WORK B O O K

Resilience
What if you could take all the shit that life
throws at you and find some deeper, more
meaningful purpose for all of it?

What if you were the one who kept a calm

presence when everyone around you is losing
their damn minds?

What if you lived a life that wasn’t an endless

pursuit of short-lived pleasure, but one in which
you take on great challenges with tenacity?

What if you quit running from the pain and

turned to face it instead?

This Resilience Course is not about little hacks

or tricks or the latest new-fangled methods that
promise to make you super mentally tough in
three days.

We’ll go much deeper than that.

We’ll dig down to the gritty underbelly of your

mind to find out exactly why you’re avoiding
certain struggles in your life—and why you need
to deal with them right now.

Are you ready to face your struggles and become

a resilient motherfucker?

Let’s get started.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

04 How to Use This Workbook

06 Lesson 01: Defining Resilience

12 Lesson 02: Choice and Perspective

21 Lesson 03: Finding a Higher Purpose

26 Lesson 04: Minimum Viable Actions

31 Lesson 05: Finding Allies

41 Lesson 06: What If You Liked It?

47 Wrap-Up

49 Notes
How to
Use This
Workbook
HOW TO USE THIS WORKBOOK

This workbook is a complement to the Resilience Course. It is primarily designed to

help you organize and keep your answers to the exercises, but also as a refresher for key
concepts covered in the videos.

You can print this workbook out or, if you’d rather save some trees, simply write down
your answers in a separate notebook, jot them down in a notes app, or type them up
in a Word document.

If you do print this workbook out, there is a Notes section at the end where you can
write down your darkest secrets, deepest fears, and maybe also your reflections on the
course.

This workbook is yours. Use it however you wish and enjoy the exercises.

Resilience 05
LESSON 01

Defining
Resilience
LESSON 01: DEFINING RESILIENCE

Welcome to the Resilience Course, a course designed to help you deal with the inherent
struggles of life and become a more resilient person.

In this course, we’ll go over concepts and practical strategies that will help you not only
navigate life’s challenges as they arise, but also understand your own role in determining
the amount of pain that you have to endure.

I’d like to start by giving you two metaphors that I’ll come back to throughout the course.

Metaphor #1: “Pain Is Like an Arrow That Strikes Twice.”

To paraphrase the Buddha, when we are struck by an arrow, we feel two types of pain.

The first is the inherent, physical pain from the arrow piercing our skin. The second is the
psychological pain from the meaning we create around the first pain—”Why me? Why did
I deserve this? That guy is an asshole for doing this to me.”

In this course, I’ll refer to these as Type 1 (inherent) and Type 2 (psychological) pain.

The more intense the Type 1 pain, the more intense the Type 2 pain. For example, an
earthquake destroying our home will cause us much more anguish than stubbing our
big toe.

We also typically suffer from Type 2 pain long after Type 1 pain has passed. We hold on to
our narratives of injustice and suffering and victimhood, and eventually these narratives—
the meaning we’ve constructed around our pain—come to define our identity.

This course will talk about both types of pain, but most of it will be dedicated to Type 2
pain. Because ultimately, it is the more significant amount of pain that we feel in our lives,
and—importantly—the thing we have more control over. We can never prevent ourselves
from stubbing our toe, but we can prevent ourselves from creating stupid narratives that
make us suffer more.

Resilience 07
LESSON 01: DEFINING RESILIENCE

Metaphor #2: “Like Building Muscle, a Certain Amount

of Pain Makes Us Stronger.”

To become stronger, we must stress our muscles regularly—walk 5,000 steps a day, go for
a run, pick up something heavy. If we never use our muscles, our body will deteriorate
and begin to fall apart. However, if we try to squat 500 pounds on our first day in the
gym, we’re going to destroy ourselves.

Similarly, there’s a Goldilocks zone of psychological pain that’s healthy for us. Some
level of stress improves mental health. But there’s a tipping point beyond which adding
more pain or stress starts to harm our health, our ability to function well physically and
mentally.

Ultimately, our goal in life isn’t to get rid of pain, but to maintain a manageable level
of stress and pain in our lives. We want to be challenged regularly. We want to have
invigorating problems to work on. The sense of overcoming grants us a sense of meaning
and purpose in our lives.

This course is designed to help you navigate this optimal level of stress and pain, to
guide you through the process of lifting a little bit more weight each day to get stronger
mentally, to improve your resilience, sense of self, and ability to manage yourself in the
face of adversity.

