Core Beliefs and Mindsets for Success with Dr. Jordan Peterson

foreign of the entree leadership podcast today at entree Leadership Summit we were able to sit down with Dr Jordan Peterson on the stage with our premium attendees our Platinum attendees and doing interview is quite interesting as you might guess with Dr Peterson there's a lot of things you can accuse him of but being uninteresting is not one of them so there you go it was a lot of fun actually and I think you're in for a treat if you want to hear more from Dr Jordan Peterson he's got a lot more leadership Insight than we can cover in just this hour that you're about to listen to check out entree Leadership Summit live stream replays Summit is the Premier leadership conference of the Year where we bring together the top Minds in business and in leadership Dr Jordan Peterson is one of our speakers on stage in addition to this podcast that we recorded with him and he delivered some wisdom that every business leader ought to hear so even though you missed this year's event there's still time to get access to the summit live stream replays go to entreleadership.com replays to learn how the best leaders lead from Dr Jordan Peterson and from all of our Summit speakers so here's our interview with Dr Peterson [Applause] well for you guys that are joining us on the podcast we appreciate it what you're hearing uh the cheering you're hearing is from our Platinum attendees at the entree Leadership Summit and uh they just came back with lunch and had no idea that I was going to be sitting here with the one and only Dr Jordan Peterson welcome Dr Peterson good good to see here good to see you all good to be here as well yep obviously you guys know who he is best-selling author and uh clinical psychologist and general uh ruckus causer on Twitter and uh among other places and uh stirring it up out there for sure so so good to spend time with you thanks for hanging out with us yeah well it's good to meet you in person we had a good conversation what two weeks ago I guess it was yeah we did on the Ramsey show we sure did so uh let's get the to the important things first I think grandparenting might be the best thing on the planet what is your grandpa name um uh my my let's see what does my granddaughter call me she's five she just calls me Grandpa yeah yeah and I have I have three grandkids um and yes is it the best thing on the planet it's definitely up there that's for sure yeah all the joy and hardly any of the responsibility exactly yeah yeah yeah I'm convinced grandbabies are about the best thing out there if I'd have known how great they were going to be I'd have been nicer to their parents yeah well you can make that up to them now yeah that's right now we can cause all kinds of trouble yeah so the dragon tie oh yeah that's what the theme of the children's book right that's right yeah well the lining of this coat is from there's no such thing as a dragon which is your favorite children's book yeah yeah I used to read it to my uh my my third year undergraduates at the University of Toronto as an introduction to a course I did there called maps of meaning it's a very short book and it's very playful and funny and it tells the story of a family who denies the existence of a small dragon in their house and there is a small dragon in your house you can be sure of that and the moral of the story fundamentally is is that if you ignore small things that are causing trouble they turn into big things that will devour you and that's essentially what happens in the book is the dragon grows big enough so that nothing can ever be done in the house and then it runs away with the house and uh the little boy insists the whole time that the dragon is there and his mother and father deny it and um after it runs away with their house they finally admit to its existence and begin to pay attention and then it shrinks and then it you know shrinks down to a manageable size and they all cohabit happily together sounds like a good therapy session yeah yeah well it's the core of psychotherapy because partly what you do in Psychotherapy and this was established by Freud is that you you confront the dragon that's run away with you you know and that might be something traumatic that happened to you long ago or might be this consequence of you know uh what what a an accruing set of traumas that have aggregated across time and the the goal always in Psychotherapy is to turn and face that which is chasing you you know and and the the the moral of the story The therapeutic story and this children's story is that if you pay attention to the things that you're afraid of you can generally Master them and cut them down to size and that's what attention is for actually changes everything all right changing gears for our business audience I'm really uh I should have read this five years ago when it came out and it's what over 15 million copies probably now 12 rules yeah at 10 million in the in the English language and and I I don't know how many million enter on in on the international front it's harder to keep track of that fabulous of course um Chewie Reed very chewy but very good very good I'm enjoying going through it and the bookmark is uh from the uh seven-year-old grandchild oh yeah that's good yeah she left me a note on a napkin so I'm using that as my bookmark but the uh um one of the things I've enjoyed uh watching your move and watching what you're pulling off in your space and with your brand and the whole process is just how you're leaning in on values at Ramsey we've got 14 core values which my friend Pat lincione makes fun of me he says how can they be core if there's 14 of them but yeah but um because he thinks we ought to only have three and he and I have a lot of arguments about that but he's wrong so um but the uh we've got core values and the problem with values is once you state them if they really are values then uh a lot of your decisions are already made it's the execution then that's painful uh if you say you can't work here if we do this this is a core value we don't mistreat people and you're mistreating someone you can't stay then automatically we know what we have to do when someone misbehaves in that way but now we've got to go through the pain and the process of letting someone go and it's very very painful so um a lot of these guys have not necessarily set their core values in place they're guiding principles how do you go about uncovering in an organization in a business what