Mark Manson | The Best-selling Author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F$%k

Audio Transcription

Speaker 1:
On today’s show, we’re joined by the New York Times bestselling author, who has sold over 12 million copies of his books. His book titles included The Subtle Art of Not Giving a (beep), and the bestselling book, Everything Is (beep). Also, Mark Manson is the author of Models: Attract Women Through Honesty. On today’s show he joins us to share about the following topics, and much, much more.

Mark Manson:
I read Tim Ferriss’s 4-Hour Workweek. I had messed around with some web design and stuff when I was in school. I read that book and I’m like, that’s it. I’m going to start a web business, and then I’m going to go sit on a beach. The funny thing about that book is that he doesn’t tell you is that you make money while you sleep because you’re working 16 hours a day to build websites.

Speaker 1:
How many blogs did you write before you had any kind of traction at all?

Mark Manson:
100, 50, 100. It’s funny, I get asked all the time, people come to me and they say, “I want to start a blog, or I want to start out a YouTube channel.” It’s probably similar with you, like I want to start a podcast. My go-to answer is I say, “Write 50 posts, and then come ask again and I’m happy to help you.” I think in the last… When it comes to content businesses like these, they don’t blow up overnight. That’s just the nature of them. You’re not going to really hit scale for like a year or two.

Mark Manson:
I started online in 2008, and that was 2011 when I had my own product, and I was making like I could live off of the money I was making from my own thing for the first time. “If you cleaned up your language more people would read you.” Which I find hilarious by the way, because I’ve sold 12 million books. But we have to train ourselves to begin to ignore them, and to sift through all of the junk diet of information, and hone in on the sources that we trust that are very good, that are very well thought out, and very productive. Not just for us but for other people as well.

Speaker 1:
All this and more on today’s interview with bestselling author, Mark Manson.

Speaker 3:
Some shows don’t need a celebrity narrator to introduce the show, but this show does. Two men, eight kids co-created by two different women, 13 multi-million dollar businesses. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the ThriveTime Show.

Speaker 1:
Yes, yes, yes and yes. Thrive nation on today’s show, we are interviewing one of my favorite authors. The author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a (beep). Mark Manson welcome on to the ThriveTime Show. How are you sir?

Mark Manson:
I’m great. It’s good to be here.

Speaker 1:
Hey your little orange covered book is all over the place. Every time I go to the airport, every time I go to Barnes & Noble, every time I go anywhere. That orange covered book is everywhere. Does it blow your mind to see your book everywhere?

Mark Manson:
Yeah, it’s pretty insane.

Speaker 1:
It’s wild. But you’ve had a ton of success, but I’d love to start at the bottom of your, the very bottom, the very beginning. Share your story of how you grew up, and when you figured out what you actually wanted to do professionally.

Mark Manson:
I had a pretty typical middle-class background, went to college. When I was in college I thought I was going to go into finance, and then I happened to graduate into the crash of 2008, so that didn’t work out so well. I was bumping around for about a year, just taking odd jobs, and I read Tim Ferriss’s 4-Hour Workweek. I had messed around with some web design and stuff when I was in school. I read that book and I’m like, that’s it. I’m going to start a web business, and then I’m going to go sit on a beach and life’s going to be easy. The funny thing about that book is that he doesn’t tell you, is that you make money while you sleep because you’re working 16 hours a day to build websites. I spent the next couple of years doing that, and then eventually the thing that stuck was a dating relationship advice website. From there I started writing, I started blogging, because back in the day, back in like 2010 or whatever, blogging was the hot new thing you had to do if you wanted to get traffic.

Speaker 1:
It was the move.

Mark Manson:
Then from there the blogging took off, and next thing I know I’m being read by like hundreds of thousands, millions of people. From there I get a book deal and it’s just like, it’s been crazy. It’s been a really crazy ride.

Speaker 1:
My mind exploded. Now I want to ask this because somebody out there needs to get the little kick in the tail they need here. When you sat down to start blogging bro, how many blogs did you write before you had any kind of traction at all? You know what I mean? How many blogs did you have to sit there because when you write it, it’s like putting a message in the bottle out there, for those who don’t know how search engines work. How many blogs did you have to write before you got any feedback at all?

Mark Manson:
100, 50, 100. It’s funny I get asked all the time, people come to me and they say, “I want to start a blog or I want to start a YouTube channel.” It’s probably similar with you like I want to start a podcast. My go-to answer is I say, “Write 50 posts, and then come ask again and I’m happy to help you.” I think in the last six or seven years that I’ve been saying that, maybe one person has actually come back with 50 posts written. In the last six or seven years that I’ve been saying that maybe one person has actually come back with 50 posts written. In the last six or seven years that I’ve been saying that maybe one person has actually come back with 50 posts written.

