TIME TO GROW UP - Best Jordan Peterson Life Advice
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It's from the uphill climb that we derive our value, and I mean this technically. So almost all the positive emotion we feel, especially the emotion that fills us with enthusiasm, and that's experienced in relationship to a goal.

And so in some sense, you want a goal that you can never attain. So you can always move closer to the goal that recedes as you move towards it. You think, well, that's frustrating. It's like Sisyphus pushing the rock uphill. But it's not because as you pursue that goal, you put yourself together and your life does get better and richer and more abundant. That's why the highest levels of virtue and goal are in some sense transcendent.

You want them to be above everything you're doing so you can continually move towards something that's more sublime and better. That's what you are. You're here to live, not to sleep.

And the problem with the vision of Mai Tai's on the beach is that, well, first of all, that's a vision of drug-induced unconsciousness. Second, it's only going to work for about a week. Third, you're going to be a laughingstock in a month and depressed and aimless and goalless. No, that's not... You want a horizon of ever-expanding possibility. And so it does happen to people because they've staked their soul on the attainment of an instrumental goal.

And it can be a pretty high order goal. But then you think, now I'm there. Now what? Well, the answer can't be, well, I'm going to live in the lap of luxury and never have to leave the face. What do you want to be? A giant infant with a gold bottle? You never have to do anything but lay in your back and suck? It's like, you see the problem with that as a conceptualization. It's no, you want to be

like an active warrior moving uphill with your sword in hand. And that's dynamic. That's exciting. These people that you're comparing yourself to, you don't really know very well.

What that means is that you see their shiny outside, but you don't see the reality of their life. There's always people out there who are doing far better than you on pretty much anything you want to imagine. And if all you're doing is seeing yourself in their reflected light, let's say, then it's going to be pretty damn dismal. But it's not a good comparison because, well, first of all, there's danger in just comparing yourself to others, period, because they're not you. And God only knows what struggles they had to undertake to get to where they were or what burdens they're currently carrying that you're not aware of.

But you can certainly contrast yourself with yourself. And that's a lot better. It is the only way. Well, it's also the only way of really measuring anything approximating proper improvement. You can actually tell when you're a little better than you were yesterday. And you can actually do that. That's another thing that's so interesting about it is that you can actually make yourself a little better in some way. Pretty much, well, I don't know if it's at every moment, but you can certainly do it every day. Be careful who you share good news with.

Because you want to share good news with people who are going to be genuinely happy for you and be careful who you share bad news with because that's equally tricky. You want someone who will listen to you when you're having trouble and allow you your grief. Beauty calls people to their higher being, I would say. And to make friends with beauty is to introduce yourself very carefully to one of the mysteries of life that make it worth living.

there's never been a better time for the majority of people to be alive and the future although we're vulnerable and terrible things can always happen to us it's hard to make a case that the future doesn't look comparatively positive we're becoming extremely technologically sophisticated and the world is changing at an incredibly rapid rate and the only way we're going to be able to manage that in a positive way is if each of us or

as many of us as possible are capable of making wise and careful and truthful decisions and if we do that then maybe things can continue to improve you don't get people to stand up on their own two feet and to adopt responsibility if everything is given to them and that that's that's a real conundrum

You know, maybe you're in California see someone speeding down the road in a in a convertible Porsche and you think oh man What a lucky bastard and the truth of the matter is that he's thinking about wrapping his expensive sports car around the next cement pillar that he comes close to you know, you can't tell and people have hard lives and and even people who are Comparatively fortunate have hard lives and the ideal that

that you're observing that makes you jealous and resentful is in large part an illusion that's created by your own mind. You have to be careful of what you're jealous of because you don't really know what it is. And then the other thing that's kind of useful is to, well, to understand you're quite different from other people and you shouldn't be comparing yourself to them because they're not like you.

They don't have your family. They don't have your temperament. They don't have your troubles. They don't have your abilities The only person that has those is you one of the rules I think it's rule four is Compare yourself to who you were yesterday and not to who someone else is today and see that's a game you can win the possibility that you can

make yourself slightly better on a continual basis is, I think that's something that's accessible to everyone. I think that's equivalent to leading a virtuous life. And there is something to be said for virtue and truth, you know, and that is one thing. Another thing that I've noticed about people who've been phenomenally successful is that they really do everything they can to live a truthful life. And you can get a bloody long ways by being honest.

You got to know that there are differences in intelligence. It's really important. If you go into a job and you're not smart enough for that job, you're going to have one bloody miserable time. And you're going to make life wretched for the people around you because you won't be able to handle the position. But what you really want to do, as far as I can tell, if you want to maximize your chances for both success and let's say well-being, is you want to find a strata of occupation in which you would have an intelligence that would put you in the upper quartile.

That's perfect. Then you're a big fish in a small pond. And you don't want to be the stupidest guy in the room. It's a bloody rough place to be. So, and you probably don't want to be the smartest guy in the room either, because what that probably means is you should be in a different room. If you want to be the best at what you're doing...

Bar none, then having an IQ of above 145 is a necessity. And maybe you're pushing 160 in some situations. And maybe that's making you one person in 10,000 or even one person in 100,000. And then also, to really be good at it, you probably have to be reasonably stress tolerant and also somewhat conscientious. Why is it that smart people are at the top of dominance hierarchies? And the answer to that, in part, is because they get there first.

Right? I mean, everything's a race, roughly speaking. And the faster you are, the more likely you are to be at the forefront of the pack. And intelligence in large part is speed. That's not all it is. So if you're moving towards something difficult rapidly, the faster people are going to get there first. You're going to have to put some effort into your life. And you need to be motivated to do that. And so what are the potential sources of motivation? Well, you could think about them in the big five.

