r/Growthmindsetbookclub

I interviewed Spencer Greenberg about his life philosophy "Valuism" and his new book The 12 Levers. In the episode he made a number of claims:

• Almost no one has harmful intrinsic values - people's core values are good or neutral, but their strategies for achieving them can be bad
• A person's intrinsic values don't generally change even when examined closely and when taking into account how they arose
• The Dodo Bird verdict from psychology (that all validated therapies are equally effective) is in part an artifact from underpowered studies

What do people think about these claims?

We also discussed how a dedicated "worry time" can help you worry less, how he evaluated evidence for his book, how to actually put self-improvement into practice, and AI therapy bots. The episode and transcript are available here.

Read "The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck" by Mark Manson expecting another feel-good self-help book. Instead got a philosophy that made me question everything I believed about happiness and success.

You're going to have problems no matter what. Choose better problems.

Manson's core argument: life is essentially an endless series of problems. Solving one just reveals the next. Happy people don't have fewer problems. They have problems they enjoy solving. Getting fit is a problem. Being out of shape is a problem. You don't escape problems. You trade up for ones that are worth having.

The desire for a pain-free life is causing most of your pain.

Most suffering comes from the expectation that you shouldn't be suffering. You feel bad, then feel bad about feeling bad. Manson argues that accepting pain as a built-in feature, not a bug, removes this second layer of suffering. Struggle isn't evidence that something is wrong. It's evidence that you're alive and attempting things that matter.

You're not special. And that's actually freeing.

The self-esteem movement taught everyone they're exceptional. Manson points out the math problem: everyone can't be above average. Believing you're special creates pressure to achieve extraordinary things. Accepting that you're ordinary removes that pressure. Ordinary people do meaningful things constantly. You don't need to be exceptional to matter.

What pain are you willing to sustain?

Everyone wants the reward. Few want the process. Manson reframes the question: don't ask what you want. Ask what struggle you're willing to tolerate. You want the fit body but not the early mornings. You want the successful business but not the rejection. Your willingness to suffer for something determines whether you'll actually get it.

Values determine the quality of your problems.

Bad values create unsolvable problems. Chasing popularity means your self-worth depends on others. Chasing wealth means there's always someone richer. Manson argues that good values are internal, controllable, and evidence-based. Honesty, curiosity, humility. These create problems you can actually solve through your own actions.

Certainty is the enemy of growth.

The more certain you are about something, the less open you are to new information. Manson advocates for holding beliefs loosely. Being wrong isn't failure. It's data. People who need to be right all the time stop learning because learning requires admitting you didn't know something.

Action isn't the result of motivation. Motivation is the result of action.

Most people wait to feel motivated before acting. Manson inverts this. Start moving first. Motivation follows action, not the other way around. If you wait until you feel like going to the gym, you'll rarely go. If you just go, the motivation shows up mid-workout.

"The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck" gave me permission to stop pretending everything needs to be positive and start dealing with life as it actually is.

What problem have you been avoiding that might actually be worth solving?

I’ve always wanted to learn swimming, but somehow, for the longest time, I kept finding reasons not to. The water, the unknown, the whole “what if I can’t do it?” thing, even being too conscious of my body and whether I’d actually be able to manage in the water. Fear was doing what fear does best.

My mind had already created so many reasons and scenarios to stay away before I had even taken the first step. Somewhere along the way, while reading Acharya Prashant’s book “Fear” and listening to his teachings, I started seeing this differently. The fear isn’t really in the act, it is in thinking about the act. We imagine, anticipate and suffer through things that haven’t even happened. The book also made me question how much of this comes from the way we know ourselves through others, through their eyes, opinions and approval.

And then, well… long story short, I stopped overthinking, got into the water… and I swam. 🏊🏽‍♀️🏊🏽‍♀️🏊🏽‍♀️

After about 2 months of practice, I can now do freestyle and backstroke. 😄🙌🏼

Wait, I forgot to add one thing: Fearlessly!! 😄

Henry Cloud and John Townsend are psychologists who noticed something in their patients. People who felt used, exhausted, and taken advantage of all had one thing in common. They didn't know where they ended and other people began. Their book explains why setting limits isn't selfish. It's the foundation of every healthy relationship.

The core idea is simple but hard to accept. You are responsible for your own life. Not someone else's feelings. Not their reactions. Not their happiness. When you take ownership of things that aren't yours to carry, you lose the energy to handle what actually is yours. And when you hand off responsibility for your own needs, you become a victim of whoever picks them up.

Cloud and Townsend explain that boundaries aren't walls. They're fences with gates. You decide what comes in and what stays out. People without boundaries let everything in. They absorb other people's moods, problems, and demands. Then they wonder why they feel empty.

