Mark Manson: The Hard Truth About Success & Happiness | Human Behavior | E342

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I'm starting this new year in Texas, y'all. Well, I still need to work on the y'all part, but I've taken a big leap into the unknown and booked a beautiful Airbnb here in Austin.
And so many entrepreneurs that I know love it here, and I'm going to see if I love it here as well. And so far, so good.
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My book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, it sold a million copies, I think, within six or eight months. I never planned for anything after this in my life, and I'm only 32 years old, so what the hell am I supposed to do next? What have you learned about happiness over the years? Happiness is overrated.
The more you think about and worry about happiness, the more you remove it from yourself. People get causation backwards.
The assumption is like, well, if I just find what I love, then I'll get really good at that thing. It's actually the other way around.
People tend to fall in love with the thing they're really good at. What is your advice for all the single people out there? The only real dating advice is self-improvement.
Marriage is supposed to limit your freedom, right? But I found that it was completely liberating because that's the magic sign. That's the sign of like, this has legs.

This is going to last for a long time.

Young Improfitters, what is the key to a fulfilling life lies not in chasing happiness, but embracing discomfort? Today, I'm sitting down with Mark Manson. He's the best-selling author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck and the host of the podcast of the same name.
Mark was on the show on episode number 65. This was during the early days of the pandemic.
And in that conversation, we talked about adulting and his book, Everything is Fucked. Today, I'm so excited to have him back on the pod because we're not in lockdown and we get a chance to explore some of his transformative rules for living.
In this episode, Mark is gonna share his always refreshingly blunt insights and give us some actionable strategies that challenge conventional wisdom and will help you redefine your past to a more meaningful life. Mark, welcome back to Young and Profiting.
Mark, welcome to Young and Profiting podcast. It's great to be here.
Thanks for having me. So you last came back on the show in 2020, and we were actually in the thick of the pandemic.
We talked about your views on adulting, your book, Everything is F'd. And today, I'd love to just get your advice on a whole slew of topics.
So let's get right into it. You turned 40 last year.
And something that I love that you do is that every decade, you share your life lessons over what you've learned in the past 10 years. So you did an article about surviving your 20s, excelling in your 30s, and now you just did a blog about 40 lessons that you learned about now that you're 40.
So now that it's the new year, I thought it'd be the perfect time to unpack some of these life lessons. So first of all, why do you do this every 10 years? Why is that so meaningful for you? There's just something about arbitrary ages that I think it's useful to take stock of your life, how much you've progressed, how much things have changed.
And just the decade years, 20, 30, 40, are probably useful years to do it. I don't think there's anything necessarily special about them, but I don't know.
It's switching over to a new decade. So it makes sense to take a little bit of extra time, take stock of your life, and consider what's changed.
So I learned that you believe that you hit all your career goals, or at least the ones that you had, by age 32. So that means you must have been doing something right in your 20s, and you say that your 20s were especially dramatic.
So why were your 20s so dramatic? What were your 20s like for you? And what were some of the things that you did to ensure that you would hit all these career goals by your early 30s? My 20s, I very much optimized for novelty, experimentation, and self-discovery, which I think are good things for young people in general to optimize for. I probably went a little bit too hard on all that stuff.
So I spent most of my 20s living as a nomad. I spent most of those years living abroad.
I was never nailed down in a specific city-country relationship.

So I was traveling around the world partying a lot.

And that had both benefits and drawbacks.

The benefits was that it exposed me to a very wide variety of experiences and people at a very young age.

So I think I probably got ahead of the curve in terms of understanding myself and understanding people

