Redefine Success and Break Free from Societal Expectations | Mark Manson

The Daily Motivation

Lewis Howes

Education, Self-improvement

4.8 • 893 Ratings

🗓️ 26 October 2025

⏱️ 9 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Leave an Amazon Rating or Review for my New York Times Bestselling book, Make Money Easy! Check out the full episode: https://lewishowes.com/podcast/mark-manson-what-people-dont-tell-you-about-success/ Manson challenges conventional notions of success and encourages listeners to question societal expectations and define success on their own terms. He emphasizes the importance of focusing on values, fulfillment, and personal growth rather than external achievements. Sign up for the Greatness newsletter: http://www.greatness.com/newsletter

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, my name is Lewis Howes and welcome to the Daily Motivation Show.
0:11.4	I did some mental jujitsu and I was asking myself, what's more valuable to the world?
0:17.0	Is writing a book that affects a million people a little bit or 10,000 very profoundly?
0:25.6	Deeply.
0:26.4	You know, who's to say which one of those two things is better or more important, more valuable?
0:31.4	Sure, selling a million copies is sexier.
0:35.3	You know, it gets you more attention.
0:36.7	You do more interviews. But there's a strong
0:39.4	argument that affecting 10,000 people very deeply is arguably a more valuable contribution to the
0:45.9	world. And so I started thinking of things in that way. It took me a long time to kind of detach
0:51.6	myself from that. When you're starting out as a writer, and this is probably
0:54.9	true with podcast and everything, it's like you love seeing the numbers go up. You know, it's like
0:58.9	every year, the number is higher than the year before. And it feels good. It motivates you. You feel
1:04.9	inspired. You're like, hell yeah, I'm growing. I'm getting better. And at some point, though,
1:10.5	like once that number gets high enough, you got to let go of it. You just, you've got to let go of it because it's not sustainable once it's that high, you know, and it's, it's, it's going to run out of oxygen. And so it, it was a difficult process to kind of get back to like step one, write a book I love. I started out started out I was like all right you know I got to
1:28.2	keep the train going you know and so I like started trying to write stuff that you know I thought
1:33.4	subtle art readers were going to really love it felt very empty it started to feel like a job forced
1:38.6	yeah which I didn't become an author to have a job I just kept scrapping it I'm like no like, no, no, no, no, no. This isn't going well. And eventually I'd just get back to like, okay, I need to write for myself first. Then once I have a book that I'm proud of that I think is great, then I can look at it and say like, okay, like how can we, you know, maybe change this or market this so that it'll sell a lot of copies.
2:02.6	You know, that's step two.
2:04.0	But step one, in a creative process, it always has to be about yourself first.
2:07.5	Otherwise, it's just, it's not art anymore.
2:10.8	How do we develop a sense of hope for ourselves?
	...

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