Resilience 08
LESSON 01: DEFINING RESILIENCE

A Note on Trauma

If you have a good workout at the gym and feel sore the next day, there are a number of
things you can do to treat that soreness: extra rest, an ice pack, a protein shake, a visit
to the sauna.

But if you squat 500 pounds on your first visit to the gym, you’re going to break your
back. That’s trauma. You’ve gone past a breaking point with pain and stress where your
mind gives in and unravels.

You can’t heal a broken back with a visit to the sauna. A broken back needs a whole
other level of treatment. You need to go to the hospital and spend months going through
intense physical therapy. The same is true with trauma.

I mention this because this course is not designed to handle trauma. We’re talking here
about regular challenges in life like being in a toxic relationship, dropping out of school,
being overworked and stressed, not something traumatic like crashing a van and killing
everyone else in it except you.

If you’re experiencing trauma or symptoms of PTSD, you need to seek professional help.
A lot of the tools and techniques in this course can be helpful, but it’s not what this
course is designed for and I want to make that clear.

Another reason I’m talking about trauma is because often we create the trauma ourselves.

As I’ve mentioned, most pain we experience is psychological, it’s Type 2 pain. If we decide
an experience—say Amazon losing our iPhone delivery—is traumatic, our brain will
believe that and have a traumatic reaction. An experience that’s a 30-pound dumbbell in
reality but a 500-pound squat in our mind will still break our back.

Ultimately, though, a lot of this is personal. Something that feels like a 30-pound
dumbbell to me can feel like a 500-pound squat to you, and vice versa. The point is to
be careful with the narratives we construct around our experience, the significance we

Resilience 09
LESSON 01: DEFINING RESILIENCE

ascribe to our pain. And that’s what this course is all about.

Without further ado, let’s get started with our first exercise.

Exercise

Part 1 of 3

Write down a particular struggle that you need help dealing

with.

Resilience 10
LESSON 01: DEFINING RESILIENCE

Part 2 of 3

Is this a Type 1 or Type 2 pain?

Most likely, your struggle will be both types. What aspects of it are Type 1, and what
aspects are Type 2?

Part 3 of 3

How manageable does this problem feel to you at the moment?

Is it a 30-pound dumbbell or a 500-pound squat?

Resilience 11
LESSON 02

Choice
and Per-
spective
LESSON 02: CHOICE AND PERSPECTIVE

To understand Type 2 pain and begin to take control over it, we’ve got to talk about
choice.

When it comes to choice and resilience, there are three facts you need to know:

1. We’re always choosing.

2. Choosing makes us happy.

3. There is always choice in struggle.

Let’s take these one by one.

Fact #1: We’re Always Choosing

Life is essentially a nonstop series of choices.

Every moment of every day, we are choosing what to pay attention to, what to think about
that thing we’re paying attention to, what we feel about things, how we’re responding to
things, what perspective we’re going to choose—will we be open-minded, judgmental,
indifferent?

These are subtle, mental choices happening all the time.

It’s important to remember this. We typically get so caught up in our suffering and
emotions that we forget that we are always choosing. And this leads to us living on
autopilot and making bad choices.

Resilience 13
LESSON 02: CHOICE AND PERSPECTIVE

Fact #2: Choosing Makes Us Happy

The other thing we need to know about choice is that it’s an essential building block of
happiness.

Psychological research on resilience, wellbeing, and happiness consistently highlights

the role autonomy plays in our happiness. People with a sense of control over their lives
feel like they have choices, and this creates a greater sense of autonomy and satisfaction
in life.

So, recognizing that we’re choosing in every moment doesn’t just lead to us making better
choices. It also results in us feeling autonomy and achieving higher levels of wellbeing.

Fact #3: There Is Always Choice in Struggle

And finally, the most important thing we need to know about choice when it comes to
building our resilience is whatever problem or struggle is going on in our lives, there is
always some choice involved.

The choice may be obvious—school is horrible, I’m experiencing this because I chose to
go to school. Or it may be subtle—I’ve got a dysfunctional family and my parents treat
me like crap. I did not choose my family, but my choice is in when, how often, and in
what manner to engage with them.

A huge mental shift that’ll get us started taking control over Type 2 pain is recognizing
the presence of choice in our struggles.

People avoid doing this for two reasons: comfort and sympathy.

First, admitting our role in choosing our problem implies our responsibility to fix it,
to do something about the situation. This is stressful, scary, and difficult. It’s easier and

Resilience 14
LESSON 02: CHOICE AND PERSPECTIVE

more comfortable to just throw our hands up and say “I can’t do anything about it, the
world is unfair.”