and understanding culture. And I think that will play into some of the success of the books.
It got me a little bit behind the curve in terms of I was out drinking and partying a lot. And I wasted a lot of time on some silly and stupid things and probably didn't work as hard as I could have or should have at certain points.
So it's one of these weird things. It's impossible to know if that trade-off was worth it.
But as a 40-year-old now, I look back at my 25, 26-year-old self and I'm like, bring it down a notch, right? Do you really need to go out on a Wednesday night? There's probably better things you could have done. But ultimately, I think because of the nature of the industry that I'm in, which essentially is observing and commenting on human nature, noticing psychological concepts, cultural trends, being able to appeal and address a wide international audience, I do think that lifestyle ended up kind of inadvertently helping me quite a bit in my career for those reasons.
I did technically meet all my career goals at 32. Part of that is that I think the success of my book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, just vastly outstripped any expectation I ever had.
And part of that too is that I was probably thinking too small at the time. And I guess we could get into each of those things individually if you want.
But that's my 20s in a nutshell, I think. Why don't you take us to the story of writing your first book? What expectations did you have? And how did it surprise you? It was a very different time back then.
So just to give a little background, I started blogging in 2007. By 2009, I eked out a very small full-time income.
And by 2012 or 13, I'd grown a pretty significant audience online. So by the time my stuff really started to take off, I was five or six years in, I'd been scraping by, I'd been living in a lot of countries that were very cheap to live in.
And suddenly I find myself, I have a bunch of articles going viral on Facebook and Twitter at the time. And I find myself with millions of readers.
And back then, what's known today as the creator economy didn't really exist back then. So back then, the roadmap was just build an audience online, and then that can get your foot in the door to go make a TV show or get a book published or make an album, right? And how old were you at this point? I was 27.
So young. I didn't realize that.
So when the agents and editors started coming knocking, right? And they're like, hey, some of these articles are great. We think we could get you a book deal.
What do you think about that? It was very exciting. And as somebody who never studied writing or journalism in school, who had never held down a real job in his life, who didn't even do well in English class as a student, the idea of me publishing a book was just so, oh my God, I can't believe this is happening.
So when I entered into that world, I set what I thought at the time were pretty ambitious goals, which was I want to be a New York Times bestseller at some point in my life. And over the course of my career, I'd like to sell a million books.
And at the time, I think because I overestimated the prestige and the power and the size of the traditional publishing industry, those things felt pretty impossible. They felt like things I would have to work towards for 10, 20 years to accomplish.
And what I didn't realize is that I had actually unwittingly tapped into the most powerful distribution system in the world, which was social media, and already amassed an audience much larger than most New York Times bestselling authors. I just didn't know that yet.
That wasn't obvious to me, and I don't think that was obvious to people in the publishing industry either. So when the book came out and it started doing really well, it sold a million copies, I think, within six or eight months.
And it was still in the publishing industry either. So when the book came out and it started doing really well, it sold a million copies, I think within six or eight months.
And it was still in the New York Times. It was huge.
I remember it myself. It was a phenomenon.
I remember everybody was talking about it. Your name was out there.
Like it was huge when it came out. It was everywhere.
And so I think the combination of my maybe irrationally low expectations and just the suddenness of the success, I didn't know what to do with myself. I hit this point where I'm like, well, okay, that's done.
I, what now? Right? Like, how do you follow that up? And by the way, I never planned for anything after this in my life or my career. And I'm only 32 years old.
So what the hell am I supposed to do next? And I actually struggled with that for a number of years. I can imagine that that could be something difficult to have.
So much success. Did you feel like you earned this success? I struggled with that for sure.
Because it felt, I don't know, in a lot of industries, publishing being one of them, the marginal improvement of a product that's 10% better is 10 times the result, right? There are plenty of books that were 95% as good as mine, but they sold 1% as many copies. And that's just the way that creative industries work.
It's like the very, very top 0.1% do 99% of the sales. And I think that's just a hard concept for us to wrap our heads around to begin with.
But certainly at the time, it was very difficult for me to wrap my head around. So it very much felt like, did I do this? What the hell did I do? You know, and it's actually funny because even to this day, a lot of aspiring authors or people who just wrote their first book and it's about to come out, they'll come to me for advice on book launches and book marketing and book promotion.
And inevitably, they're incredibly disappointed because I have nothing interesting to say. I didn't do anything special.
You just need to write an amazing book that people want to go talk about and buy for their friends and buy for their family members. But that's the answer that nobody wants to hear.
Everybody wants to know that there's some hack or some formula or some promotion that I did that moved the needle. And the fact is, there really wasn't.
Well, I think there was. I think there was a lot of pattern disruption in what you did in terms of the title, the cursing.
It was kind of like not self-improvement, but self-improvement. So I feel like you were one of the first people to kind of do self-improvement in such a more honest way.
Yes. That's actually a really good point.
I would say the majority of the marketing and promotion was done before I wrote it, which was sitting down and deciding what I should write in the first place and why. Because at that point, a lot of the ideas that ended up in the book had been viral blog posts.
And I had really thought deeply about why they went viral. And what you just described is a big reason.
In a large self-help market full of touchy-feely, woo-woo stuff, this was pretty gritty and raw and realistic. And internally to my team, I used to say, I write self-help for people who hate self-help.
That was the target market. So yeah, it was choosing the target audience, understanding the market segmentation, how I was going to differentiate myself, and figuring the branding out.
That was the stuff that put gasoline on the fire, the email sequence and how many book tour events I did. That was all just completely inconsequential.
I also think something else important that you said before was the fact that you were one of the first authors to actually have an online audience or to own your audience on social media. And so you were able to test your ideas and then take the idea that really went viral to actually write your book.
So you were one of the first ones probably to really do that. Yeah.
It was really funny, actually. I remember when I was pitching Subtle Art to publishers, I had all my newsletter followers and my Facebook followers, all the numbers were in the pitch.
And none of the publishers cared about that. All they wanted to know was which celebrities I knew or which celebrities I thought I could talk to to get promoted.
They were like very, very concerned about that. And I was like, yeah, I don't really like, I don't know.
It's actually very funny looking back in hindsight. So would you say you were lucky in your 20s then? Or would you say that you did a lot of things right, at least in your late 20s, to kind of do well? I made some good decisions.
But looking back, at the time, I did not fully understand why they were good decisions. So I had chosen a particular lifestyle.
That lifestyle, I think, had perhaps put me ahead of the curve in terms of understanding a number of topics and issues that a lot of people were interested in. And I, through experimentation with my writing online, I discovered that I was really good about writing those topics and that I could generate a very large audience on those topics.
I never put all those things together. I never understood that this weird wayward lifestyle that I had was also fueling this ability to look at human nature and personal growth in completely different novel ways.
But I think looking back, I'm glad I figured out how to capitalize on it. Can you give me some insight in terms of what was your lifestyle? For example, like 2011, I spent a couple months in the UK, half of which was sleeping on a couch in London.
From there, I managed to get a visa in the Russia. I spent six months in Russia, mostly in St.
Petersburg, studying Russian and dating Russian girls. And then that visa expired.
So then I went to Ukraine. And then from there, I met up with a friend from home.
By then it was summer. So we did a whole backpacking trip across Europe, ended in Ibiza.
I partied in Ibiza for a week, then flew to Amsterdam to meet a client. That was like the first half of my 2011.
All of that's living out of a suitcase. All of that is running my business from my laptop.
Wi-Fi was often horrendous in half the places I went. But it was very much just like a lush, degenerate lifestyle.
It was a ton of fun. But looking back, I think what was very educating about it was being in all those different

countries and really enmeshing myself with those cultures.

