"42 RULES TO DOMINATE THIS YEAR" (simple rules for improving yourself) - Jordan Peterson Motivation

[Music] i'll read you the rules okay maybe you'll find them interesting tell the truth [Music] do not do things that you hate which i think is a variant of telling the truth because you have to act out the truth as well as telling it act so that you can tell the truth about how you act that's obviously related to the first two pursue what is meaningful not what is expedient if you have to choose be the one who does things instead of the one who is seen to do things pay attention assume that the person you are listening to might know something you need to know listen to them hard enough so that they will share it with you plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationships be careful who you share good news with be careful who you share bad news with make at least one thing better every single place you go imagine who you could be and then aim single-mindedly at that do not allow yourself to become arrogant or resentful try to make one room in your house as beautiful as possible [Music] compare yourself to who you were yesterday not just who someone else is today work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens if old memories still make you cry write them down carefully and completely maintain your connections with people do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or artistic achievement treat yourself as if you were someone that you are responsible for helping ask someone to do you a small favor so that he or she can ask you to do one in the future make friends with people who want the best for you do not try to rescue someone who does not want to be rescued and be very careful about rescuing someone who does nothing well done is insignificant set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world dress like the person you want to be be precise in your speech stand up straight with your shoulders back don't avoid something frightening if it stands in your way and don't do unnecessarily dangerous things do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them do not transform your wife into a maid do not hide unwanted things in the fog notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated read something written by someone great pet a cat when you encounter one on the street don't bother children when they're skateboarding don't let bullies get away with it [Music] write a letter to the government if you see something that needs fixing and propose a solution remember that what you do not yet know is more important than what you already know and be grateful in spite of your suffering [Music] it's not neutral to not make sense of things it's very anxiety provoking it's very depressing because if things are so chaotic that you can't get a handle on them your body defaults into emergency preparation mode and your heart rate goes up and your immune system stops working and like you burn yourself out you age rapidly because you're surrounded by nothing you can control it's varying that's an existential crisis right it's anxiety provoking and depressing very hard on people and even more than that it turns out that the way that we're constructed neurophysiologically is that we don't experience any positive emotion unless we have an aim and we can see ourselves progressing towards that aim it isn't precisely attaining the aim that makes us happy as you all know if you've ever attained anything because as soon as you attain it then the whole little game ends then you have to come up with another game right so it's it's sisyphus and that that's okay but but it does show that the attainment can't be the thing that drives you because it collapses the game that's what happens when you graduate from university it's like you're king of the mountain for one day and then you're like surf at at starbucks for the next five years you know so yeah so what happens is that that human beings are weird creatures because we're much more activated by having an aim and moving towards it than we are by attainment and what that means is you have to have an aim and that means you have to have an interpretation and it also means that the nobler the aim that's one way of thinking about it the better your life and that's a really interesting thing to know because you know you've heard ever since you were tiny that you should act like a good person and you shouldn't lie for example and you might think well why the hell should i act like a good person and why not lie i mean even a three-year-old can ask that question because smart smart kids learn to lie earlier by the way and they think well why not twist the fabric of reality so that it serves your specific short-term needs i mean that's a great question why not do that why act morally if you can get away with something and it brings you closer to something you want well why not do it these are good questions it's not self-evident well it seems to me tied in with what i just mentioned it's like you destabilize yourself and things become chaotic that's not good and if you don't have a noble aim then you have nothing but but shallow trivial pleasures and they don't sustain you and that's not good because because life is so difficult so much is so much suffering it's so complex it ends and everyone dies and it's painful it's like without a noble aim how can you withstand any of that you can't you become desperate and once you become desperate things go things go from bad to worse very rapidly when you become desperate and so there's the idea of the noble aim and it's it's not something it's it's something that's necessary it's the bread that people cannot live without right that's not physical bread it's the noble aim and what is that well it was encapsulated in part in the story of marduk that's that's it's to pay attention it's to speak properly it's to confront chaos it's to make a better world it's something like that and that's enough of a noble aim so that you can stand up without you know cringing at the very thought of your own existence so that you can do something that's worthwhile to justify your wretched position on the planet what you're looking for in a text and in the world for that matter is is sufficient order and direction so then we have to think well what is sufficient order and direction means well you don't want to suffer so much that your life is unbearable right that just seems self-evident pain argues for itself i think of pain as the fundamental reality because no one disputes it right i mean even if you say that you don't believe in pain it doesn't help when you're in pain you still believe in it right it's it's you can't pry it up with logic and rationality it just stands forth as as what the fundament of existence and that's actually quite useful to know say well you don't want any more of that then is absolutely necessary and i think that's self-evident and then you say wait a minute it's more complicated than that you don't want any more of that that's necessary today but also not tomorrow and not next week and not next month and not next year so however you act now better not compromise how you're going to be in a year because that'll just be counterproductive that's part of the problem with short-term pleasures right it's like act in haste repent at leisure everyone knows exactly what that means so you have to act in a way that works now and tomorrow and next week and next month and so forth and so you have to take your future self into account and human beings can do that and taking your future self into account isn't much different than taking other people into account right because i remember there's this simpson episode and uh homer downs a quart