Failure, Solved

Fail fast. Fail forward. Fail better. As a society, we’ve turned failure into a slogan to celebrate, but somehow we’re more afraid of it than ever. So what's going on? Most of us say failure is our best teacher, but I doubt many of you have ever walked away from a failure doing a happy dance. IInstead, you probably let the moment rattle around in your head at some ungodly hour, then played it a little safer the next time. Don't worry, you're not the only one. Today, Drew and I break down why every piece of advice you've ever received about failure has, well… failed you. We cover why indulging in "failure porn" is such a harmful move and what it actually takes to learn from our mistakes (it's not what you think). We explain the evolutionary reason a rejected email can feel threatening. We tell the story of how a country's inability to admit failure got thousands killed, and of a monk so tormented by his failures that he confessed them for six hours a day. We dive into the three different kinds of failure and why the setback itself matters less than the actions you take after. And we even discuss when quitting is and isn't a failure, and the five-question test that reveals the difference. Apologies in advance: this episode will not teach you how to avoid failure. On a long enough timeline, the failure rate of everything is 100%. So let's get really great at failing. Get your free episode guide: https://mrk.mn/failureguide CHAPTERS Chapters 00:00:00 Introduction: The Failure to Understand Failure 00:01:15 Chapter 1: The Most Overdone Topic in Self-Help 00:07:39 The Failure Porn Industrial Complex 00:16:06 Why Failure Worship Made Everything Worse 00:41:47 Chapter 2: Why Failure Hurts So Much 01:02:35 The Sociometer Theory: Your Brain's Status-Tracking System 01:14:28 The Ego, Original Sin, and Why You Can't Escape Failure 01:31:57 Chapter 3: When You Define Yourself, You Define Your Failures 02:07:08 Confession, Therapy, and the Technology of Atonement 02:23:48 Chapter 4: Andre Agassi and the Two Types of Failure 02:30:00 Guilt vs. Shame: Converting Your Pain Into Growth 03:04:36 Chapter 5: Amy Edmondson and the Three Types of Failures 03:19:46 The Science of Learning From Failure: Dosage, Recovery, and Extraction 03:30:37 When to Quit: The Five Questions That Reveal If You're Being Smart or Just Scared 03:38:53 Closing Thoughts: Choosing Your Failures Wisely CHECK OUT OUR SPONSORS 80,000 Hours: Go to https://80000hours.org/solved to get your free copy of their career guide and start planning a career that is meaningful. Momentous: Head to https://livemomentous.com and use code SOLVED for up to 35% off your entire first order. Shopify: The best businesses aren’t built in boardrooms. They’re built by people who just started. Free trial at https://shopify.com/solved AG1: Visit https://drinkag1.com/solved and get a FREE Immune Support Bundle, including Omega-3 Fish Oil and Vitamin D3+K2, with your first subscription of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro. Macrofactor: Start your 14-day free trial at https://app.macrofactor.com/mfmark and use code MARK. Cozy Earth: Head to https://cozyearth.com and use my code SOLVED for an exclusive 20% off home and sleepwear! Notion: Learn more about how Notion can support your business at https://notion.com/solved Quo: Try QUO for free PLUS get 20% off your first 6 months when you go to https://quo.com/solved Purpose: Go to https://solved.deals/purpose to start getting unstuck today. Waking Up: Get started at https://manson.deals/wakingup for a 14 day trial, no risk. ⇨ Sign up for my newsletter, Your Next Breakthrough. It will help make you a less awful person: https://go.markmanson.net/cdi1xzha ⇨ Get clarity on what actually matters. Try Purpose, Mark's AI mentor app that learns your patterns, challenges your blind spots, and helps you take action. Get started at https://go.markmanson.net/217i5ys5 FOLLOW MARK Mark's IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/markmanson⁠ Solved IG: ⁠https://www.instagram.com/solvedpodcast/⁠ Twitter: ⁠https://x.com/markmanson⁠ LinkedIn: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/markmanson/⁠

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Mark Manson?

  You know, Drew, usually we do some sort of cold open to these episodes, but I failed to think of one.

• 0:07Speaker 01

  That's a scam. We're getting kind of a trend.

• 0:10Mark Manson?

  These like little meta cold open.

• 0:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. So we, you failed already.

• 0:14Mark Manson?

  I'm just.

• 0:14Speaker 01

  Before we've even started.

• 0:15Mark Manson?

  I'm just trying to be clever.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  We can't commit to a studio.

• 0:19Mark Manson?

  Oh, boy.

• 0:19Speaker 01

  We had commitment last week or last month.

• 0:21Mark Manson?

  Fortunately, we're lucky that we have such a great show.

• 0:24Speaker 01

  Well, if you remember all the bad luck we had during that show.

• 0:26Mark Manson?

  Well, yeah, that's true.

• 0:27Speaker 01

  Good luck too. I guess some good luck. The change episode, but God.

• 0:31Mark Manson?

  Did you change?

• 0:32Speaker 01

  Well, that's.

• 0:33Mark Manson?

  I have not changed.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Well.

• 0:35Mark Manson?

  I'm definitely the same.

• 0:37Speaker 01

  I, I mean, we can get into that, but yeah.

• 0:41Mark Manson?

  For another podcast.

• 0:42Speaker 01

  I'm, I'm a little bit afraid of this one then. If it's a failure, we're talking about failure today.

• 0:45Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 0:46Speaker 01

  Okay. What's gonna happen?

• 0:48Mark Manson?

  I'm pretty sure whatever happens, it's not gonna be my fault and I'm gonna learn nothing from it.

• 0:53Speaker 01

  You better listen to this episode.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  That's okay.

• 0:58Mark Manson?

  Should I?

• 0:58Speaker 01

  You probably should.

• 1:00Mark Manson?

  You probably should. That's actually what most people do is they, they learn nothing.

• 1:04Speaker 01

  That's right. Let's learn something.

• 1:05Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06Mark Manson?

  Let's try to learn something. Without further ado, I'm gonna read this intro that you put together and hope it doesn't fail spectacularly.

• 1:18Mark Manson?

  You know the quotes. You could recite them in your sleep. Edison and his 10,000 light bulbs. Michael Jordan, cut from his high school team. Fail forward, fail fast. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger? You've probably reposted one of these at some point on your Instagram. That's a little too close to home, Drew. You may even have one on a coffee mug that I don't have. You tell your friends that failure is your best teacher. You tell your kids that mistakes are how we learn. You believe it. You would swear on it. So here's the question. The last time you actually failed, really failed at something, take a moment, think about it. Something that you cared about, you failed in front of people whose opinion mattered to you.

• 2:03Mark Manson?

  What did you actually do in that situation? If you're being honest, because if you are being honest, you probably didn't immediately extract the lesson. You didn't find the silver lining. You probably minimized it in the retelling. You built a version of the story for yourself where the market shifted, or the timing was off, or the other person screwed up and dropped the ball. You probably went a little quiet in the group chat. You checked days later whether anyone was still thinking about it. And somewhere, without ever really realizing it or announcing it to yourself, you made the next bet a little bit smaller as a result. You resized your ambitions so that that particular flavor of pain would never find you again.

• 2:46Mark Manson?

  And at some point, at some ungodly hour of the night, you probably replayed it. The failure, I mean, not the lesson. On a loop, your body reacting like something was actually wrong. Obsessing over an email, a failed pitch, a faulty launch, a sentence you said three years ago that nobody else remembers. That gap between everything you believe about failure and everything you actually do when it shows up, that's not hypocrisy. It's not weakness. It's not an error. It is actually just a very human mechanism and nobody has actually honestly explained it to you. Because here's the spicy take that Drew and I have learned from researching this episode.

• 3:30Mark Manson?

  The entire modern conversation around failure is cope. The old culture that shames failure, well, it was always lying to you. It doesn't really matter that much. But the new culture that worships failure, it's running the exact same lie in reverse. And for once, we don't have to argue about this philosophically. We can just check. Because as always, the solve podcast brings the receipts. Because over the last two decades, that failure worship went fully mainstream. The conferences, the mantras, the keynotes, the measured share of people who are too afraid to fail to even try something, rose by almost 50%.

• 4:10Mark Manson?

  Perfectionism tracked across three decades and the exact countries preaching embracing failure the loudest, hit the highest levels ever recorded. And in the lab, researchers can now watch in real time, the human mind refusing to learn from its own mistakes. The single most repeated piece of advice in self-help, grow from your failures, turns out to be incredibly difficult for us to do. So today, we are going to break down all of the reasons why we both worship and shame our failures, both in ourselves and in other people. We're gonna talk about how to actually learn from our failures and it's, it's really not as simple as you think. And along the way, we're also gonna tell you a story about a conference founded to celebrate failure that,

• 4:54Mark Manson?

  spoiler alert, ended up failing. We're gonna talk about the two psychologists who drafted the most important theory of loss from a Jeep in an active war zone, while their own country's inability to admit failure got thousands of people killed around them. We're gonna talk about the evolutionary reason a rejected email can produce the same physiological response as a threat to your life. We'll discuss a monk so tormented by his failures that he confessed them for six hours a day, until his confessors had to start avoiding him and whose eventual breakdown accidentally split Western civilization in two. We'll discuss one of the greatest athletes who ever lived, who stood at the very top of his sport and secretly hated it, and spoke the truest sentence ever uttered about failure.

• 5:39Mark Manson?

  And his escape is actually how this episode ends and is completely mind blowing. We'll discuss why the best golfers on earth have a deeply ingrained bias that costs them serious money and why even when explained to them, they cannot stop it. We'll talk about the difference between quitting and failing and the five question test that tells you whether you're quitting wisely or just fucking scared. We'll talk about why what doesn't kill you makes you stronger is true only the way a barbell makes you stronger, which is to say, it doesn't. Something else does. We're gonna talk about all of this and much, much more. Because in this episode, we are going to argue that every piece of advice you've ever received about failure has been aimed at the wrong target. Avoiding it, bouncing back from it, even embracing it.

• 6:24Mark Manson?

  All of it assumes that failure is an event outside of yourself, out there in the world, but it isn't. What we're gonna discover is that it is a byproduct of your own arbitrary standards and values. The truth is, you will never avoid failure. You're only going to choose how you define it. And it turns out that there are better and worse ways to define it. And this episode is ultimately about that learning to choose. My name is Mark Manson. I'm a three-time number one New York Times bestselling author and this is Drew Burney, my co-host, producer, lead researcher, and the man who ran a pre-mortem failure analysis on this very podcast episode and concluded that I was its top risk.

• 7:04Mark Manson?

  And this is solved. The most comprehensive podcast in the world where every episode, we aim to solve one major life problem. So you never have to deal with it again. That was a good one.

• 7:15Speaker 01

  That was a good one.

• 7:15Mark Manson?

  You did not fail that.

• 7:20Mark Manson?

  But before we jump into it, be sure to rate, review, or subscribe to the show. It is the best thing you can do to support us. We put a lot of work into these episodes, if you haven't noticed. So please show your support for the show. Without further ado.

• 7:38Mark Manson?

  Our story starts in October of 2009 in San Francisco.

• 7:44Mark Manson?

  There are about 400 entrepreneurs, software engineers and investors attend a new conference that's built around one purpose. Failure. Talking about failure, embracing failure, trying to make failure a little bit more acceptable in the mainstream. The conference was called FailCon. Now, the founder, Cass Phillips, she had spent years in Silicon Valley, surrounded by startups that frequently failed. Yet every conference and event that she went to, everything was about hockey stick graphs and how everybody was succeeding and how everybody was getting rich and how everybody was gonna be super successful. And she just recognized that that wasn't the actual experience of most entrepreneurs. So at FailCon, everything was built around celebrating failures.

• 8:28Mark Manson?

  At the beginning of the event, she would always ask the audience, how many people here have failed at some sort of business venture? And pretty much everybody's hand would go up. And then all of the speakers, their keynotes had to be about their failures and what they learned from their failures. And the conference was a huge hit. They did versions in like Tokyo and Dubai and London and all over the place. They had sessions on all sorts of topics from really practical, kind of nuts and bolts startup scaling advice to philosophical discussions of like, what is suffering and what is despair? And basically, FailCon kind of had a moment. You know, it got a lot of press, got a lot of attention. It was kind of a, a big thing in the early 2010s. But then in 2014, Phillips decided to shut it down.

• 9:12Mark Manson?

  And the party line was that Phillips believed that she had achieved her goal, which was that she had made failure acceptable in, in the mainstream. But I don't really buy that and I don't think anybody else really bought that either. Personally, I think FailCon probably failed for a simple reason, which is, it's actually the same reason a lot of conferences fail, which is that it was specifically targeted towards people who don't have money.

• 9:37Mark Manson?

  Like if you think about like a conference for people who have failing startups or have a recently failed startup, what do all those people have in common? They are probably broke or in debt.

• 9:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:48Mark Manson?

  And it's hard to build a thriving conference business on attendees that are broke or in debt. But there was actually a deeper structural problem with FailCon and the philosophy behind it. And I think this is the same structural problem behind every inspirational story that we all hear about how somebody failed, you know, Michael Jordan failed so many times, or Steve Jobs failed so many times. And that is the issue of survivorship bias. So survivorship bias, it's a concept that originated with bombers in World War II. So the military, the US military noticed that all of the bombers would come back with bullet holes in the same areas of the plane. And so they did the obvious thing that you would do if you didn't think about it very

• 10:31Mark Manson?

  much, which is that they sourced more armor to reinforce the parts of the planes that had been hit with all the bullet holes. But surprisingly, this didn't prevent more bombers from being shot down. In fact, they saw no statistical increase in the amount of bombers that survived. So after a couple of years of this happening, it was an analyst in the Air Force by the name of Abraham Wall that realized that people had it completely backwards. The airplanes that were coming back with bullet holes all in the same spots, you know, around the wings and the tail fin, those were actually the places you didn't want to reinforce. Because those were the spots that the airplanes could survive being shot. Instead, what he pointed out is you wanted to reinforce all of the spots on the planes

• 11:15Mark Manson?

  that didn't have bullet holes. Because the planes that got shot in those spots were the ones that didn't come back. This flaw in reasoning, this faulty assumption that we all kind of have around this, it is something that we do all the time. Survivorship bias, it infiltrates all sorts of things, especially in our industry. We look at a story like Steve Jobs and all the inspiration around all the times he failed, or like Michael Jordan, how he got cut from his high school team. But those aren't really failures. I mean, there are literally millions of people who got cut from their high school basketball team, and none of them became Michael Jordan, right? So that is actually not something that is worth learning from.

• 11:55Mark Manson?

  Yet it's a huge part of his story, and it's a huge part of explaining why he is who he is. You see this happen with productivity a lot in our space, right? You've got some guy who's, I don't know, he writes like five books a year and has started six companies and, I don't know, he like wakes up at five and eats an upside down waffle or something. And so everybody goes out and starts eating upside down waffles and thinks that that's going to make them as successful as this like random dude on YouTube. And the truth is, is that the defining variables of success are often hidden from us. They're not apparent. And the things that are apparent are actually quite common.

• 12:38Mark Manson?

  We're just not aware of the thousands of other people that share that trait, but don't share the same success.

• 12:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it's really just like a big humble brag for a lot of these people, right? They're like, they're trying to pass these things off as failure, but really it's just part of their whole success story, which makes it still just another survivorship biased story of some kind, right? And but we end up kind of fetishizing those failures that are just the bullet holes in the wings that on the planes that came back.

• 13:03Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  Right? And this is kind of where failure porn came out of. And this actually came from a guy, Jeff Lewis, who himself was a founder of this company called Founders Fund. But he wrote this post in 2014, same year that FailCon failed. He wrote this in the Washington Post, and he coined the term failure porn. And he's got this great quote in it, it says, "It's failure as fast fashion, peddled by wildly successful people packaged for mass consumption. That's no more reflective of real failure than commercially produced pornography is of real sex." Very vivid, vivid example there, right? He has his own little kind of failure porn story around this too, with his company. He was like $45,000 in credit card debt. He was going to pitch some people on his fund one day and didn't have like the 20 bucks

• 13:49Speaker 01

  to take a cab across town, so he had to walk on an empty stomach for 45 minutes. And it was like, he calls one of his coworkers and was like, "I'm such a failure, this isn't going to work." And he got this pep talk from his coworker and everything, went and did this pitch, and they got funding and then turned it around, and it was a multimillion dollar company. And, you know, that's a failure porn story. That's not, he's like, "The real failure would have been me just giving up there."

• 14:13Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  This is just a low point in the story. It wasn't an actual failure.

• 14:16Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 14:17Speaker 01

  And he said, "The problem with this is that we trivialize failure when we do this. Real failure." This article, I should go read it, it's actually full of these great little lines in it. It says, "Just as excessive consumption of pornography desensitizes a person to the joys of real sex, excessive consumption of failure porn desensitizes a person to the horrors of real failure." So again, it's these survivorship bias stories.

• 14:41Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 14:42Speaker 01

  Take away from the actual failures, the actual harm that's actually done by real failure.

• 14:48Mark Manson?

  Well, it's funny, because just in you recounting his story, I think you, you described exactly what's wrong with all of these stories, which is, when you said it, you said, "He was broke and on his last legs, and then he managed to get funding with his last pitch meeting or whatever, and then went on to become successful." It's that went on to become successful.

• 15:09Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 15:10Mark Manson?

  That's where actually all of the meat and valuable information is, but it's not nearly as exciting or interesting as the failure porn. So the failure porn is what gets shared. And it's funny too, I was thinking, like when we were prepping for this, this episode, I was thinking about the FailCon thing. I was thinking, it would probably get really old fast. If you are a struggling startup founder, working 60, 70 hour weeks, barely scraping by, and year after year, you get up and you hear these like, the guy who started PayPal or the guy who started, you know, whatever, get up and tell you these, all of these situations that they, they were in at one point. At a certain point, it'd be like, okay, I get it, like, they struggled.

• 15:55Mark Manson?

  What did you do that worked? Right?

• 15:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. It's not a complicated message.

• 15:59Mark Manson?

  Yeah, yeah. I don't, I don't care what didn't work. Tell me what worked, right?

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 16:03Mark Manson?

  Yeah. A quick pause, we'll be right back after this. This episode is sponsored by 80,000 Hours. There's a question I get asked constantly, especially by younger people, "What should I do with my career?" And most of the advice out there is useless. They say, "Follow your passion, do what you love." Cool. Thanks, boomer. Super helpful. Meanwhile, AI is rewriting what half of these jobs even look like, and nobody seems to be updating the playbook. Which brings me to today's sponsor. 80,000 Hours is a nonprofit that spent over a decade researching what actually makes a fulfilling career that can do good in the world. They just released a new edition of their career guide with Penguin Random House, fully revised for a world where AI is changing everything. It covers what really makes a dream job, which global problems are most pressing, and

• 16:46Mark Manson?

  what to do if you're worried your role is about to get automated out from under you. Now here's what I really like about them. They're a nonprofit, so they're not trying to sell you a course or push you to some career track that benefits them. Their only goal is helping you figure out how to spend your 80,000 working hours well. That's 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year for 40 years. That's a lot of hours to spend doing something that doesn't matter to you. So head to mark.deals/8000hours. That's 80,000 in numbers and then hours. To get your free copy of their revised and updated career guide, and start planning a career that is meaningful, fulfilling, and helps solve one of the world's most pressing problems. That's mark.deals/8000hours. This episode is brought to you by Momentous.

• 17:30Mark Manson?

  This episode is about failure, right? And here's one that actually drives me crazy. The creatine market. Creatine is one of the most researched supplements on the planet. The science has been settled for years, and instead of using that as a starting point, most brands treated it as a finish line. They competed on flavors and packaging while the powder inside often wasn't even what the label said. I take creatine every day, I'm creatine maxing, like a good bro. And most people who know about it know about strength and recovery, but it also supports cognitive performance. I spend most of my day thinking and writing, speaking on camera, so the benefit does a lot of heavy lifting for me. And for a long time, I was buying whatever creatine was on the market, right? Like just the nearest bottle in front of me. But it turns out, they're not all the same.

• 18:15Mark Manson?

  Momentus manufactures their signature spec creatine in a pharmaceutical facility, verified through a six-stage testing process with four independent agencies. 10 times fewer impurities and two to five times tighter heavy metal limits. Plus, they screen for PFAS in microplastics, which most brands don't even bother to try to do. Once I saw all that, I couldn't go back to the generic [BLEEP] on the shelf. And best of all, the powder mixes clean into your smoothie. There's no grit or clumping, it's a small thing, but you do notice. So if you want to try Momentous Signature Spec Creatine, head over to livemomentous.com and use the code SOLVED for up to 35% off your entire first order. That's livemomentous.com promo code SOLVED for up to 35% off.

• 18:59Mark Manson?

  livemomentous.com promo code SOLVED.

• 19:03Mark Manson?

  All right, we're back. Where were we?

• 19:05Speaker 01

  We've romanticized failure over the last 20, 30 years to the point where it's like, it almost doesn't mean anything.

• 19:10Mark Manson?

  Why do you think that is though? Like, why do you think we romanticize it?

• 19:13Speaker 01

  I think there's kind of a, a little bit of a self attribution bias going on. So like your failures, you want to kind of externalize them, right? And you want to internalize your successes. And I think part of it is, is like, oh no, look at me. I went through all of this. I failed all this and I still came out the other side and look how, look how strong I am.

• 19:31Mark Manson?

  Strong, I am successful.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  Look, look how gritty I am. Look how, you know, I think there is kind of like a, it's a humble brag.

• 19:37Mark Manson?

  We've talked on previous episodes, yeah, how we, we tend to, our memories tend to package things in ways that like, exalt ourselves a little bit.

• 19:45Speaker 01

  You, you don't want to attribute it to luck either. Remember the luck episode? Like, like you saying, oh, I got lucky in this. That doesn't feel good. When it's like, actually, yeah, a lot of other people did the exact same things as you and you came out on top. Maybe you just got lucky. Like instead you say, no, no, no, I went through, look at all the hardship I went through. Look at all this shit that I waded through.

• 20:02Mark Manson?

  I actually went and researched how many other microprocessor companies there were at the same time as Apple. And there were like dozens, dozens and dozens and dozens and dozens. And it was really interesting. They all, they all failed and they all had like, similar stories and story arcs and made similar decisions. And the human mind thinks in terms of narratives. When you are constructing a narrative, you always need to have some sort of obstacle or setback.

• 20:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, the three axis story arc.

• 20:28Mark Manson?

  Yeah, it's, it's just the way our brains work. I think it is very natural that we look at a highly complex, long-term project or path and we just simplify it into, yeah, I was down on my luck. All these things went wrong, but I fought through it. I learned, I survived and now I'm successful. Right? Like, that's just kind of, I think our default narrative that we like to package around things. And also like, narratives make things feel meaningful. Like if I was really honest about my success and like the amount of luck and circumstance that was involved in it, it would feel less meaningful to me. And I do think that we are biased towards generating something that feels very meaningful and purposeful in our lives.

• 21:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's not a lot of lesson to be taken from luck, right?

• 21:13Mark Manson?

  No.

• 21:13Speaker 01

  If there's something we're just lucky. So we'd rather have a narrative that's a little bit cleaner and has some sort of struggle in it that we could identify with.

• 21:20Mark Manson?

  Are you susceptible to failure porn?

• 21:21Speaker 01

  Oh man, that, that whole Michael Jordan story, man, especially when I was a kid, that was like, oh yeah. You know, he's, he's just, he's got all that grit and he's, he's, he, he won't give up, you know, never give up. And he's just got to fight through all the failures and getting cut from the team, all of that. Oh, dude, I bought into that big time. In the 2010s, you really did see this too. You really did out there. It was like, no, no, no, like, fail, fail fast. What was the Facebook? Move fast and break things.

• 21:46Mark Manson?

  Move fast and break things.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  That whole thing. Everybody got caught up in that.

• 21:49Mark Manson?

  Yeah. How'd that turn out?

• 21:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, right? Right? It's very seductive. It's very seductive.

• 21:54Mark Manson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 21:55Speaker 01

  Everybody, especially Americans, we love an underdog too, right? So somebody who's down on their luck and down and out, no, they came back from it. That's a, that's a great arc.

• 22:03Mark Manson?

  So I get asked all the time, would I change anything about total art? And generally my answer is no. But it's funny, this episode, it made me kind of think back to that chapter. I'm like, oof. Yeah, I kind of, it was a little simplistic. The depth that we're going to go into in this episode is much more thorough than what's written there. I mean, I, I do think the general lesson is in that you do have to make mistakes. Like everybody makes mistakes, everybody fails and that's the fuel for learning and growth. I, I do think that is true, but I also, I also think that that is a bit of a simplistic way to look at it. There's a lot more going on under the hood than just simply like, oh, I tried a thing and it didn't work. What can I learn from it?

• 22:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 22:48Mark Manson?

  Like that's our surface level experience, but there's some deeper questions in terms of like, how are you defining success and failure? Who are you choosing to be in that pursuit? Are you defining failures in ways that you, you are actually going to be comfortable with? Like that, that's actually way more interesting and that's some of the stuff that we're going to get into here.

• 23:05Speaker 01

  What we're calling kind of the old way of looking at failure too, though, which was more just like, oh, you're a failure. Like people, you know, people saying I'm a failure or taking it so personally or over identifying with it. Obviously that's not good. We wanted to get away from that. But what we're saying is maybe we overshot a little bit too far the other way.

• 23:25Mark Manson?

  Yeah, yeah. Do, do we want to call this like a Hegelian synthesis, right? So, aren't you, aren't you excited for that?

• 23:32Speaker 01

  Do we want to call it that?

• 23:33Mark Manson?

  Of course we do. Of course we do. This is solved. Where we, where we over philosophize everything.

• 23:39Speaker 01

  So I know what a Hegelian synthesis is, but why don't you go ahead and explain to everybody else what that means?

• 23:44Mark Manson?

  George Friedrich Hegel, the German philosopher, the idealist philosopher from the 19th century, he said a lot of things, but one of the things that stuck, interestingly, he didn't actually write it, but like people later attributed it to him. So, they called it a Hegelian synthesis, which is that basically thought and information progresses in like a, a pretty standard pattern, which is that you have a thesis of how the world works or something that's true. You have an antithesis, which is the contradiction or, or an alternative hypothesis. And then what generally happens is a synthesis of those two viewpoints. It's not that one of those two things is right. It's usually some synthesis of the two points of view that

• 24:23Mark Manson?

  wins out and becomes the next thesis and develops its own antithesis. That was like the progression of history and, and knowledge in his, in his view. The Hegelian dialectic of failure would be that the, the old school version of failure was that it was this horrible shameful thing and that you should hide your failures from people and you should avoid trying anything that you're going to potentially fail. That's kind of like our default approach towards failure. The antithesis of that is that failure should be celebrated, that it should be encouraged, that we should, you know, support people in their failures, which sounds nice if you've, if you've got a startup and are trying to like find investors.

• 25:03Mark Manson?