What you start to notice when you just live in your own country, you take for granted,

you assume that your values and your assumptions and beliefs are universal.

You assume that the way people socialize is the same everywhere in the world, that the

way people show respect is the same way everywhere in the world, that the way people show respect

is the same way everywhere in the world, that the way people show interest or affection is the same everywhere in the world. And it's not at all.
It's completely different everywhere you go. And being thrown into these environments where the social norms and values change constantly, I think it taught me that it's the values that actually drive everything, which is essentially what Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck is about.
Ultimately, it's you have to choose what you make important in your life, and then everything else flows from that. And if you choose the wrong thing, it doesn't matter how hard you work, how smart you are, how well you network, what school you

went to, you're going to end up in the wrong place. And if you choose the right things to care about, you can actually stumble through hungover and end up in the right spot, right? So that initial directional choice is so, so massively important.
Why don't we stick on this for a bit? I know that you write a bit about happiness. What have you learned about happiness over the years?

And is happiness something that we can ultimately achieve? Or is it something we have to keep working on? There's a chapter in my book called Happiness is Overrated. I still stand by that statement.
The irony with happiness is that the more you think about and worry about happiness, the more you remove it from yourself. It's almost like happiness happens when you're not worried about being happy.
Ultimately, like every emotion, happiness, it's a psychological feedback mechanism that we evolved to help us survive and procreate, right? So when you're happy, it generally means that you've succeeded in some way in achieving your basic wants and needs. And when you're not happy, it's because you're lacking some of your basic wants and needs.
And I think when people try to elevate happiness and put it on a pedestal and try to make themselves be happy all the time, you're like missing the point. Happiness is not the cause of a good life.
It's the side effect of living a good life. And living a good life requires you to sometimes struggle and become frustrated and deal with problems that you don't necessarily want to deal with at the moment.
That's all part of it. And I know that you talk about purpose and meaning, and you actually have a really unique perspective about purpose and meaning.
You don't think we should put it on a pedestal and we shouldn't idolize our purpose and meaning. So I've been doing this podcast for many years, and I know the last couple of years, especially 2022-ish, everyone was like, purpose, purpose.
What do you think about that? I think the problem with purpose is that people go about it the wrong way. They approach purpose as if it's hiding under a rock somewhere.
People are like, oh, I got to find my purpose and then sign up for a yoga class thinking that purpose is magically going to appear in the yoga class. And purpose is not found.
It's created through action that feels useful. And you can have useful action doing the most mundane stuff.
You can have useful action doing the same stuff that you've done for 20 years. A lot of it is just simply how you choose to think about it and the value you choose to perceive in it.
So I think purpose is something that's fostered and created through finding useful and meaningful reasons and motivations behind the things that you do. And you don't necessarily have to like go explore the world to find your purpose.
Sometimes it's actually right in front of you and you've just been neglecting it. Let's hold that thought and take a quick break with our sponsors.
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Hiring Indeed is all you need. over your 30s you said that that you had so much success.
You kind of didn't know what to do with yourself after you reached some milestones. How did you navigate through that? And how did you decide what your purpose and mission was going to be over the next 10 years? It's funny because I think I got the purpose question correct before Subtle Art.
And I think that's part of why Subtle Art was so successful. So the mission that I decided on around that time in my career was that the self-help industry sucked, and I wanted to make it better, make it more realistic, make it more practical, and make it more appealing for more people.
And I do think I widely succeeded at that over the 2010s. Looking at myself personally, I think I actually lost track of that.
Because when you experience a meteoric rise, like I did, people are accustomed to things compounding gradually, right? This year, you want your business to be 10% better than last year. Next year, you want it to be 10% better than it was this year.
And our expectation is that things just incrementally get better like that. Well, whenever something comes along and there's a thousand percent improvement in like six months, it breaks your brain.
You don't really know how to conceptualize that and what you should be doing. And so suddenly I found myself with all these opportunities and invitations coming in that were so surreal and not in my reality six months prior.
And my default was just to say yes to everything. You know, this might be my 15 minutes.
Cool. Let's go have dinner with a congressman.
Why not, right? When is this ever going to happen again?

So my de facto response was just,

yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.

That's cool in that it gave me a lot of great experiences

and cool opportunities,

and it also made a lot of money.

But as anybody who's said yes

to too many things knows,

the consequence of that is that,

A, you get spread too thin,

so you start doing a lot of things and none of them very well.

You get burnt out because you're just overdoing it.

You're overexerting yourself.

And then third, you lose track of what matters to you, right?

If the default is yes to everything, then you're not really prioritizing anything over anything else.

