Mark Manson vs Gary John Bishop - The Battle of Potty Mouth Philosophers
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck vs Unfu*k Yourself
Think about the biggest fear you are facing right now. Maybe the project you’ve poured years into might fail. Maybe you think you will not perform up to your standard. Maybe everything you are afraid of will become true, and you are walking into a world of failure that will reveal everything you are insecure about.
Whatever it is, hold it in your mind. Feel it.
Now, two ideas. Just read and react.
Idea 1: You are afraid because you care about the wrong thing. You think you’re afraid of failure. You’re not. You’re afraid of what failure will say about you. You’ve fused your identity with the outcome. If the project fails, I’m a failure. If I don’t perform, I’m a fraud. That’s not fear. That’s a values problem. You’ve chosen to measure your worth by results you can’t fully control. Swap the metric. Measure yourself by what you’re willing to struggle for, not by whether you win. The fear doesn’t go away, but it stops meaning something about who you are.
Idea 2: You are afraid because you won’t shut up about it. You’ve been rehearsing your own failure for weeks. Playing the movie of everything going wrong, over and over, in a theater with an audience of one. You. And every screening makes you smaller. Here’s the thing: that fear isn’t a prediction. It’s just self-talk. And self-talk is not reality. You are not your thoughts. You are what you do. So do something. Anything. Send the email. Write the page. Make the call. Action is the only thing that shuts up the voice in your head. Not because the fear disappears, but because you’re too busy to listen to it.
Idea 1 is from Mark Manson. Idea 2 is from Gary John Bishop.
Which one hit harder? If you already feel it, you can vote now.
If not, keep reading. And come back later.
Mark Manson
Born in Austin, Texas and later moved to Boston, he was a dating coach before he was a self-help author. His first book was literally called “Models: Attract Women Through Honesty” (2011, self-published). He started blogging about relationships and life advice in 2008, built the blog to 2 million monthly readers by 2016, and in 2015 wrote a blog post called “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck” that became the basis for the book.
His philosophical influences are unusually serious for a guy with swear words on his covers. Existentialists like Nietzsche and Sartre, Viktor Frankl’s logotherapy, Stoicism. The Sunday Times described his writing as “like the local drunk who spent too much time in the philosophy section of the bookstore.” He took it as a compliment.
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck (2016)
Most-read nonfiction book worldwide in 2017 according to Amazon Charts. The thesis is anti-positivity. Stop trying to feel good all the time. Life involves suffering, so the question isn’t how to avoid it but how to choose suffering that’s meaningful to you. It’s not that you shouldn’t care about anything. It’s that you have a limited number of things you can care about, so choose wisely. Stop giving a f*ck about the things that don’t matter so you can give a f*ck about the things that do.
Core Ideas:
Not giving a f*ck doesn’t mean being indifferent. It means choosing what to care about carefully and letting everything else go.
Happiness isn’t a destination. Problems never go away. They just get upgraded. Happy people don’t have fewer problems. They have better ones.
You are not special. Accepting your ordinariness is liberating. It frees you from performing a life you don’t have.
Choose your suffering. What pain are you willing to sustain? That answer determines your life more than what pleasures you chase.
You are always choosing. Even when you feel stuck, you’re choosing to stay. Responsibility isn’t blame. It’s power.
Gary John Bishop
Born and raised in Glasgow, Scotland. That’s about all the personal backstory you get from him. He’s not a memoir guy. He became a Senior Program Director for one of the world’s biggest personal development organizations, and took that training background and developed what he calls “urban philosophy.” Tough-love personal development stripped of all the soft, inspirational fluff. Think of a Glaswegian bartender who also happens to have world-class coaching credentials telling you to get your shit together.
Unfu*k Yourself (2017)
The thesis is brutally simple: the only thing standing between you and the life you want is you. Not your circumstances. Not other people. Not your past. You. Specifically, your self-talk. The constant internal monologue that’s either building you up or tearing you down. Bishop structures the book around seven “power assertions”. Phrases you tell yourself to override the negative loop.
Core Ideas:
You have the life you’re willing to put up with. If it’s not what you want, you’ve been tolerating it. Stop tolerating.
Self-talk is everything. Change the conversation in your head, change your life.
You are not your thoughts. You don’t control what you think. You control what you do. Action defines you.
Take 100% responsibility. Things happened that weren’t your fault. What you do next is always on you. No exceptions.
Expect nothing, accept everything. Expectations are pre-planned disappointments. Let go of “should” and work with what is.
Comparison
I made it at the top. Go back to vote!
For Me
I really enjoy Manson’s writing. The fact that he chose to feature cuss words in life philosophy is genuinely bold, and it started a trend in the late 2010s with authors swearing up and down. Thankfully, that trend has died down by now.
But for me, Bishop’s core idea helped more. You might think I have all things figured out. This guy who writes and speaks for a career, builds a family he loves, must be living his dream life. His mind must be an inspiration buffet plus positivity symphony.
Nah, the opposite is true. I talk garbage to myself all the time. I let my biggest fears run through my mind nonstop, making me catastrophize every little setback into self-indictment.
The fears I wrote at the top of this article? That’s me. Right now.
That’s why having this Scottish guy yell at me, even cuss me out, is helpful. Sometimes you need a gentle coach who hugs you with encouragement. And sometimes you need a good verbal slap.
My vote goes to Gary John Bishop.
Slaps hurt. But once in a while, it can feel good.
It’s both and neither. For me there’s not really a winner here. You can take the good things from both of them. Sometimes it is a values issue, sometimes I just need to stop complaining and rehearsing disaster.
It's not important what others think of you. It's what you know about yourself to be true. Staying true to yourself and to know yourself is one of the the hardest things to accomplish because it means taking a good deep look inside. It's being honest with yourself about how you think, feel, act and react towards people, places and things surrounding you, events that happen that you can control and the others that you can't.
Of course it's important you remain consistent whether someone's watching or not.