Page 120 - Men’s Health - USA (December 2019)

“IF OTHER
ate. . . . I have you. My readers. People who
love what I do enough that they’re willing
to help me keep being able to do it.”)
In July 2011, Manson self-published the
book Models: A Comprehensive Guide to
Attracting Women on Amazon and on his
website. The following year, he released a
revised edition, calling it Models: Attract
Women Through Honesty. In a foreword to
the revision, he explained that he wanted
to address consent more directly. “This
was always implied in earlier versions
of the book,” he wrote, “but after being
horrifi ed at some of the emails I get from
men and how they interpret the book, I’ve
decided to be more explicit about this.”
Manson has left Entropy behind. His M me crazy,” he wrote, “but I believe that
old blog posts were accompanied by a photo
of a slimmer, younger Mark Manson—eyes
very green but a little dead, a smug half
smile on his lips. Now the “About Me”
section of MarkManson.net features a
photo of him in a light-blue button-up
shirt, arms crossed in front of him. He
122 December 2019 / MEN’S HEALTH
SELF-HELP BOOKS
SAY YOU’RE
SPECIAL,
I’M GOING
TO WRITE
A CHAPTER
CALLED
‘YOU’RE SPECIAL.’ ”
NOT
looks healthy and corporate and not at Secret’s Rhonda Byrne suggested that
all entropic. He lives in New York with single people sleep on one side of the
his wife, Fernanda. He did meet her in a bed and use only half the space in their
nightclub, he says, but he approached her closets—it will be as though they have
as a civilian. “I had no line,” he recalls. “It already found the perfect partner, she
was ‘Hi, I’m Mark.’ ” reasoned, and then the Universe will
Beyond being important from a send the perfect partner their way.
personal-development standpoint, “I know I’m a self-development blogger
Manson’s well-engineered departure from and I’m supposed to keep everything light
the pickup-artist community was a proto- and airy and full of poop jokes, but fuck
type for the rest of his professional life. He it—I hate it. It’s an awful book,” Manson
is a serial disrupter, and if there’s one thing wrote of The Secret in 2015. His campaign
he can teach us, it’s how to make yourself was one of radical change, and Byrne
the face of an industry’s aha moment. was his counterpoint. He argued that her
philosophy of all-the-time positive think-
MANSON WAS a welcome upstart among ing was in fact very destructive. “Call
the old woo-woo institutions. Dale
Carnegie, of the very old vanguard, gave changing and improving your life requires
us tips in 1936’s How to Win Friends & destroying a part of yourself and replacing
Infl uence People, which is still in circu- it with a newer, better part of yourself. It is
lation. Gentle earth uncle Eckhart Tolle therefore, by defi nition, a painful process
encouraged us to quell the damaging, full of anxiety.” Nobody called him crazy.
ego-driven thought patterns keeping Manson rejected the industry’s empha-
us from fi nding our true purpose. The sis on promising readers concrete steps