How To Become The Best Version Of Yourself - Jordan Peterson Motivation

i've looked at a very large number of terrible things both in my studies and in my personal life and in my private practice and my conclusion has been that despite the vast ocean of ignorance that we all swim in and the overwhelming proclivity for malevolence that characterizes the human psyche that the nobility that's part and parcel of us and the potential can transcend that and defeat it and so it's very dark but there's something very bright at the bottom and so i'm very optimistic about that and that's part of the reason that i'm well that i wrote the book that i wrote but also that i'm touring around the world talking to people about adopting something approximating a vision that's noble and worthy and setting their speech straight and getting their lives together and shouldering the responsibility of the world in a manner that's good for them and their family and their communities and to think about that as an aspirational goal that provides them with the meaning to offset the tragedy of their life and i believe that's solid right to the core and my impression is that it's that knowing that hearing that which is something that all people already know in some sense but hearing that articulated clearly is of great utility to people and every time someone comes up to me and this happens very often multiple times a day no matter where i am and someone comes up to me and says excuse me are you dr peterson and they usually say that very politely and they're apologetic for disturbing me even though they're not disturbing me they say look i was having a rough time a couple years ago addicted alcoholic lonesome disturbed in my personal relationships i've been watching your lectures listening to your books listening to your podcasts things are much better thank you it's like every time that happens it's overwhelming i'm sorry it always breaks me up but it's very overwhelming see it's very overwhelming to have strangers come up and tell you things that they won't tell people that are close to them you know it indicates that they trust that there's a trust there that's deep trust because the people who are doing this they come up and tell me that because they're very pleased about it but also because they know that i'll be pleased about it and i am overwhelmingly pleased about it and so and for me every time i hear something like that that's a victory you know i studied the structure of totalitarianism for a very long time and became a very firm believer in the idea of good and evil and i do believe that the most appropriate way to conceptualize the nature of human experience and is as a battle between good and evil and i think it's a very serious battle because the evil is very dark and very terrible and every time i see someone who has reoriented themselves in in an upward direction then i regard that as part of what defeats that terrible malevolence and bitterness and and i believe that the fundamental doctrine that each individual is a center of creation i believe that to be literally and metaphorically true and and i also believe that each of us partake participate in the process of transforming what could be into what is and that we do that as a consequence of our ethical choices and that we shape the world as a consequence of that and so then when i hear someone come up to me and say look you know i've i've done everything i could in the last while to put myself together and it's and it's much less dark around me i think that's one more major victory on the bitter road uphill if you could give one advice to us how we could be able to actually put our opinion out there and to actually make people listen and not to cause some mindless conflict with just yelling what advice would you give us learn to write i'm dead serious like i'm dead serious about that um because writing is formalized thinking and so the way you write is first of all you need a problem because why write if you don't have a problem so this is good advice if you're just writing an essay by the way for your classes is like pick a bloody problem that you want to write about because otherwise it's false right from the start it's up to you to engage with the material until you find something that grips you that you desire to investigate okay so you need a problem well the next thing you need to do is we need to have something to say about the problem also reading reading is really good for that read as much as you can get your hands on that addresses the problem okay so now now you now you know a bunch of things or at least provisionally know them you at least have access to them well now you start you start sorting through it's like okay well maybe i need to summarize what i've learned and then i need to iron out the contradictions between what i've learned and i need to elegantly formulate that and i need to get my word choice right and my phrase choice right and my sentence choice right and i need to organize the sentences into proper paragraphs and the paragraphs into proper sequence so that i have a coherent argument and at the same time what you're doing is is your your your your um you're integrating your own personality at the highest and most abstract level of organization and you're sharpening your tools and you're putting yourself straight because you're learning to think you learn to do that by writing and so i would say pick some hard problems and learn to write very very carefully and when i say pay attention to the word i mean that pick the right words organize them into the right phrases get your sentences straight like when i wrote my first book maps of meaning i believe i wrote every sentence in that book 50 times 50 variants of every sentence i'd read it once i'd read it again i'd read it again i've read it again and i have a little competition which sentence is better which sentence is better i'd pick that sentence do the same with the paragraphs over many many years you hone your words they're the most powerful thing about you bar none if you're an effective writer and speaker and communicator you you have all the authority and competence that there is and so you're at university maybe you're taking humanity's degree well that what's the humanities degree for it's to teach you how to think you learn to think by writing now there's more to read to speak and all of that but the best thing you can do is read and write every day a couple of hours every day write about things you find important and see if you can see if you can discover what you believe to be true and that'll build you a foundation and it's unbelievably practical like if you look at people who are phenomenally successful across life there's various reasons but one of them is is that they're unbelievably good at articulating what they what they're aiming at and strategizing and negotiating and and and and enticing people with a vision forward it's like get your words together man that's that makes you unstoppable and that that's really that's the core of the humanities that idea get your words together make yourself an articulate creature and then you're you're deadly in the best possible way [Music] your students you might think in your more cynical moments that you have to offer your professors what they want and gerrymander the content of your language to suit their predilections or what you consider to be their predilections first of all it's a very small minority of professors who are corrupt enough to punish you for producing a high quality essay that they don't agree with and and though that's reprehensible but it doesn't happen very often but more importantly it's it's uh it's the highest academic sin to do that because what you're here to do is to learn to find your true voice and every time you deviate from that for expedient reasons you corrupt yourself and not in a trivial way because when you formulate your arguments that that becomes a permanent part of your character you carry that with you it becomes part of the structure through which you view the world and it guides your actions and so you hold your words pristine and you work in a