DON'T WASTE YOUR LIFE - Jordan Peterson Motivational Speech

you know what should happen when you go to university is you should learn how to think and formulate arguments you should learn to think speak and write that's what the humanities are for they're to make you dangerous right because if you can think and speak and write you're deadly in a complex job you're exactly what's necessary there's nothing you can possibly do to become more deadly than to improve your facility with language and the way you do that is by reading especially great things and by writing and by thinking and by speaking for that matter but how how could that not be viewed as absolutely Central to what education is about you want to be inarticulate and stumble over everything that you try to think and communicate how are you going to get anywhere you don't even know who you are under those circumstances this massive feeling that's expressing itself you know maybe in violence because you can't find the words and yeah you stumble around and bump into things and you're clunky and dull and you're not witty don't Spark so let's say you take the example of a seal who's got it all but this literacy what happens to him compared to someone who has all those skills if you can't write well and he's in charge of six guys and one of those guys works hard or does something that deserves to be recognized this is the responsibility of that leader to write that person an award okay so he can't reward his he can't reward his his good workers his good soldiers he can give him a pat on the back but back isn't going to get him promoted an award is actually worth some points towards your promotion and the people that are on that board that are giving that reward they're never going to meet that leader and they're definitely not going to meet that guy there's no there's no bias it's based on this piece of paper that you hand in you're handing this piece of paper they read the piece of paper and they say award approved or award not approved or you want to do a mission and you send that up the chain of command and it's the same thing it gets to a certain point where they're just looking at it and reading and trying to decipher this pile of junk that you put together and by the way if I'm in charge and Jordan sends me a concept of operations that doesn't make any sense why would I possibly let you go out and execute an operation that I can't even understand what it is you're trying to do because what I observed in my own career and it's so interesting the parallelism is so interesting but not surprising is that nothing can stop you if you can write and it's for the reasons you just laid out it's like when you write you make a case for something whatever it happens to be and if you make the best case well then you win and you get whatever it is that you're aiming at and so you're adventurous you want to make a mark as you bloody well better learn how to write because if you learn how to write well then you can think and you can communicate your thoughts so not only are you deadly strategically you become extremely convincing and then you can go and do anything you want and no one will stop you and that's never told to people and I I I I don't really understand why you know you hear the pen is mightier than the sword which is just a cliche unless it's fleshed out the truth of the matter is is that you have a lot of potential as a child but none of that is capable of manifesting itself as Freedom before you become disciplined and discipline is a matter of the imposition of order and the order is necessary especially for people who are hopeless and nihilistic and what does it mean well it doesn't mean geez I hate getting up at eight o'clock in the morning to get ready for work that just means that you're not very disciplined you know or or maybe that it might mean something deeper but I'd start with lack of discipline before you know rearranging your whole life because you might say well I hate getting up at eight o'clock in the morning no matter what I'm doing and then it's not your job I don't mean don't do difficult things I mean watch yourself and if you see that you're doing things that make you hate yourself then consider the cost of continuing you know if something's valuable you make sacrifices to attain it that that discovery of sacrifice I think that's what separates human it's one of the primary factors separating human beings from animals 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 lay a disciplinary structure on yourself get the chaos and and check and then you can move towards a state that's Freer because it's discipline first like look if you're going to become a concert pianist there's going to be several thousand hours of extraordinarily disciplined practice that's the imposition of order on your potential let's say but what comes out of that is a much grander freedom and so in virtually every freedom that you have in life that's true freedom is purchased at the price of discipline but it's not some casual self-help Doctrine it's that if you don't organize yourself properly you'll pay for it and in a big way and so will the people around you and I would say start where you can start you know if if something announces itself to you as in need of repair that you could repair then hey fix it you fix a hundred things like that your life will be a lot different now I often tell people to fix the things you repeat every day because people tend to think of those as trivial you get up you brush your teeth you have your breakfast you know you have your routines that you go through every day although those probably constitute 50 percent of your life and people think well they're mundane I don't need to pay attention to them it's like no no that's exactly wrong the things you do every day those are the most important things you do hands down while 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 so yeah there's lots of reasons too you know because I've thought for a long time imagine that imagine you have a choice in front of you