MARK MANSON

He’s sold 14 million copies of his self-help books and now the US author is publishing a journal

Have you followed your own advice from The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck and found happiness and fulfilment?

Happiness and fulfilment are a neverending struggle. So, in that sense, yes, I’ve followed the book’s message to a T.

How will keeping a journal help people?

Journaling is helpful because it gets your thoughts outside of your brain, which then allows you to look at them as though they are not your own. When you do this, you often realise that things you’ve thought or believed are kind of ridiculous, if not wrong. That’s a good thing.

Is there a book that made you love writing?

Reading David Foster Wallace’s nonfiction in my late 20s made me want to become an author.

What’s the best book you’ve read? Hard to define “best”, but let’s go with Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace because nobody will sit down long enough to read it anyway.

A book that had a pivotal impact on your life? Tim Ferriss’s The 4 Hour Work Week convinced me to quit my job and start blogging in 2008. My job sucked though, so it wasn’t that hard of a sell.

The book you are most proud to have written?

Hard to say because, like children, you end up proud of all of them even if they don’t all turn out great. I’ll go with Everything is F*cked: A Book About Hope because life was absolutely crazy while I was writing that and I still somehow pulled it off. The book you couldn’t finish?

I don’t finish most of the books I start. I’m a strong believer in letting books go if you’re not enjoying them or if you’ve got what you need.

A book you wish you had read but haven’t got to?

A long, long list. If you really want me to answer you’re going to have to kill a lot more trees to provide the space.

What book do you re-read?

I rarely re-read books and if I do it’s usually great fiction like 10 years later. I’m currently going back and re-reading a lot of the books I was forced to read in high school and discovering that most of them were a) great and b) totally wasted on an obnoxious 16-year-old.

What books are on your bedside table?

Right now, I am reading the novel The Last Samurai by Helen DeWitt (fantastic) and Do Nothing by Celeste Headlee, which is about how we all work too much.

What are you writing next?

I’ve got ideas I love for a non-fiction (personal development/philosophy) book as well as a novel. Which one comes next, I haven’t figured out yet. Playing with them both.