This is one of the best absolute best self help books I have read. I would recommend it to any and everyone. Extremely simple and very front loaded with good advice on life in general.

Our culture today is obsessively focused on unrealistically positive expectations: Be happier, be healthier. Be the best, better then the rest. Be smarter, faster, richer, sexier, more popular, more productive, more envied, and more admired.

But when you stop and think about it, conventional life advice - all the positive and happy self-help stuff we hear all the time - is actually focusing on what you lack.

Ironically, this fixation on the positive - on what's better, what's superior - only servers us to remind us over and over again of what we are not, of what we lack, of what we should have been but failed to be. After all, no truly happy person needs to stand in front of the mirror and recite that she's happy. She just is.

The desire for more positive experience is itself a negative experience. And, paradoxically the acceptance of one's negative experience is itself a positive experience.

To not give a fuck is to stare down life's most terrifying and difficult challenges and still take action.

There's another sneaky truth about life. You can't be an important life-changing presence for some people without also being a joke and an embarrassment to others. You just can't.

People aren't just born not giving a fuck, In fact, we're born giving too many fucks. Ever watch a kid cry because his hat is the wrong shade of blue? Exactly. Fuck that kid.

I once heard an artist say that when a person has no problems, the mind automatically finds a way to invent some. I think what most people - especially educated, pampered middle-class people- consider "life problems" are really just side effects of not having anything more important to worry about.

What determines success isn't, "What do you want to enjoy?" The relevant question is, "What pain do you want to sustain?" The path to happiness is a path full of shitheaps and shame.

Who you are is defined by what you're willing to struggle for. People who enjoy the struggles of a gym are the ones who run triathlons and have chiseled abs and can bench press a small house. People who enjoy long workweeks and the politics of the corporate ladder are the ones who fly to the top of it.

Entitlement plays out in two ways:

1. I'm awesome and the rest of you suck, so I deserve special treatment.

2. I suck and the rest of you are awesome, so I deserve special treatment.