of mayonnaise and vodka and he says someone marge says you know you shouldn't really do that and homer says that's a problem for future homer i'm sure glad i'm not that guy and the idea is this is that if you configure your life so that what you are genuinely doing is aiming at the highest possible good then the things that you need to to survive and to thrive on a day-to-day basis will deliver themselves to you that's a hypothesis and it's not some simple hypothesis right because what it basically says is if you dare to do the most difficult thing that you can conceptualize your life will work out better than it will if you do anything else well how are you going to find out if that's true well it's a kierkegaardian leap of faith there's no way you're going to find out whether or not that's true unless you do it so no no one can tell you either because just because it works for someone else i mean that's interesting and all that but it's no proof that it'll work for you you have to be all in in this game and so the idea is seek ye first the kingdom of god and his righteousness it's like that's actually a fairly important caution when you're talking about not having to pay attention to what you're going to eat or what you're going to wear it's like what it's essentially saying is that those problems are trivial in comparison and the probability is that if you manifest yourself properly in the world that those things will come your way is extraordinarily high and i believe i believe that that's exactly right i mean i i've watched people operate in the world and i would say that there is no more effective way of operating in the world than to conceptualize the highest good that you can and then strive to attain it there's no more practical pathway to the kind of success that you could have if you actually knew what success was and so that's what this that's what this sermon is attempting to to pause it it's like in in the story of pinocchio you know what happens at the beginning of the story of pinocchio is that geppetto wishes on a star we talked about that a little bit and so what gepetto does is align himself with the metaphorical manifestation of the highest good he can conceptualize and say he says he makes a he makes a commitment let's say he aims at the star and for him the star is the possibility that he can take his creation a puppet right whose strings are being pulled by unseen forces and have it transformed into something that's autonomous and real well that's a hell of an ambition you know and we're wise enough to put that in the children's movie but too foolish to understand what it means it's such an interesting juxtaposition that that we can both know that and not know it at the same time you can go to the movie you can watch it and it makes sense but that doesn't mean that you can go home and think well i know what that meant well people are complicated right we exist at different levels and all the levels don't communicate with one another but but the movie is a hypothesis and the hypothesis is there's no better pathway to self-realization and the ennoblement of being than to posit the highest good that you can conceive of and commit yourself to it and then you might also ask yourself and this is definitely worth asking is do you really have anything better to do and if you don't well why would you do anything else therefore take no thought for the moral for the moral shall take thought for the things of itself sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof i spent a long time trying to figure out what that meant too because it's another one of those lines that can easily be read as pro grasshopper and anti-ant you know you remember the old fable of the grasshopper in the ant the ant works and the grasshopper fiddles and the ant has a pretty good time in the winter and the grasshopper dies and so this is like a pro grasshopper line but it's not because it says something else it says that if you orient yourself properly and then pay attention to what you do every day that works and it i actually think that that's in accordance with with what we have come to understand about human perception because what happens is that the world shifts itself around your aim because you're you're a creature that has a name you have to have a name in order to do something you're an aiming creature you look at a point and you move towards it it's built right into you and so you have a name well let's say your aim is the highest possible aim well then so that sets up the world around you it organizes all of your perceptions it organizes what you see and you don't see it organizes your emotions and your motivations so you organize yourself around that aim and then what happens is the day manifests itself as a set of challenges and problems and if you solve them properly then you stay on the pathway towards that eight and you can concentrate on the on the on the day and so that way you get to have your cake and eat it too you can point into the distance the far distance and you can live in the day and it seems to me that that's that makes every moment of the day supercharged with meaning that that's how because if everything that you're doing every day is related to the highest possible aim that you can conceptualize well that's the very definition of the meaning that would sustain you in your life well and then the issue is well back to noah well all hell's about to break loose and chaos is coming it's like when that's happening in your life you might want to be doing something that you regard as truly worthwhile because that's what will keep you afloat when when everything is flooded if you were to choose one rule from your book which one would that be and why oh it's probably tell the truth or at least don't lie and the reason for that is that that's a very good starting position to straighten out your life it's really helpful to be careful about what you say and to not say things that you know are false it's never or is it like never would be best or it would be best yes i mean it's not a straightforward thing to do and that doesn't mean you get to tell the truth to as a weapon that's not the truth that's a partial truth masquerading as truth to use as a weapon i mean it you have to be sophisticated about it but it's very useful to discipline yourself not to use your language in a manipulative manner it doesn't work it's a very very bad medium to long-term strategy and your life will become much simpler in a good way much less anxiety provoking and much more exciting and adventurous if you just say what you think or even more importantly don't say things you know to be untrue one one one suggestion i have for people is that they listen to what they say and feel how it makes them feel physically and what you'll see if you start to pay attention is that some things you say make you feel like you're standing on firm ground and other things that you say disconnect you and and produce a feeling of disunity and weakness and you might think well that's worth it because i'm manipulating the world in some particular way to get what i want and it'll probably work it's like it's not worth it it won't work it will kick back and you will be punished for it so one of the things that i've learned as a clinical psychologist which is actually quite a terrifying thing to learn is that it's terrifying when i think of my own life i've never seen anyone get away with anything ever okay everything you do that you know to be wrong will absolutely come back and haunt you and usually in a magnified way and so it's very useful to know that and to be terrified enough of that so that you become careful with what you say it's and so that's how is that possible well i don't