3 Step To Quickly Improve Your Life And Make Everything Better - Jordan Peterson Motivation

[Music] the right level of focus is the individual and what individuals can do first is like what a physician should do first do no harm right like assume that you know you're probably a force for mayhem in trouble unless you've got yourself disciplined and aimed right you know because you're complicated and troublesome and so unless you've got your act together you're trouble and everyone knows that and they know people like that so the first thing you do is constrain the amount of damage you're likely to do and you do that by disciplining yourself and by also admitting to yourself that you don't know what you're doing that there's lots of things about you that need to be improved which is actually that's a beacon of hope right it's like well my life is miserable yeah but you're doing a bunch of things wrong it's like oh good because if i'm doing a bunch of things wrong then maybe if i fix them my life won't be so horrible well that's good and everyone knows about the fact that they're not doing things right fundamentally you know they don't have to examine their conscience that much to figure that out and then you can start aiming for something something good start not lying any more than you have to or maybe not at all if you can train yourself then you start to discern truth from falsehood and then you can find out empirically does your life get better or worse well you know i've got hundreds of letters now maybe thousands of letters um from people who have been trying that you know and they say well you know i'm way better you have to do way better than you know i went into her than i thought that i was before i went into a restaurant the other day in toronto and this kid came up and he shook my hand and he said i just want to know that since i've been listening to you i've got three promotions at this restaurant and i said well you know good work man like way to be and he said yeah well i started coming in on time and i'm working really hard and i'm trying to figure out how i can do a good job here instead of being above the job you know i'll take this until i get something better it's sort of beneath me it's like no probably not actually it's not that easy to do most jobs it's actually hard to do most jobs especially to do them well and it turns out that the world is constituted if society is set up well that if you do a good job invisible doors open in front of you because people and i know this i've had lots of contact with businesses and academic institutions and like the people who run things competently are often but not always interested very interested in finding young people that they can mentor and move forward it's actually one of the pleasures of being competent in something yeah and so if they see someone who's like going that extra mile you know busy people have lots of opportunities around them and they think oh i've got that opportunity i can't really do it but i can funnel it over to this kid here yeah like let's see how he or she does it you know and so you say yeah you want to try this and the person says well i don't have time it's like okay but the smart kid says yeah yes yes i'll do that and then the person with opportunities thinks watches and thinks okay well let's you know we'll back up a bit see if person does it if they do it it's like hey here's four more opportunities that i don't have time for the system is rigged against you okay you're gonna die you're gonna be ill like it's rough man now you don't want to lay that at the feet of the social structure because the social structure at least in part is trying to have you not die right i mean that's why we have walls and electricity and all of that it works pretty damn well you know you're probably going to live until you're 80. and the only reason you're not going to live longer is because we can't figure out how to get you live longer that's why you're not going to starve to death wild animals aren't going to tear you in pieces tyrants aren't going to rip you from limb to limb it's like these are good things now you still got a big problem because the cosmic system is rigged against you in a sense but okay so fine what do you mean by that well you know you're vulnerable and and and and and you can be broken and you will be in many ways but you can't blame someone for that it's just that's the structure of reality okay so what do you do about that well as far as i can tell and i've always looked as a psychologist for optimistic ideas and and i'm not it's not i'm not an easy sell with regards to optimistic ideas especially because of my basic belief in the idea that you know the most profound truth is that life is suffering it's okay fine life is suffering you can't blame that on anyone all right so what do you do about it well maybe nothing maybe nothing maybe the jig's up it's hopeless you know but maybe that's not right maybe here's something what you have against the suffering and the malevolence let's say you have possibility you have potential in front of you inside of you even whatever that means so here's the question what would your life be like if you made use of all the potential that you were offered that's the optimistic question because you can test it out say okay well i'll just try that for a year i'm i'm gonna i'm gonna do the best i can at everything that offers itself to me just as an experiment and then i'm going to see well is my life better or is my life worse it's like you try it for a year you think huh it's actually better my friendships are better my family's better