Introduction
Mark Manson’s book the ‘Subtle art of not giving a fuck’ needs no introduction. Released in 2016 it entered the zeitgeist and remains there since the TV adaptation in 2023. There are some useful insights we can gain from understanding security leadership through the concepts it discusses.
Mason explores some key themes in his book, priorities, suffering, problem solving, responsibility, failure, and victimhood. There is an intersection on all these topics, they don’t exist in isolation. There are overlaps with themes of power, ego, and competence. The same problem is explored from different perspectives which talks to innate parts of humanity and those we rarely like to discuss. But really, these are the parts of us we should talk about more. Mason gives us a compelling reason as to why we don’t, because it is painful and not in an abstract way but in a very real and tangible way.
Give a fuck about the right stuff
Manson makes the point that this isn’t about ‘not giving a fuck’ but about not giving a fuck about things that don’t matter. It’s too easy to give a fuck about the wrong stuff and this is important for anyone in a leadership position, especially those in security. One of the problems security leaders will face is there is a lot of stuff to give a fuck about, most of which is background noise. Security leaders are encumbered by having to give a fuck about arbitrary metrics that don’t make sense, level of compliance to a poorly constructed set of controls, investigating non-sense reports of malfeasance, or some bullshit ‘intel’ about the latest APT group from somewhere unpronounceable to that carries a mystique that enchants the dullard.
Manson gives examples of how giving a fuck about the wrong thing can destroy someone’s perception of success. Dave Mustaine was kicked out of Metallica and then became successful in his own right with his band Megadeth. By any reasonable person’s measure, Mustaine is successful however as he always compared himself to Metallica which is an example Mason gives of how you can be successful and still feel like a failure. Then there was Pete Best who was in the Beatles who found happiness despite a lack of material wealth. But it’s not just about giving a fuck about the right stuff, it’s that relative measures of success can be destructive in spite of anything else. This is a point that a security leader has to be cognisant of, in how they structure what success means. Ryan Holiday discusses this too in the form of generals or football coaches and how to focus on the actions and not the outcomes. Measures of personal success have to be derived from within and deriving these from comparative external factors will lead you on the path to insanity. And this talks to Manson’s opening point about how holding aspirations about what you could be sets a bar out of reach and thus positivity can be a negative thing. It’s the feedback loop from hell.
What we give a fuck about is mired by the backdrop of an industry that values the wrong things. “Click, click, whirly, beep, beep” could be a description of what our industry values. We have vendors, industry bodies, thought leaders, training companies, all forming an eco-system. This system affirms a message about what we should be giving a fuck about. But what they are saying is intended to bend us to their desires. This is the King’s Shilling of priorities. If we drink from cup, we are press ganged into someone else’s paradigm. Perhaps it is true that our eco-system is one that is suffering an environmental crisis. We have revelled in its industrialisation, gleefully smearing ourselves in the polluting filth it creates. I wouldn’t suggest that deploying abrasive Scandinavian teenagers is a legitimate solution, but we need to understand that it is our whole industry is fucked. And this is something we should be giving a fuck about because what the industry gives a fuck about is fucked up, and that’s fucking fucked.
Having a higher order of giving a fuck means that we are less consumed with things that do not matter. As a consequence of this, adversity becomes something that is solvable. Adversity as a barrier then, is nothing more than a product of misaligned priority.
Solving problems
Happiness comes from solving problems and this is the space security should occupy. Manson described it as a work-in-progress, a constant, a journey where the destination should never be reached. A security leader should be creating an environment that promotes the resolution of complex problems then, for their own fulfilment and the fulfilment of those under their stewardship. But this is a form of action and one that needs to be continually repeated. You are what you repeatedly do, and a security leader can create teams of problem solvers or box checkers. But problems can painful if the correct grounding is not in place but as Manson describes problem can be powerful and this is a choice. Solving problems does create more problems but then the choice is about what kind of problems do you want to solve.
Problems will lead to failure and a security leader should embrace this. But not in the Agile sense of becoming permissive of incompetence by ‘failing fast’, so god damn bloody always at eye watering expense. Failure is a recurrent theme throughout the book and is antecedent of suffering. When we go out into the world, outcomes are not certain, we can’t predict the future. Failure is not easy to deal with and handling failure will not always be easy and requires introspection on the values you hold. Failure may be an indicator that what you have done might not be quite right. But failure is relative to your values as Manson describes, so failure can be a direct translation to shortcomings against those values.
Responsibility comes into how we solve problems, how we accept these problems, and how we react to these problems is all our own choice. Manson states that ‘accepting responsibility is accepting power’. This is all well and good but accepting responsibility requires competence. Without competence you cannot be responsible, and incompetence is irresponsible. But solving problems reflects on so many areas and generates a base of power and influence within the organisation through competence. A security leader should conclude that at the root of all this, values are first and foremost, ahead of problem solving, ahead of failure, ahead of responsibility, and ahead of happiness and fulfilment.
Suffering is inevitable
Mason describes emotions and pain as a form of feedback mechanism, an internal compass to know if something is worthwhile. This is emphasised by how Manson describes growth requiring the admission you are wrong and requiring the death of a part of you. He puts this in terms of breaking connections within the brain and this being physically painful. It’s reminiscent of Tyler Durden when he says ‘self improvement is masturbation. Now self destruction...’. The implication is left open but the connection is clear. To truly make any improvement, we have to be prepared to destroy something of ourselves, part of our conceptualisation of the world or perhaps a value that hasn’t actualised in the way we expect. This is a requirement to achieve the greater thing we give a fuck about. The greater good perhaps, as a Machiavellian world view would imply.
