BEST OF JORDAN PETERSON | Best Life Advice - Speeches Compilation 30-Mins Long

well there isn't anything better to have than a problem that's worth solving like that's really worth solving right and so the more of that you take on the more you have a reason to get out of bed in the morning no matter what i think i'm getting up i'm trudging forward doesn't matter what i'm suffering from i've got things that need to be done they're necessary and that gives you that sense of purpose that is the antidote to bitterness you know there's lots of different ways to interpret the world and you can maybe even make a case that there's an endless number of ways to interpret the world and the problem with that is that it kind of disorients you in terms of what you should be doing but just because there's a very large number of ways to interpret the world doesn't mean there's a very large number of productive meaningful and sustainable ways to interpret the world these people that you're comparing yourself to you don't really know very well what that means is that you see they're shiny outside but you don't see the reality of their life well first of all there's danger in just comparing yourself to others period because they're not you and god only knows what struggles they had to undertake to get to where they were or what burdens they're currently carrying that you're not aware of but you can certainly contrast yourself with yourself and that's a lot better the possibility that you can make yourself slightly better on a continual basis is i think that's something that's accessible to everyone i think that's equivalent to leading a virtuous life if you do not listen to that thing that beckons you forward you will pay for it like you cannot possibly imagine you'll have everything that's terrible about life in your life and nothing about it that's good and worse you'll know that it was your fault and that you squandered what you could have had always take into account the cost of what you're doing now because what people tend to think is whatever i'm doing now is risk free and here's a bunch of options it's like no whatever you're doing right now has all sorts of risks you're just you're just blind to them because you've habituated to them they've become invisible 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 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 or maybe you could adjust your damn plan either way you can fix it 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 [Music] these people that you're comparing yourself to you don't really know very well what that means is that you see they're shiny outside but you don't see the reality of their life there's always people out there who are doing far better than you on pretty much anything you want to imagine and if all you're doing is seeing yourself in their reflected light let's say then it's going to be pretty damn dismal but it's not a good comparison because well first of all there's danger in just comparing yourself to others period because they're not you and god only knows what struggles they had to undertake to get to where they were or what burdens they're currently carrying that you're not aware of but you can certainly contrast yourself with yourself and that's a lot better it is the only way well it's also the only way of really of really measuring anything approximating proper improvement you can actually tell when you're a little better than you were yesterday and and you can actually do that that's another thing that's so interesting about it is that you can actually make yourself a little better in some way pretty much well i don't know if it's at every moment but you can certainly do it every day be careful who you share good news with because you want to share good news with people who are going to be genuinely happy for you and be careful who you share bad news with because that's equally tricky you want someone who will listen to you when you're having trouble and allow you your grief beauty calls people to their higher being i would say and to make friends with beauty is to introduce yourself very carefully to one of the mysteries of life that make it worth living there's never been a better time for the majority of people to be alive and the future although we're vulnerable and terrible things can always happen to us it's hard to make a case that the future doesn't look comparatively positive we're becoming extremely technologically sophisticated and the world is changing at an incredibly rapid rate and the only way we're going to be able to manage that in a positive way is if each of us or as many of us as possible are capable of making wise and careful and truthful decisions and if we do that then maybe things can continue to improve you don't get people to stand up on their own two feet and to adopt responsibility if everything is given to them and that that's that's a real conundrum you know maybe you're in california see someone speeding down the road in a in a convertible portion you think oh man what a lucky bastard and the truth of the matter is that he's thinking about wrapping his expensive sports car around the next cement pillar that he comes close to you know you can't tell and people have hard lives and and even people who are comparatively fortunate have hard lives and the ideal that you're observing that makes you jealous and resentful is in large part an illusion that's created by your own mind you have to be careful of what you're jealous of because you don't really know what it is and and then the other thing that's kind of useful is to well to understand you're quite different from other people and you shouldn't be comparing yourself to them because they're not like you they don't have your family they don't have your temperament they don't have your troubles they don't have your abilities the only person that has those is you one of the rules i think it's rule four is compare yourself to who you were yesterday and not to who someone else is today and see that's a game you can win the possibility that you can make yourself slightly better on a continual basis is i think that's something that's accessible to everyone i i think that's equivalent to leading a virtuous life and there is something to be said for virtue and truth you know and that is one thing another