- What's up everybody, Mark Manson here.
And back in June, I asked you all
to ask me any question you want.
That's right, I said I'm gonna do
an "Ask Mark Anything" video.
It was amazing, there was an outpour of questions.
Dozens and dozens of people responded
and there was a real theme to the question.
A lot of people wanted to know about confidence.
And yeah, that was like three months ago
and I didn't fucking answer anything.
I guess you could say that I'm confident
that you all would wait.
So here's the video you've been waiting for.
We're gonna talk about confidence,
gonna talk about how to be confident
and how to not be a lazy, shitty YouTuber like this guy.
Check it out. (energetic upbeat music)
All right, the first question, the most upvoted question,
kinda just sets the tone for the whole AMA video
somebody asked, how do I be more confident?
If you take away anything from this video
here is like the main lesson here.
People think confidence is related to success, not true.
Confidence is related to your relationship with failure.
Being confident doesn't mean
you think you're gonna win all the time
or are you gonna do things the best
or you're gonna be fucking great every second of every day.
Being confident is understanding
that you're not always gonna win,
that you're not always gonna be the best
and that you're not always gonna be great
every second of every day.
See, when you see somebody
who's talking about how amazing they are,
how they're gonna win everything,
how they're the best fucking thing
that's ever happened on the planet,
that's not confidence, that's overcompensation.
In fact, the person who's saying those things
feels a need to say those things
because they feel so inconfident inside
and they need to cover up those feelings
of anxiety and insecurity.
On the other hand, somebody who's actually confident
is totally comfortable with the prospect of failure.
They have experience, they've been around the block,
they understand things don't always go your way
but it's still worth trying anyway.
So confidence, it's not the belief in success
it's about the comfort with failure.
Next question.
Can you talk about all the benefits of all the emotions
that we humans are unwilling to deal with
or that we avoid in our daily lives?
Yes, I can talk about this.
I've written about this extensively.
I recommend an article on my website
titled "Fuck Your Feelings."
Go to markmanson.net/fuck-your-feelings.
I've got a very long article all about this,
goes into a lot of that,
has a lot of psychological research.
But the summary for you here
is that emotions are not good or bad,
every emotion exists for a certain purpose.
Anxiety evolved to keep us safe from danger.
Anger evolved to help us overcome obstacles or make changes.
Sadness evolved to help us appreciate
the meaning of things that we cared about.
The emotions are never the problem,
it's the meaning that we attach to our emotions.
It's the fact that we decide
that being anxious makes us a loser
or being angry makes us irresponsible or dangerous.
There's nothing inherently wrong with any of these things.
And by the way, I should note
that this applies to positive emotions as well.
Feeling joy is great, like everybody loves to feel joy.
But if you start attaching meaning to your joy,
like yeah, I'm feeling joy
because I'm better than all these other fucking people.
Or yeah, I'm feeling so much joy
'cause my life is just like the best
and everybody should be like me.
That's when you start getting into trouble.
So the challenge, the constant challenge
is to embrace each emotion for what it is
without attaching all the meaning to it,
without attaching all the judgment.
'Cause emotions are gonna happen.
Some days you wake up and you just feel shitty
and like nothing happened, you just feel shitty.
And then some days you wake up and you feel great,
like everything just seems to go well, you feel wonderful.
Our natural reaction is to attach meaning
and narratives to all these different feelings
and that's dangerous.
That starts to get us into trouble.
We start wrapping our identity around how we're feeling,
we decide like oh, I'm such a guilty person
I shouldn't feel guilty all the time,
man, I have shame issues,
I should like go get like three months of therapy
to work it out.
Sometimes you just feel bad, fuck it, fuck your feelings.
Next question.
Is it better to be good at many things
and possess different skills
or should you not be a "jack of all trades"
and simply focus on one thing?
This is a really good practical question
and I think this is useful with the confidence conversation.
Because a lot of confidence comes from experience.
A lot of the reasons we feel unconfident is simply because
we have not experienced the situation much before.
And so the first argument
for focusing on one thing for a long period of time
is you simply develop confidence in that thing
because you've had many, many experiences of failures
and setbacks and yada yada yada.
So I'm gonna give this answer as short as possible.
The world today, because of the internet,
because of how fast things scale
to be really, really good at one thing,
there's disproportionate rewards for that.
So if you're in the 90th percentile at a skill,
you'll be rewarded.
But being in the 99th percentile,
it's not 10 times more reward or 10% more reward,
it's like 1000 times more reward.
So just the way the world works right now,
that difference between being at 90% and 99%
is a huge, huge gap.
So that makes me wanna say, find something and specialize
and get really, really, really excellent at it.
But there's a caveat here.
Research shows that
generally, people who become excellent at one thing,
they don't just do that thing
they're also decent or good at a number of other things.
If you look at some of the top professional athletes,
they don't just play their sport 12 hours a day everyday,
they play other sports.
Basketball players will play a lot of golf
or top swimmers will run track for fun.
Like all these different kind of related activities,
that also kind of synergize
with the one thing that they're excellent at.
There's a really good book
by a guy named David Epstein called "Range"
and he talks about this.
He talks about how excellence in any particular field,
it's not just doing that field for 10,000 hours,
it also requires being above average
or knowing what you're doing
in a few different related areas.
So yes, do one thing extremely well,
build that confidence in one area.