Second, being the victim gets us a lot of sympathy, and that feels good. It’s a natural human
tendency to enjoy and appreciate the sympathy that comes from us being victimized.

But we can legitimately be a victim and enjoy the sympathy, while also recognizing our
choices and empowering ourselves with them.

Empowering Ourselves With Choices

With every problem in life, there are three categories of choices that we make:

1. Choices we made in the past (that led to the problem)

2. Choices in the present (how we’re responding to the problem)

3. Choices in the future (how we’ll let this problem affect us)

Let’s say I walk down a dark alley one day and get mugged.

• The choices I made in the past are deciding to walk on that street and
have my phone out in a dodgy neighborhood.

• The choices I’m making in the present are whether to let the mugger take
my phone or to fight back.

• My choices in the future include whether I’m going to call the police and
press charges, how I’m going to let this experience influence my worldview,
will I ever walk down that street again.

Notice, however, that I’m not talking about fault in any of this. Choice does not imply
fault.

Resilience 15
LESSON 02: CHOICE AND PERSPECTIVE

When people think about choice, they immediately jump ahead and assume that means
fault. “I chose to walk down that deserted alley late at night, so it’s my fault I got mugged.”

But this is not the case. Choice and fault have nothing to do with each other. There are
bad things that will happen to me that may or may not be my fault—it’s not my fault
I got mugged. But I still made choices—past, present, and future—and have to take
responsibility for them.

In my book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, I call this, “The Responsibility/Fault
Fallacy.”

“
The fallacy states:

Just because it’s not our fault doesn’t

mean it’s not our responsibility.

If someone leaves a baby on our doorstep, it’s not our fault the baby got left there, but
it’s absolutely our responsibility to do something about the baby on our doorstep. We’re
always making choices, and we have to be responsible for those choices.

Choosing Our Pain

If you remember, Type 1 pain is the pain we didn’t have a choice about. It just happened
to us, like getting mugged on a dark alley. But we 100% have a choice about our Type
2 pain. We get to decide what narrative we use to explain why we got mugged, what it
means, how it’s going to affect our lives.

In other words:

Resilience 16
LESSON 02: CHOICE AND PERSPECTIVE

“
Type 1 pain may or may not be our
fault. Type 2 pain is always our
responsibility. We are always choosing
to construct the narrative that creates
our Type 2 pain.

And in the same way we can construct unhealthy narratives that hinder our lives—“I’ll
always be prejudiced against the ethnicity of the guy who mugged me, I’ll never go out after
dark again”—we can create powerful narratives that lead to positive outcomes.

Think of victims of violence who use their incredibly painful experience to create a
narrative of, “I’m incredibly hurt, but I’m going to channel this energy and emotion into
campaigning to stop this from happening to someone else.”

Note that this is not the same as “Think positive.” We’re not putting a positive spin on
the situation and saying to ourselves, “It’s a good thing I got mugged because that guy
needs my phone more than I did.” This is an oversimplification that misses out on the
ethical implications of the situation and causes us to essentially lose touch with reality.

The goal here isn’t to have a positive narrative about what happens, but to have a narrative
that creates positive outcomes for ourselves and others.

“I got mugged. That’s horrible and unfortunate. But I need to be more aware of my
surroundings, maybe learn self-defense to take care of myself and others. I need to talk about

“
my experience and raise awareness. I need to help the police catch this bad guy.”

Find the narratives that lead to positive

outcomes, and avoid the narratives
that lead to negative outcomes.

Resilience 17
LESSON 02: CHOICE AND PERSPECTIVE

Changing the narrative of our pain doesn’t only remove the second arrowhead. It can
also create positive future experiences and events that make it so our pain doesn’t last as
long. It can be the difference between suffering for a few months versus suffering for a
few years.

We want to create positive outcomes from whatever struggle we’re going through. We
want to be able to look back and say that at least something good came from it.

Resilience 18
LESSON 02: CHOICE AND PERSPECTIVE

Exercise

Part 1 of 2

Identify the narratives that are causing your Type 2 pain from
Lesson 1, and indicate which narratives are creating good or bad
outcomes for you and others.
Example: Let’s say my mother has cancer (my struggle). I can tell myself I should have spent
more time with her when she was healthy (an unhealthy narrative that creates guilt and
shame, thereby compounding my Type 2 pain). Or I can tell myself I’m not going to take her
for granted, so I’m going to spend every moment I can supporting her now and going into the
future (a healthy narrative that will create a positive outcome and alleviate pain).

Resilience 19
LESSON 02: CHOICE AND PERSPECTIVE

Exercise

Part 2 of 2

Write three other narratives that can lead to positive outcomes

to your struggle.

