Are you troubled with the way you are reacting to things in your life? Do you feel that YOU are always the problem or the whole world is against you? If you are feeling that way, you probably need some learning for you to be more forgiving to yourself.
For me, I always felt that I could have done things differently to get better results and I have a strong sense of responsibility. A lot of times when things go wrong, I would blame myself for not doing well enough instead of trying to motivate myself to do better.
At the start, I looked at this behavior as a way of improving myself. But after a while, I noticed that I stop loving myself I started to look down on myself, hate why I can’t do things right, and hated my life. This has caused me to be in a constant state of frustration towards myself because I feel that I am the problem.
Upon looking for ways to set things right, I went to a bookstore and I saw this book under the top sellers’ bookshelf, “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fu*k” I decided to give myself a chance to try reading this book as I wanted to get rid of my low self-esteem.
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck
This book was written by Mark Manson which was a blogger and published in 2016. The book itself aims to help how to stop being “positive” so that true happiness can be achieved. This book was very special to me as it did not include any sugarcoat or censorship. The author would curse in the book and you would be able to tell the difference between this book and other books that you have read.
In this book, he believes that you should try to accept the fact that human beings are flawed and limited and “not everybody can be extraordinary”, there are always winners and losers, you can’t possibly win all the time and sometimes it isn’t even your fault to fail. Manson advises us to know what our limitations are and accept them. Once we learn to embrace our fears, faults, and uncertainties, once we stop running and avoiding and start confronting hurtful truths, we can start to find the courage, perseverance, honesty, responsibility, curiosity, and forgiveness we seek.
Life is short, there is only so much we can care about and Manson makes it clear in his book that we have to figure out what exactly are the things we should care about and don’t care about the rest.
Key Lessons Learned from this book
Personally, I have benefited from this book a lot as I feel happier now as I give less care to the things that are not that important in my life. I hope that this book will help you as well. This summary will include my key lessons and important information from the book.
Having a matrix to define failure
Manson shared that we should not set our standards too high in life as that would always lead you to failure and it can be very difficult for you to persevere. Instead, try to have your own failure matrix such that you are only affected by the things within the matrix. For example, if you know that your score of Math is 60 and you know that your Math ain’t that good, you should not feel bad when your other friends get 80 because you should be focusing on the fact that you reached your standard. This does not mean that you should aim low in life, this just means that you should accept the fact that your Math is not that good and you should not be affected by what others are getting but how you can improve on your Math skills.
Only Give a F*ck to Things That Matters
Everyone needs to know that you would die someday, time is limited and there are only so many things that you can care about. You should not be affected by things that hold no values to you. There are things where you have no control over and you should not be affected by those problems. For example, if you are feeling like you are always wrong when someone is mad at you for some reason. You need to think if the person is actually someone that is worth your time and emotions. You should only care about the people who are important to you like your family, loved ones, and your true friends.
With that being said, how can this be linked to our finance learning? We should only put our money in places where we need it. For example, if you see your friends wearing all those Gucci or branded goods, why should you care? You should still focus on saving your money so that you can grow them instead of getting goods that serve no purpose in your financial goals.
It’s Okay to Suck Some of The Time
As everyone knows, no one is perfect and everyone has their flaws. That being said, most of us still bring ourselves down when things go wrong. The problem is that sometimes it’s okay to fail or to be bad at something. Instead of making yourself feel worthless, why not think of it as a reminder that you still have room for improvement? It could be a good checkpoint to see how much you improved as a person as problems only get harder and harder in life.
From a financial standpoint, you need to know that sometimes you will make mistakes and wrong investments which ends up costing you losses. But it is okay, even the greatest traders learn by making mistakes so why should you be bothered?
Final Thoughts
Overall, this book has helped me a lot in terms of improving myself and learning how to handle my negative thoughts better. For those of you who are always feeling down or concerned about everything in life, this might be able to help you like how it changed me. However, this book will not be suitable for those who are not a fan of swearing words. The book has quite a lot of contents which included the author swearing, so if you are not okay with it you shall not read it.
Click here if you wanna grab a copy!