Speaker 1:
My partner and I, Dr. Zoellner between the two of us we’ve built a 16 multi-million dollar company. There’s an optometry clinic and there’s a brick and mortar men’s haircut chain, and did different actual brick and mortar companies. We only did the podcast because people kept asking, “Can I pick your brain? Can I pick your brain?” We thought, well hey we’ll do a podcast that way when people say, can I pick your brain, there’s a way to give them our brain without giving them our time necessarily. We just now have passed the 2000 show Mark. I don’t think Mark, we had any feedback from anybody at all until about 100 shows in. This is the craziest thing ever. Even though we’d had quote unquote some success, it’s like, is anybody listening? You check how many downloads and it’s like, look, you downloaded it and I downloaded it. That’s two downloads. How did you keep yourself encouraged during that time before you gained traction?

Mark Manson:
Well, I think when it comes to content businesses like these, they don’t blow up overnight. That’s just the nature of them. You’re not going to really hit scale for like a year or two. The piece of advice I always give is like, okay, if you want to start a YouTube channel or a blog or whatever, great. You need the plan on that not being your main gig for the first year or two. You need something else going on, some backend or some associated business that you’re also trying to build. Because I just think people see the result, they see where I am now 10 years later, they see where you are however many years later. They just assume like that’s… They think that’s going to happen six months from now. No, it’s a slow burn.

Speaker 1:
How did you or when did you first monetize your blog in any capacity? Was it like an advertiser? Was it somebody who hired you for some consulting? Do you remember the first time? I just want to know how long it took you to monetize it in some capacity, because there’s somebody out there I want to encourage right now.

Mark Manson:
Initially my blogging, I’d say the first two years my blogging was just used to get traffic and to promote, to basically do affiliate marketing. To promote other people’s products, other people’s books, things like that. I started a number of blogs to do that, and they all made a little bit of money, not much. But then the dating relationship thing started to take off. After a couple of years I decided I should create my own product and then start promoting that. I started online in 2008 and that was 2011 when I had my own product, and I could live off of the money I was making from my own thing for the first time.

Speaker 1:
What was your first product for the people out there who are not familiar with your story?

Mark Manson:
I wrote a men’s dating book, basically because most of my readers at the time, I was like 25, 26, and so most of my readers at the time were around the same age, they were single guys. I wrote a men’s dating book and just self-published it, threw it up on Amazon. To my surprise, it did super well. It’s still doing well.

Speaker 1:
Models: Attract Women Through Honesty, is that the book?

Mark Manson:
Yes.

Speaker 1:
Okay. You wrote this, now you start monetizing. It took a couple years to start monetizing this thing. Then you, my understanding is that you felt inspired to write a blog one day, that you decided it was going to be the most offensive blog ever written potentially. I don’t know if that was your goal. Tell us what happened the day you woke up and thought, you know what, I’m going to write this blog post.

Mark Manson:
Sure. Well I’ll throw in just really quick there was a transition in there around 2013. One thing I always did is I would start with like a super niche market, and then once I saturated that I would pivot into a bigger market. I started with like young men’s dating advice, and then I went to just general dating relationship advice for men and women. Then I went from there into the self-help market at large. That whole process was probably like a five-year process to build up that audience one step at a time. Jump ahead to 2015, and my blog had caught on pretty well. I was getting probably a million and a half readers each month. I sat down, I was in a really cranky mood, and I had a title, I keep the sheet in my phone with title ideas and article ideas and things like that.

Mark Manson:
I had this idea that had been sitting in my phone for a long time, and it was called the subtle art of not giving a (beep). I had never really known what to write for that, it just sat there. Then one day I was feeling bummed out and angry and snarky, and decided I’m going to write an article and it’s going to say (beep) many times as I possibly can say it. But it’s also going to give some of the best life advice that I can possibly give to people. The goal was to just scramble people’s brains. Leave them in a state of like, well this is so offensive, but it’s actually really good, and I don’t know what to do with myself. That cognitive dissonance it took off. It was absolutely crazy. I think that article itself ended up getting more than 10 million page views the first month.

