Ignore Everything You’ve Read About Success (Except This)

Toss out the paint-by-numbers systems and follow these five steps instead

Mark Manson
Forge
Published in
9 min readAug 7, 2020

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Photo: Tais Policanti/Getty Images

Look, I know you want to be that big badass with the sweet-ass house and all the fancy letters after your name, but let’s be honest for a second: There’s no formula for getting that. Here’s what I can offer you instead.

Step 1: Ignore every step-by-step system for success, including probably this one.

Insane, spectacular success is achieved by doing something exceptional and extraordinary. To achieve something exceptional and extraordinary, you must — by definition — do something that few or no other people are doing or are willing to do.

Therefore, wild, insane, spectacular success can only be achieved by actively going against what others have done and believing you can do things that others believe they cannot do. Which means that anything that can be codified into a step-by-step system on the internet is full of shit and not going to help you achieve this kind of success.

Do you think Steve Jobs ever sat around Googling “How to revolutionize the way everyone communicates?” Fuck no. Do you think Thomas Edison went to the library looking for books titled How to Build

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Mark Manson
Forge
Writer for

Author of #1 NYTimes Bestseller ‘The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck’. OG Blogger. Psychology Nerd. I enjoy cats and whiskey. But not at the same time.