know if it's possible perfectly but you can always chase an ever receding goal i mean you can you can certainly not lie that's possible i mean the reason i use that formulation in the rule was because you can't exactly tell the truth because you're ignorant there's lots of things you don't know you have your blind spots and your biases even if you're trying to work against them so telling the truth that presupposes you know the truth you can strive towards the truth uh i don't think you can know it but you can certainly know when you're about to say something that's patently untrue by your own definition and you can certainly not do that so and that's an excellent place to start it will it will if you do that for a number of years your life will change radically and and and positively i'm going around everywhere i can suggesting to people for example that they adopt more responsibility and that they try to develop a vision for their life and that they try to tell the truth and of all three of those things the only idea really that competes with the truth as as in terms of potency is the idea that you should strive to be positively predisposed towards being towards existence despite its fragility and suffering so classically speaking the two highest virtues are truth and love and it's difficult to put one of those ahead of the other love means something like hoping for hoping and striving for for the best for things despite the fact that they're inadequate and damaged and and perverse and often malevolent and that's part of say love your enemies is well what do you want for your enemies well you might say you want their defeat maybe you want their violent painful defeat but it's better to want their transformation that's that's it's better in all regards to want that and to hope for that and to act towards them in a manner that might facilitate that so and that's part of that courageous attitude towards existence that would manifest itself in positive regard for for living things for especially for people so truth in the service of love that's that's the right ethic and it's hard to talk about those things especially love because the word has been weakened by misuse which is why i offered the definition i offered it's like it's a it's an attitude of courage to want the best for life because life is very cruel and harsh and it's easy to become turned against it and bitter and and there are reasons for that but it's not helpful it's wrong despite the fact that there are reasons for it bitterness is of no utility so even though you know i've met many people who've had very very hard lives and to see them become bitter is not a surprise but there's no utility whatsoever in it all it does is make it worse so grin and bear it so to speak and that's part of aiming upward and it is an attitude of courage a voluntary attitude of courage and truth serves that goal best so how could it be otherwise you know you can think about you have an option you can either have reality on your side or against you if you if you if you abide by the truth then you have reality on your side you have reality against you it's like you think you're going to come out ahead in that dispute that's not that's well you only think that if you've developed a certain amount of arrogance which is also another very dangerous thing i can get away with it it's like no you can't you are so outmatched by reality that there's no contest what makes the difference between people who can succeed and can't oh there's a lot of differences i mean it takes a lot of rare traits generally speaking to to push you in the direction of success it also depends on what you mean by success so we could do this two ways we could go after classical success discipline that's extraordinarily useful um intelligence that's very useful the marriage of those two i mean if you have two people who are equally intelligent and one works twice as hard as the other then the one who works twice as hard is much more likely to be successful creativity is another useful attribute reciprocity the ability to reciprocate that's unbelievably useful almost all the people i know who are successful have very broad well-functioning social networks so even if they don't know how to do something they know someone who knows how to do it and they've maintained their relationships with those friends and they've done it with integrity so they're trusted so they have a network of trusted people around them who are highly competent and so there's an ethical there's an ethical aspect to that because you don't gather a group of highly useful people around you to trade with unless they trust you and so honesty is a huge part of it and i mean i've seen people go into companies that were failing very dramatically competent people go in and with nothing other than their competence and their honesty turn the companies around completely and that's very interesting to to watch and i've consulted in situations where that's been the case so honesties and honesty i think the only real natural resource apart from air is honesty it's the it's the basis for wealth because if two people treat each other honestly they can take each other at their word and then they can cooperate otherwise you know like if i can't trust you god only knows what you're up to you're so complicated that we can't do something simple and straightforward and and directed together because we're going to spend all of our time trying to figure out what in the world is going on and and this is partly why so much poverty in the world is actually generated by corruption rather than an absolute lack of material well an absolute lack of material corruption is a is a force that produces poverty like nothing else how important is hard work oh very important especially at the uppermost pinnacles of different careers because as you move up a hierarchy of competence let's say you surround yourself by people who are more and more like you right they have everything you have right and so maybe at the at the utmost pinnacle you need a combination of 10 rare things and you better be firing you better be firing on all cylinders on all 10 dimensions because otherwise someone else will obtain the position so the higher up you go in whatever you do the more crucial it is that you do everything that you're doing right people get taken out you know you see people very frequently entertainers for example very very talented people and disciplined even and i'm very social too social sure exactly and and they have a drinking problem for example or and they're done they're done it takes them out often when they're 27 like so those are all but trustworthiness is a huge part of it you have to be able to take someone at their word so rule one is stand up straight with your shoulders back and rule two is treat yourself like you're someone responsible for helping and number three which is very tightly associated with number two their sort of variations on a theme is make friends with those people who want the best for you and by the way these last two rules aren't injunctions designed to make your life easier they're actually injunctions designed to make your life more difficult kierkegaard said at one point that his role in life given that everything was proceeding to become easier and easier in all possible ways that there would come a time when people would cry out for difficulty and so that's partly how he envisioned his role in the world interestingly enough as a universal benefactor of mankind who would strive to do nothing other than to make life more difficult for everyone right and so rule two and three are like that because treat yourself as if you're someone responsible for helping isn't the same as be