Mark Manson

Nothing stuck.

He didn't really like anything he studied.

The medicine at the time, it, like, made him squeamish.

Apparently the first time he saw a cadaver, he fainted.

Again, he just felt like a complete and utter failure.

It's also worth noting up until this point, like he had suffered a lot of health issues growing up.

He had eyesight issues.

He had severe back pain.

He had been ill on and off throughout a lot of his adolescence.

I mean, at this point, he's probably around 25.

He has had every advantage and privilege handed to him.

Nothing has gone well.

All he's experienced is suffering and failure.

And finally, desperate, he signs up for this expedition to the Amazon.

So it's basically this like drastic moonshot sort of project where he's gonna go down to South America.

He's gonna ride a boat down the Amazon and chart all of the unexplored territories and stuff that had not yet been charted.

deep inside the Amazon.

It's like a very extreme sort of life decision.

So he goes down there, and of course, this is the 1860s, and

to get to South America in the 1860s, as you can imagine, takes months.