Mark Manson - The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F__k (2016, HarperOne) - libgen.li

I grew up in a wealthy family. Money was never a problem. On the
contrary, I grew up in a wealthy family where money was more often used to
avoid problems than solve them. I was again fortunate, because this taught me
at an early age that making money, by itself, was a lousy metric for myself.
You could make plenty of money and be miserable, just as you could be
broke and be pretty happy. Therefore, why use money as a means to measure
my self-worth?
Instead, my value was something else. It was freedom, autonomy. The
idea of being an entrepreneur had always appealed to me because I hated
being told what to do and preferred to do things my way. The idea of working
on the Internet appealed to me because I could do it from anywhere and work
whenever I wanted.
I asked myself a simple question: “Would I rather make decent money and
work a job I hated, or play at Internet entrepreneur and be broke for a
while?” The answer was immediate and clear for me: the latter. I then asked
myself, “If I try this thing and fail in a few years and have to go get a job
anyway, will I have really lost anything?” The answer was no. Instead of a
broke and unemployed twenty-two-year-old with no experience, I’d be a
broke and unemployed twenty-five-year-old with no experience. Who cares?
With this value, to not pursue my own projects became the failure—not a
lack of money, not sleeping on friends’ and family’s couches (which I
continued to do for most of the next two years), and not an empty résumé.
The Failure/Success Paradox
When Pablo Picasso was an old man, he was sitting in a café in Spain,
doodling on a used napkin. He was nonchalant about the whole thing,
drawing whatever amused him in that moment—kind of the same way teenage
boys draw penises on bathroom stalls—except this was Picasso, so his
bathroom-stall penises were more like cubist/impressionist awesomeness
laced on top of faint coffee stains.
Anyway, some woman sitting near him was looking on in awe. After a
few moments, Picasso finished his coffee and crumpled up the napkin to
throw away as he left.
The woman stopped him. “Wait,” she said. “Can I have that napkin you
were just drawing on? I’ll pay you for it.”