Speaker 1:
I have a Judeo-Christian background, that’s my worldview. I know it seems that a book called The Subtle Art of Not Giving a (beep) probably doesn’t have a whole lot to do with my worldviews. But there’s a Bible verse that I love, Matthew 5:10 that said, blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Essentially, if you stand up for something, somebody is going to persecute you. Someone’s going to be upset about it, no matter what values you pick. I think your book is very emotionally liberating for a lot of people, of all faiths and all backgrounds. Do you get that a lot? Do you hear people tell you that it’s emotionally liberating for people to embrace that by standing up for something, somebody is going to be pissed off about it?

Mark Manson:
Absolutely. I get the religious thing too. I did a couple of podcasts with… I did a couple of Christian podcasts with pastors. One of them said that he regularly recommended the book to his congregation. I hear that from Muslims too, from Buddhists. That part really surprised me because it is a secular book. It’s not religious at all. I think so many of the life lessons are just so fundamental and part of the human experience that they’re reflected in each of the religions.

Speaker 1:
Have you spent a lot of time studying the origins of the word (beep)?

Mark Manson:
You know what’s funny, as you can imagine, I get criticism all the time. “If you cleaned up your language, more people would read you.” Which I find hilarious by the way, because I’ve sold like 12 million books. I get that email constantly. Three or four years ago, I researched profanity and vulgarity. I wrote a post about it explaining like okay, this is why I use this language. I’m not using it because I’m just an idiot who can’t think of other words. I’m using it very pointedly and intentionally to slap people in the face a little bit. It was interesting because most of what we consider vulgar today, it’s only been considered offensive for the last 80 to 100 years or so. It’s really funny if you go back to the 1700s or 1600s, what was considered offensive back then is completely different. I discovered that in 17th century England the most offensive word you could say was occupy.

Speaker 1:
It’s crazy, occupy?

Mark Manson:
Occupy. It was the most scandalous thing that you could possibly utter. It just shows you how arbitrary these things are. Words are just they’re words and the meaning, the significance we put on them, we’re choosing to put that significance on them. The meaning evolves.

Speaker 1:
The first time somebody told me what it meant, they told me about this Scottish poem I guess that came out in 1500, 1503, 1505 something like that. Where in the poem the guy uses this acronym, fornication under consent of the king. Because basically back in the day if you wanted to have extramarital sex, or you wanted to just be a man whore, you could pay an indulgence for the right to do that. He came up with this acronym, (beep) which stood for fornication under consent of the king. I just think it’s interesting how a book called The Subtle Art of Not Giving a (beep) could teach my favorite Bible verse Matthew 5:10, blessed are those who are persecuted because of their righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. I mean, seriously, your book is phenomenal.

Speaker 1:
Now in your book, and I want to talk about your new book too, but in the book The Subtle Art of Not Giving a (beep), you write, “The act of choosing a value for yourself requires alternative values. If I choose to make my marriage the most important part of my life, that means I’m probably choosing to not make cocaine-fueled hooker orgies an important part of my life.” I’d love for you to break down where you see most people struggling to reject alternative values in this world of political correctness.

Mark Manson:
I think one of the things that I raised throughout the book is that, I think people are very… There are two things that I think happen a lot today. One is that we simply aren’t aware of our values. I think part of it is just all the distraction from all the technology and phones and blah, blah, blah. We become so caught up in just this autopilot that we don’t even realize what our priorities are a lot of the time. Then I think the second thing that happens a lot, and I think this is driven primarily by social media, is that we like to portray certain values perhaps online, or to each other that we don’t necessarily live or embody or act in our real life. I think the problem is, is that the media and the social media, but just the media environment in general is rewarding that right now. It’s rewarding self-righteousness and moral outrage. It promotes that behavior and that attitude towards people. I think the right has had its own dose of that in the last 10 years, but I think right now it’s the left’s turn to really, really just scold everybody as if they’re everybody’s mother or something like that.

Speaker 1:
Well I have a funny story for you, I think you would like this Mark. Mark you are kind of to blame for this, your book is okay. One of my clients, if you get a chance to Google search him, his name is Steve Currington. If you Google search Tulsa mortgages, like you’re looking for a mortgage to buy a house, his company Total Lending Concepts comes up top in the Google search results. He’s been a client of mine for five years, and now he did $251 million of mortgages last year. He gets 1.75% on all that. He’s doing great. Long story short is he bought a Lamborghini. That was one of his goals, to buy this neon green Lamborghini. Right away just having a Lamborghini pisses people off. There are certain people that are mad, and certain people that want to get a photo.