your core values your guiding principles are well I would say the first thing likely to do when you're trying to solve that problem is don't fall prey to HR or managerials speak you know there's there's nothing I find more painful except Me Maybe reading art criticism than reading badly written corporate vision statements no God because mostly there they look to me like their post-hoc justifications and hand waving and and that makes them hypocritical and false as well as generally inelegant and and painful sort of aesthetically that's a really bad idea what what you want to do instead is you want to figure out what it is that you're trying to do and maybe what you're trying to do it's possible that what you're trying to do fundamentally is make money and I actually don't think there's anything wrong with that fundamentally um I don't think that should be something that is what would you say core to your life because if you're willing to sacrifice everything to money you're going to run into some serious problems very very rapidly but you know as a as a as part of your business Endeavor I actually think it's a worthwhile goal because it brings a certain amount of discipline to your endeavors you know I I do almost everything I do on a for-profit basis because it's one of the ways of stopping yourself from making stupid decisions right because it's not that easy to run something in a manner that will actually generate a profit and it keeps you lean and careful and focused if you are require yourself to do that and you shouldn't be apologetic about that either because unless you're willing to sacrifice everything to money attempting to run something profitably just means that you're running it in a way that can maintain can maintain the organization and allow it to grow and in principle that's admirable if you want to derive your core values you have to figure out well why the hell are you doing what you're doing you know what is it and you really have to think that through it's like you're willing to devote your life your time your resources your energy the time you could be spending with your family you're willing to devote this to this Enterprise well what is your Enterprise aiming at and it probably has one aim that's Transcendent let's say and by that I mean above all other aims and you need to be very clear about what that is and once you are clear about that what that is there will be a handful of principles like game rules that will emerge from that if this is what we're doing then we have to do this and you don't want too many of those because they say bad rules drive out respect for good rules rights minimum necessary rules you're playing a game of sorts there's some victory in in mind and in order to play that game and obtain the victory there's a set of rules that you have to abide by or principles that will enable your actions and that's what your core values are and that's part of your mission statement like a mission statement isn't some ethical postage stamp that you paste over what you're actually up to to look good that's unbelievably damaging and hypocritical what a mission statement is and a statement of core values is it emerges as the consequence of serious thought about what it is that you're engaged in you know like if you're working in construction well high quality housing aesthetically pleasing at the lowest possible cost developed delivered with maximal efficiency to clients that you serve hospitably and develop long-term relationships with like that's a pretty good Vision I mean people need somewhere to live and they obviously need someone to provide it and if you're going to do it you might as well do it well and why not make it beautiful and treat your customers properly while you're doing it like where's the moral inadequacy in that you know and maybe the leftist will shake a finger at you and say well you're doing it at a profit in the proper reason and that's all for you it's like the proper response to that is well you're an inefficient dimwit if you run it at a loss and so there's no morality there well obviously and you can't grow and you can't market and it's just a sign of your of your inadequacy there's no exploitation in profit not if you understand that well there is no exploitation no necessary exploitation in profit and it's very important to get that right so that when you're attacked you're not feeling guilty you know we were talking backstage about this idea that that successful people often at some point in their career they decide they're going to engage in philanthropic Enterprises and they say well it's time for me to give back I was like well what are you saying when you say that I've been ripping you off for 30 years and I've got away with it now I've got this pile of loot like Scrooge McDuck and I'm going to give 10 of it back so I can Pat myself on the back well that's not a good story if you've run I mean I I've I've had a lot of jobs in my life and I've run a number of businesses and and some of them have you know run into serious trouble and not worked out well and the others have thrived and it is definitely the case that if you're going to run a business properly that you have to run it as an ethical Enterprise and that there's no reason whatsoever to be apologetic about that quite the contrary and one of the things that you could do on the leadership front more broadly politically let's say especially in relationship to the ongoing culture wars is to stop being guilty about what you're doing like there's you can't let the bloody radicals on the left especially because they're jealous and envious and generally absolutely useless at doing anything even remotely productive thank you don't don't hold back closer how you really feel you you can't you can't let them torture you into the guilt-ridden admission that your business Enterprise has been exploitative and it isn't exploitative merely because you generate a profit I mean look if you're being a greedy weasel and you're ripping everyone else off then you should stop doing that but if you're offering genuine service to people and you know that you are if you have long-term returning customers right because that means you've established a relationship with them that's actually a sign that you're engaging in a highly ethical Enterprise and it's incumbent on you to stop being guilty about that like and and not just not guilty it's like no up yours what we're doing is good not bad you don't get to put us back on our