  But I don't know, like go talk to a meth head or like somebody in an abusive relationship. That's not a message you, you want to be generalizing out to the broader populace. So you could say that this podcast, we are attempting a synthesis of the two views, a more holistic view of failure and how to approach it in your own life and how to, how to benefit from it. The important thing here, the reason why we're kind of shitting on this positive view of failure is that the data's in and it doesn't really help.

• 25:40Speaker 01

  We've taken the last few decades to figure that out too, right? There is this kind of weird paradox where if you go out and you talk to people, they'll tell you, just like in the business world, let's say, it's easier than ever to start a business.

• 25:52Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  And yet people are more afraid to start a business than ever. This is right after all of these, this 20 years of failure worship has come out of the culture, right? And yet people are still

• 26:04Mark Manson?

  More risk averse than ever.

• 26:05Speaker 01

  Still more risk averse than ever. Like just some stats, like basically one in two Americans say they would fear starting a business because of the fear of failure, because it might fail. Half of all people. Around the world too, they've done these surveys every year and the share of people agreeing that starting a business is easy, that climbed to almost 60%. And yet again, almost one in two people all around the world say they're afraid of failing in one of these ventures, even though it's easier than ever. So the message didn't stick basically, right? You could actually argue that things got even worse. We didn't get more comfortable with failure. Right? We probably got less than what actually happened here, right? What was actually going on?

• 26:47Speaker 01

  One of the big things that I found anyway through all this is that perfectionism actually seems to be becoming more and more of a problem. If people were actually taking this to heart, if they were taking this advice, this failure worship to heart, what you would probably see is actually less perfectionism out there. We see the exact opposite of that in all these different studies. Now, before I jump into that though, real quick, there's two different kinds of perfectionism that researchers kind of brought to broad buckets that they can sort it into, right? One is what they call perfectionistic strivings. Okay. This is when you hold high standards and you, you are aiming for success. This is basically fine. As long as you don't like take it too far, you're really just like, I have high standards and I want to, I want to hit those, but you don't take it too personally when you don't hit them.

• 27:31Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 27:31Speaker 01

  Contrast that with perfectionistic concerns, which is the more kind of toxic form of perfectionism that people can have, which is basically you, you're holding yourself to a very high standard. And if you don't hit that, there's something very wrong with you or the world or whatever. Right? That is actually associated with more like mental health problems, even to depression, anxiety, less wellbeing that you have with that. Okay? What they've found is if you kind of control for those concerns, if you, if you, if you can parse all of that out, if you just have this like striving perfectionism where you're like, I want things to be better and I'm going to aim for them. And it's okay if I don't hit them, but I'm going to continue to aim for them and strive for them. That seems to be okay. That seems to be fine.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  It's when we get into that more toxic form of perfectionism that the wheels start to fall off a little bit. Okay? When we actually look at the numbers too, over the last 20 to 30 years, across all the countries that celebrate failure the most, mostly the Anglosphere, right? United States, UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, those places, we all celebrate failure a whole bunch. Perfectionism has actually risen and the toxic kinds of perfectionism have risen the most even too. They've done some studies from the late 2010s up to today. And they see that this trend is just accelerating. It's not getting any better. They basically concluded that, and this is a quote, young people perceive that others are more demanding of them.

• 28:50Speaker 01

  They are more demanding of others and more demanding of themselves. Like people are holding us to higher standards. We're holding ourselves to higher standards and we're holding other people to higher standards. All at the same time. Like all of that is going up when really probably none of that is actually true.

• 29:04Mark Manson?

  Okay.

• 29:05Speaker 01

  And yet that's against the backdrop of, hey, it's okay to fail. Go out there and fail. Nobody cares.

• 29:09Mark Manson?

  Give it your best shot.

• 29:10Speaker 01

  Give it your best shot and it's going to be okay. And yet we have this rise in perfectionism and rise of these ungodly standards that we put on ourselves during that. So what's going on here?

• 29:21Mark Manson?

  I hate to be that guy.

• 29:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 29:23Mark Manson?

  But I think it's the phones.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  You think it's the phones?

• 29:25Mark Manson?

  I think it's the phones.

• 29:26Speaker 01

  You think it's the phones? The trend started before the phones. I think it accelerated with the phones.

• 29:31Mark Manson?

  It could be the internet. I mean, the difference between say our adolescence in kids today. You know, when we were growing up, if you asked a girl out and she shot you down, nobody remembered, nobody saw it.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  I remember. I remember.

• 29:47Mark Manson?

  Nobody else remembered.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  Okay, right, right.

• 29:49Mark Manson?

  Nobody else saw it. You know, if you made a huge mistake in front of the class, or you did something really embarrassing, or you got kicked out of school or whatever. Now, everything is documented. There are consequences to every failure that exists today in a way that didn't exist before. And I actually think that there's some usefulness of forgetting. I was reading about Walt Disney recently, and it was super fascinating in that he came from a family of failed entrepreneurs. And he himself was a failed entrepreneur. Like, what today we know as Disney was like his, I think, his third or fourth business that he started. And his father started a bunch of businesses that failed, and his uncle started a bunch of businesses that failed. And it was funny, because what happened back in those days is you would start a business, it would fail,

• 30:34Mark Manson?

  you'd go into a bunch of debt, and you just pack your shit up and go to the next town. Because nobody in the next town knew that you failed. Right? And so you could start over, you could get new investments or get a new loan and start a new business. And so the Disneys would kind of like bounce from town to town around the Midwest, trying all these different ventures, watching them fail spectacularly, and then like, just kind of moving on and not having it track with them. Whereas today, if something like calamitous happens at one of your jobs, it's gonna be online forever, right? There's gonna be a record of it, potentially, forever. People are always gonna have access either to your old workplace, or your old boss, or your old LinkedIn profile,

• 31:17Mark Manson?

  or something you wrote like 14 years ago. It's like comedians getting canceled for tweets that they wrote in 2008.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:25Mark Manson?

  You know, like, there's just, there's a record today that follows you that didn't exist in previous generations. Even if people are more accepting of failure in the moment, which I agree with you, I don't think they are these days. Even if they were, the fact that that moment is now going to follow you for decades across your life means that you have to weight it so much higher than you would have otherwise.

• 31:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I guess I do remember, you know, when social media started to be a thing, and we had to be warned, like, hey, watch what you put online. Now think of, I mean, that's the, now you just don't even do it, because you can't even help if it gets online or not. Yeah.

• 32:03Mark Manson?

  I mean, I remember, so to your point about it being maybe before the phones, I remember when I was single in my twenties, and it started to become a thing about like, Googling the people you were going on dates with, because you would, sometimes you would find like some pretty crazy shit. I just imagine that that's like 10x.

• 32:20Speaker 01

  These two researchers, Kiran and Hill, they give some other reasons as well. Well, like, one of them being just kind of the structural competition, especially like in capitalist societies, like, competition in the markets got so crazy, and that just kind of bled into all the other areas of life. Getting into a good university or something like that, that all of a sudden became super, super important. And like, doing your, your application by committee, you know, and having your whole family, or getting tutors, or that really took off in the last, you know, 20 to 30 years as well. Like, the competition, intense competition around those sorts of things happened. At the same time, too, they're talking about the collectivist institutions that we used to have, where some of that would get diffused.

• 33:00Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 33:00Speaker 01

  Some of that kind of tension of your failures or whatever, and your church, or your, whatever communities you were in, church, temples, whatever you were going to, those are not, you know, it's, it's much more individualistic. Like, hyper-individualism has contributed to a very competitive

• 33:15Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 33:15Speaker 01

  life, not just marketplace, but life.

• 33:17Mark Manson?

  And people are, by and large, lonelier, so they have less of a support system, right? So they have fewer friends or family members close to them that they can rely upon if they do screw up, or if something does go wrong. It's interesting, because what we're talking about, it is not about people's philosophical acceptance of failure. It is more about the stakes they're involved, right? Like, when you remove social and emotional safety nets, when you make everything more competitive, and when you add a historical record that follows you for pretty much your entire life, and you can't get rid of it, what that does is it just puts so much more importance on each action and behavior that, in a way that did not exist, certainly 30 years ago, but definitely not like 100 years ago.

• 34:02Speaker 01

  One other thing they bring up, too, is like anxious and controlling parenting. There's some debate around this. Their, their studies have been questioned a little bit, but you do see it on at least an individual level, like, kids who do come from households where the parents are very controlling and, you know, expect a lot, they have very high rates of this toxic perfectionism as well. Whether that's pervasive across the culture or not, I'm not sure. But that can definitely, if you're one of those people, that can definitely have a big, a big impact as well.

• 34:29Mark Manson?

  Shout out to all of our Asian listeners right now.

• 34:31Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. So perfectionism is rising, we see that. It is really worse amongst young people, too. This is where we have the most data, too. We don't have as much data for older people, but it is worse amongst young people. Half of all teenagers, all around the world, they fear judgment for failing in some way. They, they report that they say when they're failing, they worry about what others might think of them. Which, you know, okay, that's teenagers, I get that, but...

• 34:57Mark Manson?

  But the risk of, the stats of risk aversion are so high right now.

• 35:00Speaker 01

  They're so high, they're accelerating, like I was saying, right?

• 35:02Mark Manson?

  Kids are not asking each other out, they're not taking risks, they're not going out, they're not having sex, they're not even learning to drive at the same rates that they used to. So it's, yeah, there's a lot of risk aversion going on.

• 35:11Speaker 01

  One really interesting thing we found, though, too, and a lot of people think that, well, I'm just not as good as these people, and so of course I'm afraid of failure, or whatever. An interesting thing we found was actually that the fear of failure is oftentimes the worst amongst the highest achievers. So people out there who are actually already doing, they're the straight A students, you know, the ones that are doing all the clubs, the ones that are out there achieving, looking like they're, you know, having a great time, they're actually the ones who are the most afraid of failure, which is fascinating.

• 35:41Mark Manson?

  I feel like so many people use fear of failure as an excuse for not doing the thing, whereas it's like, okay, the people who are actually out there doing the thing, and they're doing it well, are more afraid than you are.

• 35:52Speaker 01

  Right, and we're gonna find out why that is here in a little bit, too.

• 35:55Mark Manson?

  What would you say is your relationship with failure? Because I know you've, you've struggled with perfectionism

• 35:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:00Mark Manson?

  quite a bit throughout your life.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, um, I, I wanted to come in here and say, well, you know, like, I don't, the failures I do have, I don't see them as failures. But then I, I think about the perfection, I have some talks of perfection, perfectionism. What it ends up doing is it makes you not take a lot of the risks that, that you would want to take, or just like, I don't know, go and find it out. Like, I look, I don't know, I look at some of the stuff you do, and you're just like, we're gonna try this, and it, it didn't work, let's just keep moving. You know, I, I don't think you're anyone to dwell on that, and I dwell on stuff, man. I dwell on stuff, for sure. It does cost me a lot in terms of, yeah, in terms of the outcomes that I've, I've seen. I just haven't taken some of the bigger swings that I probably would have because of that.

• 36:43Mark Manson?

  Do you think some of that is that you grew up with higher stakes? Because like, I know, like, my wife grew up pretty poor, and like, ah, the margin for error

• 36:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true.

• 36:53Mark Manson?

  when she was young was just very slim. So, so she's developed, I think she has kind of evolved into a person that is just very wary of, of risking failure.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I think if you do come from that kind of background, and the way you got out of it was by, through performance, that puts a lot of weight on performance, then, right? Like, I, I got all of that through school, and, you know, the activities that I was involved in that were, that contributed to my education and all of that. And so you learn that, oh, in order to not have to go back into that world, or not be in a more precarious state, you have to perform. You have, there's something you have to do, or be, or whatever it is. And that, yeah, I bet a lot of people can identify with that.

• 37:35Mark Manson?

  I'm a weirdo, I'm definitely, I, I think I'm somebody that...

• 37:38Speaker 01

  Are, in a lot of ways, Mark. You really are.

• 37:43Mark Manson?

  I, I think this is one area where I'm not relatable. I think I'm really good with this, just because, I mean, I'm not, I, I don't give a fuck, right? Like, I just, I genuinely don't. Like, it really, I mean, you've seen this for years. It really doesn't bother me. Like, launching something that fails, or putting something out there that bombs, or, you know, saying something that gets me a thousand angry email, like, I'm just kind of water off my back, you know? And it's interesting, because when I was younger, I spent a lot of time kind of thinking about where that comes from, and I've got all sorts of narratives and explanations, you know, growing up in kind of a weird environment, that I felt, I always felt like a black sheep where I grew up. My dad's a lot more kind of rigid and perfectionist than I am.

• 38:28Mark Manson?

  But my grandfather, I mean, you talk about not giving a fuck. Like, it was, he started seven companies, he became a millionaire three times, went bankrupt three times. And according to my dad, he said, if you, if you saw him, you would never know which end of the pendulum he was on. Like, you could never tell, it didn't bother him, he didn't care. And I've, I've felt that way, too. Like, I've, I've lost a lot of money on some stupid decisions, and it actually freaked me out how much it didn't bother me.

• 38:57Speaker 01

  There, is there any area of your life where you identify failure that either you did or didn't learn from? Or, like, is there any particular area?

• 39:07Mark Manson?

  I've thought about this in terms of regrets. So like, I, I generally don't regret many things. And, and what I, the thing I would point to, the things that like, I do feel, say, dwell on, or I feel like some degree of shame or guilt, it's when I, I feel like I have failed people.

• 39:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 39:26Mark Manson?

  So if, if it's just me, and if it's like, just my money or my stuff, I really don't seem to care. Like, I'm, I'm good, you know? I could sleep on this concrete floor tomorrow, like, it's fine. If I feel like I failed somebody I really care about, like, that, that eats at me for a long time.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, we're gonna get into some of that, then.

• 39:45Mark Manson?

  Uh-oh.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 39:47Mark Manson?

  Oh, am I, am I getting on the sofa this, this episode?

• 39:50Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 39:51Mark Manson?

  Oh.

• 39:52Speaker 01

  I mean, yes, but we'll, we'll get into why that might be, I think.

• 39:56Mark Manson?

  Yeah, this hints at where we're going with this episode, in that I don't actually see most of my failures as failures. The crux of what we're gonna get into is that failure is actually more of a definitional problem than it is an actual problem. Like, the fact that you are failing at things in your life is not really the problem. The real problem, if there is one, is how you've chosen to define failure for yourself, and, and how you've chosen to measure yourself. And that's actually where we're gonna end up going with this, starting with the next chapter. But to understand that and really have an appreciation for it...

• 40:37Mark Manson?

  We do need to get into some of the evolutionary mechanisms behind our sense of failure, the feelings and emotions that come along with it, the social repercussions that are associated with it, and why something like an embarrassing email or getting shot down by somebody you have a crush on feels like fucking death in the moment, like just makes you want to crawl in a hole and never come out again. Like, why does that happen? Why does it hurt so much? Why does failure hurt so bad? Why is it so hard sometimes? And the important thing is, is that the answer, it's not just your childhood, it's

• 41:16Mark Manson?

  not a mindset, it's not, it's not about learning, you know, finding the silver lining and things. Like, sure, all of those things matter at the margins, but really, we're going to go way back, and we're going to go back 2 million years and, and look at some of the biological machinery that's going on behind the scenes, and, and try to get a deeper understanding of why all these things happen. So, stick around. But first, we're going to take a quick break, so don't go anywhere. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. Now, in my time, I've started a few businesses at this point, and every single time, there is this point where you go from being excited

• 41:57Mark Manson?

  about your idea to staring all of the logistical and administrative pains in the face. It's that phase where most new businesses go to die. The idea was great, but you got buried in the operations before you ever made the first sale. Nobody starts a business because they're passionate about shopping cart software, or payment processing, or refund rates. But that's where the early energy ends up going. You duct taped together a website builder, a payment system, some inventory tracker, and an analytics tool that your buddies swore by, and two months later, you're managing a Frankenstein of monthly subscriptions, and you still haven't made a profit. Now Shopify exists, so that never happens. Everything's in one place, so you skip the part where your enthusiasm bleeds out in the spreadsheet.

• 42:40Mark Manson?

  Their templates and AI tools get your site up without coding, and checkout converts so well that more customers actually buy, and the returning ones can do it in a single click. They even have an AI assistant for when you're stuck at 2:00 AM, wondering why your cart page won't load, and millions of businesses already run on it, from household names that you know, to people who launched last week. Now, as somebody who's tried a bunch of different businesses, the fastest way to find out if your idea is a good one is to start selling as soon as possible. Shopify is built so that you can do that on day one. So if you're ready to hear the, of your first sale today, head over to Shopify.com/solved to start your free trial. That's right, you get a free trial if you go to Shopify.com/solved. That's Shopify.com/solved.

• 43:25Mark Manson?

  This episode is brought to you by AG1. We like to picture failure as one dramatic moment, the big blow up that detonates in your face. But usually, it's the 20th morning in a row that you meant to get your act together, but didn't. The basics let you slide because nothing was technically on fire. And the shorter the days get, the easier those basics are to drop. October hits, and the mornings get darker, and "I'll Deal With It Later" starts running the show. One basic that I've actually managed to keep is AG1 Next Gen. One scoop every morning. It's formulated to support steady energy, and I've felt that. My digestion's been smoother, too, which tracks since it's clinically shown to enrich the gut microbiome. And heading into fall, I like knowing it's formulated to support

• 44:06Mark Manson?

  my immune system. But what really sold me was the research. I assume most supplements are 90% marketing and a really nice label, so the fact that AG1 Next Gen is backed by four separate gold standard clinical trials, and was clinically shown to meet 94% of nutrition needs with a proper diet, in a category where almost nobody bothers with that kind of stuff, that's the reason I trusted it in the first place. The weeks are going to be chaotic regardless, so you might as well have the boring stuff covered. For a limited time, visit solved.deals/AG1 and get a free immune support bundle, including omega-3 fish oil and vitamin D3 K2 with your first subscription of AG1 Next Gen or AG1 Pro. That's solved.deals/AG1.

• 44:54Mark Manson?

  So the modern research on why failure and loss hurts so much begins in 1969, in Israel. At Hebrew University, Daniel Kahneman is a new professor, and he invites Amos Tversky to give a guest lecture to his psychology students. And at the time, Tversky is a bit of a celebrity academic in Israel. He's considered a genius, he was a very famous paratrooper in one of the recent wars, he's generally beloved by everybody. And he gets up in front of Kahneman's class, and he starts lecturing about how people's guesses are actually often statistically accurate, that if you ask somebody to estimate, like, a large number across

• 45:38Mark Manson?

  a population, that people's intuitions are surprisingly good at this. Now Kahneman is watching him lecture about this, and he is thinking to himself, "This is total bullshit." Because Kahneman was also a veteran, but he had worked in the psychological unit. So he had watched as IDF analysts had made confident predictions, created statistical models, come up with all sorts of plans, and been horribly wrong about every single one of them. He had actually seen the opposite, that people's intuitions were absolutely terrible at predicting the future. So, he politely lets Tversky finish his lecture, and all the students leave, and he walks up to them afterwards, and in classic Israeli fashion,

• 46:20Mark Manson?

  he's like, "I think you're wrong. This is, this is a bunch of bullshit." And the two begin arguing about it. And as they're arguing, finally, they just kind of look at each other and agree, they're like, "Well, then let's study it and figure this out." So they plan to do some experiments together, and thus began probably the most fruitful research partnership in the history of the psychological field. They would go on to publish dozens and dozens of studies, they would revolutionize not just the, the, the field of, of psychology, but also behavioral economics, they would win a Nobel Prize. Their influence in how we understand human thinking and human decision-making really can't be overstated.

• 47:03Mark Manson?

  Now, their method was really interesting, which is that they would kind of just sit around together, and they would spitball hypothetical situations to each other, like little thought experiments. And the reason they did this was to test each other's intuition. So they would ask each other things like, let's say, 600 people have a terminal illness, and you have enough money to finance one of two medical programs. The first medical program is guaranteed to save 200 of the 600 people, but you're going to lose 400 of them. But the second medical program, you have a One-third chance of saving all 600, but a two-thirds chance Of all 600 dying. Which one would you choose? Um, I would probably go with the guaranteed 200. Yeah, yeah. I probably would, too. Yeah.

• 47:47Mark Manson?

  It just instinctively feels Right. Better for some reason. Right. And they noticed this pretty much universally, like, almost everybody picks the first medical program, even though mathematically, they have the exact same Okay, right. Risk profile. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's funny, little things like this, right? Like, where it's like statistically, both options are the same, but we all intuitively are, feel pretty strongly about the first program. So they had another little fun thought experiment, where they would present students with the situation where you could flip a coin, and if it came up heads, you would make $1,000, but if it came up tails, you would lose $1,000. Sure enough, pretty much

• 48:28Mark Manson?

  all the students turned this down. But what was really interesting is they changed the offer. So you flip a coin, if it lands heads, you get $1,050, even if it's tails, you only lose $1,000. Right? So the expected value is actually positive. Okay. If you had infinite money, you should flip that coin as many times as you possibly can. Interestingly, pretty much all the students still turned down the opportunity to flip the coin. So time after time after time, they started to notice a pattern, which was that people tend to weigh losing something more than they value gaining something. They even did another little thought experiment with this, is that they, they took one group of people, and they put a coffee mug in front of them, they said, "How mu- how much would

• 49:13Mark Manson?

  you pay for this coffee mug, on average?" And let's say the people said, "Five bucks." Then they would take another group of people, and they would give them the coffee mug, and say, "How much would you sell this for?" And people wanted to sell it for more than they were willing to buy it for, right? They valued losing the thing more than they valued gaining it in the first place. And this was really driven home for them, because in 1973, Israel was invaded by all of its Arab neighbors, and they were called into active duty in what today is known as the Yom Kippur War. And what was interesting is that both of them, as they were riding off to the front, when they started looking at all of the intelligence failures, and the military failures that happened leading up to that war, they kept

• 49:57Mark Manson?

  seeing the same pattern. Intelligence agencies that didn't want to risk losing too much, so they papered over evidence of an impending invasion with different narratives or different stories. People who looked away from potential catastrophe because the loss of being wrong about it would have been so catastrophic for their career, or, you know, for, for whatever, their platoon, or their agency, or whatever. Now, this phenomenon eventually would become known as loss aversion, and Kahneman and Tversky's big contribution was that they found pretty consistently that the ratio of how people weighted loss versus gain of the same thing

• 50:39Mark Manson?

  Was roughly two to one that people generally experience the loss of something as twice as bad as the benefit of gaining the same thing. And if anybody who's been competitive in sports or tried to win at anything, like everybody knows that the pain of losing is significantly more severe than the joy of winning and it lasts much longer. Now, they eventually kind of bundled up a lot of their experiments and they broadly called it prospect theory and they would go on to win a Nobel Prize for it in 2002. Unfortunately, Tversky did not survive that long, but Kahneman has always insisted that the work was theirs together and has always given him credit for all of the work that they've done together.

• 51:24Mark Manson?

  But it raises a really interesting question, which is that if loss aversion is very much just baked into our psychology, it seems to be hardwired in all of us. Why is it there? What are the circumstances in which we evolved that loss aversion would make sense in nature?

• 51:41Speaker 01

  It's kind of cruel, right?

• 51:42Mark Manson?

  Right. And as we're going to find out, you can't train yourself out of it. You can't convince yourself, like being aware of this does not change the fact that it exists inside of your brain. It's pretty much a fundamental aspect of how we perceive risk and loss in our lives. So then the question is why? Why, Drew Bernie? Just tell me why.

• 52:02Speaker 01

  It's very cruel. Like I said, right? It seems like a very cruel thing of the universe, I guess, to deliver us this like pain hurts so much more than gaining something, you know? Something good is not as equal as something that is equally bad. Like we're just, we experience pain so much more vividly and acutely than we do of gaining something, right? Why is that? If we look at, if we kind of step back a little bit, there's this really interesting study done on capuchin monkeys, okay? You know, those capuchins are like the little, you think of the like little grinder, you know, like those little monkeys.

• 52:33Mark Manson?

  You with the little symbols?

• 52:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, with the little symbols. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 52:37Mark Manson?

  I like those.

• 52:38Speaker 01

  They're cute little monkeys, but they're smart too. But we diverged from them about like 40 million years ago. We're like a common ancestor. We haven't had one of those for a very, very long time. But you can train them to operate in somewhat of an economy, right? This one researcher, Keith Chaney's from Yale back in the 2000s, he trained these capuchins to basically trade aluminum coins that he made for apples and fruits like that, right? And they figured it out pretty quick. They showed them that they could, there was market fluctuations, like some days apples would cost this much or this much and the capuchins would participate in this economy. Okay. So they were smart enough to even do that. What they found out too is they kind of set up this experiment where you could test loss aversion.

• 53:23Speaker 01

  So they had one of the experimenters go and they would offer them one apple. Every now and then they would give them two apples for the same coin, for the same aluminum coin. And monkeys figured this out, okay, fine. So you got another researcher that would come in and would show them, present them two apples, but would sometimes take one apple away. But on average, they were always getting the same number, like 1.4 apples or something like that on average, right? For every time that they would give them one of these coins. Even those monkeys though, at that point, they preferred the first person who would guarantee them one and sometimes give them an extra one. They didn't like the one who would give them two and then sometimes take one away. So even in that context, like these, this monkey that we haven't shared an ancestor with for 40 million years has loss aversion.

• 54:08Speaker 01

  They would rather take that sure gain rather than have something that would be taken away from them. Okay? It is about 71% of the trades, about 70% of the trades shook out like that. And they've actually shown this in other primate species too, ones even closer to this too. So chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, they all show this, what they call endowment effect, which is basically what you're talking about is when you have something, you would prefer to hang on to it rather than trade it for something else, even if that other thing might be a little bit more valuable, you're going to take the sure bet more likely because you don't want to experience that loss. Okay? So it seems to be very, very ancient hardware that we have, like in the mammalian brain.

• 54:51Speaker 01

  And in fact, it is what the neuroscientific studies that they've done on this have found very ancient parts of our brain that are involved with this, very deep mammalian structures. It kind of splits into these like two systems. You have a system that evaluates subjective value of whatever it is in the environment that you're hanging on to. And then the systems associated with like negative emotions. And both of these fire up whenever we're experiencing a loss like this. And so it's, and then it's very ancient, these very ancient brain systems that are in like all mammals. So it seems to be very, very hardwired into us. Now, the question you asked was why? Why would it be that way? And if you think about it from an evolutionary standpoint, right?

• 55:36Speaker 01

  Most of our history as a species has kind of, we've been living on the edge of survival, right? We're on the margin of survival. On that margin, if you get a windfall of some resource, food or whatever it is, that's kind of nice. It's going to get you through another month or two, maybe at the most. If you lose something in that same environment though, you could be dead next week. There's an asymmetry going on there. You lose something, you're dead. If you gain something, eh.

• 56:02Mark Manson?

  You live a little longer.

