If You’re Not Excited To Get Up In The Morning, It Might Mean…- Mark Manson

Duration: 14:59 2703 transcript words EN summary

Video summary

Mark Manson argues that a lack of excitement in the morning and natural tiredness at night indicates an absence of meaningful work rather than excessive stress from overworking. He contends that emotion is the most critical productivity system, countering the common dismissal of "do what you love" advice as cheesy clichés by asserting that passion makes practical differences: it increases resilience, improves feedback reception, and fosters a willingness to endure long hours for a cause one cares about. This emotional alignment serves as high-leverage fuel for achieving goals, whereas ignoring feelings in favor of relentless grinding leads to nihilism and unsustainable burnout within the modern productivity space. Manson illustrates this concept with his own career trajectory during the early 2010s when he was deeply passionate about blogging and creating content. As success mounted with book deals, movie offers, and world tours, he found himself saying "yes" to everything driven by a fear of missing out rather than optimizing for his core mission or values. This period resulted in writing three books and producing a film within four years, which ultimately drained his passion so severely that he required a full year off playing video games to recover. He reflects on how this intensity was not sustainable because it optimized for financial gain—chasing zeros on contracts—rather than the underlying purpose that had driven him throughout most of his career. The discussion extends to how people often develop toxic relationships with productivity, using busyness as a mechanism to outsource self-worth and avoid facing personal insecurities or existential loneliness. Manson cites Billy McFarland, founder of Fire Festival, as a prototypical example where the world's obsession with success would have likely overlooked ethical failures like deception and incompetence had they resulted in tangible popularity instead of failure. He notes that many productivity protocols focus on performative habits for those who are emotionally misaligned, whereas true efficiency correlates directly with enjoyment; when emotions are aligned, routines become unnecessary because everything takes care of itself naturally without the need for habit trackers or forced alarms. Ultimately, Manson admits to his own struggles as a workaholic and describes how deliberately decelerating allowed him to see that his busy calendar was merely a hedge against fear and a lack of self-esteem. He realized he had been using constant motion to avoid confronting feelings of insufficiency and scarcity mindsets, effectively telling himself "I'm so important because I have no time for you." This pattern also manifested in personal relationships, where being on the road six months a year served as an excuse to retreat from intimacy rather than addressing fears of vulnerability. By taking his foot off the gas, he was forced to find new sources of self-worth independent of external validation or professional output, acknowledging that true productivity stems from trading one's life for something deeply meaningful rather than chasing hollow metrics of success.

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If you aren't naturally tired at night and excited in the morning, then you probably haven't found something meaningful to work on. You're not stressed from doing too much. You are stressed from doing too little of what you care about. So, this this is a drum that I bang on endlessly uh to the productivity crowd and and I I feel like it just gets ignored, but I think emotion is the most important productivity system. Um there's a lot of and I think the reason it gets discounted is because there is a lot of cheesy cliched advice around like oh if you do what you love you never work a day of your life you know like [ __ ] like that. It's passion is practical. Like when you deeply care about something you're doing you're going to work on it longer. You're going to think harder about the problems. You're going to take feedback better. you're going to be more resilient. You're going to be willing to stay up at night, get up early on a Saturday or whatever. Like emotion is it is actually the highest leverage system within yourself towards whatever your productivity goals are. And I just feel like so much productivity advice is disembodied. It's like, you know, the the hustle culture [ __ ] of just like ignore how you feel. just grind, grind, grind. And yeah, it's like, oh, you know, stop being a [ __ ] like, you know, sleep when you're dead, date when you're dead, like whatever, go make a billion dollars. It It's What is it for? Like, if it's not for something, like, if you're not doing all this work for some greater cause, then then what the what the [ __ ] are you doing? Like, you might as well just hang out at the beach and play video games. Like, cuz cuz why not, you know? Like, Yeah, there there's a c there's a nihilism in a in the productivity space right now that like it really bothers me and um it cuz a I don't think it's healthy, but b I also think it's like just bad advice. Like the best advice is find something you really [ __ ] love and care about and give yourself to it. Um Bukowski's got this great line. He says, "Find what you love and let it kill you." And I just there's like so much beauty in that because when you find a craft or a trade or or a skill