3 Steps You Can Take To 10X Your Life Now

5 min readOct 29, 2020

The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*ck — Pic by ExploreOurWay

4 weeks ago, I started reading an amazing book called The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*ck (excuse my language 😅). It’s written by Mark Manson, a very popular self-help author.

I had a blast reading this book and I want to share my takeaways with you!

I’ve shortlisted 3 of the greatest ideas discussed in this book so you and I can start to be intentional about improving our lives.

Choose To Live By Good Values

The Fate Of Two Rock Stars

Dave Mustaine and Pete Best suffered from the same problem but both handled it differently. Both of them were kicked out from a band that was going to be successful.

Dave Mustaine (Left) and Pete Best (Right)

Dave was kicked out of arguably one of the greatest rock bands known as Metallica. Pete was kicked out of the iconic band known as The Beatles.

Dave was upset with their decision to kick him out so he started his own band called Megadeth. He did that to make his former band members regret their decision.

Megadeth was quite successful selling over 25 million albums worldwide. Pete on the other hand suffered the next couple of years. His musical projects failed horribly and he attempted suicide.

Despite that Pete ended up better than Dave. What!? How is that possible?

When Pete was kicked out of the band he met his wife. His values changed and he measured his success differently. He decided that he already has what’s important and that’s a big, loving family.

On the contrary, Dave continued to label himself as a failure. He measured his success based on how successful Megadeth is compared to Metallica. Metallica went on to sell 180 million albums worldwide.

Metallica — One Of The Greatest Rock Bands Of All Time

The moral of the story here is to be happy and successful you need to live by good values and metrics.

Good Values VS Bad Values

How do you know whether you’re living by good values or bad ones? Here’s a checklist I made to get you started:

Good values are achieved internally. If you want to prioritize health, you can take action and start exercising. It’s realistically possible, you become healthier which is constructive and it’s something you can immediately control

Bad values are heavily reliant on external events. If you base your success on the success of others you would never really achieve happiness.

Dave Mustaine had a problem where he thought selling 150 million more albums would make him happy when in reality it didn’t.

This goal was not realistic as the number of albums he would have to sell would just keep increasing. It’s also destructive to his happiness because he can’t hit this endless goal. It’s a value that is heavily reliant on Metallica’s success.

If you want to really be successful, you have to start reevaluating your values and define YOUR metric of success.

Happiness Comes From Solving Problems

Problems are a constant in life. Everyone has them. Sometimes, solving problems create new ones. When you want to solve your health problem by buying a gym membership, you create new problems, like having to wake up early in the morning.

Problems never stop. They either get exchanged or upgraded. Happiness comes from solving problems. If you’re avoiding your problems you’re going to be miserable.

Based on that, we could say that happiness is a form of action because to be happy you need to solve problems. True happiness occurs when you find the problems you enjoy having and solving.

It’s really important to spend your time identifying and solving problems you enjoy. Life is on a limited edition. You can’t solve all the problems in the world yourself. Pick a few and work on those instead.

You should know that these problems don’t necessarily have to be complicated. It can literally be as simple as traveling to new places, beating a video game, or eating good food.

Choose your problems wisely.

The “Do Something” Principle

“If you’re stuck on a problem, don’t don’t sit there and think about it. Just start doing it. The answers will follow.” — Mr. Packwood

Mr. Packwood was Mark Manson’s math teacher. He said that just the simple act of doing will eventually cause the right ideas to show up in your head. Through these words lies a powerful lesson in motivation.

Usually, most of us only commit to action only if we feel motivated. We feel motivated only when we feel enough emotional inspiration.

Inspiration → Motivation → Action

Let’s say you have a problem but you don’t feel inspired to solve it. If motivation was a one-way chain, you would be screwed. You would never get off your couch and get stuff done.

Luckily, motivation is actually an endless loop.

If you look at it this way you’ll see that action can actually create further inspirations which will then motivate your future actions.

Action → Inspiration → Motivation

If you lack the motivation to make a change in your life just “do something”. For example, when I was writing this article, I intended to only create the title and subtitles the first day.

Guess what. It’s 1am, I’m still typing out this article and I’m 50% done. When you “do something”, (even simple things) it actually gives you this urge to keep going.

When you ever feel like you’ve hit a wall on a problem, remember, just do something.

TL;DR

If you want to be successful and happy, you need to live by good, controllable values and avoid bad, uncontrollable values.
True happiness comes from solving the problems that matter to you. Choose the problems you enjoy solving.
If you don’t feel motivated to accomplish a goal or solve a problem, doing something (even simple things) will inspire motivation. Just do something

Hello From The Author!

Hey you, Camel here! Thank you for reading my article and I really hope it inspired you to propel your life for the better. Feel free to leave your personal takeaways and ideas on the comment section down below!

If you want to connect with me and just have a nice chat my details are below:

LinkedIn → Qamil Mirza

Email → qamilmirza@gmail.com