CHAPTER 4 
 
The Value of Suffering 
 
In the closing months of 1944, after almost a decade of war, the tide was turning against Japan. 
Their economy was floundering, their military overstretched across half of Asia, and the territories 
they had won throughout the Pacific were now toppling like dominoes to U.S. forces. Defeat 
seemed inevitable. 
On December 26, 1944, Second Lieutenant Hiroo Onoda of the Japanese Imperial Army was de- 
ployed to the small island of Lubang in the Philippines. His orders were to slow the United States’ 
progress as much as possible, to stand and fight at all costs, and to never surrender. Both he and 
his commander knew it was essentially a suicide mission. 
In February 1945, the Americans arrived on Lubang and took the island with overwhelming force. 
Within days, most of the Japanese soldiers had either surrendered or been killed, but Onoda and 
three of his men managed to hide in the jungle. From there, they began a guerrilla warfare campaign 
against the U.S. forces and the local population, attacking supply lines, shooting at stray soldiers, 
and interfering with the American forces in any way that they could. 
That August, half a year later, the United States dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hi- 
roshima and Nagasaki. Japan surrendered, and the deadliest war in human history came to its dra- 
matic conclusion. 
However, thousands of Japanese soldiers were still scattered among the Pacific isles, and most, 
like Onoda, were hiding in the jungle, unaware that the war was over. These holdouts continued to 
fight and pillage as they had before. This was a real problem for rebuilding eastern Asia after the 
war, and the governments agreed something must be done. 
The U.S. military, in conjunction with the Japanese government, dropped thousands of leaflets 
throughout the Pacific region, announcing that the war was over and it was time for everyone to go 
home. Onoda and his men, like many others, found and read these leaflets, but unlike most of the 
others, Onoda decided that they were fake, a trap set by the American forces to get the guerrilla 
fighters to show themselves. Onoda burned the leaflets, and he and his men stayed hidden and 
continued to fight. 
Five years went by. The leaflets had stopped, and most of the American forces had long since 
gone home. The local population on Lubang attempted to return to their normal lives of farming 
and fishing. Yet there were Hiroo Onoda and his merry men, still shooting at the farmers, burning 
their crops, stealing their livestock, and murdering locals who wandered too far into the jungle. The 
Philippine government then took to drawing up new flyers and spreading them out across the jun- 
gle. Come out, they said. The war is over. You lost. 
But these, too, were ignored. 
In 1952, the Japanese government made one final effort to draw the last remaining soldiers out 
of hiding throughout the Pacific. This time, letters and pictures from the missing soldiers’ families 
were air-dropped, along with a personal note from the emperor himself. Once again, Onoda refused 
to believe that the information was real. Once again, he believed the airdrop to be a trick by the 
Americans. Once again, he and his men stood and continued to fight. 