You know if you're extroverted you want friends if you're agreeable you want an intimate relationship if you're disagreeable you want to win competitions if you're open you want to Engage in creative activity if you're high neuroticism you want security, okay? So those are all sources of potential motivation that you could draw on that you could tailor to your own You know your own personality, but then there are dimensions that you want to consider your life across and so we ask people about

Well, you know if you could have your life the way you wanted it in three to five years if you were taking care of yourself properly You know, what would you want from your friendships? What would you want from your intimate relationship? How would you like to structure your family? What do you want for your career? Well, how are you going to use your time outside of your job? And how are you going to regulate your mental physical mental and physical health and maybe also your drug and alcohol use because that's

that's a good place to auger down. And that tangles in your incentive-reward system. You know, we talked about the dopaminergic incentive-reward system, and that's the thing that keeps you moving forward. And the way it works is that it works better if it produces positive emotion when it can see you moving towards a valued goal. Okay, well, what's the implication of that? Better have a valued goal, because otherwise you can't get any positive motivation. Most creative people fail at...

producing their creative product and monetizing it. Right? So your default position, if you're a creative person, is you're going to fail.

And so and that's because it's hard to come up with something new and it's and it's hard to present it to the market at the right time. And it's hard to market it like those things are really, really difficult. And so what successful entrepreneurs do is they just keep doing it over and over and over and over and over and over and over. And eventually, if they're fortunate, one of their ideas happens to hit

Right place at the right time even if your idea is good. That doesn't mean it will be successful There's so many things that have to be taken into account. So this is partly why persistence and that's part of conscientiousness is so useful It's like persistence is helpful because it enables you to run many many experiments and and you need to know that the baseline is failure you know, it's important because otherwise you'll blame that on yourself and

You know, and some of that's useful because there's probably some things that you could improve about yourself, but it's very difficult to go from zero to one, you know. You know, what should happen when you go to university is you should learn how to think and formulate arguments. You should learn to think, speak, and write. That's what the humanities are for. They're to make you dangerous, right? Because if you can think and speak and write, you're deadly. In a complex job, you're exactly what's necessary.

There's nothing you can possibly do to become more deadly than to improve your facility with language. And the way you do that is by reading, especially great things, and by writing, and by thinking, and by speaking for that matter. But how could that not be viewed as absolutely central to what education is about? You want to be inarticulate and stumble over everything that you try to think and communicate?

How are you going to get anywhere? You don't even know who you are under those circumstances. This massive feeling that's expressing itself, you know, maybe in violence because you can't find the words. You stumble around and bump into things and you're clunky and dull and you're not witty. You don't sparkle. So let's say you take the example of a seal who's got it all, but

this literacy. What happens to him compared to someone who has all those skills? If he can't write well and he's in charge of six guys and one of those guys works hard or does something that deserves to be recognized,

This is the responsibility of that leader to write that person an award. Okay, so he can't reward his good workers, his good soldiers. He can give them a pat on the back, but a pat on the back isn't going to get him promoted. An award is actually worth some points towards your promotion. And the people that are on that board that are giving that reward,

They're never gonna meet that leader and they're definitely not gonna meet that guy. There's no bias. It's based on this piece of paper that you hand in. You hand in this piece of paper, they read the piece of paper and they say, "Award approved or award not approved." Or you wanna do a mission and you send that up the chain of command

And it's the same thing. It gets to a certain point where they're just looking at it and reading and trying to decipher this pile of junk that you put together. And by the way, if I'm in charge and Jordan sends me a concept of operations that doesn't make any sense, why would I possibly let you go out and execute an operation that I can't even understand what it is you're trying to do?

Because what I observed in my own career and it's so interest the parallelism is so interesting but not surprising is that Nothing can stop you if you can write and it's for the reasons you just laid out It's like when you write you make a case for something whatever it happens to be and if you make the best case Well, then you win and you get whatever it is that you're aiming at and so you're adventurous and

You want to make a mark? You bloody well better learn how to write. Because if you learn how to write, well, then you can think and you can communicate your thoughts. So not only are you deadly strategically, you become extremely convincing. And then you can go and do anything you want and no one will stop you. And that's never told to people. And I don't really understand why. You know, you hear the pen is mightier than the sword, which is just a cliche unless it's fleshed out.

There's a book. It's a book called About Face. It's about a guy that was in the Korean War and then he was in the Vietnam War. And his name is Colonel David Hackworth. When I was on deployment, I would read, open up that book anywhere and I would read two pages or three pages before I'd go to bed if I was in my bed that night. And there were so many lessons that correlated to what I was actually going through. And a real obvious example was when you read, you can learn and you don't have to

You don't have to go through the school of hard knocks. You don't have to get punched in the face repeatedly with things that turn out to be situations that other people have absolutely gone through. The level of capability increases so much by seeing something one single time. Well, if I see something one time,

I'm infinitely better than if I'd never seen it before. It's like those little puzzles, they give you a little puzzle, some kind of a mind bender, right? The mind benders only work on you one time. The riddle only works on you one time. Then you go, "I know the answer to that." That's the answer. You never get fooled by that again. So just knowing, just seeing it one time, you're infinitely better. So when you read enough, you're capturing all these lessons

Of course, you want to put the book on. You want to become that person. That can rattle you up, man. Especially if the person is thinking all sorts of things that you've never thought. I mean, I love reading for that reason. I could pick my peers too, which I really loved. It's like, well, you know, I have these people around me, but then there's these people who've lived before me and in different places, and I can set them up on my shelf. I can enter into their world.

