Self-Help Junkies, Stupid Experts, and the Worst Life Advice I've Ever Heard

In The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Mark Manson argues that we are frustrated in life and feel like failures because we value and prioritize the wrong things, thanks in part to society’s emphasis on positive thinking, over-involved parents, and our susceptibility to superficial social media messages. This leads us to pursue emotional highs that don’t lead to lasting happiness.

The solutions are counterintuitive and include: be wrong, fail, tolerate feeling bad, accept pain, practice rejection. Because we can’t care equally about everything, we need to prioritize and focus on what brings us happiness and meaning. In other words, we need to carefully choose what we give our f*cks about.

The book draws from several established philosophies (Stoicism, Existentialism, and Buddhism), and we’ll expand and clarify the book’s messages by tracing their origins to these schools of thought. We’ll also explore some of the psychology behind what motivates people’s decisions, and why we’re driven to give so many f*cks about so many unimportant things.

In today’s hustle culture, many people think the only way to live a productive and rewarding life is to work as hard as possible. This idea is so ingrained in our culture that many work to the point of near-constant exhaustion, sacrificing their mental and physical health. But according to business strategist Greg McKeown, there’s an easier way to get the most out of your time and effort. In Effortless, he expands on this one simple truth: Achieving your goals doesn’t have to be so hard. By simply taking the easiest path, we can be healthier, happier, and more productive.

In our guide, we’ll lay out McKeown’s argument that the easiest path to success is the most viable, and we’ll provide actionable advice on how to implement this idea into your daily life. We’ll also further explore McKeown’s main points by comparing and contrasting them to other ideas in books on productivity and happiness.

In The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Mark Manson argues that we are frustrated in life and feel like failures because we value and prioritize the wrong things, thanks in part to society’s emphasis on positive thinking, over-involved parents, and our susceptibility to superficial social media messages. This leads us to pursue emotional highs that don’t lead to lasting happiness.

The solutions are counterintuitive and include: be wrong, fail, tolerate feeling bad, accept pain, practice rejection. Because we can’t care equally about everything, we need to prioritize and focus on what brings us happiness and meaning. In other words, we need to carefully choose what we give our f*cks about.

The book draws from several established philosophies (Stoicism, Existentialism, and Buddhism), and we’ll expand and clarify the book’s messages by tracing their origins to these schools of thought. We’ll also explore some of the psychology behind what motivates people’s decisions, and why we’re driven to give so many f*cks about so many unimportant things.

Science and reason create technological marvels, but they’re less successful at shaping human behavior. Since humans are irrational creatures, irrationality can be a useful tool for pushing various agendas big and small. In Alchemy, Rory Sutherland suggests that to solve economic and political problems, we should leverage people’s illogical—and even magical—ways of thinking. If business and political leaders can better understand the human psyche, they can use it to tackle the issues of the modern world.

As vice chairman of the advertising firm Ogilvy & Mather, Sutherland merged commercial advertising with behavioral science to “hack” the human mind. In this guide, we’ll examine what Sutherland believes are the faulty assumptions of standard economics, the peculiar quirks of human perception, and why meaning is more important than fact. We’ll delve into the underlying research on behavioral psychology and discuss the implications of using irrationality to influence the public at large.

Freakonomics applies the tools of economics to explain real-world phenomena that are not conventionally thought of as “economic.” Authored by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, Freakonomics argues that data analysis and incentives can explain a lot about human behavior, and that a great deal of what experts and conventional wisdom tell us is wrong. As they explore these themes, the authors give us some powerful—and highly counterintuitive—insights into why the world is the way it is.

We usually think of snap judgments as lazy, superficial, and probably wrong. But are they really? In Blink, Malcolm Gladwell argues that snap judgments can be just as good as—or even better than—the decisions that we make when we analyze a situation carefully. Blink delves into how and why we make the gut decisions we do, when it’s unsafe to trust our guts, and what we can do to make all our snap judgments smarter, less biased, and more efficient.

In this guide, we add some structure to Gladwell’s arguments and update the research he draws on, looking at how snap judgments might work in the brain. We also give you some additional strategies for maximizing the accuracy of your snap judgments.

What is the key to accomplishing seemingly impossible goals? According to the authors of Influencer, it’s all about knowing how to change human behavior. Drawing on their background in social science and organizational change, Joseph Grenny, Kerry Patterson, David Maxfield, Ron McMillan, and Al Switzler break down the complex task of influencing people into a simple three-step process: To get things done, you have to be able to set a clear goal, know what people need to change, and motivate them to make it happen. Armed with this advice, the authors say that you have everything you need to meet any goal.

In this guide, we’ll show how the authors’ arguments about influencing human behavior are rooted in psychology, touching on multiple theories of behavior change. We’ll also supplement the author’s recommendations with advice from other behavior change books like Atomic Habits by James Clear, Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins, and High Performance Habits by Brendan Burchard.