• 56:03Speaker 01

  You live a little bit longer. So there's, there's an asymmetry there where the loss is much more significant in terms of your survival than a gain would be in that. Kahneman and Tversky figured out is that that's about a two to one ratio. And so that's why you would have this bias towards wanting to hang on to things and not lose them, right? The problem comes in is that we're using this ancient evolutionary hardware on modern problems that don't have those same types of consequences, right? So like if you're going to lose 50 bucks or something like that, that's going to be the like emotionally the same as gaining a hundred dollars, that the valence there is completely skewed, when that doesn't really have a whole lot of bearing on your life now.

• 56:47Speaker 01

  Or like you're looking at your quarterly reports at your job or something like that, and if you see the loss on there, you're registering a loss in your brain using that ancient hardware and that ancient software going on and it's registering as, oh, this is a threat to my survival, when it's really not. So that's the theory, the evolutionary mismatch theory anyway, is that we're applying these in all these wrong ways.

• 57:09Mark Manson?

  I think it's exacerbated by the fact that you could probably answer too, that in a modern life, the gain of something is worth more than the loss of the thing, right? Like if you just think about money, right? Like the more money you make, the easier it is to make more. That's pretty well established. Like financial wealth compounds in all sorts of different ways, whereas like losing money, I mean, sure, you can go broke, but like you can't really, I mean, you can go into debt, you can declare bankruptcy and kind of start over. I would argue that the asymmetry today is actually the other way. I feel like probably people who are very intelligent risk takers, financial risk takers,

• 57:51Mark Manson?

  whether it's traders, finance people, entrepreneurs, even executives at large corporations, like they probably have gotten good at fighting against their loss aversion, like leaning against it, not listening to it.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's easy to like do this in terms like business and stuff like that. We also do it in a lot of other areas of our life though too, right? Like a breakup hurts a lot more than like getting into a new relationship feels good, right? I think that's a big one. I think there's a lot of people who is like, oh, I took this for granted and then I lost it. And then all of a sudden you feel all this weight coming down on it. That's loss aversion. You know, like you took the relationship for granted or something like that and then once it's gone, then it hurts so much. That's loss aversion. That also is loss aversion. Or losing a job too, just like you're saying, there's like, oh, that's probably a good thing in this. You go find a better job or there's more jobs out there, right?

• 58:45Mark Manson?

  But it still feels worse.

• 58:46Speaker 01

  It stings more than it is any gain and anybody will tell you this, anybody who's acquired any sort of success will tell you this, that the losses hurt more than the gains. The gains are never as good as you think they're going to be. That's baked in, that's hardwired in and we can't get around it.

• 59:00Mark Manson?

  I think probably the most interesting example of loss aversion that I found was there was a really interesting study done in 2011 on golfers. Great title of a paper. It's called, Is Tiger Woods Lossovers? And basically it's these two guys, Pope and Schweitzer, they analyzed two and a half million putts on the PGA tour, over 400 different pros, 239 tournaments. It's actually a really interesting way that they set up the study. So for people who don't play a lot of golf, there are things called birdies, which is kind of the equivalent of like gaining a point. And then there are things called par, which is not losing a point. Like it's, you stay at the same, the same number.

• 59:41Mark Manson?

  So you could view putting for a birdie as putting to gain a point and you could view putting for par as putting to not lose a point.

• 59:50Speaker 01

  Okay, all right.

• 59:51Mark Manson?

  So what these researchers did is that they took the exact same golf courses, they took putts of the exact same distance, same exact location, but different players in different circumstances, either birdie putts or par putts. And they analyzed all millions and millions of putts. They analyzed the distance, location, direction, everything, apples to apples. And they found a significant difference in terms of the accuracy of birdie putts versus par putts. So birdie putts, they go in 83 and a half percent of the time. Par putts go in 88% of the time. Which is crazy.

• 1:00:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:24Mark Manson?

  Like, there shouldn't be any difference.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:00:26Mark Manson?

  Right?

• 1:00:27Speaker 01

  But it is. So you're saying, hold on, so you're saying like, let's say it's a birdie putt at 10 feet.

• 1:00:31Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  And it's a par putt at 10 feet.

• 1:00:32Mark Manson?

  From, in, in the same direction.

• 1:00:34Speaker 01

  Same direction, same spot, same everything.

• 1:00:36Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  They're more likely to make the par putt than the birdie putt.

• 1:00:38Mark Manson?

  Correct.

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  Okay, okay, okay.

• 1:00:39Mark Manson?

  And the argument, the conclusion, is that players are paying a lot more attention, they're much more focused, they take more time, they're much more diligent, they're much more careful with their swing.

• 1:00:51Speaker 01

  They're afraid to lose.

• 1:00:52Mark Manson?

  They're afraid to lose.

• 1:00:53Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:00:54Mark Manson?

  So they, so they put more effort into the par putts than they do the birdie putts.

• 1:00:58Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 1:00:58Mark Manson?

  And then that shows up in the result.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  Okay, so they're, they're loss aversed in that situation.

• 1:01:04Mark Manson?

  They are loss aversed.

• 1:01:04Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:01:05Mark Manson?

  So what's interesting is that the, the loss aversion, it mellowed as the tournament went on. So like golf tournaments, they go on for four days usually, and the further you get into the tournament, you're no longer really playing against the course, which is what you do on day one. You're playing against the other golfers. By day four, you know how many strokes behind you are the person in front of you, how many strokes ahead you are of the person behind you. And so what you see is the loss aversion stops showing up with birdie and par putts, and it starts showing up with their placement on the scoreboard.

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  Hmm, interesting. So the, the, the standard changes, the, the relevant metric changes, and their behavior changes because of that.

• 1:01:45Mark Manson?

  Yes, and this is a nice little metaphor of how we're going to approach failure throughout this episode. Loss aversion never changes, what you are loss averse to changes based on your definition of failure.

• 1:01:57Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:01:57Mark Manson?

  So when the definition of failure is bogeying on a, on a hole of golf, you experience loss aversion there, but when that definition of loss changes to falling behind the, the guy ranked behind you, then that becomes what you become loss averse to.

• 1:02:13Speaker 01

  Oh, interesting, okay, that's fascinating. Okay, okay, so that's, that's all well and good. Uh, we don't want to fall behind the leaderboard in golf.

• 1:02:22Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:22Speaker 01

  Uh, we want the best treats that we can trade for, all of that. Like, why does it hurt so bad when there really isn't anything?

• 1:02:29Mark Manson?

  Being lost.

• 1:02:30Speaker 01

  Being lost?

• 1:02:31Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:02:31Speaker 01

  Or like, there's no physical damage, like, physical pain makes sense, right?

• 1:02:34Mark Manson?

  Yeah, and like.

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  There's damage.

• 1:02:36Mark Manson?

  And like a golf game, right? Like, you lose a golf game, no, nobody died.

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:02:40Mark Manson?

  Like, nobody's gonna die, but like, people get really upset.

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  Right, why?

• 1:02:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:44Speaker 01

  Why do they do that, right? There's something inside of you that is treating that as some kind of injury of some sort, obviously, but, but what is that? Like, what is being injured throughout all of this, right? Well, it turns out there was this, um, this researcher in the 90s, Mark Leary, he came up with this idea of what he calls the sociometer, right? And it's really what it is, is it's tracking your status within a social group. So, you know, in our evolutionary past, we grew up in these small groups, and letting someone down, failing something, that actually, that had real stakes to it, right? And so you would lose status in that situation if you were to fail, fail other people, especially in that situation. And losing status meant you could be left alone, which meant you could die, right?

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  There was like, real stakes involved with this. So it's not this like cold calculation that we're doing either, it's gotta hurt.

• 1:03:36Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:36Speaker 01

  It has to hurt for you to be motivated to not want to fail and not want to let other people down like this.

• 1:03:41Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:41Speaker 01

  This, again, this is what he called the sociometer.

• 1:03:43Mark Manson?

  It comes back to the fact that like, pain, at the end of the day, is an evolutionary tool. It's a nudge towards behavior that's gonna help you survive and replicate.

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:52Mark Manson?

  Or at least helped us survive and replicate for hundreds of thousands of years. And so in this case, it's like, okay, even if it is an arbitrary game, even if it is just something as simple as like, who can carry the biggest rock or whatever. In our caveman days, stuff like that mattered because it indicated who was the most reliable, who was gonna help the tribe the most, who could save your life when you needed it, uh, who could hunt the biggest game when it came down to it. And then status began, began to become attached to that. And so we have this like internal measurement gage inside of our head at all time, trying to gauge, how much status do we have with the group around us?

• 1:04:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it happens like almost automatically too. Even if you don't know the people around you, if there's any sense of there's a status thing going on, you latch on to that and you try to figure out exactly where you're sitting within that. There's this really interesting set of studies that was done, uh, by Leary and others, uh, too, uh, that was, they, they brought people into the lab, and they, uh, had strangers were assigned to just these meaningless groups. There, there wasn't really any meaning to them, but they were told that they would either be included or excluded by the group. Okay, just, there's people would be like, people are either gonna accept you or deny you based on just some arbitrary criteria, whatever it was. Even that, the people who you've never met, okay, these were strangers, people had never met before,

• 1:05:11Speaker 01

  you'd never meet again, tasks that you were doing within this group that didn't matter. If you were excluded or included, like, had a, had an effect on how you felt about yourself in that situation.

• 1:05:23Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:23Speaker 01

  Like, that's how ingrained it is, and you could tell your status from that. If you told them, if you told the people that this was just random, like, your status is just decided randomly, it didn't matter. But if you said there's other people judging you based on this, people you didn't know, again, would never interact with again, doing tasks you never, that don't mean anything.

• 1:05:40Mark Manson?

  It's so.

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  That's how innate it is.

• 1:05:41Mark Manson?

  It's so funny. So have you ever, have you ever like volunteered for a psych study?

• 1:05:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:46Mark Manson?

  Yeah, so I used to do it in college a lot, and, uh.

• 1:05:48Speaker 01

  I would do anything for 10 bucks back then.

• 1:05:50Mark Manson?

  Exactly, exactly. And I remember I used to go in, and, and it was, it was always really funny because, yeah, they, they just put you in a room of strangers. You have no idea what you're there for, you have no idea what you're gonna do, like, they, they come in and they ask you to do like some very random thing. And I'm just, I'm just thinking back and, and imagining like, walking into that room with like, five or 10 other people, and then having the, the researcher just look at me and be like, who here wants Mark to stay? And like, nobody raises their hand.

• 1:06:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:17Mark Manson?

  I would be so fucking pissed. I would be like, fuck all you people, fuck you, who do you think you are? Right, and it, it could be, who cares what the reason is for, right? Like, it's just imagining that happening.

• 1:06:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:29Mark Manson?

  Is, is enough to like, yeah, yeah, I can like imagine the emotion that would come up.

• 1:06:34Speaker 01

  Importantly, uh, in these studies too, what they found is that it's really the exclusion, it's this loss aversion going on again, okay? Because when, the same was true when you were like included in the group, they, like, they found the, the people who, yeah, oh yeah, you were accepted into the group and you're good. They felt fine, they're like, okay, fine, whatever. It's when you're excluded that the pain really came in, that that was measurable, and they got a measurable response from that, that people would just felt worse about themselves, that sociometer really took a hit. Only during the exclusions, it's a threat detection system, it's not a bonus reward system or anything like that. You don't get to feel good because you get included, you only feel bad because you're excluded. It's, it's loss aversion, is what it is.

• 1:07:14Speaker 01

  And, but it's at the social level, losing social status is really the measure that, that hurts the most.

• 1:07:20Mark Manson?

  You know what this reminds me of? You didn't go out to many nightclubs, did you?

• 1:07:24Speaker 01

  I was, I was not a clubber.

• 1:07:25Mark Manson?

  Good, good for you.

• 1:07:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:26Mark Manson?

  Good for you.

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:27Mark Manson?

  Biggest waste of fucking time and money, ever. I went to way too many clubs. And, and a lot of nightclubs, especially in like, like, big cities like.

• 1:07:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:35Mark Manson?

  New York and London.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:07:36Mark Manson?

  Um, they, they have a setup where it's like you have the VIP section, right? Where you have to pay a ridiculous amount of money to basically sit at a table behind a velvet rope, uh, where it's just as loud and shitty as the people on the other side.

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  Arbitrary standard, yeah.

• 1:07:50Mark Manson?

  It's completely arbitrary. And it was funny because I remember when I was young and broke and I used to go out to clubs all the time. You know, I would sit there, I'd be like one of the, the cattle herd, like crammed into the middle of the bar, waiting 20 minutes to get a drink. And I would, I would look over at the VIP area, you know, and they all have their own waitresses, and the waitresses are super hot, and there's like champagne bottles and sparklers and everything. I'd be like, man, it, it must be so cool to be in there. Like, it'd be so much nicer, so much easier, you could like talk to people, you could meet a bunch of girls. And I used to think that for years in my early twenties, and then I remember, once I got a little bit older and I got some money, I went out to a couple of clubs and I bought VIP tables for me and my friends. And I just remember sitting there and being like, this is it.

• 1:08:35Speaker 01

  This is so dumb.

• 1:08:35Mark Manson?

  This is so fucking stupid.

• 1:08:37Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:08:38Mark Manson?

  I just wasted so much money for nothing.

• 1:08:40Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:08:41Mark Manson?

  For nothing.

• 1:08:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, so getting included had almost zero benefit.

• 1:08:44Mark Manson?

  Zero benefit.

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:45Mark Manson?

  Zero benefit.

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  But being excluded hurt like hell.

• 1:08:46Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:08:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that's exactly the sociometer's, uh, uh, mechanism there.

• 1:08:51Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  And again, it just comes back to that whole loss aversion thing, like, losing status with our evolutionarily ancient brains that we have, that signaled literal death at one point in our evolutionary past, right?

• 1:09:04Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:04Speaker 01

  It's just being kind of hijacked now, uh, in a lot of these situations. That's a perfect example of when it's being hijacked.

• 1:09:11Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:09:12Speaker 01

  In a way that's, uh, screwing you over, basically.

• 1:09:14Mark Manson?

  And there's a lot of places that will mess with you, you know, it's different status games and, um, you know, airlines do this, right? With their statuses and points, and, you know, do you get the premium economy seat? Or did you get a free upgrade to like the, you know, special extra legroom seat, you know, and it's, and people love it. It really taps into something extremely primal in us.

• 1:09:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it does, even if it's super arbitrary, like you were saying.

• 1:09:39Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:39Speaker 01

  So yeah, there's another thing too, like, like you've kind of been hinting at, you can't really talk yourself out of this.

• 1:09:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:44Speaker 01

  You can't reason your way out, you can't, if you, even if you know about it, it really doesn't change a whole lot. One of these studies that they did as well was, uh, they had participants, they would speak into a microphone, and just talk about themselves. And then they received feedback from a quote-unquote stranger, it was just the, the, the researchers basically, that either accepted or rejected their stories, like, this was a good story, this was a bad story that you just told about yourself, right? The rejected participants, they would dismiss these impressions, they were, whatever, these people, I don't care about these people, doesn't matter, somebody I don't know, but when they measured their, their, their sociometer status kind of thing.

• 1:10:21Mark Manson?

  How they felt about themselves.

• 1:10:22Speaker 01

  How they felt about themselves later, it actually still went down, no matter what.

• 1:10:25Mark Manson?

  Wow.

• 1:10:25Speaker 01

  Even if you had that self-talk, like, we always say, oh, just, you know, screw them, they don't know what they're talking about.

• 1:10:30Mark Manson?

  It's like the comment section.

• 1:10:31Speaker 01

  It's, yeah, the comment section.

• 1:10:33Mark Manson?

  Dude.

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  It digs at you, doesn't it?

• 1:10:34Mark Manson?

  It still digs at you.

• 1:10:35Speaker 01

  I mean, it's what.

• 1:10:37Mark Manson?

  It's so funny because it's like, I know it doesn't matter, but it's like, it's still, it's still, it just sucks.

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And you were like, good feedback. You're like, oh, that's, that was nice.

• 1:10:46Mark Manson?

  Yeah, exactly. Like, there'll be hundreds and hundreds of comments.

• 1:10:48Speaker 01

  But you'll hang on to that one.

• 1:10:49Mark Manson?

  Right. And then one person like makes fun of my hair or my shoes or something. And I'm like, oh, fuck you. Joey Baloney, six, four, eight.

• 1:10:57Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 1:10:58Mark Manson?

  What do you know?

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. People that you don't know will never interact with again.

• 1:11:01Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:02Speaker 01

  And arbitrary standards. Yeah.

• 1:11:03Mark Manson?

  Yep. Fucking mammalian brain. Can't get away from it.

• 1:11:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, well, I, exactly.

• 1:11:09Mark Manson?

  You know, when, when somebody rejects us for something completely arbitrary, right? Like, and we're not actually losing it. You know, it's like, we lose a golf game, or we lose, you know, uh, Joe Blow next to us that can carry a bigger rock, or, you know, run faster than us. Like, why do we feel so bad? Like, what is actually being harmed? It was funny, because when you said that, the first thing that came to my mind was the ego. And it's interesting, because if you actually go back to Freud's theory, you know, we've done a whole episode on, on the ego unsolved. People can go back and listen to it. The TLDR is that Freud's original theory about the ego has just been completely butchered over the years. And, and people have a very, almost like a cartoonish, understanding of what, what the ego is and

• 1:11:53Mark Manson?

  the purpose it serves us psychologically. The real understanding of the ego, the Freud's like, actual explanation of what the ego is, ties in perfectly with the sociometer theory, right? Like Freud's argument is that we have two primary incentives in our lives. One is our instinctual urges and just base drives. And then one is the culture and social influence around us, right? We want to satisfy our urges and needs, but we also want people to approve of us, people to like us, to have social status, to fit in the cultural norms, social norms, to be seen, you know, to be respected and admired and all those things.

• 1:12:35Mark Manson?

  And the ego is the self-definition that balances those two things. The ego is, it is the, the bundle of narratives we tell about ourselves that exists to help us both get our, our fundamental needs met and satisfy our urges, but also do it in a way that doesn't make everybody hate us, doesn't get us kicked out of the tribe.

• 1:12:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, I had, I had a psychology professor explain it really well one time, I think. So, or you try, you have your urges and your, your base desires and everything like that. And you have society's expectations on top of you. And then the, the ego comes in and says, wait, I have a plan. Like, I thought that was a really good way to, to say what the ego is.

• 1:13:14Mark Manson?

  I got it, guys.

• 1:13:15Speaker 01

  I got this. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:17Mark Manson?

  But what's interesting about the ego is that it, it is, we protect it as if it's part of ourselves, right? Like, and when the ego is threatened or attacked, we feel the same physiological response that we do if our body is threatened or attacked. And so when we talk about failure, failure of social status, failure of like, losing the respect and admiration of others, it very much is a threat to the ego, right? Because it is a threat to our self-understanding of how we feel about ourselves and, um, and how we see ourselves. And sure enough, you see this in the research as well. Like, people will experience the pain of failure even when they're alone by themselves, even when nobody's around and nobody can see what happened or what they're doing, right?

• 1:14:00Mark Manson?

  Like, we still, even if you're alone in your room, trying to do a thing that you think is important, when you fail at it, you're gonna feel like a loser. And the reason is, is because that sociometer, it doesn't turn off when you're by yourself. It still exists within you, and you are always using it to gauge what your relative social status is to other people. And even when you are doing things by yourself, you are still measuring your ability to do those things against that sociometer of like, the standard that you have set for yourself, based on the people around you, based on society at large, based on whatever culture you exist within. Now, there's a word here that we've been dancing around.

• 1:14:42Mark Manson?

  And, and I've intentionally wanted to dance around it, and that is self-esteem. Like, another way to think about what this internal sociometer is, is self-esteem. I mean, one day, we'll do an episode on self-esteem.

• 1:14:53Speaker 01

  We definitely should.

• 1:14:54Mark Manson?

  And, and, and we will talk about all of the ways that it, it got butchered and mangled over the decades. But it is, I think, most people conceptualize self-esteem as something that exists independently and internally on your own, right? Like, when people say, oh, you just need to have better self-esteem, or like, oh, we just need to improve our self-esteem, it is often said in a way that if you just felt good by yourself on your own, then everything would be fine. But the truth is, is that self-esteem is intimately connected to how you're seen by others, right? Because ultimately, the way you feel about yourself is a response to

• 1:15:35Mark Manson?

  how you predict other people are going to feel about you, based on what you can do. So we're tying together a, a whole bundle of psychological concepts here, but the point is, is that failure hurts regardless of whether you actually lost something or not, whether it's a tangible thing you, you, you lost, or just some abstract arbitrary measurement that you, you failed to live up to. It hurts whether you agree with the people judging you or not. It hurts whether you're even with other people or not. And it hurts whether it even makes sense or not. And like you said, the reason it hurts in all these circumstances is because it identified as a threat prevention system,

• 1:16:20Mark Manson?

  as a way to protect yourself and to keep you in good graces with the people around you, and to keep you competent and living up to expectations that other people set for you and that you've set for yourself. We still haven't defined failure yet, and a lot of that is because it doesn't really matter what the definition of failure is. If you lost something, either tangible or abstract, it's going to feel bad, no matter what. You could be fucking Steve Jobs, and it's, and you wake up, it's gonna feel shitty, right? Warren Buffett wakes up, sees he lost a bunch of money. It's gonna feel really shitty, and it's gonna feel worse than making that same amount of money. Doesn't matter who you are, what situation you're in, how smart you are, how many ways you rationalize the importance of the failure,

• 1:17:04Mark Manson?

  how many lessons you gain from the failure, it is going to suck, always, all the time.

• 1:17:11Speaker 01

  It's just fascinating. I, I don't know.

• 1:17:14Mark Manson?

  It's kind of sick.

• 1:17:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's cruel.

• 1:17:16Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:17Speaker 01

  It's really cruel. Like, our, our minds are just set up to be kind of cruel to ourselves, and it, we, we create these egos.

• 1:17:24Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 1:17:24Speaker 01

  And then these egos are what is reflecting back on us that we, that hurts us too. Like, it's the target of our pain, but it's also our own creation.

• 1:17:32Mark Manson?

  And it is, the whole purpose of the ego is to be hurt.

• 1:17:36Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:17:37Mark Manson?

  Because by being hurt, the ego is signaling to us that our livelihood is under threat, right? So we construct our egos, we create all these narratives about who we are and what we can do, and who's gonna like us and who's not gonna like us, so that all those narratives can fail us and be threatened, so that we can get really upset and anxious and freak out, so that we behave in more adaptable ways that promote our survival.

• 1:18:02Speaker 01

  And I guess there's, there's one or two ways you could look at that. Maybe I'm getting ahead of myself here, but that could either be the best realization you have of this whole episode.

• 1:18:09Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:18:10Speaker 01

  Or the worst, right? It depends on how you look at that.

• 1:18:13Mark Manson?

  Yes. You have to define yourself in some way or another, right? We, we covered that in the ego episode, like, you, you have to pick some self-definition. And whatever self-definition you choose is going to be the definition that fails at some point. And it is that failure that is evolutionarily useful. Because as soon as it fails, that is what motivates you to change your behavior and act differently in the future, which is, of course, your way of learning, right? So the learning is, generally, it's gonna happen, you know, unless, there are times where you can kind of live in denial.

• 1:18:47Speaker 01

  Sure, sure.

• 1:18:48Mark Manson?

  You know, Freud, Freud had his defense mechanisms, which I think in many ways prevented learning. I think that they were defined in such a way that it was like, there were ways that people protected their ego in a way that prevented them from having to learn, right? So it's like, you, you develop a strong sense of denial, uh, or you project your own flaws on the other people as a way to protect your ego, and because you're protecting your ego, your ego never gets harmed. And because it never gets harmed, you never have to learn and grow and develop a new self-definition. This, this comes back to the fact that it's just like, growth is fundamentally rooted in pain. Failure is inevitable, no matter how you define your goals, your aims, your identity. You are choosing the future ways in which you are gonna fail.

• 1:19:31Mark Manson?

  And so the game is not necessarily learning from failure, because as long as you're just honest about failure, that's gonna happen anyway. The game is not avoiding failure, because that's impossible. The game is, is choosing the right goals and identity.

• 1:19:48Mark Manson?

  So that you have good failures.

• 1:19:49Speaker 01

  Hmm. So that pain is worth it.

• 1:19:51Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:52Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:19:52Mark Manson?

  Right. So a very crude example, if I define myself as a family man, right? That is a self-definition that I'm going to fail at at some point.

• 1:20:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:20:05Mark Manson?

  And each time I fail at that, I'm probably going to become better in my relationships, become more loving, better with intimacy, better with communication, and become a better family man. If I define myself as a meth head, I'm setting myself up for a series of failures that are like not going to help me very much. Right? I'm being very inefficient in sourcing meth in downtown LA right now, right?

• 1:20:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. Whereas, whereas if you define yourself as a family man, that pain is very informative and will guide you along the way into becoming closer in line with your values or what you actually want to be and something that's very chosen and intentional.

• 1:20:41Mark Manson?

  Correct.

• 1:20:42Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:20:42Mark Manson?

  Before we can even talk about growing from failure, which we will talk about that

• 1:20:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:47Mark Manson?

  towards the end of the episode, we have to talk about what are we, how are we defining ourselves? Because the way we define ourselves defines what our failures are going to be. Right?

• 1:20:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:20:58Mark Manson?

  I'm not a golfer, so I don't give a shit if I miss a par putt. Tiger Woods probably gives a lot of shit if he misses a par putt, right? So for me, it's not a failure. I don't care.

• 1:21:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:21:10Mark Manson?

  Tiger Woods, it's like, it probably feels life and life or death to him at certain points.

• 1:21:16Speaker 01

  Yeah. I brought this up several times in the change episode. I kept saying, you know, pain is a great teacher. And I think this is a little bit where rubber hits the road with it.

• 1:21:26Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:27Speaker 01

  Pay attention to what, what's causing you pain. And if you like dig underneath of it, I think we're going to talk about this a lot. I'm going for it. But if you dig underneath of that, is that pain worth it? Is that pain really what like the, the family man versus the meth head, right? Which one of those pains is a better pain to have?

• 1:21:42Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:21:42Speaker 01

  Like, I think that's what I was trying to get at. That's kind of what I was trying to get at in the change episode, like pain is a great teacher, like listen to it, don't, don't avoid it.

• 1:21:49Mark Manson?

  Cause the chapter of my book is called failures, the way forward. And this is why that just feels very surface level, you know, at, at this point, because it's, yeah, it is the way forward, but it's, it's the way forward for what, right?

• 1:22:03Speaker 01

  Ah, okay.

• 1:22:04Mark Manson?

  Like if, if you are failing at something that is a waste of your time, it's probably good you're failing. You probably don't want to move forward. And you see this a lot, like, we're going to talk about quitting later and, and what the difference is between quitting being a success and quitting something being a failure. And I think a lot of it has to do with understanding like, is something worth failing at? Is something worth pursuing in the first place? Because if it's not worth pursuing in the first place, then failure, like failing at that thing is a good thing. You should, I should hope that I'm not very good at being a meth head.

