What Nobody Tells You About Achieving Your Wildest Dreams

You’d think selling 20 million books makes you satisfied with life. It doesn’t.

I started blogging in 2007. For the next 9 years, I woke up every morning and chased the dream of making money online.

More than 3,000 mornings in a row, I woke up inside a trash compactor. The only way to keep the walls from crushing me was to succeed. But for years, they kept closing in.

Then, in 2016, I published The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck.
I held my breath.

It started out okay, landed on the New York Times list, but quickly fell off.

But a few months later, something happened. The audiobook took off.

Then it got huge in Australia. Then the UK.

Then it landed back on the Times list, was selling 10,000 copies a week. Then 20,000. Then 30,000.

By mid-2017 my book was #1 literally everywhere. 12 different countries by my count. I was living my dream.

But here’s what nobody tells you about achieving your dream: the next morning, you wake up without a dream.

Instead of turning on my laptop and working toward a goal that day, I turned on my Nintendo and played Zelda for six hours.

After a few days of that, I remember thinking:

“What’s the point of all this? You worked for 10 years just to play Zelda all day?”

Take it from someone who got everything he thought he wanted:

It’s the wanting of the dream that is satisfying, not the having.

It’s great to achieve your dreams, but make sure you’ve diversified your dreams enough, across enough areas of your life, so that you never wake up one day without one.

See you Monday,
Mark Manson

#1 New York Times Bestselling Author
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