And there it is, a security leader must understand that they will need to cause pain to those that they lead for them to grow. They will need to hurt the organisations they are there to protect in their own best interests. This is swapping of the problems, and posing the question, what problems that are preferable for an organisation to face? Those that are present from their current situation, or those that would move them towards their objectives.
Suffering is required to be mentally healthy. Struggling through suffering gives us meaning. Manson alludes to this when he talks about how without death nothing has meaning. In a leadership context there would be the need to create cohesion within a team or structure, suffering creates the shared identity of a group and unifies them through a commonality. It keeps that group healthy and mentally stable as is an emergent requirement of the human condition. So, a leader must create the culture in which adversity, struggle, and suffering are present but controlled. This is the facilitation of stability, growth, and progress, derived from suffering. And this is what we can distil both from and for the human condition. This is the only responsible and competent way to approach this. Machiavelli knew this all too well and there is a component of intent for the security leader to consider.
It would be very easy for a security leader to slide down the slope to despotism or masochism. The famous Stanford Prison experiment is cited as a cautionary tale where the arbitrary power is granted to those without the checks and balances to marshal themselves. This is why self-reflection is so important, yet it is one of the most painful things to do. Growth itself requires the admission that you are wrong. This requires introspection beyond the capability of most. To grow is to suffer, to turn the mirror of self-reflection on ourselves and acknowledge what we truly are. And what we are is much worse, and more flawed than we think.
Too easy to become a victim
Of course, victimhood comes into the frame. It is 2024 after all. Mason describes this as victim chic. A security leader should be aware of how this plays out in the corporate space. This reflects in the mentality of those around them, and those under their stewardship. Modern corporate culture creates virtue out of victimhood by the endorsement of special interest groups, promotion of celebratory and commemorative months for this or that marginalised group. I’ve heard it described as making victimhood a virtue and making strength a vice. But this mindset has a destructive set of associated traits for those that adopt it, typically defined as need for recognition (of their victimhood), moral elitism, lack of empathy, and rumination.
A victim looks for someone to blame, a persecutor, this is something that is described in Transactional Analysis and the Drama Triangle. Manson describes a model similar to the Drama Triangle when talking about entitled people but does not go as far as to draw the direct connection. I would take a speculative view that victimhood is also an indicator of incompetence as described in the Peter Principle going so far as to state that those exhibiting indicators of victimhood will likely be highly correlated to those exhibiting incompetence. But the well runs deeper perhaps, those with higher Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood will have insecure attachment styles, namely anxious/ambivalent attachment. We can infer from how insecure attachments develop that adequate relationship formation within the first three years of life is being neglected on masse. I’ll allow myself to muse on this point.
Perhaps there is attribution to single income households being less viable, or how companies encourage primary care givers to return to a work within a twelve-month period. There is a perverse irony to the fact that the organisations that promote societal good are the ones that are promoting schemes and services that facilitate primary care givers returning to work rather than taking the requisite time to ensure the next generation has secure attachment styles that don’t lead to the endless waves of blue haired pricks reading fucking poetry, shedding rainbow tears. There is a lot to say about victimhood and the wider societal issues it creates, and this is a real fucking problem for a Security leader. Having them within the castle walls means you have an unstable element within the organisation. A fifth column of cry babies. This is the very essence of the path to hell being paved with good intentions. What the corporates have advanced is subverted competence of their future employees, mortgaging our future stability in the name of ‘corporate and social responsibility’.
We grant that security has an emotional component to it and an element of perception or feeling from those seeking protection. What then if those seeking protection are emotionally unstable or unable to regulate their feelings? Those in the victim mindset who are seeking and creating threats, real or perceived, undercut the security of the organisation as they will never feel safe. And how does this work with the concept of suffering? Or the creation of new problems through the resolution of the old ones? Those seeking to apply methods in the greater good or best interest will be subverted . . . ‘coz me feels.
Mason outlines that evil people don’t think they are evil, but they do think they are right. Evil is certainty, which means there cannot be growth beyond the existing paradigm. And the pernicious nature of victimhood is that of resigning oneself to a set paradigm with no self-reflection, without growth, without new problems. Solving them would shatter the identity of victimhood. Uncertainty is the root of all progress meaning risk is required to grow. Afterall, ‘Never was anything great achieved without danger’. The only certainty will be stagnation. Security leaders must accept the stark reality that victimhood mentality is evil, that it is incompetence, that it is to be regarded as contemptable.
An environment that venerates victimhood as a virtue promotes the abdication of personal responsibility. It is the abdication of responsibility where the victim becomes king and when regicide becomes just.
Conclusion
Responsibility, power, ego, suffering, success. These all are improved and enabled by self-reflection, informed by action, and predicated on values. Once you have a grip on these you have control of your action, your emotions, the things you give a fuck about. But that control is always on a precipice with hubris hanging above like the sword of Damocles waiting to fall. We need to understand the limits of what we can control, or even what we should control.
There is an inevitable conclusion manifest from the construct of these attributes, a narrative theme from the past that echoes towards the future. That is, we cannot know the future. These axioms are rarely stated but they are worth reiterating. Time moves forwards, we exist in the present, the past is only a memory, the future has not yet been written, John! We can reflect on what has happened to modify how we act today. History doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes . . . the possibilities are still very open.
None of the work we do inwards would be required if we could make projections into the future, now this is not to say that from a psychological perspective the process of abstracting and extrapolating towards the future isn’t useful or necessary but without uncertainty we cannot suffer or know meaning. Mason makes the point about our mortality giving us meaning, and our death is the only thing that is certain. But before our inevitable demise, we need uncertainty, we need to feel we have struggled and overcome. If we could see forwards with any reasonable precision, we would undermine the biological, psychological, and philosophical basis of humanity itself.