6 Lessons From "The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A Fuck"

Relationships with books are kind of like relationships with people. Part of the relationship is you. Part of the relationship is outside of you (the other person / book). And part of the relationship is timing - the context of the moment in time that you're reading it. What's going on. What baggage you're carrying. What new perspectives you've just gained. What validation you’re yearning for. What problems you're trying to solve. 

Reading is an active endeavour. You don't sit back on the couch, tune out and waste away two hours like Netflix or the endless scroll of social media. You use your brain to process the words, your memory to contextualize it within your past experiences and your imagination to see it applied to future you. 

Just like relationships with people, timing is everything. You can come across the best book in the world, but if you're not equipped to read it ... it falls flat. Or you could stumble on diamond in the rough with a book that your intellectual set has overlooked and have it rock your world.

One of my top five most influential books over the past decade has been "The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A Fuck" by Mark Manson. His writing feels like you're getting advice over a couple of drinks at a pub instead of reading a best-seller. And his content - his lessons - hit me right at the time that I needed to hear it. 

I had just become a new dad. I was navigating and growing through a political organization that mismatched its words and its actions. I was working to balance my life as a dad, a husband, a boss, a colleague, an athlete and a teammate.

And reading this book left me a profoundly simple filter for how to live my life - be deliberate about choosing the important things to care about. Don’t give a fuck about the rest.

1/ WE’RE NOT ENTITLED TO HAPPINESS

You feel that you’re perpetually entitled to be comfortable and happy at all times, that everything is supposed to just exactly the fucking way you want it to be. This is a sickness.

We are not entitled to happiness. The world isn’t going to give it to you for free. You have to find it. Create it. Be present. Make choices. Own your shit.

Happiness comes from overcoming problems. Believing in yourself. Investing into great relationships by doing the hard work of being vulnerably yourself. The presupposition that we deserve a happy life without doing the work is adolescent. Literally. Children are entitled to happy life. And even then, not every hour of every single day.

Entitlement is the enemy.

Happiness is not a solvable equation. Dissatisfaction and unease are inherent parts of human nature and, as we’ll see, necessary components to creating consistent happiness.

2/ PAIN = GOOD. AVOIDING PAIN = BAD.

The pain of honest confrontation is what generates the greatest trust and respect in your relationships. Suffering through fears and anxieties is what allows you to build courage and perseverance. Everything worthwhile in life is won through surmounting the associated negative experience.

Accept and lean into the suck in order to grow as a person. Pain is a signal that there is an opportunity for growth. Something to learn. A way to get better. Accept the negative experience, don’t avoid it. Remember the pain of the loss and let if fuel you to figure out what went wrong and how to build yourself to mazimize a positive outcome the next go around.

Pain is an inextricable thread in the fabric of life, and to tear it out is not only impossible, but destructive: attempting to tear it out unraveled everything else with it.

Pain is part of life. Trying to avoid it is what multiplies that pain. Be kind to yourself and deal with the pain when it is at 1x instead of avoiding it such that it compounds to be 10x as damaging. 

3/ SUFFERING CREATES CHANGE

We suffer for the simple reason that suffering is biologically useful. It’s nature’s preferred agent for inspiring change. 

Shame. Pain. Guilt. They all suck to feel. But the reason that they hurt is to encourage ourselves to change. To take a different route. To muster up the strength. To build resilience. To confront and solve the problem. The only reason you stoop down to take a pebble out of your shoe is when it’s annoying the shit out of you. If it didn’t cause some minute form of suffering, you wouldn’t waste the effort.

4/ THE POWER IS IN TAKING RESPONSIBILITY

When we feel that we’re choosing our problems, we feel empowered. When we feel that our problems are being forced upon us against our will, we feel victimized and miserable. 

We don’t always control what happens to us. But we always control how we interpret what happens to us, as well as how we respond. Nobody else is ever responsible for your situation but you. Many people may be to blame for your unhappiness, but nobody is every responsible for your unhappiness but you. This is because you always get to choose how you see things, how you reaction to things, how you value things. You always get to choose the metric by which to measure your experiences. 