thing that i've noticed about people who've been phenomenally successful is that they really do everything they can to live a truthful life and you can get a bloody long ways by being honest you got to know that there are differences intelligence it's really important if you go into a job and you're not smart enough for that job you're going to have one bloody miserable time and you're going to make life wretched for the people around you because you won't be able to handle the position but what you really want to do as far as i can tell if you want to maximize your chances for both success and and let's say well-being is you want to find a strata of occupation in which you would have an intelligence that would put you in the upper quartile that's perfect then you're a big fish in a small pond and you don't want to be this you don't want to be the stupidest guy in the room it's a bloody rough place to be so and you probably don't want to be the smartest guy in the room either because what that probably means is you should be in a different room if you want to be the best at what you're doing bar none then having an iq of above 145 is a necessity and maybe you're pushing 160 in some situations and maybe that's making you one person in 10 000 or even one person and a hundred thousand and then also to really be good at it you probably have to be reasonably stress tolerant and also somewhat conscientious why is it that smart people are at the top of dominance hierarchies and the answer to that in part is because they get there first right i mean everything's a race roughly speaking and the faster you are the more likely you are to be at the forefront of the pack and intelligence in large part is speed that's not all of it is so if you're moving towards something difficult rapidly the faster people are going to get there first you're going to have to put some effort into your life and you need to be motivated to do that and so what are the potential sources of motivation well you could think about them in the big five manner you know if you're extroverted you want friends if you're agreeable you want an intimate relationship if you're disagreeable you want to win competitions if you're open you want to engage in creative activity if you're high in neuroticism you want security okay so those are all sources of potential motivation that you could draw on that you could tailor to your own you know your own personality but then there are dimensions that you want to consider your life across and so we ask people about well you know if you could have your life the way you wanted it in three to five years if you were taking care of yourself properly you know what would you want from your friendships what would you want from your intimate relationship how would you like to structure your family what do you want for your career how are you going to use your time outside of your job and how are you going to regulate your mental physical mental and physical health and maybe also your drug and alcohol use because that's that's a good place to auger down and that tangles in your your incentive reward system you know we talked about the dopaminergic incentive reward system and that's the thing that keeps you moving forward and the way it works is that it works better if it produces positive emotion when it can see you moving towards a valued goal okay well what's the implication of that better have a valued goal because otherwise you can't get any positive motivation most creative people fail at producing their creative product and monetizing it right so your default position if you're a creative person is you're going to fail and so and that's because it's hard to come up with something new and it's j and it's hard to present it to the market at the right time and it's hard to market it like those things are really really difficult and so what successful entrepreneurs do is they just keep doing it over and over and over and over and over and over and over and eventually if they're fortunate one of their ideas happens to hit the right place at the right time even if your idea is good that doesn't mean it will be successful there's so many things that have to be taken into account so this is partly why persistence and that's part of conscientiousness is so useful it's like persistence is helpful because it enables you to run many many experiments and and you need to know that the baseline is failure you know it's important because otherwise you'll blame that on yourself you know and some of that's useful because there's probably some things that you could improve about yourself but it's very difficult to go from zero to one you know stop drinking too much how do you know if you're drinking too much you regret what you do when you're drinking it's it's interfering with other important goals it's causing you financial distress it's getting you in trouble with your friends or your family it's getting you in trouble with the police stop abusing substances if you can right if you see that they're hurting you physical health are you in decent shape are you strong and coordinated and if you're not you'd be better if you were you'd feel better you'd be more effective you'd live longer you'd be less sick and you really see that mountaintop like if someone's been in shape once in their life they age way better and it's also a really good way of maintaining your cognitive ability like you know you you hear about those exercises that you can do online to make you smarter and keep your cognitive ability intact those don't work there's no evidence that they work exercise works cardiovascular and weightlifting you start to decline in your fluid intelligence at about the age of 25. and it's a linear trend downhill and it can accelerate as you get older it's just like this quite ugly if you exercise you stave that off maintain your relationships and and foster them so when i look at successful people they're really good at something they're reliable right you can count on their word they're generous and they have a wide wide connection network which becomes more and more valuable as you get older so it's one advantage that older people really have over younger people they have a connection network and a connection network is huge well you could be connected to a thousand well-connected people