This is optimal living daily episode eight hundred and six. How do you measure your life part one by Mark Manson of Mark Manson net? And I'm just a molecule very own personal narrator, welcome optimal living daily OLD for short, old for shorter, where I narrate the best blogs I can get permission from, covering personal development, minimalism, productivity, all that kind of stuff. So today's post comes from Mark Manson, the author of a super popular, pretty new book called the subtle art of not giving a f I saw in the Dallas airport, and then Joss from optimal relationships daily found it in Amsterdam.
So he's all over the place. But it's been a while since I've narrated his stuff. So I'm excited to bring more to you. And this one's a bit longer than usual.
So I'll read the first half today and the rest tomorrow. So let's get right to part one and start optimizing your life. How do you measure your life part one by Mark Manson of Mark Manson dot net? In the early 1980s, a talented young guitarist was kicked out of his band.
The band had just been signed for their first record contract and they're preparing to record their first album. A week before recording began, they fired the guitarist. There was no warning. No discussion.
The guitarist woke up one day and he was handed a bus to get home. The guitarist was demoralized. He felt betrayed. No one considered his side of the story.
No one cared how he felt at the most crucial moment of the band's short career. He was abandoned by those he trusted the most. So he vowed to start a band of his own. He would start a band so amazing and so successful.
His old band would regret ever firing him. He becomes so famous that they would spend the rest of the lives thinking about what a horrible mistake they had made. His ambition would make them pay for their disrespect. He recruited even better musicians than before.
He wrote and rehearsed religiously. His desire for revenge fueled his passion. His rage ignited his creativity. Within a couple of years, his new band had signed a record contract of their own and was taking off.
The guitarist's name was Dave Mustane and the band he formed was called Megadeth. Megadeth would go on to sell over 25 million albums and tour the world many times over. Today, Mustane is considered one of the most brilliant and influential musicians in all of heavy metal music. Unfortunately, the band he was kicked out of was called Metallica.
Metallica has since sold over 180 million albums worldwide and they're considered by many to be the greatest heavy metal band of all time. And because of this, in a rare intimate interview in 2003, a tearful of Mustane admitted that he couldn't help but still consider himself a failure at times. Despite all he had accomplished, he was still the guy who got kicked out of Metallica. Tens of millions of albums sold, concerts performed in stadiums full of screaming fans, millions of dollars earned, and yet a failure.
This is where most articles say, Hey, don't compare yourself to others. Be happy blah, blah, blah. And then we also go over how great of a life lesson this is and go back to sharing funny pictures of Miley Cyrus on Facebook. But this advice is totally banal and petty.
Don't compare yourself to others. It's up there with just be yourself and act confident in terms of how useless it is. As humans, we're wired for comparison. It's an inevitable facet of our being.
We're constantly trying to gauge how we measure up to those around us. That guy is a better car than me. She is taller than me, but I'm prettier. I wonder how much money Bob makes and if his wife spends it all, gosh, I wish the people I work listen to me the same way they listen to Jake.
Comparison and the drive for status are innate parts of our nature. And that's unlikely to change anytime soon. But what we can change is the basis of those comparisons. What yard stick are we using?
We may not be able to stop measuring ourselves against others. But we can decide which yard stick we use to measure. A simple example, I don't make as much money as most executives and managers in the agricultural industry. By one metric, you could therefore say that I am less successful than they are.
And in fact, if you put me next one on an airplane, in a fancy restaurant, at a business conference, or in an expensive nightclub, those environments would reinforce my inferiority. By those yard sticks, I would clearly not measure up. Mr. VP of Monsanto is sitting in first class.
I'm not. I'm crammed in economy class between two crying babies and an obese pregnant woman. But I make a comfortable living helping people improve their lives while Mr. VP up in first class extorts his money from thousands of poor farmers around the world interfering with world food markets and helping perpetuate the poverty of millions of people in the developing world.
So first class or not, I'm gonna feel like I have a leg up on him because it's all in how you choose to measure success. I don't measure my success by displays of monetary wealth. I prefer to measure it based on social and global impact. Is that totally self serving and biased?
Absolutely. And that's the point, you get to choose how you measure success. Most of us are never told this is not something we pick up in school or church. In fact, most of our social systems are built with their own metrics of success built into them, which we are then expected and sometimes forced to follow.
Get good grades, make tons of money, go to church, buy nice things, raise a nice family, watch football, feint shock when Miley Cyrus shakes her on TV. Many of society's metrics are useful measurements for us. Many of them are not. It's vital that we remember that they're not absolute.
We shouldn't limit ourselves to them. Money is nice, but one can choose to see it not as absolute measure of wealth, but as a useful tool to help achieve true wealth. Religion gives billions of people's lives moral direction, but that doesn't require one to believe in religion to be a good moral person. Relationships and family are important, but lacking them doesn't make you any less valuable as a person.
Again, we get to choose and the beauty and the frustration is that we're all different. So most of the time our metrics will be different. How will you measure your life? Hear that in tomorrow's episode.
You just listen to part one of the post titled How Do You Measure Your Life by Mark Manson of Mark Manson.net. I'm constantly thinking about how to optimize my health, what supplements to take hours of sleep, what my diet should focus on. Superpower finally takes the guessing out of it. One simple lab test covers over 100 biomarkers in their app gives you a complete picture of your heart, liver, hormones, metabolism, even environmental toxins.
Plus it used to cost $499 right now. It's just $199. And head to superpower.com and use code old at checkout for an additional $20 off your membership. I do miss reading Mark stuff.
He has a unique take and doesn't like to recycle the same old stuff. I also like the story, Metallica, Megadeth makes it easier. Remember the moral story. And we hear more about how to measure your life in tomorrow's episode.
So with that, have a great rest of your day. Hope you have a great weekend and I'll see you tomorrow where we'll finish up this post and where your optimal life awaits.