Speaker 1:
But now in a town like Tulsa with 500,000 people, everybody knows him. Now he is a very pro-Trump kind of guy, that’s his worldview is pro-Trump. He recently auto wrapped his car, a Lamborghini, with Trump and his crazy hair all over the car. I’m not kidding. If you go to YouTube and go to LamBros right now on YouTube, it’s LamBros, L-A-M-B-R-O-S. He has millions of people that want to see this Lamborghini with the Trump wig on it. It’s the craziest thing, because it looks like he turned up Donald Trump into an action hero. It’s amazing. It just screams a Trumptastic America.

Speaker 1:
Its American flags and eagles and there’s a big wall going around our country, and it’s this craziest thing ever. He gets people that will clap and boo, but it causes people to react. I just want you to explain this, because you’ve studied the science of this, I’m sure. Why is it that everybody in a town like Tulsa is going to know the guy with a Lamborghini with Trump on it, and no one’s going to remember the guy with the Honda with nothing on it because he doesn’t want to offend anybody? If you had a Lamborghini with Bernie Sanders on it, why does everybody remember that, and no one remembers the guy with the Honda and the conservative black so no one gets offended?

Mark Manson:
Well we tend to remember things that cause an emotional reaction. We also tend to overestimate the importance of things that cause an emotional reaction. For instance, this is why everybody’s freaked out about the coronavirus because it’s very scary, when the flu kills 10 times more people every single year, year after year after year. It’s that the flu is very boring and quotidian and not very exciting, so we forget about it. We don’t pay attention to it. This is one thing that I write about a lot. It’s just that our human faculties are very flawed. We didn’t really evolve for truth, we evolved for survival.

Mark Manson:
A lot of the way our perceptions work, our memory works, our emotions work, can actually work against us in a lot of ways. Especially when we live in such a complex world where we have to deal with so many different kinds of people. One of my missions in life is to just make people more aware of how flawed their psychology is, and make them aware of how a green Lamborghini with Trump on it driving by can like set them off one way or another, and that it doesn’t matter. It’s just a car. It’s just completely unimportant.

Speaker 1:
I’ve seen people so outraged even before he auto wrapped it with the Trump stuff, I’ve seen people outraged that he even has a car that cost that much. It’s crazy. It’s just wild how here’s that we want to be outraged. In your book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a (beep), we are defined by what we choose to reject. If we reject nothing, we essentially have no identity at all. I’ll pick on myself. I have five kids, they’re great kids. I have one wife, we’ve been married almost 20 years. I drive a Hummer and I live on a ton of land. I mean, just a ton of land, thousands of trees. That’s my thing. I reject a lot of things, but I didn’t really I wasn’t aware of it until I’d read your book, how many things I reject. I don’t participate in social media except to put out content.

Speaker 1:
I don’t respond to stuff. I don’t go out to eat when requested to. When people ask me to go out to eat, I don’t do it I just don’t. I invite people to my house, but I don’t go out to eat. I never meet alone with women because I know myself, and I just want to you know where three or more gathered, I feel better about life as a married guy for me personally. I have these certain things that I do, and I didn’t realize how much it irritated some people that I have these certain rules I live by. Can you talk to me or talk to the listeners out there about some of the things that maybe we need to reject to become happier people? What are some of the things that we need to, that maybe the average listener needs to start rejecting to get to maybe to be more at peace?

Mark Manson:
I think the big thing I propose all the time is we need to develop a habit to become merciless with the information that we consume. I draw an analogy with the 1950s and 60s. When industrialized food blew up and suddenly everybody can go to the grocery store and get Twinkies and TV dinners and all this stuff. For the first time in human history, there’s just this over abundance of really, really sweet and salty food for very cheap. For the first time ever, we had to learn how to manage our eating habits, manage our nutrition, manage our diet, start exercising, things like that. It’s a skill that we had to develop as a culture in reaction to the abundance that we produced. I think the same thing is happening today with the internet and information. There’s this overabundance of information.

Mark Manson:
There is the Twinkie equivalent of shocking YouTube video, or upsetting tweet that just went out today. Our mind craves those things because they’re very easy, and they’re very satisfying for a short period of time. But we have to train ourselves to begin to ignore them, and to sift through all of the junk diet of information, and hone in on the sources that we trust that are very good, that are very well thought out, and very productive. Not just for us but, but for other people as well. I’ve been on a crusade about that. For some people that means getting rid of all social media. I don’t necessarily… Some people need some degree of social media to keep in touch with certain people or for work or for whatever.

Mark Manson:
But for me it’s like there should be a really, really strong screening mechanism of what you let onto your news feed, what you let into your inbox. There should be a really, really strong screening mechanism of what you let onto your news feed, what you let into your inbox. There should be a really, really strong screening mechanism of what you let onto your news feed, what you let into your inbox. If you’re a guy with five kids, I totally get it, who you go to dinner with, or how oft can you go out for dinners. Time is really the only truly scarce resource in this world, and so you need to protect it and you need to take care of it.

