Book Review: The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck

One book I wanted to finish before the year’s end was The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck¹ by Mark Manson. A pillar in the self-help community, he’s reached millions of people through his blog, markmanson.net, has written several self-help books, and has done many appearances guiding people through the sh*tstorm that we might call life.

I want to highlight a few things that I came across in the book that resonated with me and I highly recommend adding this book to your book collection. Mark released another book called, Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope², which I haven’t gotten a chance to read but it’ll be added to my collection of books gathering dust in the corner of my room.

“It’s far more helpful to assume that you’re ignorant and don’t know a whole lot. This keeps you unattached to superstitious or poorly informed beliefs and promotes a constant state of learning and growth.”

This first one resonates with me as a reminder to myself, especially in the field I work in, where there might be multiple solutions to a single problem, and getting to the right solution takes collaboration along with trial and error.

Having the approach of, “Is there another way?”, has helped me find answers as well as learn new things that I wouldn’t have seen if I was set in my ways of, “I’ve done this before, this is just how things work.”

There’s the opposite side to this where I’ve been the ignorant person, closed off to new things, and that’s hurt me in more ways than one. I’ve also met people with this mindset and convincing them of anything is near impossible and the best thing to do is to cut off your interaction with them as quickly as possible.

In the end, ingraining this belief into your being has a lot of benefits since an open mind allows new thoughts and lessons to enter with the opposite being your ego stunting your growth. In this day and age with the media shouting opposing viewpoints and blending the truth, sadly… it’s harder than ever.

“Improvement at anything is based on thousands of tiny failures, and the magnitude of your success is based on how many times you’ve failed at something.”

While failure is one of the hardest things to overcome, it is also necessary in order to achieve the goals that you set for yourself.

Mark goes deeper into this in explaining that avoiding failure leads to stagnation and the core issue is setting bad values.

As a developer, nothing holds truer. The most impactful learning that I’ve experienced over my career has been through solving the problems that I get stuck on or struggle to solve. These result in deeper learning and understanding of the language and framework and this is where I would “level up”.

It’s not an easy thing to dive head first into where an error occurs or try to debug an issue which you did not expect to see.

Getting through these is the challenge that helps developers grow into better developers that pegs a notch into the experience tree.

In Conclusion

Mark’s articles has been a solid foundation to myself and million’s of others around the world by helping us understand our nature as human beings.

I highly recommend this book as an easy read for when you’re diving into the self-help genre to help yourself. I recently found out that there is a bit of hate for him in the Reddit sphere but thinking on it, who doesn’t have some level of hate when you’re famous author in the self-help world.

I’ll be buying his other book, “Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope” in the near future and hopefully I get some more insight that will help me understand myself and the world around me better.