heel morally [Applause] that's the difference in the free market in a voluntary Market well that look here's a way of thinking about it you want you might want to get down to the core of what's ethical how do you know that two people that could be you and your customer are engaged in a an ethical Enterprise and the answer is you both do it voluntarily so there's no compulsion in force but you do it in a manner that you both want to repeat like that's actually the definition of ethical is and look imagine you have a relationship with your wife or your husband hopefully that's the case it isn't just that you have our relationship you is you have a repeating sequence of micro relationships right an indefinitely repeating sequence of micro relationships and insofar as each of those micro relationships is going well you want to repeat them and it's the fact that you're both voluntarily on board with that over the long run that indicates that it's an ethical Enterprise and you know well as as small business owners or maybe some of you or larger business owners that you mistreat even one of your customers at your peril because if you mistreat someone they not only will they remember that and they will never forget it we have a specialized module as human beings by the way to remember cheaters so you might forget people you cooperate with but you do not forget people that ripped you off and not only that you will tell everybody you know about it if you mistreat a handful of your customers I don't know how many if you've mistreat 100 customers your business will fail because they'll tell 100 people and that's ten thousand and that's probably enough to sink you and so if you've been treating your customers well enough so that they've established long-term reciprocal relationships with you same applies to your suppliers then by definition you're engaging in an ethical Enterprise you know and you might say well it could be better it's like well good make it better but it's already ethical if it's sustainable you know I hate that word but you know you know what I mean if it's voluntarily sustainable it's ethical and one of the wonderful things about a free market Society it is a society of voluntary exchange that's what makes it ethical nobody has to be your customer and certainly no one has to be your repeat customer or your supplier and what that means is that you have to conduct yourself in a manner that's commensurate with mutual gain right and maybe Mutual expanding gain in order for the whole game to continue and that's what you want in your marriage is you want you want repeated interactions in a manner that produces Mutual expansion so that you become you want to keep playing with your partner let's say but you want to do it in a way that makes the whole game better as you progress you do exactly the same thing on the business front and this isn't some hand waving you know moralistic whitewashing it's like no companies that don't do that companies that rip off their customers fail customer companies that even mildly mistreat their customers fail now that isn't true if there's an artificial Monopoly let's say but then we're not in the domain of voluntary exchange so as long as the system is set up so that your customer has a choice and so does your suppliers you have to conduct yourself in an ethical manner to succeed and conservative types have done a very bad job of making that case to the leftist in particular it's like no you don't understand if we weren't ethical given the rules of volunteer exchange we would fail so you come after us and you say well just because we you've made a profit so you're an exploiter it's like no you have failed to make a profit because you're a loser and now you're resentful about it and you're coming after me right you know what it it's a bit it's a bit more complicated because a lot of the people who criticize you they've gone off to University and they've been supplied by resentful and bitter losers I would say on the intellectual front with an array of sophisticated arguments about why you're an exploitive capitalist and they're quite articulated about that you know and they're good at exploiting guilt and another problem is that competent people who are conscientious and that's a very good predictor of business success especially on the managerial front conscientious people are guilt prone and because conscientious people will be scouring their conscience all the time for things they've done wrong and that's a good thing if you're going to run a business because you should pay attention to the details but what it does is it opens you up on the attack front because if a radical comes after you and says you could be a little less sexist than you are and you could be a little less racist than you are and maybe there's something about your profitable activity that's exploitive if you're conscientious you're going to feel guilty right away and say well you know I probably could be better than I am which is true but that doesn't mean that you give the moral upper hand to your accuser it's like well who the hell are you to come after me what have you done with your life have do you have a family have you have you produced anything of value are you like an 18 year old pop who is wet behind the ears who's not maintained themselves at all and think because you've been educated by idiots that you now have the moral upper hand so yeah I think that's the uh critical thinking breakdown on the argument about generosity through taxation taxation is not voluntary yeah and and it's not generosity and yet it's posed as we're going to increase taxes to be generous and anyone who is generous anyone who is compassionate is going to go along with that word the actual the actual that's the actual basis for generosity is voluntary well there's your heart has not changed when someone comply forces you to do something there's another element to that I read a great definition of Christian charity and it applies to charity in general but this happened to be specifically a description of Christian charity generosity and productivity right both right you don't get to be generous with someone else's money that's not generous that's the theft of someone else's money to elevate your moral virtue falsely right if you're going to be charitable well the first thing you have to do is be useful enough to have something to offer well that's not easy and then you have to be useful enough to have enough to offer so that you can