Another few years went by and the Philippine locals, sick of being terrorized, finally armed them- 
selves and began firing back. By 1959, one of Onoda’s companions had surrendered, and another 
had been killed. Then, a decade later, Onoda’s last companion, a man called Kozuka, was killed in a 
shootout with the local police while he was burning rice fields—still waging war against the local 
population a full quarter-century after the end of World War II! 
Onoda, having now spent more than half of his life in the jungles of Lubang, was all alone. 
In 1972, the news of Kozuka’s death reached Japan and caused a stir. The Japanese people 
thought the last of the soldiers from the war had come home years earlier. The Japanese media 
began to wonder: if Kozuka had still been on Lubang until 1972, then perhaps Onoda himself, the 
last known Japanese holdout from World War II, might still be alive as well. That year, both the 
Japanese and Philippine governments sent search parties to look for the enigmatic second lieu- 
tenant, now part myth, part hero, and part ghost. 
They found nothing. 
As the months progressed, the story of Lieutenant Onoda morphed into something of an urban 
legend in Japan—the war hero who sounded too insane to actually exist. Many romanticized him. 
Others criticized him. Others thought he was the stuff of fairy tale, invented by those who still want- 
ed to believe in a Japan that had disappeared long ago. 
It was around this time that a young man named Norio Suzuki first heard of Onoda. Suzuki was 
an adventurer, an explorer, and a bit of a hippie. Born after the war ended, he had dropped out of 
school and spent four years hitchhiking his way across Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, sleeping 
on park benches, in stranger’s cars, in jail cells, and under the stars. He volunteered on farms for 
food, and donated blood to pay for places to stay. He was a free spirit, and perhaps a little bit nuts. 
In 1972, Suzuki needed another adventure. He had returned to Japan after his travels and found 
the strict cultural norms and social hierarchy to be stifling. He hated school. He couldn’t hold 
down a job. He wanted to be back on the road, back on his own again. 
For Suzuki, the legend of Hiroo Onoda came as the answer to his problems. It was a new and 
worthy adventure for him to pursue. Suzuki believed that he would be the one who would find 
Onoda. Sure, search parties conducted by the Japanese, Philippine, and American governments had 
not been able to find Onoda; local police forces had been scavenging the jungle for almost thirty 
years with no luck; thousands of leaflets had met with no response—but fuck it, this deadbeat, col- 
lege-dropout hippie was going to be the one to find him. 
Unarmed and untrained for any sort of reconnaissance or tactical warfare, Suzuki traveled to 
Lubang and began wandering around the jungle all by himself. His strategy: scream Onoda’s name 
really loudly and tell him that the emperor was worried about him. 
He found Onoda in four days. 
Suzuki stayed with Onoda in the jungle for some time. Onoda had been alone by that point for 
over a year, and once found by Suzuki he welcomed the companionship and was desperate to learn 
what had been happening in the outside world from a Japanese source he could trust. The two men 
became sorta-kinda friends. 
Suzuki asked Onoda why he had stayed and continued to fight. Onoda said it was simple: he 
had been given the order to “never surrender,” so he stayed. For nearly thirty years he had simply 

been following an order. Onoda then asked Suzuki why a “hippie boy” like himself came looking for 
him. Suzuki said that he’d left Japan in search of three things: “Lieutenant Onoda, a panda bear, 
and the Abominable Snowman, in that order.” 
The two men had been brought together under the most curious of circumstances: two well- 
intentioned adventurers chasing false visions of glory, like a real-life Japanese Don Quixote and 
Sancho Panza, stuck together in the damp recesses of a Philippine jungle, both imagining them- 
selves heroes, despite both being alone with nothing, doing nothing. Onoda had already by then 
given up most of his life to a phantom war. Suzuki would give his up too. Having already found 
Hiroo Onoda and the panda bear, he would die a few years later in the Himalayas, still in search of 
the Abominable Snowman. 
Humans often choose to dedicate large portions of their lives to seemingly useless or destruc- 
tive causes. On the surface, these causes make no sense. It’s hard to imagine how Onoda could 
have been happy on that island for those thirty years—living off insects and rodents, sleeping in the 
dirt, murdering civilians decade after decade. Or why Suzuki trekked off to his own death, with no 
money, no companions, and no purpose other than to chase an imaginary Yeti. 
Yet, later in his life, Onoda said he regretted nothing. He claimed that he was proud of his choic- 
es and his time on Lubang. He said that it had been an honor to devote a sizable portion of his life 
in service to a nonexistent empire. Suzuki, had he survived, likely would have said something sim- 
ilar: that he was doing exactly what he was meant to do, that he regretted nothing. 
These men both chose how they wished to suffer. Hiroo Onoda chose to suffer for loyalty to a 
dead empire. Suzuki chose to suffer for adventure, no matter how ill-advised. To both men, their 
suffering meant something; it fulfilled some greater cause. And because it meant something, they 
were able to endure it, or perhaps even enjoy it. 
If suffering is inevitable, if our problems in life are unavoidable, then the question we should be 
asking is not “How do I stop suffering?” but “Why am I suffering—for what purpose?” 
Hiroo Onoda returned to Japan in 1974 and became a kind of celebrity in his home country. He 
was shuttled around from talk show to radio station; politicians clamored to shake his hand; he 
published a book and was even offered a large sum of money by the government. 
But what he found when he returned to Japan horrified him: a consumerist, capitalist, superficial 
culture that had lost all of the traditions of honor and sacrifice upon which his generation had been 
raised. 
Onoda tried to use his sudden celebrity to espouse the values of Old Japan, but he was tone- 
deaf to this new society. He was seen more as a showpiece than as a serious cultural thinker—a 
Japanese man who had emerged from a time capsule for all to marvel at, like a relic in a museum. 
And in the irony of ironies, Onoda became far more depressed than he’d ever been in the jungle 
for all those years. At least in the jungle his life had stood for something; it had meant something. 
That had made his suffering endurable, indeed even a little bit desirable. But back in Japan, in what 