Taking responsibility is freeing. It wrestles the reigns of power from uncertainty and puts you in the driver’s seat. Is it your fault that it’s raining today? Nope. But you still get to make the choice of what to do about it. If you’re going to go for that run or not. If you’re just going to enjoy the day chilled out with a blanket and a book. Or if you’re going to take your kids out to splash in muddy puddles.

You don’t control the weather. But you do control your response.

5/ PICK YOUR PROBLEMS

“Don’t hope for a life without problems,” the panda said. “There’s no such thing. Instead, hope for a life full of good problems.” To be happy we need something to solve. Happiness is therefore a form of action; it’s an activity, not something that is passively bestowed upon you.

Happiness is action and making choices. It’s not something that smacks you in the fucking head as you’re toddling down the path of life. That’s a drunk seagull.

So actively choose your problems. Choose the shit that you’re willing to suffer for. Back in the day, I wanted to be someone who could play the guitar. So, I bought one. What I didn’t do is dedicate myself to learning how to player the guitar. I strummed around and then got bored with it.

I thought I wanted something, but I really didn’t. I didn’t want to suffer for it. I didn’t want to put in the work. I just wanted to be a suave guy at parties that could bust out a couple of songs on the guitar. I wanted the win, but didn’t want to sweat during the game.

Pick your problems. Pick what you’re willing to suffer for. Pick what you’re willing to work for. Because if you don’t pick your problems, new problems will just find you.

6/ STRONG BOUNDARIES ARE BASED ON NOT CARING ABOUT NEGATIVE OUTCOMES

I first experienced a first flavor of freedom: the ability to say whatever I thought or felt, without fear of repercussion. It was a strange form of liberation through accepting rejection. 

True freedom is not giving a fuck what people think of you. Being secure enough in yourself to be wrong, make mistakes and have minimal core repercussions. Having built a safety net of friends, agility, confidence, and “fuck you” money that you don’t need to suffer anyone’s shit. That you can draw strong boundaries and stick to them. Why? Because there’s minimal consequences if you do, and a pain in the ass if you don’t.

People with strong boundaries are not afraid of a temper tantrum, an argument, or getting hurt. People with weak boundaries are terrified of those things and will constantly mold their own behavior to fit the highs and lows of their relational emotional roller coaster.

People with strong boundaries understand that they may hurt someone’s feelings sometimes, but ultimately they can’t determine how other people feel. People with strong boundaries understand that a healthy relationships is not about controlling one another’s emotions, but rather about each partner supporting the other in their individual growth and in solving their own problems.

—

And that’s that. What appeared to be a silly airport book with “fuck” in the title written by a blogger that I like ended up shifting my perspective on how to approach life. It may have been the ideas, it may have been the way that they were expressed, it may have been the timing. All I know is that it made a difference.

- Christian

10 Takeaways From "The Everything Store"

As part of my “quarantine cleanup” I realized that there is a whole stack of books that I’ve read, highlighted and taken notes in … but never revisited. So I figured that it would be helpful for me to dive back into them and extract some of those key lessons.

Rereading a book read a couple of years ago is an interesting process. The person re-reading is (hopefully) not the same person who read it the first time. We all change. Experiences shape us. Time passes. We grow. We fall down. We learn some hard lessons and we keep on going. I don’t note the date that I read a book, but I am certainly going to do that now.

The first of the foremat that I’m trying is to distill the lessons / personal notes / highlights of the book into ten lessons. If you’re looking for a better version of this, you can read fellow-Canadian Shane Parrish’s summary here.

But this book was written in 2013. As was the review. Seven years later, the context is different. Amazon has grown from successful startup to economic monolith - the acquisition of Whole Foods, the proliferation of AWS, the Department of Defence contracts and - of course - the COVID-19 pandemic has pushed a lot of economic and cultural power to Amazon.

So perhaps it’s interesting to view a book written almost a decade ago through the lens of today.

1. BUILD YOUR TEAM ON POTENTIAL, NOT PAST EXPERIENCE

Miller knew nothing about toy retailing, but in a pattern that would recur over and over, Bezos didn’t care. He was looking for versatile manager - he called them “athletes” - who could move fast and get big things done.

I think that we can all agree that the hiring process in most organizations is broken. They defer to past experience. To people exhibiting a specific mold or pattern throughout their career. Someone worked at Nike? Holy shit! They must be amazing. That means that you’re relying on another company’s recruiting department from a couple of years ago to filter your candidates.