And I can benefit from everything they've thought and saturate myself with that person. And it's very disruptive, especially if the person that you're reading has a mind that's more powerful and more well-developed than your own. It was very disruptive, but unbelievably useful, unbelievably useful to try on other people like that. And you get the benefit of their entire life distilled into their book.

You know, it's 30 years of work. I read this one book called "The Neuropsychology of Anxiety" which is a great scientific work. It's a very hard book. I think it has 1800 references, something like that. And this guy, Jeffrey Gray, he actually read all those references and he understood them. And so it took me six months to read the book.

But I got an entire education out of it. I got to experience in six months what it took him 30 years to learn. Like, what a gift that is. It's unbelievable. What were you reading when you were in university? Was it fiction, novels? Was it nonfiction? What were you focusing on?

As trite as this may sound, it was actually the most impact was from Shakespeare. It was the most impact on multiple levels. And I'll tell you the primary level. And when I've covered Shakespeare on my podcast, I explain this to people. People think, well, you know, I didn't really understand. I read it and understand it. If you think you're going to just pick up Shakespeare, open it up and read it and understand it, you're not going to because it's barely written in English.

It's barely written in English. It's almost another language. So what you have to do is you have to start to interpret it. And so what I realized with Shakespeare is number one, the weight of the words. That these words were so pregnant with meaning that you had to pull those words and parse those words and pull those words apart to see all the depth that each individual word had and then the way that they're put together.

And what was great about this was by the time I was back, because then I went right back into the SEAL teams and somebody would hand me a rules of engagement document that was written by some lawyer in Washington, D.C. And I'd pull it out and say, wait a second, this word, I don't know what this word means. Let's pull this word out. Let's see what this let's see what this actual definition of this particular word is and how that changes my viewpoint of these rules of engagement. And how can I translate that for my troops so that they actually know what to do?

So that part for me was from a reading perspective, starting to read Shakespeare and saying, oh, okay, you're not going to understand this. And if you don't understand something, that's

That's okay. You pull out the Oxford English Dictionary and you look it up. And then you not just find out what the meaning of the word is, but what's the root word and where does it come from and what kind of depth and what kind of... Yeah, and that's really... That's unbelievably useful too. Virtually every word is like that because a word is an ancient artifact. It's like...

It's like an animal in some sense. It has an evolutionary history and it transforms across time. And each word kind of, it carries the echoes of its past with it too, because each word attracts other words.

in a particular unique way. So it kind of lives in a word ecosystem as well. And the ecosystem contain information about the history of that word. And you think, well, why is that important? It's like, well, hey, guess what? You think in words, you talk in words, you have all these archaic

entities, these words, these living entities that you use. It's like the more you know about them, the more you know about you, the more you know about other people and the better you are at formulating and communicating your ideas. There's nothing lost in that kind of investigation. There's nothing but gain there. How did I balance marriage, fatherhood and a demanding career? Well, I stopped wasting time. That helped a lot. I stopped drinking.

I stopped going to bars. I really didn't spend a lot of time with my friends when I had young kids in particular. I had friends and I saw them, you know, with some degree of regularity, but

Where I cut corners was more with social life outside my family. So I spent a lot of time with my wife and I spent a lot of time with my kids and I spent a lot of time on my career. And so you have to make choices. And I think those were reasonable choices. I'm not displeased with them. Don't abandon your friendships, but you can certainly look at where you're wasting time and just stop doing things that you know to be a waste of time. So, and I did.

The funny thing is, if you're trying to stop drinking, you need something better than alcohol. And alcohol is pretty good. So you better find something a lot better, man. Yeah. And then it is, then esteemable people do esteemable things. It's like, yeah, well, you want to figure out, you want to figure out something that you're doing with your life that's worth not getting drunk and screwing up because that's fun. I,

concentrated on my marriage and making time for it. I concentrated on spending time with my kids consciously, and I concentrated on developing my career. Those were the three elements of my life. And I had some time left over for creative pursuits and for friends. But most of it was a matter of getting rid of time wastes of any sort. And I just pushed that out of my life day after day until I wasn't wasting any time.

or virtually no time. And, you know, I've asked my undergraduates frequently how much time they waste per day. And general estimates are like six to eight hours of time they regard themselves as wasting. Like that's a whole career right there, right? So if you just stop wasting time, you can do a tremendous amount, especially if you also try to maximize efficiency. And I always found that incredibly motivating. You know, I'm a motivating person.

Game how much can I do in the least amount of time possible? That was that's fun to try to do that as far as I'm concerned Because if you're starting to put your life together and you have friends that object those are not friends Those are just people, you know, they're not friends because a friend is someone this is one of the hallmarks of a friend Here's two hallmarks. Mm-hmm. A friend is someone you can tell bad news to and

And they won't tell you why you're an idiot. And they won't interfere with your suffering. They'll just listen. They'll just listen. And maybe they'll suffer along with you. Okay. So you can tell bad news to them. And they won't tell you some worse thing that happened to them. They'll listen. And they'll suffer along with you.

But a friend is also someone you can tell good news to. And the friend will say, wow, in this veil of tears, something good happened to you. Great, man. I'm wonderful. It's rare. It's unlikely. Good for you. I hope 10 more things like that happen. And they're not envious and they're not jealous and they're not one up on you. And if you're trying to get your life together, it's actually, if you're trying to get your life together and your friends get in the way, that's actually real useful for you because you've now identified who your friends aren't.