he considered to be a vacuous nation full of hippies and loose women in Western clothing, he was 
confronted with the unavoidable truth: that his fighting had meant nothing. The Japan he had lived 
and fought for no longer existed. And the weight of this realization pierced him in a way that no bul- 
let ever had. Because his suffering had meant nothing, it suddenly became realized and true: thirty 
years wasted. 
And so, in 1980, Onoda packed up and moved to Brazil, where he remained until he died. 

The Self-Awareness Onion 
Self-awareness is like an onion. There are multiple layers to it, and the more you peel them back, the 
more likely you’re going to start crying at inappropriate times. 
Let’s say the first layer of the self-awareness onion is a simple understanding of one’s emotions. 
“This is when I feel happy.” “This makes me feel sad.” “This gives me hope.” 
Unfortunately, there are many people who suck at even this most basic level of self-awareness. I 
know because I’m one of them. My wife and I sometimes have a fun back-and-forth that goes 
something like this: 
 
HER. What’s wrong? 
ME. Nothing’s wrong. Nothing at all. 
HER. No, something’s wrong. Tell me. 
ME. I’m fine. Really. 
HER. Are you sure? You look upset. 
ME, with nervous laughter. Really? No, I’m okay, seriously. 
 
[Thirty minutes later . . . ] 
 
ME. . . . And that’s why I’m so fucking pissed off! He just acts as if I don’t exist half the time. 
 
We all have emotional blind spots. Often they have to do with the emotions that we were taught 
were inappropriate growing up. It takes years of practice and effort to get good at identifying blind 
spots in ourselves and then expressing the affected emotions appropriately. But this task is hugely 
important, and worth the effort. 
The second layer of the self-awareness onion is an ability to ask why we feel certain emotions. 
These why questions are difficult and often take months or even years to answer consistently 
and accurately. Most people need to go to some sort of therapist just to hear these questions asked 
for the first time. Such questions are important because they illuminate what we consider success 
or failure. Why do you feel angry? Is it because you failed to achieve some goal? Why do you feel 
lethargic and uninspired? Is it because you don’t think you’re good enough? 
This layer of questioning helps us understand the root cause of the emotions that overwhelm 
us. Once we understand that root cause, we can ideally do something to change it. 
But there’s another, even deeper level of the self-awareness onion. And that one is full of fucking 
tears. The third level is our personal values: Why do I consider this to be success/failure? How am I 
choosing to measure myself? By what standard am I judging myself and everyone around me? 
This level, which takes constant questioning and effort, is incredibly difficult to reach. But it’s 
the most important, because our values determine the nature of our problems, and the nature of 
our problems determines the quality of our lives. 
Values underlie everything we are and do. If what we value is unhelpful, if what we consider 

success/failure is poorly chosen, then everything based upon those values—the thoughts, the emo- 
tions, the day-to-day feelings—will all be out of whack. Everything we think and feel about a situ- 
ation ultimately comes back to how valuable we perceive it to be. 
Most people are horrible at answering these why questions accurately, and this prevents them 
from achieving a deeper knowledge of their own values. Sure, they may say they value honesty and a 
true friend, but then they turn around and lie about you behind your back to make themselves feel 
better. People may perceive that they feel lonely. But when they ask themselves why they feel lonely, 
they tend to come up with a way to blame others—everyone else is mean, or no one is cool or 
smart enough to understand them—and thus they further avoid their problem instead of seeking to 
solve it. 
For many people this passes as self-awareness. And yet, if they were able to go deeper and look 
at their underlying values, they would see that their original analysis was based on avoiding respon- 
sibility for their own problem, rather than accurately identifying the problem. They would see that 
their decisions were based on chasing highs, not generating true happiness. 
Most self-help gurus ignore this deeper level of self-awareness as well. They take people who are 
miserable because they want to be rich, and then give them all sorts of advice on how to make more 
money, all the while ignoring important values-based questions: Why do they feel such a need to be 
rich in the first place? How are they choosing to measure success/failure for themselves? Is it not 
perhaps some particular value that’s the root cause of their unhappiness, and not the fact that they 
don’t drive a Bentley yet? 
Much of the advice out there operates at a shallow level of simply trying to make people feel 
good in the short term, while the real long-term problems never get solved. People’s perceptions 
and feelings may change, but the underlying values, and the metrics by which those values are as- 
sessed, stay the same. This is not real progress. This is just another way to achieve more highs. 
Honest self-questioning is difficult. It requires asking yourself simple questions that are uncom- 
fortable to answer. In fact, in my experience, the more uncomfortable the answer, the more likely it 
is to be true. 
Take a moment and think of something that’s really bugging you. Now ask yourself why it bugs 
you. Chances are the answer will involve a failure of some sort. Then take that failure and ask why it 
seems “true” to you. What if that failure wasn’t really a failure? What if you’ve been looking at it the 
wrong way? 
A recent example from my own life: 
 