dedicated way to become as articulate and clear as you can possibly become and there's nothing that's more practical and noble than that at the same time that's why the humanities are so valuable you know you think well what good is a humanities degree it's like well you come out of here able to speak and think and write no matter where you go like you're you're headed for for the pinnacle and hopefully in a in a way that's positive for everyone so that's what i would recommend [Music] i've done about 150 public lectures or so in the last year all over the world and to large audiences the audiences in australia were starting to approach well we had audiences 5500 people in australia so which is quite remarkable you know that the 5500 people would come to listen to like a serious discussion about philosophical theological and and psychological issues and and to participate in that and and i don't pull any punches i'm not speaking down i would never speak down to an audience i i think that's a dreadful error of arrogance but the reason that i think people believe what i say is that i'm very pessimistic well look because most times when you when you listen to someone who's who's a motivational speaker let's say you know it fills you with a temporary optimism but you go home and and the wiser part of you knows that mostly it's it's the painting over of rotten wood with with a fresh coat of paint and i tell my audiences very clearly that their life is going to be difficult and sometimes difficult beyond both imagining and tolerance and that that is definitely in your future if it isn't in your present and for many people it's in their present and that that and that and that that can be unbearable that enough to turn you against life itself to corrupt to corrupt you to to drive you to nihilism to drive you to suicide and worse to drive you to thoughts of of vengefulness of of infinite scope to not only be turned against yourself and your fellow men but to be turned against being itself because of its intrinsically brutal in some sense nature and and that is worse than that actually because it's not only that we suffer and and that that will necessarily occur but that we all make our suffering worse because of our ignorance and our malevolence and everyone knows that to be true and so the discussions start let's say on a on a on an unshakable foundation but then i can tell people look despite that despite that we're remarkable creatures you know we're capable of taking up the burden of that suffering and facing the reality of that malevolence voluntarily we can actually do that and all of the psychological evidence suggests and this is independent of your school of psychology if you're a practical psychologist a clinical psychologist of any sort the evidence is crystal clear that if people voluntarily confront the problems that face them and the malevolence that surrounds them that they can make headway against it and not only psychologically so it's not only meaningful to do that psychologically which which it is to to confront the problems that that torment you voluntarily that's meaningful psychologically but it's also practically useful in that you can actually solve some of the problems that beset you when i talk to undergraduates i ask them you know how much time do you waste every day by your own reckoning and it's somewhere between five and eight hours you know it's a lot of it's a lot of time well i usually walk through i walk the stu students through an economic analysis of that i said well you know why don't you value your time at 50 an hour and calculate for yourself just exactly what you're doing to your future by your inability to discipline yourself it's worth thinking through in any case people do waste a lot of time and they're they also act counterproductively a lot of the time regardless we do make progress and and and we can thrive under the difficult conditions that make up our lives and we can resist the malevolence that entices us that's within our power and we don't know the limits to that and we also know that it's better to we all know this that it's better to live courageously then cowardly everyone knows that that's what you teach people that you love and and and we know that it's better to live truthfully than in deceit and you can tell that too because that's also what you tell people that you love and we know that you should pick up your damn responsibility and move forward everyone knows that it's it's part of our intrinsic moral nature and that nature is there and it's not difficult to communicate to people about this like everyone knows that you wake up at three in the morning when you've left let your life go off the rails and that you berate yourself for your uselessness and your cruelty and your failure to take off to take the opportunities that are in front of you and if you were the master in your own house in some sense the captain of your own destiny if there was no intrinsic nature well that would never happen you'd just let yourself off the hook there'd be no voice of conscience tormenting you but no one escapes from that and what that indicates to me is that at least psychologically we live in a universe that's characterized by a moral dimension and we understand that well and that moral failings have consequences and that they're not trivial they destroy you they destroy your family they destroy your community and and you can tell people that and they listen because they know they don't know they know that's the thing and maybe that's the thing about being an intellectual you have the opportunity to articulate ideas that other people know they embody but they can't articulate and that's what people tell me you know they say well you help me give words to things that i always knew to be true but couldn't say or or they say i've been trying to put some of your precepts into practice responsibility being a main one vision another honesty i i suppose bringing up the pack and saying this is the fun part of doing all this fun is a weak word that it's it's it's a it's the remarkable part of doing all this i mean i have people tell me constantly wherever i go it's so delightful that you know they're in a pretty dark place and they tell me why and there's plenty of dark places in the world and they decided well maybe they were gonna develop a bit of a vision and take a bit more responsibility and start telling the truth and putting some effort into something and they come up and they say well you can't believe how much better things are it's like i got i got three promotions i had one guy tell me this was a lovely story you know 15 seconds he came up after a talk he said two years ago i got out of jail i was homeless he said i own my own house i have a six-figure income i got married and i have a daughter thank you that was the whole conversation it's like he decided he decided he was going to put his life together and you know and so you can look at that pessimism that that constitutes let's say the core of what well i think it's the core religious message really is the is the tragic nature of the world the reality of suffering it's part of the core religious message but what emerges out of that properly conceptualized is a remarkable appreciation for what human beings are capable of like we are unbelievably resilient and and able creatures and we do not have any conception of our upper limits i would say for the last 45 years we've told psychologists have been have been certainly to blame for this at least in part you're okay the way you are that's what we tell young people oh you're okay the way you are it's like and there's nothing worse than you can tell that you can tell someone who's young than that especially if they're miserable you know and lots of them well if they're miserable and aimless it's like oh i'm miserable and aimless and sometimes i'm suicidal and i'm nihilistic and i don't have any direction in your life it's in my life it's like well you're okay the way you are here and it's like they don't want to hear that they want to hear look you know you're and you know this you're useless you know nothing you haven't got started