And you might think, well, I can't give them up. It's like, oh, yes, you can. And not only can you, you should. And it would be better for them. Because if they're aiming down and they want you going down with them, there's nothing good about what's happening to them. And there's certainly nothing good about that for you. You might say, well, why do people drink too much? It's like, if you like alcohol, that's a stupid question. Yeah. Right. It's like, why do people drink too much? Well, because it's great. You know, it's like, OK, so why stop? Well, you do stupid things when you're drunk.

you hurt yourself, you compromise your health. It's really hard on the people around you. You tend to turn into a liar and it screws up your life. Yeah. It's like, yeah, but it's pretty fun. Yeah, well, it is, but you need something better than that. And what's better isn't being straight and not making mistakes. It's like, that's all prohibition in some sense. What's better is, no, you need adventure, man. You need to get out there and have something to do.

Yeah. And something worth waking up for. And you need, that's the substitute for the addiction. Actually, the addiction is the substitute for that, if truth be known. You need to be afraid of the right thing. And you should be afraid of contaminating your soul with deceit. That's what you should be afraid of. That will definitely do you in. And I know exactly how. What happens is...

you know, garbage in, garbage out, the old programmer saying goes. And so you'll fill your head with nonsense and no one will call you on it except you. But you can still that voice if you try hard enough. You just wait until you get in real trouble. You know, one day there'll come a point where you have to make a decision. And the decision is the difference between life and death or worse between someone else's life and death or worse between health and the suffering that's worse than death.

And because you've compromised yourself to such a degree, you will not be able to rely on your judgment and you will make the mistake you shouldn't make. And then you're done. And that will absolutely happen. Approach it voluntarily, carefully, but voluntarily. Don't freeze and run away. Explore. Instead, you expose yourself to risk, but you gain knowledge. And you wouldn't have a cortex that, you know, is...

ridiculously disproportionate if as a species we hadn't decided that exploration trumps escape or freezing. It's like we explore. That can make you the master of the situation. So you can be the master of something like fire instead of just being terrified about it. So one of the things that's absolutely phenomenally fascinating, I think, is that one of the things that the Hindus do in relationship to Kelly is offer sacrifices.

Say, well, why would you offer sacrifice to what you're afraid of? Well, it's because that is what you do. That's always what you do is you offer up sacrifices to the unknown in the hope that good things will happen to you. So in a sense, you're faced with something terrible. The uncertain future that faces all of you, right? Something you're afraid of, no doubt. How many of you are worried about your future? Yeah. Why? You're all young, you're smart, you're relatively good looking. It's like, what the hell are you worried for? What are you worried about?

You have innumerable quasi-autonomous subsystems that make you up that will generate stories impulsively, and you'll just act them out. And you know that because you watch yourself over two weeks and you think, Jesus, I did a lot of stupid things in the last two weeks. And you think, why? And it's because you're a random, you're a collection of somewhat random quasi-autonomous

Autonomous personality units and lacking a leader. They're just gonna fire off whenever they want You know first you're hungry then you're thirsty then you want to go to bed with your wife You know then you want to sleep in then you want to tell your boss off Then you want to curse at the guy that cuts you off in traffic It's like you're kind of like a two-year-old. You know just it's one emotional frame after another vying for dominance there's no overarching hierarchy, and there's no king at the top and

So you know we already talked about pyramids of competence and what's supposed to be at the top is you want to bring all those things together We understand this neurologically. I'll show you some of that in a little bit. We understand this neurologically how How this maps in some sense right on to the neural structure of your being you want to put something in control and and

The thing that you should put in control is the bloody thing that pays attention and learns, right? Everything else in the hierarchy should be subordinate to the thing that pays attention and learns. What advice do you have for a young man in his 20s? Make a plan. Look at what you're interested in. Get disciplined about something. Allow for the possibility that you have something important to contribute to the world, and that the world would be a lesser place without that contribution.

Don't be afraid of taking on responsibility. You're so... It's where you find what sustains you in your life. You can take on too much responsibility. You have to be cautious in that regard, but that's a less common problem than not taking on enough. A lot of the things that people regard as traps are actually the means to their life. You know, often young people are afraid of commitment, for example, in the context of a romantic relationship. And

Because they feel that that's going to interfere with their pursuit of something more valuable. But that's just not the case. You're not going to find something more valuable in your life than a committed relationship with someone that you love, that sustains itself across time, and that in all likelihood produces children. That's life. And there may be people for whom...

Avoiding that is the better route but those people are very rare and you need a real reason to assume that you're one of those people and hopefully for you you're not You know I've had a very good career a very meaningful career in multiple dimensions and it's still been the case for me that the most important part of my life has been my intimate relationship with my wife and my and my family and

So don't be afraid of that, or be afraid of it, but don't let that stop you from pursuing it. Your ambition, if you have any sense, is actually to become competent. Do you want to be competent and dangerous, or do you want to be vague and useless? It is definitely the case that there is no more exceptional form of the capacity to be dangerous than to be articulate. And so it's a moral endeavor in some real sense. To become articulate is to become the master of your own tongue.

Every advantage comes with a disadvantage. So if you're extroverted, you're social and you're positive, but you're impulsive and you can tilt towards hedonism and you can't stand being alone.

No matter where you land in the temperamental landscape, you're going to have your associated faults and temptations. You've got a goal, and you'll see that as you progress towards the goal, there'll be obstacles that emerge, and some of them you don't want to confront. That's why it's useful to order your room. Chaotic room makes you anxious. Why? Too many pathways, man. People don't really repress the things they don't want to face. They just fail to unpack them.

You want a horizon of ever-expanding possibility. We're built to walk uphill. And when you reach the pinnacle of the hill, you want to stop and appreciate the vision. But the next thing you want is a higher hill in the distance. Beware of unintended consequences. It's like, oh no, this thing will just do what I want it to do and nothing else. It's like...

