.
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I thought that was really important.
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And I think this is such a crucial insight because that really ties in with feeling unique in terms of your problems, feeling uniquely overqualified and entitled in one way or the other way, the positive way or the negative way.
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And I think that if we do go through the emotional onion,
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with everything that ends up kind of bothering us or making us feel inadequate, we can always find at the bottom some sort of real cause or something that we can actually work on.
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And these are the problems, these are the goals that we should be happy to work on, the journey we should be happy to undertake, is finding the root of all these problems we think we have, finding the actual problem, and then solving that.
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Because I think that will lead to much more contentedness and satisfaction with everybody who s listening to this.
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I think you just summarized my book better than I could.
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It s not too late to print it on the back cover.
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There you go.
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Thanks so much, Mark.
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Really appreciate it.
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Thanks, Jordan.
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It s good being back.
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Interesting stuff.
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I love the backwards law, the self-awareness onion, the feedback loop from hell.
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These are all familiar concepts, but lots of stuff here.
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I read the whole book cover to cover.
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I highly recommend it.
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I really like Mark s writing.
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It s a quick read, as well, and full of actionable stuff.
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If you enjoyed this one, don t forget to thank Mark on Twitter.
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We ll have that linked in the show notes, as well as some other resources, including his blog that we mentioned on the show.
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You can tap our album art in Most Mobile Podcast Players to see the cheat sheet for this episode.
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We ll link to the show notes right on your phone.
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I also post a lot on Twitter.
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I m easy to engage with there.
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Producer Jason is there as well.
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At the Art of Charm on Twitter.
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Our boot camps, our programs, we run every single week here in LA.
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We sell out a few months in advance, but please, if you re interested, get in touch.
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Go to theartofcharm.com or just give us a call here in the office.
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We ll get you some info so you can plan ahead.
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We ve also got our social capital challenge.
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Also at theartofcharm.com slash challenge, or if you re here in the states, text charmed to 33444.
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That s C-H-A-R-M-E-D to 33444.
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It s all about improving your networking, your connection skills, inspiring people to develop relationships with you.
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And we ll also email you our fundamentals toolbox that I mentioned earlier on the show.
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I also send out videos with drills and exercises to help you move forward every single week.
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It ll make you a better networker, a better connector, and a better thinker.
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That s theartofcharm.com slash challenge or text charmed here in the US to 33444.
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This episode of The Art of Charm was produced by Jason DeFillippo.
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Jason Sanderson is our audio engineer and editor.
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Show notes on the website are by Robert Fogerty.
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I m your host, Jordan Harbinger.
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go ahead and tell your friends, because the greatest compliment you can give us is a referral to someone else, either in person or shared on the web.
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So stay charming, and leave everything and everyone better than you found them.
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Thanks for listening to The Art of Charm.
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Get more confidence, relationship skills, life hacks, and more at theartofcharmpodcast.com.