In 2023, my publisher offered me $5 million to write my next book.
I said no.
From 2016 to 2022, I was in full-blown author mode. Writing, touring, promoting. It felt like one never-ending deadline—and by the end of it, I was completely burnt out.
By 2022, I felt drawn back to entrepreneurship. The creator space had changed dramatically. AI was emerging. Everything was moving fast—and writing a book all of a sudden felt like the slowest, least relevant thing I could do.
The problem was, I was still on the hook for another book. A big one. With a massive payday.
I had an impossible decision to make: Turn down the money and work on what I want? Or take the money and spend the next year or two cashing the checks?
My agent warned me:
“If you don’t write this book, there’s a very good chance they’ll cancel the contract. You’ll lose the $5 million. And you’ll have to return the $1.25 million they already paid you.”
Let me tell you: It does not feel good to give $1.25 million back to somebody after they’ve given it to you.
But I knew the book wasn’t the move. By this point, I had learned the hard way: when you take money over meaning, you just burn yourself out and end up producing a worse result.
So this time, I listened to my gut.
I turned down the money.
I gave back the advance.
And eventually I started building what would become my new business: Purpose.
When you’re clear on what matters to you, decisions have a way of making themselves. And this was no different.
For me, that meant solving the problem I’d been obsessed with for years:
How do you make deep, personalized growth accessible to everyone—regardless of time, income, or access?
With Purpose, that’s what we built.
I’m sure I’ll write another book at some point. When it’s the right time. For the right reason. Hell—when I feel the purpose behind it.
But right now, building Purpose is what I actually give a sh*t about.
And I can’t ignore that.
You can try Purpose for free to see if you like what I gave up $5 million and 52 weekends to work on.
But I’ll also leave you with this question: What’s one opportunity you already know you need to walk away from, even if it costs you?
Discover how to build a better email routine with ADHD to stay organized, follow through more easily, and keep your inbox under control.
The post How to Build a Better Email Routine with ADHD (Part 2 of 3) appeared first on Marla Cummins.
Episode Summary If you’ve ever opened your calendar and felt overwhelmed, guilty, or just plain confused, you’re not alone. A lot of adults with ADHD struggle to make traditional calendar systems work, even though they know they need one. In this episode, I explore why that happens. I’ll walk you through some of the hidden...
The post Top 5 Reasons Your ADHD Brain Struggles with Calendars appeared first on Marla Cummins.
Episode Summary Getting support for ADHD at work can feel risky, especially if you’re unsure whether to disclose. In this episode, Marla talks with neurodivergent HR expert and former Amazon leader Kate Broeking about how professionals with ADHD can advocate for what they need, protect their performance, and navigate the process with clarity and confidence....
The post Can You Get ADHD Support at Work Without Disclosing? appeared first on Marla Cummins.
Hey party people! It’s Mark Manson, and today I want to talk about Dr. Jordan Peterson and his books, “12 Rules for Life” and “12 More Rules for Life.”
I’ve had the pleasure of chatting with him on his podcast and even got some F-bombs out of him. But what really stuck with me was the idea of creating our own rules for life—guiding principles and codes that help define us as individuals.
So, without further ado, let me share my rules for life.
Disclaimer: These are MY rules for life, not a prescription for everyone. Take them or leave them, but let’s dive in.
The first rule is taking responsibility for everything in your own experience, even if it’s not your fault.
This concept comes from existentialism, specifically Jean-Paul Sartre. He believed that in every moment, we’re making choices and that this constant choosing can be a burden.
To avoid this responsibility, we often blame others or adopt their values. Sartre called this “living in bad faith,” when we avoid responsibility and live for others rather than ourselves.
On the other hand, living authentically means making conscious choices based on our own principles and values. This idea of personal responsibility is essential for self-improvement and emotional health.
It’s crucial to understand that responsibility doesn’t equate to fault. Bad things happen, but it’s our responsibility to deal with them and move forward.
The second rule is that there’s no such thing as a bad emotion—only bad reactions to emotions. Emotions are normal human functions, and what makes them good or bad is how we respond to them.
Emotional intelligence or emotional skill is essential in managing our emotions, and we all have our strengths and weaknesses.
Being open to experiencing emotions without judgment is the first step to emotional health. The second step is expressing these emotions in a healthy and non-damaging way.