actually afford to distribute it in whatever way you see fit without causing you or the people who are immediately dependent on you undue stress and that's not that's profit for God's sake obviously you know if you're just barely getting by what you're not going to be able to be charitable I mean sometimes people are even under those circumstances but it's somewhat self-defeating in that they cut you know they cut the ground from underneath their feet if you're going to be charitable in the most fundamental sense you have to be productive and then you have to be generous and you know a shortcut to that is to say well no your productivity is just theft and so now we can steal from you and now we can be generous with your money and now we can claim moral virtue because we've stolen money from the exploiters to be generous with it's like there isn't a bit of that argument that's credible in the least and but because conservative types and maybe even the classical liberals it's easy to make them feel guilty the radicals you know have a free hand in putting that agenda forward there's no EXT there isn't a single element of that that's moral in any sense whatsoever I mean I suppose you could say look left to their own devices people are so innately cruel and useless that all they'll do is hoard money for themselves and never be philanthropic and the answer to that is conservatives voluntarily give more money to charitable Enterprises than liberals do end of argument so and that's despite taxation so it's there's you don't have a moral leg to stand on on that front we're fighting an income tax in the state of Tennessee 10 or 15 years ago 15 years ago I guess now and I I told the guys if you want more if you think the state of Tennessee needs more taxes just send them some send them some extra money yeah yeah don't take care sure but you can do that no one would do it well you there's a situation at the end of the Canadian tax form that allows you to do that if you want yeah that's right so one government some money man it's go right ahead yeah no one does it it's the most inefficient charity on the planet Yeah well yeah yeah yeah yeah absolutely on even charitable Enterprises you know it's one of the it's no easier to do good with money than it is to run a profitable Enterprise with money and maybe that's because those are actually the same thing you know there's no harm there was no shortage of harm done by stupid giving and just because you're hypothetically motivated by compassion doesn't mean that you're going to run an Enterprise that's going to do people good it's really hard to do good it's way easier to sow Discord and cause trouble and and to mask that with some you know facade of Compassionate Care and so it there's there's plenty of evidence on the foreign aid front that foreign aid does way more harm than good and I think that's I think the evidence is 100 credible you know what it's like if because you all run small I'll tell you a story about what what changed my political thinking when I was very young when I was 16 13 to 16 I worked with a Socialist Party in the province of Alberta which is where I grew up and uh and I I was fortunate enough to know the leader of the Socialist Party in in my Province home province of Alberta who was the only opposition Member of Parliament in the whole Province it was like 36 conservatives and one socialist and the only reason the people in my home District voted for this man was because he was a good man he was a labor leader and most of the socialists at that time in Canada were former labor leaders and they did stand at least in part for the genuine interest of the working class anyways I worked with them for a few years and I got disenchanted in part because when I went to the conventions of the party I met the radical types and they were the same as they are now and like they just I thought what the hell's up with you people you're just bitter and resentful like you claim to be caring for the poor but that's just a lie you're just bitter and resentful and you think morality consists of praying in public right it's like you hold a sign that says I'm against poverty it's like well who the hell isn't against poverty you know that's not a I'm for poverty it's like you know you know more homeless so because I because it makes me feel better by comparison it's like nobody thinks that nobody thinks that and so that set up a cognitive dissonance in my imagination I thought well if this end of the political distribution has the moral upper hand why the hell is it producing all these resentful activists and now well that's a question that we're asking ourselves in Spades now but then I was nominated I served on the Board of Governors of this little college that I went to Grand Prairie Regional college and uh all of the people who were on the board were people I presume people like you they were all owners of small businesses and they'd been successful and the towns that I grew up in in Northern Alberta were like 50 years old you know they'd just been scraped out of the Prairie it was the last of the frontier and everyone there was an immigrant so most of the people who had started these small businessmen were immigrants who came there with nothing and built something and even though I didn't share their political views I found them individually admirable and I also found that the same applied to the small businessmen that I worked for at that point you know I thought well you've actually done something with your life you know and you're there's a solidity there a productive solidity exactly and so it was at that point that I realized I didn't know anything and just stopped working on the political front altogether I decided that that point to become a psychologist rather than a lawyer or a politician which is kind of where I was heading it at that point in my life and I realized that I realized that it was the people who had built productively that had the moral upper hand they might not have been very good at expressing their ethos intellectually or explicitly but in terms of their character they had they had established a victory and I think this is actually the problem on the conservative front broadly across the world is that they're people of solid character but they're not good at articulating the foundations of their ethos and then when the radical leftists come along and take them apart ethically they don't know what to do they throw up their hands because I mean think about it