• 1:22:39Speaker 01

  Okay. I really hope so too.

• 1:22:42Mark Manson?

  Unfortunately, I'm prodigious at acquiring meth on the streets of LA.

• 1:22:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:47Mark Manson?

  I just appear to be like a Isaac Newton of.

• 1:22:52Speaker 01

  And yet here you are.

• 1:22:53Mark Manson?

  Yet here I am, talking to you.

• 1:22:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:55Mark Manson?

  What are some good ways that you define failure for yourself throughout your life? And what are some bad ways?

• 1:23:03Speaker 01

  Just professionally speaking, I've, if I've like, I guess I haven't been fired from really any jobs that I think of, but I've definitely failed.

• 1:23:10Mark Manson?

  Not yet.

• 1:23:14Speaker 01

  We'll talk about that.

• 1:23:16Speaker 01

  But when I have like, I've gone into something and I didn't, it just didn't work or I quit, you know, I left grad school. Like I've talked about that plenty of times before. I never saw that as a failure. I did really see that as, oh, uh, the pain I was experiencing during that was pain I really didn't want. So I'm getting the hell out.

• 1:23:31Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:31Speaker 01

  So I think that was a healthy way to see it. Every time that I have though, like an unhealthy way to see it has always been it's someone else's standard or someone else's definition that I have not lived up to. And I probably felt that sting that we're talking about the sociometer sting.

• 1:23:47Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:48Speaker 01

  And not really paid attention to why and just felt bad and just externalized all of it. Thought that I was just a failure and like, how could I live up to this, that, the other thing? It was always some external standard usually.

• 1:23:59Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:00Speaker 01

  Um, that, that I was failing to live up to. I think that's a big difference for me. Anyway, I don't know.

• 1:24:05Mark Manson?

  I definitely relate to that. I, when I think about it, I, I think about it like my early dating and relationships. Like I very much, it was like a very, I was very superficial in that like I viewed my success at dating really just in terms of like how many women I went out with and how many I hooked up with.

• 1:24:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:24:23Mark Manson?

  What eventually happened, and I, I wrote about this in my dating book many years ago. Um, what eventually happened is I realized that like I was putting so much time and effort into like pursuing women that I didn't even actually enjoy being around. It was because of what you're saying. It's like I had, I had kind of downloaded this, this lame cultural script of like what a successful dating life as a young man was. And I was trying to live up to that regardless of how much I actually enjoyed the company of the women I was seeing. And, um, and as soon as I flipped the, the standard of success from, I guess, hooking up with lots of girls to like being happy and enjoying the women I spend time with, it completely changed everything, right?

• 1:25:07Mark Manson?

  And then, then it, it changed the, the nature of the failure, right? So it was like before, if I went on a date with a woman and she didn't call me back, that felt like a catastrophic evaluation of my worth as, as an individual. Whereas like when I changed, shifted the metric to just like having a happy, good relationship with somebody.

• 1:25:30Mark Manson?

  And I went on a date with a woman and she didn't call me back. It was like, oh, well, I guess we wouldn't have been happy together. Good thing she didn't call me back, right? Like it's no longer a failure. Like texting her a million times and like manipulating her to go back out with me would have been the failure.

• 1:25:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:25:46Mark Manson?

  Because it would have made us both miserable.

• 1:25:48Speaker 01

  Right. And some people, some people would say, oh, you're deluding yourself and you know, you're inflating your own ego or whatever. And that's, and you're deluding yourself. Well, you're deluding yourself either way, really, right? There's a delusion on either direction of those.

• 1:26:00Mark Manson?

  Every vector.

• 1:26:01Speaker 01

  So you may as well choose the one where it's telling you a better story and, and giving you a better outcome and is aligned with what you actually want, not what other people are telling you. And all of those arbitrary standards that you're putting on yourself, they just make yourself miserable.

• 1:26:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah. And it's, I think that the point and that came up in the research too, is that you're going to feel bad when other people judge you, whether you agree with them or not, whether you even care about them or not. It's just going to feel bad no matter what.

• 1:26:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:26:28Mark Manson?

  So you might as well pick the thing that's going to make you happy anyway, right? Like you're going to get criticized no matter what you do, so you might as well do what's best for you.

• 1:26:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. No, that's totally true. I guess I, I get that. Like, um, I don't know if I, I don't get a lot of overt signals, uh, like from my family. You know, I'm like, I'm not, I'm not married. I'm in my 40s. I'm not married. I don't have kids and all that kind of stuff. And I come from a pretty traditional family.

• 1:26:51Mark Manson?

  Newly single ladies.

• 1:26:53Speaker 01

  Well, talk about a failure.

• 1:26:56Mark Manson?

  The world, I don't know if we have time in this podcast.

• 1:27:00Speaker 01

  That's another episode. That's another episode. I see that too, because I will tell myself, I'm like, well, I don't care what they think. And it's like, I actually do.

• 1:27:06Mark Manson?

  You do.

• 1:27:07Speaker 01

  But when I sit down and think about it, I'm like, not, but I'm still okay. Even though that, that it kind of gets at me a little bit, I'm like, I'm still okay with like my choices and the way I've done this. And yeah.

• 1:27:19Mark Manson?

  It's, it's funny because yeah, it never, things like that, they never stop getting to you. It's like the comments, right? Like I get asked all the time by younger influencers, creators are like, when do you stop caring about? I'm like, you never stop.

• 1:27:30Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:31Mark Manson?

  You just get better at it.

• 1:27:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:32Mark Manson?

  It's like public speaking, right? You never stop being nervous before you go speak in front of an audience. It doesn't bother you as much as time goes on, like you get desensitized to it. Like that, I think that's more of what happens.

• 1:27:44Speaker 01

  Yeah. I think that's where I'm at with it too. Yeah.

• 1:27:45Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:46Mark Manson?

  Well, believe it or not, we're going to go even deeper on this. Which is way deeper than I think anybody asked for when they started this, this episode, but, um, this is why we're here.

• 1:27:57Speaker 01

  Let's get weird.

• 1:27:59Mark Manson?

  We go way too deep and get weird.

• 1:28:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:28:02Mark Manson?

  Uh, so the, in the next chapter, I mean, what I'd like listeners to do is, is think about one of the largest failures that they have experienced in the last few years. And, and take a moment and think about what are, what are the assumptions or, or yardsticks that they are using to measure that failure? Like what, what are, what's the underlying assumption or value that defines that failure? In many cases, I think people don't realize that they didn't actually accept the terms of, of their failure. Like they just kind of in, inherited it from the people around them. So that's the first thing I want them to do, but then I want them, as we go into the next chapter

• 1:28:44Mark Manson?

  and we start talking a little bit more deeply about this identity stuff and, um, and how we're measuring ourselves and the ego and where all this stuff comes from in the first place. And does any of it matter? I want them to keep, keep that in mind as we work through it. So as you know, for many months, we've been joking about doing an episode on religion, religion solved. And surprisingly, a lot of people in the audience have encouraged us to do it. So this next chapter is going to be, we're going to dip our toe in the water. And we're not going to get religious, but we are going to use two of the world's most prominent religions

• 1:29:22Mark Manson?

  as a way of investigating how we define failure and how we define ourselves in the first place. Hold that thought. We've got a quick message from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by MacroFactor. Quick confession, my relationship with food tracking has usually been the same story. I get motivated, I download some app, I spend four days meticulously weighing chicken breast, and then life happens and I forget the app exists until my pants stop fitting. Rinse, repeat for basically a decade, which is why I've partnered with MacroFactor for the next stretch, because it's built different than the calorie counting apps that I've used in the past. Most of those apps give some generic macro target on day one and then just expect you to follow it forever,

• 1:30:05Mark Manson?

  regardless of what your body is actually doing. But MacroFactor doesn't do that. It's a nutrition coach that actually reads your data. You log your weight and your food, and every week it looks at what really happens to your body and adjusts your targets accordingly. So there's no guessing, there's no static plan that stops making sense three weeks in. My goal right now is pretty simple. Build a little muscle, stop white knuckling my diet, and actually understand what my body's doing instead of vibing off a number I pick on a whim. I'll be using MacroFactor to get me there and reporting back on how it goes. So if you want to try it yourself, click the link in the description and use the promo code MARK for a 14-day free trial. This episode is brought to you by Cozy Earth. Now, I need to tell you something a little bit embarrassing.

• 1:30:47Mark Manson?

  I have become a sheets guy. I spent most of my twenties sleeping in hostels and guest houses across Asia and South America. I did not care about bedding. If it was flat and roughly horizontal, I would figure out a way to sleep on it. But now, I'm that guy who will have an entire deep dive conversation with you about sheets, and it's entirely Cozy Earth's fault. Cozy Earth sent me their sheets and I put them on expecting nothing because, I mean, come on, they're sheets. How different could they be? But you climb in and it immediately feels completely different. They're made from viscous from bamboo, so they're soft and lightweight in a way that makes your old sheets feel like a sleeping bag. And if you've been in LA this summer, you know that the humidity has been insane. With regular sheets, you wake up at 3:00 AM,

• 1:31:29Mark Manson?

  sticking to everything, but these are breathable and they naturally wick away moisture so you don't wake up feeling clammy. So if you're a sheets snob like me, check out Cozy Earth. Besides, they come with a 100-night sleep trial and a 10-year warranty, which for sheets is absolutely insane. But I bet money that you'll end up keeping them that long and maybe even packing them for vacation. So if you want to try them out, head to cozyearth.com and use my code SOLVED for up to 20% off. That's code SOLVED for up to 20% off home and sleepwear. And if you see a post-purchase survey, please be sure to mention that you heard about Cozy Earth right here.

• 1:32:06Mark Manson?

  So we have now managed to get two hours into a podcast about failure without actually defining failure. And there is actually a very good reason for this, which is that failure is completely relative. It's failure compared to what, right? What is the standard or expectation that you're setting that is defining your failure? So it is actually difficult to define failure without first looking at the standards and expectations we set for ourselves. And it turns out that those standards and expectations are very deeply linked with how we see who we are. And the best vehicle to explain this phenomenon and this experience that we all have,

• 1:32:48Mark Manson?

  I actually think is one of the most popular religions in the world, which is Buddhism. I'm going to tell briefly the story of the Buddha again. I'm going to tell it with a little bit of a twist in a way that I think will help us understand failure and loss on a deeper, more profound level. So for people who don't know, the Buddha was born a prince to a very wealthy family. And the Buddha's father was apparently a very bold and ambitious man. And when his son was born, he decided that he wanted to create an environment that his son would never know lack, would never know pain, would never know loss, would never know failure.

• 1:33:28Mark Manson?

  And so he contrived everything in his son's environment to fulfill every wish, every desire. So supposedly, as the myth goes, as the Buddha grew up, he never wanted for anything. Anything he wanted at any time, it was immediately given to him, and he never had to deal with any problem. He never had to take responsibility for any struggle, any outcome. Everything was just easy peasy, lemon breezy. Now, interestingly, this became very dissatisfying for him. I think he probably intuited, once he became an adult, that this was kind of an empty life. Like, it was just this hedonic treadmill of indulgences and ever escalating novelty.

• 1:34:09Mark Manson?

  And at a certain point, he decided that he wanted to actually experience the world. And so late one night, he snuck out of the palace and he encounters four different people, that all of them shock him. So the first one is an aging and withered old man. He had never seen somebody old before, and this kind of freaked him out. The second thing he saw was a deeply sick person, someone riddled with disease and deeply suffering because of it. The third thing he saw was a corpse on the side of the road. He had never seen anybody who was dead before. And then the last thing he saw was a wandering ascetic, which was, at the time, it was a monk that gave away all possessions and just kind of wandered around, took a vow of poverty, I suppose. Now, all these things completely shocked him.

• 1:34:54Mark Manson?

  Like, he had never been exposed to anything like this in his life, and it kind of gave him a wake-up call and he realized, you know what? I got to get out into the world. I need to learn and understand everything that's going on that I haven't been exposed to before. So soon after, he planned to exit the palace for good. He had a wife and a child. He left them in the middle of the night without saying goodbye to them. And he decided to wander the wilderness as an ascetic himself. He gave up all possessions. He took a vow of poverty. He supposedly lived on like a single peanut each day. He basically intensely suffered intentionally for an extended period of time.

• 1:35:37Mark Manson?

  Intentionally suffering isn't really satisfying either. It's just kind of another form of indulgence, just, you know, with a different flavor, I suppose. And so eventually, he came to the conclusion that like, this wasn't really leading anywhere either. And so that's when he went and sat underneath the Bodhi tree, and he decided that he was not going to get up until he had a better idea. And that's when he became enlightened. I find this story interesting because earlier, we were talking about kind of the Hegelian dialectic, the thesis, the antithesis, the synthesis. I think we could look at the Buddhist story of kind of an example of that dialectic at work, right? So you have this prince who's born into a life of luxury. He has zero problems, zero failures, right? That's kind of our natural instinct

• 1:36:22Mark Manson?

  is to avoid any loss or failure. That is not satisfying because you don't grow, you don't have accountability for anything, you don't have any repercussions for anything, you never have to change. And that's not living. That's not a life, right? So he becomes dissatisfied with that. And then he goes to the other extreme, which is he seeks out failure. He seeks out pain. He seeks out loss. And he tries to indulge and optimize that suffering to achieve some degree of enlightenment or self-empowerment. And he realizes that too is a dead end. That is just another form of self-indulgence, and it is also an unhealthy relationship with failure and loss. And so the synthesis that he arrives at, I guess you could say, under the Bodhi tree,

• 1:37:06Mark Manson?

  is that everything is a sense of loss. Everything is an eventual failure. Because the moment you attach yourself to any thought, any desire, any identification, you are defining the terms of your future failure. Because nothing lasts, and because nothing lasts, anything that you attach yourself to is destined to fail you at some point. From a Buddhist perspective, every time you say "I am" and then finish the sentence, you are committing a very subtle act of self-harm, because you are setting the standards and expectations by which you're going to measure yourself. And by definition, every measurement and standard you set for yourself is one day going to fail you.

• 1:37:50Mark Manson?

  So as soon as you define yourself in any way, shape, or form, you are also defining the terms of your future failures. So in this sense, failure is not only inevitable, it is a fundamental part of our consciousness and the way we experience the world. Now, the Buddhist response to this is that you just shouldn't define yourself at all. That you should let go of all attachments, all standards, all expectations. And this is a pretty radical idea. I mean, this ultimately is the realization that the Buddha came to, sitting underneath the Bodhi tree, and became the kind of the foundational premise of- The philosophy of Buddhism, but I do think there is a lot of wisdom in that of at

• 1:38:33Mark Manson?

  least defining yourself extremely loosely and not being too invested or too attached to any single definition of self, because the more invested you are in any definition of self, the more you bank your self-esteem or how you feel about yourself on any single narrow definition, the more vulnerable you're making yourself for when the eventual failures do occur. I'm not really going to recommend that everybody goes full Buddhist and just like sits in a corner and stares at a wall and tries to let go relinquish every single form of identification and attachment in their lives. I don't think that's necessarily

• 1:39:11Mark Manson?

  practical in 2026, but I do think it's an incredibly important principle to understand. And I think as a mental exercise, it is useful for people to kind of explore this idea that a lot of their self-definition and a lot of the standards and expectations that they've invited into their lives are completely arbitrary, are completely self-defined and don't necessarily need to exist. Like you can kind of just stop measuring yourself in certain ways technically whenever you want.

• 1:39:43Speaker 01

  Right. Okay. So you're advocating for Buddhism light?

• 1:39:47Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:39:47Speaker 01

  It kind of sounds like, okay.

• 1:39:48Mark Manson?

  A diet Buddhism.

• 1:39:49Speaker 01

  So this kind of leads to the four noble truths of Buddhism, right? Like the first noble truth being life is suffering or some sort of dissatisfaction that's just inherent in life. The second noble truth, I think, was that we create a lot of that suffering though, too. And this is kind of what you're getting at, is that these attachments that we have or these identities that we identify with or these, these things that we call ourselves, that creates some sort of inevitable future failure that you're talking about that will generate more suffering for us if we hold on to them so tightly. So you're not advocating necessarily going and sitting under the Bodhi tree and reaching full enlightenment, although if you can, great, right? But just being aware of that, being aware of those

• 1:40:30Speaker 01

  attachments and the failures they're setting you up for is something that can be useful for us because we can not attach to them so tightly if we're more aware of them. Is that what you're saying?

• 1:40:42Mark Manson?

  Whenever we pursue something or we're interested in something, I think we're psychologically predisposed to only see the upside of the success of that thing while we tend to ignore the inevitable failure of that thing, right?

• 1:40:54Speaker 01

  The inherent inevitable failure. Okay. Yeah.

• 1:40:56Mark Manson?

  And, and what's funny too is like, I think it's really important for the listener to, to get this too. Like this isn't just about trying to achieve something and failing. Like, it's not like, like trying to lose some weight and not quite losing it. Like sometimes the failure is precipitated by succeeding at the thing, right? So like, let's say I want to become a parent and I want to, I want to parent a child. Well, if I parent successfully, I'm going to raise a healthy, independent adult who's no longer going to need me around anymore, which it means like being a successful parent means you no longer have to parent somebody.

• 1:41:30Speaker 01

  So, so even success can hold the seeds of failure.

• 1:41:33Mark Manson?

  Correct.

• 1:41:33Speaker 01

  And you're just kind of screwed either way.

• 1:41:35Mark Manson?

  Correct. Yeah. And, and this is like, and I mean, this is what is so powerful about the first noble truth is like, everything is impermanent.

• 1:41:42Speaker 01

  Every single thing, right?

• 1:41:43Mark Manson?

  Nothing lasts. Everything goes away at some point and it goes away whether you succeed at it. It goes away whether you fail at it. It goes away no matter what. So anything you attach yourself to, anything you define yourself by, you are tacitly signing up for the thing that is going to eventually disappoint you or, or the thing that you're eventually going to grieve. I mean, that sounds kind of dark and sad, but like it's inevitable.

• 1:42:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:42:11Mark Manson?

  Right? So it, it's, it's not necessarily a sad thing. So it, the question then becomes, what is worth doing even though you know you will probably lose it one day, right? It is, I think for many people, it's like being a parent is worth it, even though they understand that one day they're not going to be a parent anymore. I think about this, you know, with marriage, right? There is going to come a day where either my wife or I die before the other one, right? And it's, it's still worth doing though, even though you know that that is going to eventually happen. It becomes a very useful compass for people to think about what they invest themselves into. Because, you know, last chapter, we both gave some examples of like very superficial things that we pursued, really just to kind

• 1:42:54Mark Manson?

  of like win a little bit of status and approval from others and how empty that is. I think this is kind of the, the rubric for how do you pursue something that is really worthwhile over the long run?

• 1:43:07Speaker 01

  You know, the third noble truth is that it is possible to escape suffering, right? Even if you lose something, even if you fail at it. Uh, and then the fourth noble truth is how you do that, the, the eightfold path, what they call this is how you live to, in order to do that. Again, what you're saying is you don't have to sit under the Bodhi tree.

• 1:43:23Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:43:23Speaker 01

  And become enlightened to do that. Is this what they mean by, I'm kind of becoming an amateur Buddhist. Okay. There, this is, I've been looking into it before this episode even started.

• 1:43:30Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:31Speaker 01

  Is this what they mean by the middle way? Is this what, I, I don't know if I completely understand the middle way in Buddhism. Is that what they, do you know about this at all?

• 1:43:38Mark Manson?

  It's very similar. It's very Aristotelian. Like it's like any pursuit, there is, you will kind of naturally be, there's a magnetic pull towards either extreme, right? There's, there's always a tendency of like, you should try to go out and make all the money or you should just never not care about money at all, right? Where it's like, actually the way of non-attachment is understanding that money matters, but it's also not everything, right? So there's always kind of this.

• 1:44:04Speaker 01

  Okay. Like the virtue is found in the balance. That's the Aristotelian view, but in the, in the Buddhist view, it's the middle way, which is.

• 1:44:10Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 1:44:11Speaker 01

  How you become non-attached is seeing both of those simultaneously.

• 1:44:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah. And we talked about this a little bit in the values episode where it is actually a highly functional person, you have a, almost like a balance of power of values within you. Like you have this tension between all the different things that you value in your life and you're, you often have to make compromises between them. Whereas like an unhealthy individual is when one value kind of takes over and becomes a tyrant and, and every other value or, or thing of importance has to be sacrificed to that single value. Like that's, that's where dysfunction comes from. That's where imbalance comes from. And Aristotle would say that would, that would mean living unvirtuously. And then a Buddhist would say that you have become attached to, to something and, and, and that is the root of your suffering as a result.

• 1:44:59Speaker 01

  Right. Okay.

• 1:45:00Mark Manson?

  There's kind of two other principles that I think are worth touching on that kind of flow out of this idea that, that failure is an inevitable side effect of just setting standards or expectations for yourself. So the first one is, is that failure is relative and it's relational. There's never just failure in a vacuum. It's always failure compared to what, right? What is the expectation or standard that you have set? And then what is the gap between what happened and that outcome? I think everybody has had a series of these experiences throughout their lives where like something has happened to you and it initially felt like a failure because it didn't meet the expectation you had in that moment. But then as you kind of processed it and thought about it, you suddenly realized

• 1:45:43Mark Manson?

  like, wait, this is actually a really good thing. Oh, I'm actually glad this happened. This isn't a failure at all, right? Like we've all had that experience before. I think one of the most profound and world-changing versions of this was, uh, Alexander Fleming. So Fleming was a biologist and he was, he was studying bacterial cultures and he went on vacation. He accidentally forgot to seal some of the, the bacteria that he was studying. And so I guess the petri dishes like became overgrown with mold while he was gone. So when he came back, the specimens that he was studying had like, were ruined by a bunch of mold. And so by the standard of a biologist studying bacteria, he had actually failed spectacularly. He had like destroyed dozens of samples by leaving them out and not protecting

• 1:46:28Mark Manson?

  them appropriately. But what he noticed after he kind of cleaned everything up is he noticed that where the mold was, bacteria wouldn't grow in its place. And this eventually led to the discovery of penicillin, which is derived from a form of mold. And penicillin has arguably gone on and saved probably more lives than maybe almost anything.

• 1:46:47Speaker 01

  The first antibiotic. Yeah.

• 1:46:48Mark Manson?

  It's the, the first antibiotic. I mean, it's like saved hundreds of millions of lives, maybe even a billion lives. Who knows? And this was discovered as a failure. It was a form of failure. But if you move the goalposts, it's actually one of the greatest successes in human history. This sort of stuff happens everywhere. I mean, I see it like in our business, this industry, podcasting, online content, media, everything is changing so fast. I mean, how many times do I change our business strategy?

• 1:47:18Speaker 01

  By the end of the month, I'm not even sure what we're measuring anymore. Yeah. Sometimes. Yeah. Because we have to. Yeah.

• 1:47:23Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Sometimes I feel bad for the, I feel like the team gets whiplash because it's like every other quarter, I'm like, okay, guys, we're changing everything.

• 1:47:30Speaker 01

  We're going to look at something completely different now.

• 1:47:31Mark Manson?

  But it, what, what happens so often is it's like you define standards and expectations for the quarter or for the year, and then you get to June and you're like, oh, this actually isn't what we should be optimizing for anymore. We need to change our definition of success and that means we need to change our downstream strategy. And you run into this in romantic relationships as well. I would say the majority of fights within a romantic relationship is the downstream result of either two people having different expectations about certain things or one person failing to shift their expectations about something based on new evidence or, or a new experience. So failure is inevitable.

• 1:48:12Mark Manson?

  Failure is relative and relational. And the last one is that failure is therefore arbitrary. It is a made up concept. The idea that Alexander Fleming failed as a biologist is a completely made up definition. The idea that a golfer failed because he missed a putt is completely made up. Putting a ball in a hole 400 yards away, like this is a completely arbitrary construct that a bunch of people came together and just agreed was important. And it's not real. Back to the Buddhist view, it is illusory. Everything is illusory, right? It's like this podcast success is illusory, right? Whether we get a quarter of a million downloads or half a million downloads or a million downloads, whether that is success or failure,

• 1:48:57Mark Manson?

  it's an arbitrary number that we, we make up and we make it up so that we can either feel good or bad about what we did and what happened. At any moment, we can decide to measure success in a, in a different way and then feel differently about ourselves.

• 1:49:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:11Mark Manson?

  And so this raises the question of like, if you are feeling like a failure in your life, if you are feeling like you are consistently failing to measure up to some standard or expectation, where did that standard or expectation come from?

• 1:49:27Mark Manson?

  When did you adopt it? Like who says that you have to have it? You don't, right? Like I think we adopt so many of our standards without realizing that we adopted them. And then we have them for so long, we assume that they are capital T true. When really it's just another arbitrary narrative that we decided to identify with.

• 1:49:50Speaker 01

  God, yeah, you see this all the time, right? Like, people are, oh, my God, I'm like 35 and I haven't bought a home yet. Or, and it's like, okay, what, what standard are you, where you should have a home by 35 or whatever it is, you know?

• 1:50:01Mark Manson?

  Are you measuring yourself by like the boomers who could just, houses were practically handed out on a street corner? Or are you measuring yourself by 21st century standards where there's not enough homes anywhere, right? So it's like, what are you measuring by?

• 1:50:15Speaker 01

  It's just kind of like the water we swim in though, a lot of times, right? We're just like, this is what people do, and so we do it. Not realizing that just, that's setting us up for a lot of that suffering and anguish that the Buddhists talk about. Like, you're attaching to something and you don't even know what you're attaching to. If you choose something and you fail by it, that's one thing. But when it's just kind of handed to you and you're just doing it blindly, that's kind of another level of suffering too, I think.

• 1:50:34Mark Manson?

  I do want to note one thing though, because what we are talking about right now, I think is a very profound realization for people when they first have it, you know? Whether it's when they go to therapy or, you know, when they meditate for the first time or whatever. Like, the first time you kind of realize this of like, oh, my God, I bought into all these scripts without really realizing I bought into them. And then they are arbitrary and I don't have to accept them. It is a very, very powerful personal experience that I think most people go through. There's a little bit of pushback I'll, I want to put out there, which is that once people realize this is, is there's a tendency to think, well, we can just define anything however we want, right?

• 1:51:15Mark Manson?

  Like, we can, don't tell me what tall means or what rich means or what poor means. Like, I can just decide what anything means myself and then you can't tell me whether I'm right or wrong. So while that is philosophically true, I think for a society to function well and a culture to be beneficial for the majority of people within it, people do have to come together and agree on some terms and definitions. If everybody has a different definition of everything, then you can't coordinate. And if you can't coordinate, then you don't get the benefits of being a social species, right? You don't get all the, all the good things that, that come with being part of a larger social group.