A note: While it’s great that public figures are becoming more open about their emotions and mental health, we should avoid glorifying or judging them based on these emotions. Emotional vulnerability is essential, but let’s not lose sight of the fact that we’re all just human.
The third rule is that every action and decision you make should be motivated to improve lives, both yours and others’. It’s about having a value towards radical growth and always maintaining the intention of growth and improvement.
These three rules—radical responsibility, radical acceptance, and radical growth—are simple, straight to the point, and pretty much impossible to live up to.
But that’s the point: good rules for life should require constant effort. Otherwise they wouldn’t be for life, would they?
Ever find yourself drowning in a sea of negativity, wondering how you can escape the relentless tidal wave of self-doubt and judgment?
Well, you’re not alone. We all suffer from negative thoughts, and it’s about time we learned how to deal with them effectively.
In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore three steps that can help you manage negative thinking, accept failure, and ultimately achieve more of your goals.
One of the most important things we can do when dealing with negative thoughts is to accept that failure is a natural and necessary part of life. We often forget that failure is a concept that we invent in our own minds, setting arbitrary benchmarks that, when not met, make us feel like losers.
For example, consider your financial goals. If you decide that you need $50,000 to be happy and you only achieve $40,000, you’ll feel like a failure. But if you set your goal at $40,000 from the start, suddenly you’re a success.
It’s crucial to understand that the goalposts we set for ourselves are often arbitrary and malleable.
The first step in managing negative thoughts is to hold those mental images and standards a little more loosely. Nothing ever turns out quite as good or as bad as we expect. Our minds have a tendency to exaggerate and amplify certain feelings or expectations.
Remembering that, like everyone else, you’re full of shit sometimes, can help you keep things in perspective.
Learning to forgive yourself for your mistakes and failures is a necessary component of managing negative thoughts. Often, the difference between people who suffer from negative thoughts and those who can move on is the ability to let go of self-judgments.
To begin practicing self-forgiveness, separate the action from the intention. Most of the time, when people make mistakes, they genuinely intended to do something good. Focus on that intention and try to understand the motivation behind it. Once you can empathize with your own motivations, you’ll find it easier to forgive yourself.
Next, draw a lesson from your failure. Ask yourself what you can learn from it, how you can do better next time, and what will prevent you from making the same mistake again.
By deriving value from your failures, you’ll start to see them as opportunities for growth rather than reasons to beat yourself up.
One of the most dangerous traps people fall into is judging their negative thoughts with even more negativity. This creates a vicious cycle that can be difficult to break. For example, feeling insecure about being insecure, or getting anxious about feeling anxious.
The key to breaking this cycle is to simply not judge negative thoughts negatively. Understand that it’s normal to experience anxiety, insecurity, and other negative emotions. Accepting these thoughts and feelings as part of the human experience can help you break free from the spiral of negativity.
Our culture’s obsession with positive thinking has created unrealistic expectations of success and happiness. It’s essential to get more comfortable with the negative aspects of life and understand that they are a necessary part of personal growth. Embracing the negative allows us to derive the positive lessons and experiences that come with it.
So it’s time to accept that negative thoughts are not only inevitable but also useful in helping us grow as individuals. By embracing failure, practicing self-forgiveness, and not judging our negative thoughts with more negativity, we can learn to navigate through life with more ease and less misery.
I’m on an old man rant today.
The world’s a shitfest, and something needs to be said: Opinions are like assholes, everyone’s got one, and most are full of shit.
So, here’s my argument: people need to have fewer fucking opinions.
In the good old days, people had more humility and respected that not everything was perfect. Authority was based on credentials and expertise. You had to earn the right to be heard. But now, thanks to the internet, everybody’s an expert on everything.
The problem is that we’re all drowning in information, and this overload causes us to mistake the quantity of knowledge for the quality of knowledge. And that’s where we all get into trouble—we pay attention to everything and believe that every opinion is worth considering.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a psychological phenomenon that states that the less people know about a subject, the more confident they are in their knowledge. Conversely, the more people know about a subject, the more they doubt their knowledge.
It’s a weird paradox, but it makes sense: the more time you spend with a subject, the more aware you become of everything we don’t know and understand.