Don’t hire for past experience. Hire for who can deliver future results. Do the hard work to find, test and develop talent. Hire for values like hard work, tenacity, openess to learn and politness. Teach the skills like sales, marketing, customer service.

2. EXPLICITLY STATE YOUR VALUES

The leadership team agreed on five core values and wrote them down on a whiteboard in a conference room: customer obsession, frugality, bias for action, ownership and high bar for talent. Later Amazon would add a sixth value, innovation. 

Think about your values. Bat them around. Poke holes in them. And then write them down. Start wtih the smallest circle - yourself. Define who you want to become. What’s non-negotiable and what’s flexible. As Pete Carroll advised Steve Kerr before his first season as an NBA head coach - ask what kind of coach you want to be. A lot of us default to skating through life chasing a position, partner or goal without thinking what kind of person you want to be at work, in a relationship or on the field.

Are you someone who succeeds at any cost, or someone who thinks a strong reputation is required for long term success? Are a romantic partner who looking for a short term or long term relationship? Are you the type of player who puts their body on the line for the team, or prioritizes their long term health even if it means not catching that?

There are no right answers. But asking the questions may shake you out of your comfort zone to make your default choices more intentional.

3. FOCUS ON WHAT’S IMPORTANT AND FORGET MARKET PRESSURE

Bezos insisted the company need to master anything that touched the hallowed customer experience, and he resisted any efforts to project profitability. “If you are planning for more than twenty minutes ahead in this kind of environment, you are wasting your time,” he said in meetings. 

Amazon had pressure to deliver for the market. The people betting on your success / failure with minimal skin in the game. They don’t actually care if you succeed or not. They care if you’re predictable. They care if they can make money through investing in your business. And they judget success measured in fiscal quarters, not over years or decades.

If you’re confident in your approach, your focus and your team, don’t focus on selling a story to the market. Just represent yourself and ingore the noise. Masai Ujiri - President of the 2019 NBA Championsip Toronto Raptors - provided great insight on how he does this. After trading away the face-of-the-franchise in DeMar DeRozan to stack up for a championship run, he knew his decisions were going to be second guessed and overanalyzed in the press.

So what did he do? He made a deal with himself that he would not read any press on the trades until 6 months later. A year later, the trades he engineered help situate the team to bring the first NBA championship to Canada. Ever.

4. WHEN YOU OUTSOURCE, YOU’RE THINKING SHORT TERM.

By relying on Amazon, the retailers (AOL, Circuit City, Borders) delayed a necessary education on an important new frontier and ceded the loyalty of their customers to an aggressive upstart.

Outsourcing knowledge / skill / expertise is common. Especially for growing companies. I get it. You can’t be great at everything. But be acutely aware that when you are outsourcing something that you are consciously creating a potential long term disadvantage. Put a trigger or exit strategy in place. Have options. Don’t be locked into one supplier/[partner.

You’ve got to decide what you’re great at. And what you’re not. But don’t let your weaknesses become the blindspot that your competitors can leverage to their advantage.

5. WHY INNOVATE INSIDE YOUR ORGANIZATION WHEN YOU CAN CREATE A NEW ONE?

Great companies fail not because they want to avoid disruptive change, but because they are reluctant to embrace promising new markets that might undermine their traditional businesses and that do not appear to satisfy their short-term growth requirements.

Set up autonomous organizations charged with building new and indepenedent businesses around the disruptive technology.

The Kindle was designed to kill Amazon’s core business - physical books. The business unit had a separate office. A separate staff. It was completely autonomous, clear of the previous politics, culture and baggage fo the previous organization. They had a clear mandate from the top and buy-in to make it happen. It was an monumental task - build the hardward, build the network and convince publishers to sell thousands of ebooks for $9.99.

Replicate the iPod model for books. A new unit, separate from the mothership, prevented the naysayers, the politics and the old thinking to pollute the opportunity. It cleared the path for the group to tackle the singular focus of bringing a new e-reader and it’s ecosystem to the market.