because you do so here's the choice your life life is either meaningful or meaningless okay so let's go through the meaningless part first because you think well of course I don't want it to be meaningless it's like yeah just hold on a second nothing you do matters and so impulsive pleasure is the order of the day no responsibility that's you can do whatever you want it's like Pleasure Island and Pinocchio right it's like never Landing Peter Pat is still a kid can play all the time impulsive pleasure and and no responsibility that's the reward for meaninglessness well but then the other side is okay well let's say you want your life to be meaningful it's like okay than what you do matters it actually matters right make a mistake hurts you hurts your family hurts the world in a deeper way than you think and you have to be awake to that and then you have to take it on yourself so you're at a particular stage right now and that stage would involve a particular world view and the behaviors that go along with that so the perceptions and behaviors but it's not enough because you haven't mastered the whole world and you're making mistakes all the time and then there's other neurological mechanisms that so maybe that's a more left hemisphere phenomenon the instantiation of that identity then there's right hemisphere mechanisms that are tracking your errors and sort of and keeping track of them and the errors are an indication that your theory is incomplete so it acute the errors accumulate and the information around the errors accumulate and another identity starts to become formulated and it it solves all the problems your previous identity did but also some additional ones when you have an aha moment like that it's the manifestation of that next identity that's that's making itself known it's you know because it's being built from the bottom up it isn't explicit yet then you'll encounter an explicit statement you you mentioned a couple there and they map onto that and that's the ahabs like oh yes oh yes that's what ties together these things that I've been wrestling with in the back of my mind tension for example is mediated by unconscious forces and you know that you know that perfectly well you know if you're sitting down to study for example your conscious intent is to study but you know perfectly well that all sorts of distraction fantasies are going to enter the theater of your imagination Non-Stop and annoyingly and and there isn't really a lot you can do about that except maybe wait it out you know so you'll be sitting there reading and your attention will flicker away you'll think about I don't know maybe you want to watch Jane the Virgin on Netflix or something like that or maybe it's time to have a peanut butter sandwich or you should get the dust bunnies from on out from underneath the bed or it's time to go outside and have a cigarette or maybe it's time for a cup of coffee or it's like all these subsystems in you that would like something aren't very happy just to sit there while you read this thing that you're actually bored by and so they pop up and try to take control of your perceptions and your actions non-stop maybe you think well this is a stupid course anyways why do I have to read this damn paper and what am I doing in University and what's the point of life it's like well you can really get going if you're trying to avoid doing your homework and and and then you might think well what is it in you that's true trying to avoid because after all you took the damn course and you told yourself to sit down why don't you listen well because you're you're a mess that's basically why you haven't got control over yourself at all I don't know how to start improving my life someone might say that and I would say well you're not aiming low enough regulate your habits try to get up at approximately the same time each morning I would recommend that you get up approximately when other people get up so that would be something in the neighborhood of 7 30 or 8 in the morning or perhaps earlier perhaps a little bit later but you want to stabilize that because your your circadian rhythms operate more uh what would you call it fluidly and your mood is likely to be regulated better if there's islands of stability in your daily routines human beings like daily routines just like dogs like daily routines and so regulate your sleep I would say when you get up in the morning eat breakfast that's a really important thing to do I can't tell you how many people I've treated in my clinical practice whose proclivity for emotional instability and depression anxiety General hopelessness emotional pain and gloom and doom as well as capacity to concentrate or property regulated or inhibited or reduced by merely ensuring that they ate a I would say a protein and fat Rich breakfast relatively soon after they wake up and that's especially true if they're stressed and as it turns out that if you stress yourself after a fast which is of course what you've undertaken if you haven't eaten since the night before that your body produces enough insulin to deplete the sugar in your blood and then it's very difficult for you to become regulated properly with regards to your metabol metabolism until you sleep again and so it can be regulating your sleep and your breakfast eating habits in particular can be in a very effective way of regulating your mood and increasing your capacity to concentrate the other thing I would say is that scheduling your time is also extraordinarily useful and so I can tell you a little bit about how to use schedules effectively you should you should develop a long-term plan es you have to set up your long-term vision and then I would say once you set up that Vision so that you know how to orient yourself then you should start designing your days and you can do that very effectively with a calendar like Google Calendar many people say well I hate using a schedule and or I hate using a calendar what you're doing is using the calendar as an external Tyrant that's telling you what you should do if you were going