i'm i'm less anxious i'm more positively oriented i'm less resentful and bitter and jealous and angry you know i'm more physically healthy it's like hey great and you still you're not that good at it it's like what happens if you did that for five years yeah that's a good addiction that's an addiction yeah it's an addiction to possibility and then it's also an exponential thing and this is actually technically true we know this beyond a shadow of a doubt there's this principle that economists talk about they often call it the matthew principle which is based on a statement in the new testament from those who have everything no yeah uh to those who have everything more will be given and from those who have nothing everything will be taken it's really a vicious statement but what it means is as you go downhill you go downhill faster and faster and people know that it's like it isn't linear man it's exponential you do one thing stupid then two stupid things happen then four stupid things happen and it's you know before you know it you're done but the reverse of that is also true you do one good thing and then you know you get two opportunities and you fix them up and you get four and this is how the world works it's a fundamental economic principle and you see because of that that a small proportion of people have most of the gains accrue to them and they're the ones they're healthy that's luck often you know they didn't get run over by a bus like there's lots of arbitrary things about life that have to go right but after that it's like those are also people who are capitalizing on what they're being offered without bitterness or resentment and then maybe it won't work for you but you don't have a better you don't have a better plan than that so there's a rule for working with old people in old age homes and the rule is don't do anything for the for the uh residents that they can do themselves you think well that's pretty harsh it's like no it isn't you're you're helping them retain their independence and their strength right yeah you're not stealing their strength and it's the same with little kids like little kids should be doing whatever they can that's productive and useful as young as they can you know people talk a lot about self-esteem which is it's very badly conceptualized self-esteem because it it's come to mean you should feel good about yourself which i don't believe i think you should feel good about who you who you could be if you got your act together and you shouldn't be feeling so good about who you are now in your sorry state it's like what the hell man you're 17. don't be feeling too good about yourself get the hell get your act together and see what you could be and feel good about your trajectory yeah that's way different but also your competence and so like even with little kids is they know they're being taken care of they have an existential debt to their parents it's like if you allow them to be useful and encourage them to do things then they get to pay off that existential debt and then they can see that they're contributing members of even this small society and it's no lie [Music] one one of the studies was a study of motivation technical study of motivation in rats let's say you want to motivate a rat okay so first of all you make him hungry you know work for food so then maybe you have him learn this maze he has to run the maze to get the food reward and so he runs it a few times he knows there's food there so you put him at the beginning of the maze and you let him go and then you watch how fast he goes to the maze now there's a couple of ways you can measure his motivation you can attach him to a spring and have him pull against the spring and then you know you get some estimate of how much work he's willing to put in to to go down the maze or you can time him okay so now imagine you got your hungry rat and you let him go at the beginning of the maze and he zooms up to get the food and he's you know moving at like 10 miles an hour but now you do something different you put him in the same place but as well as him being hungry and going after the food waft in a little bit of cat odor [Music] yeah yeah rats hate cats they can't stand them even if they've never met a cat they can't tolerate the odor it really terrifies them and so that rat will run towards that food much faster than he will if he's just hungry and so like if you want to run if you want to run towards something that you want it's really useful to be running away from something you truly don't want yeah and i thought about so that's part of the reason we built that into the system and i had a metaphysical take on that too which is like many religious systems have a kind of notion of something like hell that's very well developed in in in christianity and so hell is where you end up when you lie that's one way of thinking about it in a very good way um you might think well is there any psychological utility in that idea and the answer is yeah you need to you need to know where you could end up if things went wrong because then you're motivated by fear to move forward if you're not motivated by fear to move forward then your fears in front of you stopping you because you might think oh my god i can't take the risks necessary to attain these goals what if something goes wrong well it's like yeah well then then you're frozen but if you think no no wait a second there's risks to proceeding but nothing compared to the risks of failing so then the fear is behind you pushing you forward that's way because you need a vision of hell it's like okay what's your own what's your personal vision