you've got 60 years to put yourself together and god only knows what you could become and that's so that message is so much more it's so funny because it's so it's such an attack but it's so positive because there's faith there in the in the potential that makes up the person rather than the miserable actuality that happens to be manifesting itself at the moment and young people respond extraordinarily well to that because when you know that if you're a parent and you love your your child your son your daughter what you're trying to foster is the best in them you want that to manifest itself across the course of their life you want them to become continually more than they are to see what they could be and well and i think that's part of the great message of the west is that that's that's the that's the ethical requirement of individual being in in in the proper sense is to constantly note that you're not what you could be to take responsibility for that and to and to commit yourself like body and soul to the attainment of that ideal my hierarchy would be something like this i type letters i type words phrases sentences paragraphs i sequence the paragraphs i make chapters i write books it's all coherently laid out towards some higher order aim all of that and the aim is as far as i'm concerned to share my clinical knowledge and to educate people and that makes sense because i'm a clinician and a researcher and a professor and so if i was going to do that i've decided i'm going to do that so that's what i'm doing and hopefully that's a good thing and hopefully people respond to it as if it's a good thing because then that's a good thing for me and it's a good thing for them and so that seems to be like the very definition of a good thing and i'm trying to set things straight right i'm trying to set myself straight by writing carefully i'm trying to set the culture straight by saying what i believe to be the case i'm trying to set other individuals straighter by communicating with them i'm trying to ensure that we can live more harmoniously in our culture and in the world and you think well those are good things to have at the outermost reaches of your value hierarchy you know my friend of mine was talking to me about bricklayers the other day and he's trying to restructure a major company at the moment and we were talking about how to motivate people he said well let's say you're a bricklayer it's like you know one damn brick after another how are you going to be excited about that well let's say you're a medieval bricklayer right and it's it's 1500 and you're working in you're working in one of the great uh you're working in one of the great early renaissance cities in europe and it isn't a wall you're building it's a cathedral it's going to take 350 years and why are you doing that well it's for the ultimate glory of god whatever that means and so you're not putting one brick down after another it's like you're involved in this unbelievably complicated moral structure that stretches really stretches all the way up to heaven itself so to speak and each of your minor actions you know your local actions is imbued with the spirit of that entire moral structure well that's a philosophy it's like well do you have a meaning in life what's the meaning of life well hopefully it isn't just unrequited suffering and malevolence we could dispense with that as much as possible that might be a good start but then to aim high well that seems to be reasonable to aim as high as you can and we've laid out things that could be aimed at you could constrain yourself you know there are things you're not doing and things that you shouldn't be doing you stop doing the things that you shouldn't be doing and start doing the things you should be doing that's a good start wake up enough so that you can set the structures around you right it's your moral obligation as a citizen your responsibility and your divine duty i would say from our cultural perspective because in the west everyone is regarded as a sovereign individual the fate the fate of the state a sovereign individual on whose shoulders rests the fate and the health of the state right that's the fundamental presupposition otherwise why do you get to vote to just to make a mistake well no that's not it you're supposed to be awake so that the ship of state continues to move forward in the appropriate direction and somehow we've decided that's up to you why well because we've also decided hey man you can do it and not only that no one else can and so that's something to know and might be something to take seriously it's like who knows what the hell you'd be if you got your act together you'd be a force to contend with you know you'd have constrained the malevolence of in your own soul and you'd have started to take advantage of the potential that's around you and to build yourself out of that potential into god only knows what you know and then and then maybe with that wisdom you can set the structures around you in order at least more in order than they are or maybe to disintegrate them a bit when they need it and to restructure them so they're even better than they are and you can push back nature and it's in its horrible form and invite it forward in its positive form and make things better for you and for your family and for your community and you can approach the unknown itself and you can explore that the potential that's out there and you can bring back the treasure that's part of the unknown potential and you can distribute that and that is what you can do and then not only that's what you need to do because you need to have a meaning in your life a name a value structure that's of sufficient potency and magnitude to justify the limitations and the trouble that life constitutes right it's not this is no trivial business that we're involved in right we're all in this up to our necks literally it's a it's a mortal game you're all in and and there's and and and to play it wrong is is is to risk suffering in hell and i'm not talking about afterlife i'm not talking about something metaphysical you can generate plenty of hell right here around you plenty an unlimited amount and so you can move towards that direction or you can move towards a positive direction and you can orient yourself and you know you can know you can learn this is why the post modernists are so incorrect it's like look you need a name you need a name you cannot organize the way you look at the world without a name it's not optional and then the question is well what should the aim be well probably not to radically increase the amount of misery and suffering that you experience in everyone else i mean maybe you want to go that route but and people do but i think they only do when they become bitter and they give up you know they and they make mistakes they know they're making right it's it's conscious decision to go down that route it's not like they think that's okay to begin with their aim's wrong it's like straighten out your aim so there's an old idea this idea of sin sin is a word that was derived from a greek word hamartia and hamartia is an archery term and it means to miss the target and so you think well how can you miss the target well you have no weapon well then you miss the target you you have no target you have no aim well then then you miss the target you don't pick up your bow well then you miss the target you don't draw it back then you miss the target you don't practice and and miss many times right because you have to do that to develop the skill to hit the target so you're not willing to take the risk to miss you you do none of that and so you miss the target and that's the sin and then you miss your life and then what happens around you is that well there's far more hell than there has to be and there's much less heaven than there could be and it's on you and that's part of your what would you say your divine value let's say that that sets you aside along with everyone else as as something someone some being that even the law itself has to respect intrinsically and it's marked out in our culture by the sovereignty that you possess and the notion