Mark Manson
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F***
ISBN: 978-0-06-245771-4
I’ve had a lot of people recommend books to me over the years. I try to pick up most of them and give them a shot, and many of the books recommended to me end up being good reads. Either this means that my friends and I are like-minded, or they just have excellent taste when it comes to reading material. However, it’s been a long time since I’ve read a recommended book that resonated with me as well as this one did – where I spent a great number of the pages nodding in agreement with the points the author was making and being able to put myself in his shoes.
Not giving an F means that you’re comfortable in your own situation. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t be aspirational. I’m never going to stop looking up to people who I want to emulate, and neither should you. However, putting yourself down because you’re not hitting milestones at the same pace is a waste of energy. You need to be comfortable with the pace at which you’re moving forward and not base your self-worth on others.
Life is a struggle, as the author writes. To achieve anything in life, you have to struggle and sacrifice. As I’ve discussed before, and as others have written about, nobody likes discussing the struggle involved in moving from point A to point B, or beyond. This is the dark secret of the entrepreneurial community, where thanks to social media, it appears as though people just glide from one party to the next, from founding the company to the big acquisition or IPO at the end of the “messy middle,” as Scott Belsky calls it. A feedback loop is present in social media, and it’s something that shouldn’t receive any of your limited Fs.
The part of the book I enjoyed the most was the part talking about saying no. Saying no to people and saying no to jumping onto new projects is one of the biggest struggles I’ve had over the nearly five years that I’ve been involved in the entrepreneurial ecosystem – something I’ve discussed at length in other blog posts, and probably will talk about again and again. Saying no to things that are either unimportant or conflict with your own personal brand is the most important thing you can do to help balance yourself and to improve yourself. You can’t possibly give an F about everything, so why try? Each person has a limited number of Fs – a very small number compared to the amount some people try to give. Why waste those Fs on the unimportant or the destructive?
It seemed like the main purpose of the book was, through humor, to get people to step back from what they’re doing and to take a top-down look at how their lives are organized. What could you cut? What makes you feel bad? Can you stop doing or interacting with what makes you feel bad? Why are you giving so much attention to things that really could be ignored? Why are you sweating the small stuff? It’s the important things that deserve your limited supply of Fs.
Overall, 8/10, would recommend not just for the humor, but because the book just makes you feel better about yourself, no matter how you’re feeling at the moment.