of hell you let your life fall apart because of your own stupidity and your own blindness it's like near the worst place you could be in five years well that's what we ask people to write about arithmetic helps too well this is something i've done with big groups of students and my clients as well it's like okay i ask students in particular between the ages of say 18 and 20. it's like well how much time do you waste in a day is it an hour people say no is it like four hours no 10 no it's usually about six i can get a group of 200 students to agree that they're just wasting six hours a day no and by their own definition of wasting right so okay so then we do some we do some mathematics with that we've got the six that's fine six hours a day okay so that's 40 hours a week all right so then i think well what's your time worth they think well minimum wage because you know most of the students if they went down at work they'd only get minimum wage but that's not right because that's a discounted version their time is worth way more than that if they're working on something useful because it's an investment so it's perfectly reasonable to assume that if you're a reasonably bright student your time is worth 25 dollars an hour something like that because of its potential for future payoff it's okay well that's a thousand dollars a week right so it's four thousand dollars a month it's fifty thousand dollars a year in four years it's two hundred thousand dollars so that's that's what wasting your day is costing you it's like let's make no mistake about it you're going to be two hundred thousand dollars poorer in four years because you're wasting your time is that is that really what you want to do you you're rich enough so that you're willing to forego that two hundred thousand dollars well no one's ever sat them down and said look put an estimate out of the value of your time figure out how much of it you're wasting and then ask yourself if you really think that that's a good idea because it's actually not a good idea and i don't think anybody thinks it's a good idea yeah damn straight i think it's it ties into the if it gets measured it gets managed the moment you start putting stuff down in in numbers that does something to our brain yeah well it's part of the goal setting issue it's like you you calibrate things and make them precise you you can no longer hide from it you know and the funny thing too is that because i also asked the classes the same thing well do you enjoy yourself while you're wasting that time and the answer is always no people feel terrible it's like you know they're watching one youtube video after another that they're not even interested in you know or they're watching like endless amounts of pornography or some damn thing and or they're playing video games not because they want to but because they can't stop and they know they should be doing something else it's not enjoyable time so not only is it weight and that's part of why it's wasted it's like it's not productive and it's not enjoyable well so how much of that procrastination is because setting goals is a great counter to that so how much of that behavior if you look at it because it's not rational behavior it's also sort of kind of same like goal setting wired into us because of our evolutionary path i've always wondered about procrastination in myself like why am i like that every now and then oh well that oh that's a good question well look procrastination needs no explanation the answer to should you do something difficult and energy intensive is no because it's difficult and it's energy intensive right so there actually has to be a so your default position can easily be no i'm not going to do that difficult and intensive thing there should be some internal resistance to doing that because it's costly okay well but then you think well wait a second there are conditions under which investing in something intensive and energy demanding is is is appropriate well yeah but you got to specify the conditions like why should you listen to yourself you can think about it this way why should you listen to yourself if you're an idiot you know what i mean if you don't have a plan your body's thinking no i'm just going to sit here and take it easy because who knows when the next antelope is going to come along so i can kill it i'm just going to lie here like a lion and wait yeah it's like no you need a reason that that's a bad idea and i think a track record like the goals and the the reasons and the and that you've already chased after a few antelopes for example and you've actually managed to do it so yeah you can well there's that too you know they're because your your your deeper self might be saying well you want me to get up and do something what makes you think i can trust you you know you're not just running down some blind alley well if you've if you've had some victories you can say no no no we're we're serious about this and so but and then the goal setting too like i would think about it more like it's more like the development of a vision it's a better way of thinking about it i think because goals they're a bit it's a bit narrow in a sense the idea is that you can have a vision of the future and a counter vision and that that you not only can you have it you need that it's without that you you won't move forward against your procrastination how do you remain focused and productive in the face of insurmountable work lists schedules and i have help i mean my wife in particular in the last year has been unbelievably helpful i mean it's become a full-time job for her really helping me manage