that like you deeply deeply care about or a mission that you deeply deeply care about, you are willing you become willing to trade yourself for that mission and and you are lit like when you trade your time you are literally trading your life for something. So, what are you going to trade it for? And what is the point of trade of making that trade? Get a billion dollars, you know, get get a hundred million followers. Like, what these what these [ __ ] do? Like, what does that mean, you know? So, I continue to bang that drum uh hopelessly. Hopelessly, yes. But I don't I don't get it I don't get invited to the to uh you know the same uh uh biohacking conferences that uh uh my contemporaries do. So uh Joe Hudson's got this wonderful line. He says enjoyment is efficiency. Yes. Uh that he looks at however much enjoyment I get out of doing a thing is just a direct correlate with how efficient I was at doing it. That the more that I enjoy something the more efficient I'm going to be. Dude, people and it's double-sided as well, right? Like the better you get at something, the more you fall in love with it. And the more you love something, the more patience you're going to have to get good at it. And so it's just like to me it's like the most obvious entry point, but I think a lot of people develop kind of like [ __ ] up relationships with productivity and work. Um, and I say this as like a bonafide workaholic. Well, I was going to say, you know, you have found something that you love. Mhm. And you have done it so much that it killed almost killed your passion or at least acutely killed your passion. You wrote three books in three years. Yeah. Three books. Three books in a movie in four years. Yeah. Yeah. Um and then needed to kind of just play PlayStation for basically a full year after that to recover. Yeah. But it's it's interesting because in hindsight I think the reason that happened is I actually lost sight of what what I was doing and why I was doing it. Right. So early in my career, uh, was blogging, doing the creator thing in the early 2010s. [ __ ] loved it. Book blows up, all these opportunities show up, big book deals, movie deal, you know, world tour, all this [ __ ] Start saying yes to everything cuz it's like, well, when's this going to come around again? and and basically gave three to four years of my life to a bunch of stuff that was really wasn't it wasn't optimizing for for what I cared about. It wasn't optimizing for for the mission that had driven me throughout most of my career. It was optimized for [ __ ] that's a lot of zeros on that contract. like I should probably say back I should probably say yes to that, you know, and and don't get me wrong, like it's I think it's okay to do that in in bits and spurts. Um, but it's not long-term sustainable. And I think a lot of people develop and it took me a number of years to kind of get back to what I love and appreciate about my work and like getting that that mission focus again. Um, but I I do think people often use productivity as like they develop like a toxic relationship with productivity. It becomes a a way to outsource their selfworth and and avoid dealing with a lot of these like simple truths that they don't want to admit about themselves. Um, and it's and you can definitely get we live in a culture that will gladly encourage that. Correct. Yeah. I mean, I've always thought about Billy McFarland, the guy that started Fire Festival. Yeah. It's the [ __ ] prototypical example of this. I always thought about if Billy McFarland had managed to string together a semi-coherent festival, he would have been hailed as the Steve Jobs of marketing. Yeah. The nothing could have changed or nothing would have needed to have changed in his motivation for doing it. his like shameless requirement for self-promotion, the deception that he was going through with his investors, the fact that he didn't know the he was the adult that didn't exist but saying that he did all the way down. The only issue that people had was that the rug got pulled out from underneath his obfiscation and his lies and his incompetence. But if he'd even just about managed to creep like a okay festival out, people are so seduced by success. The modern world praise at the altar of success so much that they would have happily forgiven or uh overlooked the things they did. We all know this. There's so many people that hold on to popularity not because people think that they're good or authentic or sort of genuinely being truthful, but because they're a rocket ship that's going up and to the right. and that sense of, huh, I don't think that that's where your productivity uh like uh pioneer uh should be at. I don't think that that's necessarily the person that you should be following. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. Um it's funny, too, cuz I I see so much of this this stuff and like so much productivity advice. It's funny to me. So much productivity advice is a actually catered to people who are using their productivity as a way to escape their problems, right? It's all about morning protocols and when to set your alarm and hey, do this thing in the first 5 minutes or whatever. And like I don't know, I look at that I'm like, okay, first of all, I'm up by 6 without an alarm and I can't [ __ ] wait to get to my computer. Like I'm like I don't have a routine. I'm like already awake. I'm awake because I'm excited. Like as soon as my eyes open up, I'm like starting to think about what I'm gonna do that day and I'm so excited that I just like I get out of bed and I'm in front of my computer within three minutes and like why would I use a protocol? Like why would I need like a habit tracker or like you know all this stuff like if the emotions are aligned like everything takes care of itself. Whereas if the emotions aren't aligned then you have to spend all this extra energy. It's like the performative thing right with people and relationships. It's like if the emotions aren't aligned, then you're like basically self- flagagillating to get yourself to perform all these actions that are ultimately performative. It's like, okay, I put in 12 hours today. I got these six things done. I hit these KPIs this month. Uh, you know, my new nighttime routine demands I do these six things. And it's like you know it there's a there's a certain healthy rhythm that like naturally emerges as with most things most things when you know the systems are aligned. That was a an interesting transition that I had you know we we had when we have done it was about a year ago when we did that. No it must have been a little over a year ago I think. Yeah it was a little it was like a year and a couple months. Okay. Um and that was me as in the trenches as I've ever been. You were going hard. Correct. Yeah. Um and since then have uh learned to back off a little bit, but in that as you as you take your foot off the gas or as you speed up um you sort of notice changes in life and you could make an analogy to sort of acceleration or deceleration in things, you know, um your net worth staying the same is kind of it's nothing. But it going up it's like ah there's a change and going down, [ __ ] you'll notice that too. Yeah. Um, one of the things that I noticed as I sort of purposefully tried to uh de uh decelerate uh delever uh some of the things that I was doing from then until now, which I've done real real successfully, uh was I had to face an awful lot more of the things that my obsession with productivity and being busy were hiding in the fog. Yeah. So, you know, my busyiness was certainly a hedge against uncertainty and fear and a lack of um importance and meaning and this desperate requirement for validation and uh a lack of self-esteem. It's like, how can I not be important? Look at how many calls I've got today. Like, the world the world need me. Look at how busy my calendar is. Like, my calendar is so [ __ ] busy. There's no way that I'm a worth worthless piece of [ __ ] It's impossible. It's simply impossible. So, yeah. Sure, there may be some echoes of existential loneliness in the in the background, but sorry, bro, I can't hear you. I'm blasting Sleep Token at 150 dibels. Like, that was a busy calendar was a hedge against existential loneliness for me. And it's a really good way to just continue to not to uh not see the lies that you're telling yourself, to, you know, not have to face the fears, the senses of insufficiency, the scarcity mindset, all of that stuff. It's like I'm so busy, bro, that I don't have time for that. Totally. And as you if you go, okay, I see that that's a pattern that almost everybody does and I'm going to I now have the opportunity maybe to choose to take my foot off the gas. You sort of feel that slowing as you kick forward and you go, "Okay, where do I take my self worth from now?" Because I used to take it from there. And now I have to realize maybe me believing that my importance, my self-importance was bolstered by my level of busyness was a lie. Uh, and that's a like that's a [ __ ] real to go through. Yeah, for sure. And I I str like again admitted workaholic here like this is this is something I struggle with too. The other thing I noticed and I don't know I'd be curious if this rings true for you. Um I've not been brought up to date on your your dating life. Um but it like I I see in friends that you know they're like perpetually single and or they like want to settle down but then they complain that like they they can't find the right person. And I'm like, "Well, dude, you're on the road like 6 months a year. Like, when was the last time you saw the same person twice?" And it's I think in some cases it that busyness again, it kind of comes back to that strategic incompetence. It's like, "Oh, well, I I can't figure out my dating life cuz I'm too busy. I'm It's a get out of jail free card, right? You've got you've always got one foot out of the door. So, if this thing doesn't work, well, it's not that much of a comment on my sense of selfworth cuz I wasn't that committed anyway." like I'm Yeah. It's not because I'm hopelessly bad at making somebody feel comfortable around me and scared of letting somebody see me. It's because I'm on the road 6 months at the end. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. I've seen that. I've seen that. I think I've done that not in my intimate relationships, but I've done that in like with like social and family relationships, right? It's like, uh, yeah, sorry I can't come home. I'm like touring Australia, you know. I'll see you next year. This episode is brought to you by Eight Sleep. If you struggle to stay asleep because your body gets too hot or too cold, this is going to help. It automatically cools down or warms up each side of your bed up to 20°. It's got integrated sensors that track your sleep time, your sleep phases, your HV, your snoring, and your heart rate with 99% accuracy. And it'll even start cooling or heating your bed for you an hour before bedtime. 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