MARK MANSON !

10 LIFE
LESSONS I
LEARNED
FROM
SURVIVING MY
20S
March 6, 2014 • 13 minute
read • by Mark Manson

"

O
n my 20th
birthday, I got
drunk and peed
on some old ladies’ front
lawn. A cop saw me and
stopped me. Fortunately, I
talked my way out of going
to jail that night. I already
had an arrest record, but
he didn’t bother to check.
My 20s started out with a
bang.

At the time, I was aimless. I had

just dropped out of music school
and cut my long, tangly hair. I
wanted to move out of Texas but
didn’t know how or where. I
would sometimes lecture people
about the spiritual aspect of
consciousness and had a number
of half-baked ideas about the
theory of relativity and whether
the universe actually existed or
not.

I was smart and audacious and

arrogant and really annoying.

Three days from now, I will be

turning 30 years old. I will be in
Las Vegas and probably
completely out of my mind when
it happens. But I’m happy to
report that I’m far more
responsible and far less
pretentious these days. I’ve
changed a lot in these 10 years. I
don’t get arrested anymore and I
don’t pee on people’s lawns
anymore. I’ve built businesses,
been around the world multiple
times, and managed to create a
career for myself as a writer —
something I never could have
predicted.

In our instant gratification

culture, it’s easy to forget that
most personal change does not
occur as a single static event in
time, but rather as a long,
gradual evolution where we’re
hardly aware of it as it’s
happening. We rarely wake up
one day and suddenly notice
wild, life-altering changes in
ourselves. No, our identities
slowly shift, like sea sand getting
pushed around by the ocean,
slowly accumulating into new
contours and forms over the
passage of time.

It’s only when we stop years or

decades later and look back that
we can notice all of the dramatic
changes that have taken place.
My 20s certainly were dramatic.
Here are some of the things I
learned:

1. FAIL EARLY AND

OFTEN; TIME IS
YOUR BEST ASSET
When you are young, your
greatest asset is not your talent,
not your ideas, not your
experience, but your time. Time
grants you the opportunity to
take big risks and make big
mistakes. Dropping everything
and traveling the world for six
years or starting some company
to build this crazy app you and
your friends came up with when
you got high one night, or
randomly packing up all (four) of
your belongings and moving to
another city on a whim to work
and live with your cousin, you
can only get away with these
things when you’re young, when
you have nothing to lose. The
difference between an
unemployed 22-year-old with
debt and no serious work
experience and an unemployed
25-year-old with debt and no
work experience is basically
negligible in the long run.

Chances are you aren’t strapped

by all of the financial
responsibilities that come with
later adulthood: mortgage
payments, car payments, daycare
for your kids, life insurance and
so on. This is the time in your
life where you have the least
amount to lose by taking some
long-shot risks, so you should
take them. Because it’s the
disastrous failures of these years
— that crazy love affair with the
Taiwanese dancer that made
your mother lose her hair, or the
entrepreneurial joint venture
some guy in Starbucks talked you
into that turned out to be an
elaborate pyramid scheme — it’s
these failures that will set you up
for your life successes down the
line. They are the best lessons of
your life. Get learning.

2. YOU CAN’T
FORCE
FRIENDSHIPS
There are two types of friends in
life: the kind that when you go
away for a long time and come
back, it feels like nothing’s
changed, and the kind that when
you go away for a long time and
come back, it feels like
everything’s changed.

I’ve spent the majority of the last

five years living in a number of
different countries.
Unfortunately, that means that
I’ve left a lot of friends behind in
various places. What I’ve
discovered over this time is that
you can’t force a friendship with
someone. Either it’s there or it’s
not, and whatever “it” is, is so
ephemeral and magical that
neither one of you could even
name it if you tried to. You both
just know.

What I’ve also found is that you

can rarely predict which friends
will stick with you and which
ones won’t. I left Boston in the
Fall of 2009 and came back eight
months later to spend the
Summer of 2010 there. Many of
the people I was closest to when
I left could hardly even be
bothered to call me back when I
returned. Yet, some of my more
casual acquaintances slowly
became the closest friends in my
life. It’s not that those other
people were bad people or bad
friends. It’s nobody fault. It’s
just life.

3. YOU’RE NOT
SUPPOSED TO
ACCOMPLISH ALL
OF YOUR GOALS
Spending the first two decades of
our life in school conditions us to
have an intense results-oriented
focus about everything. You set
out to do X, Y or Z and either
you accomplish them or you
don’t. If you do, you’re great. If
you don’t, you fail.

But in my 20s I’ve learned that

life doesn’t actually work that
way all the time. Sure, it’s nice to
always have goals and have
something to work towards, but
I’ve found that actually attaining
all of those goals is beside the
point.

When I was 24, I sat down and

wrote down a list of goals I
wanted to accomplish by my 30th
birthday. The goals were
ambitious and I took this list very
seriously, at least for the first few
years. Today, I’ve accomplished
about 1/3 of those goals. I’ve
made significant progress on
another 1/3. And I’ve basically
done nothing about the last 1/3.

But I’m actually really happy

about them. As I’ve grown, I’ve
discovered that some of the life
goals I set for myself were not
things I actually wanted, and
setting those goals taught me
what was not important to me in
my life. With some other goals,
while I didn’t attain them, the
act of working towards them for
the past six years has taught me
so much that I’m still pleased
with the outcome anyway.