that there's something in you that's made in the image of god something that can confront the unknown and to create habitable order out of chaos and potential and to do that properly and that's all true as far as i can tell and it's all necessary to know it's coded in the deepest stories that are at the base of our culture and we're we're in danger of not understanding them and not believing them and it's a big mistake because they're heavy and profound and weighty and fundamental and necessary because you have to stand on something that's solid or everything is sand and you you fall in and you're done and so is everything around you you can't look at the world without a name literally you can't even perceive it you cannot regulate your emotions without a name the better your aim the more precise your aim the more elevated your aim you remember in in pinocchio when geppetto wants to turn pinocchio into a real boy he wishes on a star it's a strange thing eh but everybody just accepts it it's like well yeah if you've got a puppet you just made a puppet and you want to turn it into a boy the logical thing to do is open the window and wish on a star everyone knows that it's like none of that makes the least bit of sense obviously except metaphorically but we do understand it because we can watch that and it makes sense it's something magical about it and there is something magical about it because the truth of the matter is is that if you want to transform something that's nothing but a wooden headed puppet into something that's a fully functional autonomous moral autonomous individual then what you do is you elevate your eyes above the horizon to the highest point of light that you can perceive and you aim at that and that works and that works for you and it works for your partner and it works for your children and it works for the world let's say you're socially anxious okay so what happens when you're socially anxious you go to a party your heart's beating why the party is a monster why because it's judging you and it's judging you it's putting you low down the dominance hierarchy because that's what a negative judgment is and that interferes with your sexual success and that means that you're being harshly evaluated by nature itself right so you are confronting that the dragon of chaos when you go into the social situation and so what do you do you're like this right you hunch over and that's low dominance i'm no threat it's like well that's not going to get you very far you know but that's a logical thing to do in the in in the face of a tyrant so i'm no threat you know you look at the king and you're dead i'm no threat i'm hunched over and then what's happening internally how what are people thinking about me what are people thinking about me am i looking stupid am i looking foolish geez i'm awkward i hate being here man i'm sweating too much it's all internalized right it's all self-focused the the the eye isn't work the eye isn't working what do you tell people stop don't stop thinking about yourself because you can't it's like don't think of a white elephant white elephant white elephant white elephant you can't tell someone to stop thinking about something because they get caught in a loop what you do with socially anxious people is you say look at other people look at them right why because if you look at them you can tell what they're thinking and then you you're unless you're unless you're terribly socialized and some people are some people have no social skills and so the reason they can't go to a party is because they don't even know how to introduce themselves like they're just no one ever taught them how to behave and so they're really good candidates for behavior therapy because you walk them through the process of how you actually manifest the procedures that are associated with social acceptability but most people aren't like that they have the ability so if they're really introverted and high in neuroticism they can usually talk quite well to someone one-on-one why because they look at them well if i look at you it's another thing to do if you're ever speaking to a group of people never speak to the group of people that doesn't exist you talk to individuals and then they reflect for you the entire group because they're all entrained if you look at one person they broadcast you what everyone's thinking and you know how to talk to one person so it's easy so as soon as you focus on the person not you you push your attention outward use your eye you push your attention outward and you start watching well then all your automatic mechanisms kick in and you stop being awkward because if we're talking and i'm looking here i don't know what you're going to do next and i'm going to put disjunctions into the like they're like bad chords in the melody of our of our conversation and the reason is i'm not paying attention so that's why the eye is the thing at the top of the pyramid it's like the thing that enables you to win the set of all possible dominance hierarchies is the eye pay attention pay attention that's the critical issue that's why the egyptians worshipped horus that's why horus was the thing that rescued osiris from the from the depths it's the capacity to pay attention what do you pay attention to most what your right hemisphere signals as anomalous it attracts your attention it's like this isn't going quite right i'm not looking at that wrong that's what you look at that's what you look at what's not going right because that's see that's the terrible monster that might eat you but it's also the place you get all the information so that's why it's useful to have discussions with your enemies because they will tell you things you do not know and that's such a great thing because if you don't know them well you're not very smart are you you know there may be a time when you go somewhere that's the thing you need to know and maybe your enemy will tell you why you're such a fool you know and a bunch of other things that aren't true too but even one thing that's accurate it's like yeah thanks very much man maybe i'll do some work on that and i won't have to carry that forward so and then that's part of the reason again why the terrible predator it's always the terrible predator that has the gold it's like it's the person who delivers the message you do not want to hear so it's rough it's rough but it doesn't matter life is rough i lose my ability to think straight or intelligently in confrontational or unfriendly social situations any suggestions for adaptation or improvement well a couple i suppose one is is that when you get nervous in this kind of situation that you're describing what often happens to people is they start paying attention to themselves they get self-conscious so you know let's say i got self-conscious all of a sudden during this q a what would happen is that i'd stop paying attention to the questions and the screen and what i'm doing and i'd start paying attention to how i was feeling and to the nervousness and then i'd start to get aware that i was not responding properly and that would make me more nervous and then i would get more aware of that and that could just shut me down entirely that's happened to me now and then in a lecture and sometimes almost happened when i was talking to sam harris the first time what you have to do in a situation like that is it's not so much that you have to stop attending to yourself because if you start thinking i should stop attending to myself then you'll just think about yourself more what you have to do instead is pay more attention to the situation and to the people that you're talking to so you have to increase the degree to which you're at attending outwardly and that'll stop you from attending inwardly um that's a very effective technique you can practice that generally speaking every time you get nervous start paying more attention and that'll that'll uh that'll help you out a lot um that's really good suggestion for social anxiety in general is that if you see most people but not everyone but most people have enough implicit social skill because they were reasonably socialized when they