• 1:51:56Speaker 01

  So again, from my amateurish Buddhist understanding, I think they address this as well. They distinguish between the relative and the, and the ultimate, I think is what they call it. There's just different names for it, but the relative is like the world that we have to navigate and live within and try to be in harmony with one another. And that's kind of what you're talking about. There's actually, hold on, you know, you can't just be making up all the rules all the time. We all have to agree on a few things. That's what they call the relative, kind of this human world that we have to interact with each other. Whereas the ultimate, like you're saying, the philosophical truth is actually, no, these are all arbitrary and made up. And there's a recognition of that. I think, again, that kind of comes back to that middle way though, recognizing both. Again, this is my amateur Buddhist understanding.

• 1:52:35Mark Manson?

  I think that's accurate. And, and I think a, a good example of this is imagine there's a golf tournament with a bunch of PGA pros and all the PGA pros come together and they're like, you know what? This whole golf thing is totally made up. I'm going to change the definition of a birdie. I'm going to change the definition of a driver. I'm going to change the definition of a sand trap.

• 1:52:52Speaker 01

  This isn't a par four, it's a par six.

• 1:52:53Mark Manson?

  Yeah, it's like every individual golfer is like, well, you can't tell me what a birdie is. I, I have my own definition. You can't invalidate my truth. It's like, okay, well, now the golf game means nothing, right? You, you completely, you've like destroyed the entire activity because there is no definitional agreement across like what certain terms are. You don't want to be so attached that you forget that this is all just a bunch of made up stuff and you don't necessarily have to buy into everything. But at the same time, you can't just tell the world to fuck off and imagine anything that's true for yourself. Anything you feel like is true for yourself is true. That's not really going to be helpful either.

• 1:53:33Speaker 01

  That's a form of attachment itself, right? It's attachment to yourself.

• 1:53:37Mark Manson?

  Right, attachment to your own definitions, yeah. To kind of wrap this all up, if I had to define what failure is, I would say, really what we do is we define success as an arbitrary and temporary arrangement of certain standards and circumstances. And then failure is just the moment that reality fails to live up to that circumstantial arrangement. And on a long enough timeline, the failure rate of everything is a hundred percent. So there is no arrangement of circumstances that you or I could imagine that will always exist.

• 1:54:15Speaker 01

  Western psychology too, has also kind of come to the same conclusion around this whole attachment to identity thing and all that. But when it comes to like wellbeing, for instance, Jennifer Crocker back in the 2000s, she, you know, came up with this idea of like self-worth and identity. The, the moment that you decide your worth depends on any domain in your life. Again, it's kind of like that attachment. That is just setting you up for where the failure is going to be the most destructive in your life, right? So if you say, my job is the thing that, you know, that defines myself worth the most or my relationship or whatever it is, you know, my, whatever hobby you have or, or talent or anything like that.

• 1:54:55Speaker 01

  That's going to be kind of the ground zero for any sort of like damage or any sort of threat to that is going to hurt the most. And the more you, you, you double down on one or you single out one area of your life or anything like that, the more risk you're setting yourself up for. You actually wrote an article about this a long time ago, right?

• 1:55:13Mark Manson?

  Diversify your identity.

• 1:55:15Speaker 01

  Diversify your identity, right, right. The identity side too, there's other researchers who, clear back in the eighties, like they, they were thinking about this too. Like, if you define yourself through fewer and more concentrated roles, the blast zone for any of those, when it does get, inevitably does get blown up. These people, they, they suffer more from like anxiety, depression, all the wellbeing metrics you can think of. Basically, concentrating your identity or your self-worth in any one of these areas is going to lead to catastrophe a hundred percent of the time at some point. There's a tendency to, for people to be like, well, just succeed at it all the time then. Well, again, there's an inevitability of the impermanence of it at some point.

• 1:55:58Speaker 01

  These like fixed labels even too, maybe it's not a domain in your life, but it's just a trait that you have. Like, I'm talented, I'm smart, I'm beautiful, whatever it is, right? Any one of those is going to fail you at some point. And attaching too hard to them, the, the Western psychology bears this out too. Took them a couple thousand years to catch up to the Buddhists, but they figured it out too. So if we haven't lost all the people yet who got turned off by the religion, just know that there's actually some science behind it too.

• 1:56:21Mark Manson?

  We still have a chance to lose them here.

• 1:56:23Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, no, no, yeah, for sure.

• 1:56:25Mark Manson?

  Cause we're not done with the religion yet.

• 1:56:27Speaker 01

  But, but yeah, but if you think about this though, like you, you could even put all three of these together. Like, think of somebody who is like nothing but their job title, right? And so they stick their self-worth on that domain, whatever they're in finance or they're in, you know, whatever. They identify with that so much too, like that's their identity. And they believe that their talent or their intelligence or whatever is what makes all of that possible for them. What happens when they get fired or there's a market crash? You remember seeing this back in like 2008, right? The, the financial crash, like people committed suicide.

• 1:56:57Mark Manson?

  Right, every, yeah, every massive market crash, there's a bunch of Wall Street guys that off themselves.

• 1:57:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that's their sole identity. They've based it on their intelligence that I'm a really smart person, so I'm going to go into finance and I'm going to stick my whole identity, I'm a finance guy and I make a lot of money, that's who I am, right? That's a, that's a, an obvious example, but it happens all the time.

• 1:57:16Mark Manson?

  Yeah, there, there was an interesting news story about a guy who killed himself in New York a number of years ago. And I, I remember reading about it and I, I think this is like, you know, because everybody hears that there's always a bunch of Wall Street people that end up committing suicide after a financial crash. And I, I think that's what they don't realize is that people in finance, it's not just, it's not just the money. In a lot of cases, it's their sense of competence, it's, it's their sense of self-worth. But people don't understand that if you're a really successful guy in, in finance, you're not just investing your own money, you're not just investing in your company's money, you're investing your family's money, you're investing your friend's money, you're investing your neighbor's money.

• 1:57:55Speaker 01

  That literally is your identity.

• 1:57:56Mark Manson?

  It is your identity.

• 1:57:58Speaker 01

  So all those people, you, those people, this is what they see me as.

• 1:58:00Mark Manson?

  Right, and it's, and it's like, if the market starts crashing, it's like the guy across the street's like banging on your door being like, did you get out in time? Did you get out of time? And if you lost everything, right? Now you have to go to all those people you love and care about in your life and tell them that you lost all their savings.

• 1:58:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, so for us to sit here and say, well, I would never do that. Well, you don't have your identity wrapped up like they did. Yeah, okay, but have you ever done this? Have you ever sticked your identity on too much? I feel like you're, you kind of spread out quite a bit. Are there certain things?

• 1:58:29Mark Manson?

  I don't know, I don't think I'm very diversified.

• 1:58:31Speaker 01

  Oh, you don't, okay.

• 1:58:32Mark Manson?

  I don't, okay, I don't. Yeah, I'm definitely more focused these days. I think when I was younger, maybe it was a little more diversified, but yeah, these days I, I'm, dude, I'm becoming so boring and repetitive. Like, I just, I work, I hang out with like the same five people.

• 1:58:48Mark Manson?

  Hang out with my wife and I play some video games. Like that's kinda it.

• 1:58:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:58:52Mark Manson?

  That's kinda, that's kind of all I've got going.

• 1:58:54Speaker 01

  So if one of those legs got knocked out.

• 1:58:56Mark Manson?

  Oh, yeah. I mean.

• 1:58:57Speaker 01

  You would be devastated, you think?

• 1:58:59Mark Manson?

  I know I haven't done anything and I don't think I will do anything that could potentially get me canceled, but like.

• 1:59:05Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:59:06Mark Manson?

  You know, if, if I got canceled, if my career got massively jeopardized, yeah, it would be, it would be a deep, deep cut.

• 1:59:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:59:14Mark Manson?

  For sure. Like, there's a lot of my identity.

• 1:59:17Speaker 01

  Oh, I bet. Well, and there's a lot, a lot of people depend on you, too. Yeah.

• 1:59:20Mark Manson?

  Yes. I can sympathize with that. I could definitely see that.

• 1:59:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know. I feel like as I get older, I've loosened a lot of those. I've talked about this before. Like I've, I had that identity as like, oh, I wanted to be the smart guy. That was kind of like me getting out of certain situations. Like being smart is gonna get me out of these situations and it'll get me things that I need and, you know, satisfy some of those basic needs that I had. And that worked for a long time, but then I started to see it fail. And I think luckily I kind of like have slowly loosened my grip on that. It used to be like any slight to my intelligence, I took it very, very personally, right? And that's another thing you'll see with somebody who over identifies with something is that they take it, everything very personally around that domain. I still have plenty of attachment, sure.

• 2:00:00Mark Manson?

  We're gonna talk later about what are good things to identify with, like what are good failures to sign up for? And I think that's an example of a bad failure to sign up for because it is based on metrics outside of yourself, right? Like you're, you're, you're essentially basing your, how you view yourself on the perceptions of others or, or, or the ability of others.

• 2:00:22Speaker 01

  It, it came in to start contrast too. Like when I go to grad school and everybody's smart around you, that doesn't mean anything anymore at that point. So you're like, well, I gotta find something else, I guess, or.

• 2:00:31Mark Manson?

  I had the same experience in music school.

• 2:00:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. All right. Right.

• 2:00:34Mark Manson?

  My whole identity when I was a teenager and then I went to music school and I was just.

• 2:00:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, everybody's talented.

• 2:00:40Mark Manson?

  Everybody. It's like, and, and half the guys in my class were so much better than I was. And it just, man, it was a brutal hit to the ego.

• 2:00:48Speaker 01

  Like I said, I feel like I have fewer and fewer identities. Maybe it's because I'm an amateur Buddhist too.

• 2:00:53Mark Manson?

  There you go. You are, you are getting pretty deep down, down the meditation rabbit.

• 2:00:56Speaker 01

  Oh, man, we'll, we'll get into that.

• 2:01:00Mark Manson?

  So if we haven't lost everybody with the religious talk yet, there's still time, Drew. There's still time to fail in this chapter. I want to pivot to Christianity because I think there are some really interesting concepts in Christianity that have a lot to say about failure and the management of failure and atoning for failures. As an atheist, I personally would characterize Christianity as a very efficient atonement technology or, or set of practices. The same way I think Buddhism is a set of practices to like loosen the, the ties of identity and like loosen that identification with things.

• 2:01:39Mark Manson?

  I've come to appreciate Christianity as, as a set of practices to help one manage the inevitable fallout of our failures and, and disappointments.

• 2:01:50Speaker 01

  Okay. I'm interested to see where you're going with this.

• 2:01:53Mark Manson?

  So I actually want to start with the definition of sin. So I, I mean, as you, we've talked on this podcast before, I grew up in the church. I grew up going to church all the time.

• 2:02:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, same.

• 2:02:00Mark Manson?

  Very, very familiar with the Bible. One of the concepts I always hated when I was younger was this concept of original sin, which is this idea in Christianity that people are born sinful and you can only be redeemed by coming to Jesus and asking for forgiveness. As a teenager, I thought this was the most fucked up thing that you could tell people that like, you're essentially telling people that there's something inherently wrong with them and there's nothing you can do to fix it other than pray to God and pray to Jesus.

• 2:02:31Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:02:31Mark Manson?

  And yeah, I think on one level that is probably not the best message to be disseminating. Like it, it is, well, let's just say it's a little culty, but.

• 2:02:43Mark Manson?

  But as I've gotten older and I've, I've done a little bit of a deeper research into some of these things, and especially prepping for this episode, I, I came across some things that made me think about original sin in a little bit of a different way. So the first thing is that I think the popular contemporary idea of sin is that you did something wrong, that you are a bad person, right? Like we think of sin, like if I say the word sin, what do you think of?

• 2:03:08Speaker 01

  I've like, you know, fornication and.

• 2:03:10Mark Manson?

  Stealing something. Yeah. They hit it like violence, hitting somebody.

• 2:03:15Speaker 01

  Murder, like, yeah, all the horrible things that people do. Yeah.

• 2:03:18Mark Manson?

  Like I, I almost equate it. It's like, it's like crime essentially, right? What's interesting is that sin, if you look at the, the origins of the word sin, it actually, it comes from an ancient Greek word that was used in archery. And the word sin was, was the word that, that described an arrow that, that missed the bullseye. So like the gap, I guess the, that, that gap in which you missed, that was the sin, right?

• 2:03:45Speaker 01

  So it didn't hit where you were aiming.

• 2:03:47Mark Manson?

  Exactly. So it is, interestingly, the origination of the word sin is much more attuned and aligned with the idea of failure or missing expectations of trying to live up to some sort of standard or outcome and just falling short. And so the idea of original sin, if you take all the things we just discussed about Buddhism, that no matter how you define yourself, you are also defining your future failures. You're defining all of the standards and outcomes that you're gonna fail to live up to. And how that's inevitable and unavoidable, and there's nothing you can do about it because it is just a, a ingrained piece of your psychology.

• 2:04:29Mark Manson?

  You could call that original sin, right? It's like we are all born with this sense of self that we can never fully live up to. The only way to atone for that is through some radical form of self forgiveness. That understanding of, of Christianity, I was like, oh.

• 2:04:46Speaker 01

  It's a little more palatable.

• 2:04:48Mark Manson?

  Tell me more.

• 2:04:48Speaker 01

  Okay, okay.

• 2:04:49Mark Manson?

  This is way more interesting. I think the backbone of Christian theology, there is a very manipulative culty way of looking at it, which is kind of what I described earlier. But I, I do, I also think there is kind of a profound psychological way of looking at it as well, which is that we are all hampered with this kind of inherent sense of guilt and shame of the fact that we will never be able to fully live up to the standards we set for ourselves, that no matter what we pursue in our lives, it is gonna slip through our fingers at some point, that the failure rate of everything is a hundred percent. It is always gonna be difficult to, to deal with that and wrestle with that.

• 2:05:29Mark Manson?

  Whether or not anything is our fault, we are always gonna wrestle with certain feelings of guilt and shame around that. And what, what is the cleanser of guilt and shame? It is a radical form of, of compassion and forgiveness for ourselves. If Buddhism nailed the psychological explanation of why we struggle so much with feelings of inadequacy and, and anxiety and failure and doubt and all these things. I think Christianity nailed the, the solution, right? Which is kind of this radical self compassion, this radical self forgiveness. What's also super interesting about Christianity is that it has this baked in mechanism of confession,

• 2:06:10Mark Manson?

  which I, I guess in some ways you could say it was like the predecessor of therapy, of talk therapy.

• 2:06:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:06:17Mark Manson?

  Which I never really thought about before until we worked on this episode. I was like, huh. Interesting. We didn't just invent therapy out of nowhere. Like we've actually, the church has been doing this for like 2,000 years. There's a funny story around confession, which is that Martin Luther, the, the guy who kicked off the Reformation. Apparently he was such a neurotic mess. He was a monk in a monastery in Erfurt and, and the early 1500s when he was younger. And apparently he was such a neurotic, self-loathing mess that he would catalog and document all of his failings with such minute detail that his confessions would often last up to six, five, six, seven hours at a time.

• 2:07:01Mark Manson?

  And it got to the point where like every thought that he had that was wrong, every like minute tiny mistake that like, eventually one of the confessors, one of the priests like pulled him aside and was like, look, man,

• 2:07:14Mark Manson?

  you don't really have any problems. Like. He's like, I'm talking to people who like fucking killed somebody, like cheated on their wives. You're coming in and telling me that you feel bad because like the rice was undercooked last night, you know, like it's, they had a little bit of a, a, a come to Jesus moment, no pun intended. Of like, of like, dude, you don't really have any problems. You're kind of just making this shit up and, and you're abusing yourself. I don't remember exactly what the confessor told him, but there is a great line in there about how forgiveness is not merely this external thing that happens to you. It is, part of it is learning to develop a tolerance and, and understanding of your own shortcomings.

• 2:07:56Mark Manson?

  So if you think of confession in terms of being a technique or even a technology, right? For alleviating the guilt and shame of, of failure. I, I think there's actually a really interesting kind of scientific explanation for this, and I'd put therapy in the same category, which if you go back to the sociometer theory that we talked about last chapter, right? That we are, there's like something innate within each of us that we are always subconsciously measuring ourselves and how much value we have relative to the tribe. And that a lot of our, what we experience as our self-esteem is a reflection of that sociometer, right? If you fail at something and then you go talk to somebody else about it, one of two things is gonna happen and maybe both.

• 2:08:41Mark Manson?

  First thing that's gonna happen is if that person listens to you, empathizes with you and accepts you despite your failure, that probably repairs your sociometer. It reassures you of like, okay, I have not lost status with the tribe. I'm not a total loser. I'm not gonna get kicked out tomorrow. Thank God, I'm okay. The second thing it can do is that it can alert you to whether you had an unhealthy or an inaccurate expectation or outcome that you are working towards, right? Cause if you think about like, part of the value of therapy or just talking to anybody is, is the empathy that you get, right? That there is a certain amount of healing in that. But another aspect of it is like beating yourself up over something and then you go

• 2:09:26Mark Manson?

  talk to somebody and they're like, well, why, why are you beating yourself up over that? Like, why is that success to you? That doesn't make sense. My definition's completely different.

• 2:09:36Speaker 01

  Goes back to definitions.

• 2:09:37Mark Manson?

  Right. And then you hear their definition, you're like, oh, I was being crazy. I, this is like, that's completely off base. I should have seen it this way that the entire time. So I think the, the magic of what Freud called the talking cure, I think is largely, it's a combination of both of those things. It is seeing that you are, you are not going to be socially punished, that you're not being ostracized and then also having the ability to recalibrate your expectations in such a way that the failure maybe doesn't look like such a failure anymore.

• 2:10:08Speaker 01

  Again, if we haven't lost the people who are turned off by the religion, that bears out in like the psychological research as well. And you're right, you made the parallel with therapy. That's exactly what it does. And then it's, it's, it's not only that, but just like disclosure in general, any distressful event, not maybe it's not a failure, just anything that's bothering you and getting it out there. It seems to have some sort of beneficial effect all across the board. And it's not just catharsis. It's not just getting it off your chest too. There is some form of processing, which is exactly what you're talking about. Like there has to, you can't just vent to somebody like venting is fine, sure. But there, there has to be some sort of like processing that happens with it. Penny Baker, back in the nineties, he did all this research on this and did this whole

• 2:10:51Speaker 01

  meta-analysis around it and kind of like basically the form of the confessional where you have an audience and it's not, you're not just doing it to yourself. Journaling is good, processing on your own is good, but actually putting it out there precisely because of what you're talking about. Like that sociometer theory that we have, it's like we, we have to in our minds, put ourselves back into the group and be okay and, and accepted in some way. When you think about this, a friend comes to you and they, they're like, oh man, I feel awful about this. Usually what you're like, you're like, dude, like, take it easy on yourself. And that has a lot of reparative effects that, that we've seen. There's also the, the cost of like not disclosing things too. If we keep all of that in, you end up doing it, that's where the rumination often comes in, right?

• 2:11:35Speaker 01

  That's where the open loops stay open and you can't quite close them. And so there's always that going on in your, in the background, you know, of your mind. There's a physical aspect to it too. Body keeps the score. Vessel Vanderkolk, a lot of that is real. There's all sorts of effects of not disclosing versus disclosing. Again, though, it's not just the catharsis, there's a, there's gotta be a processing element to it.

• 2:11:56Mark Manson?

  From what I recall, a lot of Penny Baker's research on journaling in particular, found that it was, journaling was, was most beneficial when you specifically journaled about something that bothered you. Like you couldn't just sit down and just dump all your thoughts and ideas. I mean, I'm sure there's some value in that, but like, it was specifically when you journaled about some issue in your life that was really eating at you, that is when you saw the benefits of it.

• 2:12:24Speaker 01

  And it wasn't just the facts of what's eating you too, but the emotions and the integration between the facts and the emotions. This is what happened. That's a very important part of it. This is how I felt about it. And then there will continue, if you did it over several sessions too, and, and the story developed over time and you were able to integrate it and tell a more coherent story over time about that, that helped a lot too. You, you can do that a lot better with someone else. And I think that's why therapy works for some people, for a lot of people around something that you can, you can tell a coherent story about and eventually make sense of, both the factual and the emotional side of it. So, yeah.

• 2:12:55Mark Manson?

  In the case of confession in the church, the, the power is that radical forgiveness, right? It's like you, you go, you go sit with the priest or whatever, you tell the priest all the awful things that you've done. The priest, you know, consoles you, reassures you and says, you're forgiven, God still loves you, Jesus loves you, whatever, right? There's probably some sort of like cleansing effect that comes with that.

• 2:13:18Speaker 01

  It's closure too, yeah.

• 2:13:19Mark Manson?

  The other thing that I thought about while you were talking is when we hold things in, those standards and metrics by which we measure ourselves, they seem to kind of drift and they drift into like irrational areas. And it's only by like saying it out loud. I mean, I, I'm sure you've had this experience a million times, right? Where it's like, you've, you've like thought something, you're really anxious about something. And then you like just go to say it out loud. And as soon as the words come out of your mouth, you're like, wow, I'm being ridiculous.

• 2:13:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like what, what's really interesting about that too, is that the, they, they do find that the, the listener in that situation, if they have two qualities, it tends to do the best as well. One of them is compassion, which you've already said. The other one is being assertive though too. So this, I have, I have a friend in particular, when I am thinking those kinds of like crazy thoughts or whatever, I'll call her up and she's, she'll sit and listen and then she'll immediately come back to me and be like, what are you like, this is why this is crazy. So there's a compassionate, and this is, the confessional is set up like this, like priests were, they're, they were trained to be like this, be compassionate, know that we're all sinners, quote unquote, sinners, right? But then also they have a code by which they live. And they said, this is, this is how you should go about it. So there's an assertiveness to it as well. So you're, you're absolutely right.

• 2:14:34Speaker 01

  Like, it's like, yeah, getting out loud, you might hear it yourself, but someone else could reflect back to you how crazy it is too, and be assertive enough where they can be like, look, I get where you're coming from, but at the same time too, you're being fucking stupid.

• 2:14:45Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:14:46Speaker 01

  You know what I mean? Like that's actually very, very valuable. So it's not, again, it's not just catharsis and getting it out there. It's some sort of reflection and, and processing that has to happen around it.

• 2:14:56Mark Manson?

  Yeah. I remember I met a woman years ago and I remember she came up to me after an event once, this was like a kind of a business event. And she told me that she really wanted to start a family, but she felt like she couldn't until she was professionally and financially secure. And she was just afraid that she was going to run out of time. And this, it was a conference with like a lot of successful people. So I was just, and I kind of looked at her, I'm like, you're probably fine. Like in my head, I'm like, she's probably fine. So I was like, okay, when would you be financially and professionally successful enough to, to be able to comfortably have a child?

• 2:15:30Speaker 01

  Yeah. Where's your standard? Where's your definition here?

• 2:15:32Mark Manson?

  And her definition was a million dollars a year.

• 2:15:34Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:15:35Mark Manson?

  She thought that was bare minimum.

• 2:15:36Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:15:37Mark Manson?

  To like raise a kid.

• 2:15:38Speaker 01

  To raise a kid, okay.

• 2:15:38Mark Manson?

  And it's always tough because you like, you don't want to like laugh in people's faces, but you know, I remember I was like, okay, that's interesting. Why, why a million? And then she started going through all the reasons. She was like, well, you know, either my husband and I would, we'd want to quit working, we'd want to have a nanny, we'd want to like go to a private school, like blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I was like, okay, everything you just described, like that you're maybe at like 300K, maybe at most, like if you're in a really expensive neighborhood, where's the, this other 700K coming from? Like I actually tried to do the math with her and it just kept coming up so short. I told her, I was like, it's, it's clear that this is, there's a lot of fear here and you are overcompensating with an extremely large number in your head.

• 2:16:22Mark Manson?

  And you are defining success as this absurdly large number to compensate for that, that irrational fear that's going on. I was like, where do you think that fear is coming from? And sure enough, it turned out she grew up very poor and, and was like, you know, father went broke when she was young and the family, you know, like lived in a car for a couple of months and had this like torrid story from her past. And I was like, got it. Okay. That's, so it's, the extremity of the number is, is, it's proportional to your internal emotions. It's not, it has nothing to do with the spreadsheet. I was like, first of all, that's completely understandable, given where you come from, but you should listen to the spreadsheet.

• 2:17:03Speaker 01

  It's an arbitrary standard she, she adopted without knowing.

• 2:17:06Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:07Speaker 01

  Without knowing it. Yeah. Yeah, that's crazy. And so, yeah, reflecting it back to somebody and hopefully seeing it right in front of your face.

• 2:17:13Mark Manson?

  It was funny too, because I remember, I remember asking her, I was like, I was like, how many people do you know who have had kids and don't make a million dollars a year? And she was like, she was like, oh, everybody.

• 2:17:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, a hundred percent of people.

• 2:17:21Mark Manson?

  And I was like, how many of those kids are fine? And she was just kind of like, oh yeah, good point.

• 2:17:28Speaker 01

  Right, right. Yeah.

• 2:17:30Mark Manson?

  But it's funny, I mean, your, your brain plays tricks with you, right? It's, and it's coming back to that Buddhist point of the attachments, right? You know, it's like that attachment is probably deep seated in her from a very young age of like this intense anxiety around money and an overcompensation around money. And it's probably been there for so long that she like forgets that it's there. She doesn't realize, you know, people don't really talk about money a whole lot. So like, she doesn't have people to measure herself against, or maybe she only hangs around people who are super rich. And so her measurement of what's acceptable is like gotten completely out of whack. And she doesn't realize it because she's not confessing.

• 2:18:08Speaker 01

  You can get attached to independence. You can get attached to non-attachment even too, right?

• 2:18:12Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 2:18:13Speaker 01

  Like that's, that's always one of my favorite ones that I point out myself sometimes. Like I, and goes kind of similar to that story. Like when I was growing up, I just realized so many different situations where it's like, oh, I'm on my own. And so like independence became a value of mine or like a standard by which I, I measured a lot of my life. And then I see it start failing as I get older too. That's another one, like with the being smart thing and the independence thing, then starts failing you too, at some, at some point.

• 2:18:36Mark Manson?

  When I was younger and I was really into Buddhism and meditation, I started to notice that. So some, some of the retreat centers and stuff that I used to go to, like the, the hardcore regulars, there was a little bit of a status game among them, right? You know, so you, you kind of hang out with these people after a retreat and you know, they, they'd be like bragging about the month of silence that they did, or how they were meditating three hours a day or whatever. And they're, you know, it just kind of became another dick measuring contest to see who was going to get enlightened first. And I'm like, this is just the same thing. Like this is another version of attachment.

• 2:19:08Speaker 01

  I just heard this, I think this is the term used for that is Zen stink. Isn't that what they call it? Zen stink?

• 2:19:14Mark Manson?

  I haven't heard that.

• 2:19:15Speaker 01

  It's like, oh, look at how quickly I'm becoming enlightened or on my, on the path to enlightenment or whatever it is. Yeah. They call it Zen stink.

• 2:19:22Mark Manson?

  But it's a real problem.

• 2:19:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure.