this way someone comes up to you on the street says justify marriage and you think well I thought we sorted that out like 25 000 years ago you don't know what to say you have no idea how Justified marriage you know a lot of the things we do in our life that are ethical we do we act out we don't think through like I presume the vast majority of you put up a Christmas tree but you have no idea why you know like and if someone Anthropologist came over to your house and said well why do you put up a Christmas tree you'd say well everyone does it something like that it's beautiful and it's part of it but you have no idea why I mean there are reasons for the Christmas tree that's a place where you put the light that shines in the dark darkness at the darkest time of the year and that light signifies in the Christian tradition that light signifies Christ and that signifies the service of the highest to the lowest and you're acting that out but you don't know it and when you're married you're acting out a very deep ethos as well and you don't know what it is and but everyone's agreed on it and a lot of your conservative virtues are things that everybody's already agreed on and so when an intellectual comes along and says justify that you don't know what the hell to say and then you can be picked apart you know what isn't the isn't your ideal of marriage heterosexual long-term stable child-centered couples isn't that exclusionary and isn't the exclusion wrong well you think well exclusion yeah well that's wrong and uh well I don't know and then you're guilty and it isn't because you're wrong it's just that you don't know how to articulate that traditional value and well and that's a huge problem that's a huge problem but that doesn't mean you're wrong and and the same thing applies on the profit front it's like it's hard to articulate why that's acceptable also because it does seem like if you're generating profit it's obviously the case that that can be used by you for narrow personal reasons right you can buy a you can buy a yacht and fill it with super models and cocaine if you want and and that but people don't and most wealthy people in the United States by the way are like you they're they're they're they're the owners of not immense businesses you know small to moderate businesses and they're very conservative in their consumerist habits and careful in their distribution of their resources they're not like Hollywood hedonists you know or or or the Wall Street psychopath types not at all Wall Street people are psychopath types but you know the kind that are parodied in movies you know people you're people who are very careful with your capital and you live moderately that's also a sign of that ethos but it's hard for conservatives to articulate that doesn't mean you're wrong and it doesn't mean that you should be guilty one of the ways you combat those kinds of things if you don't have number one don't have to have an argument you just have to be right and just keep moving yeah but the uh I don't have to defend I don't have to enter into that conversation like yeah you're a nut and I'm moving on yeah well but probably hardly we're in a situation where you probably do have to learn to articulate it because what's happening is that that Central ethos that traditional ethos even voluntary exchange it's under such vicious attack that if you don't learn to defend it and articulate it it's going to be taken from you and that probably means I suspect that means that each of you is going to have to think to some degree about how to involve yourself in at least the local political landscape it's like you know what the school boards are doing or maybe you don't and you should I mean these these low-level political positions have been occupied by radical types and the only real solution to that is to take them away and occupy them with people who have some sense and the problem is you probably have something better to do but but it just doesn't matter because at the moment if you abdicate that responsibility then the radicals are going to take it and then they're going to take what you have that already happened in the universities we abdicated our responsibility as professors and the radicals took the the institutions from us and as far as I'm concerned they're gone we're not getting them back they're done so what happened in the universities is the administration took over the faculty The Faculty retreated 3 000 steps the administration took over the faculty and then the Dei radicals took over the administration and the same things happening on the corporate front and the way that you're enabling that I don't know how relevant this is to everybody in the room but you hire an HR person you hire Dei consultant you start playing that game maybe to keep the critics off your back they will take you out don't do that that's a big mistake you think well you know we have to play the public relations game we have to look like we're appeasing the radicals is you do you can't appease a snake it's a big mistake yeah and so [Applause] so one of my uh as I'm going through the 12 rules I think maybe one of my favorite is make friends with people who want the best for you I am convinced that one of the reasons we've been able to grow Ramsay from nothing uh is that I early in my process realized that isolation for leaders is a death knell I mean it's a real problem especially running a small business that you just don't have anybody to talk to about this crap right right you don't have anybody to process this stuff with and so I I put a group of guys around me I call them the Eagles and they're some of the most accomplished people in our community and I put them together in a Bible study and we call it the Eagles Bible study but being around that group of men to bounce things off into wine with when things were tough and you know to process decisions and all that I'm convinced it changed everything make friends with people who want the best for you Charlie tremendous Jones one of the old motivators used to say five years from today you'll be the same you are same as you are today except for the books you read and the people you meet so make friends with people who want the best for you talk about that especially in light of isolation issues for leaders yeah well you know here here's a way of thinking about it's it's hard to get the terms right because we talk about it our culture I mean and psychologists as well talk about it as mental health and it