This book by Mark Manson is designed to impact your outlook and how you view your position in the world. Its central hypothesis is that happiness is not meant to be the default, constant state, and that struggle and the desire to improve are where happiness comes from. It emphasizes the difference between responsibility and fault, two concepts commonly conflated but with very different meanings. 

I enjoyed reading the book and would recommend it.

Utility in the academic space

This book comments frequently on entitlement and the feeling that one is owed something for their efforts. High performers in stressful situations (like academia) are primed to experience entitlement and other similar emotions. This book can help with keeping perspective and spurring positive action in the face of the rejection that is so common in biomedical research.

Notes and quotes

Wanting to improve is a negative experience while accepting your negative experience is a positive experience. Everything worthwhile in life is won by surmounting the associated negative experience.

Not giving a f*ck is staring down life's biggest challenges and still taking action.

Prioritize your thoughts based on your values. If you care too much about too many things, you begin to feel entitled to comfort and happiness.

3 subtleties: 1) it's not being indifferent, it's being ok with being different. 2) To not care about adversity, you have to care more about something besides adversity 3) you are always choosing what to care about whether you realize it or not.

Dissatisfaction and unease are required for happiness, they spur action and innovation, and happiness comes from solving problems. Negative emotions are a call to action. What is the pain that you want to sustain? Who you are is defined by what you are willing to struggle for.

Entitlement makes people need to feel good all the time even at the expense of others around them. You and your problems are not privileged in their severity or pain. Exceptionalism is not normal.

Everyone has emotional blind spots. It is with identifying these and working on them. It's needed to explore why we feel things. This helps you find the root cause of the emotion so you can act.

Emotions come from values, which determine the nature of our problems. These don't change. We chose what our problems mean and how we measure them. Bad values that cause problems for people include pleasure, material success, always being right, staying positive. Good values are reality based, socially constructive, and immediate and controllable. Bad values are superstitious, not constructive, and beyond your control.

You are responsible for everything that happens in your life. You can't control what happens, but you do control how you react. Accepting responsibility for your problems is the first step to solving them. Responsibility and fault are different.

Growth is an endlessly iterative process. Certainty is the enemy of growth. All beliefs are wrong, some are just less wrong than others.

Measure yourself by mundane identities. The more unusual your self definition, the more threatened it will be. It forces you to give up your sense of entitlement. Improvement at anything is based upon thousands of tiny failures. If you are unwilling to fail, you are unwilling to succeed.

Pain is part of the process. It motivates change. Pain makes what are simple problems feel complex. Separate what you feel from what you are. Learn to sustain the pain you've chosen and then act despite it.

Don't just sit there. Do something. Answers will follow. Action brings inspiration brings motivation brings action brings inspiration. To truly appreciate something you must confine yourself to it. To value something you must reject things that are not that thing. The desire to avoid rejection at all costs is a form of entitlement.

Good relationships have boundaries and responsibilities. When you have murky areas of responsibility for your own emotions you don't develop clear values. Victims and saviors. Without conflict there can be no trust. When trust is broken, the one who broke it has to identify why and fix their behavior.

Commitment gives you freedom because you are not distracted by the unimportant and the frivolous. Novelty loses novelty, deeper experiences are available only with commitment.

A man who lives fully is prepared to die at any time. Confronting your morality removes all the stupid frivolous values. What is your legacy?