Quotes from Mark Manson

Self-publishing provides more freedom and control, but it also provides more risk. Publishing provides more credibility and promotion, but your vision can also get lost in the bureaucratic machinery of the business. It's a tough decision to make.

In 2008, after holding down a day job for all of six weeks, I gave up on the whole job thing to pursue an online business. At the time, I had absolutely no clue what I was doing, but I figured if I was going to be broke and miserable, I might as well be while working on my own terms.

At the core of all human behavior, the good feelings we all want are more or less the same. Therefore, what we get out of life is not determined by the good feelings we desire but by what bad feelings we're willing to sustain.

People want to offer opportunities to people they care about. They want to help people they believe are good people or have shared life experiences with.

I think that, pretty much, any good thing taken to extremes can become a bad thing.

That first morning that I woke up self-employed, terror quickly consumed me. I found myself sitting with my laptop and realized, for the first time, that I was entirely responsible for all of my own decisions, as well as the consequences of those decisions.

I think it's always been normal for humans to compare themselves to each other, but we're so hyper-connected all the time now that it's driving us insane.

Real happiness comes from discovering a sense of importance in one's actions and in one's life.

I think most people who try to start a business, they realise very quickly that one of the biggest hurdles is having to be self-determined.

OK, I'm as lazy as the next guy. Full disclosure. And I often feel guilty about it.

There's nothing wrong with having goals, but obsessing over them is often counterproductive because, in reality, achieving a goal isn't always what it's cracked up to be.

Don't hang out with a bunch of people who drag you down when you can hang out with one person who makes you feel good.

Little things, when we're caught up and fretting about them, often appear to be big and meaningful and world-changing in the moment they are happening.

It's easy to want the benefits of something; it's hard to want the cost.

People want to start their own business or become financially independent. But you don't end up a successful entrepreneur unless you find a way to love the risk, the uncertainty, the repeated failures, and working insane hours on something you have no idea whether will be successful or not.

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.

A lot of cases, what makes you an interesting and complex person makes you a really horrible person to be with romantically.

If someone is better than you at something, then it's likely because she has failed at it more than you have. If someone is worse than you, it's likely because he hasn't been through all of the painful learning experiences you have.

It's possible to fall in love with somebody who doesn't treat us well, who makes us feel worse about ourselves, who doesn't hold the same respect for us as we do for them, or who has such a dysfunctional life themselves that they threaten to bring us down with them.

Like anything worth doing in life, happiness takes time and patience and consistency.

One of the problems of modern society, or the post-Internet age, is that there are so many things bombarding us that we could care about. I think it's more important than ever to really get clear and focus on what's worth caring about and what's just noise or distraction.

We all have great aspirations for ourselves, but if you expect yourself to change the world tomorrow, then you're going to just drown yourself in anxiety and constant feelings of inadequacy.

Obviously, we all want to feel pleasure. It can't be one of our highest priorities because, simply put, anything worthwhile in life is going to be un-pleasurable at times. Pleasure is the type of thing that if you get the other stuff right, pleasure will happen on its own.

My belief is that we all already care about something important. We all already know what is important and meaningful for ourselves. The problem is just that many of us have lost touch with it.