sort of sounds like something that's in your head you know in your brain mental health means you have a healthy nervous system mental health means you're well structured internally as a psychological entity and that's actually it's half true so here's an example let's say you are mentally healthy and one of your children is doing very badly well you're going to be suffering away you're going to be anxious and distressed and have some decrement of Hope and so that's not you exactly not if you think of you as something that's only internal but it's definitely something that's affecting your mental health and the reason for that is that mental health is not you so like you need to be well constituted psychophysiological right your body has to be in working order and the different elements of your nervous system have to be integrated into something like a coherent and Visionary whole and that's you but then like you need an intimate partner and that has to be a dyadic relationship that's communicating well and then that needs to be nested inside a family and that Nest needs to be nested inside a community including a community of friends and then that needs to be nested inside a town or a city and and a state or a province and then a nation and all of those things have to be working harmoniously together and so if you're going to be sane you have to be acceptable to valued by and in constant contact with a social group and then you need to if you're wise select your social group carefully I mean this is why there were businessmen organizations like the rotary and the Kinsmen and so forth and you know we we see their membership plummeting in recent years but it was there because people were wise enough to understand that even if you had attained things you know on your own as a solitary Venture an entrepreneur that it was extremely useful to have a community around you it's not good that men be alone no no no you look here's how you stay safe this is what sane means sane means that you are acceptable enough to other people so they tell you when you're stupid right because if you have 20 people well that's that's exactly you distribute that I thought that was marriage sanity that's right well that's what marriage marriage a huge part the advantage of marriage is that is that you know your wife Taps you back into position and vice versa and all you have to do is be acceptable enough so she won't leave and she'll continue to do that right right well every single one of us is so complicated that we can't regulate ourselves like you'll fall apart on your weakest side but if you have people around you who are bolstering you and those would be genuine friends those are people who are who are pleased when good things happen to you and commiserate with you when bad things happen to you right they're there when you they're there in good times and bad and you you know who your friends are especially if you've gone through bad times and it isn't that those friends in some ways are additions to your mental health they are actually without them there's no way you can be mentally healthy any more than a kid with no friends can be a happy kid right the definition of a happy kid is one who's at the center of a well-functioning network of voluntary friends there's no difference between that and setting up your life property that's why children set their lives up like that you know they're doing that to practice becoming a a fully functional adult and so you do you need to you need a network around you that's thriving and communicating and you know another thing to understand too is the mechanism of free speech is the process by which those social relationships maintain their integrity so you know in a marriage if if the principle of free speech doesn't apply in your marriage it's doomed because you cannot discuss your actual problems and solve them and then they just accrue like the little dragon that we talked about at the beginning of this conversation they just accrue and once there's enough of them then you spend your fortune in divorce court right so so if unless you can speak freely with your wife and that means there's going to be some conflict because Free Speech means conflict because you're dealing with real problems unless that principle of free speech applies the relationship will disintegrate and that's the same at every level that's why Free Speech isn't a right given to you by the state free speech is the precondition for the stability of the state and it has to stay the hell away from it from that from interfering with that principle or it will Doom itself right so that's why we think about it as a god-given right right it's outside it's the process upon which the Integrity of the state itself depends no matter what level you're conceptualizing the state you know because the your marriage is a tiny state and it's the same with your family and if the information is Flowing freely that's going to cause some conflict obviously because you're going to discuss difficult things and you have to do that because life is difficult and you know the problem is going to come at you at your family and you guys aren't going to feel the same way about how to solve it so then you have to have a an argument about it you have to exchange your opinions and hopefully you do that in a way that helps you come up with a solution to the problem that's likely to work and so and all that's dependent on free speech so now the um walk through how this connectivity with people causes your personal growth causes you to become something tomorrow that you aren't today well look look think about what we're doing in this dialogue like there's a variety of things happening here at the same time so you and I are trying to establish a relationship at least for the purpose of this podcast right and so and maybe if we have some sense we're trying to do it in a way that would make it more likely for us to want to meet again in the future so like we could attempt to dominate each other and we could attempt to one-up each other and we could attain some relative status in doing that right now but if you did that to me I I wouldn't talk to you again and vice versa so that would be a stupid medium to long-term strategy you know instead we can sit here and try to exchange some information in an exploratory way and you could come away you know somewhat changed and I can come away somewhat changed and that's a good deal and then maybe we'd enjoy that if we did it in proper