okay that means you are connected to the entire world right it's unbelievably valuable and that's one of the things that's so absolutely remarkable about the situation that i'm in right now as far as one of the great benefits is i can contact pretty much anybody and they'll talk to me it's like really that's so cool having a connection network is of an inestimable value reliability generosity you can work on both of those philosophical sophistication it's very useful because it orients you properly you have a sophisticated sense of of the world you find for example that doing things for other people is actually more rewarding than virtually anything else you can do you know when you hear you should be of service to other people well if you actually watch yourself you pay attention to yourself and you do something that helps someone else and it genuinely helps them i defy you to find another experience that is that satisfying it's actually quite stunning how satisfying that is and so that's a very useful thing to realize there's no better life strategy if if the ethical argument is put properly it is by far the most compelling argument it's like if you want to have everything you could possibly want and more then be a good person the better a person you are the more likely that is to happen that doesn't mean you that you're completely protected against getting cut off at the knees but there's no better strategy when i when my health fell apart and i was in the hospital for or multiple hospitals for long periods of time you know i stopped doing everything i was doing and everything i was doing was difficult my clinical practice was difficult the professorial job was difficult the company i was running was difficult the writing was difficult yeah the lecturing was difficult it was all difficult and i'm not complaining about the difficulty i actually loved that that was that was fine i'm not complaining about it at all but because it was difficult i have to be in really good shape to do it and so then i wasn't in really good shape and so because i wasn't really good shape and everything i had done was difficult i didn't know what to do and i couldn't get back on top of things because it was like trying to jump into a car going 200 miles an hour you know it's very easy for us to call people who are doing something that we're not doing stupid it's like don't be so sure about that you know and it would have been better for me if i would have had a wider variety of skills that weren't so high intensity i could have had some leisure activities that i got good at music might have been good that weren't so demanding see what i i tried to do if i saw something was difficult i wanted to master it i was driven to do that just to see how far i could go in these multiple directions and that left me vulnerable to one thing it left me vulnerable to being in a situation where i wasn't healthy enough to manage it what are two or three things that everyone should focus on their twenties well it certainly doesn't hurt to be in physical good physical condition so we can walk through it stop drinking too much how do you know if you're drinking too much you regret what you do when you're drinking it's it's interfering with other important goals it's causing you financial distress it's getting you in trouble with your friends or your family it's getting you in trouble with the police stop abusing substances if you can right if you see that they're hurting you physical health are you in decent shape are you strong and coordinated and if you're not you'd be better if you were you'd feel better you'd be more effective you'd live longer you'd be less sick and you really see that mount up like if someone's been in shape once in their life they age way better and it's also a really good way of maintaining your cognitive ability like you know you you hear about those exercises that you can do online to make you smarter and keep your cognitive ability intact those don't work there's no evidence that they work exercise works cardiovascular and weightlifting you start to decline in your fluid intelligence at about the age of 25 and it's a linear trend downhill and it can accelerate as you get older it's just like this quite ugly if you exercise you stave that off maintain your relationships and and foster them so when i look at successful people they're really good at something they're reliable right you can count on their word they're generous and they have a wide wide connection network which becomes more and more valuable as you get older so it's one advantage that older people really have over younger people they have a connection network and a connection network is huge well you could be connected to a thousand well-connected people okay that means you are connected to the entire world right it's unbelievably valuable and that's one of the things that's so absolutely remarkable about the situation that i'm in right now as far as one of the great benefits is i can contact pretty much anybody and they'll talk to me it's like really that's so cool anything that's every day is a significant percentage of your life compare yourself to who you were yesterday and not to who someone else is today one of the things i tell people when they're trying to develop a vision for their life or an implemental plan is make a bad plan make the best one you can but don't get obsessive about it it's like make a plan implement it you'll figure out when you implement it why it's stupid exactly and then you can fix it a little bit then you can fix it a bit more and then you can fix it a bit more i don't think that i've ever been in a situation where if something wasn't going right for me and i sat and thought okay all right i'm willing to figure out what i'm doing wrong which is a big thing to think because you never know how much you're doing wrong it might be something that you really don't want to contend with but if you clear some space to meditate on that the probability that you'll figure out something that you did that was stupid that's bending you and twisting you in the wind you'll get an answer very very rapidly the answer to how you pay for your past sins isn't by jumping off a bridge well how much do you need to be beat up enough so you fix the problem no more than that minimal necessary force