Mark Manson
Medellin, AT
Male, 28
I am a professional blogger, internet entrepreneur, and world traveler. I've been to over 40 countries and am currently working on my second book about long-term travel and how to work/live abroad. On my blog I write about self development and creating a unique lifestyle for yourself. Feel free to ask me anything.
A couple years ago, I had a regular feminist commentator who would often disagree with me respectfully. Although it didn't happen immediately, she slowly, over the course of months, influenced me to start considering other perspectives. Unfortunately, a lot of the reader influence happens because of the bad apples. For instance, if I try to teach a concept in a certain way and some guys with that problem are able to rationalize their way out of the advice, then it forces me to sit down and re-think how I'm explaining concepts. I enjoy good criticism (emphasis on "good") and my work has been criticized a bit over the years that has helped me shore it up and make it stronger. But I can't think of one single reader comment or email that changed everything for me. Most of the influence I've gotten from readers has been a slow, long-term progression.
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Ugh... good question. There are two that stand out: 1) I focused way too much of my dating advice on humor and coming across as cute and funny to women -- impressing them, really. Humor is nice and everything, but it's not the crux of attraction like I seemed to think for a while. Focusing on it so much also implies the idea that women must be impressed and entertained if they're going to like you, which is a terrible mindset to have. 2) That having sex with more women somehow changes you on a deep personal level, when in fact, sex is often shallow meaningless or even emotionally harmful. It's the same mistake most of the seduction industry makes, but I'm a little ashamed I bought into it so much wholeheartedly.
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Sometimes my parents call me up feeling really guilty when I do a post about my emotional baggage or childhood issues, haha. But generally, no. Most of the people either don't care, are mildly flattered, or never find out because they don't read me. The exception is girlfriends. My ex could get pissy/happy depending on how I referenced her in various posts. And the current girl I'm dating actually cried when she read a post I wrote about her (it was the good kind of cry). Honestly, it's surprising how little blowback or drama I've gotten considering how personal I do often get.
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I'm a night owl. Over the years, my sleep schedule usually ran from 4AM to 11AM or so. I usually made it a goal to be up by noon. Although the past few weeks I have been experimenting with polyphasic sleeping (google it), so I've been going to bed at 4AM and getting up at 7AM recently. Being up that early feels... weird.
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CrossFit Coach
Why is Crossfit so popular with women?
Fashion Model
How much do promo girls at convention booths get paid?
Bar Mitzvah DJ
What's the craziest thing you've seen at a bar mitzvah?
For articles and blog posts I set deadlines for myself because it's important to post content consistently and keep readers regularly engaged. For larger projects like books or products, I don't set deadlines but rather progress goals, i.e., "I want to write 5,000 words this week," etc.
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Yes, I do. One of the best pieces of advice I ever got related to this actually came from my high school math teacher. He was an old dude and had been teaching for 40 years or something. And he told us that he noticed that when kids were stumped on the test, if they started writing something, anything, their brains would naturally start to trial-and-error their way into the problem and come up with something. But if they just sat there and stared and thought, nothing ever came of it and they only got more and more frustrated. On my site, I refer to this as the "Do Something Principle" I apply the same concept to writer's block. When I have writer's block I force myself to just start writing, even if I think what I'm writing is total shit and silly and useless, I just keep going. And inevitably what happens is I find one or two things I like and want to keep and then expand on those, and then that gives me new ideas and I continue until I'm over it. But it often takes a number of attempts. What I've found is that some article ideas give me a lot of writer's block while others come out of me effortlessly. Not completely sure why.
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It's penetrating further and further. I think it's inevitable, the social and economic changes happening, as well as the philosophies of the younger generations are converging on this type of lifestyle. It's kind of our version of the "free love" revolution I suppose. They are hard ideas to grapple with, but change always is. I think a decade from now people's attitudes towards this type of lifestyle will be quite different it will be considered a lot more mainstream.
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