Speaker 1:
Well you know there was an article that Paul Graham, the guy behind Airbnb and Dropbox and Reddit. He sent out a tweet to an article that appeared in the Guardian called our minds can be hijacked, the tech insiders who fear a smartphone dystopia. In that book or in the article Justin Rosenstein, who created that Facebook like button, he was explaining how just some of the statistics that are out there, and why he personally is now trying to avoid using smart phones and apps and that… This is the guy who invented the Facebook like button. He said the average person now taps their phone or swipes it 2,617 times a day. Nielsen now shows the average person is on their phone 11.3 hours a day. Psychology Today has articles about this.

Speaker 1:
What advice would you have for somebody out there who feels… Maybe the business owners out there who feel, they own a bakery, they own a plumbing business, they own a doctor’s office, a law firm, something like that. Every time they look at their phone, there’s a bad review or a good review. There’s a bad comment or a good comment. They got all the apps set up there. They got all the push notifications going on. Therefore, they can never actually be happy because they’re in this permanent dystopia, seeking universal praise. What advice would you have for the business owner out there who’s got thousands of data points coming in a day, and they’re just letting those push notifications push their brain around?

Mark Manson:
Outsource it. Especially as an author and somebody who is very prominent on social media, I have very strict rules for myself in terms of… It happens about once or twice a year, where I will somehow end up scrolling into the reviews of my own books. As I’m doing it, I’m like, why are you doing this Mark? Don’t do it, don’t do it, don’t do it. Sure enough, I get there and I read two of them and I’m like, it ruins my day. The feedback’s important, but the problem is, is that so much of the feedback you get online is just noise. It’s the Yelp review of somebody whose like, “Amazing bakery but couldn’t find parking, one star.” If you see that as the business owner, that is going to upset you so much. But if you get somebody on your staff or an assistant or somebody and tell them like, “Look, once a month, comb through Yelp, find the five most useful pieces of feedback on Yelp, and then write them out and send them to me in an email or something.” That’s super useful. Then you don’t have to take the emotional toll of scrolling through all of these (beep) emails and reviews and things like that. Having to go through the emotional roller coaster of reading those things.

Speaker 1:
I noticed too, I’m going through your book reviews right now on Amazon. The trolls for my businesses they love to write the long, long reviews. The trolls do. Now the happy guy usually write a short to the point thing. I’m seeing love this book and the concept, thank you. Five stars. Awesome. This is definitely one of my favorite self-help books, and it goes on five stars. Mark, you’re killing it. But then the one guy who’s upset, he’s got a lot of time on his hands. He likes to write stuff. It’s unbelievable. Now for the business owners out there to make this very actionable. One of the things we teach a lot in our business coaching program is the Purple Cow, the concept by the ThriveTime Show guest and bestselling author Seth Godin.

Speaker 1:
Where he talks about if you’re remarkable, it’s likely that some people won’t like you. That’s part of the definition of being remarkable. Nobody gets unanimous praise ever. The best a [inaudible 00:29:58] can hope for is to be unnoticed. Criticism comes to those who stand out. You are standing out. What advice would you have for the bakery owner out there or the business owner out there who is wanting to paint their sign neon green so that it stands out. They’re wanting to paint their plumbing truck with a Purple Cow print to stand out. They are wanting to deliver that sermon that’s going to outrage people, but hold them accountable. They’re wanting to, but then they don’t want to offend anybody. What would you say?

Mark Manson:
It’s impossible. This ties back into that quote that you pulled up earlier, which is, “Think about these things in terms of who do you want to alienate?” Because if you’re a business owner, or if you’re trying to do something in the world, like you said, you’re going to have to alienate somebody. Ask yourself, who do I want to alienate? Which customers do I not want coming into my bakery or into my doctor’s office? Then position yourself accordingly.

Speaker 1:
That is good right there. Who do you want to alienate? We got to put that on a shirt, that is hot. That’s hot. That’s a book title for you my friend right there. That’s book four or five, that’s hot. Who do you want to alienate? [Shunda 00:31:10] that is good. I’m going to hit my bomb button here. Glory, that was a good one. Okay, I’ll move on. That was good. Now you have a book again you see it, you find it everywhere. You’ve gone from the blog guy to the book guy, the self-published guy, to now the bestselling author guy. I just want to know, I want to know the process. What was your process like for getting a book deal? I think a lot of people want to know what that looks like.