nice to yourself it's not that and to associate with people who want the best for you means that they get to demand the best from you and that's also not an easy thing rule four is compare yourself to who you were yesterday and not to who someone else is today and that's an injunction about envy right it's easy you need people who you need things that are above you because you need to do something worthwhile with your life you need something to aim at but one of the consequences of that is that you can become envious of people that you believe have attained more in a deserved or undeserved manner and that can make you better and so it's much better to compare yourself to yourself and to use yourself as the target for improvement and comparison rule five is don't let your children do anything that makes you dislike them and the rule of thumb there is if you dislike them then other people will and it's a bad idea to allow your children to act in a way that makes other children dislike them or adults dislike them given that they're going to have to deal with children and they're going to have to deal with adults so your primary responsibility as a parent is to help your child learn how to behave so that the social world opens up its arms to them and welcomes them at every level and you've done your job if you can manage that and it's not a simple thing to do rule six is put your house in perfect order before you criticize the world and that's not take no action for others until you have your act together that isn't what the rule means it means that bind your ambition with humility and work on what's right in front of you that you will suffer for if you get wrong before you engage in the large-scale transformation of other people rule seven is do what is meaningful and not what is expedient and i would say in some sense in some sense that's the core ethos of the book not exactly because rule 8 which is tell the truth or at least don't lie is a necessary conjunction to that or a necessary additional element because i don't think that you can pursue what is meaningful without telling the truth and the reason for that is if you don't tell the truth or let's say if you lie which is an easier way to think about it you corrupt the mechanisms the instinctual mechanisms that that that manifest themselves as meaning and then you can't trust them and that's a very bad idea so the fundamental reason to not lie is because you corrupt your own perceptions if you lie and when you corrupt your own perceptions then you can't rely on yourself and if you can't rely on yourself then well good luck to you because what are you going to rely on in the absence of your own judgment you've got nothing if you if you lose that [Music] rule nine assume that the person that you're listening to knows something you don't and that's not so much a mark of respect for the person although it is that it's a mark of recognition of your own unbearable ignorance you know one of the things you have to do in life you have to decide what's more important what you know or what you don't know first of all there's a lot of what you don't know and so if you make friends with that if you decide that's important then well that's a good thing because you're going to be surrounded by what you don't know your entire life and so if you're appreciative of that then that's going to make things go better for you but but the other element of that is well why should you be appreciative of what you don't know and the answer to that is well you shouldn't if your life is absolutely perfect in every way you have exactly what you need and want you put everything in order around you then what you know is sufficient but if you believe that things could still be put right around you in your own personal life and with regard to the effect that you have on other people then obviously what you don't yet know is more important than what you do know and you should be paying attention to find out what you don't know at every possible moment and if you're fortunate when you have a conversation with someone and you're actually interested in what they say then even if they're not very good at communicating even if they're awkward or even if they display a certain amount of enmity towards you there's always the possibility that they might tell you something you don't know in which case you can walk away from the conversation less ignorant and corrupt than you were when you started the conversation and if your life isn't everything that you would like it to be then being slightly less ignorant and corrupt is probably a good thing and so rule 10 is be precise in your speech and that's that's an observation i would say that that's a variant of a new testament injunction which is or maybe a description of the nature of the world which is knock and the door will open and ask and you will receive which is a very strange theory let's say but which i would say is far more in accordance with what we know about the psychology of perception let's say than you might imagine because it is the case that [Music] you don't get what you don't aim at you might get what you do aim at and your aim might get better as you aim as well which is something to consider if you specify the nature of the actually if you specify the nature of the being that you want to bring into being then you radically increase the probability that that's what will occur and of course you all know that because you regard yourself at least to some degree as active creative agents right your fundamental attitude towards yourself at least in the manner that you act towards yourself is that you wake up in the morning and you have a landscape of possibilities that lay themselves open to you and you make choices between those possibilities and determine in consequence how the world is going to manifest itself so you confront a field of potential that's a good way of thinking about it and through your choices you determine which elements of that potential are going to concretize themselves into the real world and you are very unhappy with yourself if you don't do that properly and you're very unhappy with other people if they don't do that properly and you're very unhappy with other people if they don't treat you like that's what you're like because part of what you demand from people let's say in terms of sheer civility is that they act towards you as if you're the locus of voluntary choice in a world of potential and you upgrade each other for that as well if you have children and parents your parents will say to you if you're fortunate you're not living up to your potential which is actually a compliment in a sense even though it's also a judgment and the compliment is i know perfectly well that you could be more than you are rule 11 is don't bother children when they're skateboarding and that's actually a discussion of courage of encouragement more more specifically because i've i've been trying to understand for example what role parents play in the lives of their children and i would say this is a role that that that is a fundamental importance as well as attempting to guide your children so that they act in a socially desirable manner so that the world opens itself up to them you also want to encourage them which is not the same as sheltering them it's not the same at all and to encourage someone is to say something like or to act out something like look kid the world is a very hard place and it's a bitter place in many ways and it's not only a hard and bitter place it's also touched with betrayal and malevolence and that's the fundamental bottom line but there's something in you that is capable of taking that full on and transcending it and that's encouragement you say