No, it turns out that not only is what we want from each other the real thing, but that's also the adventure of your life. And so if you aren't truthful, and that means, unfortunately, especially at the beginning, when you start to be truthful, it means...

deeply coming to terms with your inadequacies in humility. So it's very painful. Without that, you don't have the adventure of your life. You have the role that you've acquiesced to. And that'll take all the meaning out of your life. It's good for you to go take your place in the world. Have some ambition. Have a vision. Have a goal. Have a strategy. Try to be a good person. Not because...

It's your duty precisely because that's the proper way to live. You sit on the bed and say, okay, man, I'm ready to learn something. What's one thing I'm doing wrong that I know I'm doing wrong that I could fix? You meditate on that, you'll get an answer. You grow in proportion to the weight you take on voluntarily. And it's also true that we have no idea what the upper limit to that is.

People are afraid of the truth because often if you reveal it, it causes conflict in the moment. Telling the truth is definitely an adventure. Seeking for sure, but also telling. Another way of going about it is to just say what you think and see what happens. That's an adventure because you don't know what the outcome is going to be. So look, there's this old idea that it's necessary to have faith in the truth.

And so here's a way of thinking about that. Someone asks you a question and you might think, well, here's the outcome I want. And so here's how I'm going to answer that question. So that's one way of approaching it. But another way of approaching it is you ask me a question. I'm going to think about the answer and I'm just going to tell you what I think. And it doesn't matter what the outcome is because I'm willing to see what the outcome will be predicated on the idea that there isn't a better outcome than the one that truth produces.

Even if it's harsh and terrible in the short term, and sometimes it is, it's like there isn't a better way of doing it. Now, you might say, "Well, how do you know that?" And the answer is, "Well, I don't know that." That's why it's an article of faith. Because I believe, and I believe this deeply, the being that you produce as a consequence of telling the truth is good, by definition, even though it's harsh and often uncomfortable.

Because you get in trouble. One of the things that I've really learned recently, or learned to articulate better, is that there's a very tight relationship between aspiration and responsibility. The first question might be, do you need to aspire to something? And the answer is, well, yes, because you have to do something. If you just sit there, you'll die. You can't just sit there. You have to go act out in the world. Okay, so act towards what?

Well, that's whatever your aspiration is. You have to have an aim. Okay, well, what should the aim be? Well, it should be something worth doing, let's say. Why do something that you don't feel is worth doing? What do you think is worth doing? Well, if you watch other people and you judge when they're doing something worthwhile, you usually judge them positively if you see that they're taking responsibility, at least for themselves.

What, do you want to be completely useless so other people have to take care of you? That's pretty pathetic. And maybe you could get your act together so you're taking care of yourself and your family. And maybe you could even do better than that and take care of yourself and your family and your community. Well, good for you. That's responsibility and that's an aim. Well, here's one of the things that's cool about that is that your life doesn't have meaning without aspiration or an aim. Okay, so you need a hierarchy of values. There's got to be something at the top. It's got to be something important. If you don't have that, your life doesn't have any meaning.

So if you criticize the hierarchy, or even the idea of hierarchy, you destroy the idea of aspiration. And then people have nothing. Well, that's not helpful. People are built for a struggle and they're built for a weight. And you want to take on a heavy burden voluntarily. See if you can put yourself together. See what you can do out in the world while you're waiting to die. It's an all-in game. It better be worthwhile. It took me a long time to understand that belief regulated emotion.

So what happens is that if you act out your identity, if you act out your beliefs in the world and what you want doesn't happen, what happens is that your body defaults into emergency preparation for action. And the reason for that is you've wandered too far away from the campfire and now you're in the forest and maybe you're naked.

And so what do you do then? And the answer is, well, you don't know what to do. So what do you do when you don't know what to do? And the answer is you prepare to do everything. And the problem with that is that it's unbelievably draining psychophysiologically. Like it hurts you. And there's an immense physiological literature detailing the cost of exactly that kind of response.

People stay where what they do has the results they want. That's partly why you want to be around people who share your cultural presuppositions. It's very hard on us not to be where we know that what we want is going to happen. We hate that. And no wonder there are varying degrees of that, obviously. You can really be where you don't know what's going to happen or you can only be there to some degree.

But by and large, we're conservative creatures. Even if we're liberal in temperament, we can't tolerate that much uncertainty. You might ask, well, why? And the answer is, well, because you can be hurt, pain, you can be damaged, you can become intolerably anxious, and you can die.

So it's no wonder you're sensitive or very sensitive to negative emotion. What do you want in your life? It's a very hard question to answer. You're going to have to put some effort into your life. Set up some aims for yourself, goals that you actually value. You need to be motivated to do that. If you're extroverted, you want friends. If you're agreeable, you want an intimate relationship. If you're disagreeable, you want to win competitions. If you're open, you want to engage in creative activity. If you're high neuroticism, you want security. So now you've got your thing to aim at. Think, well, I'm motivated because I got my thing to

thing to aim at. It's like you're not as motivated as you could be because you don't yet have your thing to run away from. Because if you really want to be motivated, you want to be going somewhere and you want to be not going somewhere else. You got to aim at something. Otherwise, your life is meaningless. Well, what should you aim at? Well, pick something.

