Creating Confidence with Heather Monahan
Confidence Classic: Stop Chasing Perfect and Start Living with Purpose with Mark Manson
21 Jan 2026
Chapter 1: How can realizing you're not special lead to personal freedom?
I actually find it a lot more liberating to remind myself of all the ways that I'm not special. Even if I accomplish something, success, however I choose to define it, 99% of my time each day is spent doing very, very average things, worrying about very, very average problems and messing up in very, very average ways.
But I think when you focus on that 99% of the stuff that is like everybody else, it liberates you because you realize like, oh, my problems are actually not that unique.
Come on this journey with me. Each week when you join me, we are going to chase down our goals, overcome adversity, and set you up for a better tomorrow. I'm ready for my close-up. Tell me, have you been enjoying these new bonus confidence classics episodes we've been dropping on you every week? We've literally hundreds of episodes for you to listen to.
So these bonuses are a great way to help you find the ones you may have already missed. I hope you love this one as much as I do. Hi, and welcome back. I'm so excited to reintroduce you.
We've had him on the show once before, but today we are revisiting Mark's, based on his global best-selling self-help phenomenon, The Subtle Art of Not Giving an F-bomb, is a cinematic documentary designed to help us become less awful people. Literally, Mark Manson has a movie, and we're sitting down here today with him talking about it. Mark, thanks for making time to be with us today.
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Chapter 2: Why does growth often feel uncomfortable and how can we embrace it?
It's good to be back.
Okay, so let's get into it. First of all, it's kind of funny thinking about all of the success, massive success as an author. I bow down to the millions and millions of books that you've sold. So impressive. So incredible.
However, in your teachings, when you talk about quote unquote success, I'd love it if you could kind of share with everybody what that, you know, achieving millions of books being sold, if that related to happiness for you.
That's a great question. I mean, it's funny because in the short run, yeah, for sure. It's exciting to see the sales numbers come in. It's exciting to see the money come in. But in the long run, it's amazing that the mind adjusts to the new normal so quickly. And those same anxieties and preoccupations and doubts and stuff still exist. It's just they take a new form.
Chapter 3: How can we separate our self-worth from our achievements?
So it's like before the book, I used to be anxious and insecure of like, well, nobody's going to like my book. Nobody's going to buy it. And then when everybody bought the book, now my anxieties and insecurities is like, well, nobody's going to like the next book. I'm a one-hit wonder. This is never going to happen again. How do I top this? And so the anxiety is the same.
It's just the surface of your life shifts and changes underneath it.
Number one, thank you for being honest and sharing that because it makes me feel better about having those same fears and concerns and not having had that incredible success. So thank you for that. But what's interesting is in hearing that you're projecting, oh, what if this isn't successful? So many of us have heard or have been taught, you've got to put out there what you're going to expect.
You've got to feel that that success has already happened.
Chapter 4: What patterns can we break to improve our relationships and work life?
How do you think that you have been able to achieve not only one success, but multiple successes in your career without having or leveraging that methodology?
I just think in terms of actions, like worthwhile actions, I try not to label things too much of like, okay, well, this makes me a successful person and this makes me a successful author. I feel like the labels will just trip you up as much as they help you. Like maybe they help you early on to get motivated, but... As you're going, they can become traps.
And so I try not to think so much about what makes this movie successful, what makes this next project a success. And I just try to focus on, okay, let's make the best movie possible. Let's make the best book possible. What's the message that people need to hear that nobody's saying right now? Okay, let me go write that book. And then let other people talk about success.
You know, it's if I if I just leave that discussion out of my own brain as long as possible, it things tend to go better, I find.
All right. Well, you're talking about not labeling things. And while you might not like to label things, you do like to have your own law, Manson's law of avoidance.
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Chapter 5: How can letting go of labels help us redefine our identities?
So can you break that one down for us? Because I find that to be pretty entertaining.
Yeah.
