The One Principle That All Highly Successful People Share | Mark Manson

My name is Mark Manson. I'm the author of The Subtle Art of Not Giving a ****, as well as some other works. I'm a YouTuber, podcaster, and my work focuses primarily on the importance of values. Achieving the Right Kind of Success Today we live in a success-obsessed culture. People feel like if they can just make enough money, if they can just have the right car or buy the right house, if they can find the right partner, then everything's going to be fixed and fine. And what's tricky is that I think we tend to be kind of bad at defining success for ourselves. We don't think very hard about how are we measuring success? What is the metric by which we determine whether we're making progress or not? And a lot of this comes back to understanding our own motivations, right? Like a lot of people, maybe they want to have a really fancy car or a really nice house or live in a certain part of town, and they think that's actually what they want. But really, what they want is respect or approval or attention, not realizing that there are way easier ways to go about getting respect, approval, and attention in your life than having to go spend a million dollars in a house on the other side of town. If we don't question how we're measuring success, then we're going to be unclear on what we're willing to give up to get there. And if we're not willing to give anything up to get there, then we're basically guaranteeing that we're never going to be successful in the first place. And these days, people are particularly obsessed with extraordinary success, like massive outlier success, multi-multi-billionaire type success. And people want to replicate that, but I don't think people are paying attention to the right thing. I don't think they realize what is actually involved. Because if you want to achieve massive, extraordinary amounts of success, you have to do three things well, and people tend to ignore or overlook two of them. The first one is that you have to have a contrarian take. This is just basic logic. If you want to capitalize on an opportunity that is greater than 99.9% of other opportunities, then you have to be willing to look somewhere that 99.9% of other people are not willing to look. You have to find an idea that 99.9% of people think is a stupid idea. You have to be willing to consider it. And the irony is that this willingness to be contrarian, this willingness to look at ideas that other people think are ridiculous, usually goes completely against why people want to be extraordinarily successful. People imagine that if they're extraordinarily successful, they're going to be celebrated and everybody's going to love them. Everybody's going to want to hang out with them and be friends with them. And it's like, no, actually the thing that's going to make you that successful is going to make you a pariah. It's going to make you look ridiculous. You're going to sound stupid. People are going to be like, that guy is crazy. What is he on about? Step number two is you have to be right about that contrarian idea. Most contrarian ideas are contrarian for a reason, because they're horrible ideas. They're ridiculous. They're wrong. They're stupid. So you have to find that rare contrarian idea that everybody else has overlooked and everybody else is wrong about. And then step number three is you have to have enough conviction on that idea to execute on it massively. And this is where everybody gets tripped up because they look at somebody like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates or Warren Buffett, whoever, name your famous super successful person, and they look at like, okay, what was their morning routine? How many hours a day were they working? What did they do with their weekends? Completely missing the fact that this person took an idea that everybody else thought was ridiculous and then completely rearranged their life to optimize for that idea. The optimization itself is completely secondary. Whether you wake up at 4am or 6am or work 13 hours a day or 12 hours a day, it doesn't matter. It really doesn't matter. What matters is, is you found the right contrarian idea, you're correct about it where most other people are incorrect, and then you invested massively into it. One of the things Warren Buffett said himself is that over the course of a career that has spanned nearly 80 years, the vast majority of his success could be boiled down to roughly a dozen correct bets. And the truth is, is that almost nobody will do this because A, they're probably not going to have a contrarian idea to begin with because they're too dependent on the people around them to dictate what they think. B, even if they have a contrarian idea, they're probably not going to be right about it. And then C, even if they're right about it, they're probably going to be too scared to drop everything else they're doing and go all in on it. And even if you do get to the other side of it, even if you do get all the money and the accolades and the fame, now you're in a situation where everybody who comes to you, you don't know why they're there. Are they there to get something from you? Are they there because they want something from you? Are they trying to take advantage of you in some way? And you start asking yourself, where were these people before I was famous? What you realize is that that extraordinary success, it creates conditions for people to be attracted to you that undermines the benefits of having them in your life. That it complicates your relationships. It complicates your lifestyle. It