One section that stuck with me was about guilt. People with weak boundaries often feel guilty when they say no. The book reframes this. Guilt isn't proof you did something wrong. It's often just discomfort from breaking an old pattern. The people who taught you that "no" was selfish probably benefited from you never saying it.

They also explain that boundaries without consequences are just suggestions. Telling someone their behavior bothers you means nothing if nothing changes when they keep doing it. You teach people how to treat you by what you tolerate.

The hardest part was recognizing that my lack of boundaries wasn't kindness. It was fear. Fear of rejection. Fear of conflict. Fear of being seen as difficult. I called it being "easy-going" but it was actually being unable to stand up for myself.

The resentment I felt toward others was just the bill coming due for all the times I abandoned myself to keep the peace.

Btw if you found this useful follow r/selfimprovement_books for more lessons like this. We share insightful tips that can help improve your life

Read this expecting validation for my scattered interests. Instead got research that challenged everything I believed about mastery and success.

Late specialization often beats early specialization.

The author documents how many top performers in sports, music, and business started late and sampled widely before committing. The "Tiger Woods started at age 2" narrative is the exception, not the rule. Roger Federer played multiple sports into his teens. Many successful scientists switched fields midcareer. The sampling period isn't wasted time. It's building range.

Kind vs. wicked learning environments.

Chess is a kind learning environment. Clear rules, immediate feedback, patterns repeat. Deliberate practice works beautifully here. But most of life is a wicked learning environment. The rules are unclear, feedback is delayed or misleading, and patterns don't repeat reliably. Applying kind environment strategies to wicked environments backfires. You need range to navigate ambiguity.

Generalists see what specialists miss.

Specialists develop deep grooves of thinking. They're powerful within their domain but blind to adjacent solutions. Generalists transfer concepts across fields. They connect dots that specialists can't see because the dots exist in different disciplines.  argues that the biggest breakthroughs often come from outsiders who import ideas from elsewhere.

Match quality matters more than early commitment.

Author introduces the concept of match quality: how well your work fits your abilities and interests. Finding high match quality requires exploration. People who try multiple paths before committing often find better fits than people who lock in early and stick with sunk costs. Short term efficiency loses to long term alignment.

The book gave me permission to stop apologizing for my winding path and start seeing it as an asset.

What skill from an unrelated area ended up helping you in unexpected ways?

Read this expecting controversial financial advice. Instead got a philosophy that made me question how I value time and money.

Most people die with too much money and too few experiences.

Perkins documents how people save aggressively their whole lives, then die with significant wealth they never used. They optimized for a retirement they were too old or sick to enjoy. The money sitting in accounts represents experiences that never happened and time traded that was never recovered.

Experiences have time windows.

A backpacking trip through Southeast Asia at 25 creates memories you draw on for 50 years. The same trip at 70 might not be physically possible. Learning to surf at 30 is different than learning at 60. Perkins argues that delaying experiences until "later" often means losing access to them entirely. Each experience has an optimal window, and it closes.

Memory dividends compound over time.

An experience today pays dividends for the rest of your life through memories, stories, identity, and perspective. An experience delayed pays dividends for less time. Perkins calculates that front-loading experiences, especially in your 20s and 30s, maximizes total life satisfaction because you have more years to benefit from them.

The goal isn't to die broke. It's to die with zero wasted potential.

Perkins isn't advocating for recklessness. He's advocating for intentionality. Know what experiences matter to you. Know their windows. Allocate resources accordingly. Dying with millions in the bank means you worked days you didn't need to work, doing things you didn't want to do, for money you never used.

This book made me uncomfortable because I realized I was defaulting to "later" for things that might not be available later.

What experience are you delaying that has a closing window?

Read this expecting motivation. Instead got a mirror showing me how often I sabotage myself without realizing it.

Ego makes you talk instead of work.

Holiday points out that talking about your goals gives you a dopamine hit similar to actually achieving them. Your brain can't tell the difference. So you announce the project, feel good, then lose the drive to execute. People with ego problems are always talking about what they're going to do. People with results are too busy doing it to talk.

Ego makes you fragile when you should be learning.

When someone criticizes your work, ego hears an attack on your identity. It gets defensive, dismissive, or wounded. The opportunity to improve disappears because you're too busy protecting your self-image. Holiday argues that the ability to receive feedback without emotional reaction is one of the biggest advantages you can develop.

Ego hits hardest after early success.

The most dangerous moment is right after your first win. Ego tells you that you've figured it out. You stop listening to advice. You assume past methods will keep working. You surround yourself with people who agree with you. Holiday documents how many successful people flame out not because they lost talent, but because ego made them unteachable.

The antidote is staying a student permanently.

Holiday's solution isn't false humility. It's genuine curiosity. The moment you believe you've arrived is the moment you stop improving. Every master still considers themselves a student. Every expert knows how much they don't know. Ego closes that awareness off.

