This is Optimal Living Daily, Episode 807. How do you measure your life? Part two by Mark Manson of markmanson.net and I'm Justin Molick. Happy Sunday and welcome back.
We're welcome for the first time if you're new here. This is where I simply read to you every single day of the year including weekends and holidays. So today's article is a continuation from yesterday. So if you're new here, I would recommend listening to yesterday's episode first, but if you're all caught up, let's get right to part two and continue optimizing your life.
How do you measure your life? Part two by Mark Manson of markmanson.net. How will you measure your life? So this raises the question, how will you measure your life?
Which metrics for success will you choose for yourself? This is not an easy question to answer. Back in my dating coach days, I worked with a lot of men who had poor metrics for success in their dating lives. They wanted to judge their quote unquote success based on how many women they slept with, how attractive the women they dated were, often utilizing a 10 scale to do so, how many women they could date at once, how young of a woman they could date and so on.
It's no coincidence that men with these metrics of success are the same ones who struggle with relationships. These metrics of success are problematic because they make harmful and unattractive behaviors appear economical and rational. For instance, if one's metric for success is to date someone who is rich or popular, then lying or faking one's identity may become a rational strategy in order to achieve that success. But these strategies are demeaning and also lead to poor relationships.
For men like these, I develop something I call happiness hypotheticals, which I've found to zero in on the utility of a success metric. For instance, to these men, I would often say, let's pretend you had a choice to date one of two women. One is stunningly gorgeous but is immature and not enjoyable to be around. The other one is average looking physically, but you're always happy when you were around her.
Which one would you choose to be with? Or it's a man who I have a fixation on their number of football partners, I would say, what would you rather do? Sleep with 10 girls who don't excite you or sleep with one who blows your mind night after night? The answers to these questions are blindingly obvious to most people, but people who have unhealthy fixations and their dating lives experience a lot of cognitive dissonance when trying to answer these hypotheticals.
The reason I bring these up is because once I moved beyond dating, I found that these hypotheticals apply wonderfully in most areas of life. For instance, here's a classic question for you to chew on. Would you rather be rich and work a job you hate or have an average income and work a job you love? This one is a little bit deeper.
Would you rather be someone famous and influential for something that doesn't matter, like say being on a reality TV show, or be anonymous and unknown despite working on something that is insanely important, like for instance, researching cures for cancer? Or for those who feel like they always need to be dating somebody, would you rather have nothing but toxic relationships? Or would you rather always be alone and emotionally healthy and happy? The happiness hypotheticals are powerful tools because they can show us what metrics of success actually matter for us.
Many of us think relationships will make us happy, but emotional health should be the goal in relationships, the side effect. Many think popularity will make them happy, but once you do something important and noble and let the fame be the side effect. As humans, we're all driven by happiness and meaning, but we often get caught up in unnecessary status concerns and superficial comparisons. When we create hypothetical either or situations between those comparisons and happiness, it can quickly sort our priorities out for us.
Tools such as these show us ways in which we can measure our own success. I'm not famous, but I improve people's lives. That makes me successful. You're single and alone right now, but you're happy and proud of yourself.
That makes you successful. We must take care in choosing the way in which we measure success, because the metrics we choose will determine all of our actions and beliefs. For instance, if you decide that watching 12 hours of television per day is your life's ultimate purpose and you're a greatest metric of success, then within a few months, you'll find yourself fat, lonely, and miserable, and unsuccessful. If you decide becoming the biggest drug dealer on your blog is your definition of success, then you may find yourself shot.
The metrics of success, which we choose, lead to long-term real-life consequences, and they determine everything. I challenge you to take a moment and set up happiness hypotheticals with some of your biggest drives and desires in your life, and see what answer comes up. What you'll notice is that bringing your yardstick off of external measures of success and onto internal states of happiness and meaning will lead to a more purposeful and fruitful life. Here's a recent example of mine.
Earlier this year, I found that I was getting really hung up on how many people were reading my book and my blog. I was getting frustrated because for the first time in my career, my readership had plateaued. I found myself tempted to pander to the lowest common denominator just to get more traffic. I had asked myself, would I rather be read by a massive audience for something I don't care writing about or a smaller audience for something I do care writing about?
That quickly put things in perspective. I need to write about the things which are important to me in my life first and look to cater that information to help others second. That's the only way that what I write will feel true. In the case of David Mustaine, he felt like a failure after decades of massive material success because his metric for success was a superficial one, being better and more popular than Metallica.
But what if Mustaine had instead chosen happiness as his metric? What if he decided to measure his success based on how widely and enthusiastic his music was received by people and how well he felt he was expressing himself artistically? That would have changed everything. You just listened to part two of the post titled How Do You Measure Your Life by Mark Manson of markmansand.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. Great post for Mark, definitely resonate with me, hopefully it did for you too. Like I mentioned yesterday, you can find Mark's book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving AF.
On his site or Amazon, it's got over 3000 ratings there, four and a half stars too, which is solid. It's a great way to show your support for him. And leave it there, have a great rest of your day. And I'll see you tomorrow for Minimalist Monday, where you're optimal life.
Now wait.