I’m firmly convinced that the

whole point of goals is 80% to get
us off our asses and 20% to hit
some arbitrary benchmark. The
value in any endeavor almost
always comes from the process of
failing and trying, not in
achieving.

4. NO ONE
ACTUALLY KNOWS
WHAT THE HELL
THEY’RE DOING
There’s a lot of pressure on kids
in high school and college to
know exactly what they’re doing
with their lives. It starts with
choosing and getting into a
university. Then it becomes
choosing a career and landing
that first job. Then it becomes
having a clear path to climb up
that career ladder, getting as
close to the top as possible. Then
it’s getting married and having
kids. If at any point you don’t
know what you’re doing or you
get distracted or fail a few times,
you’re made to feel as if you’re
screwing up your entire life and
you’re destined for a life of
panhandling and drinking vodka
on park benches at 8AM.

But the truth is, almost nobody

has any idea what they’re doing
in their 20s, and I’m fairly
certain that continues further
into adulthood. Everyone is just
working off of their current best
guess.

Out of the dozens of people I’ve

kept in touch with from high
school and college (and by “keep
in touch” I really mean “stalked
on Facebook”), I can’t think of
more than a couple that have not
changed jobs, careers, industry,
families, sexual orientation or
who their favorite power ranger
is at least once in their 20s. For
example, good friend of mine
was dead-set when he was 23 of
climbing the corporate hierarchy
in his industry. He had a big
head-start and was already
kicking ass and making good
money. Last year, at age 28, he
just went and bailed. Another
friend of mine went from the
Navy to selling surf equipment,
to getting a masters in education.
Another friend of mine just
picked up and took her career to
Hong Kong. Another friend
stopped working as an
environmental scientist and is
now a DJ.

I rarely had any clue what I was

doing. I get emails all the time
from people wanting to know
how I built my business, when I
decided to become a writer, what
my initial business plan was. The
truth is I never knew any of those
things. They just happened. I
paid attention to opportunities
and acted on them. Most of
those opportunities failed
drastically. But I was young and
could afford those failures.
Eventually, I was fortunate
enough to work my way to do
something I liked and do it well.

5. MOST PEOPLE
IN THE WORLD
BASICALLY WANT
THE SAME THINGS.
In hindsight, I’ve had a pretty
rollicking 20s. I started a
business in a bizarre industry
that took me to some interesting
places and allowed me to meet
interesting people. I’ve been all
over the world, having spent
time in over 50 countries. I’ve
learned a few languages, and
rubbed elbows with some of the
rich and famous and the poor
and downtrodden, in both the
first and third worlds.

And what I’ve discovered is that

from a broad perspective, people
are basically the same. Everyone
spends most of their time
worrying about food, money,
their job and their family — even
people who are rich and well fed.
Everyone wants to look cool and
feel important — even people
who are already cool and
important. Everyone is proud of
where they come from. Everyone
has insecurities and anxieties
that plague them, regardless of
how successful they are.
Everybody is afraid of failure and
looking stupid. Everyone loves
their friends and family yet also
gets the most irritated by them.

Humans are, by and large, the

same. It’s just the details that get
shuffled around. This homeland
for that homeland. This corrupt
government for that corrupt
government. This religion for
that religion. This social practice
for that social practice. Most of
the differences that we hold to be
so significant are accidental
byproducts of geography and
history. They’re superficial —
merely different cultural flavors
of the same overarching, candy-
coated humanity.

I’ve learned to judge people not

by who they are, but by what
they do. Some of the kindest and
most gracious people I’ve met
were people who did not have to
be kind or gracious to me. Some
of the most obnoxious asshats
have been people who had no
business being obnoxious asshats
to me. The world makes all
kinds. And you don’t know who
you’re dealing with until you
spend enough time with a person
to see what they do, not what
they look like, or where they’re
from or what gender they are or
whatever.

6. THE WORLD
DOESN’T CARE
ABOUT YOU
The thought that is so
frightening at first glance — “No
one cares about me!?” —
becomes so liberating when one
actually processes its true
meaning. As David Foster
Wallace put it, “You’ll stop
worrying what others think about
you when you realize how
seldom they do.”

You, me, and everything we do,

will one day be forgotten. It will
be as if we never existed, even
though we did. Nobody will care.
Just like right now, almost
nobody cares what you actually
say or do with your life.

And this is actually really good

news: it means you can get away
with a lot of stupid shit and
people will forget and forgive you
for it. It means that there’s
absolutely no reason to not be
the person that you want to be.
The pain of un-inhibiting
yourself will be fleeting and the
reward will last a lifetime.

7. POP CULTURE IS
FULL OF
EXTREMES,
PRACTICE
MODERATION

My life immediately got about

542% better when I realized that
the information you consume
online is predominantly made up
of the 5% of each extreme view
and that 90% of life actually
occurs in the silent middle-
ground where most of the
population actually lives. If one
reads the internet enough, one is
liable to start thinking that World
War III is imminent, that
corporations rule the world
through some conspiracy, that all
men are rapists (or at the very
least, complicit in rape), that all
women are lying, hypergamous
whores, that white people are
victims of reverse racism, that
there’s a war on Christmas, that
all poor people are lazy and
destroying the government, and
on and on.

It’s important to sometimes

retreat to that quiet 90% and
remind oneself: life is simple,
people are good, and the chasms
that appear to separate us are
often just cracks.

8. THE SUM OF
THE LITTLE
THINGS MATTER
MUCH MORE
THAN THE BIG