Resilience 20
LESSON 03

Finding
a Higher
Purpose
LESSON 03: FINDING A HIGHER PURPOSE

Creating new narratives that lead to positive outcomes is part of our “meaning making”
process, our attempt to find a profound, higher purpose for our suffering.

Finding a higher purpose for our suffering is one of the most fundamental lessons
established by human civilization. It’s provided the basis for centuries of religions and
philosophy.

You may have heard this famous quote from Friedrich Nietzsche: “He who has a why to
live for can bear almost any how.”

Viktor Frankl also explores this idea in his book Man’s Search for Meaning. He draws on
his experience in a World War II concentration camp to make the point that, even in
the harshest, most oppressive conditions, we can find a sense of meaning and purpose
that helps us survive.

Finding this higher purpose is a strategy we have access to at every moment in life. For
every struggle, we get to decide, “What end are we suffering for? What is the greater
purpose for which we are sacrificing?”

This ties in with resilience in a very important way. When we lack that higher purpose,
any sense of meaning for our suffering, then we simply suffer. It’s a pointless suffering,
with no value derived from it. But when we have a higher purpose, we imbue that
suffering with meaning and value.

“
Put another way:

A higher purpose turns meaningless

suffering into meaningful sacrifices.

Resilience 22
LESSON 03: FINDING A HIGHER PURPOSE

An obvious example is parenting a young child. You’d put up with your child screaming
every fifteen minutes and throwing tantrums, but you wouldn’t tolerate the same
behaviors in your colleagues or friends.

Just imagine going into work one morning, and your boss comes in, starts thrashing all your
stuff on the desk and banging his fist on your desk screaming. Would you tolerate that?

The difference between the two situations is that when your child behaves in this way,
there is a greater meaning and purpose to it. The child is growing and needs your
parental guidance to grow up and learn how to manage their emotions. Raising a child
and dealing with all this bullshit is a lifelong project that fulfills you in a way that dealing
with a boss throwing a tantrum doesn’t.

“I am guiding a life into the world, helping it mature and grow into a beautiful person.”

This is such a profound and beautiful purpose that you’re willing to deal with them
throwing fits and puking on the rug. You understand that’s an inherent sacrifice in the
project. When a friend does it, you don’t have that same purpose.

The point is to take whatever suffering or problem we’re experiencing and find some
higher purpose above our own pleasure or satisfaction to justify it.

Creating Your Higher Purpose

Sometimes the higher purpose is very obvious. I’m stressed out because I’m struggling
in a class at university and have to deal with my shitty professor. The higher purpose is
baked into the struggle here. I am there for my education, it’s an investment that will
pay off over the course of my life.

In these cases, it’s useful to simply remind ourselves consistently of the higher purpose:
“This is why I’m doing this. This is why it matters. This is going to help me in the long run.”
But a lot of times, there is no higher purpose. You get in a car accident and end up bed-

Resilience 23
LESSON 03: FINDING A HIGHER PURPOSE

bound in the hospital for three months. In this case, it’s up to you to generate the higher
purpose yourself through your reaction to the event.

How will you use those three months? How will you use this opportunity to think about
your life, change your perspective on priorities? Maybe you’ll spend the time reading a
dozen books that help you realize important things about your life. Maybe it makes you
realize how you’re taking many things for granted and there are people in your life who
are a bad influence on you.

A lot of times, finding a sense of purpose is something we have to pursue consciously.

You can sit in that hospital bed and feel sorry for yourself for three months. Or you can
use that time and ask: How can I come out of this a better person?

“
This is the question I consistently ask myself whenever I’m going through a tough time:

“How can I make this one of the best

things that ever happened to me?”

Asking yourself this question is crucial. In any misfortune, tragedy, or horrible

circumstances, ask yourself: “How can I make this one of the best things that ever
happened to me? What do I have to do for this to be true?”

This higher purpose can be religion or God. Or it can be some sort of activism or
political belief. Or it can be a relationship—”I want to be a good parent.” Or as simple
as, “I just want to be a good person, live a good life, have a good career.”

If you’ve never thought about this before, then that’s a big thing lacking in your life. In
that case, I recommend you check out my Finding Purpose Course, also available in the
Mark Manson Premium Subscription.

To bring it back to resilience: A sense of purpose turns pointless suffering into sacrifice.
And sacrifice imbues our life with a sense of meaning, makes everything seem worthwhile.