well as difficult as things are you're up to the challenge so in rule 12 is pet a cat when you encounter one on the street and it's a oddly enough a meditation on fragility it's a discussion of what you do when you don't know what to do and that's really when things have gone badly for you when you face a terrible tragedy in your own personal life or in your familial life or perhaps even in the life of your community when things come crowding in at you too quickly in in the case of a death in the family or a terrible illness or the collapse of a dream or any of the things that can flip your world upside down is how do you cope with that and that chapter contains the discussion of the necessity of narrowing your time frame because sometimes the right way to look at the world is across years and sometimes it's across months and when things are more out of control perhaps it's across days and when things are really when you're really up against the wall it's a cr across hours or even minutes and during those minutes then you concentrate on doing as well as you can with what's right in front of you for the longest unit of time that you can tolerate conceptualizing [Music] [Music] part of your goal if you want to take your place in the hierarchy properly is to be a good person and that was the argument i was trying to make in the chapter not that you're supposed to be like the most brutal crustacean on the block you know it's so foolish it was kathy newman i think that asked me in in in the uk so you're saying that human society should be organized along the lines of lobsters it's like look lady if you're gonna if you're gonna insult someone you might want to try accusing them of something of believing something that someone somewhere believed at least once in the entire history of the human race and not that yes absolutely lobsters for everyone you know what i was trying to make the case was that we have this very old system in our nervous systems which is very old which keeps track of where we are in hierarchies and that regulates our emotions because of it because it's really important to you and you and you and you if you're not completely bloody psychopathic that you have a place in a social hierarchy and that you're admired and respected and valued by other people and it's so important that that the neurochemical system that keeps track of that regulates your other emotions so that if you're low on the totem pole because well for whatever the reason happens to be sometimes you deserve it sometimes it's accidental sometimes you've been hurt there's lots of ways that that that this can happen your serotonin levels plummet like a defeated lobster and then you you feel way more negative emotion about everything and way less positive emotion about everything and that's absolutely dreadful like it's it's that's clinical depression and it's a terrible terrible condition and so it's absolutely crucial that you maintain a tenable position in a hierarchy and not of one of power but one of competence and at least even if you're not in a position that's tenable you're moving upward towards one that's tenable because that at least gives you hope you know because maybe you're young and useless and you don't know what the hell you're doing you're just getting started and so you're low man on the totem pole but it's not like you're stuck there forever you do some decent work i had some kid tell me the other day it was really nice god you know i was in a rough shape two years ago i was just getting married i just got married and i was nihilistic as hell and depressed and bitter and things weren't going well for me at all and uh and i was unemployed and one of my friends got me a job and he said i really liked the bloody job i didn't want to have the job and i was kind of dragging my ass to the work and not doing it well and i listened to one of your lectures and it said look if you haven't got anything going for you but you have a job don't quit your job whether you hate it or not it's like man that's what you're hanging on to the edge of the world with your fingertips you know don't let go if you can find a better job okay fine but you don't just quit because then what you're done another thing that i mentioned was uh why don't you just try to work as hard as you can at your damn job for like six weeks right all flat out you know if you work 10 longer hours you make 40 percent more money that's something worth thinking about you know you've got a job maybe you show up 15 minutes early and you leave 15 minutes late you know when you actually work and your boss notices because people would probably notice and then maybe someone's going to get promoted and maybe it'll be you because something's going to tilt the scales and that little extra bit of work done without cynicism and resentment might be enough well he said he started at 21 bucks an hour and in six weeks he was making 37 dollars an hour and it's not a king's ransom man but it's a hell of a lot more than zero and it's quite a lot more than 21. he said his life had turned around substantially because he learned if he put some damn effort into it and i'm not trying to be joel optimist here like i know that people hit runs of bad luck and that things can take you out of life right unfortunate illnesses and and and and betrayal and like there's no shortage of randomness and horror that can wipe you out even if you're doing your best but you don't have a better bloody plan than to do your best and it tends to work a lot better than you think and what's so interesting about the hierarchies that people set up is that that's how they're set up they're not set up on power they're set up on reciprocity and skill and trust not always you know and if you're in a job where you work hard and you're a good guy and and you're doing your best and your boss is a bloody tyrant and you never get a break it's like okay fine you're you're you're in a fuco world get the hell out of it you know you get your resume set up write your cv fill in the educational gaps that you can have that you have send out your 25 resumes a day and prepare to make a lateral move because you're in a bad place but almost everywhere and this certainly been the case virtually everywhere i've worked and i've had like 50 jobs you know if you go above and beyond the call of duty in an awaken intelligent way interpersonally socially with regards to the diligence of your work with regards to the truth of your attitude and your courage and all of that that will work and you know if you try it for a year and it doesn't work then go somewhere else because you can right you're free i mean it's not easy you can't just walk out the door and instantly find another job but you're not enslaved you could make a move you could even decide that you're going to make a move and double your salary you know it's not a bad goal and it's certainly a possibility it's like it isn't hierarchy it's ethics that determines success in a functional society it's ethics that determine success not power the rest of it's a bloody lie and that doesn't mean that all our systems are perfectly ethical you know you've got to be awake if you're in a system there's going to be some corruption in it part of what you're supposed to do is keep your damn eyes open for the corruption and your mouth speaking truth so when the corruption starts to take root you object to it so the whole damn system doesn't turn into a pathological power play and that's part of your ethical responsibility as a conscious being an ethical being a religious being for that matter and a citizen you know and and you're charged with that that's why you're that's why you vote that's why you're the cornerstone of your state man