Mark Manson:
It was a little bit different for me because I had a big blog. Generally you always want to get an agent. What I noticed when this question comes up, people tend to overestimate how important the book idea is. Book ideas are a dime a dozen, it’s like business ideas. We’ve all got business ideas, and none of it matters. Until you actually write the thing, none of it really matters. People overestimate the book idea, they underestimate all of the business stuff. Who’s your target market? How do you plan on marketing it? Do you have an online platform?

Mark Manson:
Do you have a blog or a podcast or a YouTube channel? Do you have connections to journalists or other people that can promote it? That stuff is just as important, if not more important than the actual book idea itself. If Kim Kardashian wants to write a book, they don’t even care what the book idea is, they’re like, “Here’s some money, go write it.” If you have a platform and a marketing machine above a certain size, they’ll figure out the book idea with you later. I think people need to worry more about the business side of things, and a little bit less the idea will figure itself out.

Speaker 1:
How did you determine what agency to go with or agent to go with?

Mark Manson:
It’s actually a really funny story. When I wrote that blog post around The Subtle Art of Not Giving a (beep) blog post, I happened to mention on the website around that time that I was working on a book, and I wasn’t sure if I was going to self publish it or publish it normally. I got about four or five agents reaching out to me and setting up calls with me. It was an interesting conversation because by that time I was making good money through my site. I was making good money from my self-published book. I knew if I self-published another book, I’d probably make high six or low seven figures from it. I went into these calls with the agents of like, okay, convince me why I should do this? Convince me of why I should sign with a publisher and give them 70% of my royalties or whatever.

Mark Manson:
It was funny because all of the agents, they tried to be my buddy. They tried to be like, they promised me the moon. They said, “No, it’s going to be amazing. Just trust me.” They tried to sweet talk me and all this stuff. Then I got on the phone with this one woman, and she consistently interrupted me. I could never get a word in. Then when I asked her why I should go with a publisher instead of self-publish, her response was, “I don’t know, do whatever you want, but if you want a publisher call me back.” Then she hung up on me. I was offended for about five seconds, and then I’m like, (beep) that’s the person I want negotiating on my behalf to other people. I called her back the next day and I’m like, “All right, you’re on.” She’s been my agent ever since. She’s amazing.

Speaker 1:
This just in tips for getting mega clients, talk over them, and just don’t let Mark Manson talk and then you too can become his agent.

Mark Manson:
Exactly.

Speaker 1:
That is awesome. Okay, so now your book is everywhere. It’s in Target, it’s in Barnes & Noble, it’s in airports. I mean literally everywhere I go I see the orange cover. I’ve actually bought many copies of the book for my employees and for myself, and for people I care about. You’ve probably made at least $200 from my staff here, because I think you get two bucks a book maybe right? It’s not that sweet. People think you get a lot more per book. But hopefully you’ve made a few hundred dollars off my staff.

Mark Manson:
Yeah, two to three dollars each I’d say.

Speaker 1:
I’ve probably paid you $600 so far, so I need this help. If you’re out there listening today, buy a copy of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a (beep). Let’s get at least $1000 in Mark Manson’s pocket today. If you think about it folks, all you got to do is go without a regrettable purchase from a convenience store. Don’t get the regrettable burrito. Don’t supersize a meal this week. Maybe fast for one day. Don’t go to Starbucks for one day. Buy a copy of the book. You could have been done, but you decided to go ahead and work on another book. Your next book is called Everything Is (beep): A Book About Hope. What? What is this book about? What inspired you to write it?

Mark Manson:
Two things really. The first was, I’ll say there was a social component and then a personal component. The social component is what we were talking about earlier. Is that I think by every, pretty much every material metric, being alive today is the best it’s ever been in the history of humankind.

Speaker 1:
Truth.

Mark Manson:
The world is amazing. If you take the time and just think about, if you think about what’s happening right now, I’m walking around in sweatpants in LA with a headset on that isn’t even like there’s not even a cord, and I’m talking to you, God knows where you are. It’s being recorded and it’s being blasted out to hundreds of thousands of billions of people or whatever. It’s absolutely stunning what we experienced on a day-to-day basis. Yet, when you look at mental health measurements and the more psychological metrics, people are more anxious, depressed, and miserable and upset and angry, than any other time in modern history. I wanted to look at basically to me that says that there’s something about modern life and all this technology and everything that is causing us to feel as though things are getting worse, even though they are actually getting better. I wanted to write a book that looked at that, and took a real critical analysis of what it is about the world that is causing that.