my schedule and keep me on track but a lot of it is like i get up in the morning i have like everything scheduled i know exactly what i'm supposed to do there's a hierarchy of of uh of priority and and i'm really operating on a day-to-day level right now because there's so many things to do i can't look more than about a day or two ahead although it's it's it's basically scheduled you know but um i learned to discipline myself when i was in graduate school when i was writing i wrote a book called maps of meaning that was published in 1999 and i worked for that on that for about 15 years about three hours a day and i really sort of grabbed myself by the scruff of the neck and like forced myself to learn how to concentrate without without deviation all right you got three years man you're gonna live them anyways devote those three years to setting the world up around you so that it's the best it could possibly be for you as if you were taking care of yourself as if you cared for yourself well what would that look like you know let's say just for the sake of argument if you figured out where you were that you could have what would be best for you well what is that i bet you never asked people don't ask and so life comes at them like random snakes and they sort of fend them off and life goes by and things don't work out the way people expected them to but a huge part of that is they didn't know where they were because they wouldn't look or didn't know that they should look ignorance and willful blindness right two great catastrophes and they never figured out where they wanted to go or why now there's a problem with figuring out where you want to go and the problem is is that you make your conditions for failure clear to yourself and people don't like that so if you keep yourself in the fog then you can't tell when you screwed up now that isn't so good because you're still screwing up you're just too blind self-blind to notice although in in the short term that's less painful if you make your criteria for success razor sharp then you know every time you screw up but that's great because then you could fix it you could either repair the the behavioral inadequacy or the conceptual inadequacy that you're using as a tool in that situation or maybe you could adjust your damn plan either way you can fix it and so okay so you're living in one of these bloody things and you might as well it seems to me you might as well make it the best one you could live in because you don't have anything better to do now if you don't do that if you don't do it consciously and and this is what the psychoanalyst pointed out is that you have innumerable quasi-autonomous sub-systems 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 personality units and lacking a leader they're just going to 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 [Music] i've been telling people online in various ways and in lectures that they should start fixing up the world by cleaning up their room and i wanted to just elaborate on that a little bit before i get back to the lecture itself so as it's become this internet weird internet meme you know uh and and and and and it's a joke and good it's a joke i'm really happy about the fact that so much of this has got like the leave-in of humor and it's really important because that's what stops things from degenerating into into conflict humor and i was thinking about this idea of cleaning up your room in relationship to the mustard seed idea and you see the thing about cleaning up your room this is also something i learned from carl jung and his studies on alchemy because for jung when the alchemist was attempting to make the philosopher's stone he was not only engaged in the transformation of the material world but he was engaged in a process of self-transformation that occurred at the same time as the as the chemical trend as the chemical transformation so it's a psychological work in some sense let's say you want to sort out your room and beautify it because the beauty is also important and let's say that all you have is just a little room like you're not rich you're poor and and you don't have any power that's another thing but you've got your damn room and you've got this space right in front of you you know that that that's a part of the cosmos that you can come to grips with and you might think well what's there in front of you right in front of you and the answer to that is it depends on how open your eyes are that's the proper answer because you could say and william blake said this for example and eldest huxley made comments that were very similar that in a transcendent state you can see infinity in the finite and you might say well you can say in you can see infinity and what you have within your grasp if you look and you could say maybe that's the case with your room and so you want to clean up your room well okay how do you do that exactly well a room is a room is a place to sleep and so if you set your room up properly then you figure out how to sleep and when you should sleep and how you should sleep and then you figure out when you should wake up and then you figure out well what clothes you should wear because they have to be arranged properly in your dresser then you have to have some place to put your clothes and if you're going to have some clothes you have to figure out what you're going to wear those clothes to do right and then that means you have to figure out what you're going to do and then your room has to serve that purpose because otherwise it isn't set up properly and if it doesn't set up if it doesn't serve your purposes you will