The uncomfortable realization from this book is that ego operates invisibly. You don't notice it running the show. You just notice the consequences later.

What's a time ego got in your way without you realizing it until after?

I used to think breathing was one of those things my body handled automatically, so there wasn't much to think about. After reading Breath by James Nestor, I started paying attention to it in a completely different way.

The book is basically an investigation into something we do all day without thinking: how we breathe. Nestor looks at the history, science, and different breathing practices around the world, and makes a simple argument: the way we breathe can have a real effect on how we sleep, feel, and function.

One of the most interesting parts was his discussion of mouth breathing. Breathing through the mouth, especially while sleeping, can affect sleep quality and the way the body handles oxygen. Nestor explains why the nose is designed to do much more than simply let air in. It filters, warms, and humidifies the air, and plays a role in producing nitric oxide.

I also liked the section about breathing slowly. Nestor discusses research around slower breathing and how it can influence the nervous system, heart rate, and stress levels. I tried some of the breathing exercises while reading the book, and that made the ideas feel much more practical than simply reading about them.

The book also goes into how our lifestyles and diets may have changed the development of our jaws and airways. The connection between softer modern foods, reduced chewing, and changes in facial structure was something I had never really thought about before.

What I liked most is that the subject sounds ordinary, but Nestor makes you notice something you've probably never paid attention to. You don't have to agree with every claim in the book to get something from it. For me, the main takeaway was simple: sometimes improving something as basic as breathing is worth paying attention to.

Ernest Becker was a cultural anthropologist who wrote this book while dying of cancer. He won the Pulitzer Prize for it two months after his death. The thesis is simple and devastating: everything humans do is a response to the terror of knowing we're going to die.

Becker argues that consciousness is both our greatest gift and our greatest curse. We're animals who know we're animals. We eat, sleep, and decay like everything else. But unlike everything else, we know it's coming. That awareness creates a terror so deep that most of human civilization is built to distract us from it.

He introduces the concept of "immortality projects." These are the things we pour ourselves into to feel like we matter beyond our biological expiration date. Career achievements. Children. Religious beliefs. Creative work. Political movements. Legacy. Becker says none of these are bad. But when you don't realize you're using them to manage death anxiety, they start controlling you instead of serving you.

The book explains why people attach so intensely to group identities. Nationalism. Sports teams. Political tribes. When you merge with something larger than yourself, you borrow its permanence. The group will outlive you. So being part of it makes death feel less final. This also explains why people react so violently when their group is threatened. It's not just disagreement. It's an attack on their defense against mortality.

One section that rewired me was about self-esteem. Becker argues that self-esteem isn't really about liking yourself. It's about feeling like your existence matters. When someone criticizes you, the sting isn't about their opinion. It's about the threat to your sense of significance. If you don't matter, death wins.

The uncomfortable conclusion: most of your striving isn't about what you think it's about. It's about not disappearing. Becker doesn't say stop striving. He says understand what's driving you. When you see the fear underneath, the grip loosens. You stop needing every project to save you from oblivion.

The book is heavy. I had to put it down multiple times. But nothing else has explained human behavior to me as completely.

I went through "The Denial of Death" on BeFreed during late night walks when the quiet felt appropriate for a book that's essentially asking you to sit with the fact that you're going to stop existing. I mostly used Deep Dive mode at 20-30 minutes because Becker's arguments about immortality projects, hero systems, and how death terror drives everything from career ambition to religious devotion are the kind of ideas that collapse into motivational poster nonsense if you rush them. They need time to build.

The full context of how Becker connects Freud's psychology with Kierkegaard's philosophy with Otto Rank's theories on creativity is what makes the thesis feel earned instead of edgy. For the immortality projects chapter I switched to Debate mode where two hosts argued whether Becker's framework is a genuinely useful lens for understanding human motivation or whether reducing all human striving to death anxiety is reductive in a way that flattens the actual richness of why people create, build, and love. That session was important because the book is so compelling in its logic that it's easy to walk away seeing death terror behind every human action, which is both illuminating and paranoid depending on how tightly you hold it. Hearing the counterargument that some striving is genuinely about curiosity, connection, and joy rather than fear kept me from turning a powerful lens into an everything-hammer. I also used the creation feature to combine "The Denial of Death" with "Man's Search for Meaning" by Viktor Frankl and that was one of the heaviest sessions I've done on any app. Becker says we build meaning to escape death. Frankl says we build meaning to survive death, having literally done so in Auschwitz. Hearing those two frameworks argue through each other, one from a dying anthropologist and one from a concentration camp survivor, produced a picture of human motivation that neither book comes close to alone. Becker says meaning is a defense mechanism. Frankl says meaning is the only thing that's real.