“It bugs me that my brother doesn’t return my texts or emails.” 
Why? 
“Because it feels like he doesn’t give a shit about me.” 
Why does this seem true? 
“Because if he wanted to have a relationship with me, he would take ten seconds out of his day 

to interact with me.” 
Why does his lack of relationship with you feel like a failure? 
“Because we’re brothers; we’re supposed to have a good relationship!” 
 
Two things are operating here: a value that I hold dear, and a metric that I use to assess progress 
toward that value. My value: brothers are supposed to have a good relationship with one another. 
My metric: being in contact by phone or email—this is how I measure my success as a brother. By 
holding on to this metric, I make myself feel like a failure, which occasionally ruins my Saturday 
mornings. 
We could dig even deeper, by repeating the process: 
 
Why are brothers supposed to have a good relationship? 
“Because they’re family, and family are supposed to be close!” 
Why does that seem true? 
“Because your family is supposed to matter to you more than anyone else!” 
Why does that seem true? 
“Because being close with your family is ‘normal’ and ‘healthy,’ and I don’t have that.” 
 
In this exchange I’m clear about my underlying value—having a good relationship with my 
brother—but I’m still struggling with my metric. I’ve given it another name, “closeness,” but the 
metric hasn’t really changed: I’m still judging myself as a brother based on frequency of contact— 
and comparing myself, using that metric, against other people I know. Everyone else (or so it 
seems) has a close relationship with their family members, and I don’t. So obviously there must be 
something wrong with me. 
But what if I’m choosing a poor metric for myself and my life? What else could be true that I’m 
not considering? Well, perhaps I don’t need to be close to my brother to have that good relationship 
that I value. Perhaps there just needs to be some mutual respect (which there is). Or maybe mutual 
trust is what to look for (and it’s there). Perhaps these metrics would be better assessments of 
brotherhood than how many text messages he and I exchange. 
This clearly makes sense; it feels true for me. But it still fucking hurts that my brother and I 
aren’t close. And there’s no positive way to spin it. There’s no secret way to glorify myself through 
this knowledge. Sometimes brothers—even brothers who love each other—don’t have close rela- 
tionships, and that’s fine. It is hard to accept at first, but that’s fine. What is objectively true about 
your situation is not as important as how you come to see the situation, how you choose to mea- 
sure it and value it. Problems may be inevitable, but the meaning of each problem is not. We get to 
control what our problems mean based on how we choose to think about them, the standard by 
which we choose to measure them. 

