Mark Manson

He gets down there, he contracts smallpox and almost dies.

In fact, it takes him months to recover.

By the time he gets home, he is depressed to the point of being suicidal.

And he's journaling at this point, and he's journaling about how horrible his life is and how awful everything is and how nothing has ever gone right.

And he starts writing down thoughts of ending his own life.

And so in his journal, he made an agreement with himself.

He said, for the next year, I will take responsibility for everything in my life and I will put all of my effort into improving my life as much as possible.

And if at the end of the year, nothing has gotten better, then I give myself permission.

At that point, I have tried everything.

And what is interesting is that something in that journal entry cracked something open in him because up until that point,

he was very much the product of the influences around him.

He has brilliant siblings who are doing amazing things.

He's supposed to go to Harvard.

He's supposed to do this amazing expedition.

Nothing he was doing was really for himself.

And in that moment in his journal, he gave himself permission to just do something for yourself, to just own your own decisions and try to make

lemonade out of whatever lemons life is handing to you in that moment and much later he wrote that he attributed this this moment this journal entry was the thing that turned it around for him that was his

180 degree pivot point in his life where the trajectory switched.

And of course, he went on and became William James and all the things that I said earlier about him.

And that experience would largely influence the school of thought that he became known for, which is pragmatism, which is this idea that you should adopt the beliefs that are most useful to you and most helpful to you.