So after about four or five years, I started to feel the repercussions of all of that. I felt extremely burnt out.
I became very unhealthy. I was no longer excellent at anything.
I was good or above average at a lot of things. And I lost track of what drove me, what motivated me.
So my 30s, I think, was very much getting a lot of clarity on what I stand for, what I want to do with my life. Because, you know, when you're young, when you're in your 20s, you think about missions and purpose and like all these goals and dreams you have, right? And it's all very exciting and it's all in the future, right? I've got plenty of time.
I'm going to work my ass off for years and decades and all this stuff. I think once you get to like your mid or late 30s, you start realizing how long and how difficult it is to accomplish one dream or goal.
And you realize you really don't have enough bandwidth to do more than one or two more of those in your whole life. Suddenly, your mortality becomes a lot more real.
I really just need to pick the one hill I'm willing to die on because life is short and that's all I'm going to have the energy and the mental power for. So my 30s was very much just getting a lot of clarity and focus.
It's like, okay, I accomplished all these things. What do I want to use this stuff for? What is the point of all of this? What's the point of selling 20 million books? What's the point of having millions of readers? What are we driving towards over the next 20 years? Because after that, I'm probably done.
I'm on a beach somewhere playing pickleball. I know that you've done a lot of reflecting.
You put out this 40 great life lessons in honor of your 40th birthday. So I thought we could do something fun, rapid style.
I'll rattle off one of the insights or hindsights that you had in your 30s, and you can tell us about it. So passion is not the cause of good work, but the effect.
It's funny, when you look at the psychological research on passion and enjoying your job, what they find is that people get causation backwards. So the assumption is like, well, if I just find what I love, then I'll get really good at that thing.
But it's actually the other way around. People tend to fall in love with the thing they're really good at or the thing they're really rewarded for.
So it's actually what you should be looking for is what do you have a talent for? What do you have a knack at? What do you find that people actually compliment you on or note that you're really good at? And then if you start focusing there, you'll start to fall in love with it. In a lot of ways, humans are just very, we're very narcissistic.
We want to be great at something, right? And so when we do find something we're good at, our psychology is kind of wired to start making us feel emotionally satisfied. Yeah, I always tell my listeners to pay attention to what you get compliments for and then try to turn that into a business somehow.
So growth is rarely accompanied by joy and celebration. Yes, I think by definition, growth requires breaking or losing some aspect of your former herself.
And by definition, growth requires breaking or losing some aspect of your former self. And by definition, breaking or losing an aspect of yourself is painful and uncomfortable.
And in many cases, there's actually a component of grief to it, right? I quit drinking a couple of years ago. And while I don't want to drink anymore, I don't want to drink again.
Sometimes I look back at my former lifestyle and I miss it. I get nostalgic.
I'm like, oh man, remember like, God, those parties were so much fun. And there's like a little bit of sadness that comes along with it.
But that's also one of the most profound transformational growths that's happened to me in the last couple of years, right? So generally speaking, most growth comes from some aspect of loss, not all the time, but most of the time. Okay.
One of the last ones, be careful how you define yourself. Yes, because the way our mind works is that however you choose to define yourself, you are going to start defending that definition.
So if you define yourself poorly or superficially, you're going to end up spending a lot of energy and effort defending a really poor superficial definition of who you are. Generally speaking, I think it's useful to think of yourself in the broadest and most ambiguous terms.
I'll give you an example. I think I suffered quite a bit because I adopted the identity of I'm a best-selling author.
That became what I was known for. That became what I had been most successful at.
And this happens to all of us, is that when we become successful at something or when people start recognizing us for something, we just assume that that's who we are. And I spent many years feeling a lot of pressure and a lot of anxiety.
And anytime I went to write a book or write something, it put a lot of pressure on myself. Well, I'm supposed to be this big bestselling author guy.
This is supposed to be what I'm amazing at. And it took something that used to be fun and felt kind of low stakes, it turned it into something that felt very high stakes and very anxiety ridden.
And then something happened a few years ago, which is I took some time off and then I kind of realized I'm like, wait a second, before all this author stuff, I was an entrepreneur and I built an online business and that was a ton of fun. And I actually missed that a lot.
And I was like, you know, just because being an author is the thing I was most successful at doesn't mean I have to be an author. I can be an entrepreneur who happens to write books and they happen to sell really well.
And that simple shift in my head, it just gave me so much internal freedom, unstifled me in so many ways. So yeah, you really want to be careful how you define yourself because no matter what you choose, you're almost choosing a mental prison for yourself.
So make sure you choose a very broad and easily navigable prison. I love that example.
And it reminds me of something that Nick Loper,

who came on my show, talked to me about.

He says that he's in the audience business

and he keeps it like super vague.

He's like, I'm in the business of building audiences

and I sell whatever I want to them.

And I just thought that was so cool

to think about it that way.

Okay, last one.

And then we're going to transition

to talk about relationships.

So this is the perfect transition.

Don't overestimate romantic love.

Thank you. Okay, last one.
And then we're going to transition to talk about relationships. So this is the perfect transition.
Don't overestimate romantic love. I think if you think about all of the worst relationship decisions you've made, chances are you were either drunk or you were madly in love with somebody.
And you probably use that love to justify the horrible decision. I think the truth is that romantic love is great.
It feels amazing. It's very powerful.
But it doesn't necessarily fix relationship problems. In fact, if the relationship is unhealthy, then romantic love can actually make that relationship feel even worse.
Romantic love actually just amplifies whatever relationship already exists underneath. So if it's a healthy relationship, and it's a very loving, respectful relationship, then the romantic love will make it feel even better.
But if it's a disrespectful relationship, it doesn't have trust, and the people don't treat each other well, then the romantic love will actually make that relationship worse. So be very, very careful around romantic love.
And very much like a drug, romantic love, it short circuits your ability to be rational. Your decision making gets worse.
So the same way like you wouldn't drive when you're drunk, don't make any too big decisions while you're in the throes of romantic love. You actually know a lot about relationships and dating.
You started your career writing about dating. You got married in your 30s.
What new things did you learn about love and relationships once you tied the knot? Marriage has been fantastic. When I was younger, I didn't even know if I would ever get married.
I had very little desire to get married.

Even when I met my wife, I was still on the fence of whether marriage even made sense as a concept or an institution. Now that I am married, and actually even very quickly after I got married, I've become a very big proponent of marriage.
The reason is actually pretty simple. There's a lot of value in constraints.

