The Subtle Art of Not Giving A Fuck-Mark Menson

1. The deeper the pain, the more helpless we feel against our problems, and the more entitlement we adopt to compensate for those problems. This entitlement plays out in one of two ways:1. I’m awesome and the rest of you all suck, so I deserve special treatment.2. I suck and the rest of you are all awesome, so I deserve special treatment.
2. if everyone were extraordinary, then by definition no one would be extraordinary.
3. Being “average” has become the new standard of failure. The worst thing you can be is in the middle of the pack, the middle of the bell curve. When a culture’s standard of success is to “be extraordinary,” it then becomes better to be at the extreme low end of the bell curve than to be in the middle, because at least there you’re still special and deserve attention. Many people choose this strategy: to prove to everyone that they are the most miserable, or the most oppressed, or the most victimized.
4. A lot of people are afraid to accept mediocrity because they believe that if they accept it, they’ll never achieve anything, never improve and that their life won’t matter.
5. We all have emotional blind spots.
6. The trick with negative emotions is to 1) express them in a socially acceptable and healthy manner and 2) express them in a way that aligns with your values.
7. Emotions are just feedback.
8. “One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most beautiful.”
9. “self-improvement” is really about: prioritizing better values, choosing better things to give a fuck about.
10. The first failure is taking responsibility for everything that occurs in your life, regardless of who’s at fault.
11. The second is uncertainty: the acknowledgment of your own ignorance and the cultivation of constant doubt in your own beliefs.
12. The willingness to discover your own flaws and mistakes so that they may be improved upon. The fourth is rejection: the ability to both say and hear no, thus clearly defining what you will and will not accept in your life.
13. The final value is the contemplation of one’s own mortality; this one is crucial because paying vigilant attention to one’s own death is perhaps the only thing capable of helping us keep all our other values in a proper perspective.
14. It’s the idea of taking control over her own thoughts and feelings and being happy again.
15. The beauty of poker is that while luck is always involved, luck doesn’t dictate the long-term results of the game.
16. A person can get dealt with terrible cards and beat someone who was dealt with great cards.
17. “Outrage is like a lot of other things that feel good but over time devour us from the inside out. And it’s even more insidious than most vices because we don’t even consciously acknowledge that it’s a pleasure.” 
18. Many people become so obsessed with being “right” about their life that they never end up actually living it.
19. Evil people never believe that they are evil; rather, they believe that everyone else is evil.
20. The man who believes he knows everything learns nothing.
21. We cannot learn anything without first not knowing something. The more we admit we do not know, the more opportunities we gain to learn.
22. The only way to solve our problems is to first admit that our actions and beliefs up to this point have been wrong and are not working.
23. Manson’s law of avoidance on them"The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it."
24. “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
25. Avoiding failure is something we learn at some later point in life.
26. Our proudest achievements come in the face of the greatest adversity.
27. Our pain often makes us stronger, more resilient, more grounded.
28. Death scares us. And because it scares us, we avoid thinking about it, talking about it, sometimes even acknowledging it, even when it’s happening to someone close to us.
29. All the meaning in our life is shaped by this innate desire to never truly die.
30. “The fear of death follows from the fear of life. A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time.”