were children so that they do know how to act in social situations but they get anxious and then that interferes with them implementing what they know just like if you're a pianist and you get anxious and self-conscious while you're playing you'll forget what you know because while you've activated a different part of your brain if you can remember to pay attention and you can direct your attention outward and you attend hard enough then what will happen and try to put the other person at ease and try to ask them questions then that'll kick in the automatic because you're paying attention to what the person is doing into their facial expressions and all of that that will clue in the automatic and implicit uh knowledge that you have and make things much more smooth and and uh and anxiety free so attention really plays a huge role in regulating anxiety you know there's this idea in very deep idea in clinical psychology a fundamental idea which is that if someone's anxious about something what you do is you and it's getting in their way you take what they're anxious about and you define it because that already delimits it right because one of the problems with being anxious about something is you won't speak of it it's like voldemort and then if you don't speak of it you it's way bigger than it should be as soon as you start talking about it you cut it down to size and so and it's for a bunch of reasons it's because you're not as afraid you're not as afraid of as many things as you think and you're braver than you know and more and more capable so as soon as you're brave enough to start talking about what you're afraid of then you see that there's more to you than you thought and that there's less to the problem than you thought and then you can decompose it further into smaller problems and then you can figure out how to approach those smaller problems and so and then it doesn't seem to me to be that you get less frightened it seems to be that you get more courageous which is way better than being less frightened because there's lots of things to be frightened about so if you're courageous that that really does the trick well if you're dealing with someone who's particularly socially inept and you're doing psychotherapy with them you might teach them how to shake someone's hand properly and say their name and remember the other person's name and so you just practice that with them so that they have the motoric routine down so that form of knowledge is built right into your body it's like look at the person put out your hand shake it don't not like a dead halibut but you know with a reasonable grip say your name don't mumble it look look at them so that they can hear you and then when they say their name try to remember it and that's then so you can practice that with people and so then they develop something that's motoric right it's embedded right in their body and so and then you can say to them well the other thing you can do is when you start a conversation is don't sit there thinking about what you're going to say next because then you won't be paying attention to the person and you'll make a fool out of yourself because you'll manifest non-sequiturs right because you'll get out of it's like if you're dancing and all you're paying attention to is where your feet are then you're going to step on the other person all the time so you want to pay attention to the other person and then whatever automatized social knowledge you have will come to the forefront so it's a good thing to know if you're socially anxious right if you're socially anxious one of the things you should do is pay way more attention to the person you're talking to rather than less and you should pay as little attention as possible to yourself so if you feel yourself falling in because you're anxious then what you do is you push your attention out and pay attention to the person because to the degree that you've been socialized then all your automatic responses will kick in so but anyway so you go out into the social world and you learn to shake someone's hand and you learn how to listen to them and ask them questions because that's the next thing because people love you can't just ask them random questions obviously but if they start talking to you and you don't understand something about what they're saying or maybe something they said is interesting and you ask them a question they're pretty damn happy about that because it means you're actually paying attention to them and people actually love to be paid attention to because it hardly ever happens so they really really like it and so okay so so what's happening well first of all you're mastering the automated motor movements right where to point your eyes where to put your hands how to move your lips like really embodied knowledge it's a special kind of memory you're practicing that so that's building new skills for you and then by listening to the person and watching yourself interact you're also generating new new abstract information that enables you to conceptualize the world in a different way so if you go out to 10 you go out and talk to 10 different people or 50 different people then you get to listen to what those 50 people said you get to watch how they're how they express themselves and you gather a corpus of knowledge that changes the way you perceive that broadens you as a social agent i spent a fair bit of time talking about the flood which is a very common mythological story the idea that there is a flood and that the creator of of everything determines that from time to time to wipe things out and that that's appropriately read as a description of the conditions of existence you know no matter who you are as you walk through life you're going to be confronted by catastrophes that have the possibility of washing you away and you need to know how to conduct yourself in order to prevail when that happens i mean that can happen to you personally you can get very ill or it can happen to you and your family when a family member breaks down or or dies or or has something terrible happen to them or there's an economic catastrophe in your family and it can happen socially and not only can it happen it will happen no one in the injunction to noah for example or the description of noah because he's the person that builds an ark is that he walks with god and that means that he has his moral house in order and that his generations are perfect which means that he has his family in order and what that means is that when the crisis comes he's prepared to deal with it and and can prevail and that's what people need to know they need to know how to do that because the crisis is always coming that's why the apocalypse the idea of the apocalypse and the end of the world is also archetypal it's because our worlds come to an end continually in small ways and sometimes in large ways and so in some sense it's necessary to be constantly preparing for the apocalypse because you're going to go through experiences in your life that will throw you for a loop and force you to either radically change or to or to fail and perhaps to die so those experiences in life where the fundamental constants that keep you oriented shift and then you fall into the unknown that's the underworld of mythology you fall into the unknown and into the underworld and part of that underworld can be hell now hell is the part of the underworld that emerges when you're embittered by your failure and you turn towards the desire to destroy and everyone who thinks about this can can appreciate that because most people at least if they reflect on their own experience can understand full well the negative psychological consequences of of falling flat on your face it's it's not only that you fail it's that you become bitter and turn against the world that's a trip to hell for all intents and purposes the fundamentalist types tend to read those things very concretely and to only project that out into an afterlife say or or a purely spiritual world and i'm not making any claims about at the moment about metaphysics or or post-life existence i'm saying that these descriptions pertain to psychological