And coming back

to talking about clarity and focus, right? Like knowing what's worth caring about. The value of a marriage is that it solves so many of those questions for you, theoretically, for the rest of your life.
Sometimes the way I describe it is that before I was married, even when I was in relationships, a percentage of my brain was always running this piece of software. And the software was called, where's the hot girl in the room? And does she like me? And I think most males could definitely relate to this software, but I don't know, maybe women too.
But it was like kind of the same way if you leave Photoshop on your computer and it just slows everything else down. It was like this program was running in the back of my brain.

You know, I'm just like always looking around being like, oh, wow, she's really cute.

I wonder if she'd like me. It was just this pattern in the back of my head that went

nonstop. As soon as I got engaged, it was like closing that piece of software.
And suddenly,

like 20% of my brain's bandwidth was freed to think about more important things. And it was actually incredibly liberating, which I found very fascinating because by definition, marriage is supposed to constrain you.
It's supposed to put limits on you. It's supposed to limit your freedom, right? But I found the actual psychological experience was that it was completely liberating because I never had to worry about all of these things I used to worry about all the time.
And just the comfort and the ease that comes with that, I think can't be overstated. And then on top of that, the trust that you build with somebody over a long period of time, the stability that you build with them, you can't put a value on it.
It's incredibly powerful and energizing, knowing that no matter what happens in my business, no matter what happens in my personal life, there's always somebody that I care about who's got my back, who's always going to be supportive, who can always give me advice, who can always tell me if I'm bullshitting myself or screwing up. It's priceless.
I love that you're bringing this up because in the online dating world, it's like the options are endless, right? You get 20, 30 matches a day, especially if you're good looking and successful. And even if you're not, there's somebody for everybody out there.
And I think it's really hard for people to make a decision in today's world and online dating. So what is your advice for all the single people out there that are struggling to just pick a partner and make it work? I definitely think getting off the apps, if you can, is useful.
I think the apps unintentionally filter for the wrong things. Unfortunately, I was single before the apps.
But when I think back to my dating life, I can't tell you how many times I met a woman and I wasn't initially that interested in her. But say over the course of the evening or meeting her a couple times, the attraction slowly grew.
And it was all these intangible things. It's like, oh, she's got this quirky sense of humor.
And like, oh, wow, she said this really interesting thing. And there's a chemistry that happens.
And next thing you know, it's like, wow, she's actually really hot. That's cool.
you know? And I think the apps, they rob everybody of the opportunity of having that experience. We're very unconscious of most of the things that draw us to another person and most of the things that will make us happy in a relationship.
And most of the things that we think will make us happy in a relationship actually won't. They're like very superficial or inconsequential.
And so, yeah, I think the apps are just filtering for the wrong things. And I think if you have ways to meet people in the real world, you should absolutely lean into that.
The other piece of advice I give to single people all the time is sit down, write down a list of all the things you want in a partner, and then take that list, prioritize that list from most important to least

important with that absolute top two or three items should be kind of non-negotiables. Like,

I'd rather be single than date a person without these traits. Mark whatever is non-negotiable to

you, and then delete the rest of the list. And only look for the things that are non-negotiable.

Because what I see over and over again these days, and again, it ties into the perception of

Thank you. list and only look for the things that are non-negotiable.
Because what I see over and over again these days, and again, it ties into the perception of so many options, is that people will meet somebody great. They'll check all of the non-negotiable boxes, but then there's some very superficial thing, quote unquote, wrong with them.
That's like number 12 on the list. It's like, oh, well, you parents are from this state, and I don't want to have to travel there on holidays.
And they're done. It's ridiculous.
People break up with each other, stop dating each other for the stupidest, most inconsequential, unimportant reasons. So find your list of non-negotiables, delete everything else off the list.
Those are all nice-to-haves. They're not must-haves.
And understand that even if you find the perfect partner, they're still going to drive you crazy like 10% of the time. That's just life.
That's humans. Humans are annoying.
Every single human on this earth is annoying 10% of the time at least. So accept that fact and good luck.
Yeah, I think I read something where you said you marry the person you're going to fight with or something like that. Absolutely.
Absolutely. So that's a trait that I always tell people who are in a new relationship.
So I often get the question of people like, hey, I met this amazing person. We've been dating for three months.
What should I be looking out for? What are the signs that we're really good for each other long-term? And the answer I always give is when you have your first fight, really pay attention to how it goes. Because if you fight well, meaning if you make up quickly, forgive each other quickly, compromise quickly, move on quickly, and there's no bad blood.

People don't resent each other.

People aren't bringing up an argument

from four months ago to score a point

against each other.

If you fight well, if the fights are productive

and relatively quick, that's the magic sign.

That's the sign of this has legs.

This is going to last for a long time. Because every couple fights, every couple disagrees about dumb stuff, the question is, are you able to move beyond the dumb stuff and not take it personally and not escalate things? When I think about relationships, I feel like there's so many people out there who are probably compatible.
And it's just about picking someone who you want to invest in. And over time, just like a company and investing in a company or investing in a stock, your returns just grow and grow because you're investing in that relationship.
Would you agree? Oh my God. I love that metaphor.
Here you go. It's like buying a single stock and holding it for 30 years is going to give you much better returns than buying and selling stocks every single day.
Not only because you're probably going to buy and sell the wrong ones, but the friction costs, all the fees, the carry costs, and the brokerage fees and everything, it's going to eat your portfolio alive. So yeah, buy and hold.
Buy and hold when it comes to relationships. Yeah.
So one of your tips for dating for single people is actually to be the person that you want to date to get your shit together. What do you have to say to all the men and women out there who feel like they can't find their right match right now? It's funny because I wrote a dating book early in my career.
And I think one of the first things I say in that dating book is that the only real

dating advice is self-improvement.