makes you consider all sorts of repercussions and motivations that you never had to consider before. I see this misalignment all the time with people who come to me with questions. Obviously, I hear from a lot of aspiring writers and authors who come to me for advice. And it's funny because so many people come and they're like, I want to be a writer. I want to do what you do. I've got all these great ideas. How do I get there? And my answer to them is always, go publish 50 articles and then come back and ask me again. And I say this for two reasons. One is, it determines who's willing to actually do the work from the ones who just want to fantasize. But the other reason is that by actually writing 50 pieces and publishing them and getting feedback on them, that in and of itself is probably going to solve 90% of the person's questions. They're going to learn everything that they would have asked me. They're going to find out anyway. And it's funny because I've been giving this answer to people for almost two decades. I've probably told multiple hundreds of people to do this at this point, and only two people ever did it. And what that tells me is that people want the result. They don't want the process. People want the benefits. They don't want the cost. And if you don't want the cost of something, then I would argue you don't actually want the thing. I went through this myself when I was younger. Before I was a writer, I attended music school and I wanted to be a professional musician. And it's funny because when I was in high school, I was the music guy. I'd bring my guitar to parties and I'd sing and play songs. And it was kind of a social identity. And I loved it. It kind of defined my whole adolescence. But when I got to music school and I actually tried to be a professional musician, I realized something, which is that the experience of playing music for people and hearing applause and being seen as this really talented guy on stage, that's like less than 1% of what the experience of being a musician is. 99% of the experience is practicing and rehearsing by yourself, alone in a room, being celebrated by nobody. And I hated that experience. I didn't enjoy any aspect of it. And it took me about two years in music school to finally accept to myself that I don't actually like being a musician. That because I'm not willing to sit in a room by myself for five hours a day, practicing songs, I'm also not willing to do what it takes to be the guy on stage. So I think people need to stop separating the process from the outcome. They need to realize that being a successful bestselling author is posting hundreds and hundreds of articles online. It's having your writing ridiculed. It's having people trash you in the comments. It's having people misunderstand you constantly. That is what the process is. That is what the reality is. The benefits are just 1% of it. The other problem of focusing so much on the outcome instead of the process is that it can paralyze you. It seems too big. It seems impossible, like this gigantic mountain that you have to climb and surmount. And so I think people just lose motivation and they become too afraid to start. One of the most important life lessons I ever learned was actually from my high school math teacher. His name was Mr. Packwood. And I remember we were sitting in class, we were taking an exam, and I guess most of us were having trouble with it because we were just sitting there staring at the page, not writing anything. And I remember he stopped the class and he said, can I say something really quick? He said, let me give you a piece of advice. He said, if you're stuck on a problem, just rewrite the problem and try to find the first step. He said, don't worry about solving the entire problem. Just rewrite it and find step one, because there's something magical in the process of just writing step one that steps two, three, four, and five will start to reveal themselves. And sure enough, it was crazy. I remember sitting there writing out the problem, writing out like the most basic step, and then suddenly seeing the problem differently and realizing what steps two, three, and four were. And as I got to university and adulthood, I realized that this applied to so many things in life. Like if I had a term paper and I didn't know how to start it, I'd pull back and I'd say, you know what, let's just write two sentences. Let's just write one sentence. And sure enough, in the process of writing that one sentence, I could see the whole first paragraph. And then in the process of writing that paragraph, I would see the whole introduction. I saw this in my social life. I'd go to a party, I'd see a cute girl. I didn't know what to say to her. Just walk up and say hi. And in the process of saying hi, I'd find the next thing to say. And then in the process of saying that, I'd find the next thing to say. And next thing you know, you're in a 20 minute conversation. Eventually when I started writing, I codified this and I called it the do something principle, which is basically when you want something and you're stuck, just do something, like anything. Find the minimum viable action. Find the action that feels doable in this moment. Just go do it. Because in the process of doing it, you will generate the motivation and inspiration to keep going. And I think this is actually one of the most profound realizations that I've had in my life, which is that inspiration is not the cause of action. It's the effect of action. The action comes first. And then once you've done the action, you get the inspiration to keep going. You don't