conditions that are always around us right here and now and that the mythological landscape is the landscape of human experience it's not the objective world and the landscape of human experience and the objective world aren't the same thing there's no pain or pain is not an objective thing it's part of the subjective world of human experience but it's but it's it's reality is is undeniable from an experiential perspective so our materialist outlook doesn't do a good job of orienting us in the world because it doesn't tell us how to behave and it can't you know it's the famous conundrum put forward by david hume that just which is you can't derive an ought from an is which means no matter how much factual information you extract from the world you're not going to derive from that an unerring guide to how you should act and so you might say well there's an endless number of answers to the question how you should act but that's not helpful because all that does is disorient you you want to push yourself out against the world in as many ways as you can because that forces you to develop you know and there's there's there's that's partly because as you push yourself out against the world and learn new things you become more and more informed right by the information that you're that you're generating in your active encounter with the world but also we know that when you put yourself in new situations new genes turn on in your nervous system and they code for new proteins and so you exist a lot in potential and the way that and you need to actualize that potential into in order to become all that you need to be in order to prevail in the world and the way that you do that is by pushing yourself out against new unknown things and forcing your own transformation in the face of those challenges and the idea is that if you do that let's say religiously then you can turn yourself into a character that has enough power and strength to prevail in the tragic conditions of life without becoming embittered and and cruel and malevolent and i mean it again to me this the longer i study this i suppose the more self-evident it seems to me life is very difficult it will challenge you to to your core you need to be able to withstand that challenge or or you'll you'll warp and and deteriorate how do you develop yourself to withstand that challenge you take on responsibilities and challenges voluntarily and strengthen yourself how else could you possibly do it i mean you could hide but there's no hiding you can't hide from illness and death you can't hide from loneliness or pain it's not possible and if you retreat then the things that chase you just grow larger so you have to put yourself together and you do that by seeing what's right in front of you regardless of whether or not you like it and encouraging yourself to master what you see voluntarily and to extend yourself and to stretch yourself out constantly and you do that with your eyes open and you do that with your with your speech and thinking carefully monitored and regulated so that you don't corrupt yourself with unnecessary ignorance and delusion because that will just hurt you when the crisis comes so this is why these and then it goes back to why these meta-narratives these archetypes exist they instruct us on how to do just that right how to face chaos how to face tragedy because they provide examples they set the pattern yeah they set the pattern yeah and and the issue is how do you manifest the pattern in your own life that's the crucial issue is how do you realize the archetype in your own life and you do that in part by accepting the struggles of your being or perhaps even welcoming them and subjugating yourself to them and opening yourself up to the possibility of radical transformation in in in the face of your errors and faults that's humility i suppose you're not all that you could be well you might say well why does that matter well that's it's easy to answer that if you're not all that you can be you will suffer more than you have to and so will the people around you and you might say well i don't care about that it's like well that's unlikely because virtually everyone cares about their own pain but even if you have got to the point where you don't care about that that's certainly nothing to be happy about or proud of it's it's a catastrophe you have to become who you are right according with pindar quoted by nietzsche well that's associated with jung's idea of the self is that that one of the ways to understand that because it seems like a very strange pronouncement is that you are what you are but you're also what you could be which is a strange thing right because then that's no more than to say that you are characterized by an indefinite amount of potential so you are what you are and you are the potential that that you are and that's a very paradoxical statement because it's not obvious how you can be something that's potential because potential isn't being it's it's the possibility of becoming but be that as it may we're stuck with it it's a paradox but we're stuck with it the the goal of authenticity from an existential perspective is to pursue that which you could be so that you can flesh yourself out so you can burn off what about you is dead and outdated and so that you can allow what could be to come to life and the the deep archetypal idea is that to the degree that you do that you redeem yourself and you redeem the world around you and i believe that that's again i i don't think that that's metaphysics it seems to be the the most practical of truths you can be afraid but you can't stop yeah that's the thing because the fear is justifiable but it's not that doesn't make it a sufficient reason to retreat and stop there's no retreat in life that's the thing there might be periods that where you can pull back and rest but because we're surrounded by the unknown and the unexpected and because we're characterized by [Music] the consequences of our ultimate ignorance and because we're finite there's no stepping back if you ask for something it will be given to you right it's a very strange idea but i like that idea a lot and i believe my in my experience that has been true if it was that i wanted what i was asking for because that's the real issue right because the question is if you want something what does it mean to want it and what it means is to sacrifice whatever is necessary to get it because otherwise you don't want it and so there's an equation here and i'm not claiming its ultimate accuracy but the equation is something like you don't want it unless you're willing to sacrifice for it and if you don't want it you're not going to get it because you're scattered but if you do want it and you make the proper sacrifices then god only knows what might happen and that's a see one of the things i really like about the existential philosophers is their emphasis on personal responsibility you know that many of them had an emphasis on the role that people had in shaping their own destiny the exist for the existentialists and i think this was a consequence of the religious substructure of philosophical thinking it was self-evident that life was tragic and and bitter but and then fair enough but that isn't where it ended the the next issue was well there are better in ways better and worse ways of dealing with that and the better way of dealing with the fact that life is tragic and better is to posit the self you could be and live authentically in relationship to that and then the next issue and some this is something kierkegaard talked about particularly when he talked about the necessity of being a knight of faith is that the thing is and this is i think part of the light part of life that's the intractable adventure no one can take the adventure of life away from you that that's they can't do it with good advice for example because no one can demonstrate to you that if you straighten yourself out and aim at what you want and make the proper sacrifices that your life will turn out in the manner that you might want it to turn out it isn't in anyone else's purview to make that judgment the only person that can