Resilience 24
LESSON 03: FINDING A HIGHER PURPOSE

Exercise

Now that you’ve created some better narratives around your

suffering, I want you to think very deeply: What is a higher
purpose for this struggle? What’s going to make this worth it in
the end? What can you do to make this one of the best things
that ever happened to you?
Think very hard. Be creative. Obviously, you’re not going to wake up tomorrow and
think: “This is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.”

For most of our struggles, we’re going to have to change many things over a long period
of time, and hopefully in five years we’ll be grateful that this horrible thing happened
to us. Begin by finding that higher purpose and writing out those steps in the roadmap
that will get you there.

Resilience 25
LESSON 04

Minimum
Viable
Actions
LESSON 04: MINIMUM VIABLE ACTIONS

We’ve talked about which narratives we should be creating around our problems and
finding a higher purpose to make our sacrifice meaningful. Now let’s talk about which
kind of narratives to not create.

The same way creating a useful narrative or finding a sense of purpose in our suffering
can help us be more resilient, creating bad narratives around our suffering can make us
shit the bed.

Perhaps the biggest problem I see in people who are trying to handle problems in their
lives or feeling overwhelmed by everything that’s going on is they tend to make a lot of
unconscious assumptions about their problems.

For example, they get in a big fight with their partner and suddenly start imagining
divorce lawyers showing up. Or they screw up at work and start freaking out that they’re
going to be unemployed and homeless.

We all tend to get a little dramatic when problems arise in our lives. We get taken over
by our emotions and our mind immediately starts generating narratives of the worst
fucking thing possible, which of course just makes everything even more painful. It’s
that second arrow.

“
In Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, this is often referred to as “Catastrophizing:”

Catastrophizing is taking a small

problem in life and imagining it to be
as wide and damaging as possible.

In a sick way, catastrophizing is trying to fulfill that quest for meaning. It’s trying to
give ourselves that greater sense of purpose. If a single fight with our partner over the
toothpaste tube makes us think that we’re going to get a divorce, that gives us something
very important to think and worry about in our life.

Or, if being sick and missing a couple of days of work makes us start thinking about how

Resilience 27
LESSON 04: MINIMUM VIABLE ACTIONS

we’re going to be unemployed and homeless, that also imbues that daily boring struggle
with a sense of grand cosmic purpose.

The problem is that, in giving ourselves a false sense of meaning, catastrophizing makes
everything worse. In fact, it’s potentially the least helpful form of narrative we can adopt
when trying to deal with a problem in our life.

We Have No Clue

The fact of the matter is, when there’s a problem, we don’t know exactly how influential
it’s going to be.

Our fight with our partner about the toothpaste tube can easily be just another little
fight about the toothpaste tube. Maybe we didn’t get enough sleep last night. Maybe
we’re taking out frustration from work on our partner for something stupid. 99% of the
time this is going to be the case.

Or, maybe we’ve been harboring huge relationship problems for decades and they’re
finally coming out on the toothpaste tube.

We don’t actually know the significance of our problem until we’ve lived with it and seen
the consequences, until we’ve investigated and talked about and tried to understand it.

Minimum Viable Actions

What this means in practical terms is that when we have a problem in our relationship,
we should focus on the problem, not the whole relationship. If we screw up at work, we
should focus on the screw-up, not our whole career.

Put another way, we should cross the bridge of those imagined catastrophic consequences

Resilience 28
LESSON 04: MINIMUM VIABLE ACTIONS

when we come to it. Because the fact is most of them are going to be illusory.

Focus on the problem. Focus on the thing that’s right in front of us and that we can affect
here, in this moment.

“
The best way to accomplish this is something I call “Minimum Viable Actions:”

“Minimum Viable Actions” is doing

the smallest, simplest thing in this
moment to make things better.

Minimum Viable Actions have all sorts of benefits in various areas of our lives. They can
be a way to successfully direct an emotion in a positive direction. They are useful for
overcoming procrastination and anxiety. They’re useful for figuring out if something has
a greater sense of meaning or purpose for us.

And they’re useful for resilience. Because they keep us focused on the present, prevent us
from catastrophizing, from inventing narratives about our suffering that aren’t necessarily
true, thereby compounding our Type 2 pain.

Solve the toothpaste problem today, worry about the relationship problems tomorrow.
Solve the problem at work today, deal with your career problems tomorrow. Don’t
conflate the two. Don’t confuse the two to be the same thing. Sometimes the toothpaste
tube is just a fucking toothpaste tube.

The beauty of Minimum Viable Actions is that they generate a sense of momentum.
When we solve that one little thing, it gives us more confidence and inspiration to start
approaching and tackling the big things.