you're you're the you're the you're the what would you call you're the you're the wellspring of the ethical actions that replenish the dying world that's what you are and if you if you act that's really that's what you are and if you act that out properly then things work and that's why that's always been described as ethical behavior it's not because you're supposed to be good you know and being good isn't that easy anyways and it certainly doesn't mean being nice and harmless it's not an easy thing to be good you have to be tough as a damn boat to be good because you have to stand your ground when you need to stand your ground and you have to be able to say no when it's time to say no and you have to mean it and so then you have to think and plan strategically so that when you're going to say no you can mean it and it will stick you know and that takes a certain amount of that takes a certain amount of integrated malevolence i would say and once it's integrated it's not malevolence it's strength it's it's strength of character it's the ability to stand your ground and you have to cultivate that and you cultivate that at least in part by telling the truth and so you take your place in the world as a decent person and as a decent citizen and then and you play the hierarchical game properly and that is to stand up straight with your shoulders back it's like the world's an onslaught you've got the tyranny of culture to deal with you've got the catastrophe of nature you've got your own damn malevolence and ignorance right all coming at you plus the incredible complicated indeterminate potential of the future that's all coming at you and it's all your responsibility and you can cringe away from it and be afraid of it and be victimized by it and be bitter and cynical about it and and no wonder because it can be painful or you can turn around and you can say man bring it on because there's more to me than there is to the catastrophe i looked at the darkest things that i could think of right not only what happened in auschwitz and what happened in the gulag but but personal issues you know it's like i wasn't so much interested in the totalitarians as a group i was interested in the people who undertook the terrible acts that the totalitarians required you know the people who i was just rereading ordinary men and it was a story about a police battalion in poland that trained ordinary policemen to take naked pregnant women out into the fields and and and shoot them in the back of the head it takes a lot of training by the way before you can bring yourself to do that and you aren't the same person by the end of it it's pretty goddamn horrific you know and i was trying to figure out what would it be like to be that person because we are that person and then what would it be like to not be that person right to refuse to do that to not participate in that you know and and what i've discovered by making that totalitarian proclivity personal was that there was there's more to us than there is to the horror his nature is bent on our destruction bad as culture is tyrannical and bloody back as far as you can look as malevolent as you are in in the darkest part of your heart and that's plenty malevolent the the possibility that's within you that can well up the courage and the truth and the ability and the skill and and the and the willingness to set things right if you are willing to set them right is more powerful than all of that and so it's so interesting it was it was proof for me of an old saying i i read from carl jung it's an alchemical motif in stir quality inventor which is what you most want to be found will be found where you least want to look essentially and it's so interesting because it means that if you're willing to turn around and to stand up stay and stand up straight and face the darkness like fully what you discover at the darkest part is the brightest light and then not something that's so much worth discovering because there's going to be terrible darkness in your life and it's going to make you cynical and bitter and it could easily be that you're just not looking at it enough because if you looked at it enough and you didn't shy away and you brought everything you had to bear on it you'd find that there was more to you than there was to the horror the circuit that we use to to defend ourselves against predators as we've evolved cortically that circuit has has come to represent what we don't know in general because the predators of course inhabit where we don't know and so evolution is a conservative force and we use the circuits that we've evolved to represent new things and so the unknown the chaos is often represented by a monster that swallows you up and pulls you down and you know when you're feeling terrible you don't say well i'm feeling up you say i'm feeling down well why is that well down is worse i guess you're flat on the ground when you're down or you're in a hole or something like that you're hiding in a hole you know it's down and you're threatened by something you know maybe you're threatened by your own inadequacy that might be part of it maybe that's partly what you imagine as a monstrous force because you know your proclivity towards procrastination and your weakness of character is part and parcel of why you happen to be in the underworld and that's the underworld the mythological underworld that's where you go when things fall apart and if you understand that if you know that that's what that means then you have one of the keys that opens up ancient stories to you and you understand things you could your life can be organized going very well and then something comes up and poof everything changes some axiom that you were living by and it might be the existence of a partner it might be a job it might be your health any of those things gone and you go somewhere when that happens you go somewhere it's a state of being you're still in the same world but it's not the same at all anymore everything about it is different it's all negative and dark and you don't know what to do you're confused and so what do you do down there in the underworld when things have fallen apart especially if if it's the worst possible case scenario and you realize that you actually had something to do with your demise that's really annoying you know when something bad happens to you and then you know you grind yourself into bits trying to figure out what the hell happened and then you realize that well you were playing a causal role now sometimes you're so depressed you assume you're playing a causal role and you weren't it's not easy to figure out by any stretch of the imagination and it isn't that everyone who does something terrible is at fault for it but sometimes you find that you were off the path somehow and maybe even that you knew it and they didn't attend to it and that's why all of this hit the fan and so then down there in that chaos you decide that you're going to do what you're supposed to do instead and then maybe you get to rise up again renewed if you're lucky and then you can go fix the city and that's what this story is about and that's why i picked the image to represent the course because really what happens you see with the psychoanalysts the road to to health if you're not doing well which means that as you act in the world you're not getting what you want there's something wrong with your the match between your presuppositions and your actions habitual and the way the world is responding to you and so it's not turning out for you and the question is well what can you do about that and one answer might be to examine yourself for presuppositions and action patterns that are not serving you well and to find out what they are and what