be unhappy and not happy in the room because the way that we perceive the world is as a place to move from point a to point b in and then if the place that we're in facilitates that movement then we're happy to be there and if the place that we're in serves as an obstacle to that movement then we're unhappy to be there and so what it means to set up your room is that you have to have somewhere to go that's worthwhile or you can't set up your room and then your room has to be set up to facilitate that and then the next thing is well maybe you have to make it beautiful but that's not easy right that means you have to have some taste and that doesn't mean you have to have money it doesn't because you can be garish with money and you can be tasteful with nothing all you need is taste and taste beats money when it comes to beautifying things you know i mean not that money is trivial because it's not but taste is crucial and people who are very artistically oriented can make beautiful things out of virtually nothing and not only that the literature suggests that if you're going to make beautiful things putting real constraints on on what you allow yourself to do facilitates creativity instead of interfering with it because let's say you have to make something out of nothing right which i suppose would be a godly act right you have to make something out of nothing you have to be creative in order to do that and so then to to beautify your room means that you also have to develop your capacity to be creative and so then you can make your room shine but then what will happen is that if your family isn't together they will interfere with that you'll interfere with that because you won't have the discipline to do it properly but then when you start building this this this little microcosm of perfection with what you have at hand then it'll evoke all the pathologies of everyone in your household they'll wonder what the hell you're up to in there and they won't necessarily be happy because if you're if they're in a lowly place let's say and so are you and you're trying to move out of that then the higher you move out of that the more the place they're in looks bad and you might say well what they should do is celebrate your victory over chaos and evil but that isn't what will happen what will happen instead is that they will attempt to pull you back down they'll attempt to and i mean obviously all families don't do that but but all families do that to some degree and some families do almost nothing but that and so what that means is that if you're going to organize your room then you're going to have to confront the devils in your house and that's often that's often a terrifying thing because some of those devils have have lineages that go back many many many generations and god only knows what you have to struggle with in order to overcome that and so and then and so to sort yourself out and to fix up your room is a non-trivial matter you know and you you can do that you'll learn by doing that and then maybe you'll learn enough by doing that so that you can fix up your family a little bit and then having done that you'll have enough character so that when you try to operate in the world at your job or maybe in the broader social spheres that you'll be a force for good instead of harm because you'll have learned some humility by noting just how difficult it was to put your damn room together well and yourself for that matter and so you'll proceed cautiously with your eyes open towards the good [Music] do you plan your day much or your time generally does this lead to higher productivity yes i plan my day obsessively my calendar is always absolutely full and often weeks in advance and i plan in the morning especially when i'm on top of things and i plan each hour and i probably plan each minute and yes it leads to way higher productivity you know you you decide what your goals are going to be you place them in the calendar use the calendar as your friend eh because what you want to do with the calendar is design a day that you want to have or a day that would be good for you and a day that would be good for you is one that you're that you're uh you know when you end the day you feel that you've moved moved yourself ahead towards your valued goals and that you've kept chaos under control and that enables you to sleep soundly and with a good conscience and to know that the next day is going to be at least not worse than that day planning is unbelievably useful and again you know i i don't want to sound like a broken record with regards to the future authoring program but it really is useful you know you need to figure out what it is that you're aiming at and why and then you need to figure out how you're going to break that down over the months and the weeks and the days but i would approach your calendar like it's your best friend you think okay i'm going to design a week man that i really want to have and that means you can schedule in leisure and all the things that you want to do which which you absolutely should do and it's also quite fun to um give yourself minimal time to do something complicated because it's quite challenging to see if you can do far more than you thought in far less time treat yourself like you're someone that you care about see i read this i read this this piece of work by jung a long while back and it was a meditation on um the injunction to treat your neighbor as as you would like to be treated something like that and what jung pointed out which i really liked was that that wasn't an injunction to be nice to other people it was an invitation to reciprocity