• 2:19:24Mark Manson?

  Yeah. It's, I mean, and it, it goes back to like, the sociometer follows you everywhere. It is human nature to, no matter what environment you put yourself in, you will start measuring yourself against the people in your environment and.

• 2:19:39Speaker 01

  Your brain is a big comparison machine.

• 2:19:40Mark Manson?

  It is.

• 2:19:41Speaker 01

  Basically is what it is. Yeah.

• 2:19:42Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. No matter what it is, no matter what the comparison is.

• 2:19:45Mark Manson?

  So at the end of the last chapter, I, I asked the listener to think about a, a major recent failure and kind of consider where they got the definition of that being a failure. I think with this chapter, really what to think is first, where did that definition of failure come from? Did it come from themselves? Did it come from somebody outside of them? Were they aware that they were accepting that definition, that expectation? And then I think the second piece would be, what is their mechanism for? Finding atonement, or finding compassion, or forgiveness for that failure. Who have they shared their feelings with? And if they have shared the failure with somebody, I'm curious if they ended up finding out that their expectation or their metric was maybe a little bit out of whack, a little bit irrational.

• 2:20:29Mark Manson?

  But the point of all of this is that failure is inevitable. Failure is relative and relational, and failure is arbitrary. It's self-defined. But it's also guaranteed. It's a structural, fundamental part of our psychological machinery. It is the inherent price that we pay for caring about anything, for pursuing anything, which I think makes us land with a much better question than we probably started this episode with, which is that it's not about how to fail less. It's about figuring out what is worth failing for? What is worth doing despite the inevitability of failure happening?

• 2:21:13Mark Manson?

  And that is what we're going to get into in next chapter. Hold that thought. We've got a quick message from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Notion. There's a lot that AI can do right now. A lot. And look, I run an AI company and I think about this stuff all day, but I keep coming back to the same thing. I've never built anything that mattered by myself. Books, the podcast, Purpose, all of it came from being in a room with people who gave a shit and figuring it out together. Best work still comes from people thinking as a team, which is why my team uses Notion. Notion is the AI workspace where your team's knowledge, projects, and agents all come together in one place. We run our entire pipeline through it, episode planning, workflows, research, everything.

• 2:21:55Mark Manson?

  And because everything lives in one place, the AI actually has context. It knows what your team is working on, so it can help instead of generating stuff in a vacuum. Over 100 million people use Notion. 98% of Forbes Cloud 100 run on it. OpenAI, Cursor, Lovable, the companies building AI are building on top of Notion. So if you want AI that makes your team sharper, instead of making your team optional, check it out. Learn more about how Notion can support your business at notion.com/solved. That's notion.com/solved to try Notion today. And when you use our link, you're supporting the show. This episode is brought to you by QUO. It's almost Halloween, so allow me one spooky business horror story for you.

• 2:22:37Mark Manson?

  Somebody out there needs exactly what you sell, so they call, and your business does the scariest thing imaginable. It ghosts them. Get it? Ghost. The phone rings, nobody picks up, and so they go haunt the competitor instead. You never even find out what happened. Now, for a business, that is real money out the door. Every unanswered call is a customer deciding that you're closed. That's why today's episode is brought to you by QUO, spelled Q-U-O. The business phone system built so you never miss a call. Set up in minutes on any device, keep your existing number, and add teammates as you grow. There's no IT and no hassle. QUO is the number one ranked business phone system on G2, trusted by over 90,000 businesses

• 2:23:19Mark Manson?

  who rely on it to stay reachable and look professional every single day. You won't win every opportunity, but some were never yours anyway. But the ones who came looking for you, make sure that someone is there to answer. Money is on the line. Always say hello with QUO. Try QUO for free, plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to solve.deals/quo. That's solve.deals/quo. So there are two ways that we can fail at something. And the first generates information and self-improvement. The second generates judgment and self-loathing. And it's a very subtle difference between the two.

• 2:24:02Mark Manson?

  Now, my favorite memoir ever written is actually Andre Agassi's. I'm not a tennis fan. I could probably count on one hand how many tennis games I have watched in my entire life. Andre Agassi's memoir is fantastic. It's so good. The opening line is, "I hate tennis." Which is like, from the first sentence, you were like, "Okay, I need to know more." Right? You're just absolutely hooked. What's great about the book, other than his incredible self-awareness and self-disclosure, is he had a crazy life. So for people who don't know, Andre Agassi, he was one of the best tennis players who ever lived. His father was an Iranian immigrant, came over to the US in the 1970s.

• 2:24:47Mark Manson?

  He was a former professional boxer, and he decided, before Andre was born, he decided that his son was going to be the number one tennis player in the world. So as soon as Andre could walk and hold a racket, he was playing tennis. Now, Andre's father was such a psycho. He took one of those tennis ball machines that like shoots balls at you, and he modified it himself to shoot balls harder and faster at Andre than any human child could hit it. He wanted other kids to feel easy compared to the ball machine. And then, once he modified the ball machine, he forced Andre to hit 2,500 balls a day. And his reason for it was that if you did 2,500 balls a day, that was 17,500 balls per week, which added up to a million balls per year.

• 2:25:32Mark Manson?

  And he told Andre that if he hit a million balls a year, he would be unbeatable. Andre was seven when he did this. And sure enough, 22 years later, he had eight Grand Slam titles, an Olympic gold medal, a career Golden Slam, and was widely considered one of the best tennis players in the world. Now, what's interesting in the book is he talks about his ascendance and his achievement of all of his goals in a way that is a little bit counterintuitive from the outside, but I think makes sense based on all the science and research we've been talking about in this episode. So for example, when he became the number one ranked player in the world, and I think it was 1990, he said that he wasn't happy about it.

• 2:26:13Mark Manson?

  In fact, he actually just got more anxious and worried because now he had something that he could lose. And when he won his first Grand Slam title, he won Wimbledon in 1992, he also said that he wasn't that happy. He was mostly just anxious that he was going to have to defend his title the next year. And so each accomplishment he added to his belt, it didn't make him any happier. It actually made him more miserable because he was afraid of losing what he had already accomplished. This is loss aversion in action. The more you raise the stakes, the more asymmetrical the downside becomes, right? You have more to lose than you do to gain, so therefore, it becomes a lot more difficult

• 2:26:57Mark Manson?

  to be excited and happy to gain more. So this pressure built and built and built, and Agassi kind of imploded in the mid 90s. He went through a little bit of a crisis, a career crisis. He started playing terribly. He had drug problems. He had personal life problems, became kind of a mess. And he had to start over from the bottom. He actually had to kind of go to the equivalent of the tennis minor leagues to like get back on the saddle. And what's interesting is that when he started the second time, he made an agreement with himself, which is that it wasn't going to be about the titles. It wasn't going to be about winning all the matches. It wasn't going to be about being ranked number one.

• 2:27:39Mark Manson?

  He made tennis a vehicle to some other goal. So he had started a foundation, and he realized that the more he won at tennis, the more he was able to provide resources and attention and donations for his foundation. The foundation actually became the goal. It became the thing that he identified with and the thing that he defined his success and failure by. And interestingly, as soon as tennis became the instrument to that new goal, he quickly ascended again. And he won the French Open in 1999. He became the number one ranked player again. He kind of had this big comeback in the late 90s and early 2000s. And interestingly, he was able to enjoy it this time.

• 2:28:23Mark Manson?

  He was able to be satisfied with each victory because the point of the victory was not the victory, right? It kind of comes back to what we talked about last chapter, about how some definitions of success are self-defeating in that, once you achieve them, they go away. If your goal is to be the best player in the world, as soon as you become the best player in the world, there's nothing else to win. There's only something to lose. And that's incredibly demotivating. Makes you even more anxious and more neurotic and just absolutely miserable. Whereas if you're trying to achieve some other goal, and tennis is the instrument to achieve that goal, then being number one in the world is just a better way to achieve that other goal. It's not the point in and of itself.

• 2:29:06Mark Manson?

  Now, these two approaches, these two periods of Agassi's career, I think are good examples of what healthy failure and unhealthy failure end up looking like. An unhealthy version of failure is when you take some arbitrary metric outside of yourself and you decide to base your identity and your self-esteem on it. And that ultimately ends up being self-defeating because you are basing your self-worth on something that you actually don't have control of. Whereas when you take some metric that you do have control of, you know, the quality of your relationships, your contribution to society, your ability to help other people, that is something you do always have control of. And so the inevitable failures that come along with it, they happen in a way that

• 2:29:48Mark Manson?

  is much more healthy and able to be integrated into your future actions and behaviors. So it turns out what Agassi's career shows us is kind of a mapping of what the psychological research shows us, is that there is a healthy way to pursue success and to handle failure, and there is an unhealthy way to pursue success and handle failure. And As we discussed in the last two chapters, it has less to do with work ethic, how hard you're trying, how smart you are, how talented you are, and it has everything to do with which definitions you've chosen for yourself.

• 2:30:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, this, this really does map like really well onto the research that was going on for the last 40 years, like even in the middle of when Agassi was going through this, you can categorize goals kind of based on how you define competence of those goals. And these were studies that were done over the eighties and nineties, for the most part, that came up with this framework and it continues on to today. But essentially, you can have mastery goals where competence of the goal, or the mastery of the goal is the reference point is yourself, right? Or like, it's your own past performance compared to your current performance.

• 2:30:57Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 2:30:58Speaker 01

  Right? You could also conceptualize this as task driven, right? So the success means just getting better at the thing, right?

• 2:31:06Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:06Speaker 01

  Contrast that with performance goals, which are the competence, the reference point for a competence in that is comparison to other people, or some external standard like we've already talked about, right? This is very ego driven.

• 2:31:20Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:31:20Speaker 01

  Success means that you are demonstrating superiority over other people, or over some standard that's external to you. Okay? So you can already see like what we've talked about, where, where this is probably headed, right? Now, one detail about the like, performance goals, is that your ability is judged kind of by your effort to outcome ratio. If you don't try very hard and you succeed, you're like, oh, look, you're, you're really good at that, right? You're just, your, your performance is really good, you're a good person at that. But if you try really hard and fail, well, that's, that's a, that's a verdict on you and your abilities, you as a person at that point, right? So what's interesting about that is a lot of people, when they have these performance goals, or when they conceptualize goals in terms

• 2:32:03Speaker 01

  of performance and these external standards, or comparing themselves to others, they will withdraw before they even start because they realize that. They're like, oh, if I fail at this, it's a, it's a verdict on me, so I'm not even gonna start. So that's why so many of us do this. We don't even start because that's how we're looking at the goal itself.

• 2:32:20Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 2:32:21Speaker 01

  You talk about this all the time. You've always talked about how competitive you are, but you talk about how you're competitive with yourself. That's what you've tried to do anyways, turn that competition inward, which I think is kind of part of the, part of the unlock here, a little bit, yeah.

• 2:32:34Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I mean, you see this a lot in sports psychology. There's all these behind the scenes documentaries and stuff for like NFL players and NBA players and all this stuff. And you can see that like, all these psychological findings have, have absolutely infiltrated the sports world, because all the players say the same shit. They're like, it's ultimately, it's just, it's a competition with ourself, man. Scoreboard doesn't matter. Scoreboard, there's all these old sayings that have become really popular, like the, the scoreboard will take care of itself, you know, do your job, the scoreboard doesn't matter, you know, all these things, I guess, kind of heuristics and mechanisms to get the athletes to turn their, their yardstick internally, and just try to be as good as they can possibly be, and be better than they were the day before. And then understanding that if they do that

• 2:33:17Mark Manson?

  well consistently, they will win games and championships as a side effect.

• 2:33:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, every professional sports team has a sports psychologist on, on staff now. I'm probably collegiate teams at this point too, but yeah. You make an important point there too, is that these are, they're situational states, you can change this.

• 2:33:34Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:33:35Speaker 01

  Like, if you do have this orientation that's more performance driven, you can change it back to more of a mastery goal orientation. Could go the other way as well, though, too. It's very situational based. I've even figured this out too. This guy, John Nichols, kind of figured this out, that if you introduce things like rankings, public comparisons, the evaluative pressures will tip towards more of the performance and ego driven goals that you have, right? Where you think about social media, right? This kind of tips us all over into that performance driven goals, just, just by nature of being in it, right? There's kind of some parallels with intrinsic and extrinsic motivation here too, which we don't gotta get too deep into, but you know, it's kind of the same thing. Like, if you, if a kid just likes school, and then all of

• 2:34:19Speaker 01

  a sudden you want to reward them for getting good grades, like by paying them or rewarding them somehow, it turns it into more of a performative thing.

• 2:34:25Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:34:26Speaker 01

  Right? And you can, you can go from them just doing it to, because they enjoy it, to them now having to perform. I mean, we see this in like, lots of different areas, but it is situationally dependent, but we can use that to our advantage as well. Just like you're saying, like, you can turn that competitiveness back on yourself.

• 2:34:41Mark Manson?

  And I think the key here, the mechanism that's going on here, is that when you pursue performative goals, you're tapping into that sociometer. And as soon as you tap into the sociometer, you, you're getting your self-esteem involved in a way that you can't really win long-term. You end up like Agassi, right? It's like, the more you win, the more you have to lose, right? Like, if you, if you become king of the mountain, like, there's only one way, which is down. So even if you succeed at those performative goals or performance based goals, you just, the success generates more anxiety for the inevitable failure, which just makes that inevitable failure that much more harrowing and difficult to deal with. Whereas if you turn it inward and, and focus on the mastery goals, understanding that the

• 2:35:24Mark Manson?

  performance will happen as a side effect, if you're only competing against yourself, then you don't have to face that self judgment to nearly the, the same degree. You're not getting the sociometer involved.

• 2:35:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:35:35Mark Manson?

  As much.

• 2:35:35Speaker 01

  I think also what you're kind of getting at a little bit here too, is, is what they developed later in this kind of series of studies as well, which is, there's another modifying kind of component to this. So you have the mastery, which is more self referential, and you have the performance goals, which is other referenced, right? But then you also have, like, what's your, what's your reference towards success? Is it towards success, or is it towards avoiding failure? Okay, so they call that approach, which is approaching, you approach success, you want to, you, you want to succeed.

• 2:36:05Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:06Speaker 01

  Versus, do you want to avoid failure? There's two different orientations around that. So you could have like, it gets nerdy here a little bit, but there's like a two by two matrix now. You can have a mastery goal or a performance goal, or you can have an approach or avoidance orientation towards those. Okay? So there's like four different configurations, and we can kind of go through these, but don't get too bogged down in the, in the matrix of it, but just, the configurations actually do have some real world consequences here. So like the mastery, if you have a mastery goal orientations and you're approaching success, that's kind of considered to be the, the healthiest. So you are self referenced, you want to improve, you just like doing the thing for doing the thing, and you're competing against yourself maybe.

• 2:36:43Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:36:43Speaker 01

  Or at least comparing yourself to a past version of yourself, and you're approaching as in, I want to succeed, so am I getting better?

• 2:36:51Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 2:36:51Speaker 01

  Is this actually working? Did I learn anything from this? There's that kind of orientation towards it. You can also have a mastery avoidance orientation as well. This is like, I would say like, a lot of like, really old professors, you know, they're like, they've gotten to, they've, they've developed all these theories, or they've thought about, you know, all these things for so long, and they know all this knowledge, but they don't want to like, lose their rank within their field. And so they don't take any risks or anything like that. They're avoiding failure. It's that loss aversion again.

• 2:37:20Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:20Speaker 01

  And then you get into the more performance driven ones. So like, performance approach, which I think is probably what Agassi started out as, he was performing, he didn't like tennis, but he, so he was performing based on someone else's standards and comparing himself to other tennis players, but he wanted to succeed, he was very, very competitive. But then, once he got to that top position, that changed into performance avoidance.

• 2:37:44Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:37:45Speaker 01

  Where he was, again, didn't like tennis, was comparing himself to all the other people around him, or his father's standards, or some external standard, and he didn't want to lose that spot so bad.

• 2:37:55Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 2:37:55Speaker 01

  So he was just trying to avoid failure at a certain point, which is like, the worst place to be. Like, you're, you're just, you're, you're so focused on some external standard of some kind that you don't even, again, you haven't questioned maybe, and you just don't want to lose whatever is you have around it. It's like, you're, you're holding on to something so tightly, you don't want to lose something that you don't even want in the first place.

• 2:38:15Mark Manson?

  Yeah. The effect of the loss aversion is that the higher you scale any sort of mountain, the stronger the gravitational pull of the failure avoidance. You see this in business all the time, right? Companies, they get to a certain level, and then they just stop taking risks, right? Because it's, you know, the, the executive leadership are like, well, we don't want to fuck up our bonuses, so like, let's just keep doing the same thing. There's actually a great book written about this called The Innovator's Dilemma.

• 2:38:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:38:38Mark Manson?

  It's about all the examples throughout history of large companies that actually invented technology like 10, 20 years before they became popular, but they didn't want to take the risk of investing in that new technology because it could potentially, I mean, the most recent and perfect example is the fact that Google actually invented ChatGPT five years before OpenAI did, but they actually kept it concealed and didn't develop it because they're afraid that it would interfere with their Google search. And so that's like, perfect example of failure avoidance, undoing the, the possible benefits of, of pursuing mastery over something.

• 2:39:17Speaker 01

  At the scale of an institution.

• 2:39:18Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:19Speaker 01

  Okay, so yeah, at the, at the individual level though, what are the real consequences of the fear of failure, right? And if you think about it, they've kind of studied this a little bit too, but you're not actually afraid of the practical consequences necessarily. I mean, you might be afraid, yeah, I'm gonna lose my job, or you know, you'll lose the material aspects of it.

• 2:39:38Mark Manson?

  Sure.

• 2:39:39Speaker 01

  But what it really comes down to is back to that sociometer. You're actually afraid of devaluating your rank, let's say, or your, your estimate of yourself within a group, of having that uncertain future, of losing, others losing interest in you, within whatever social circle you, you run. Essentially, it's the feeling of shame that you're afraid of, right? That's really what we're afraid of. We're afraid of feeling shame.

• 2:40:08Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:40:09Speaker 01

  Because that is a reflection of how we feel about ourselves within this ranking sociometer type thing that we've been talking about, right?

• 2:40:18Mark Manson?

  And it's

• 2:40:20Mark Manson?

  Interesting. This kind of ties in with the loss aversion, like the side effect of that fear of shame is that we start exaggerating the second and third order effects of something. So it's like

• 2:40:29Speaker 01

  Blows it way out of proportion.

• 2:40:31Mark Manson?

  Right. So you start imagining things like, well, I'm afraid of, you know, not being home enough or whatever. And then you start thinking through, what are the consequences of that failure? It's like, oh, well, Junior's gonna become a drug addict and he's gonna drop out of school and he's gonna end up in jail. And it's like, all this catastrophized stuff that is not realistic whatsoever, but it is accurately reflects the emotional intensity of that fear of failure. This comes back to just a truth about human psychology, which is that we always feel first and then we justify the feeling with a narrative later. And so if you have this deep seated fear of failure and fear of shame because of some

• 2:41:13Mark Manson?

  failure in your life, the narrative you create around that failure will match proportionally to how afraid you are of it. And this is also why the exercise of, of, we've, in a few episodes, we've talked about the exercise of negative visualization, like the Stoic practice of like actually writing out the worst case scenario and how you would handle it. Because that exercise is so useful because what you realize when you actually start writing out like, okay, if I'm not home enough, or I don't hang out with Junior enough, like what is realistically gonna happen? You start writing it out and you realize like, oh, I'm being completely unrealistic right now. I'm blowing things out of proportion.

• 2:41:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, but we blow it out of proportion because again, of that evolutionary mismatch we have, because losing statuses would be so catastrophic in a, in a, in a small group of tribal people, right? That actually you should overweight that. But really, yeah, if you sit down and think it out, it's honestly not as bad as it is, right?

• 2:42:10Mark Manson?

  Rarely, yeah.

• 2:42:11Speaker 01

  That said, though, okay, so we talked about this in the shame episode a lot, too. Like shame kind of has a less unhealthy cousin, right? And that's guilt.

• 2:42:21Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 2:42:22Speaker 01

  Guilt and shame, we, we talked about this a lot in the shame episode as well. The definitions are very important because of where you place the attribution for the bad feelings, right? Basically, guilt is kind of what we say is when you did about bad thing, right? Shame is when you are something bad.

• 2:42:43Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 2:42:44Speaker 01

  All right. And we usually go straight to the shame, or a lot of people who are more shame prone, at least, will go straight to the shame, again, because of that, that, that fear, that loss aversion of loss of status, that sociometer fear that we have, right? But while guilt doesn't exactly feel very good, we at least can feel like we can do something about it.

• 2:43:03Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:43:03Speaker 01

  In a lot of these situations, right? Roy Baumeister did a lot of this work in the, the nineties around guilt. It's a relationship maintenance emotion. You feel guilt about something, it motivates you to go do something about it, right? You go repair that relationship, you go apologize, you go make it right in some way. Shame, on the other hand, is like a withdrawal. It's kind of the opposite. Instead of engaging, you wanna withdraw from, from the group or from any social situation because you're so afraid of losing face in that situation, right?

• 2:43:33Mark Manson?

  Yep.

• 2:43:34Speaker 01

  So they have, they both feel shitty, but one of them is actually like more productive.

• 2:43:38Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 2:43:39Speaker 01

  Shame is much more calibrated towards though, that those social consequences, not the actual harm done. Whereas guilt is like, oh, I actually did something wrong. I need to fix this, right?

• 2:43:48Mark Manson?

  My sense is that these kind of more mastery related goals, the consequence is more likely to be guilt over failure because you're not measuring your self-worth. You're kind of, you're managing to leave the sociometer out of it to a large extent, not completely, but to a large extent. So when you do fail, you just kind of feel bad and you're just like, ah, man, I fucked it up. I should have, didn't take advantage of my, my situation. Whereas if it's a performance related goal and you're, you're basing your self-worth on hitting some sort of arbitrary external metric that other people are measuring, that's when you invite shame into, into the equation.

• 2:44:25Speaker 01

  Precisely.

• 2:44:26Mark Manson?

  And I imagine Agassi, right? It's early on, he, first of all, he's raised by a fucking crazy father who, who basically inculcates him from a very young age that like, you're only as valuable as your, as your tennis ability and you're gonna be the, the best in the world.

• 2:44:44Speaker 01

  Completely performance driven, yeah.

• 2:44:45Mark Manson?

  Completely performance driven. And then he develops a personality and of, of a person who's like, his feeling about himself is completely proportional, like how he's performing on the court, which is not, not a healthy version of self-esteem. Of course, everything collapses, he falls apart. And as soon as he loses, you know, the world number one, or he loses a few big matches, his whole life comes apart because it's just his self-worth comes apart. Whereas the second version, Agassi 2.0, it's much more mastery driven and it's much more, there's more guilt associated, right? Cause it's like, Agassi version two, if he, if he loses a big tennis match, he feels bad because that's an opportunity that he could have leveraged to help his foundation, which is his real goal. That's how he's actually

• 2:45:29Mark Manson?

  measuring success. So he feels, maybe he feels guilty about that. Maybe he feels like he could have done something better. Maybe he feels like he could learn something from it. Whereas Agassi version 1.0, it's like, if he loses a big match, it's like, oh, I'm a piece of shit. I'm worthless. I'm such a loser. I can't believe this happened. Right? And then he goes and does a bunch of drugs.

• 2:45:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. He was addicted to meth at one point, wasn't he?

• 2:45:52Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:52Speaker 01

  That's insane. One of the top tennis players in the world and he gets addicted to methamphetamine because, because precisely what we're talking about here.

• 2:45:59Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:45:59Speaker 01

  Like he was so ashamed of who he'd become, right?

• 2:46:03Mark Manson?

  And by the way, for everybody listening, we did a full solved episode on shame last year. It's about four hours long. It's actually one of our, I think it's our most popular episode, interestingly.

• 2:46:13Speaker 01

  Might be at this point, yeah.

• 2:46:14Mark Manson?

  Yeah. I think it's, it is, it is the most popular solved episode. I believe it is August, September of, of 2025. So go check that out on the feed if you wanna get the full download on shame. I think there's an interesting relationship between guilt and shame and, and the concept of achievement. I think with each emotion, achievement serves a very different role, right? With guilt, achievement, I think can be very healthy. It alleviates guilt. Like you said, guilt is, it's action oriented. It's like, okay, I didn't do the thing I was supposed to do. So let me go fix that. Let me, let me be better next time. Let me learn from this so that I, I don't feel guilty again. Like guilt

• 2:46:55Mark Manson?

  is a very practical emotion. It's a, it's a very corrective emotion in terms of, of what we do. And so it's, anytime it comes up, there, there's usually a lesson underneath it that we can implement. Shame is a completely different ballgame. And what's interesting is that I think people try to alleviate shame with achievement, but it backfires because what happens is, is the more you try to perform your way out of shame, the more you just reinforce the shame. If I have a deep seated shame that I'm a fundamentally broken person and the only thing that is gonna make me okay is, is if I get more views on YouTube, then pursuing more views on YouTube is not gonna make me feel better about myself. It's just gonna

• 2:47:39Mark Manson?

  keep feeling like it's not enough. It's like pouring water into a bucket with a hole in the bottom. Like it's just, the more I pursue it, the more I feel worthless, the more I feel like it's not good enough, the more I need, I feel like I have to pursue it further. Which is why I think shame drives a lot of addictive compulsive sort of behaviors. And so the, the trick is to find a way to convert the shame into the guilt. And I think a lot of that is a perspective shift, which is that understanding that, first of all, your failures don't make you a bad person. They make you a good person who maybe did the wrong thing or who messed up in some shape or form. Not to bring Jesus back into it, but there's

• 2:48:19Mark Manson?

  an old Christian saying of love the sinner, hate the sinner. I think there's a lot of wisdom to that, right? Like that is kind of the conversion move between the shame and guilt. We did a, our change episode back in June. And I personally think that's one of the best episodes we've done because what I love about that episode is that we, we really got finely detailed about human personality and what are the aspects about ourselves that we cannot change? And what are the aspects about ourselves that we can? And how people tend to get both of those things wrong? Like people tend to think the things that can be changed are the things that can't. And so they feel shame around it. They hate themselves

• 2:49:01Mark Manson?

  for it. And then they also assume that things that can't really be changed are things that they can. And so they just kind of bang their head against the wall constantly trying to change them. I think there's a lot of value. I think people who are struggling with this, that you can probably get a lot of value from that episode, first of all, but also understanding that like, what aspects of yourself are changeable? And that ultimately, whatever the bad behaviors you feel awful about.

• 2:49:28Mark Manson?