Rock Star Problems 
In 1983, a talented young guitarist was kicked out of his band in the worst possible way. The band 
had just been signed to a record deal, and they were about to record their first album. But a couple 
days before recording began, the band showed the guitarist the door—no warning, no discussion, 
no dramatic blowout; they literally woke him up one day by handing him a bus ticket home. 
As he sat on the bus back to Los Angeles from New York, the guitarist kept asking himself: How 
did this happen? What did I do wrong? What will I do now? Record contracts didn’t exactly fall out 
of the sky, especially for raucous, upstart metal bands. Had he missed his one and only shot? 
But by the time the bus hit L.A., the guitarist had gotten over his self-pity and had vowed to start 
a new band. He decided that this new band would be so successful that his old band would forever 
regret their decision. He would become so famous that they would be subjected to decades of see- 
ing him on TV, hearing him on the radio, seeing posters of him in the streets and pictures of him in 
magazines. They’d be flipping burgers somewhere, loading vans from their shitty club gigs, fat and 
drunk with their ugly wives, and he’d be rocking out in front of stadium crowds live on television. 
He’d bathe in the tears of his betrayers, each tear wiped dry by a crisp, clean hundred-dollar bill. 
And so the guitarist worked as if possessed by a musical demon. He spent months recruiting 
the best musicians he could find—far better musicians than his previous bandmates. He wrote 
dozens of songs and practiced religiously. His seething anger fueled his ambition; revenge became 
his muse. Within a couple years, his new band had signed a record deal of their own, and a year 
after that, their first record would go gold. 
The guitarist’s name was Dave Mustaine, and the new band he formed was the legendary heavy- 
metal band Megadeth. Megadeth would go on to sell over 25 million albums and tour the world 
many times over. Today, Mustaine is considered one of the most brilliant and influential musicians 
in the history of heavy-metal music. 
Unfortunately, the band he was kicked out of was Metallica, which has sold over 180 million al- 
bums worldwide. Metallica is considered by many to be one of the greatest rock bands of all time. 
And because of this, in a rare intimate interview in 2003, a tearful Mustaine admitted that he 
couldn’t help but still consider himself a failure. Despite all that he had accomplished, in his mind 
he would always be the guy who got kicked out of Metallica. 
We’re apes. We think we’re all sophisticated with our toaster ovens and designer footwear, but 
we’re just a bunch of finely ornamented apes. And because we are apes, we instinctually measure 
ourselves against others and vie for status. The question is not whether we evaluate ourselves 
against others; rather, the question is by what standard do we measure ourselves? 
Dave Mustaine, whether he realized it or not, chose to measure himself by whether he was more 
successful and popular than Metallica. The experience of getting thrown out of his former band was 
so painful for him that he adopted “success relative to Metallica” as the metric by which to measure 
himself and his music career. 

Despite taking a horrible event in his life and making something positive out of it, as Mustaine 
did with Megadeth, his choice to hold on to Metallica’s success as his life-defining metric con- 
tinued to hurt him decades later. Despite all the money and the fans and the accolades, he still con- 
sidered himself a failure. 
Now, you and I may look at Dave Mustaine’s situation and laugh. Here’s this guy with millions 
of dollars, hundreds of thousands of adoring fans, a career doing the thing he loves best, and still 
he’s getting all weepy-eyed that his rock star buddies from twenty years ago are way more famous 
than he is. 
This is because you and I have different values than Mustaine does, and we measure ourselves 
by different metrics. Our metrics are probably more like “I don’t want to work a job for a boss I 
hate,” or “I’d like to earn enough money to send my kid to a good school,” or “I’d be happy to not 
wake up in a drainage ditch.” And by these metrics, Mustaine is wildly, unimaginably successful. 
But by his metric, “Be more popular and successful than Metallica,” he’s a failure. 
Our values determine the metrics by which we measure ourselves and everyone else. Onoda’s 
value of loyalty to the Japanese empire is what sustained him on Lubang for almost thirty years. But 
this same value is also what made him miserable upon his return to Japan. Mustaine’s metric of 
being better than Metallica likely helped him launch an incredibly successful music career. But that 
same metric later tortured him in spite of his success. 
If you want to change how you see your problems, you have to change what you value and/or 
how you measure failure/success. 
As an example, let’s look at another musician who got kicked out of another band. His story 
eerily echoes that of Dave Mustaine, although it happened two decades earlier. 
It was 1962 and there was a buzz around an up-and-coming band from Liverpool, England. This 
band had funny haircuts and an even funnier name, but their music was undeniably good, and the 
record industry was finally taking notice. 
There was John, the lead singer and songwriter; Paul, the boyish-faced romantic bass player; 
George, the rebellious lead guitar player. And then there was the drummer. 
He was considered the best-looking of the bunch—the girls all went wild for him, and it was his 
face that began to appear in the magazines first. He was the most professional member of the 
group too. He didn’t do drugs. He had a steady girlfriend. There were even a few people in suits 
and ties who thought he should be the face of the band, not John or Paul. 
His name was Pete Best. And in 1962, after landing their first record contract, the other three 
members of the Beatles quietly got together and asked their manager, Brian Epstein, to fire him. Ep- 
stein agonized over the decision. He liked Pete, so he put it off, hoping the other three guys would 
change their minds. 
Months later, a mere three days before the recording of the first record began, Epstein finally 
called Best to his office. There, the manager unceremoniously told him to piss off and find another 