Everything else is either a detail or a distraction.

I still believe that.

The best thing you can do as a single person to increase your opportunities is to simply

improve yourself, to develop better social skills, better social awareness, meet more people, improve your career,

develop confidence, independence, all those things. The problem is sometimes you run into

people who feel like they are amazing themselves, but they're not meeting amazing people.

And in those situations, it's generally one of two problems. One is you're diluting yourself.

You think your market value is much higher than it actually is, in which case it's a reality check. But the second issue is sometimes you do have amazing people, but they're just looking in the wrong places.
They're not thinking clearly about who is going to make them happy, who they're probably going to naturally be compatible with, and what demographic of dating they're to have the least amount of friction with. I'll draw another business analogy in here.
When you're building a business and you're going to launch a product, you do tons of research on your target market. You get a really clear understanding of, okay, what are the age, demographic, geographics of the people who are going to buy this product, the ones that are going to use it the most, the most profitable customers, right? People don't apply that same thinking to dating.
They just spray and pray. They just send out 50 messages to people on apps and just hope, right? They don't think really hard about like, okay, who am I going to appeal to? What is my lifestyle going to appeal to? If you're really religious, why are you trying to meet somebody in a club? Go to church.
If you are a high achiever and very driven professionally, why are you hanging out at football parties trying to meet somebody? Go to business networking events. Go to industry events.
Try to meet somebody at work. It's basic common sense stuff like that that I I'm like shocked how many people miss it.

How about really good looking people, really successful, really good looking people

that feel like they have so many options?

Do you feel like it's actually harder for them to date?

I don't think it's harder for them to date.

I think it's harder for them to commit because you run into a concept called paradox of choice,

which is that the more options you have, the less satisfied you generally feel when you choose one. So you get this situation where you always feel like you could probably do a little bit better if you just kept looking.
And that can get you in the trouble, right? Because at some point, you just have to buy and hold. So I was with somebody for most of my adult life and we broke up.
Now, as I've approached dating again, I'm successful. I've got a lot going on.
I feel like there's endless options and it's hard to commit. What advice do you have for me? Like, how can I commit to somebody or what is the best way for me to decide who I should commit to?

The best way to decide is to simply find a person who you naturally stop wanting to see other

people. For example, when I met my wife, I was dating like three other girls.
And the first

date with her went amazing, but I still saw the other girls. And then the second date was also amazing.
And I noticed after that second date, when I went back out with some of the other girls, I was kind of like sitting there being like, yeah, she's all right. But man, this other girl, I'd kind of rather be hanging out with her.
And so like, there was like this natural, the desire to see other people just started to kind of naturally fade over the course of like a month, month and a half. And I just kind of naturally wanted to see her more and more.
It sounds like it was about the friendship too, the friendship that you felt you had. Absolutely.
There really is a chemistry thing that happens and you do have to filter and look for that. In your case, I would say I would say, when did you start dating again? Like how long have you been dating? I've had like boyfriends and things like that, but I'm like dating again more recently, let's say in the last two months.
Oh, okay. So you're like, you're fresh back on the market, basically.
At this phase, what I would do is just really try to pay attention. The men that you go on dates with, just really try to pay attention to the things you like and the things you don't.
And be honest with it too, because there's probably, I imagine there's probably guys you go on dates with, there are things you like about them that you didn't really expect to like. And there's things you didn't like about them that you also didn't really expect to not like.
Just try to learn your own preferences in this period because you're still just fresh

back on the market. There's no rush.
I would just use this as data collection. Just try to

understand what you're feeling and what you're drawn to and then start filtering for those types

of men. We'll be right back after a quick break from our sponsors.
I want to talk about your career and entrepreneurship. I want to pick your brain about your business, your brand.
So you've got all these different revenue streams, books, podcasts, courses, blog. Where do you make your most money from? Like what is your big moneymaker out of all these things? It's changed a lot over the years, but 2024, it's probably like 40 to 50% books, 20 to 25% courses, and then 25 to 35% brand deals and ad revenue.
And then there's a little bit of speaking in there. I don't do a ton of speaking, but I'd say 5% speaking fees.
And when you say brand deals, is it like blog, podcasts? Podcasts and newsletter primarily, but we also do some YouTube brand deals. Do you know that I run the number one business and self-improvement podcast network? Ooh, I do not.
Yeah, I represent Amy Porterfield, Jenna Kutcher. I just signed Neil Patel.
I represent a lot of people, Trent Shelton, Russell Brunson. I'm like the girl that gets everyone's sponsorship.
So we could talk after the show. Let's talk about books.
So you said books. I was actually really surprised to hear you say this because I have a social agency as well.
And a lot of my clients who are authors, they make a majority of their money from speaking. So like they write a book.
And like most of the money is actually coming from their speaking engagements. But you are a really popular author.
So maybe that's why you actually make money off your books. Can you break that down? How do typical authors make money off their books? I'll stick to nonfiction because fiction is kind of its own thing.
But in the nonfiction world, the typical business model for like a nonfiction author is the book is actually a lead magnet for their speaking fee. So you write a book, I don't know, you pick some sort of business concept, like some sales tactic, right? You write a book about it.
That defines you as the expert on B2B sales in this industry. That gets you invited to all sorts of industry events.
A bunch of companies want to bring you in to consult. That's actually where most of your revenue comes from.
Because you're probably charging $25K a speaking fee. You're doing $10K, $20K per consulting gig.
You do 20 of those a year. That's a low six-figure income.
Whereas the book itself, you're probably making $25K to $50K total off of the book. So most nonfiction authors, that's the model is they get really clear.
They want to target a specific industry or define expertise for a specific industry. They write the book to be the lead gen for that industry, and then they actually go get paid on speaking and consulting.
But for you, it's different. You're more of like a volume game with your books because you have such a broad audience.

