Mark Manson is known for his outspoken, brutally honest author known for his self-help advice publications. He is a two-time #1 New York Times bestselling author whose books have sold over 13 million copies worldwide. His work has been translated into more than 60 languages and hit bestseller lists in sixteen different countries. According to Amazon Charts, his book ‘The Subtle Art of Not Giving A …..’ was the most-read non-fiction book in 2017.
He has 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, Time Magazine, Larry King, Dr. Oz, New York Times, New York Post, USA Today, Buzzfeed, Vice, and Vox, among many others.
‘Men’s Health’ has called him, “unnervingly well-read” and the Sunday Times described his writing as, “the local drunk who spent too much time in the philosophy section of the bookstore.”
He has 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.
He has also been a guest lecturer at a number of universities and 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 he was an author, he was a blogger. He started a blog in 2009 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, he was one of the first brands to launch a paid subscription model that has since been adopted by most of the online publishing industry. He has never hosted ads and as he says in an interview he never will. Currently, more than half a million people receive his free weekly newsletter ‘Mind….’ Monday each week.
A little about ‘ Manson
Mark is 36 years old. Before he was a writer, he was a failed musician. He grew up in Austin, Texas and moved to Boston to attend university. He graduated from Boston University in 2007 with a degree in International Relations and Business. He worked at an investment bank for three weeks and abruptly quit after a manager complained that he read too many books while in the office. That was his one and only attempt to ever have a “real job.”
He started his first online business in 2008. In 2009, he packed up some clothes and his laptop and lived all over the world for the next seven years, working remotely as he went. In that time, he visited more than 65 countries and spent significant amounts of time in about a dozen of them. He speaks three languages well, and three others rather poorly. He met his wife while living in Brazil. They now live in New York City.
His life’s mission is to improve the public conversation around mental health and happiness. His 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, he shares evidence-based life advice built off the back of decades of psychological research and proven therapeutic techniques. He also aims to share this information as widely as possible and as inexpensively as possible — as he believes 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 made the decision to change themselves.
Confrontational
Many consider his work to be crude and unnecessarily confrontational. But he writes the way he does because his goal is to challenge the cultural notions around emotions, vulnerability, shame, sexuality and profanity. “To do that effectively, sometimes you need to shock people or be contrarian,” he thinks.
“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,” he says in an interview.