band. He gave no reason, no explanation, no condolences—just told him that the other guys want- 
ed him out of the group, so, uh, best of luck. 
As a replacement, the band brought in some oddball named Ringo Starr. Ringo was older and 
had a big, funny nose. Ringo agreed to get the same ugly haircut as John, Paul, and George, and in- 
sisted on writing songs about octopuses and submarines. The other guys said, Sure, fuck it, why 
not? 
Within six months of Best’s firing, Beatlemania had erupted, making John, Paul, George, and 
Pete Ringo arguably four of the most famous faces on the entire planet. 
Meanwhile, Best understandably fell into a deep depression and spent a lot of time doing what 
any Englishman will do if you give him a reason to: drink. 
The rest of the sixties were not kind to Pete Best. By 1965, he had sued two of the Beatles for 
slander, and all of his other musical projects had failed horribly. In 1968, he attempted suicide, only 
to be talked out of it by his mother. His life was a wreck. 
Best didn’t have the same redemptive story Dave Mustaine did. He never became a global 
superstar or made millions of dollars. Yet, in many ways, Best ended up better off than Mustaine. In 
an interview in 1994, Best said, “I’m happier than I would have been with the Beatles.” 
What the hell? 
Best explained that the circumstances of his getting kicked out of the Beatles ultimately led him 
to meet his wife. And then his marriage led him to having children. His values changed. He began 
to measure his life differently. Fame and glory would have been nice, sure—but he decided that 
what he already had was more important: a big and loving family, a stable marriage, a simple life. 
He even still got to play drums, touring Europe and recording albums well into the 2000s. So what 
was really lost? Just a lot of attention and adulation, whereas what was gained meant so much more 
to him. 
These stories suggest that some values and metrics are better than others. Some lead to good 
problems that are easily and regularly solved. Others lead to bad problems that are not easily and 
regularly solved. 

Shitty Values 
There are a handful of common values that create really poor problems for people—problems that 
can hardly be solved. So let’s go over some of them quickly: 
 
1.   Pleasure. Pleasure is great, but it’s a horrible value to prioritize your life around. Ask any drug 
addict how his pursuit of pleasure turned out. Ask an adulterer who shattered her family and lost 
her children whether pleasure ultimately made her happy. Ask a man who almost ate himself to 
death how pleasure helped him solve his problems. 
Pleasure is a false god. Research shows that people who focus their energy on superficial 
pleasures end up more anxious, more emotionally unstable, and more depressed. Pleasure is 
the most superficial form of life satisfaction and therefore the easiest to obtain and the easiest 
to lose. 
And yet, pleasure is what’s marketed to us, twenty-four/seven. It’s what we fixate on. It’s what 
we use to numb and distract ourselves. But pleasure, while necessary in life (in certain doses), 
isn’t, by itself, sufficient. 
Pleasure is not the cause of happiness; rather, it is the effect. If you get the other stuff right 
(the other values and metrics), then pleasure will naturally occur as a by-product. 
2.   Material Success. Many people measure their self-worth based on how much money they make 
or what kind of car they drive or whether their front lawn is greener and prettier than the next- 
door neighbor’s. 
Research shows that once one is able to provide for basic physical needs (food, shelter, and 
so on), the correlation between happiness and worldly success quickly approaches zero. So if 
you’re starving and living on the street in the middle of India, an extra ten thousand dollars a 
year would affect your happiness a lot. But if you’re sitting pretty in the middle class in a devel- 
oped country, an extra ten thousand dollars per year won’t affect anything much—meaning that 
you’re killing yourself working overtime and weekends for basically nothing. 
The other issue with overvaluing material success is the danger of prioritizing it over other 
values, such as honesty, nonviolence, and compassion. When people measure themselves not 
by their behavior, but by the status symbols they’re able to collect, then not only are they shal- 
low, but they’re probably assholes as well. 
3.   Always Being Right. Our brains are inefficient machines. We consistently make poor assump- 
tions, misjudge probabilities, misremember facts, give in to cognitive biases, and make deci- 
sions based on our emotional whims. As humans, we’re wrong pretty much constantly, so if 
your metric for life success is to be right—well, you’re going to have a difficult time rationalizing 
all of the bullshit to yourself. 
The fact is, people who base their self-worth on being right about everything prevent them- 
selves from learning from their mistakes. They lack the ability to take on new perspectives and 
empathize with others. They close themselves off to new and important information. 

