Mark Manson

That's my man.

Yeah, I mean, to just summarize really quick his work, I mean, first of all, what's fascinating about him is that he was doing work behind the Iron Curtain, so he was in Eastern Europe, right?

He was disconnected from Western psychology.

His theory basically, positive disintegration, like, literally means what it says, which is that it is a positive result of the disintegration of your understanding of yourself.

He studied World War II survivors and Holocaust survivors, and what he found is that the majority of the survivors that he interviewed

years later said that it was one of the most important things that had happened.

While it was a horrible experience, it had an incredibly profound positive effect on them.

And it was because it forced this experience of positive disintegration.

It destroyed all of their assumptions and identity of who they were before.

And so it allowed them to recreate themselves from the ground up in a much more healthy and holistic way.

It's all self-report.

It's all observational.

I feel like if it wasn't common, then just the self-help industry wouldn't exist.

My sense is that a lot of what is perceived as kind of a sudden transformation in a self-help seminar, it's actually people who are

kind of already in this spot and they're like highly influenceable in that moment.

It's interesting.

Right, right.

In many ways, I do think values are the deepest form of adaptation.

Values underpin all of those other things that we talked about.

So the way you prioritize your behaviors, the things that you're motivated to do, the goals that you set for yourself, all of those things are largely dictated by your values, what you choose to find important.