possibly figure that out is you it's something that can't be stolen from you i would say it's your destiny it's a destiny that cannot be stolen from you and you can forego it you can say well i'm not willing to put in the effort because what if i fail well first of all if you don't put in the effort you will fail because life is hard and it takes everything out of you to do it properly so you will fail and if you make the proper sacrifices you might fail that's why i like the ambiguity in the story of cain and abel because we're never really told why god rejects cain's offerings there's hints that cain maybe isn't doing as good a job as he should and he certainly gets bitter about it but there's no smoking pistol it doesn't say well kane is a bad guy he made terrible sacrifices so god rejected him you never know kane might have been working pretty damn hard and things still didn't work out for him and i think that ambiguity is appropriate in the story because that ambigu ambiguity is in life it you'd be a fool to say that everything always works out for everyone if they just do things right i mean i think that's a very that's a very careless thing to say given how much tragedy and catastrophe there is in the world and how much of it seems to be undeserved but that still has very little bearing i think on on on your own individual adventure and the necessity for the necessity for opening the door to who you could be and and the necessity to do that seriously and i do believe and i think i think that's why this most impossible of verses you know knock and the door will open why that's believable is that i have never met anyone who couldn't hypothesize a better them in some manner all they had to do was ask it's like well how could you be better think well here's three ways it's like it's no problem right you can think about that no time flap maybe it's small ways but you can almost always at least think of something stupid that you're doing that you could quit there's there's an idea that jung developed about the trickster and the jester the comedian right that the trickster is the precursor to the savior that's one of the things i learned from jung that was just it's so unlikely you'd never think that it's so amazing that that might be the case but the the the the the satirical and the aaronic and the and the troublemaker the comedian the fool the fool is the precursor to the savior why because you're a fool when you start something new and so if you're not willing to be a fool then you'll never start anything new and if you never start anything new then you won't develop and so the willingness to be a fool is the precursor to transformation and that's the same as humility and so if you're going to write your destiny you can do a bad first job you're going to get smarter as you move forward that's the thing is that so something beckons to you that's what happens here maybe the star that geppetto wished on was the wrong damn star but at least it was a star right at least it was in the sky at least it moved him forward and so you say in your life well something grips you and and and fills you with interest and you think well should i do that and the answer is if not that then something what if it's a mistake it's a mistake rest assured what do you know you're going to stumble around right and what's going to happen is this you're going to move to you're going to not stay in stasis you're not going to wander around in circles and i see people like that they said well i never knew what to do and now i'm 40. it's like that's not so good that's not so good and you might say well and there is a literature too that suggests that people are a lot more unhappy when they look back in their lives about the things they didn't do than they are about the mistakes they made while they were doing things and so that's really worth thinking about too because there's redemptive mistakes and a redemptive mistake would be a mistake that you make when you go out and try to do something you know you actually you think okay i'm gonna try to do this and you're not good at it you make a bunch of mistakes it's like what what's the consequence if you pay attention is you're not quite so stupid anymore that's the thing is you've been informed by your by the results of your errors and so what happens is you you you follow the beacon you follow the light and and you're blind so you don't know where the light is it's it's dimly apprehended only and you're afraid to follow it but you decide to take some stumbling steps towards it and as you take stumbling steps towards it you become illuminated and enlightened and informed because of the nature of your experience because you're pushing yourself beyond where you are and you're going into the country that you have not yet been in and you learn something and so what happens then is the star moves you move 10 feet towards it you think no that's not right i didn't get it right it isn't there it's actually there and so then you you see it somewhere else and you shift yourself slightly and you move forward and that's what happens is that you continue as you change the thing that guides you forward moves right it's like god in the in the in the desert in egypt the pillar of light that you're following it's moving it's not a permanent thing you move towards it it moves away it guides you forward and so you say well is what i'm aiming at paradise itself and the answer to that is no because what do you know you you couldn't see paradise if it was right in front of you but you might get a glimmer of it and so you move towards it and you grow and then the next time you open your eyes you see a little bit more clearly and that's what happens is that just happens over and over right it keeps moving and so you move like this but the thing that's so cool is that all those zigs and zags you say and each of those zags is and ziggs is a catastrophe i hit a wall my god and then i had to die a little bit and i barely got back up it's a phoenix transformation at each at each turn and it's painful but the thing is is that even though you've you've traveled 20 miles let's say on that road and you've only moved three miles forward you've moved three miles forward instead of falling backwards because that's the thing too is that if you stand still you fall backwards you cannot stand still because the world moves away from you if you stand still and there's no stasis there's only backwards and so if you're not moving backward back forwards then you're moving backwards and that's more more of the underlying truth of of the matthew principle to those who have everything more will be given from those who have nothing everything will be taken it's a warning do not stay in one place [Music] well as you zig and sag maybe then maybe the cataclysm of each transformation starts to lessen there's not so much of you that has to die with every mistake [Music] and maybe you end up oriented at least reasonably properly and if you were sensible that would have been your trip but it wasn't right it's that and perhaps it's a lot worse than that perhaps there's no shortage of backtracking but it doesn't matter because as you stumble forward you you illuminate and inform yourself and perhaps that's partly because the world is made of information and if you encounter it and tangle with it then it informs you and then you become informed and then you're in formation and then you're ready [Music] if you start with the presumption that there's a baseline of suffering in life and that that can be uh exaggerated by as a consequence of human failing as a consequence of malevolence and betrayal and self-betrayal and deceit and all those things that we do to each other and ourselves that we know that aren't good that amplifies the suffering that's sort of the baseline against which you have to work and and and it's contemplation of that often that makes people hopeless and depressed and anxious and overwhelmed and all of that and and they have the reasons but you need something to put up against that and what you put up against that is meaning meaning is actually the instinct that helps you guide yourself