proportion and we think you know we could have another conversation and that would be the beginning of a friendship right and you can see an ethic emerging out of that now it's more complicated than that in this situation because we have to do that in a way that engages you and that means we have to craft our gestures and our words in a way that brings you in as participants in the conversation you might say well it's not a conversation because you're on stage it's like if it's not a conversation your mind is going to wander you're going to start thinking you know I might as well check my phone or you're going to be thinking about other problems that you have in the back of your mind they're going to come to the Forefront it's a conversation if the two of us are capturing your interest because we're watching you and paying attention to this situation and ensuring that the points that we continue to make are keeping your attention now if you're a public speaker you can tell that because of the silence see you know that if if the crowd is silent and people aren't rustling around that they're not distracted and you know if they're not distracted they're focused and you know if they're focused that it's a conversation and so you're participating in the conversation with your non-verbal attention but but that doesn't mean it's not a conversation it's still a conversation and so we're doing that all we're doing that all together social media has made the comparison game get completely out of control and in business we always study best practices we want to see what another organization is doing and uh the the downfall for that I've seen so many times personally and also with some of the folks we coach that the downfall of that is that you can get a bit add you can get all over the map in other words you can change your direction 16 times because you're constantly comparing yourself to others and one of your 12 rules is compare yourself to who you were yesterday not to who someone else is today well part of the problem possibly with social media is that it's a lot of one-off comparisons you know like I said if if we were never going to see each other again ever arguably although I still think this is wrong arguably I could take a chance to just defeat you right because then I would accrue the status and could move on now if we're constrained by the fact that we have to meet again then that's a stupid strategy that's why you tell your kids by the way this is another example of how you act out an ethos that you don't understand you know maybe you have a kid on the sports field who's a real star maybe he's more skilled than anyone else on the playing field but he's kind of a jerk you know and he won't pass to his teammates and if he scores he takes all the credit and does a little dance and if he loses he whines and so you're embarrassed and you tell your kid look you know for all your skill I'm a bit ashamed to you and the kid says what's your problem Dad or Mom what's your problem I am the best player out there and my team would have lost without my effort and you know that might be true and you think well it doesn't matter whether you win or lose it matters how you play the game and the kid says yeah but I tried to win and I did win and so like what are you talking about and you don't know what to say and what you say is look kid the winner is the one who gets asked to play again right exactly that man and if you violate that principle you think you've won because that's because you're a fool you're taking the local victory over the long term victory and you don't do that you don't subordinate the long-term Victory to the local Victory and when you tell your kid to be a good sport you're saying conduct yourself in a manner that makes you the person that everyone invites to play Forever and you do that how do you do you know how you do that you give credit where it's due you don't take all the victory onto yourself you try to nurture the people underneath you so to speak so that they can become as or more confident than you right you take responsibility for the flaws you don't you're not too triumphant when you win and you're not too devastated when you lose those are all the principles of fair play and the reason those are principles is because if you play that way people will invite you to keep playing and so if your kid is a good sport he'll have friends and maybe friends for life and then he wins and you say you don't sacrifice that kid so that you can be the best soccer player here today when you're you know in grade six and and you have this local Victory that's stupid that's foolish it's unwise now you know generally we're not articulate enough to lay that out but you know when you lay it out like that people can understand it right away you have to conduct your businesses like that exactly it's to be reciprocal 100 and the more reciprocal your business is the more it'll Thrive you know you want your customers to be not satisfied you want your customers to be thrilled and you want to do the same with people you enter into a business relationship with I mean that's my criteria for being involved in a business that was the criteria for the daily wire deal that I made a year ago it's like we both walked away from that negotiation thrilled the idea was yeah absolutely man we're 100 on board with this and that's what you want from A supplier right if you're the kind of negotiator that walks away from your supplier going I already got one up on him it's like yeah till he figures it out and then has like a hundred schemes up his sleeve how you're now low priority business on the supply chain front you want the guy to think oh my God this is such a good deal I can hardly believe it happened and I'm going to do absolutely everything I possibly can to make this relationship last and you want the same attitude well with your wife and your husband that's for sure but definitely with your customers if you have any sense at all and most of you all of you I presume to the degree that you've been successful you know you know this you want people to be thrilled with the fact that they're dealing with you you know what I mean the best companies I've I've ever dealt with they'll make mistakes but then when you call them and you say look you know this kind of screwed up they say hey man we're sorry we will be over there to fix this right now and please let us know if there's anything else we can do to rectify our error and that's not just you know