It’s far more helpful to assume that you’re ignorant and don’t know a whole lot. This keeps 
you unattached to superstitious or poorly informed beliefs and promotes a constant state of 
learning and growth. 
4.   Staying Positive. Then there are those who measure their lives by the ability to be positive 
about, well, pretty much everything. Lost your job? Great! That’s an opportunity to explore your 
passions. Husband cheated on you with your sister? Well, at least you’re learning what you really 
mean to the people around you. Child dying of throat cancer? At least you don’t have to pay for 
college anymore! 
While there is something to be said for “staying on the sunny side of life,” the truth is, some- 
times life sucks, and the healthiest thing you can do is admit it. 
Denying negative emotions leads to experiencing deeper and more prolonged negative emo- 
tions and to emotional dysfunction. Constant positivity is a form of avoidance, not a valid solu- 
tion to life’s problems—problems which, by the way, if you’re choosing the right values and 
metrics, should be invigorating you and motivating you. 
It’s simple, really: things go wrong, people upset us, accidents happen. These things make us 
feel like shit. And that’s fine. Negative emotions are a necessary component of emotional health. 
To deny that negativity is to perpetuate problems rather than solve them. 
The trick with negative emotions is to 1) express them in a socially acceptable and healthy 
manner and 2) express them in a way that aligns with your values. Simple example: A value of 
mine is nonviolence. Therefore, when I get mad at somebody, I express that anger, but I also 
make a point of not punching them in the face. Radical idea, I know. But the anger is not the 
problem. Anger is natural. Anger is a part of life. Anger is arguably quite healthy in many situa- 
tions. (Remember, emotions are just feedback.) 
See, it’s the punching people in the face that’s the problem. Not the anger. The anger is 
merely the messenger for my fist in your face. Don’t blame the messenger. Blame my fist (or 
your face). 
When we force ourselves to stay positive at all times, we deny the existence of our life’s prob- 
lems. And when we deny our problems, we rob ourselves of the chance to solve them and gen- 
erate happiness. Problems add a sense of meaning and importance to our life. Thus to duck our 
problems is to lead a meaningless (even if supposedly pleasant) existence. 
 
In the long run, completing a marathon makes us happier than eating a chocolate cake. Raising 
a child makes us happier than beating a video game. Starting a small business with friends while 
struggling to make ends meet makes us happier than buying a new computer. These activities are 
stressful, arduous, and often unpleasant. They also require withstanding problem after problem. Yet 
they are some of the most meaningful moments and joyous things we’ll ever do. They involve pain, 
struggle, even anger and despair—yet once they’re accomplished, we look back and get all misty- 
eyed telling our grandkids about them. 

As Freud once said, “One day, in retrospect, the years of struggle will strike you as the most 
beautiful.” 
This is why these values—pleasure, material success, always being right, staying positive—are 
poor ideals for a person’s life. Some of the greatest moments of one’s life are not pleasant, not suc- 
cessful, not known, and not positive. 
The point is to nail down some good values and metrics, and pleasure and success will naturally 
emerge as a result. These things are side effects of good values. By themselves, they are empty 
highs. 