magically feel motivated one day on the couch and then go get up and go to the gym. You get up and go to the gym and the fact that you're there motivates you to actually do something. And so when you're stuck in life, look for that minimum viable action. Look for the simplest thing you can do in this moment, because just in the act of doing it, you will generate the motivation to keep going. The other reason people don't take action is a simple fear of failure and rejection. They don't want to embarrass themselves. They don't want to make a fool of themselves. And it's funny because if you zoom out and you think about this a little objectively, this is very irrational. Because what is rejection? Rejection is you signaling to the world, this is what I'm about. This is what I care about. And it is a certain percentage of the world looking at that and being like, no, not for me. And that's great because now you don't have to deal with a bunch of people who weren't going to make you happy anyway. This is something that is very true, I think, in dating that applies to everything, which is that rejection is secretly a good thing because it is the sorting mechanism of the universe for removing all of the things that are not going to make you happy. The other way failure and rejection benefits you is that it's information, right? It shows you what you're good at, what you're not good at. It shows you how you can do things better. It's part of the learning process. It's those failures that generate the information and feedback that allow you to become great at it. Nobody became great the first time they did anything. So once you start seeing failure as part of the process, you see rejection as part of the natural filtration of your life. Not only do you stop being afraid of it, but you actually start leaning into it. So it's funny, in my own career, I quit my job in finance in 2009 to start blogging. Everybody around me thought I was insane. But I had this conviction, you know what? Content on the internet, it's going to be a thing. This is really going to go somewhere. There's going to be opportunities. So I was publishing every single day. I was writing articles all week, every week. I was working around the clock. For a few years, I was struggling to buy. But what I didn't realize at that time is that I was market testing my ideas. I was finding different perspectives that worked with people, that connected with people. I was getting reps that most other writers in the world weren't getting. Most other writers at that time, they would publish once a month or once a week or once every other year if they were writing a book. So they didn't get that market feedback from the reader. They didn't have that immediate relationship. And so because I got all those reps, and because I wrote all of those bad articles, and because I got to see what all my good ideas were and all my bad ideas were, when I did get my first book deal, I had a much clearer sense of what I wanted to say, and what I thought was going to resonate, and what people connected with when I talked about it. And all three of my books were massive, smash hits. And it's funny because by that point, I had spent seven years being on this island, going home at Christmas, having everybody in my family look at me and be like, what do you do for work again? And me trying to explain to them what a blog was and why. No, thousands of people read this, I promise. And them just kind of shaking their head and being like, who? How do you make money? And then suddenly being this huge number one New York Times bestseller, my book is in every airport, it's in every bookstore, it's on TV, it's on the radio. And seeing the way people's disposition changed, and seeing how suddenly different people started taking a different attitude towards me, different aspects of my life started changing. And don't get me wrong, success is great. Money's great. I wouldn't take it back. But it does complicate things, and it doesn't play out as cleanly or smoothly as it does in your fantasies. And what really surprised me is that after my books took off, and I found myself with all of this publishing success, I went through a bit of a period of depression. Because I didn't know what to hope for anymore. I didn't have dreams anymore. Basically, everything I had dreamed of since I was 20 years old had come true. And while that was amazing, it was amazing for a few months, maybe a year. But then after that, I woke up, I was the same guy, had the same problems, dealt with the same bullshit, and I had nothing to look forward to. It was like, oh, wow, the best things I could have imagined for myself are in my past. So what do I have to look forward to? Why do anything? And it was a surprisingly hard period to work through, especially because nobody wants to shed any tears for a depressed multimillionaire. Nobody sympathizes with the guy whose book is number one everywhere and is like, I'm sad. I don't know what to do with my life. And so you find yourself in this very odd, lonely position that really the only people that relate or understand are other people who have experienced sudden astronomical success. It taught me a lot about what is actually meaningful and important in our lives. And I'm extremely proud of the books, and I'm extremely proud of the success, but it showed me the importance of A, having things to look forward to outside of my work, having dreams that exist outside of my own achievements, and B, always maybe caring about something that can't be achieved, that isn't worldly or material. To get access to videos early, ad-free.