to do about them and maybe some of that is maybe you're not moving forward because of fear and maybe that fear is grounded in terrible experiences that you had in the past that you've never been able to understand and maybe one of the ways of gluing yourself back together and expanding your personality so that you could in fact live properly in the world is to go back to those terrible events and untie them and straighten them out and understand them and drop them to navigate and there's two things you need to know the first is where the hell are you exactly precisely right razor sharp what's good about you and what's bad about you buy your own buy your own reckoning you don't have to you can ask other people but this is a game you play yourself it's like as far as i'm concerned i'm taking stock what is it that's okay about me and what needs some work and you got to watch to not be too self-critical when you're doing that too because that can just be another kind of flaw and then the next is okay well where are you going what's your destination well and that's what the frame is now you know you could do that in a very sophisticated way and you do that by thinking consciously about who it is that you are in an articulated manner and where you want to go and why and how you're going to get there and people hardly ever do that that is that's come as such an absolute shock to me as an educator i i just because one of the other programs i i use this in my classes one of the other programs in this suite of programs is called the future authoring program and i started developing in my maps of meaning class which is where some of this material is from and i got students to write about their past it's like okay we're we're talking about stories so let's tell your story who are you how do you get here and what are you now that usually helps people put things to rest although it's quite stressful while you're doing it stress goes up when you're doing it and maybe you feel miserable for a couple of weeks and then stress goes down and it stays down so that's and that's also why people don't do it because who the hell wants to have their stress go up but if it's temporary it's a sacrifice so then the next issue is well where are you going and one of the things that and this i just still i cannot understand these students that have been in education system for 15 years 14 years high end students most of them not once in their whole bloody life did anyone ever get them to sit down for like a day and say all right justify your existence like well seriously it's like here you are in university you're taking a bunch of courses you've got some sort of vague career plan it's like defend the damn thing a bit since you're going to go live it and everything you're staking everything on it it's like what's your damn plan and why are you so convinced that it's not the plan of a babbling fool because if you haven't thought about it then it is and if you really want to go out there and live that out you know one of the things carl jung said was that you you're in a story whether you know it or not and and then he made two nice comments about that if it's someone else's story you're probably going to get a bit part and it might not be the one you want and if it's a story that you don't know it might be one with a really bad ending or maybe it's just bad period with a worse ending and if you don't know what the story that you're living out is maybe that's the one you know maybe you got that from your mother you got it from your grandmother you got it from your aunt or god only knows where you picked it up because you pick up things like mad because that's what human beings are like so maybe you're living a malevolent tragedy unconsciously and then one thing you might ask yourself is well how wretched and miserable is your life let's add futile to that how wretched miserable and futile is your life and you might say well yeah 70 percent on each count it's like then you're probably unconsciously living out a malevolent tragedy and maybe that's not for the best what's either that or the whole universe hates you right or 70 percent hates you you know so so anyways you know we got students to start writing in detail about not what they wanted it's not a career thing because that's the closest people usually get is they have a career plan it's like no no it's not a career plan that's that's peripheral important but peripheral it's like 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 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 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 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 and partly what those religious stories are trying to relate to the degree that they can is that each person has a destiny that's actually crucially important and that in the pursuit of that destiny they start to they start to see what is associated with the highest orders of meaning one of the reasons that i believe that each person should take their place in life and that this is so important for each individual is that we have we all have that potential residing within us and it has the possibility of making the world more like hell or more like heaven and to the degree that we can have the courage and the faith to manifest that in a positive way then we tilt everything in a positive direction and that's not some naive sort of namby-pamby positive direction where everyone's nice to each other all the time that's like the ongoing march of civilization that makes the world that feeds people and and cures disease and and helps take care of children and and keeps suffering under bay and keeps malevolence in check and that's all part of that divine capacity that people have and religious systems are an attempt to to to communicate that across the centuries and you know it's not an easy thing to divine from them but it's a very important thing to understand and i really do believe that you leave a hole in the world if you don't fill if you don't fill the space around you with the destiny that's part and parcel of the best part of you and it's not good you have to have a sense of you have to have two senses you have to have a sense of how terrible the world is and could be and then you have to decide that you're going to move away from that as much as you possibly can at least to move away from that if you have a conceptualization of hell yes and to be properly terrified of that and to understand that that's a place that you can put yourself and drag other people into and that it's sufficiently real and that's the proper message of the 20th century and then to think about how you might improve yourself incrementally so that that probability decreases and then you can start to develop a vision of what things might look like if they were better and strive towards that and partly what i'm doing now is for me trying to clarify the relationship between meaning and responsibility which i think is a of all the things that i've been talking to people about probably the most useful to help people understand that you need a meaning in your life to buttress yourself against the tragedy and the malevolence and the betrayal and that you find that fundamentally in adoption of responsibility now that can become excessive you know if it's if it's too one-sided and it and you don't see a part for other people to play but fundamentally you need to carry a weight that's sizyphus and that weight should be something that you truly regard as worth carrying it justifies the sacrifices it orients yourself in life it provides you with a sense of meaning it constrains your anxiety gives you a certain amount of dignity and it puts the world it it moves the world forward