it was something like this it's like you should figure out how you would like to be treated like you were taking care of yourself not how you would like people to respond to you it's more important than that it's like imagine you had a child that you really cared for and and someone said well people will treat this child exactly like you want them to but you have to figure out what that is and so then you'd have to sit down for like a month and you'd think okay well how do you want your child to be treated you don't want everyone just to be nice to him you know you want people to challenge him and you want people to discipline him and you want people to tell him when he's wrong it's like you don't just want everyone to be nice that's that's pathetic it's pathetic there's there's no challenge in that and so well you want to treat other people like you would like to be treated well then you have to figure out how would you like to be treated and well you'd like people to fawn all over you and just lay everything at your feet it's like no that's that's not something you'd wish for for someone that you were taking care of and then then there's an additional problem which is it's often the case that people will treat other people better than they treat themselves that happens extremely frequently so one of the things i pointed out chapter two was that if you have a dog and you take him to a vet and the vet gives you your prescription medicine you'll go buy the medicine and you will give it to the dog and you will do it properly but if you go yourself to a doctor and you get a prescription there's one that there's a 30 chance you won't even pick up the medication and if you do there's a 50 chance that you won't administer it to yourself properly and so i really thought about that when i first came across that statistic it really it was another one of those little facts i thought what is up with that it's like you'll do it for your dog so obviously you'll do it for something you care about and you're conscientious enough so you'll actually do it so like why wouldn't you do it for you your dog likes you you know even your dog would rather that you did but but you don't you don't and and it's actually one of the reasons that modern medicine doesn't work nearly as well as it could because people just don't take their medication you make the world a much better place a much worse place if you don't take care of yourself so you should bloody well take care of yourself you know because well that's what the chapters about it's partly because you have something valuable to bring into the world that's the thing about being an individual it's the thing that western civilization has always recognized that as an individual you have a light that you have to bring into the world and that if you don't bring it into the world the world is a dimmer place and that's a bad thing because when the world is a dim place it can get very very very dark and so it's not just so that you feel better and not just so that you're a number one lobster not none of those things you need to take care of yourself because you're in the best position to do that and it's necessary for you to take care of yourself despite the fact that we're mortal and vulnerable and self-conscious and capable not only capable of doing terrible things but actually do them despite all that you you're still you still have that responsibility [Music] compare yourself to who you were yesterday not to who someone else is today and the reason i wrote that was because i had this client kenny i'm a clinical psychologist and i spent 20 hours a week for 25 years listening to people listening to people tell me about their lives you know and and those people were people who were just barely hanging on to the bottom of the world up to people who were so successful you can hardly believe it like the entire gamut of people and and that's been absolutely fascinating it's like it's like being a clinical psychologist if you really listen is like being immersed in a dostoevsky novel all the time you know because it's amazing what people will tell you if you listen to them they are people are so interesting if you actually listen to them because they're so peculiar like they're like penguins or rhinoceroses and ostriches they're unlikely creatures and anyways um with regards to um to uh comparing yourself to who you were yesterday and not just who someone else is today um this old client of mine he was about 85 when he came to see me and he was a financier and a kind of a mathematical genius he made these little pendants out of a a mathematical symbol for the most beautiful mathematical equation that was ever written he made them out of gold and he would hand those out and he had studied psychology as a young man and he introduced me to this concept that i didn't know about called the pareto distribution which see i've been taught as a psychologist that most human characteristics were normally distributed right so most people were average and some people were extreme that that's a pretty or a normal distribution intelligence is like that and height there's more people of average height than very tall or very short and weight is like that and lots of things are normally distributed and psychologists tend to assume that everything is but it isn't creative products are distributed in a pareto distribution and that's a whole different thing and it's really important to know this it's another fundamental fact the knowledge of which can sort of transform the way you conceptualize let's say the political landscape so here here's an example of the pareto