Speaker 1:
We had a guy by the name of Daniel Goleman the clinical psychologist on the show. He was talking about in this world of digital devices, we have to create boundaries that didn’t exist before. He talks about how if you lived in this world back in the day, the 1980s. When I first started my first company, DJ connection, even though [inaudible 00:38:23] became the largest wedding entertainment company in the country, do you know how many times I got a text message from an angry customer? Never. Do you know how many times I got a bad review? Never. Why? Because you couldn’t do it. If you were pissed what would you do? You call, you leave a voicemail we call you on Monday.

Speaker 1:
Now everybody’s all hooked up to the devices, and Daniel Goleman writes, we need to recreate boundaries. When you carry a digital gadget that creates a virtual link to your office, you need to create a digital boundary, a virtual boundary that didn’t exist before. What advice would you have for the listeners out there who own companies where they have literally thousands of people at any given time who could be happy or pissed? I see so many business owners that struggle. It’s like the bigger their company gets, the more depressed they get because they’re always hooked up to the digital universe. What advise would you have for them to maybe create a little more happiness in their craniums?

Mark Manson:
I think that’s a great piece of advice, the digital boundaries. For me I’ve just learned throughout my career, especially as I become more popular and recognized and all these things. Drawing that line between the professional and personal, and then sticking to that line, not breaking it. It’s just so important for my mental health and sanity. It’s also better for my professional health and sanity. If I’m taking messages from my team during dinner with my wife, and I’m stressing out about stuff like this or that, not only is it removing me from my personal relationships in that moment, but it’s stressing me out. It’s burning me out, and I’m going to be less available the next morning when I need to get up and be ready for work. I just try to, if things come in after, when I’m done for the day, I’m done for the day. When I’m on the clock, I’m on the clock. When I’m off it’s just no emails, no texts. If something comes through for whatever reason, I say like, cool, I’ll look at it tomorrow.

Speaker 1:
That is powerful. Now in your book out there, there’s somebody out there who’s thinking about, they’re going I’m thinking about buying the book Everything Is (beep), but at the end of the day, I might not. I got to click the button and I have carpal tunnel. I might have to go to Amazon and click a button and I have carpal tunnel. My hand is very tired right now, but yet I’m very motivated to buy the book. It’s hard. I’m just going to open the book and just peep, just peer into it a little bit. Chapter one of Everything Is (beep): A Book About Hope is titled the uncomfortable truth. What is the uncomfortable truth?

Mark Manson:
I feel like you should read because I’m not going to do it justice if I don’t read it. If you go to the second section, there’s a joke on there about like if I worked at a Starbucks, what I would write. Instead of writing people’s names on the cup, what I’d write instead. It’s something akin to like you and everyone you know are going to die, and pretty much everything you do in your life is going to have absolutely no significance on the grandest scale of things. It just goes on and on and on. It’s like we’re just a bunch of monkeys on a piece of dirt. Enjoy your coffee. It’s called the uncomfortable truth because on the one hand it is true. We are so tiny and insignificant, and things are so fleeting, and seem so minuscule in the grand scheme of things. But it’s a fact that we all have to negotiate and figure out for ourselves. We all are confronted with that truth at some point in our lives, and we all have to develop some sense of meaning and purpose for ourselves in spite of it. That’s what the book is about.

Speaker 1:
This idea has been, we’ve had a lot of emails recently from listeners about this. When I built djconnection.com, I sold it when I was 27. Since the age of 27, I haven’t really had to work in the way that other people have had to work. I have this little boutique we’ll call it, Mark, consulting company. I never take on more than 160 clients because I just don’t want to. It’s like I got to 160 and I was like, that’s good. It bothers people though when you’re satisfied, and or comfortable with where you’re at. They almost feel like it’s depressing when you don’t have any huge goals to eat the earth. I just want to tap into your brain and your goals here. What are your goals? Do you want to put out 10 books before the age of X? Do you just want to make your next book the best book? How do you define success? Because I think it’s very interesting when we interview super successful people to find out how you define success.

Mark Manson:
Well, it’s interesting you asked that because after Subtle Art came out, I really struggled with that. Because I’d say previous to Subtle Art, I had a lot of those conventional metrics of success. I want to be a New York Times bestselling author. I want to sell a million books. I want to do speaking engagements in foreign countries and all this stuff. All of that happened in like a year. I suddenly was sitting around with a lot of time on my hands, and a lot of money coming into my bank account, and having no idea what to do with myself anymore. I’ve actually spent a lot of time the past few years thinking about that. For me right now, I think of it as I have a few missions in life. One of them is I feel like the self-help genre or the self-help industry has a lot of toxic and cancerous aspects to it. I want to disrupt that industry.