Aim at it. As you move toward it, you'll get wiser. Then maybe your aim will change. That's okay. But at least it'll change in an informed way. Discipline yourself in one dimension. See what happens. In some sense, life is a game. The analogy is that in life, like in sports, you're

Setting forth a name and then arranging your perceptions and your actions in pursuit of that and that you also generally do it while cooperating and competing with other people That's also the game like element as well. Okay So once you get your goal structure set up you think okay if I could have this life looks like that might be worth living despite the fact that it's going to be anxiety provoking and threatening and there's going to be some suffering and loss involved in all of that the goal is to have a vision for your life such that

all things considered, that justifies your effort. Put yourself in the right frame of mind. Treat yourself like you're someone responsible for helping. You're someone that you are responsible for helping. So what that means is you have to start from the presupposition that despite all your flaws and insufficiencies, that it's worth having you around and that it would be okay if things were better for you. It's like if you want to have everything you could possibly want and more, then be a good person.

The better a person you are, the more likely that is to happen. That doesn't mean that you're completely protected against getting cut off at the knees, but there's no better strategy. Then what do you do?

Well, then you turn down to the micro routines. It's like, okay, well, this is what I'm aiming for. How does that instantiate itself day to day, week to week, month to month? And that's where something like a schedule can be unbelievably useful. Google Calendar. It's like, make a damn schedule and stick to it. Okay, so what's the rule with the schedule? It's not a bloody prison.

That's the first thing that people do wrong. They say, well, I don't like to follow a schedule. It's like, well, what kind of schedule are you setting up? Well, I have to do this, then I have to do this, then I have to do this, you know, and then I just go play video games because who wants to do all these things that I have to do? It's like wrong. Set the damn schedule up so that you have the day you want. That's the trick. It's like, okay, I've got tomorrow. If I was going to set it up so it was the best possible day I could have, practically speaking, what would it look like?

Well, then you schedule that. And obviously there's a bit of responsibility that's going to go along with that. Because if you have any sense, one of the things that you're going to insist upon is that at the end of the day, you're not in worse shape than you were at the beginning of the day, right? Because that's a stupid day. If you have a bunch of those in a row, you just dig yourself a hole and then you bury yourself in it. It's like, sorry, that's just not a good strategy.

Now it's okay. Now you've got your vision. You're trying to get through a territory you don't understand. And here's your option. No map. A map that's not so good, but has some things about it. Or a great map. Well, obviously the great map is the thing you want. But the map that's something is way better than the map that's nothing. Plus, as you explore, because of your map, you can start to fill in the details. Let's say you aim at something and you...

and you develop some skills along the way, and then you get like a third of the way there and you think, oh, that's not for me. It's like, well, yeah, fair enough. But now you've still got the skills you developed. You know exactly why it's not for you now. And then you can bring that wisdom back. Even though it's not perfect, you can bring it back to your next plan. And so as you plan, you get better at planning, which is the crucial thing. So then we say to people, take your positive vision.

and make it into eight stateable goals, right? So, and then rank them in a hierarchy, break the goals into incremental goals so that you have a reasonable probability of succeeding. Within some timeframe, that's the other thing. You have to parameterize it with regards to timeframe. That's right. And when you're in the zone, you're expanding your skills in a manner that's intrinsically rewarding because you're succeeding. And so you want to set, if you're good to yourself, you think, okay, I need to set a goal

But I need to set a goal that someone as stupid and useless as me could probably attain if they put some effort into it. Then you've got it perfectly because it's not so high that it's grandiose or impossible that you fail necessarily and then justify your bitterness. Well, I set a goal and I didn't attain it, so I'm not going to set any more goals. It's like, no, you set a goal that was inappropriate and you're playing a trick on yourself because you wanted to fail so that you could justify not having to try, which isn't helpful. You're still going to be a victim.

It's like there's no way out of that man, so you know because life is this life is a challenge that in some sense can't be surmounted So there's no way out of your problem, but there are certainly proper ways of dealing with it And then the next thing is okay You need a rationale for them because you're gonna have doubts and other gonna people are gonna put up obstacles Why would it be good for you? Okay?

Why would it be good for your family if you attain that goal? Why would it be good for the broader community? Because if it's a good goal, it should be good for you. That's fine. But if it's a really good goal, it should be good for you in a way that's good for other people. Win-win-win. Yes, exactly. And if you're going to decide what your goals are, why not set up the ones that benefit you?

the largest number of people simultaneously. Yes, if you can do that, you should start with your own concerns because you have to take care of yourself. - Basic needs first. - Yes, put your own oxygen mask on, then put your child's oxygen mask on. - Community. - Yeah, right. And then you can, as you build up the basis of competence locally, you might develop enough skills so that you can expand that outward.

And it also gives your goal a certain amount of nobility. And so if someone challenges you and says, well, why are you doing that? That seems stupid. You could say, I'm doing that because it helps me take care of myself, but it benefits my family. And here's the reasons why. And this is the repercussions out into the broader community. People who are putting up objections and doubts aren't

aren't armed to deal with that kind of response. And then when you have those doubts in your mind that plague you, you say, "Why am I doing this?" "Oh yeah, it's because I have to take care of myself, because otherwise I'm pathetic and useless and bitter and cruel, and then I'm going somewhere terrible, so that's a bad idea, and here's how it would help my family, and here's how it would help the community, and that's a good enough set of reasons for it." Unless I can think of better ones. Without better ones, that's good enough. When the unknown emerges, you tend to experience anxiety.

And then there's the known, and I define the known very specifically and very carefully. The known is the place you are when what you're doing produces the results you want. And I say want because that brings motivation and emotion into the game. So you're motivated to pursue something.

You pursue it and what you want happens. Not only do you get what you want, but you get validation for the structure that governs your perceptions and your actions. If you gaze into the abyss long enough, you see the light, not the darkness. I'm betting my life on it. Bring it on. The adventure along the route, man. And I would say, where's that adventure to be found?

