Mark Manson on Success and Writing

Tim Ferriss

Or what stood out to you about how he worked with his team outside of that example that you just gave? This kind of validates what we were talking about earlier.

Mark Manson

The first thing that really stood out to me about his team was they've all been with him forever. And it was funny. I was talking to one. He's got one guy named Scototty who i love he's scotty's been in a few of his youtube videos lovely lovely guy and scotty was kind of joking with me he's like yeah i'm the new guy on the team I've only been here nine years everybody in like significant roles in his team have been with him since at least the fresh prince days many of them since since the 80s some of them since He was a kid. They're like childhood friends that he kind of put into the appropriate place. So that really blew me away. It also validated a lot of my beliefs around loyalty and trust. He also explained it to me once, as he said, he was like, look, when you become famous, nothing is scarce. If you want money, you can go get money. If you want parties, you can go get parties. If you want sex, you can go get sex. He said, the one thing that becomes more scarce as you become famous is trust. And so he said,

Mark Manson

Face-balling.

Tim Ferriss

And maybe I'm actually screwing up this thought exercise by making a three-parter. No, it's not a three-parter. But it is going to be a year or two of focus on this, which would be the seminal definitive book with Spielberg's full cooperation, full access, journals, everything, pay you some insane Amount of money, right? Twice the number that you would pick as a stretch goal that you're like, they'll never say yes to. He's like, I'll just pay you twice as much. Let's get this over with so we can get to the work. What do you do when stuff like that comes up? Because you know, it's going to come up.

Mark Manson

Maybe not that specifically.

Tim Ferriss

I'm using an absurd goal to drive the exercise, right? Because if it's like, ah, this is a B minus offer, easy to say no to, right? Because you want to strive to do an A plus in the things you just described.

Mark Manson

So how do you think about saying no to the stuff that will be tempting? For lower level stuff, I think the best way is to simply set rules. I've done that with speaking the last year or two. What are your rules? So

Mark Manson

If that offer came down the pipeline like tomorrow, my reaction would be, so I'm building out a video team. We're going to start scaling video content in 2023. I'm under another contract with Harper to do another book in 2024. So we can get started 2025 if you want. That would probably be the conversation, which I'm sure he would hate. The challenge there would be holding the line with that. If he started to push back and it's like, well, we'll offer you twice as much money as your Harper contract. It's like, you can't get seduced. You need to hold. It's like boundaries in relationships, right? It's like, if you tell somebody like, hey, this doesn't work for me, don't do it. And then they do it. It's really hard to not let it slide. Nobody wants to confront people in their lives and say, hey, that's upsetting to me. I told you not to do it. It's really hurtful that you did that. Nobody wants to have that conversation. But if you want to have good relationships, you have to have that conversation. And I think it's the same in the professional world. If you don't set those boundaries of like, okay, this is what works for me.

Tim Ferriss

And if you don't hold those boundaries, you just kind of end up in this no man's land.

Tim Ferriss

Thinkers or let's stick with writers first and we can then talk about other people who might be influencing your thinking. But are there any particular writers or books that you have been paying particular attention to in recent memory. I can buy some time by giving you examples. I would say there are the longstanding influences, which we don't necessarily have to focus on, but we could if they're still highly relevant to you in your life now. For instance, I believe that you've mentioned David Foster Wallace, Joan Didion, Hunter S. Thompson, and others, Stephen Pinker, Jonathan Haidt. In my particular case, for instance, I've had a number of books recommended to me, only one of the three of which I've read. It's 4,000 Weeks by Oliver Berkman, which I thought was a fantastic book. And there are a number of chapters that really stuck out as counterintuitively helpful, such as Cosmic Insignificance Therapy, which I ended up excerpting on the blog because I wanted To share it with people and share the book with people. Then there's another, which I suspect I will find interesting, which is called Die With Zero, which is by, I believe, Bill Perkins. I've not read it yet, but these are books that seem to cohere in a