Correct.

So I'm self-help, which is a very broad audience.

And also, it's less B2B, it's B2C, right?

So it's high volume, low price point.

And towards the top of the market in terms of volume.

So I'm published, I think, in 75 different languages.

I've hit number one, I think, in 13 or 14 different countries.

And then Subtle Art has just had this insane staying power. So book royalties continue to be a huge part of my income.
And speaking is a relatively minor part of my income. It's funny because I don't actually charge that much more than kind of a general nonfiction author for speaking.
Just because I don't have like a super business friendly message that's going to improve sales by 20% in the next quarter or anything like that. I'm just kind of, I'm the not give a fuck guy, right? So it's, I'm usually just coming in for general motivation and to shake hands with everybody.
So speaking is not a huge part of my model. So I know that there's a lot of people that write.
And when I think of a writer, I'm usually thinking of a struggling writer who's broke, right? Most writers, in my opinion, are broke and don't make it. So why do you think you are different? Why do you think that you're a writer who makes money off your books? I really do think it actually worked out very much in my favor that I started as an entrepreneur because I always approached my writing as an entrepreneur.
It's funny because a lot of things I was saying about the dating market, I very much see my books as just products, right? And it's like looking for product market fit, understanding customer demographics, ideal customer, target audience. These are all the same concepts, but most authors don't think about that.
Actually, a very common piece of advice that I give to aspiring writers is to study copywriting. And when I tell them that, they wince and get really uncomfortable.
They don't like hearing that, right? Because every aspiring writer has this romantic vision of being like the next Hemingway or Virginia Woolf or something. And it's when you tell them to go study advertising and copywriting, because ultimately the business you're dealing in is attention and words command attention and certain word combinations are much more powerful than others.
Most writers don't think of it in those terms. And I think I've gained quite a bit from thinking in those terms.
I also think when I look at the traditional self-help industry, say of like the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, it was very America-centric. It was very boomer-centric.
Like it was very just, Hey, all these people in midlife crisis, go to this seminar and find your potential and you'll live up to your purpose and you'll, you know, all this stuff. And I think I was one of the first who tapped into the international market.
And a lot of that is just because I came up on the internet, right? So it's like, I found the message that not only appealed to Americans, but it appealed to people in India, it appealed to people in Taiwan and South Africa and Egypt and Brazil. And so that's relatively new as well.
I know we were talking about audience businesses before. So when you're thinking about building your audience, what are some of the ways that you try to find new audiences? And do you think about how to upsell and increase LTV with your current audience and the different offers that you have at different stages? It's a great question.
So the way I look at it is that we live in this world now where it's a multi-platform business. We're on all the different social platforms.
I'm podcasting. I've got YouTube videos.
I've got newsletters. I've got blogs.
And the strengths and weaknesses of every platform is different. Some platforms are very good at discovery and finding new audience, but they're not great at monetizing.
Other platforms are great for monetizing, but it's harder to grow. And different platforms also attract different types of people.
So what I've really been focusing on the last couple of years is trying to lean into the strength of each platform and not worry about the weakness. So for example, YouTube is great at discovery and audience building.
It's not so great at monetization. So I don't really worry a whole lot about making YouTube profitable.
I just want it to grow the audience as much as possible. And then I'll just funnel those people into the newsletter or into the podcast or something else like that.
As you know, podcasts are great business models. It's a great business to be in.
So with the podcast, it's all about just maximizing engagement, monetization, making sure the listeners are happy, making sure there's some consistency, and not worrying so much about growth and discovery and, oh, is this going to get caught by the algorithm and all that stuff? So that's how I've been thinking about it. In terms of LTV or monetization, I'm in a transition phase at the moment in that my monetization is very much like all my courses and everything.
They were built and launched in the 2010s and they did really, really well back then, but now they're out of date. So my team and I were actually in the process of,

we're going to redo my entire backend, top to bottom.

And we should hopefully start launching that stuff

next year or this year, 2025.

2025 and 2026 will be the process of relaunching the backend

and building out a new funnel,

just because what I have now is old and out of date.

You mentioned your newsletter list a bunch of times.

It's a long time. I think I actually started my first one in like 2010.
For most of my career, my approach to the newsletter has just been, oh, this is just where the super fans are. And these are probably, these are the people that are most likely to buy something.
I never thought about the newsletter as a product itself or as a platform itself. That's relatively new.
I think that's something that's developed just the last few years. So my newsletter just kind of went along as a companion to my blog or the rest of my business.
And it grew steadily, but I never put too much emphasis on it. And then I'd say probably 2022, 21, 22, when all newsletters really started to take off in a big way and monetization became much better with them.
And we've been focusing really hard on growing the newsletters since then. And so, yeah, now it's a huge part of the business.
It's a big moneymaker for us. It's a huge audience and it's very, very engaged.
So it's like anything I launch or any book I do or whatever I promote there, it's going to send a lot of juice. I've been obsessed with newsletters lately.
So like I told you, I have this podcast network and I have like 500 podcasters that I really want in my network. And so I created this list of just 500 emails of all the top podcasters that I want in my network.
And I designed content that hosts want that they can't find on the internet. That is about monetization and growth and all the hacks because I know the most stuff about podcasting out of pretty much anybody in the world, right? So I can see Alex Hermosey opening up my email 10 times.
I can see Grant Cardone opening it up 20 times. I can see all these people that I want in my network.
And it's just so cool. And newsletters to me are so underrated.
I feel like there's so much

potential because you can just get directly in somebody's inbox and you can basically send them

marketing messaging that's helpful and valuable. And you can see who's engaging with it.
Where like

if you put out a blog, you can't tell who read it. So I just think it's so cool.