Defining Good and Bad Values 
Good values are 1) reality-based, 2) socially constructive, and 3) immediate and controllable. 
Bad values are 1) superstitious, 2) socially destructive, and 3) not immediate or controllable. 
Honesty is a good value because it’s something you have complete control over, it reflects real- 
ity, and it benefits others (even if it’s sometimes unpleasant). Popularity, on the other hand, is a 
bad value. If that’s your value, and if your metric is being the most popular guy/girl at the dance 
party, much of what happens will be out of your control: you don’t know who else will be at the 
event, and you probably won’t know who half those people are. Second, the value/metric isn’t 
based on reality: you may feel popular or unpopular, when in fact you have no fucking clue what 
anybody else really thinks about you. (Side Note: As a rule, people who are terrified of what others 
think about them are actually terrified of all the shitty things they think about themselves being re- 
flected back at them.) 
Some examples of good, healthy values: honesty, innovation, vulnerability, standing up for one- 
self, standing up for others, self-respect, curiosity, charity, humility, creativity. 
Some examples of bad, unhealthy values: dominance through manipulation or violence, indis- 
criminate fucking, feeling good all the time, always being the center of attention, not being alone, 
being liked by everybody, being rich for the sake of being rich, sacrificing small animals to the 
pagan gods. 
You’ll notice that good, healthy values are achieved internally. Something like creativity or humil- 
ity can be experienced right now. You simply have to orient your mind in a certain way to experience 
it. These values are immediate and controllable and engage you with the world as it is rather than 
how you wish it were. 
Bad values are generally reliant on external events—flying in a private jet, being told you’re right 
all the time, owning a house in the Bahamas, eating a cannoli while getting blown by three strip- 
pers. Bad values, while sometimes fun or pleasurable, lie outside of your control and often require 
socially destructive or superstitious means to achieve. 
Values are about prioritization. Everybody would love a good cannoli or a house in the Bahamas. 
The question is your priorities. What are the values that you prioritize above everything else, and 
that therefore influence your decision-making more than anything else? 
Hiroo Onoda’s highest value was complete loyalty and service to the Japanese empire. This 
value, in case you couldn’t tell from reading about him, stank worse than a rotten sushi roll. It cre- 
ated really shitty problems for Hiroo—namely, he got stuck on a remote island where he lived off 
bugs and worms for thirty years. Oh, and he felt compelled to murder innocent civilians too. So de- 
spite the fact that Hiroo saw himself as a success, and despite the fact he lived up to his metrics, I 
think we can all agree that his life really sucked—none of us would trade shoes with him given the 
opportunity, nor would we commend his actions. 
Dave Mustaine achieved great fame and glory and felt like a failure anyway. This is because he’d 

adopted a crappy value based on some arbitrary comparison to the success of others. This value 
gave him awful problems such as, “I need to sell 150 million more records; then everything will be 
great,” and “My next tour needs to be nothing but stadiums”—problems he thought he needed to 
solve in order to be happy. It’s no surprise that he wasn’t. 
On the contrary, Pete Best pulled a switcheroo. Despite being depressed and distraught by get- 
ting kicked out of the Beatles, as he grew older he learned to reprioritize what he cared about and 
was able to measure his life in a new light. Because of this, Best grew into a happy and healthy old 
man, with an easy life and great family—things that, ironically, the four Beatles would spend 
decades struggling to achieve or maintain. 
When we have poor values—that is, poor standards we set for ourselves and others—we are 
essentially giving fucks about the things that don’t matter, things that in fact make our life worse. 
But when we choose better values, we are able to divert our fucks to something better—toward 
things that matter, things that improve the state of our well-being and that generate happiness, 
pleasure, and success as side effects. 
This, in a nutshell, is what “self-improvement” is really about: prioritizing better values, choos- 
ing better things to give a fuck about. Because when you give better fucks, you get better problems. 
And when you get better problems, you get a better life. 
The rest of this book is dedicated to five counterintuitive values that I believe are the most bene- 
ficial values one can adopt. All follow the “backwards law” we talked about earlier, in that they’re 
“negative.” All require confronting deeper problems rather than avoiding them through highs. These 
five values are both unconventional and uncomfortable. But, to me, they are life-changing. 
The first, which we’ll look at in the next chapter, is a radical form of responsibility: taking re- 
sponsibility for everything that occurs in your life, regardless of who’s at fault. The second is uncer- 
tainty: the acknowledgement of your own ignorance and the cultivation of constant doubt in your 
own beliefs. The next is failure: the willingness to discover your own flaws and mistakes so that they 
may be improved upon. The fourth is rejection: the ability to both say and hear no, thus clearly 
defining what you will and will not accept in your life. The final value is the contemplation of one’s 
own mortality; this one is crucial, because paying vigilant attention to one’s own death is perhaps 
the only thing capable of helping us keep all our other values in proper perspective.