Mark Manson on taking the first steps toward happiness

It's Wednesday and it's time for some Wit and Wisdom.

This week's wise words come from Mark Manson, the best-selling author known for books with profane titles like Everything is F***ed or The Subtle Act of Not Giving a F***.

In the latter book, he says in order to achieve happiness, you have to do something bold.

Choose something.

Everybody enjoys what feels good. Everyone wants to live a carefree, happy, and easy life. To fall in love, and have amazing sex, and relationships, to look perfect, and make money, and be popular, and well-respected, and admired, and a total baller to the point that people part like the Red Sea when they walk into a room. Everybody wants that. It's easy to want that. A more interesting question, a question that most people never consider is, what pain do you want in your life? What are you willing to struggle for? Because that seems to be a greater determinant of how our lives turn out.

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He says happiness requires problems and struggle, and fulfillment comes from finding answers for our struggle.

Whether you suffer from anxiety or loneliness, or obsessive-compulsive disorder, or a d*** boss who ruins half of your waking hours every day. The solution lies in the acceptance and active engagement of that negative experience. Not the avoidance of it. Not the salvation from it.

Or as a wise reader of mine once told me, “put a stake in the ground.”

You never know what you can find where you are.

What do you think?

And what's your struggle?

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