Thank you. and valuable and you can see who's engaging with it.
Where like if you put out a blog, you can't tell who read it. So I just think it's so cool.
And if you're on a platform, you don't control distribution and you also don't control the list. With a newsletter, you own the list.
So even if your email service provider kicks you off their service, you can just go sign up for another one and import your list and send all the same people. I know we are running out of time here.
This episode is going to be launched in the new year. So before we go, I just want your advice on how we should approach new year's resolutions and habits in 2025.
My spiel about goals is that I think most of the value of a goal is that it actually gets you off the couch and doing something.

And the actual achieving of the goal itself is less important.

So I always advise people to set goals and intentions that are achievable and practical.

And don't get so worried if you don't actually hit the arbitrary number that you set for yourself. The point is to just motivate yourself to start taking action in the right direction.
So if you decide you want to lose 20 pounds and you only lose 15, who cares? You got off your ass, you did something, you accomplished something, that's what matters. So goals, it's all about direction and not the destination.
Mark, I love today's conversation. I feel like it was like a grab bag of all your best life advice.
We got a little undercover look into your entrepreneurship and everything you got going on with your business. I end my show with two questions that I ask all of my guests.
The first one is what is one actionable thing our young and profiters can do today to become more profitable tomorrow? Write down all of the stuff that you are doing and look at what is the least useful. I find this with myself.
I make myself do this pretty regularly. There's always something that I'm doing on a weekly basis that there's no reason for me to be doing it.
It's just habit and I should be outsourcing it. I should be hiring somebody to do it or it just shouldn't be done at all.
But it's very difficult. Generally speaking, the easiest way to make progress is not by adding a new activity.
It's by eliminating something that's not bringing a lot of value. So basically tracking all your activities and removing anything that is just can be outsourced or is a waste of time.
What is your secret to profiting in life? And this can go beyond business and financial. I would say, and it's funny because this is going to be paradoxical with the word profit, but both in business and in life, when in doubt, just give more value because eventually it will come back to you in some shape or form.
So good. Mark, this has been such an awesome conversation.
Where do you want to point everybody to? Where can they find you and everything that you do? I'm everywhere. I'm doing everything.
Check out the podcast, the Subtle Art Not Giving a Fuck podcast with Mark Manson. We're actually rebranding, relaunching the show soon.
That's a whole nother conversation, but definitely check it out on all your podcast feeds. YouTube channel is just Mark Manson.
And then on every platform, my books are in every store. You can't escape me.
Yeah, you can't miss them, guys. You can't miss them.
Mark, it's always a pleasure to have you on the show. Thanks for hopping on.
Thank you. To all my younger Yap listeners out there, you guys have no idea how good you have it today.
Imagine yourself like Mark Manson in 2007, starting a blog and trying to scrape together a big enough following on early Facebook and Twitter to build an audience. And then maybe after years and years and years of struggle, you somehow miraculously get that book deal or TV show.
And then even if you do manage, despite all the odds, to be known and break through like Mark did, all of a sudden you're swimming in money and attention and with no idea how to handle it. You're defined by your singular success.
To most people, you're just the not give a fuck guy. But you've got to hand it to Mark.
He turned those lemons of that struggle into lemonade. Like a good entrepreneur, he took the time to figure out exactly who his audience was and what they wanted.
And so when he did break through again, he had a built-in following that came with him. Mark also emerged with a great perspective on life and a boatload of good advice.
Like, happiness is not the cause of a good life. It's the side effect of living a good life.
And purpose is not found. It's created.
And the last one I'll share is passion is not the cause of good work, but the effect. So go forth, my Yap Bam, and multiply.
Make your content, build your following, create your purpose, and wake up every day thanking your lucky stars that this is not 2007. Thanks for listening to this episode of Young and Profiting Podcast.
If you listened, learned, and profited from this conversation with the super compelling Mark Manson, then please share it with somebody who would also enjoy it. And if you did enjoy this show and you learned something, then drop us a five-star review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, wherever you listen to the podcast.
I love getting your reviews. And if you guys want to watch this podcast as video, go check out our YouTube channel.
Just look up Young and Profiting. You'll find all of our episodes on there.
You can also find me on Instagram at Yap with Hala or LinkedIn by searching my name. It's Hala Tzaha.
And of course, I've got to give a big thanks to my Yap production team. I've got the best team in the world.
I'm so grateful for you guys. And I'm also grateful for everybody tuning in.
I really feel like lately the show has been picking up more than ever. We're growing so fast on YouTube and Spotify suddenly.
And it's just such a great feeling. You guys are sharing the show by word of mouth.
You guys are really enjoying the show. I've been getting extremely good feedback lately.
And I just feel so thankful. I feel so thankful that I get to do this, that you guys enjoy it, and that I get to do what I love.
And I wish the same for all of you guys tuning in out there. I hope you find

something that you love to do and get paid for it. Well, with that said, thank you guys for