But the way you become excellent,
the way you go from being very good at something
to being excellent at something
is when you're able to cross reference knowledge
from a few different domains of life.
You can't just sit in your bedroom 16 hours a day,
practicing violin or whatever.
You gotta go play with an orchestra,
you gotta play some jazz.
You gotta watch some movies,
try to write a score for a movie.
Like get good at improvising.
It's like all these related skills
that will feed back into your primary skill
to get you to that very top level.
Next question.
What is one question
that most people avoid asking themselves?
This is so easy.
This is so easy 'cause nobody ask themselves this,
very few people ask themselves this.
That question is, what if I'm wrong?
How likely is it that I'm wrong?
Especially on the internet,
nobody fucking asks themselves this.
Nobody actually stops to say like,
hmm, maybe this bullshit tweet I'm writing,
maybe I have no idea what I'm talking about.
Nobody thinks about this.
And this is the funny thing
because I think this is one of the things
that gets lost on the internet.
There's something about being in person.
Let's say I'm arguing with somebody in person.
There's something about seeing their physical
and emotional reaction to something that I say
that kind of like just naturally makes me stop and think,
hmm, maybe I'm the asshole here.
Whereas like you go online,
you might as well just be like spouting something
into the void, right?
Like you don't get that physical presence
and kind of that emotional energy
from interacting with somebody.
You could have the same argument online
and you're just like, man,
I am fucking donking on these idiots,
they're so fucking stupid.
Being online, it allows that illusion to perpetuate.
And to bring it back to the theme of confidence,
I think there's something inherent
about the mediums of interaction online
that makes us overconfident.
I think also,
this is why podcasting has unexpectedly become so huge.
I don't think anybody expected 10 years ago
that podcasts would be this popular.
And I think the reason
is because podcasts are the only medium online
that you actually get that sense.
You can hear people's tone of voice.
You can get a sense for their mood,
the sense of doubt when they say things.
Or maybe they're being self-deprecating
or maybe they're a little bit unconfident.
You get that intangible quality
of people saying things with podcasting
or with YouTube videos
that makes that question far more likely.
It's like, what if I'm wrong?
How likely is it that I'm wrong?
What are the consequences of being wrong?
I think in the written form and in written social media,
things like Facebook and Twitter, it's a shit show guys,
it's just, I can't do it, I can't do it anymore.
Next question.
Do you have advice for someone who isn't happy
in her first job?
Yeah, fucking quit. You're young, go do something else.
Next question.
If you assume that life is meaningless
and there's no objective morality or good,
basically that there's no objective reason to do anything
and no objective reason to give you
or other subjective feelings credence,
how do you select goals?
Well, that got philosophical fast.
Look, I talk about this a little bit in my second book,
"Everything is Fucked."
Nihilism can cut both ways.
You can have a nihilistic attitude and say,
well, there's no reason to do anything
so why do anything at all if nothing matters?
But you can cut the other way too.
You can say, well, if nothing means anything
and why do anything 'cause none of it matters,
why not do anything?
If it doesn't matter, why not do it?
In a cosmic sense, I'm a nihilist.
I don't believe there is some overarching meaning
or purpose to the universe or all of existence.
I believe that meaning and purpose
are something that are psychologically constructed
within the human mind,
it's a psychological mechanism that we evolved
'cause it's useful.
Humans need to feel like their actions are purposeful,
that there's some sort of meaning attached to them.
That's fine, part of our responsibility being human beings
is that we need to find meaningful pursuits,
we need to find things that create that meaning
for ourselves.
So it doesn't really make sense to me
to say, if nothing means anything,
why have goals, how do you set goals?
No, no, no, you set goals
because that's how you find meaning.
The goals are what create the meaning,
the meaning doesn't create the goals.
So not only can you have goals
without any sort of cosmic meaning,
you have to have goals because there's no cosmic meaning.
You have to find some pursuit
that feels worthwhile for yourself.
And asking yourself, what is that worthwhile thing,
it's incredibly hard
'cause there is no objective right answer.
There is no, with finality,
this is the most important thing to do forever and ever
and nothing's ever gonna change it.
There's just not.
And so for me, the things that feel meaningful
tend to derive from a few places.
One is, what gives me a sense of growth
in becoming a better person?
What gives other people a sense of growth
in becoming better people?
And what is something that is worth sacrificing for?
And I just focus on those thing,
improve myself, improve others, improve the world.
Find something to sacrifice that feels worthwhile
and that generates that sense of meaning.
That's not fucking easy
and there's no like right answer at the end of the test.
And that's part of the joy of being human,
you never fully know if what you're doing is right or not,
you never know if you're fucking up completely.
Which is why confidence is based in the comfort
of knowing that you may fail.
That all of this may be pointless,
that you wasted a bunch of time, made a fool of yourself
but at the end of the day,
you're still all right with it because it was worthwhile,
the sacrifice was worthwhile.
So I hope your sacrifices are worthwhile.
If you'd like, you can sacrifice yourself
by subscribing to the channel, liking this video,
maybe adding a comment.
What do you find meaningful and purposeful in this life?
Actually, that's kind of heavy for a YouTube comment.
So fuck it. Just like and subscribe.
And maybe next time I won't wait three months to answer.
So until next time,
this is Mark getting the fuck outta here.
(energetic upbeat music)