You don't want someone else's fate. Man, your fate's enough and your adventure's enough. It's plenty. It's more than you can ever fully realize. And so that's also part of the reason that we all believe that the individual has some intrinsic dignity. It's don't be so sure that your position and your room is so damn trivial. It might be your attitude towards it that's trivial. And if you're in dire straits and dire circumstances, just look at how much opportunity you have to make things better.

Well, maybe the same thing is true of life, right? You bind yourself to it. And the tighter you bind yourself to it, the more you find out what it is. And that's like a radical embrace. We're built to walk uphill. And when you reach the pinnacle of the hill, you want to stop and appreciate the vision. But the next thing you want is a higher hill in the distance because...

It's from the uphill climb that we derive our value. Almost all the positive emotion we feel, especially the emotion that fills us with enthusiasm, that's experienced in relationship to a goal. And so in some sense, you want a goal that you can never attain. There's nothing that makes you more formidable than verbal competence and being able to articulate, be able to think, to marshal your arguments, right?

Aim yourself in one direction and you might say well I've gone halfway down this path and I found out it's wrong. Or how do you distinguish that from just giving up? Well that's a really hard question right? It's a moral hazard. But then the absolute is yeah but you have to play one of them. You have to learn to play one of them. You have to become an expert at at least one of them. And then that's not a relative proposition. And I believe that's true. So you want to commit to something. And then when you commit to something you require yourself to

bring all of your disparate components moving in a single direction, united in a single direction. So it's a unifying act. You said that a harmless man is not a good man. A good man is a very dangerous man who has that under voluntary control. How should people become more dangerous? Oh, becoming more articulate is definitely, I would say, that's the primary array of weapons.

I mean, physical prowess is something and it's not nothing. That physical confidence that comes along with that as well. But the same thing replicated at the level of the ability to communicate and to think, that's a way broader field of battle and opportunity. In a world with seemingly infinite options, it can be challenging to decide on the best course of action for one's life.

Pearson suggests that a useful approach is to focus on what bothers you or what you find most challenging. These discomforts or challenges can be an indication of where one should focus their time and energy. By leaning into what is difficult or uncomfortable, individuals can discover their strengths and find direction in their lives. Be honest with yourself about your interests, abilities, and limitations, and pursue the path that aligns most closely with your values and passions.

There's a lot of things you could be bothered by, like a million things, man. But some things grip you, they bug you, and they might make you resentful and bitter because they bug you so much. Like, they're your things, man. They've got you. So then I look for a question that I would like the answer to. I would really like the answer to it. So I don't assume I already have the answer because I would actually really like to have the answer. So if I could get a better answer,

Great. And so that's the first thing. And that's like a prayer. It's like, okay, here's a mystery. I would like to delve into it further. Well, so that's humility. It's like, here's a mystery, which means I don't know. I would like to delve into it further, which means I don't know enough already. And then comes the revelation. It's like, well, what's a revelation? Well, if you ask yourself a question, it's a real question. Do you get an answer or not?

The answer is, well, yeah, thoughts start to appear in your head. From somewhere. That's right, from somewhere. Where do they come from? Do you have a sense? Depends on what you're aiming at. It depends on your intent. So imagine that your intent is to make things better. Then maybe they come from the place that's designed to make things better. Maybe your intent is to make things worse. Then they come from hell.

Jordan Peterson is adamant about the importance of setting goals in life and the need to embrace the difficulty that comes with pursuing them. Peterson emphasizes that while it's acceptable to change your direction in life, it's essential not to make it easier for yourself. Instead, he suggests that it's crucial to challenge yourself continually and strive for greater accomplishments. He highlights the importance of goal setting as a powerful tool for personal growth and development.

and encourages people to embrace the challenges that come with pursuing their dreams. Because it's inappropriate to continue in a direction you now realize to be wrong, but it's also inappropriate to give up and use that rationalization as an excuse, and how do you distinguish? Especially seeing as we're not transparent to ourselves. Well, right, exactly. So that is genuinely a moral hazard. So one of the

principles that I tried to abide by in my therapeutic discussions was you can change course as long as the next thing you do is equally or more difficult because that's a check against just giving up so

You want to discipline yourself so you can get yourself organized so that you can go in a particular direction, so that when you find the right direction, you can really go in that direction. And that does require an apprenticeship of sorts. And it might not matter in some sense exactly what the apprenticeship is, as long as it is rigorous.

You want a goal that you can never attain. So you can always move closer to the goal that recedes as you move towards it. You think, well, that's frustrating. It's like Sisyphus pushing the rock uphill. But it's not because as you pursue that goal, you put yourself together and your life does get better and richer and more abundant. That's why the highest levels of virtue and goal are in some sense transcendent.

You want them to be above everything you're doing so you can continually move towards something that's more sublime and better. That's what you are. You're here to live, not to sleep.

And the problem with the vision of Mai Tai's on the beach is that, well, first of all, that's a vision of drug-induced unconsciousness. Second, it's only going to work for about a week. Third, you're going to be a laughingstock in a month and depressed and aimless and goalless. No, that's not... You want a horizon of ever-expanding possibility. And so it does happen to people because they've staked their soul on the attainment of an instrumental goal.

What's your time worth? You're a university student. Well, it's certainly worth minimum wage, because obviously. But it's worth way more than that, because if you spend a productive hour when you're 20, then you gain the benefits of that hour for the rest of your life. So there's the compounding effect of time spent when you're young. So I say, well, let's assume your time's worth 50 bucks an hour, which I think is an underestimate, but whatever. Let's call it 50. We call it 25, but we'll call it 50. That's $2,000 a week you're wasting. It's $100,000 a year.