distribution huh you know there's a rule of thumb that if you run a company that twenty percent of your employees do eighty percent of the work or the twenty percent of your customers are responsible for 80 of your sales or the 20 of them are responsible for 80 of the customer service calls same thing but that's not exactly the rule the rule is worse than that the rule is in a given domain the square root of the number of people operating in that domain do half the productive work so you think well you have 10 employees three of them do half the work it's like yeah okay what if you have 100 employees then 10 of them do half the work what if you have a thousand employees then it's 30 and if it's 10 000 employees then it's a hundred and this actually turns out to be a rather ironclad rule it it applies across very very many situations it applies for example to the mass of stars and the size of cities so you can see how universal it is as a law and it's it's something like those that have more get more and those that have less get less that's the matthew principle right to those who have everything more will be given from those who have nothing everything will be taken away and the economists sometimes call that the matthew principle and so what what that lays out is a world that's rife with inequality so you know you hear this idea that i think it's the 85 richest people in the world have more money than the bottom two billion that's a pareto distribution phenomena and you might say uh to hell with capitalism for producing that it's like sorry you got your diagnosis wrong it's a natural law it's no matter what society you study you get a pareto distribution of wealth you get a pareto distribution of number of records recorded you get a pareto distribution of number of songs written or goals scored like any creative product has that characteristic and it's partly because as you start to become successful let's say people offer you more and more opportunities and as you start to fail people move away from you and you plummet and so okay so that's rough so what it is what it means is that there is always a landscape of inequality and i'm not saying that we shouldn't do anything about it although i am saying that we don't know what to do about that's the thing you know because you can modify the pareto distribution of wealth let's say but if you but we don't know how to do it without maybe disrupting the system so completely that it collapses which is what happened in the soviet union for example and in maoist china they were trying at least in principle to adjust inequality but the cure was far worse than the disease and the the truth of the matter is we actually don't know technically how much inequality there has to be to generate wealth we can guess and you could say well there should be less and you might say well there should be more if you're left-wing you'd say less and if they're if you're right-wing you'd say well we'll just let the inequality flourish but we do know that it's inevitable and we also know that we don't know how to regulate it so there is inequality what that means is there's always going to be people around that are better at something than you are and the and that's a that's a problem because you can get jealous and you can get bitter and you can get resentful and worse you can get hopeless you know because you look like look i have this this friend of mine he told me something so funny um he was he was decrying his his lack of success in the world and he compared himself to his roommate and uh he said you know his roommate his college roommate was doing much better than he was and his bloody roommate was elon musk it's like really like it's like oh you're not doing as well as elon musk well it's i mean you can see it would take it rather personally because they were roommates and everything it wasn't like he was doing badly like he was doing pretty damn well it's like i'm not as good as elon musk it's like yeah well you and like seven billion other people you know but but i thought it was instructive because well because you have to be careful who you compare yourself to now you can't just not compare yourself to others to successful people right because then you don't have anything to email one of the fundamental theses of 12 rules for life and also of maps of meaning is that because life is essentially tragic in its fundamental essence you need a sustaining meaning that's deep and and profound and deep and profound enough to get you through bad times because there will be very bad times in your life there'll be death and there'll be illness and there'll be disappointment of of all sorts and and there'll be just the standard difficulties of life in the world to contend with and you really must have something that's profound and powerful to set up against that and i think that your voluntary adoption of the struggle to improve being is the proper antidote to that [Music] you

Channel: WisdomTalks

Views: 206,821

Rating: 4.8739691 out of 5

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Advice, young people, how to, Psychology, lecture, Jordan B. Peterson, success, Jordan peterson motivation, Jordan peterson best habits, Jordan Peterson motivational video, a w motivation, 3 Step To Quickly Improve Your Life And Make Everything Better, quickly improve your life, rules to improve your life, how to improve your life, the mindset that will improve your life, change your life, improve your life, mindset for success, habits of successful people

Id: LQRC4K1zrz0

Length: 38min 30sec (2310 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 13 2021