Mark Manson

And so when he started crying for help and he went underwater, nobody could see him and nobody could find him.

So he died that day.

And it kind of...

It shattered my entire life, really, in that moment.

Up until that moment, I would say that while there were obviously, like, problems in my childhood, I had never really dealt with any sort of hardship or had to confront my mortality in any meaningful way or...

had been forced to have any sort of perspective on like how lucky i was and how fortunate i was and how much time i was wasting and how much of my potential i was wasting and like josh's death like really it just forced me to sit with myself for a couple months

and reevaluate everything that I cared about and really question all of my own behavior.

Because there was a very real sense of like, that could have easily been me.

And I think anytime somebody experiences a tragic death very close to them like that, it starts bringing up a lot of those thoughts of like, am I using my life well?

Am I living well?

I think if you could point to one event that had

more of like where I did a 180 change in my life, it was probably that one.

I immediately stopped smoking pot and doing drugs.

I immediately signed up for a bunch of business courses at the college I was attending.

I started making really good grades.

I stopped partying as much.

I just really got my shit together.

And for the first time in my life, really thought about my potential and what I was doing with my life and set ambitious goals for myself and really took myself seriously, interestingly enough.

It's weird.

I've talked about...