don't hit anything harder than it needs to be hit that's a good rule of thumb is there something i can do now to atone for what i failed to do in the past so let's say you go over your past with a fine-tooth comb and you decide you're going to take responsibility for everything that you did that was wrong and everything that you failed to do that you could have done that was right like does that change the world it's like it depends on how thoroughly you do it you might say it changes the world like nothing else possibly can and i think that that's actually right and that's also a frightening thought because it means that things would be way better than they are if you weren't so damn useless there's this unlimited power that's associated with genius but it's constrained and that's really what the human spirit is like because it has this aspect of the infinite when you don't get what you want then a landscape of questions emerge and those questions can resonate through different levels of your identity from the trivial oh i told the joke wrong to the profound there's nothing desirable about me and i'll be alone for the rest of my life it's daunting to even consider that and then there's the discipline and responsibility that that necessitates which is also daunting it's like oh my god the problem's that serious i'm really going to have to get my act together in order to not contribute to it much less solve it and so the problem is terrible and then the solution is daunting when i commit to something and make sacrifices you know if something's valuable you'll make sacrifices to attain it that discovery of sacrifice it's one of the primary factors separating human beings from animals because we discovered that we could let go of something we value in the present and we would gain something we value even more in the future god aim at something it's like otherwise your life is meaningless well what should you aim at well i don't know well pick something aim at it as you move toward it you'll get wiser then maybe your aim will change that's okay but at least it'll change in an informed way it's like discipline yourself in one dimension [Music] see what happens well that's exciting if you do not listen to that thing that beckons you forward you will pay for it like you cannot possibly imagine you'll have everything that's terrible about life in your life and nothing about it that's good and worse you'll know that it was your fault and that you squandered what you could have had 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 or maybe you could adjust your damn plan either way you can fix it 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 you can't make yourself interested in something interest manifests itself and grips you that's a whole different thing and so what is it that's gripping you and how do you conceptualize that is that a divine power well it's divine as far as you're concerned because it grips you and you can't do anything about it and so there's a calling in you towards what you're compelled by and what you're interested in is sometimes that might be very dark and sometimes not but you're compelled forward by your interest and so the idea that what moves you away from your country and your father's house and the comforts of your child at home is is something that's beyond you and that you listen to and hearken to that's exactly right and you can say well i don't want to call that god it's like it doesn't matter what you call it exactly it doesn't matter to what it is what it's called it still is let's say you want to become who you could be in the fullest sense so let's say you're someone who's going to solve some serious problems okay the first thing you have to do is admit to the seriousness of the problems that's no joke and so the first thing is just the terror of the problem itself and that's enough to paralyze you and that's the hydra that's the gorgon with the head of snakes it'll paralyze you and turn you to stone that's the basilisk in the harry potter series you look at it and turns you to stone and lurks underneath everything right and it's malevolence and tragedy and and so and so there's that and then the next is well you're going to take responsibility for that you're really going to do that are you that's a hell of a load man and so it's daunting to even consider that and then there's the discipline and responsibility that that necessitates which is also daunting it's like oh my god the problem's that serious i'm really going to have to get my act together in order to not contribute to it much less solve it and so the problem is terrible and then the solution is daunting but what the upside that is is like well there isn't anything better to have than a problem that's worth solving like that's really worth solving right and so the more of that you take on the more you have a reason to get out of bed in the morning no matter what i think i'm getting up i'm trudging forward it doesn't matter what i'm suffering from i've got things that need to be done they're necessary and that gives you that sense of purpose that is the antidote to bitterness okay well let's say you want your life to be meaningful it's like okay then what you do matters it actually matters so that's an interesting thing so let's say you go over your past with a fine-tooth comb and you decide you're going to take responsibility for everything that you did that was wrong and everything that you failed to do that you could have done that was right it's like does that change the world it's like depends on how thoroughly you do it you might say it changes the world like nothing else possibly can and i think that that's actually right you have to allow yourself a certain latitude for error that's a useful thing to know too one of the things i tell people when they're trying to develop a vision for their life or an implemental plan is make a bad plan make the best when you can but don't get obsessive about it's like make a plan implement it you'll figure out when you implement it why it's stupid exactly and then you can fix it a little bit compare yourself to who you were yesterday and not to who someone else is today the same basic idea right is that you have to get your markers for success right because otherwise you can end up in the situation you described which