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

Well, next time you’re at a swanky cocktail party and you want to impress
somebody, try dropping Manson’s law of avoidance on them:
The more something threatens your identity, the more you will
avoid it.
That means the more something threatens to change how you view
yourself, how successful/unsuccessful you believe yourself to be, how well
you see yourself living up to your values, the more you will avoid ever
getting around to doing it.
There’s a certain comfort that comes with knowing how you fit in the
world. Anything that shakes up that comfort—even if it could potentially
make your life better—is inherently scary.
Manson’s law applies to both good and bad things in life. Making a
million dollars could threaten your identity just as much as losing all your
money; becoming a famous rock star could threaten your identity just as much
as losing your job. This is why people are often so afraid of success—for the
exact same reason they’re afraid of failure: it threatens who they believe
themselves to be.
You avoid writing that screenplay you’ve always dreamed of because
doing so would call into question your identity as a practical insurance
adjuster. You avoid talking to your husband about being more adventurous in
the bedroom because that conversation would challenge your identity as a
good, moral woman. You avoid telling your friend that you don’t want to see
him anymore because ending the friendship would conflict with your identity
as a nice, forgiving person.
These are good, important opportunities that we consistently pass up
because they threaten to change how we view and feel about ourselves. They
threaten the values that we’ve chosen and have learned to live up to.
I had a friend who, for the longest time, talked about putting his artwork
online and trying to make a go of it as a professional (or at least
semiprofessional) artist. He talked about it for years; he saved up money; he
even built a few different websites and uploaded his portfolio.
But he never launched. There was always some reason: the resolution on
his work wasn’t good enough, or he had just painted something better, or he
wasn’t in a position to dedicate enough time to it yet.