Yeah, my ego just was insatiable. So I had to start naming laws after myself. No, the Manson's Law of Avoidance says that people will avoid experiences in proportion to how much it threatens their worldview and identity. And I think that's really important because I think most people have had the experience before of... Yeah, obviously you get anxious and avoid negative experiences.
But a lot of us, we also get anxious and avoid positive experiences as well. You know, like that huge opportunity comes around and you kind of freak out and you blow it. Or, you know, a person you really like, you finally meet somebody you really, really like and you think there's a lot of potential with and you find a way to screw it up or... make up an excuse to not see him again.
And I think most people have had this experience at some point in our lives, and it doesn't make sense. We often get upset and beat ourselves up like, wow, I'm such an idiot. Why would I do that?
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Chapter 6: Why does avoiding pain create more problems than it solves?
But if you look at it from an identity perspective, it actually makes a lot of sense. Your ego's job is to keep things the same at all times. It doesn't matter if things could be better. It doesn't matter if they could be worse. If they're different, that is scary and uncomfortable.
And so your mind is always trying to kind of trick you into staying in the same spot and doing the same thing and believing the same things and feeling the same things. And so anytime you try to break out of that default state and change something in your life, it's going to be accompanied with certain amounts of anxiety, anger, sadness, insecurity. It's just part of the process.
And I think this is really important to understand because it's a credit to, I guess, self-help marketing over many decades that I think a lot of people have kind of developed this assumption that growth is this It's like a weekend retreat. It's euphoric. You're going to be singing and screaming and hugging strangers when, oh my God, my breakthrough finally happened. I'm a new person.
Let's throw a party.
Chapter 7: How can we stop chasing perfection and start living with purpose?
It doesn't work that way. It's usually any sort of real growth or breakthrough. It is accompanied with a lot of insecurity and self-doubt. And even when you're on the other side of that, there's anxiety of like, well, what if I fall back? What if I screw up again? What if I relapse?
You know, it's not an easy process and it doesn't always, there are like, it does feel great sometimes, but it also feels not great sometimes. And I think it's just useful to be realistic about that.
Well, I mean, it's interesting that we're talking about this at the same time we're talking about you entering into this new era in your career, you creating and narrating this movie, you opening up your life to a whole new level. How were you able to let go during this process?
So the book came out in 2016. We shot the film in 2021. So I had already had... I had about five years of doing interviews about the book. And so I had talked about all the stories and concepts a million times.
Chapter 8: How does confronting mortality help clarify what truly matters in life?
In a way, it was almost like practice for the film. So... When it got time to sit down and actually narrate and talk through the film, that wasn't such a hard part. The hardest part for me was, I don't know. Can I curse on this podcast? Sure. Awesome. All right. I don't know a damn thing about filmmaking. And that was apparent very quickly.
Like my first meeting with the director, he started asking me all these questions. And I was like, whoa. I have no fucking clue what you're talking about, dude. Like, you're the director, you figure it out. And so there was a lot of trust and letting go that I had to go through of like, this is my baby. It's, you know, my name's going to be on it. My face is going to be on it.
But these other people, the director, the producer, the editor, they're actually making it. And that was very scary at first. And it took a lot of like, okay, just trust them, go with it, you know, assume it's going to be great. And then, you know, as we started going through production and things started shaping up, I was like, okay, good. They know what they're doing.
But, you know, early on, it was a little bit terrifying.
But this wasn't the first time you had been pitched on the concept of turning your book into a movie, right?
No, I was pitched multiple times and all sorts of stuff. I mean, my agent and I, we had meetings about sitcoms and reality shows and even a drama made out of a teenage version of Mark. Just tons and tons of stuff, which when you take those meetings, it's very sexy and exciting. You're like, oh my God, this person in Hollywood wants to talk to me about my idea. That's a very seductive thing.
But what I realized once I actually got into these meetings, what I realized, I'm like, this makes no sense. I'm like a nerdy author who sits in gym shorts most days each year alone in an office typing words onto a Word document. I'm not going to be on a reality TV show. This is crazy.
The younger you, the player could have been on the reality TV show for sure.
Yeah.
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