in a better manner and i do believe that each of us every day decide with every decision whether we're going to make the world a better place or a worse place and so that's meaningful for me that's that's that's the essence of it's the essence of what i believe meaning to be the instinct that orients you towards proper action in the world it's a real it's the most real thing there is one of the things that people don't understand too it's not laid out very clearly is that a virtuous path so that would be one that's oriented to some higher order goal is a lot more difficult and requires a lot more courage and discipline and strength than an impulsive criminal path even though even though there's a certain romance that's associated with that that's probably better than hiding in your mother's basement you know but that doesn't mean it's the highest order way that you can possibly be and so part of part of orienting yourself in the world is to heed that call to adventure and to try to make the adventure as difficult as you can manage and as productive in consequences you can manage you have written a book and done a series of lectures that have become embraced around the world some people don't get lucky breaks that's for sure some people just die and horribly yeah life's rough no doubt about it and if good luck comes your way then you should be grateful for it and if happiness manages to manifest itself you should be grateful for that too but how do you give a personal responsibility message while taking account that for some people it's harder to take personal responsibility and their deck is stacked against them well i think the deck is stacked against everyone to some degree because life is very difficult and we all die so but people some people do have it harder than others and and all of us have it very hard at some times in our lives it's like well what's the what's the alternative you take responsibility for that and try to struggle uphill because the alternative makes everything worse it's not like it's fair i know perfectly well that people have brutal lives i've been a psychotherapist for 20 years i've seen things you can't imagine horror shows that you can't fathom and people who have been hurt in so many ways so many dimensions it's like bitter should they be bitter should they be resentful should they become violent these things don't help they have to struggle uphill despite their excess burden and it's responsibility not guilt you know it's not necessarily their fault and one of the things that has just blown me away in the last year because i've talked to lots of people lots of people live you know but also lots of people online but it's more obvious live and it's obvious in this theater as well is that i've i've gone around and spoke and then a large proportion of my audience has been young men young you know under 30 something like that and i've spoken to them a lot about responsibility and what's so odd about about this is that of all the things that i've spoken about because i can see the audience and i can feel how the audience is reacting because i'm always paying attention to all of you it's insofar as i can manage that so i i get some sense of how what i'm saying is landing you know what you have to do if you're going to speak effectively to people and what what happens is if i talk about responsibilities everyone be is silent just like they are now silent and and not moving right focusing attentive say pick up your responsibility pick up the heaviest thing you can and carry it and the room goes quiet and everybody's eyes open and i think that always makes me break up i was [Applause] i don't i don't know why i was speaking to an english journalist today who's going to write an article in spectator magazine and i was talking about this and at the same point in the discussion the same i had the same emotional reaction i don't really understand it it's i think it's something there's something about it that's so crucial because you know we've been fed this unending diet of rights and freedoms and there's something about that especially there's something about that that's so pathologically wrong and people are starving for the antidote and the antidote is truth and responsibility right and it isn't it isn't because that's what you should do in some you know in some some i know better or someone knows better for you what you should do since it's that it's not it's that it's that that's the secret to a meaningful life and without a meaningful life then all you have is suffering and and nihilism and despair and all of that and self-contempt and and that's not good and so the men it's necessary for men to stand up and take responsibility and they all know that and and are starving for that message and and the message is more that that's also a good thing to stand up and take responsibility because you're cursed so much now from from from from when you're young with this notion that your active engagement with the world is part of what is destroying and undermining the planet and adding to the tyranny of the social systems it's like how about not so much of that hey because it's it's it's it's too soul deadening it's anti-human right to the core and my sense instead is that you know if you if you were able to reveal the best of yourself to you in the world that you would be an overwhelming force for good and that whatever errors might be made along the way would wash out in the works and that's the other thing that you see in the abrahamic story is because abraham is not a perfect person by any stretch of the imagination he's a real person and he makes mistakes but it doesn't matter the overarching narrative is you know maintain your covenant with god and despite your inadequacies then not only will you prevail but your descendants will prevail it's like great that's really good news you know so it's been really something to see that in the in the stories on a very regular basis daily basis wherever i am now people come up to me and it's often men and tell me the same sort of stories that i laid out in that clip you know that they've decided to develop something approximating a vision for their life and to adopt more responsibility and to straighten themselves out and that and that they can see why that's necessary because you all you you you can't just do it you also have to see why it's necessary because it takes effort to forego immediate gratification and resentment and aggression and and and short-term status seeking let's say to put something away for the future you have to understand that you have a moral obligation to do that that's paramount and and partly what i'm trying to do is to provide people with an explanation that that carries them through the difficulties because i do believe that every person who doesn't bring forth their potential into the world leaves a gap that's filled by something that's not good and not good for anyone not good for them not good for their families not good for the culture and it's a real problem and i believe that is the case for every single person [Music] so you

Channel: SUCCESS CHASERS

Views: 1,027,563

Keywords: success chasers, jordan peterson success chasers, jordan b peterson, jordan peterson, jordan peterson motivation, jordan peterson motivational video, success chasers jordan peterson, jordan peterson life advice, jordan peterson 2021, improve yourself in 2021, how to improve yourself, how to reinvent yourself, how to improve your life, motivation for 2021, create your dream life in 2021, simple rules to improve yourself in 2021, improve your life, 42 RULES TO DOMINATE THIS YEAR

Id: Z7NFZ7b_67M

Length: 71min 31sec (4291 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 01 2021