HR marketing hand waving they're over there the next day and they fix the mistake and so then you think well you know not only do they try hard but even if they do screw up they fix it oh I'm perfectly happy to continue that relationship into the foreseeable future That's the basis for voluntary exchange of that iterates see one of the things that psychologists have learned is that that's how ethic ethics itself emerges like ethics is the pattern of behavior let's say in conception that governs repeated interrelationships so I could dominate you on a one-on-one let's say but the problem is you wouldn't want to have anything to do with me again and if we're going to interact repeatedly which we want to do if we're going to establish you know a credible let's say real and deep business relationship I better be treating you certainly treating you as well as I would treat myself and vice versa and I think it's partly because there's no difference if we're going to interact in the long run the difference between US starts to disappear because your interest is now it's literally now my interest they are the same thing you know and if you surround yourself with a thousand people and their interest and your interest is no theirs and vice versa well you have a thousand people working in your interest I mean how could you possibly have a better deal than that there's a thousands of them in one of you if you're working hard to work to promote their interests and they see that they're going to work hard to promote yours and then everybody wins and what I mean by that is that's actually how societies become wealthy you know abundant I mean literally everybody wins and it's not because then that Thousand and One are extracting excess resources from the other million it's no they're actually creating abundance they're creating wealth it's not theft you can't steal what's not there it has to be produced and you produce it obviously you produce it through the voluntary exchange of Labor clearly you know and this is another place where the left they're so off Target ethically you know the the degree of absolute poverty in the world in the last since the fall of the of the Berlin Wall essentially it is plummeted so fast it's unparalleled in human history you know there wouldn't be any people in the world who were in privation now if it wasn't for political corruption and that's all because it's all because the principle of voluntary exchange has become almost a universal Norm even though you know we're we're starting to Savage it again and what's that's lifted the billions of people that everyone predicted would starve the majority of them into the middle class right in 30 years it's an absolute bloody miracle and the idea that the leftist radicals who criticize that could possibly have the moral upper hand in the face of that kind of evidence it's a kind of miracle and it's it's a miracle of inerticulate guilt on the part of the classic liberal and conservative types because the evidence is crystal clear you know there's there are there are there are vanishingly a vanishingly small proportion of the world's population is in absolute privation and if we continue even on the developmental pathway that we're on now there'll be no poverty in the world at all by 2035. despite the fact that there'll be like 8 billion people I mean my God it's such a miracle and that's a voluntary exchange miracle and to the degree that you're participating in that you're bringing that about there's there's nothing to feel guilty about on that front so and it's you have to become articulate enough to start to be able to defend this and maybe that's why you want to take on your political responsibility you know because doing that would force you to become articulate enough to defend your principles and that's a good thing to learn you know and then your models for the young people in your community who are looking at a pathway forward that involves responsible citizenship instead of this idiot subjectivity that they're being conned into by the radicals it's like no get out there and be responsible and productive and generous that's a way to have life you know get married have some kids start a business do something productive profitably and then be intelligently generous they'll have some meaning in your life and then when those Storms Come you'll have something to to buttress you you know some real relationships some real accomplishments you know that in your own life you know the things that you've done well that's what you've got when the storms come so you want to invite young people along for that and you got to shed your foolish guilt in order to manage that Dr Jordan Peterson ladies and gentlemen [Applause] well that was fun I'm glad you were with us I don't get to do weird stuff like that very often and I'm not that good of an interviewer but you don't have to be with him all you gotta do is just toss a piece of meat into the cage and the lion will get after it I mean there you go so fairly easy to do guys and uh what a what an interesting interesting dude a lot of fun hey if you're like most business owners you don't have anybody to talk to about the struggles of running a business and ultimately that affects your ability to grow and make decisions we created advisory groups so you could join other business owners who are looking for the same thing as you Community I walked with a group of men we called the Eagles in the early days of our business the first 14 years every Wednesday morning we got together those are guys outside my business that spoke into my life in a lot of areas and business was part of it I'm convinced that part of the reason Ramsay's word is today is because of that group so when you connect with like-minded like valued business owners in an Advisory Group changes everything so go to entreereleadership.com coaching to learn more and apply for a group hey folks that about puts this uh version in the books remember better a weary Warrior than a quivering critic leader sir leaders are active not passive leaders act on principle not appearances this world needs more high quality leaders so choose to lead I'm Dave Ramsey your host thanks for listening to the entree leadership podcast [Music]

Channel: EntreLeadership

Views: 328,113

Keywords: entreleadership, dave ramsey, Core Beliefs and Mindsets for Success with Dr. Jordan Peterson

Id: SbJe868Kw-c

Length: 53min 9sec (3189 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 14 2023