The truth probably lives somewhere in the tension between them and hearing both voices in the same session is what let me sit in that tension instead of picking a side too quickly. For the self-esteem chapter I used Explain Like I'm 5 because the mechanism of how criticism triggers death anxiety, how the sting of someone's disapproval isn't really about their opinion but about the threat to your sense of significance, is one of those insights that sounds dramatic until someone strips it to the simple circuit underneath. The notes feature saved the immortality projects framework and the self-esteem-as-death-management concept automatically so they were accessible during the quieter moments when those ideas resurface on their own, which with this book, they do.

Read this expecting tips on how to learn faster. Instead got a framework for mastery from someone who became a chess prodigy and then a world champion martial artist. Not a summary, just the parts that changed how I approach getting better at anything.

Investment in loss is where real learning happens.

Waitzkin argues that most people avoid situations where they might lose or look bad. This protects the ego but kills growth. He actively sought out opponents who would beat him because losing revealed holes in his game that winning never could. The willingness to lose repeatedly, without emotional collapse, is what separates people who plateau from people who keep improving.

Make smaller circles.

Instead of learning more moves or techniques, Waitzkin focused on mastering fewer things more deeply. He'd take one chess principle or one martial arts movement and practice it until it became invisible, until he could execute it without thinking. Depth beats breadth. A simple technique practiced ten thousand times defeats a complex technique practiced ten times.

The soft zone beats the hard zone.

The hard zone is when you need perfect conditions to perform. Silence, comfort, no distractions. The soft zone is when you can absorb disturbances and use them. Waitzkin trained himself to focus during chaos by deliberately practicing in noisy environments. Eventually distractions became neutral, then fuel. Needing perfect conditions is a fragility most people never address.

One mistake becomes two when you don't control the mental spiral.

Waitzkin observed that after making an error, most people make another one immediately. The first mistake triggers frustration, the frustration clouds thinking, and clouded thinking produces the second mistake. Learning to reset emotionally between moves, to treat each moment as fresh, prevents one bad play from becoming a collapse.

Build your trigger.

Waitzkin developed a consistent pre-performance routine that put him in his optimal mental state. Same music, same movements, same breathing pattern. Over time, the routine became a trigger that reliably activated focus. Then he gradually shortened the routine until a single breath could produce the same state. You can train yourself to access peak performance on command if you build the association deliberately.

Numbers to leave numbers.

First you learn the rules consciously. Then you practice until the rules become unconscious. Then you forget you ever learned them. Waitzkin calls this "numbers to leave numbers." Mastery looks like intuition, but it's built on thousands of hours of conscious practice that eventually disappears from awareness. The goal is to internalize principles so deeply that they stop feeling like principles.

Stress and recovery is how you build mental endurance.

Just like physical training alternates between exertion and rest, mental training requires intervals. Waitzkin applied cardiovascular interval training to focus. Short bursts of intense concentration followed by complete relaxation. Over time the bursts get longer and the recovery gets shorter. Most people try to concentrate continuously and wonder why they burn out.

What concepts from this book changed how you approach learning something difficult?

Marcus Aurelius was the most powerful man in the world. Emperor of Rome at its height. He had armies, wealth, and absolute authority. Yet he spent his private moments writing reminders to himself about how to think clearly and live well. These notes were never meant to be published. That's what makes them hit different.

You control your mind, nothing else.

Marcus repeats this constantly. Events happen. People act. Circumstances shift. None of that is in your control. The only thing you ever truly own is your perception and your response. Everything else is borrowed. When you accept this, you stop wasting energy fighting things you cannot change.

Your judgments create your suffering.

Something happens. Then your mind adds a story. "This is unfair. This will ruin me. This shouldn't be happening." Marcus argues that the event itself is neutral. The suffering comes from the layer of interpretation you add on top. Remove the judgment and the pain often dissolves.

People will disappoint you. Expect it.

Marcus writes about preparing each morning for difficult people. Liars, the ungrateful, the selfish. Not to become cynical but to stop being surprised. When you expect people to act according to their nature, you stop feeling betrayed when they do. The frustration was never about them. It was about your expectation.

Time reveals what matters.

He constantly reminds himself that emperors before him are now dust. Fame fades. Achievements get forgotten. This isn't depressing to Marcus. It's clarifying. If nothing lasts, then most of what you stress about doesn't deserve the weight you give it. Only character and virtue survive the filter of time.

Obstacles are the path.

What stands in the way becomes the way. The thing blocking you is often the thing that builds you. Marcus didn't see hardship as punishment. He saw it as training. Every frustration is a chance to practice patience. Every setback is a chance to practice resilience.

Part 2 coming soon.

Btw if you found this useful follow r/selfimprovement_books for more lessons like this. We share insightful tips that can help improve your life