Speaker 1:
Yes, yes, yes and yes. I could not agree more. This is great continue. I love this. I couldn’t agree with you more.

Mark Manson:
That’s beautiful because that’s a long-term slow-moving thing. One thing that I discovered the hard way is that having those very numerical external metrics of like, okay, I want to do a million dollars in revenue or something. That’s nice, it’s nice to have those and it’s nice to get those. But they’re not sufficient. You need some broader, and again, I think of it as like a mission in life. Disrupting the self-help industry is one of them. Another one is the same one I mentioned earlier, which is simply making these ideas about understanding how our emotions drive our sense of what we find important.

Mark Manson:
How a green Lamborghini feels important but it’s not. Or, a few hundred people in China dying feels important but it’s not, it’s just scary, and those aren’t the same things. I want to raise the consciousness and the culture, and have all these psychological concepts. Psychologists have known this stuff for decades, but it hasn’t seeped its way in. People haven’t processed it yet. I feel like we need to process. If we’re going to survive the social media age, we have to process these things, or else we’re just going to get thrown into a hurricane.

Speaker 1:
Mark we have four minutes and four rapid fire questions, so here we go. What is the disappointment panda?

Mark Manson:
Disappointment panda is a superhero I created in Subtle Art and it’s super power is to tell people truths that they don’t want to hear.

Speaker 1:
Awesome. Such as, maybe give just one example.

Mark Manson:
In the book he walks door to door like a Bible salesman, and knocks on the door. Somebody will come and say, “You think that making more money will make your kids appreciate you but it won’t.” Then he tells them to have a nice day and goes down to the next house.

Speaker 1:
Disappointment panda. Brett Denton, one of our thrivers out there. He’s a very successful business owner, listener, client of mine. He built a gym called Cavell Fit. It’s like a big group classes, a fitness training center in Boise, Idaho. He writes a question for you. He says, “It seems you have a knack Mark for writing and researching in a way that is new and fresh. How do you determine the content for writing, and how to spin it in a way that is new and interesting?”

Mark Manson:
Generally I use myself as a barometer. I trust that if I find it interesting, and if I tell my friends about it and they seem to find it interesting, that it’s probably something that a lot of people are experiencing or thinking about. Then from there in terms of writing in a fun or clever way I get bored easily. My bar is like, I need to write something that I wouldn’t be bored reading, and that’s it.

Speaker 1:
Okay. Final two questions for you. ThriveTime guests Nir Eyal the author of Hooked, and now Indistractable apparently is your writing accountability partner. Could you explain about your relationship with Nir as it relates to being your writing accountability partner?

Mark Manson:
Nir’s great. We wrote our books together. Being a writer is hard because it’s very isolating. It’s really hard to keep yourself on task when you’re just sitting in a room by yourself for six, eight, 10 hours at a time. I met Nir a few years ago. We had both just started our last books, and we were both struggling to make much progress on them. We discovered that we only lived maybe half a mile away from each other. We started meeting up a couple mornings each week and banging it out, and we’ve been friends ever since.

Speaker 1:
Final question. You’ve got the mic and before we drop the mic, you can say anything you want to our half a million listeners. Any word message, book they should buy, action step you want them to take, disappointment panda quote. Anything you want to say?

Mark Manson:
Well I’m not promoting anything at the moment. Just check out the books next time you’re in the airport. But I would say improving your life is about improving your problems, not improving necessarily improving your successes. Focus on choosing good problems, and the all the good stuff will happen as a byproduct.

Speaker 4:
Can you dig it?

Speaker 1:
I’m going to say this to the listeners. I don’t want any of the listeners to feel bad if they don’t buy a copy of Everything is (beep): A Book About Hope. I don’t want them to feel bad. But I can say for as little as maybe $20 a week, you too could support a very successful author by buying a copy every week. Just keep buying that, put that on auto ship, get that stuff. Get that on Amazon. Mark Manson, thank you so much, man, for being on the ThriveTime Show.

Mark Manson:
Thanks man. It was a blast.

Speaker 1:
Thrive nation that was an incredible show right there. Mark Manson, great author, great guest. If you learned something today, share that with somebody you know. Just share the podcast with somebody you know, send them a text, send them an email, tweet it to them. Send it to them on Facebook. Maybe fax them an MP3 if that is in fact possible. Now without any further ado, we like to end each and every show with a boom, so here we go. Three, two, one boom.