 Hello guys, and welcome to Brains Applied. My name is Willem, and this is my very first book review that I'm doing on this channel. And this first book will be The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck by Mark Manson. A counter-intuitive approach to living a good life. Now before I start off, I want to say a few things. The first one being, yeah, if my voice sounds a bit weird, or if you hear me sniffing, I'm really sorry, but I slept a bit too little the last few days and partied a bit too much. So yeah, now I'm having a cold. Also, I'm actually recording this video for the second time because I first recorded it yesterday, and I wanted to edit it today, and then I was like dude, I look sooo crappy and sleepy and messed up. So I'm recording it again. Also, what I did is actually I changed some of the camera settings because if you've seen my previous video, which I recorded with my camera, most of them looked pretty crappy and like the video encoding of YouTube doesn't really help either. So I actually tweaked the settings a bit, thanks to Google, and now actually the quality is going to be way much better. So hey, I hope you enjoy it. Last thing that I wanted to say is I decided to make my videos a bit less scripted. So well, I actually just wrote down a few points that I wanted to say, but I don't have an entire script. So this is going to be a bit more natural. This video is going to cost me less editing, but it might happen that I actually need some more time to think about something or that I make some pronunciation or other mistakes, because English is not my mother tongue. So that might have quite an influence. Now, if you like it or if you don't like it, just drop a comment below and just tell me why you don't like this new style of me presenting something. So let's get started with the book review. The subtle art of not giving a fuck by Mark Manson. Let's start with the design and the cover. The thing is Mark Manson is a blogger. If you've never read any work of him, I'll put the link to his blog in the description. And this is actually what you really notice in the book. For example, with the title, it's very catchy because the internet is filled with distractions and well, you need to have a catchy title and you need to catch the attention of your readers. And he does that with a book and it actually does a good job. It caught my attention as well. But you also notice it in his writing style that he actually is a blogger. Now, there's one thing which actually bothers me about the cover. If it's like a very neat design, but if you look closely, you can probably see it on the camera. Let me just check it. No, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah, OK, you see there a bit. So all the letters of the cover are printed in matte black ink. However, the stain here is printed in glossy black ink. And you actually notice quite a difference and I don't know why they did it. But it is really bothering my OCD. But hey, that's just my opinion now on to the content. In his book, Mark Manson actually makes one major point. And that is that people, whether you like it or not, whether you know it or not, can set their own goals in life. And to live a happy life, they should do it according to their own identity, to their own values. For example, let's say your parents want you to become a doctor. If you try, if you said being a doctor as your goal, but you don't really want to do it, you're probably never going to become happy. And he also gives an example in his book about social media nowadays and celebrities. Because on social media, we see a lot of celebrities being famous, being fancy, having a lot of fans, being rich, being pretty, that kind of stuff. And well, the thing is, especially with millennials nowadays, now in this case, everyone wants to become like a celebrity, being like, you know, the Instagram influencers go, go drink your daily Starbucks, going on a lot of trips, always wearing the latest fashion, that kind of stuff. And people said it as a goal, but it's not good. Because if you, for example, want to become a celebrity, you should enjoy the process of getting there and not the end result. You shouldn't do stuff just because you like the end result. You should do stuff because you actually like the process. For example, being a rock star, everyone at one point in his life wanted to become a rock star, having thousands of fans, having really cool, large, major concerts. I mean, I bet at one point in your life that you wanted to wanted to become a rock star and so did I. However, I didn't want to go through the process of playing for empty venues. I didn't want to go through the process of dragging your band's equipment everywhere and just doing it for days and days. And I didn't want to go through the idea of probably not making a proper living for years and years and not being sure whether you you will ever become famous or rich or whatever you want to achieve. So, yeah, that's the thing. If you want to become happy, you should set your own values, what you like and you should do it because you like the process and not just the end result. So that is the major idea of this book. And I think that Mark Manson does have a really, really, really good point here. And what I also like about the book is the writing style. As I said, it's very much like a blog. It's very nice. It's very easy. It's very light and open. But also it's sometimes a bit like crude and maybe you can even call it a bit profane. So that's pretty weird. It's pretty interesting writing style and also it's actually a pretty negative book. He's like, yeah, you know what? I don't care about you, but I just want to tell you my message. It's not like one of these self-help books where he's just like giving you that feel good idea. You know, it's just like a bitch slap in the face by reality. And even though it's a pretty negative book in the end, I actually felt that pretty optimistic and pretty positive about like what it said. I was like, yeah, you know what? He's right. I can actually do this. So, yeah, that's about the content of the book. There is, however, one or two things which I didn't really like. So this book is written like a blog post. The problem is that it is a two hundred pages long blog post. And like for the first half of the book, you're like, oh, this is so cool. And he tells all kinds of anecdotes and stories to to support his idea. But like halfway through the book, you become a bit like, yeah, you know, it's cool, but this is like more repetition. The book was, in my opinion, a bit sorry, a bit too repetitive. And I think he could have added some more, some newer insights in the second half as well. What I also missed is that I'm very much of a psychological and sciency guy. And while this book was more philosophical, so I missed a bit of like the background idea of our of sorry, of how our human psychology works and there was not included in the book. So that's a pity, in my opinion. Would I advise you to buy this book? I think I would. The thing is, it's like 15 euros. It's not too thick. It's it's easy to read. It's very nice to read. And especially if you're new to the field of like self development, especially if you're like stuck a bit in some kind of like victim mentality, you know, where you always blame others for the stuff that goes wrong in your life. I think this book might actually teach you a few things about life. So really buy this book or not buy it, but read it, just find it somewhere, go to the library, maybe maybe they have it over there. But yeah, you should read this book. That's it for today. I hope you like my very first book review. If you have any feedback, just drop a comment below, share this video with your friends. Also, follow me on social media. I have Twitter and Instagram. I'm especially active on Instagram. And one last thing is, of course, if you liked it, I will be posting a new video every Friday from now on. So press the subscribe button and the bell icon. And in that case, you will receive a notification when you when I sorry, when I upload a new video. So I think I will see you guys later. Oh, and don't forget to check out my previous videos. See you guys later.