Steps to Becoming Insanely Successful...or Whatever | Mark Manson

• Success means different things to different people and is not always about bigger cars or the number of followers.
• To achieve something extraordinary, you have to do something that no other people (or maybe just a few) are doing or willing to do.
• Therefore, step-by-step systems on "how to be successful" are not going to help you achieve spectacular success.

The Narrative Fallacy makes us to see events as stories, with logical chains of cause and effect. When it comes to success, do not fall for the ‘narrative’ fallacy’ and think that great people became successful due to what happened to them, and if we emulate that, we will achieve the same result.

We need to do something extraordinary and exceptional to achieve great success, and that makes any successful person an exception, someone who did what few others were willing to do. Instead of googling for success, find what you want to do to change the world!

• Very few of us went through childhood without getting any emotional scars.
• Be it home or school, we suffered many problems when our impressionable mind wasn’t mature enough to handle them the way we can as an adult.
• Our worldview becomes skewed, and we start to build upon the mutated version of the world around us, messing up with our lives.
• Success by itself is not about money or fame or power, but our upbringing programs us to think about success in a certain way.

Our definitions of success are made up and largely motivated by our emotional dysfunctions. Most people work towards the formula of success, striving for money, prestige and power, running towards a goal that keeps getting farther away. They get super exhausted and may experience a breakdown when they realize that all this does not really mean anything.

When we realize that our emotional dysfunctions and pressures of society were our main motivators towards whatever we had been pursuing, we suddenly see the futility of it all and experience an existential crisisn(or a mid-life crisis) sometime in our 40s or 50s.

Being a good person, taking care of your loved ones, being trustworthy, positive and honest, don’t require much and makes even a simple existence an enjoyable one.

Life, as imperfect and unfair it may seem, is pretty good. Life has plenty of beautiful moments if our definition of success isn’t about accumulation of wealth or a drive towards more power, but to live a healthy, happy and fulfilling life.

Having ‘breakout’ success is not an intentional goal.

Giving your life meaning and purpose, while being creatively engaged with the problems of the now, is an emotionally healthy definition of success.

Most scientific breakthroughs have been from people who questioned the status quo and assumptions which were the norm. The ‘outsiders’ with no fixed plan asked the right questions and did something that seemed small and unexpected, in the present moment.