  They are likely not an inherent part of your nature or who you are. They are very likely bad adaptations that were misused in a new environment. So what I mean by that is that generally speaking, it's like people's patterns that cause bad behavior or problems in their lives. They are leftover patterns from previous eras in their life, where that pattern evolved to actually serve them really well. It's like a childhood habit that helped them get through their childhood and adolescence. But now as an adult, it's backfiring and screwing up all their relationships. But because they've had that pattern for so long, they think that's an inherent part of who they are, when really it's just a pattern of behaviors

• 2:50:10Mark Manson?

  that they picked up very early in their life and they never learned how to put it down. So the move from shame to guilt, I think is, is A, first having some compassion for yourself, understanding that failure is inevitable. Everybody screws up everything at some point. That doesn't necessarily make you a bad person. And that a lot of the patterns and behaviors behind that failure aren't necessarily permanently who you are. They are just patterns you picked up along the way. And then B, taking that yardstick and instead of applying it to yourself being worthy of others, try to just apply it to yourself being worthy of yourself, right?

• 2:50:54Mark Manson?

  Like it's learning how to take the sociometer out of the equation and recognizing that you don't necessarily have to try to live up to everybody else's standards and arbitrary metrics, because they are just as arbitrary as ones that you would come up with for yourself.

• 2:51:12Speaker 01

  You said something in the change episode too, that applies here and I think sums this up pretty well. And brings Buddhism back into, so we get a little Jesus and Buddha here.

• 2:51:20Mark Manson?

  Fuck yeah.

• 2:51:21Speaker 01

  You made the point that you're, I think it was a meditation teacher of yours would say, you're perfect just as you are, but you can always be better.

• 2:51:28Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 2:51:29Speaker 01

  And I think that's getting at that too, where we have those inherent characteristics about ourselves that we can't change. You're perfect just as you are.

• 2:51:37Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:38Speaker 01

  But you can always be better because we have these adaptations. We have all of these arbitrary things that we've set for ourselves. And so there's the difference between guilt and shame too.

• 2:51:48Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:51:49Speaker 01

  You don't have to be ashamed of who you are, but you could also be better. Use guilt in those situations where you have failed yourself or failed others and make it right.

• 2:51:57Mark Manson?

  And I think what I talked about on that episode, and it really applies here, is that you need both sides of that statement to be a whole, healthy person, right? If you only believe that you're already perfect as you are, then you're going to turn into a narcissistic twat and be self-absorbed and just really impulsive and do whatever you want. If you only believe that you can always be better, then you're going to be guilt ridden, shame ridden. You're going to constantly be beating yourself up over small failures and infractions. It is the marriage of those two perspectives simultaneously that I think creates a healthy individual, understanding that like you're fine. Like this is, you're a human

• 2:52:41Mark Manson?

  and you are just as fucked as all the other humans. Like we're all struggling and we're all failing at pretty much everything that we're trying to do in various capacities, but that's okay. That is being human.

• 2:52:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:52:54Mark Manson?

  And trying to be better is the whole part of the game. That is the whole game.

• 2:53:01Speaker 01

  But doing it with self compassion, right? That's kind of what I think what we're dancing around here is, is for a long time I was very, I'd hear the word self compassion and be like, ew, this is gonna, uh.

• 2:53:10Mark Manson?

  Touchy feely.

• 2:53:10Speaker 01

  It's touchy feely. It's you're letting yourself off the hook. You're, you know, this is getting into, oh, it's okay. You know, you don't have to do anything. You're perfect as you are, going a little too far that way. But that's actually, that's not, that's not what it is. This is kind of like the middle way, right? This self compassion that we're talking about, recognizing that you, there are things you could change about yourself. There are things you could do better, of course. We all can though. And that's part of the self compassion is just that recognized shared humanity, right? There's also like an underlying like you also don't have to change anything too, at the same time.

• 2:53:44Mark Manson?

  Ultimately, it is about how you feel about your failures. In subtle art, I wrote, the reason self-esteem, I think the self-esteem movement kind of failed as a movement is that it tried to improve how people felt about their successes and the best aspects of themselves. When really the measure, like proper measurement of mental health is how you, how do you feel about your failures and shortcomings? And I think self compassion is a much better measurement of that. Implicit in it is that you are failing at all times. So the question is, is what is your relationship with that failure? Is it, is it that of mastery and guilt? Cause you didn't, you know, take advantage of your opportunity or maximize your situation? Or is it that of like self-loathing and shame?

• 2:54:29Mark Manson?

  Where you try to shrink from the world and, and hide from the world because you feel fundamentally inadequate? It is that balance of recognizing and owning the failures, but also being okay with them. That is the way forward.

• 2:54:41Speaker 01

  A great book on this, like the person who wrote the book on it, Kristin Neff, wrote the book called self compassion about this, right? And she goes into like what all this entails and everything. One of the things she talks about in it a lot is she cheated on her ex-husband, I think it was. And had a lot of shame around that for a very long time. Just felt like she was a bad person. Eventually came around and said, no, no, no, I just, I ended up doing this bad thing.

• 2:55:06Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 2:55:06Speaker 01

  Uh, and, and kind of converting that into guilt and being like, I can do better in the future. I'm okay. It's all right. Eventually got there, right? She talks about how self criticism really kind of escalates that shame more, whereas the self compassion, what you do want to cultivate is kind of what you use to convert that into some form of actionable guilt, I guess. Both of them feel shitty again, neither of them feel good, right? But just one of them has an out. One of them has a direction you can point yourself. And she kind of talks about these three components that you can kind of cultivate for more self compassion. One of them being self kindness rather than the self criticism, right? Uh, one, another one I had mentioned already was a common humanity, like recognizing, like we've just been talking about. We're all kind of fucked up.

• 2:55:51Speaker 01

  We all have these, these major shortcomings. Original sin, if you want to, or life is suffering from the Buddhists, right? Like we all have that.

• 2:56:01Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:56:02Speaker 01

  Recognizing that helps be a little bit kinder to yourself too.

• 2:56:07Mark Manson?

  Yeah. And I think that's kind of a natural outcrop of shame is that one of the defining aspects of shame is that you feel like I'm the only one who's like this.

• 2:56:16Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:56:17Mark Manson?

  Right? Everyone else is normal. I'm fucked up, which the reality is that we're all fucked up.

• 2:56:24Speaker 01

  It's a little bit narcissistic even too.

• 2:56:26Mark Manson?

  It is, it is, it really is.

• 2:56:27Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:56:28Mark Manson?

  And it is interesting that, yeah, both, both religions have kind of a

• 2:56:33Mark Manson?

  a counterpoint to that. It's like a fundamental basis, right? It's the Buddhists believe that it's like, yeah, everybody suffers all the time, which implies your, your suffering is not special at all.

• 2:56:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:56:45Mark Manson?

  Christianity says we are inherently of sin. We're flawed essentially. We are always off target, which is basically saying that it's not giving you permission to fail. It's just saying that it's inevitable, right? So there's not, there's nothing uniquely wrong with you because we're all in the same boat.

• 2:57:05Speaker 01

  Right. Kind of touches on her third component of it too, which was mindfulness over, over identification with whatever you did, like the, the shame, basically saying, I am this bad, horrible, terrible person. That's over identifying with it.

• 2:57:18Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:18Speaker 01

  There's a better way to do it, which is to be mindful of that. You're like, oh, no, no, no, I'm actually separate from this bad thing that I did in some way, shape or form. I'm, I don't have to over identify with that, right? And, and she says you could do it best through mindfulness, which I mean,

• 2:57:34Mark Manson?

  Sure.

• 2:57:34Speaker 01

  I would agree too. You talked about my meditation practice lately. This is a big thing around it is not identifying with your thoughts, with your emotions, with your failures, with whatever is going on, with any sort of identity that you have. Being able to say like, oh, that is, that's not real. And in a sense it's not real.

• 2:57:55Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:57:56Speaker 01

  Right? We go back to that relative versus ultimate thing I was talking about. Yes, relatively speaking, you might've let someone down. You might've screwed up, you might've failed somehow, but ultimately that's not actually who you are.

• 2:58:07Mark Manson?

  Yeah, a really, a really common meditation practice that I've seen taught in many places is that as you're meditating and as identifying thoughts arise, reframe them in your own head. So for example, if you say like, I am tired, you reframe it in your head as I'm, I am experiencing tiredness.

• 2:58:23Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:58:23Mark Manson?

  Or if you have something like, I, I'm, I don't know, you're thinking about something that happened. You're like, I am a bad friend. You're like, I'm somebody who behaved badly with a friend, right? Like it's just, you keep removing the I am-ness of it and you replace it with like, this happened.

• 2:58:40Speaker 01

  And it creates that separation there. So you're like, oh, okay, this is just something that's feeling good. Thoughts, feelings, all of that, they're, they're temporary. Again, the impermanence of everything too, comes back to that as well, right?

• 2:58:50Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:58:50Speaker 01

  Another really good meditation practice though, is what they call meta or loving kindness. And it's, it's really interesting because the way they do it is they'll start you out with, you know, think of someone very close to you that you love and adore and just have no ill will towards, you know, send them love and kindness. This is getting touchy feely really quick, I know.

• 2:59:10Mark Manson?

  But, but look at you Drew.

• 2:59:11Speaker 01

  But the, the, the point of doing that is then you think of like, um, somebody like an acquaintance.

• 2:59:16Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 2:59:17Speaker 01

  Okay. Now wish them, you know, happiness and all of that. Okay. Now think of somebody that's maybe a little bit difficult to get along with. Find a way to then wish them that. Eventually you go back to yourself though, which is for a lot of us, that's the hardest one.

• 2:59:30Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 2:59:31Speaker 01

  But after practicing it on other people, just like if a friend comes to you, right? And they're like, I'm having, I'm feeling shameful about something I did or whatever. And you're like, no, it's okay. And you walk them through, you're not a bad person. It's a, you know, you did a bad thing, but that's okay. You can make this right. You can point that back at yourself and eventually get to that self compassionate place where you are separate from a lot of those things, where you can see this as, oh, this is something I can move on from, something I can change, something I can convert to guilt if I need to.

• 2:59:59Mark Manson?

  All right.

• 2:59:59Speaker 01

  It's, I know.

• 3:00:01Mark Manson?

  Kumbaya Bernie.

• 3:00:02Speaker 01

  No, no, no, you know what? Honestly, the, the waking up app from Sam Harris, we got to deal with them. And I, I was a paid member before we even had a partnership with them. We both were, yeah, we both were.

• 3:00:13Mark Manson?

  Friend of the show.

• 3:00:14Speaker 01

  Friend of the show. It's a fantastic app and it's not, there's no of the mysticism and religion, if you're not into that. There's a really great introductory course that he does. And it will walk you through like how to meditate, just what we're talking about this mindfulness and separating from your thoughts, emotions and all that. It teaches some meta even too, in the introductory course. This has been just indispensable, invaluable for me over these last, this last year or two, honestly, that I've been getting more into this. And it really does, like when you, when you do separate from those thoughts and emotions in a way, and you see them for what they really are, like it just takes so much of the sting off of it. And so like.

• 3:00:55Speaker 01

  I'm not enlightened. I'm not going to say that by any means, but I would say I've reduced my suffering by quite a bit, just from that. So you can go to Manson.deals/wakingup and you can get a free trial for that and get started on that. Like I said, the introductory course is fantastic, just to start with.

• 3:01:12Mark Manson?

  He really knocked it out of the park with that.

• 3:01:14Speaker 01

  Yeah. But then there's all sorts of, there's talks on there about meditation. There's way more meditations around it. There's lots of meta meditations if you want to get into that. Like it's, it's worth it.

• 3:01:23Mark Manson?

  All right. Join Drew Bernie on this path to enlightenment.

• 3:01:26Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 3:01:28Mark Manson?

  All right. So we've, we've established how failure is arbitrary, relative, purely definitional. We've now talked about how there's kind of two ways we respond to failure. There's like the shame-based response. There's the guilt-based response. Obviously, we want to try to convert our failure responses more to guilt because that, that's what opens up the opportunity for improvement and growth and change. So in the next chapter, we're going to finally get into the nuts and bolts of like, how do you actually grow from failure? How do you learn from failure? How do you change from your failures? Turns out there's three different types of failures. Each way that you learn from them is slightly different. We're going to get into all of that. And we are officially done with all the Jesus and

• 3:02:11Mark Manson?

  Buddha kumbaya bullshit. So stick around.

• 3:02:17Mark Manson?

  But before we keep going, let's take a quick break for a word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Purpose. We've been talking about failure this entire episode, and I want to talk about what most people actually do when they fail at something. They open a chatbot, type out the whole thing at midnight, and it says some version of, "That sounds really tough. You're being so brave by reflecting on this." And then they feel better for about an hour. Nothing changes. Because the tool was built to make them feel good, not to help them figure out what went wrong. Purpose is the first AI that is built to do the opposite. It learns your personality, your values, and the patterns you keep repeating, especially the ones that keep landing you in the same place. And when you fail at something, it doesn't tell you that you're handling it beautifully, or that you're so brave. It

• 3:03:00Mark Manson?

  asks what part was actually in your control, what you should do differently, and then gives you the next step. Not a 10-item plan that you'll forget by Thursday, one simple thing. And then it checks in later. If anything in this episode hit close to home and you want something that helps you actually learn from your mistakes, instead of just processing your feelings about it forever, go to mark.deals/purpose and start for free. That's mark.deals/purpose. This episode is brought to you by Waking Up. So we've spent this whole episode talking about failure. And honestly, the failure itself is usually over pretty fast. What lasts is your mind replaying it on a loop for the next six months. The conversation you should have handled differently. The problem you saw coming and avoided it anyway.

• 3:03:43Mark Manson?

  Your brain will construct an entire courtroom, put you on trial, and find you guilty every single night at 2:00 AM. Drew and I both use Waking Up, and we're using it long before it sponsored the show. It's the meditation app built by Sam Harris, and it's the only one either of us has stuck with because it's the only one that treats you like an adult. There's no soothing voices telling you to picture your problems as a leaf on a stream. It actually teaches you how your mind works. It gives you guided meditations, lessons on consciousness, philosophy, conversations with people who've spent their entire lives studying this stuff. There is no fluff. And if you want to keep losing the 2:00 AM trial, that's your call. Or you could learn how the courtroom got built in the first place. Waking Up is

• 3:04:23Mark Manson?

  giving Solved listeners a free 14-day trial, so go to solved.deals/wakingup to get started. That's solved.deals/wakingup.

• 3:04:36Mark Manson?

  In the mid 1990s, there was a first-year PhD student at Harvard named Amy Edmondson. And she was studying medication errors that happened in hospitals and among medical teams. And she was working with some very prestigious people in the field. Her thesis posited a pretty reasonable hypothesis, which is that the teams that had the best teamwork and communication probably committed the fewest errors and had the best outcomes in patients in the hospital. And so she spent tons of time studying this. She spent hundreds of hours in the hospitals. She studied eight different nursing units and worked in two different hospitals over this period. And then the data came back completely wrong.

• 3:05:17Mark Manson?

  In fact, it came back backwards. It was the medical teams that had the most errors were the highest performing. Now, this freaked her out. She wrestled with a great deal of shame. She started to think, maybe I don't know what I'm doing. Maybe I don't know how to do research. Maybe I screwed up the data. What am I doing here? I'm a fraud. I'm a fake. Everything is wrong. Fortunately, she stuck with it. She went back to the data. She spent some more time analyzing it. And then she came to a profound realization. A realization that is kind of like a sister realization of the survivorship bias we talked about in chapter one. And that is, that it wasn't that the best medical teams committed

• 3:06:00Mark Manson?

  more errors, it's that they felt free to report more errors. It's the teams that were screwing up the most, they were the ones that weren't even surfacing the mistakes that they were making. They weren't even aware of the mistakes they were making in the first place. Whereas the best teams had the most awareness over their mistakes, and so they were reporting them more often. So what she realized is kind of this paradoxical effect, which is that the people who tend to learn the most from failure are the ones who confront the most failures. And the people who learn the least are the ones who find ways of avoiding or just simply being oblivious of their failures in the first place. Now, she would

• 3:06:40Mark Manson?

  go on and develop the concept of psychological safety in teams. This has been shown in a bunch of research to actually be one of, if not the most important trait of successful teams, is that people feel a psychological safety to fail, to make mistakes, to correct each other, or to point out errors in each other's work. That's not the thing that you would intuitively guess or point at. If you were to guess like, what makes for the best performing team? You would probably assume the same thing she assumed, that they have great communication, that they collaborate super well, they have the best ideas. When at the end of the day, it's like, no, actually, they are the most honest about their failures.

• 3:07:21Mark Manson?

  Not only to themselves, but to each other. And I think the psychological safety piece of it is crucial because, because as we've talked about throughout this episode, our failures hurt so much because of the social repercussions that they have. But if we are surrounded by people who are accepting of those errors, that gives us the permission to openly face them.

• 3:07:43Speaker 01

  Edmondson, she actually, later on in her career, in 2023, she wrote a book called The Right Kind of Wrong. And it was the Financial Times Business Book of the Year, actually. And basically recaps her entire career around studying this type of thing, and studying failure in teams, but also within individuals too. Like creating psychological safety within yourself is, could be argued to be a very important thing too. Admitting your mistakes, being honest about them, all of that sort of thing, right? She identified three different kinds of failures, three different kinds of errors that can occur. And each one of them kind of demands a different response, even though we kind of treat failures kind of all the same, or you need to learn the same lesson from all of them. She said, no, that's actually not the case. There's different kinds of failures, and some, some we can learn

• 3:08:27Speaker 01

  from, and some we can't really learn a whole lot from, so we should just move on from them, right? The three types of failures, there was basic failures, complex failures, and then intelligent failures. Okay, so a basic failure is basically just, it's familiar territory. You've done this thing a million times, just something.

• 3:08:44Mark Manson?

  You just did it wrong.

• 3:08:44Speaker 01

  The ball got dropped somewhere, somewhere along the way, right? In a, in a hospital setting, and even in individual settings, though, she's like, usually what the fix is, is like a checklist. Like, just make a checklist if you, you drop the ball here. Set up some sort of system, set up some sort of forcing function that just forces you to make sure you do this every time. There's no real lesson to be learned here from these types of failures, right? Just fix it, move on, just don't do it again. That's the lesson, basically, from those, right? Then there's what she called complex failures. There's usually kind of multiple causes or sources. Maybe there's multiple people involved, or multiple steps in a process that you just, you forgot to order something, or a delivery got delayed, or whatever it is, right? In an institutional setting, it's usually just, there's a lot of moving parts.

• 3:09:28Mark Manson?

  Moving parts, lots of people.

• 3:09:30Speaker 01

  And usually what it is, it's a reflection of the system that you have built for it, right? You need to have a system in place to make sure it doesn't happen again. Some sort of robust system, or a more robust system.

• 3:09:41Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Or, or like a system that like flags issues before they happen.

• 3:09:45Speaker 01

  It surfaces issues before they happen. Yeah, something like that. Okay. You could even say in this too, like, on the individual level, there's a parallel here with like, any kind of relationship, right? Maybe it's a romantic relationship or something where... There's so many moving parts to that. There's different communication styles. There's maybe different, different goals that are even going on, but you would maybe have some system in place for that relationship. You don't have to get too technical and nerdy about it, but you know, like successful couples usually have regular check-ins, you know, that's a system.

• 3:10:13Mark Manson?

  Or like certain communicative habits, right?

• 3:10:16Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah.

• 3:10:16Mark Manson?

  People never break up for one rea- or they rarely break up for one reason. Even if somebody cheats or something, it's usually the cheating is not, didn't happen in a vacuum. There's like a whole history of things that led up to the cheating.

• 3:10:28Speaker 01

  Chain of events, yeah.

• 3:10:29Mark Manson?

  I know people who have gone so far as to actually formally introduce systems into their relationships with like different, like I know a guy who has a fucking notion for his marriage.

• 3:10:39Speaker 01

  You've told me about this before. That's okay.

• 3:10:42Mark Manson?

  And they have like monthly goals, quarterly goals. It's a-

• 3:10:45Speaker 01

  I'm all about regular check-ins, don't get me wrong.

• 3:10:47Mark Manson?

  It's a lot. Whatever works.

• 3:10:49Speaker 01

  That's true.

• 3:10:49Mark Manson?

  Whatever floats your boat. They seem very happy. So it is interesting to see relationships as like a complex system, whereas like a basic failure is, oh, I forgot to take out the trash because I was tired, you know, whatever.

• 3:11:02Speaker 01

  There can be some learning done in a complex failure, but generally it's just like more about prevention, right? Like preventing things from getting worse than they were or repeating the mistake again.

• 3:11:11Mark Manson?

  Improving the system.

• 3:11:12Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 3:11:13Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:11:13Speaker 01

  The last type was intelligent failures though, and these are more like, she treats these more like experiments. Okay. This is where you're actively trying to learn something, whether it fails or not, and failure is almost kind of besides the point at this point, right? There's a few criteria, she points out, that, that create an intelligent failure. One of them is new territory, something you've probably never done before, but you're trying it out. So you set out to learn something absolutely new. So again, failure is kind of beside the point at this, at this stage. You are actually setting out to gain something that at some future time at least, to have some sort of gain, some sort of credible opportunity that you're looking to capitalize on. Okay. You're not just doing this on a whim. It's intentional. You also have a prediction about how this is going to go. All right. It's not like, you

• 3:11:58Speaker 01

  have a guess of like, if I do this, then this will happen. The intelligent part, I think, is really in this last component that she describes, which is keeping it as small as possible. Because it's unknown territory, because there's all this uncertainty around it, you keep the stakes kind of small in order to learn something very specific. You try to blow this out of proportion and you don't actually learn a whole lot because you don't actually know what went right and what went wrong, or if it was just luck. Again, she treats these more as experiments. And this is really what she says, this is the repeatable thing we want to do. This is the kind of failure we actually want to actively engage in. Whereas the other two, like basic failures, mitigate those as much as possible. You're not going to learn a whole lot anyway. Minimize them, move on. Complex failures, kind of the same

• 3:12:40Speaker 01

  thing. Optimize your systems, have good systems in place. They're complex, so you have to. But otherwise, it's more about prevention in that. Intelligent failures are where we really can potentially learn the most.

• 3:12:52Mark Manson?

  Yeah. It's interesting. Tim Ferriss has a heuristic around decision-making that is kind of similar to this, where he, he says that when choosing what to try to do, ask yourself which failure produces the most information, which is really interesting if you think about it. And I've ended up running these through a lot of my own decisions where I'm like, okay, I'm going to try to do this thing. It, it has like maybe a 10% chance of success, but by failing at it, I'm going to learn so much about myself, about the team, about my abilities, about what I like, what I don't like, that it's probably still worth doing anyway.

• 3:13:27Speaker 01

  Okay. So just to recap real quick. So the basic failures don't require a whole lot of response. The complex failures, get your systems in place, surface the problems as quickly as possible. Increase the number of intelligent failures, just like you were talking about. You're, you're good at, you do this all the time.

• 3:13:42Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:13:42Speaker 01

  You do this in the business all the time. You're just like, we're going to try this. And then two weeks later, you're like, it's not working. Let's move on.

• 3:13:47Mark Manson?

  Let's stop.

• 3:13:47Speaker 01

  But we learned that it didn't work.

• 3:13:48Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 3:13:49Speaker 01

  This thing doesn't work. This thing doesn't work. This thing doesn't, oh, this thing kind of works. Let's go with that.

• 3:13:52Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 3:13:53Speaker 01

  And it is, it's usually small little things that we're doing that we're, we're pushing the envelope.

• 3:13:56Mark Manson?

  I do want to go back and, and double click really quickly on the basic failures. You said they don't, there is no response. What's implied in that is don't dwell on it.

• 3:14:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay.

• 3:14:07Mark Manson?

  Like a lot of people will sit and dwell and they'll be like, oh my God, I'm such an idiot. Why did I do that thing? I can't believe I-

• 3:14:13Speaker 01

  Or they search for the lesson and the lesson is you just-

• 3:14:16Mark Manson?

  You were tired.

• 3:14:17Speaker 01

  You were tired.

• 3:14:17Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:18Speaker 01

  You just dropped the ball this one time. There's not a big lesson to be gleaned from it. So just move on.

• 3:14:22Mark Manson?

  Yeah. Okay. So that makes a lot of sense and it, and it's good to know what kind of failure we're, we're dealing with when it happens. What about this idea that failure makes us more resilient, that it makes us stronger?

• 3:14:33Speaker 01

  I'll point you to one study that was done in 2010. And what they found was that previously successful founders, okay? They, they'd had a business, they succeeded with it, probably sold it, had some sort of exit, went on to found a new company. Their second venture succeeds about 30% of the time. A little bit surprising, but it's only about a third of the time, right?

• 3:14:51Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:14:52Speaker 01

  But if you look at first time founders who've never started a company before, they succeed about 21% of the time. Now, these are, again, these are venture backed, so they're pretty, they're vetted, selected for.

• 3:15:01Mark Manson?

  These are the best of the best.

• 3:15:02Speaker 01

  Best of the best, right?

• 3:15:03Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:15:03Speaker 01

  If you have started a business before and failed that business, then try to start another one. It, what they found in this study anyway, was you would succeed about 22% of the time. So there's really not a whole lot of difference between a first time founder and somebody who's failed once and tried to start again. They're basically the same, have about the same hit rate in venture-backed capital anyway.

• 3:15:23Mark Manson?

  Interesting.

• 3:15:23Speaker 01

  That kind of tells us in that situation anyway, that they didn't learn a whole lot from their failures, right? Like you, they're gleaning more from their successes there, right? The successful people are gleaning more from their successes than the failures are from their failures, right? The success seems to transfer more than the failure does in that situation. I'm not saying, obviously there are people who like learn a lot from failures and the intelligent failures are the best ones and all of that, right? I'm not so sure how to completely generalize that, but it is an interesting little fact there. And especially in the, the entrepreneurial and venture-backed world.

• 3:15:57Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 3:15:58Speaker 01

  Where failure is celebrated so much.

• 3:16:00Mark Manson?

  Worshipped.

• 3:16:01Speaker 01

  It doesn't seem like there's actually that much of an effect.

• 3:16:03Mark Manson?

  In business, there are almost an infinite number of ways to fail. In most markets, there are only a handful of ways to succeed. So it actually makes sense that you would learn more from your successes than your failures because it's like each individual failure.

• 3:16:17Speaker 01

  You only found one way to fail.

• 3:16:19Mark Manson?

  Right. There's just, there's just, there's thousands of ways you can fuck up.

• 3:16:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:16:23Mark Manson?

  Whereas there's really only a handful of ways that you can succeed. I'm, I'm trying to think if that generalizes to other things, like-

• 3:16:31Speaker 01

  I'm not sure, but there is one little thing they found in this too, was that kind of goes along with that, which is one of the skills that seem to be repeatable, which kind of goes against everything I've ever heard too, was market timing.

• 3:16:46Mark Manson?

  Oh, yeah.

• 3:16:47Speaker 01

  So, so if you know that market really well, like you said, you've succeeded in it once, you can time it again for whatever shift in that market there is. Like that's a transferable skill.

• 3:16:58Mark Manson?

  Yeah. You could say market knowledge.

• 3:16:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Which is, yeah, it's down, that's downstream market knowledge. Yeah, for sure.

• 3:17:04Mark Manson?

