I’m Mark Manson, and I’m Here to Give You Life Advice That Doesn’t Suck

A bit about me

I am a three-time #1 New York Times bestselling author whose books have sold over 14 million copies worldwide. My work has been translated into more than 65 languages and hit bestseller lists in sixteen different countries. According to Amazon Charts, my book The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck was the most-read non-fiction book worldwide in 2017.

I have been published or featured in over 50 of the biggest newspapers, magazines and television/radio shows on the planet, including: NBC, CNN, Fox News, the BBC, GQ, the Guardian, Time Magazine, Larry King, Dr. Oz, the New York Times, New York Post, USA Today, Buzzfeed, Vice, and Vox, among many others.

Men’s Health has called me, “unnervingly well-read” and the Sunday Times described my writing as, “like the local drunk who spent too much time in the philosophy section of the bookstore.” (I took it as a compliment.)

I’ve had the great fortune to speak to some of the most successful and innovative companies on the planet, including Google, Facebook, Microsoft, Blackstone, Stack Exchange, Xero and LinkedIn, among others.

I’ve also been a guest lecturer at a number of universities. I’ve delivered lectures about happiness at the University of Southern California and University of Vienna, and entrepreneurship at the University of Utah and the McCombs School of Business at the University of Texas in Austin.

But before I was an author, I was a blogger. I started a blog in 2007 and within a few years it was being read by more than a million people each month. Today, this site is read by more than 15 million people each year.

In 2015, I was one of the first brands to launch a paid subscription model that has since been adopted by most of the online publishing industry. In 2022, I launched The Subtle Art School, a collection of video courses that deep dive into all my favorite topics I’ve written about in my books and on my blog for nearly 15 years. I have never hosted ads and I never will. Currently, more than half a million people receive my free monthly newsletter Mindf*ck Monthly each month.

A little about me: I’m 38 years old. Before I was a writer, I was a failed musician. I grew up in Austin, Texas and moved to Boston to attend university. I graduated from Boston University in 2007 with a degree in International Relations and Business. I worked at an investment bank for three weeks and abruptly quit after a manager complained that I read too many books while in the office. This was my one and only attempt to ever have a “real job.”

I started my first online business in 2008. In 2009, I packed up some clothes and my laptop and lived all over the world for the next seven years, working remotely as I went. In that time, I visited more than 50 countries and spent significant amounts of time in about a dozen of them. I speak three languages well, and three others rather poorly. I met my wife while living in Brazil. We now live in Los Angeles.

My life’s mission is to improve the public conversation around personal development and happiness. My approach to this has been to disrupt the self-help industry and debunk many of the old tropes about positive thinking and the law of attraction and other woo-woo nonsense.

Instead, I share evidence-based life advice built off the back of decades of psychological research and proven therapeutic techniques. I also aim to share this information as widely as possible and as inexpensively as possible — as I believe mental health and self-improvement are not something for the few or the privileged, but rather they should be a right for anyone who has taken on the responsibility to improve themselves.

Many consider my work to be crude and unnecessarily confrontational. But I write the way I do because my goal is to challenge our cultural notions around emotions, vulnerability, shame, and sexuality. To do that effectively, sometimes you need to shock people or be contrarian.

Finally, life advice is most effective when it’s fun and unpretentious. Therefore, my goal is to entertain as well as sustain. To amuse as well as advise. To disseminate potentially life-changing information to millions in a way that is not only ethical and transparent, but at the same time, also hilarious.

In other words, to share life advice that doesn’t suck.