to be a conventionally good person each day so you load yourself up with arbitrary responsibilities but that's not really how you should use a schedule what you should use a schedule to do is to design the day that you would most like to have and obviously that's going to include accepting some responsibility and undertaking to make progress on those things that you have to make progress on to keep your life from collapsing into chaos but it should also mean that you schedule in activities that make you actually want to have that day and so if you're using a schedule properly that it can be your friend and that can also be something that can increase your capacity to concentrate and then I would say well if you're if you're very scattered then you can start to train yourself you might say well um I need to learn to read without distraction so maybe what you do you say okay well for the next week I'm going to read 10 minutes a day and I'm going to try to limit the distractions and if you're successful at that then you could try 12 minutes a day and if you're successful at that you could try 15 minutes a day and the trick is to set a goal for yourself that is slightly beyond your current level of performance enough to be challenging enough to be worthwhile if you accomplished but not so difficult that you're likely to fail and then practice incrementally day by day trying to inculcate the habits that you want to inculcate and assume that it'll take you a number of months or even a number of years in order to become very fluent at The Habit the important thing is to start improving incrementally because incremental Improvement pays off like compound interest 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 caring that you're not aware of but you can certainly contrast yourself with yourself 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 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 [Music] you gotta 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 make making you one person in ten thousand or even one person in 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 your autism you want security okay so those are all sources of potential motivation that you could draw on that you could tailor to your own you know your own personality but then there are dimensions that you want to consider your life across and so we ask people about well you know if you could have your life the way you wanted it in three to five years if you were taking care of yourself properly you know what would you want from your friendships what would you want from your intimate relationship how would you like to structure your family what do you want for your career well how are you going to use your time outside of your job you're quite different from other people and you shouldn't be comparing yourself to them because they're not like you you know 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 the only person that has those is you compare yourself to who you were yesterday and not to who someone else is today and see that's a game you can win 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 and so that's also darwinian in some sense you know you're creating all these little Enterprises that are sort of alive they're run by people after all and 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 you know what do they say if at first you fail then try try again and um and that would probably mean try something different rather than the same thing but 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 it's very if you're starting out as a salesperson for example the hardest sale is the first customer and then you know they get easier with each additional customer [Music] 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 that's one way that you can identify those people who are actually on your side [Music] be careful who you share bad news with because that's equally tricky you know you you you want someone who will listen to you when you're having trouble and allow you your grief especially if it's a consequence of something tragic and who won't try to one-up you you know because often when you're talking to people they'll be thinking about what they have to say that's worse and that's not helpful if you need a listening ear make one room in your house as beautiful as possible I I talked a lot about already about the necessity of cleaning your room which is you know in some sense a foolish piece of advice because it seems so obvious but it's not obvious at all and you'll find if you try it especially if you're in a household that's not very functional that you'll encounter obstacles that you couldn't imagine existed while you're trying to put your life in order and you can take your surroundings Beyond order and and and move towards Beauty and that's unbelievably useful there's a saying that says tough times produce strong men strong men produce good times good times produce weak men weak men produce tough times yes if that's the truth which phase are we in today [Music] well if you think about it historically you have to say that we're in good times I mean that doesn't mean everything about the current times are good and of course life is always tenuous and and and difficult but since 1919 if you go back a hundred years ago imagine what the last five years would have been like right you would have been the entire world was encapsulated in a terrible War the trench warfare was absolutely brutal and that was a five-year period and then that was followed by the Spanish influenza which killed 120 million people and you know so I'd rather be here now than there then by a substantial margin and I think life is never easy even under relatively positive conditions but I would say that speaking on a global level 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 you know maybe things can continue to improve [Music] thank you foreign

Channel: Motivation2Study

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Id: 2YCQrwTeet8

Length: 26min 54sec (1614 seconds)

Published: Mon May 29 2023