The key in living a good life is not giving a fuck about more things, but rather, giving a fuck only about the things that align with your personal values.

The desire for a more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically, the acceptance of one’s negative experience is itself a positive experience.

If you are able to not give a fuck about the pain your goals require, then you become unstoppable.

We should question our emotions because they are not always right.

You can’t merely be in love with the result. Everybody loves the result. You have to love the process.

Self-esteem, by itself, is overrated. It doesn’t help to feel good about yourself unless you have a good reason for feeling that way. The struggle makes self-esteem useful, not the participation trophy.

The more uncomfortable the answer, the more likely it is to be true.

People who are exceptional become that way by thinking they are average and focusing on improvement. You don’t become exceptional by believing you are exceptional.

Problems are inevitable, but what they mean is flexible. We get to control what our problems mean to us based on how we choose to think about them and how we choose to measure them. The way we measure success influences how we view the problems we face.

We don’t always control what happens to us. But we always control how we interpret what happens to us, as well as how we respond.

People will often fight over who gets to be responsible for successful and happiness. But taking responsibility for our problems is far more important because that’s where real learning comes from

Certainty is the enemy of growth.

The more you try to become certain about a particular issue, the more uncertain and insecure you will feel.

The more you embrace being uncertain and not knowing, the more comfortable you will feel in knowing what you don’t know.

The man who believes he knows everything learns nothing.

Manson’s Law of Avoidance: The more something threatens your identity, the more you will avoid it. The more something threatens how you view yourself, the more you will avoid getting around to doing it.

If it feels like it’s you versus the world, chances are it’s really just you versus yourself.

The magnitude of your success is tied to how many times you’ve failed at that thing.

Goals are limited in the amount of happiness they can provide in our lives because they are finite. Once you achieve the goal, it can no longer provide happiness because the finish line has been crossed. Paradoxically, then, by choosing processes as your focus, you can increase your overall, lifelong happiness by focusing on the process and not the goal. Processes never end, which means happiness can continue indefinitely.

If there is no reason to do anything, if life is pointless, then there is also no reason to not do anything. What do you have to lose? You’re going to die anyway, so your fears and embarrassments and failures don’t mean anything. You might as well try.