The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck

TV, hearing him on the radio, seeing posters of him in the streets and pictures
of him in magazines. They’d be flipping burgers somewhere, loading vans
from their shitty club gigs, fat and drunk with their ugly wives, and he’d be
rocking out in front of stadium crowds live on television. He’d bathe in the
tears of his betrayers, each tear wiped dry by a crisp, clean hundred-dollar
bill.
And so the guitarist worked as if possessed by a musical demon. He spent
months recruiting the best musicians he could find—far better musicians than
his previous bandmates. He wrote dozens of songs and practiced religiously.
His seething anger fueled his ambition; revenge became his muse. Within a
couple years, his new band had signed a record deal of their own, and a year
after that, their first record would go gold.
The guitarist’s name was Dave Mustaine, and the new band he formed
was the legendary heavy-metal band Megadeth. Megadeth would go on to
sell over 25 million albums and tour the world many times over. Today,
Mustaine is considered one of the most brilliant and influential musicians in
the history of heavy-metal music.
Unfortunately, the band he was kicked out of was Metallica, which has
sold over 180 million albums worldwide. Metallica is considered by many to
be one of the greatest rock bands of all time.
And because of this, in a rare intimate interview in 2003, a tearful
Mustaine admitted that he couldn’t help but still consider himself a failure.
Despite all that he had accomplished, in his mind he would always be the guy
who got kicked out of Metallica.
We’re apes. We think we’re all sophisticated with our toaster ovens and
designer footwear, but we’re just a bunch of finely ornamented apes. And
because we are apes, we instinctually measure ourselves against others and
vie for status. The question is not whether we evaluate ourselves against
others; rather, the question is by what standard do we measure ourselves?
Dave Mustaine, whether he realized it or not, chose to measure himself
by whether he was more successful and popular than Metallica. The
experience of getting thrown out of his former band was so painful for him
that he adopted “success relative to Metallica” as the metric by which to
measure himself and his music career.
Despite taking a horrible event in his life and making something positive
out of it, as Mustaine did with Megadeth, his choice to hold on to Metallica’s