The internet magnifies the Dunning-Kruger effect. It allows anyone to post anything, anywhere, at any time, to be read by anyone. The result is an explosion of overconfidence and misinformation, making it difficult for people to navigate the sea of opinions.
Having low expertise opinions is dangerous for two reasons. First, anything you believe can be confirmed with a Google search. It doesn’t matter who you are or how crazy your belief is, you’ll find something online that tells you you’re right.
Second, and more importantly, we’re now influencing each other with our misguided views. In the past, if you believed something crazy, it was your loss. Now, with all the outlets for sharing opinions, misinformation can spread like wildfire, making it difficult for people to know what to trust.
In David Foster Wallace’s classic novel, Infinite Jest, there’s a movie that is so entertaining that anyone who views even a small portion of it will give up all desire to do anything else in life in order to keep watching. Throughout the book, characters who see it give up family, friends, careers, even eating and sleeping, just to continue watching the film.
The overarching theme of Infinite Jest is that it’s possible, both as an individual and as a society, to be too entertained. And much of the book’s 1000+ pages are about the absurdity of such a society. Wallace wrote Infinite Jest in the early 1990s, a time when televisions were just starting to get dozens of channels, news was being broadcast 24 hours per day, video games were taking over the minds of young kids, and blockbuster movies were earning unheard of amounts of cash at the box office each summer.
At the time, Wallace had just gone through a recovery program for alcohol and drug abuse. Yet, despite getting clean for the first time in his adult life, he noticed something strange: he couldn’t stop watching television.
Wallace seemed to understand that as media multiplies, so does competition for attention. And as competition for our attention multiplies, content is no longer optimized for beauty or art or even enjoyment—but rather for its addictive qualities. When there are two TV channels, the channel doesn’t really have to worry about you clicking away, they just make the best show they can. But when there are 200 channels, suddenly that channel must do everything it can to keep you watching as long as possible. Wallace saw this problem coming decades in advance, and with his personal understanding of addiction based on his recovery experience, he seemed to grasp the addict culture we’d all soon be a part of.
Today, we regularly mistake this addictive media for entertainment. There’s some psychological function deep in our brains that tells us, “Well, I just spent six hours watching this show, I must like it a lot.” When, no, its script is actually a mediocre piece of hot trash and you’re being manipulated by cliffhangers and bad writing for hours on end to keep watching. The same way you get hijacked into scrolling through social media way more than you’d actually like to, your brain gets hijacked to watch “just one more episode” to find out if so-and-so really died or not.
In social media, this “it’s addictive, but I also kinda don’t like it” phenomenon has been recognized and discussed to death. But in other areas of media and entertainment, we haven’t caught on yet.
Streaming services and Hollywood are the obvious culprits here. How many more mediocre Marvel Universe movies do we need to prove this point? How many more bad Star Wars spin-offs? How many bad Netflix shows with every episode ending in a cliffhanger? Everyone complains about how Hollywood doesn’t have any new ideas anymore. Well, there’s a reason nothing new is getting made: endlessly adding content to the same well-worn storylines keeps people hooked. Constantly playing to people’s sense of nostalgia and remixing classic genres is a risk-free way of guaranteeing viewership.
Music is in a similar place. For a while now, market research on music streaming services has found that people spend more time listening to old music instead of new music and the trend on this is in the wrong direction. Music lovers are voting with their mouse buttons and those mouse buttons are going back in time, not forward.
Veteran music producer Rick Beato has made a number of videos lately talking about how popular music the past few years has gotten simplified to the point where it’s one or two chords and a single melody, repeated over and over for two or three minutes. No chorus. No bridge. No variation. No build-up or release. Just an endless hodgepodge of catchy sounds repeated, one after another.
Part of this is because the economics of music streaming is such that artists have incentive to not create the best songs or albums possible, but rather to create as many small, simple songs that prevent you from clicking away as possible. It’s created an artistic environment where it’s better to have 200 decent, listenable songs rather than 20 brilliant songs.
A similar problem plagues YouTube, where the biggest creators rack up millions of views doing inane things like opening a thousand Amazon boxes or giving away cars to their friends, over and over and over again. On the one hand, it’s not that interesting. On the other, you find yourself mindlessly clicking on the next video, and the next, and the next, and the next.
