Mark Manson

This comes at a point at my life where I feel out of sorts: I'm unemployed and looking for my next gig, my country is now hostile to people I care about, and I feel left behind by my own choices. This book is a great read for me now, not because it says that everything will get better, rather because it admonishes that I am responsible for the choices that lead up to this point and it is my responsibility to determine what is important in my life and how I carry myself through it. Throughout show more this book I felt echoes of Leo Babauta's "Zen Habits" blog and the acknowledgement that it is OK to embrace the issues that come up and to truly feel them without papering over the feelings.

It's a quick read. Definitely not for someone who has issues with salty language, but if you can make it through the title you should be OK with the rest of the book. show less

Mostly, I'm not a fan of self-help books, but I am a sucker for clever or catchy titles. Knowing nothing of the author or his philosophies, I read this simply because of the cover.

The arc of my enjoyment of this book seemed to follow the same arc as the number of uses of the word fuck per page. So the first chapter was quite good, but the book slowly tapered off from there.

Early on, a lot of the author's suggestions appealed to me, since they were things I already do. I see life as a series show more of problems to be solved and take happiness out of getting to the other side, making myself slog on even when I don't want to. But as the book went on, the stories and philosophies espoused just became sort of generic.

I was surprised the author was as young as he turned out to be, based on all his crotchety complaining about these kids today. He seems to have a real problem with the so-called "snowflakes" and people who feel entitled, and the majority of the book seems to be a diatribe against them. This wasn't particularly interesting to me.

p.s. I described the book to my wife, and she quickly concluded the author was a sexist asshole who had read a little about Buddhism. I don't think she's wrong. show less

Mark Manson writes like you're having a casual chat with a no-nonsense friend who tells it like it is. No fluff, no sugar-coating, just straight-up advice on how to stop stressing over things that don't really matter & focus on what truly does.
I love how he flips traditional self-help ideas on their head. Instead of telling you to chase happiness, he makes you question what's actually worth your energy.
It's refreshing, laugh out loud funny, & brutally honest!

Having picked this up on a whim while visiting the library to return other books, I'm surprised to find it...pretty good. Turns out the scary-named Manson is preaching the same gospel my grandfather (born in 1901) might have. You can't avoid suffering. You can't help the cards you're dealt, but it's up to you how to play them. Sometimes life is about making hard choices. If you want good things, you have to work for them. Build some character, for God's sake! Grow up!

The author is a show more well-known blogger and his mostly millennial audience apparently eats this stuff up, and good for them, and for him. He writes in the accessible, easy-going style you'd expect of a practiced blogger. The first few chapters are the most successful and contain the core message, while the later chapters are broader and more padded out with questionable examples and TMI personal anecdotes. (I really didn't need to know that his background includes running a for-profit dating advice website right out of college, or all the details about how his first girlfriend dumped him and how it felt. But maybe that's a generational difference.) I'd probably recommend this book to a young person suffering from lack of direction, an inflated sense of specialness, and conflicting values, which is to say nearly every young person. It didn't do me any harm, either. show less