And in fact, what we end up discovering is that each big life problem is really just a
bunch of small problems stacked on top of one another. So if we get in the habit of
continually pursuing a Minimum Viable Action, the big problems will eventually take care
of themselves.

Resilience 29
LESSON 04: MINIMUM VIABLE ACTIONS

Exercise

Part 1 of 2

What is the smallest positive step you can take to improve upon
your suffering right now?
It can be something as simple as texting somebody an apology, promising yourself to
wake up early tomorrow, going for a 30-minute walk around the block.

Part 2 of 2

REAL-LIFE

Go and fucking do it.

Resilience 30
LESSON 05

Finding
Allies
LESSON 05: FINDING ALLIES

In the late 19th century, neurologist-turned-psychologist Sigmund Freud made a

discovery through working with his patients that everybody’s problems came down to
repression—i.e., they were not expressing their desires or emotions in a natural and
healthy way.

Although Freud took the idea a bit too far (see: little boys want to have sex with their
mothers and kill their fathers and, therefore, smoke too many cigarettes), he had
discovered a powerful tool to manage our psychological wellbeing: talk therapy.

The idea behind talk therapy is simple: Sitting down and talking about our thoughts and
feelings for an extended period of time in a safe environment causes those thoughts and
feelings to lose their power over us.

In other words:

Pre-verbalization: We feel controlled by our emotions.

Post-verbalization: We feel in control of our emotions.

It almost doesn’t matter how or why we verbalize our emotions, what matters is we’re
verbalizing them to people or in situations where we feel safe and secure, where we’re
being empathized with.

This could be talking to a friend or a therapist, journaling, etc. The point is we’re sitting
down and explicitly putting our thoughts or feelings into words.

None of this probably comes as a surprise, yet it’s astounding how many of us don’t do it.

Resilience 32
LESSON 05: FINDING ALLIES

It’s All About Relationships

Psychological research consistently shows happiness is almost directly proportional to

the quality of close relationships people have in their lives.

Close relationships essentially mean having people in our lives that we feel comfortable
sharing our problems and feelings with. It’s the friend we can go sit with cradling a glass
of wine and unload the shit that happened to us that week. It’s the family member we
can call up crying who will listen and sympathize and tell us everything’s going to be OK.

The more of these people we have in our lives, the better we’re going to be able to
manage our emotions and the more resilient we’ll be when problems arise.

“
In short:

Better relationships equal more

resilience.

This network of trusted confidants doesn’t just benefit us because we’re able to share our
feelings and unload the burden of those feelings. It’s also useful because those people can
often help us.

Our parents will not only sympathize with our problems at work, but they can also offer
advice on how to deal with our work issues based on their decades of experience. Same
with a friend we turn to after a nasty break-up who’s lived through one before.

Having not just the emotional support, but also the logistical and intellectual support of
the people around us makes everything we deal with that much easier.

Resilience 33
LESSON 05: FINDING ALLIES

Find Your Allies

The goal of this lesson is to get you to take inventory of your relationships. How many
of these people are your “allies” that you can rely on in times of trouble?

Exercise

Part 1 of 5

Write down all of the close relationships in your life, people you
speak to regularly. Then ask yourself: If I went to them with a
problem, how helpful would they be? Would they be there
emotionally? Would they offer advice or support?

Resilience 34
LESSON 05: FINDING ALLIES

Tally up your list. Ideally, you should have at least half a dozen people in your life you
feel comfortable taking at least some of your problems to.

If it turns out you have no people you can turn to, that’s a serious issue. I’d recommend
you check out the Healthy Relationships Course, also available in the Mark Manson
Premium Subscription, to get to work on building more close relationships in your life.

The more allies you have, the more support you will get and the more resilient you will
be in the face of adversity.

We Are Not Alone

The other reason having these allies is important—cheesy though it sounds—is to

remind us that we’re not alone.

Every time we suffer through something, our mind warps our perception to make it feel
as though our form of suffering is completely unique, that nobody else has ever gone
through it before. This is bullshit.

“
There is not a single problem on
this earth that nobody else has
experienced.

In fact, most problems we go through in life—losing a loved one, the ending of a

relationship, failing to achieve certain goals or dreams, falling victim to addiction or
compulsion, failing somebody in our life—are the same problems everyone experiences.

Because our feelings are so intense and profound, we convince ourselves that nobody
understands what we’re going through, nobody has had to deal with a problem this
difficult before.

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LESSON 05: FINDING ALLIES

Yet when we sit down and tell our allies about what we’re going through, we quickly
discover that everybody goes through this stuff. Just this simple knowledge that we’re
not the weird ones—that we’re not fucked up—is reassuring.