When everything is measured in terms of engagement, content will be optimized for addictiveness. Not entertainment or artistic merit. Not intellectual substance or creativity. Pure, plain addictiveness. That means we, the consumers, get a higher quantity of more predictable, less innovative, less interesting art in our lives.
In the realm of art and music and film and television, this is really annoying and frustrating. It requires each of us to sift longer and harder to find something new and great. But where this optimization for addictiveness gets dangerous is another part of culture that I want to talk about… *takes a deep breath* …politics.
I’ve written before about how most people in the United States agree about most things, yet somehow our political parties and government continually find ways to do things most people don’t like. Many pundits have attributed this inconsistency between the public’s desires and the government’s actions with theories about the primary system or entrenched special interests or polarizing social media.
But what about this? Politicians—like Hollywood executives, pop stars, and YouTube creators—are incentivized to generate more engagement. Not great results. Just more engagement, all the time. Therefore, their actions are not optimized to produce smart policy or common sense bills or a shrewd compromise, but instead to grab and hold our attention as long as humanly possible.
David Foster Wallace saw this coming too. The president of the United States in Infinite Jest is a former pop singer who obsesses over his television ratings, thinks policy discussions are too boring and considers war with Canada based on how good his photo ops would be in military camo fatigues. In the book, terrorist groups run rampant, as the battlefield is not for territory or resources, but for eyeballs and headlines.
Ultimately, nobody can manage our attention but ourselves. We can get mad at Netflix or Spotify or the Senate. But ultimately, these systems are loose reflections of our own attention habits shining back at us. Change our attention, change the systems. There’s an old saying that people “vote with their feet.” Well, today you need to vote with your eyeballs and mouse clicks. Don’t watch the next episode of that poorly written piece of garbage that keeps teasing you with characters almost dying. Don’t listen to the next half-assed album with 27 different two-minute tracks. Don’t click on clickbait. Don’t mindlessly scroll through TikTok and YouTube, rewarding people for attention-grabbing stunts. And don’t watch or respond to politicians and pundits who try to blather on and on about pet issues but never actually get anything done.
In the chaotic, entertaining mess of Infinite Jest, there is the story of Don Gately, a recovered alcoholic who would literally rather die than relapse into his substance abuse. When I first read the book years ago, Gately’s storyline seemed out of place. Amid all this futuristic mayhem of short attention spans and insanely addictive entertainment and neurotic teenagers, Gately’s narrative seemed like an oddly conventional story of personal triumph over one’s demons and an ability to sacrifice oneself for others.
What I realize now is that Wallace wrote the character of Don Gately as an example of what we would all need to aspire to become: recovered addicts. People who can cut themselves off cold turkey, who can turn off the drug. People who can manage their own attention and not fall victim to endless streams of mindless engagement. People who can step above the fray of political addiction and demand substance over bluster. And not just for our own sake. For everyone else’s as well.
Last weekend, Will Smith walked on stage at the Oscars and slapped Chris Rock for making a joke about his wife. Since that moment, my phone and inbox have been inundated non-stop with people (friends, family, readers, journalists) wanting my “take” on the situation. After all, I just spent three years co-writing a book with Will about mastering one’s emotions. What the hell?
First, let’s begin with the obvious: What he did was unacceptable. What I write here is not meant to justify or excuse his actions. He has already apologized to Chris and others in a public statement. These are simply my personal thoughts and observations, since so many have asked for them.
Second, let’s get my biases out of the way. I am no longer professionally involved with Will. We have no solid plans to work together on anything else at the moment. Other than a couple short texts, I have not seen or spoken to him since our book tour ended in mid-November. That said, I do really like the guy and consider him a friend. I also like many of the people who work for him and consider them friends.
To the people who have written me long screeching emails asking why I associated myself with such a horrible person, who have claimed that I am now untrustworthy for working with him, who have criticized me for not publicly crucifying the guy: kindly go fuck yourself.
To those of you who have claimed that his actions have now tarnished my body of work: you clearly have not understood anything about my work.
Back in 2018, when his team contacted me about his book, my number one condition for working with Will was that his book be candid about his flaws and failures as a person. For my entire career, I have argued that it’s in confronting the worst aspects of ourselves and being open about them that we find growth and help inspire growth in others. I had no interest in presenting a beautifully polished book about a guy who never fucked up and won at everything. I wanted to dig deep into the life of one of the most universally beloved people on the planet and look at what failures and insecurities made him tick.
