The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*ck Summary

1-Sentence-Summary: The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*ck does away with the positive psychology craze to instead give you a Stoic, no-BS approach to living a life that might not always be happy, but meaningful and centered only around what’s important to you.

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The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*ck Summary


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For as much as I love positive psychology, sometimes it just doesn’t work, even for me. There’s another mode that might sound odd, but still works: toiling. You know how you have the occasional week where it’s literally just grinding? Even if you usually like your job, nothing exciting happens for a few days, you have a lot of deadlines and you just toil away to get it done.

It’s the mode I’m in right now and weirdly, it’s still kinda satisfying. Probably, because it feels liberating not to have to ooze happy vibes all the time. Blogging demigod Mark Manson has coined a better phrase for this mode of operation: The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*ck. His first “proper” book, this instant New York Times bestseller is a no BS self-help book for people who usually hate self-help.

Mark gets that life has become overwhelming and the only way to find our center around the things that really matter to us is to not give a f*ck about anything else.

Here are my 3 favorite lessons:

  1. Values you can’t control are bad values to follow.
  2. Don’t believe you know anything with certainty, for it keeps you from improving.
  3. Trying to leave a legacy might ruin your life.

The trick of not giving a fuck about most things is that you’ll be able to give one about what really matters to you. Let’s see how we can get a bit closer to that!

The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*ck Summary

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Lesson 1: Only hold values you control.

Mark is a very Stoic guy and it shines through his writing and advice. A common idea in Stoicism is to focus only on the things you can control. This is easy enough to understand and implement when it comes to your actions, but it can be applied to more intangible aspects of your life as well.

Take your values, for example. I know it’s hard to put them into words, but if you try to describe yourself in, say, three adjectives, you already have a good idea of which values most dictate your life. Let’s say you chose the words honest, punctual and popular. Here’s where Mark makes an interesting remark: Only choose to have values you can control.

Most of us give up some of our ideals as we grow up, try to have a career and make money. While that’s just part of real life, it’s important you don’t hand off the steering wheel altogether. Values you don’t control are bad, because they’ll be a constant source of unnecessary suffering in your life.

When we look at the three we just mentioned, honesty is 100% in your control. Only you know how honest you are, but no one else needs to. Punctuality is partially in your control. If you always leave with plenty of buffer time, you can compensate for most potential obstacles. Popularity, however, is totally out of your grasp. Sure, you can be nice and friendly to everyone, but you can’t control other peoples’ opinions. Some will always hate you, no matter what you do.

Therefore, popularity isn’t the best value to focus on and you could try replacing it with one more controllable, such as kindness.

Lesson 2: Certainty hampers growth.

What a great principle distilled into just three words: certainty hampers growth. Imagine you could choose between two modes of moving through the world: one in which you think everything you know is 100% true and one in which you think nothing you know is 100% true. Both are stressful, but which one do you think would help you make better decisions?

The latter, of course. While there’s some middle ground to be found here, rejecting the idea that you know anything for sure is a great base to start learning from. This is true for discovering factual knowledge, such as using the scientific method to build business hypotheses helps arrive at better conclusions, but it is also true for gaining conceptual knowledge.

The second kind is more implicit knowledge about the relationships between various entities. Let’s take your place in the social hierarchy at school, for example. If you’re convinced you’re ugly, you’ll be sad a lot. But if you notice that you get lots of compliments at school, people call you charming and some have a crush on you, that’s evidence your brain is playing you with false certainty.

If you allow yourself to have a little doubt, you can then disprove this limiting belief you hold about yourself.

Lesson 3: Don’t obsess about leaving a legacy.

Here’s an uncomfortable, but important reminder: You’re going to die one day. We all are. Whether we admit it or not, when the time comes closer, we’re all scared. That’s why many of us want to leave a legacy, myself included. However, Mark says that might ruin our short amount of precious time here on earth.

The more we’re driven to build a great body of work, the more start chasing fame, working too much and focusing on the future. What if instead, we just tried to be useful in the present? We could still help a ton of people, enjoy our days and fully be here, while we’re here.

Mark’s stance is clear: Find ways to bring yourself, your loved ones and the people you meet joy in the now and let the legacy part take care of itself.

The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*ck Review

Mark’s writing is funny and to the point. No bullshit, lots of curse words, but lots of insight too. It’s a medium long book with just over 200 pages, but light in terms of how fast you get through, because Mark uses many examples too. I already learned another lesson from the first chapter: success has nothing to do with self-improvement. You can read that chapter as a free preview on Scribd.

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Who would I recommend The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*ck summary to?

The 21 year old software engineer, who thinks about quitting his first job after six months, because it’s not fun, the 45 year old fighter pilot, who couldn’t care less about self-help, and anyone who hopes to become a mega successful artist.

Last Updated on August 11, 2022

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Niklas Göke

Niklas Göke is an author and writer whose work has attracted tens of millions of readers to date. He is also the founder and CEO of Four Minute Books, a collection of over 1,000 free book summaries teaching readers 3 valuable lessons in just 4 minutes each. Born and raised in Germany, Nik also holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Business Administration & Engineering from KIT Karlsruhe and a Master’s Degree in Management & Technology from the Technical University of Munich. He lives in Munich and enjoys a great slice of salami pizza almost as much as reading — or writing — the next book — or book summary, of course!