Three Rules to Get Support

Now that you’ve got your list of allies, I want you to start connecting with them when
you have a problem, lean on them for support.

There are better and worse ways to do this. I’m going to give you a few rules to help you
better connect with these allies and receive the support and sympathy that you seek.

» RULE #1: DON’T BE A WHINER

Don’t whine or complain.

There’s a subtle difference between telling someone about our situation and complaining
about it. When we’re complaining, we’re not just saying “I have a problem.” We’re saying,
“I have a problem and I shouldn’t have that problem,” “This isn’t fair,” “I don’t deserve
this.”

The idea that we don’t deserve our problems is bullshit. We all have problems. We all
make choices all the time and some of those choices will be fallible, and we’re always
going to be responsible for them. Whether we deserve them or not isn’t the point.

Thinking we don’t deserve our problems is a dangerous mental path to go down and will
actively interfere with people’s ability to support you (not to mention they’re also not
going to like you very much).

The key to getting the help we need is to eliminate the expectation that we shouldn’t
have to suffer. Life is suffering. Focus on finding solutions and improvements.

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LESSON 05: FINDING ALLIES

» R U L E # 2 : S H A R E Y O U R P R O B L E M S U N C O N D I T I O N A L LY

Don’t go to your ally expecting support back. Don’t approach your friend thinking, “I’m
only going to tell you if you’ll agree to help me.”

This is a dick move and puts an unnecessary amount of pressure on the other person.
You don’t know what the other person is going through in their life, how able or willing
or emotionally secure they feel to offer you support.

Emotional support is only valid if it’s given willingly. It needs to be a gift.

When you approach the people in your life, simply share your problem. You can ask for
help, but it needs to be OK for them to say no. None of that “I thought we were friends
and you’re supposed to help me” bullshit.

» RULE #3: HIRE A PROFESSIONAL

If you’ve made that list of allies and feel like you don’t trust anyone on the list to be there
and help you, then you need to find a professional to support you when the going gets
tough—be it a therapist, a psychiatrist, a counselor, a pastor.

Even if you do have a good group of allies in place, having a therapist can also be helpful.

The reason for this is that a lot of people will want to support and help you, but they’re
not emotionally healthy themselves and their advice will suck.

Therapists, on the other hand, are trained professionally to provide support in a way
that maintains healthy boundaries. So there is no risk of your helper’s issues getting
intertwined with yours.

I often tell people to think of therapists not as emergency room doctors that you visit
when shit hits the fan, but as dentists that you go to for regular checkups to keep up
your mental hygiene.

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LESSON 05: FINDING ALLIES

If you’re in doubt and wondering whether you should see a therapist, you should
probably get one.

Ultimately, an effective way to increase your resilience is to find allies in life who will
listen and support you, and to learn to verbalize your thoughts and feelings to those
people when problems do arise.

Exercise

Part 2 of 5

Pick at least one ally to talk to about your struggle. Outline very
specifically: who it is, how you will approach them, where you
will talk to them (a call, a coffee, an office, etc.).
That person can be a friend, a family member, a therapist, etc.

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LESSON 05: FINDING ALLIES

Exercise

Part 3 of 5

Outline your strategies of approach. How will you frame your

problem and ask for support?
Make a bulleted list of what exactly you’re going to say. This list will make it easier for
you when it comes time to have the conversation.

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LESSON 05: FINDING ALLIES

Part 4 of 5

REAL-LIFE

Have the conversation.

Part 5 of 5

Once you’ve spoken with the person, come back and write down
how it went.

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LESSON 06

What
If You
Liked It?
LESSON 06: WHAT IF YOU LIKED IT ?

By this time, you’ve learned about the choices you’re making as part of your struggle and
the narratives you’re creating. You’ve created a higher sense of purpose for your suffering
and taken a Minimum Viable Action. You’ve found your allies and talked through your
shit and made it lighter for yourself.

In this final lesson, I want to talk about two concepts that dig a little deeper and are
more long-term: enjoyment and identity.

Enjoy Your Struggle

A lot of people want to get fit but can never seem to keep up an exercise routine. I was
one of those people, until one day a friend gave me one of the best pieces of advice I’ve
ever gotten: Unless you find a way to enjoy exercise, you’re never going to stick with it.

It’s so simple, yet it blew my mind. I had never thought of it that way.

And this is true for almost anything in life, not just exercise. Unless you enjoy the long
hours and huge financial risks that come with being an entrepreneur, you’re not going to
succeed. Unless you enjoy the thousands of hours of practice and putting yourself out
there only to be rejected time after time, you’re not going to become a successful musician.