And for those of you who read the book, his actions last Sunday will not strike you as unfamiliar. The book had extensive discussion of his deep insecurities around failing to protect the women in his life. We talked about the culture of violence of his neighborhood and family growing up. We wrote candidly about his relationship to fighting and how, particularly when he was young, he had a propensity to start physical altercations unnecessarily. We discussed his relentless perfectionism and how he sometimes achieved that perfectionism through intimidation and fear of those around him.
Maybe you all missed the memo, but you were put on alert months ago. Literally on page one of the book, it says:
What you have come to understand as ‘Will Smith,’ the alien-annihilating MC, the bigger-than-life movie star, is largely a construction—a carefully crafted and honed character—designed to protect myself. To hide myself from the world. To hide the coward.
It feels impossible to talk about this incident without also discussing our culture of celebrity worship. Every time something like this happens, you see people dogpile on the offending celebrity with a gleeful moral righteousness, “OMG WiLl, I uSeD tO hAvE sO mUcH ReSpEcT fOr YoUU.”
Really? The guy who pretends to blow up aliens for a living?
I guess I’ve never understood celebrity idolization. Hell, I expect these people to fuck up and disappoint us. After all, they’re under 100x more scrutiny and pressure than any of us will ever be and many of them come from difficult backgrounds and struggle with mental health issues.
For years, one of the traps I’ve pointed out in my relationship advice is idealizing another person—to assume that because you love them, they must not have any problems whatsoever. In relationships, there’s a name for this: codependency. Codependency pretty much always leads to dysfunctional relationships and heartbreak.
Yet, people do this with the celebrities they love all the time. For some reason, we decide that just because a guy can shoot a basketball well, we expect him to be a great businessman, a great father, a great husband, a great community leader, to have informed and nuanced political views (that also match our own), to have upstanding ethics and little-to-no emotional dysfunction. Oh, and he has to do all this while never complaining.
Yet, it is these same codependent types that spend their lives idolizing strangers on screens who then become shocked—#ABSOLUTELYSHOCKED!!!—that so-and-so-with-the-basketball turns out to be… well, human.
It reminds me of an interview with the rapper Lil’ Wayne that I saw years ago. The interviewer kept obnoxiously bringing up the fact that Wayne had recently been arrested for drug possession, expecting Lil’ Wayne to show some sort of remorse or regret about it. Yet, he didn’t. Flummoxed, the interviewer finally asked him, “But what do you say to all of the young people out there who look up to you, who look to you to know how to live their own lives?”
Wayne responded with something like, “Man, if you need a rapper to tell you how to live, then maybe you ain’t really livin’ at all.”
The same way you can’t have a healthy loving relationship without accepting and even appreciating a person’s flaws, I would argue you can’t really be a “fan” of someone unless you’re also willing to accept and acknowledge that person’s shortcomings.
So, where does this leave us with Will? Can you accept and tolerate his shortcomings? As disappointed as I am with what he did, I can. But I have also seen his incredible generosity up front and close. I have studied the decades’ worth of wonderful things he has done for the people in his life, his community and his industry. I’ve been around him enough to know that his heart is in the right place and he’s embarrassed by what he did.
In our Twitter-driven world, I believe we’re over-optimized for moral judgment and under-optimized for forgiveness. Moral judgment comes easy and is rewarded with retweets and clicks. Forgiveness is difficult and doesn’t go viral.
Finally, I would like to point out that I took a lot of shit last month because of my piece about how people get worked up into a frenzy about stuff that doesn’t directly affect them and then quickly forget it and move on once their outrage becomes boring.
A lot of people interpreted the piece to imply that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine didn’t matter and proceeded to tell me how horrible of a person I was. Part of this was probably because I could have written things more clearly. But still, that was not my point.
The point was that 99% of the people losing their collective shit over Putin and Ukraine on social media will have likely forgotten or lost interest in it within a few weeks. And, indeed, that seems to be the case. How do I know? Because those are largely the same people freaking out and filling our news feeds about The Will Smith Slap these past few days.
Next month, it will be something else.
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