is that like there's always people out there who are doing far better than you on pretty much anything you want to imagine and if all you're doing is seeing yourself in their reflected light let's say then it's going to be pretty damn dismal but it's not a good comparison because you shouldn't just compare well first of all there's danger in just comparing yourself to others period because they're not you and god only knows what struggles they had to undertake to get to where they were or what burdens they're currently carrying that you're not aware of you just don't know any of that but you can certainly contrast yourself with yourself and that's a lot better it is the only way well it's also the only way of really of really measuring anything approximating proper improvement you can actually tell when you're a little better than you were yesterday so and and you can actually do that that's another thing that's so interesting about it is that you can actually make yourself a little better in some way pretty much well i don't know if it's at every moment but you can certainly do it every day it's funny i mean you know obviously if you have a problem and you think about it you can think up a solution and it's not obvious how you do that you know i mean it's not like you know how you're manipulating your neurons or something it it it happens of its own accord in some sense like you can participate with in it i guess and you can interfere with it and it seems to take a certain amount of willpower but it still all happens mysteriously behind the scenes one of the things that i've been so so you know there's lots of different ways to interpret the world and you can maybe even make a case that there's an endless number of ways to interpret the world and the problem with that is that it kind of disorients you in terms of what you should be doing but just because there's a very large number of ways to interpret the world doesn't mean there's a very large number of productive meaningful and sustainable ways to interpret the world and one of the things you do have to do is figure out how you can conduct yourself today so that you don't upset the apple card in a week or a month or a year and so you know what what you do in some sense psychologically is you admit to yourself that your current frame of reference is faulty and then you start opening the door to a different kind of thinking which is more creative thinking it's more lateral thinking think well i'm wrong but that's not necessarily a problem because i could be right if i thought some other way well you know that's great often it works yeah there's there's almost no lack there's almost no end to the utility of trying to figure out which ways that you're wrong because there's lots of them and every time you discover one then you don't have to be quite so wrong anymore that's a really good deal yeah the day the day is like a page in a book of course there's many pages in a book but the page repeats and so one of the things i often had my clients do i'll tell you a little story had one client who was spending about 45 minutes a night fighting with his young son about when to go to bed and so you know they weren't having a pleasant time of it because it was just a constant battle and that's common like it's very common for parents of young children to be locked in a battle that occurs day after day sometimes it's around eating sometimes it's toilet training sometimes general behavioral issues sometimes it's bedtime so we did some arithmetic it's like okay 40 minutes a day so that's 280 minutes a week so that's like say five hours it's 20 hours a month it's 240 hours in a year that's six work weeks that's a month and a half you're spending a month and a half of work weeks doing nothing but fighting with your son what makes you think you're going to like him right well and you know it's it's you think well it's only 40 minutes a day it's like don't don't fool yourself anything that's every day is a significant percentage of your life you know because what you your weight let's say 16 hours five of those hours are basically maintenance so you got about 11 and then seven of those are work so now you're down to four and so if you're spending 15 minutes a day doing something painful and stupid and you do it every day it's like 10 of your productive life and so it's really useful to to get because people think backwards they think well i have a vacation coming up and that's really important it's like no it's not you're only going to do it once it's not that important yeah um how you treat each other at lunchtime if you eat together every day that's your life fix that get it get it so that the food's good get it so that you're happy with the people that are sitting there fix that it's like poof ten percent of your life is fixed [Music] while you admit that there's a problem first and then you ask for the minimum necessary intervention which would be all right well i'd like to move forward on this some small amount that someone like me could actually manage and i i'd be willing to carry it out and then you reorient the way you're thinking as a consequence of that and something usually pops out of the abyss to guide you it's very strange but it's not really any stranger than the fact that we can think at all because the fact that we can think is actually very strange it's strange like the fact that we can dream is strange you know and that's strange beyond belief that you can dream and and or that something in you dreams which is a much better way of thinking about it because it's not like you're really in control of your dreams they just sort of happen [Music] [Music] you

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Keywords: Motivationhub, motivational video, eye opening speech, speech, success, motivational speech, motivation, motivational, inspirational, jordan, jordan peterson, jordan peterson motivation, jordan peterson motivational speech, jordan peterson interview, jordan peterson motivational video, jordan peterson 2022, best of jordan peterson, best of jordan peterson motivation, life advice, jordan peterson life advice, Best Motivational Video, speeches compilation, 30 mins long, interview, advice

Id: mAL03fAQZQk

Length: 32min 43sec (1963 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 25 2022