In The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, I talk about finding the pain you want to sustain.
This is what gives you an advantage in life. It can be applied to all sorts of situations—
whether it’s exercise, diet and nutrition, relationships, our career, setting goals.

We tend to assume that if something is difficult or painful, it must suck in every way
possible. But that’s not true. There are plenty of things in our lives that are difficult and
painful, but we can also find a way to enjoy them.

So the question is:

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LESSON 06: WHAT IF YOU LIKED IT ?

“
How can we make this struggle fun?

Can we gamify it in some way? Can we create goals and benchmarks to meet on our way
there? Can we bring someone else in to make us accountable?

The things we’ve been doing in this course—acknowledging the choices we’re making
in our struggles, creating new narratives, discovering Minimum Viable Actions, finding
allies and talking about our problems—these are all ways to make the struggle more fun
and interesting for ourselves.

Simply put, if we’re doomed to inevitably suffer from problems throughout our lives,
we might as well find ways to make them interesting and enjoyable. It’s not just about
choosing interesting problems or choosing problems we enjoy having, it’s also about
finding ways to enjoy the problems we do have.

Be That Person

The last thing I want to talk about is identity.

A lot of the interplay that happens when we’re struggling with something has a lot to do
with how we see ourselves. In the last lesson, I talked about whiners who believe they
don’t deserve to suffer.

The whole point of this course is to undo that mentality. We don’t know if we deserve
to suffer or not. We don’t know if it’s supposed to be easier or harder than it is. We don’t
know if it’s fair or not. It’s up to us to write the narrative that leads to positive outcomes.

Resilience 43
LESSON 06: WHAT IF YOU LIKED IT ?

“
You write the narrative around the
meaning of your suffering.

The most important narratives we write are those we write about ourselves.

What I found when I was working on problems in my own life was that, as the years
wore on, I started to define myself as somebody who enjoys being challenged, somebody
who’s good in a crisis, somebody who thrives in a certain amount of uncertainty and
chaos.

And once I saw myself as that person, I became that person.

“
This is due to a funny trick in our psychology:

The way we see ourselves is the way

we wish to be seen by others.

As soon as we see ourselves as someone who thrives on challenge, who’s resilient and
enjoys enduring the pain and struggle, we’ll start trying to prove that to the world. We’ll
be motivated to show the world how incredibly resilient we are.

“I’m the kind of person who eats shit and then smiles about it, and I want everybody to
know that.”

As we start to be validated for this identity, it begins to take hold. And eventually we
reach the point where we’ve fully assumed this identity: We’re able to be resilient without
even thinking about it, without having to do any of the exercises in this course.

Start constructing that identity for yourself. What does the version of you look like who
enjoys enduring and overcoming struggle, who doesn’t give a shit whether you deserve it

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LESSON 06: WHAT IF YOU LIKED IT ?

or not and just gets on with it? What does that person look like, and how can you start
stepping into that identity?

Exercise

Part 1 of 2

Think back to your original struggle that you began the course
with and write down:
- Has the problem gotten better? Has it gone away?
- How much progress have you made? What has your
progress looked like?

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LESSON 06: WHAT IF YOU LIKED IT ?

Part 2 of 2

What is your biggest takeaway from this course?

What is the one thing you want to remember forever?

Resilience 46
You’re
Done!
YOU’RE DONE!

Congratulations, you’re done with the course!

Hopefully, by now the struggle you started out with has become more manageable, or
has gone away entirely. If it hasn’t, though, not to worry.

The concepts and strategies we’ve talked about throughout this course are things that we
never master. We merely get better at them as time goes on. So we need to practice the
strategies consistently and regularly remind ourselves of the concepts.

This course is designed to be repeatable. If you’ve gone through it once and chipped
away at the issue but still feel like you’re not completely there, come back in a couple
weeks. Give it another go. Maybe new perspectives will pop up, realizations of new
choices, new narratives that can be created.

Feel free to come back to this course at any time and see if it takes you further. Come back
with a different problem. Maybe go fuck up your life a little so you’ll have something to
do the course again with. (Shit, did I say that out loud?)

In any case, I hope you’ve gotten a lot out of these videos. That’s it for now. Thanks for
doing this course.

Now go practice being more resilient and smile at every shitstorm life throws at you.

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Notes
NOTES

Use this space to write down your darkest secrets, deepest fears, and maybe also your
reflections on the course.

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NOTES

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NOTES

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NOTES

Resilience 53