It's like, how much better would your life be if you weren't wasting a hundred thousand dollars a year? The DaVinci Code. Everyone liked that. It sold a lot. And you know, it was full of little mysteries and it was full of hints that there was more to the world than you think. And which is definitely true. And that, you know, there was a way of getting access to that knowledge and that it would really be worthwhile.

And people like that, they like that idea. The reason for that is because it's actually, it's true. Some people have traced fairy tales back more than 10,000 years. So they're part of an oral tradition. And oral traditions can last for tens of thousands of years.

You know, a story that's been told for 10,000 years is a funny kind of story. It's like people have remembered it and obviously modified it. It's like a game of telephone, you know, where I tell you something and you whisper it to the person next to you and so on. It's like a game of telephone that's gone on for, you know, a thousand generations. And all that's left is what people remember. Maybe they remember what's important because you tend to remember what's important.

It isn't necessarily the case that you know what the hell it means. You don't know what music means. But that doesn't stop you from listening to it. You don't know, generally speaking, what a movie that you see or a book that you read means, not if it's profound. It means more than you can understand. Because otherwise, why read it? Learn to write. I'm dead serious. I'm dead serious about that. Because writing is formalized thinking.

So the way you write is first of all, you need a problem because why write if you don't have a problem? So this is good advice if you're just writing an essay by the way for your classes It's like pick a bloody problem that you want to write about because otherwise it's false right from the start It's up to you to engage with the material until you find something that grips you that you desire to investigate Okay, so you need a problem

Well, the next thing you need to do is, well, you need to have something to say about the problem. So, reading. Reading is really good for that. Read as much as you can. Get your hands on it. Addresses the problem. Okay, so now you know a bunch of things, or at least provisionally, you at least have access to them.

Well now you start sorting through it. It's like, okay, well, maybe I need to summarize what I've learned. Then I need to iron out the contradictions between what I've learned. I need to elegantly formulate that. And I need to get my word choice right, and my phrase choice right, and my sentence choice right. And I need to organize the sentences into proper paragraphs, and the paragraphs into proper sequence, so that I have a coherent argument. And at the same time, what you're doing is

is you're integrating your own personality at the highest and most abstract level of organization. And you're sharpening your tools and you're putting yourself straight because you're learning to think. You learn to do that by writing. Many, many years. You hone your words.

They're the most powerful thing about you, bar none. If you are an effective writer and speaker and communicator, you have all the authority and competence that there is. And so you're at university. Maybe you're taking humanities degree. Well, what's the humanities degree for? It's to teach you how to think. You learn to think by writing. Now there's more to read, to speak and all of that. But the best thing you can do is

Read and write every day. A couple of hours every day. Write about things you find important. And see if you can discover what you believe to be true. And that will build you a foundation. And it's unbelievably practical. Like if you look at people who are phenomenally successful across life. There's various reasons, but one of them is that...

They're unbelievably good at articulating what they're aiming at and strategizing and negotiating and enticing people with a vision forward. It's like, get your words together, man. That makes you unstoppable. And that's really, that's the core of the humanities, that idea. Get your words together. Make yourself an articulate creature. And then you're deadly in the best possible way. So...

And take that seriously. The best thing you can do is teach people to write. Because there's no difference between that and thinking. And one of the things that just blows me away about universities is that no one ever tells students why they should write something. It's like, well, you have to do this assignment. Well, why are you writing? Well, you need the grade. It's like, no, you need to learn to think.

Because thinking makes you act effectively in the world. Thinking makes you win the battles you undertake. And those could be battles for good things. If you can think and speak and write, you are absolutely deadly. Nothing can get in your way. So that's why you learn to write. It's like, I can't believe that people aren't just told that. It's like...

It's the most powerful weapon you could possibly provide someone with. And I mean, I know lots of people who've been staggeringly successful and watched the two of my life. Those people, you don't want to have an argument with them. They'll just slash you into pieces and not in a malevolent way. It's like if you're going to make your point and they're going to make their point, you better have your points organized because otherwise you are going to look like and be an absolute idiot. You are not going to get anywhere.

And if you can formulate your arguments coherently and make a presentation, if you can speak to people, if you can lay out a proposal, God, people give you money, they give you opportunities, you have influence. That's what you're at university for. And so that's what you do. You're in English, right? In languages anyways. It's like, yeah, teach people to be articulate because that's the most dangerous thing you can possibly be.

So and that's motivating if people know that it's like well why are you learning to write because you here's your sword here's your m16 right here's your bulletproof vest like you learn how to use them. You students you might think in your more cynical moments that you have to offer your professors what they want and gerrymander the content of your language to suit their

predilections or what you consider to be their predilections first of all it's a very small minority of professors who are corrupt enough to punish you for producing a high quality essay that they don't agree with and though that's reprehensible but it doesn't happen very often but more importantly it's it's uh it's the highest academic sin to do that because what you're here to do is to learn to find your true voice

And every time you deviate from that for expedient reasons, you corrupt yourself. And not in a trivial way. Because when you formulate your arguments, that becomes a permanent part of your character. You carry that with you. It becomes part of the structure through which you view the world. And it guides your actions. And so you hold your words pristine. And you work intently.

in a dedicated way to become as articulate and clear as you can possibly become. And there's nothing that's more practical and noble than that at the same time. If you come out of here able to speak and think and write, no matter where you go, like you're headed for the pinnacle. And hopefully in a way that's positive for everyone.

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