  I think one of the reasons purpose has been so successful in our space is that, you know, I've been doing this for 20 years. Like I know this market, this industry like the back of my hand. It's been interesting. All of our competitors come from other markets. And so I see them making what are, in my opinion, like pretty large missteps. I think it's likely we're either close, close to being the market leader or currently the market leader.

• 3:17:25Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:17:26Mark Manson?

  Yet we were started comparatively on a shoestring budget. Like some of these companies raised tens of millions of dollars.

• 3:17:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. That's wild. But I, I think it does, it speaks to the fact too, what it is, is market knowledge.

• 3:17:37Mark Manson?

  I'm trying to think of that, if that applies to relationships as well. Everybody says like the divorce rate's 50%, which by the way, has not been true in 30, 40 years. But it's more like 30, 32%. But what's interesting is most of the divorces come from the same small group of people. If you've been divorced once, you're actually way more likely to be divorced in future marriages. And so it also makes me wonder if-

• 3:18:00Speaker 01

  Hmm. That's an interesting parallel. You just found another way to fail a relationship. You never found the right way to do it.

• 3:18:05Mark Manson?

  Exactly.

• 3:18:05Speaker 01

  There's one way to do it.

• 3:18:06Mark Manson?

  And there's like that classic Tolstoy quote. Every happy family is the same. Every miserable family is miserable in its own way.

• 3:18:12Speaker 01

  Meaning there's lots of ways to be miserable.

• 3:18:14Mark Manson?

  There's a lot of ways to fail a relationship.

• 3:18:16Speaker 01

  There's a very narrow path.

• 3:18:17Mark Manson?

  There's really just only a couple of ways to have a success, successful one.

• 3:18:21Speaker 01

  Yeah. And if you figure that out early, it's easier to repeat, I think is the, the point from that. So, yeah. It's just that, does failure make you stronger? That question is like asking, do dumbbells make you stronger? It's like, well, it's kind of depends on how you use them, right?

• 3:18:34Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 3:18:35Speaker 01

  Not only that, there's actually a really interesting kind of parallel with like working out with this. It's this concept of hormesis. Okay. And hormesis is when a stressor is, it's harmful at very high doses, but it's very ineffectual at very, very low doses, kind of an inverted U curve to it. That's kind of what we see with failure is the same thing as like, as working out, right? You lift just the right amount of weight at the right time and the right dosage.

• 3:19:02Mark Manson?

  You get stronger.

• 3:19:02Speaker 01

  You get stronger. If you overdo it or underdo it, you don't learn anything from it.

• 3:19:05Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:06Speaker 01

  And they've identified these like four moderators that determine whether or not you will learn from adverse events or failure in your life too. Okay. The first one is dosage. Like I said, like how much are you actually exposed to failure? Again, if it's too much.

• 3:19:22Mark Manson?

  You get overwhelmed.

• 3:19:23Speaker 01

  You're overwhelmed and you just give up, right?

• 3:19:25Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:19:25Speaker 01

  If you don't get enough, you're not pushed in the right direction, right? It's coming back to that balance that you need to have some sort of motivation, but not too much so that you quit.

• 3:19:35Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 3:19:35Speaker 01

  Right? There was this, uh, one researcher in the late 2010s, Wilson found what, uh, they called the, the 85% rule. The optimum error rate is about 15%. So you're succeeding about 85% of the time, but failing about 15% of the time. Or again, if you're just succeeding all the time, you're not getting a whole lot of error signal and correction signal. If you're failing all the time, you're probably just going to give up. So, but it was just interesting to find that there's actually like a, a number they can put on it. About 15% failure rate, you learn the most. You also, just like when you're lifting weights though too, you need recovery. That's the second moderator. This is something I learned recently. My knee is, I'd been trail running and went way too hard and went to the PT and he's like, well, how much you rested? And I told him and he's like, that is, no

• 3:20:16Speaker 01

  dude. He's like, no, no. But I was running way too, way too frequently, way too much.

• 3:20:21Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:20:21Speaker 01

  Uh, same thing with failure. After a failure, you need a point to recover and process that. If it's an intelligent failure, you need time to be able to process that. Another one is whether or not this failure was survivable to your identity. How big of a hit did you take to your identity? Going back to what we talked about in, in that chapter on over identifying with your goals or even making some part of your life, your entire identity. If you take a hit to that, like how much does it actually drain? How much of a hit do you actually take to who you are?

• 3:20:54Mark Manson?

  Yeah. The defense mechanisms will kick in and you'll, you'll ignore the data in front of you to preserve your ego.

• 3:21:00Speaker 01

  The ego is a hell of a drug.

• 3:21:01Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:21:02Speaker 01

  Right? It will come in and it will try to defend itself and try to, to, to survive over learning anything. And then the last moderator is very intertwined with this intelligent failure type of thing, which is extraction. Like, do you actually sit down and learn from it? If you're, if you're too ego driven around it, if you're too performance driven around it, you don't sit down and learn the lessons. You just try to save face. You just try to- Make yourself look good from the failure or whatever it is, you're not going to learn a whole lot. That goes back to the whole psychological safety thing that Ebenson found. She founded an institution, but like I was arguing, I think you have to have it with yourself as well, too. Like, is it okay for you to sit down and be honest with yourself about this failure that you had? You do have to take the time to actually extract the lessons

• 3:21:44Speaker 01

  from it. You have to be able to surface those and be self-aware enough to surface the lessons from the failure to learn something from it.

• 3:21:51Mark Manson?

  So that's really useful. Dosage, recovery, survivability, extraction. There are a few techniques we can apply as well that help mitigate failure and also help prep us beforehand to make sure that we learn from it. One of them is the pre-mortem, which is a practice where you sit down before you start working on a new goal or new project, or you take the team before you start on like this quarter's initiative or whatever. And you actually take like an hour and you write out, if this is to fail, what will have caused it? And you come up with as many ideas as possible of what those potential failure points are. And you write them out and you think of the catastrophic failures, the mild failures, the systemic failures, the complex failures, and then of course, the basic failures. Like,

• 3:22:35Mark Manson?

  where are the places that you can just potentially screw up? And then, once you've mapped out all of the potential failure points, that can allow you to start planning to prevent those from happening in the first place. So it can reinforce your plans going into whatever project you're doing to make sure that the failures don't happen ahead of time. The other thing that you can do, so there was some, some research pretty recently in 2022 around looking at how people are able to properly extract the lessons from failures after the fact. One is called loss framing, which is take whatever you lost from the failure and actually quantify it. Like, try to list out all the things that it cost

• 3:23:18Mark Manson?

  you. This could be how much money you lost, how many hours you spent, how many clients you missed out on, how much revenue was lost out on. There's something about quantifying things, and it's interesting because this works in reverse as well. Like, when you quantify things in your life, you kind of objectify it and it allows you to kind of separate yourself from it a little bit. That's a little bit of a hazard when you do that to the good things in your life. But if you're evaluating the bad things in your life, you can actually use that to your advantage, right? So if you're super upset that something didn't go your way, if you actually sit down with a spreadsheet and calculate, okay, what did I actually miss out on here? Oh, it was like 500 bucks in like 12 hours of my life? You're like, okay, that's not that bad, actually. Like, I think I'm gonna be

• 3:24:03Mark Manson?

  fine. The nice thing, too, is that by quantifying that failure, you, it gives you a better sense of how to move forward or how to correct it moving into the future. And again, like we talked about earlier, like what often happens is that something feels catastrophic. And then when you actually write it out, you're like, oh, okay, that actually isn't that bad. Like, I'm being a little bit of a drama queen right now. The second technique that, that these researchers identified is, is something called corrective feedback, which is really just simple, like, what are the tangible steps and processes you can do the next time that will prevent that failure from happening again? So it's, it's essentially the post-mortem rather than the pre-mortem. It's like, okay, this is what happened. If we did these things in hindsight, it would have prevented it. So let's make sure that

• 3:24:47Mark Manson?

  that those things are implemented going into the future. But ultimately, to bring this all back to the definitional problem of failure in the first place, is that our ability to manage the failure is largely going to be dependent on how we define our expectations in the first place. And so the four moderators that you mentioned are a huge part of that. Is like simply setting our expectations appropriately so that we are pursuing something that is the manageable challenge. It is something that is both achievable, but also difficult, something that we can recover from, something that is not threatening to our ego identity, and something that we can definitely learn and extract information from after the fact. If you line up your goals to match those factors after the fact,

• 3:25:33Mark Manson?

  then you are setting yourself up for good failures. As we've established, those failures are inevitable. So we might as well line ourselves up to have the failures that we're going to benefit the most from.

• 3:25:43Speaker 01

  You've kind of mentioned this a few times on, on various episodes that we've done about some of your relationships, I guess. I, I think there's like a kind of a crude pre-mortem, post-mortem thing you did, you did when you got with your now wife. You were like, okay, I'm not gonna, if this ends, it's not gonna be because of all these dumb reasons from before.

• 3:26:00Mark Manson?

  Yes.

• 3:26:00Speaker 01

  So there's a little bit of a post-mortem, pre-mortem thing going on there.

• 3:26:03Mark Manson?

  That's a really good catch. I had not, I had not thought about that.

• 3:26:06Speaker 01

  I, we're talking about businesses and money and all this stuff. It applies in a lot of other areas, too.

• 3:26:11Mark Manson?

  Yeah, I screwed up so many of my early relationships for very stupid reasons. And, and the only agreement I made with myself when I was dating my wife was just, if this ends, make sure it's not for a dumb reason. That was it.

• 3:26:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, like I said, like as a crude pre-mortem kind of type of thing, but also there's a post-mortem, uh, kind of looking back analysis that you did as well. You're like, oh, I messed up this, this, and this. This relationship failed because of whatever trait that I have that I don't want to have going forward. Right? And you turn that into also a pre-mortem as well.

• 3:26:44Mark Manson?

  But this brings up an important facet of this, of failure, which is, when is it okay to quit?

• 3:26:52Speaker 01

  Ah, okay.

• 3:26:53Mark Manson?

  Like, when is quitting failure? And when is quitting actually just being smart and not banging your head against the wall?

• 3:27:00Speaker 01

  There's been some interesting research around this, too. There was this, uh, Carsten Rorsch, um, I believe this is back in the early 2000s, identified these, like, okay, there's, there's two capacities that we have when we're looking at quitting. There's goal disengagement. So that's, that's quitting, basically. Like, when do you disengage? Like, there's a skill around when to quit, right? But there also has to be a skill of re-engaging. And is that re-engaging with the same goal or a different goal? There's like a whole skill set around that, too. They're kind of, they're two independent skills as well. All right. That one doesn't necessarily follow the other and vice versa, right? People who can do these both very well. They know when to quit and they know when, where, where and when to re-engage. They seem to have the best outcomes around mental health, wellbeing,

• 3:27:43Speaker 01

  happiness, all of that. Again, they're independent, though. They don't, just because you have one, doesn't mean you have the other necessarily. What they've also found, too, is that that's why this whole like never give up kind of ethos that's out there in the culture is actually terrible advice.

• 3:27:58Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:27:58Speaker 01

  Because actually, the best advice is, yeah, give up smartly and then re-engage smartly, too. Like, know when to pivot or whatever you want to call it. That's actually the best, uh, the best way to do that. But like, how do you go about doing that?

• 3:28:10Mark Manson?

  Right. Well, how do you define smartly?

• 3:28:13Speaker 01

  Exactly. Annie Duke, who we had on the luck episode, um, uh, last time, she has a whole book on quitting. And it's fantastic, actually. Everybody should go out and, and read that one. Um, she gets very in the weeds about certain things, but then she talks about relationships. She talks about careers. She talks about all different areas of life. Okay. She says something along the lines of quitting on time is usually too late. Right? It feels too early, but usually you're actually too late.

• 3:28:36Mark Manson?

  Interesting.

• 3:28:36Speaker 01

  When that happens. There were some studies she talked about, the one in particular, where people were going through big life changes and decide, happened to make decisions about something and it involved quitting, changing a career, leaving a relationship, those sorts of things, like big life decisions, right? They found these people while they were still deliberating on this, whether or not, followed up with them like six to 12 months later, or something like that. The people who quit pretty much right away were much happier six to 12 months later than the people who hung on for longer. A lot of times what they would do, too, is like, what's the, what's the chances of this working out versus not working out? If you're at 50/50, you're usually actually at more like 75/25. Like, you should quit at that point. We hang on for a little bit too long. Again,

• 3:29:21Speaker 01

  it goes back to that loss aversion thing. That's what she found in that book, though, which I, I thought was just a fascinating thing. It's like, when you're like, ah, yeah, I don't know, maybe I should quit, maybe I shouldn't. It's a toss-up. Most likely, you should probably just go ahead and quit at that point. And I've seen this, a lot of my therapist friends, like, work with people who are, you know, they're, they're really unsatisfied in their jobs. And they're like, man, if this person would just quit their job. And I've told them, I'm like, oh, you should get that book for them. And like, that's a little too on the nose, giving them a book called quit, you know, and telling them what to do. But I think there's something to that where intelligent quitting feels like quitting too early.

• 3:29:54Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:29:55Speaker 01

  A lot of times. We probably should quit a lot more than we do.

• 3:29:58Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 3:29:59Speaker 01

  But it goes back to that loss aversion that we, we hold on to, that bias that we hold on to.

• 3:30:03Mark Manson?

  It's interesting that the conventional wisdom is always to stick to it.

• 3:30:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, stick it out.

• 3:30:07Mark Manson?

  Whereas it sounds like the actual research suggests that people should quit more often.

• 3:30:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Relationships, too. A lot of people are like, ah, they're going through this. Like, should I stay? Should I go? If you're at that point, most of the time, it's probably time to go.

• 3:30:21Mark Manson?

  There's sunk cost fallacy, right? You know, people, especially you get five years into a job or eight years into a relationship and it feels like you're throwing away all that time if you don't stick it out. Um, so there's a lot of biases against quitting. What are the questions or like the, the ways we can determine whether it's time to quit something or not?

• 3:30:40Speaker 01

  So Rorsch actually had these like five questions you should ask on whether or not you should quit, right? The first one being attainability, like honest appraisal, like, is this actually something you have the time, the resources, and the willingness to like stick out? If not, move on, right? That, that's a pretty simple one.

• 3:30:57Mark Manson?

  Simple, not easy. Cause it's a lot of people, I mean, I, I do this, too. A lot of people are not honest with themselves. How much time and energy they're going to put into something? Like, there are many things that if I spent 12 hours a day, every single day, I probably could accomplish, but am I? No.

• 3:31:15Speaker 01

  I was just talking to a friend recently and she's like, you know what? I really want a, a clean house, but I just know I'm not gonna do it. I know I'm lazy, so I'm not gonna do it.

• 3:31:23Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:31:23Speaker 01

  I was like, okay, good on you.

• 3:31:25Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:31:25Speaker 01

  All right. The next one, the reversal test. Okay. So imagine succeeding fully right now.

• 3:31:32Speaker 01

  Again, being very honest with yourself, would you still want it? Or is it more just like this kind of nebulous idea that you have that you might want it? It separates this kind of from like, is this goal the wrong goal? Or is it the setback that's going to hurt more? If you fully succeeded in it, would you actually still want it? That's a hard one to imagine as well.

• 3:31:52Mark Manson?

  You mean, still want it after succeeding?

• 3:31:54Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah.

• 3:31:54Mark Manson?

  Like, still want to do it?

• 3:31:55Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah. Would you want to continue doing it?

• 3:31:58Mark Manson?

  Which like, for example, Agassi, if you had asked him,

• 3:32:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:32:02Mark Manson?

  if you were the best player in the world, would you still want to play tennis? He would immediately say no.

• 3:32:06Speaker 01

  At one point, he would say no.

• 3:32:07Mark Manson?

  Right.

• 3:32:07Speaker 01

  And then we go back to the approach versus avoidance thing as well, too. So are you moving to something better or are you just trying to avoid failure? Like, if you set a goal out or you're just trying to fulfill some external goal where you're not going to be seen as a failure? Or you're actually trying to learn something and get better? Again, turning that back on yourself and competing with yourself and improving yourself versus just trying to avoid failure? The advisor test, I kind of like this one, too. It's like, would you tell a friend to go after this? Like, if a friend came to you and said, gave you all the information that you have in front of you, said, "I want to do this. This is how much time, money, resources, energy I'm going to put into it." Would you tell that same friend to do it or not? That's, I think, another tricky one, too.

• 3:32:45Mark Manson?

  It's a tough one. It requires a lot of honesty.

• 3:32:48Speaker 01

  The last one, the cost of the information. So is continuing still the cheapest way to learn something in this situation? Or do you already have the lesson? Are you actually going to learn something out of this and get something out of this? Or do you already know this lesson and it's just kind of like a waste of your time? The through line through all of this really, though, is that rational quitting? It's kind of a directional thing. Rational quitting is, it's approach motivated. So you're trying to succeed. You're trying to figure out something. You're trying to learn something. It's honest and it's attainability. You could actually probably do this or you're willing to do it anyway. And you're going somewhere with it. That has direction.

• 3:33:29Speaker 01

  You, again, you're learning, you're pushing something into new territory and learning something new about yourself. If you're quitting on the other side, it's avoidance motivated. You're just trying to avoid failure. You're trying to avoid discomfort. And really, the only, maybe the only successful route to it is exiting it, is failing it to begin with. So those were Rorsch's kind of five criteria, anyway.

• 3:33:53Mark Manson?

  I have another one that I used to ask people way back in the day when I coached people, which is I used to call it the desert island test, which is if you could do it, but you had to do it on a desert island and nobody would know about it, would you still do it? And I like that one because it sorts out the people who are externally motivated. They're like, really chasing that social validation, that social approval. Because in a lot of cases, people are like, no, actually, I wouldn't. Which then tells you something. It's, you're not actually doing it for the thing itself. I think the other interesting question around this that I've heard recently. So there was an interview of Elon Musk a few years ago and they were talking about, I mean, the story of SpaceX is just like absolutely ridiculous.

• 3:34:36Mark Manson?

  He was so close to bankruptcy multiple times. And it was interesting because the interviewer asked him, he said, "Looking back, what do you think, if you were to run the SpaceX experiment 100 times, how many times would it have succeeded?" And I forget what he said, but it was a very low number. It was like, you know, he was like, maybe three or four times out of 100, it would actually have worked. And then the interviewer said, "At the time, what did you think the likelihood was that SpaceX was going to succeed?" And he said 10%, which was a little bit shocking because most entrepreneurs are like delusionally optimistic about themselves. And then the interviewer said, "Well, if you only thought it had a 10% chance to succeed,

• 3:35:20Mark Manson?

  why did you still do it?" And he said something really fascinating, is he said, "Some things are worth doing even if you expect them to fail", which I never really thought about before.

• 3:35:30Speaker 01

  That's a very different way to look at things.

• 3:35:32Mark Manson?

  Yes, right? Like, what in your life is worth doing even if it is overwhelmingly likely that it's going to fail? It's hard to think of.

• 3:35:40Speaker 01

  That's hard to come up with something, yeah.

• 3:35:42Mark Manson?

  More than like one or two things. In terms of like a litmus test of what you're willing to fail at and what failures are tolerable and what failures are worth it and what failures you can learn from, I think that's a pretty powerful question. And again, to bring back the Agassi example, right? Like, Agassi 1.0, if you asked him, "If you knew you were going to fail at your tennis career, would you still do it? Is it still worth doing?" Chances are, I'm pretty sure he would have said, "Absolutely not. There's no way I would do this if I thought I was going to fail." Whereas Agassi 2.0, if you asked him, he probably would have still done it, right? Because he's like, "Look, this is my best route to do the thing I really care about,

• 3:36:26Mark Manson?

  contribute to the thing that really matters to me." The tennis is just, it's a side effect of what I actually care about.

• 3:36:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:36:33Mark Manson?

  Which is really interesting.

• 3:36:34Speaker 01

  That is very interesting. Do you have anything like that in your life that you can think of? I think it can also be applied backwards, too, I guess. So like, you can look back and say, "Well, that was still worth it even though I failed." That's a little more common, I think.

• 3:36:46Mark Manson?

  The thing that comes to mind immediately is my marriage.

• 3:36:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:36:49Mark Manson?

  That is a hurdle you kind of have to cross to get into a marriage. Because it is like, when you get married, like, it is something that you think about. It's like, are we going to go to the distance? Is this going to end in divorce? Like, even this business, if I knew it was going to fail, I would probably still do it. I would do it much differently.

• 3:37:08Speaker 01

  Ah, right, okay, yeah, yeah. Ah, that's a, yeah.

• 3:37:11Mark Manson?

  I would do it differently.

• 3:37:12Speaker 01

  It's more common for us to apply this backwards, I think, where it's like, "Oh, it failed, but I think it was still worth it." That's a little easier to see sometimes, too. I don't want to get too far into it, but yeah, I am newly single. And so I had a relationship that failed. Yet another one in my life, too. It's a long string of them that I have not learned a lot from, I think. Sometimes I, not like you where I haven't.

• 3:37:33Mark Manson?

  I'm sure you have.

• 3:37:34Speaker 01

  I've learned plenty, I've learned plenty. But you're going through this breakup, leading up to it was just, it was a lot of emotional turmoil going on. And the breakup itself, like, when we dragged it out over a couple of hours and all of this, right? But I did say at one point, there are people who don't get the chance to have their heart broken like this.

• 3:37:55Mark Manson?

  Hmm.

• 3:37:56Speaker 01

  And that's what I mean, like, that was worth it. Like, this sucks. Terribly sucks, right? But some people don't even get the chance to feel this shitty.

• 3:38:06Mark Manson?

  Yeah.

• 3:38:06Speaker 01

  You know what I mean? Like, that's a weird way to put it, I guess. And it's, again, it's a backwards-looking kind of a version of this. But yeah, I'm looking back and I'm like, that was worth it. I did learn a lot from this and I'm still taking a lot of lessons from it. But it kind of took that to get there, too, for me. So, yeah.

• 3:38:25Mark Manson?

  I do think relationships, romantic relationships, or to me, that's kind of maybe the most obvious category of a lot of them or most of them. Even when they don't work, they tend to be worth it. But yeah, there are a lot of things in life that, yeah, they're not worth it if they don't work out. And it's, I think, maybe the value of that question is spot those things beforehand and just don't get too invested.

• 3:38:49Speaker 01

  The Buddhists had that one figured out, like, don't get too attached.

• 3:38:51Mark Manson?

  Yeah, there's something to it. What's your big takeaway from this episode?

• 3:38:55Speaker 01

  Oh, I think one of the most eye-opening sections for me, anyway, was definitely like the mastery versus performance goals. Even though I kind of knew that, I've heard about intrinsic and extrinsic motivation a lot before and I know all of that. But really seeing that put like front and center, a mastery goal being something that's like, no, no, no, it's like, compare yourself to yourself. We've said it many times before, you've said it many times before. Put that right next to the performance goals, though, where you put all of this together, where the measurement is external to you. Again, I knew all of that. I knew, I've known all of that. But kind of putting that all together like this in this packaging that we had really showed me the areas of my life where I'm still doing that. And I didn't think I was, but I probably am in a lot of different ways.

• 3:39:40Speaker 01

  So that was good to just kind of do a quick inventory. Is this a mastery goal? Is this a performance goal? Is this a mastery goal? Is this a performance goal? There was a lot of clarifying around this recent relationship that ended. I think there was some performance goals around that, too, for me, that I had to really come to terms with, so, yeah.

• 3:39:55Mark Manson?

  In the realm of relationships, performance goals are like very corrosive. Like, they really, they backfire entirely.

• 3:40:01Speaker 01

  Well, and they're very hard to see, too. There's a social script for you or here's the thing you're supposed to do.

• 3:40:08Mark Manson?

  And you get validated for it.

• 3:40:09Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 3:40:10Mark Manson?

  It's what other people look and see to judge whether your relationship's working or not. So I thought there was a lot of interesting research around, you feel the sting of failure even if you don't agree with people's judgments of you, even if you don't know the people, even if you're alone, even if there aren't people around you, like, it still stings in every circumstance. I thought that was really fascinating. There are a lot of research tidbits in this one that I wasn't aware of prior. But I think for me, you know, I mentioned at the top of the show that I think subtle art really kind of gave failure a kind of a conventional mid 2010s. You know, failure's the way forward, you know, stick it out, learn from it.

• 3:40:54Mark Manson?

  Don't take it personally, like, all the kind of the generic advice that's pretty common these days. I was just very satisfied with how deep we got with this one. Again, we tend to think of failure and success as this binary thing that we imagine that there are people out there that are just successful at everything they do or they're successful at the vast majority of the things that they do. But the slippery definitional nature of failure and the relativity of it and how it is like very uniquely tied to our self-definition and our expectations for ourselves and how it's universally experienced. Like, you can, you can take, whatever person you think is the most successful at whatever you want to point out,

• 3:41:36Mark Manson?

  the majority of that person's experience is probably going to be a failure.

• 3:41:40Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 3:41:41Mark Manson?

  Like, which is fucked up, right? It's like, it's almost like our conventional notions of success are almost like these surfaces that we can only see on other people, we can never see on ourselves. And the internal lived experiences of this constant everlasting cycle of failures and processing those failures, learning from those failures, moving on from those failures. So I really enjoyed the, kind of the philosophical depth that this got to.

• 3:42:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:42:09Mark Manson?

  I actually didn't expect it to go there. I'm glad we finally did our little religion section, you know, to keep the people happy. But yeah, this one was much more of an intellectual kind of thing for me. As you pointed out, I think I tend to handle failure pretty well in my life. So there were fewer like a-haz for me, but some fun, fun intellectual adventures.

• 3:42:34Speaker 01

  You've been talking about this for a long time, too, defining your own metrics. You've been talking about that for a long time. That was in the subtle art, that was an old blog post you did. You've been talking about this for a long time. So I think you've had a lot of time to internalize it.

• 3:42:43Mark Manson?

  And I actually think some of the frameworks in this episode, I think, probably did a better job of explaining or grounding those ideas than the book did. Well, I guess it's time to quit. Quit the episode.

• 3:42:58Speaker 01

  Let's quit it. It is time to quit. Intelligent failure here.

• 3:43:01Mark Manson?

  Intelligent failure. We will see how this one does and then we will learn from it. That is all for today's episode, everybody. Thank you for listening, for sticking with us. As always, you can get a free PDF guide with all of our research, references, citations, exercises, everything. Totally free, you can review it whenever you want. Go to solve podcast.com/failure. Check that out. Sign up for the newsletter so you can get notified when the next episodes come out. And please, follow us. Give us a review on whatever platform you're listening to this on. It's the best thing you can do to support the show. Here's a challenge for you guys. Go find your friend that is the biggest failure in your life and send them this episode.

• 3:43:44Mark Manson?

  And then tell them, "I think you need this."

• 3:43:49Speaker 01

  Let us know how that goes.

• 3:43:50Mark Manson?

  And let us know how that goes in the comments. All right, thank you, everybody.