6. ALWAYS SEARCH FOR THE BEST TRUTH. 

Jeff (Bezos) does a couple of things better than anyone I’ve ever worked for,” Rick Dalzell says. “He embraces the truth. A lot of people talk about the truth, but they don’t engage their decision-making around the best truth at the time.

There are many forms of truth. And the best truth shifts over time as more evidence comes to life. As we have experienced over the past months, science is a fluid and evolutionary process. More experience, more exposure and growing bodies of evidence fuel better insights. Better understanding. Better working knowledge.

We have to remember that almost all truth that we’re looking for - outside of the laws of physics - is a based on working information. As knowledge shifts, we have to be aware how our biases and our egos disrupt our thinking - prefering the secure to the uncertain. Prefering to confirm rather than question. Always search for the best evidence based truth, regardless of where it comes from.

7. NOT JUST COLD HARD DATA. ADD PERSONAL STORIES.

The company relies on metrics to make almost every important decision, such as what features to introduce or kill. Yet random customer anecdotes, the opposite of cold, hard data, also carry tremendous weight and can change Amazon policy.

Understanding the data as it sits in the current world is important. It’s the bedrock of solid decision making. That’s because for the majority of things (including fantasy football performance I might add), past behaviour is the most consistent predictor of future performance. But pure data does not predict the future. You need human stories and insights for two reasons: (1) to contexualize the reasons and colour behind the decisions that peopel are making, and (2) to sell it in.

People see numbers. But people remember stories. As rational and logical as we all try to be, our executive functions would prefer an idea with a personal story attached to it. It makes it real. It makes it relatable. It makes it memorable.

8. GOOD LEADERS HAVE AN OBLIGATION TO VOICE DISAGREEMENTS

Leaders are obligated to respectfully challenge decisions when they disagree, even when doing so is uncomfortable or exhausting. Leaders have convocation and are tenacious. They do not compromise for the sake of social cohesion. Once a decision is determined, they commit wholly. 

Voicing disagrements is not easy. The social pressure to agree with the group is imprinted onto our very genetic code - it’s the programming that knows we survive better in groups than alone. But as a leader, it is not your job to be popular. It’s your job to put the organization on track for success. And to do so, you need to be searching for a correct solution, not a popular solution.

Disagreements make concepts stronger. Even if they’re wrong. By attacking an idea, it forces you to consider counterpoints. To call out the flaws in the logic. To identify previously unforeseen challenges. Even if the dissenting point of view turns out to be a red herring, it still provides immense value in the act of opening people’s minds to other possibilities.

9. HAVE A LONG VIEW. BUILD OVER DECADES, NOT YEARS.

If humans think long term, we can accomplish things that we wouldn’t otherwise accomplish. Time horizons matter, they matter a lot.

Amazon was founded 26 years ago. Bezos bet on the future of commerce being over the internet. He knew that he wanted to create the “Everything Store” but needed to start somewhere. He needed to start somewhere, so he chose books.

There were three million books in print worldwide - enough to leverage an infinite bookshelf that couldn’t be stocked in traditional retailers. That small slice of an advantage. He started with books, added in CDs, toys, then … everything else. It wasn’t overnight. It was bit by bit.

We often look at an overnight success and don’t recognize the hours, years, and decades behind their current trajectory. Build with the long view in mind, not the quick cashout. It’s the difference between building an audience on the hottest social media platform vs owning the relationship directly with them. The second is much more difficult in the short term, but will pay off whenever a platform changes/gets banned.

10. SMALL ADVANTAGES COMPOUND. CULTIVATE THEM.  

Any process can be improved. Defects that are invisible to the knowledgable may be obvious to newcomers. The simplest solutions are the best.  We don’t have a single big advantage. So we have to weave a rope of many small advantages. Amazon is still weaving that rope. 

Amazon doesn’t have a single advantage - it’s had a lot of tiny advantages. A great reminder that there doesn’t have to be a silver bullet. There doesn’t need to be a single reason that you’re better than the competition. There can be a thousand tiny ones.

- -

As I comb through my notes from the book, there are certainly a lot of amazing tidbits, stories and lessons through three decades of Amazon. It’s great to understand the reasoning, difficulties and intentions behind some of their greatest hit and painful failures. I’m just excited to be priviledged enough to hold the opportunity to learn from them.

- Christian