through that catastrophe and most of that meaning is to be found in the adoption of responsibility so if you think for example if you think about the people that you admire well you think about when you have a clear conscience first because that's a good thing to aim at which is something different than happiness right you've justified your existence right and so you're not waking up at three in the morning in a cold sweat thinking about all the terrible things that you've involved yourself in what you said to someone that you shouldn't have said or how you acted or what opportunity you lost or or or yeah or or the things that you've that you've let go that you should have capitalized on and all of that and so if you think about the times when you're at peace with yourself with regards to how you're conducting yourself in the world it's almost always conditions under which you've adopted responsibility right at least the most the most guilt i think that you can experience perhaps is the sure knowledge that you're not even taking care of yourself so that you're leaving that responsibility to other people because that's pretty pathetic and i unless you're psychopathic and you know and you're living a parasitical life and that that characterizes a very small minority of people and an even smaller minority think that's justifiable but most of the time you're in guilt and shame because you're not you're you're not not only are you not taking care of yourself let's say so someone else has to but you're not living up to your full potential and so there's a existential weight that goes along with that so you admire yourself or perhaps you can at least live with yourself when you're taking responsibility at least for yourself and so that settles your conscience but then if you look at the people that you spontaneously admire so the act of spontaneously admiring someone is the manifestation of the instinct for meaning right so this is partly why people are so enamored of sports figures because the sports figures are playing out the drama of attaining the goal of attaining a certain kind of let's say psychological and physical perfection in pursuit of the goal that's the drama and to spontaneously admire that is to have that instinct for meaning latch onto something that can be used as a model and then that model should be transcribed into something that's applicable in life you know when you really like to see in an athletic performance you really like to see someone who's extremely disciplined and in in shape do something physically remarkable but and and to stretch themselves even beyond their previous exploits because you really like to see a brilliant move in an athletic match but you also like to see that person ensconced in a broader moral framework so that not only are they trying to win and disciplining themselves in pursuit of that victory and then stretching themselves so they're continually getting better but they're doing it in a way that helps develop their whole team and that's good for the sport in general and that reflects well on the broader culture so that's all being dramatized in a in an athletic event and it's really it's not philosophical it's concrete right it's dramatized in the world and that's what the games represent and so well it's partly because well in some sense life is a game [Music] so if the if the goal of the game is to put the ball through the ball into the net then the goal of having games is to produce people who can take proper aim no matter where they are right that's exactly what we're trying to do with with with athletics and well there's more to it too because if the background of life is is there's a there's an inerratical component of suffering and that's complicated by let's say malevolence and the proclivity of people to betray themselves and others which which complicates it makes it worse then the if you don't have a noble aim and and and if that isn't imbuing your life with sustainable meaning then you fall prey to all the catastrophe this pain and the anxiety and the anger that that suffering generates and that makes you bitter it's not only that if you don't have a goal you suffer it's that you if you don't have a goal you suffer and then you get cruel and bitter and resentful and then you start to actively try to make the world a worse place and so so because you can't suffer pointlessly without becoming bitter and you can't become bitter without becoming cruel so you need a name so then the question is what should your aim be to establish your aim you have to know where you are it's like you're trying to orient yourself on a map you can't orient yourself on a map unless you know where you are you also have to know where you're going right so those are the two relevant things the past authoring program helps people write about their lives so it's a guided autobiography we ask people to break their life up into six epochs six sections and then to write about the emotionally important events in those in those epochs and to detail out why why the positive things happen and why more of that could conceivably happen in the future and to detail out why the negative things happen and to try to understand why with an aim to not replicating them in the future because the purpose of memory isn't to remember the past the purpose of memory is so that you you figure out what went wrong when something went wrong so you don't duplicate it in the future so that's the purpose of memory we already talked about the fact that you need a name in life or or that's where you derive your meaning and without that things go to hell and and as literally as that can be taken and so but it's not easy to ask people to say well it's easy to ask them what do you want in your life it's a very hard question to answer because it's too vague and grand so we help in the future authoring program we help people break that down it's okay so here here's the situation so put yourself in the right frame of mind so what's the right frame of mind it's like rule two in this book treat yourself like you're someone responsible for helping you're someone that you are responsible for helping so what that means is you have to start from the presupposition that despite all your flaws and insufficiencies that it's worth having you around and that it would be okay if things were better for you so you need to take care of yourself like you're taking care of someone you care for so there's a bit of a detachment in that and then the next thing is okay so now look three to five years down the road okay you get to have what you need and want assuming you're being reasonable and that you actually want it which means you're willing to make the sacrifices that would that would make it possible so you're asked first of all okay here's you get to have what you want and need that's the proposition but you have to aim at it you have to define it name at it so here so then the first thing is okay um if you could put your family together the way you wanted it to be what would that look like and so that might be your siblings and your parents but that also might be you know your wife or your husband and your kids assuming that you're at that point in your life if you could have the family you wanted what would that look like right okay career same thing you get to have the career or the job that that is within your grasp necessary and and suitable for for you if you're taking care of yourself how are you going to educate yourself because you're not as smart as you should be there's a lot more things you need to know so you've got to keep learning and moving forward so you need to plan for that how are you going to take care of yourself mentally and physically right so how are you going to avoid that the catastrophic temptations for example of drugs and alcohol because that pulls a lot of people down you need a plan for that you're going to be a social drinker how much are you going to drink how much is too much what about your drug use you got to regulate that so it isn't a pitfall how are you going to use your time meaningful and productively outside of work because you need a plan for that [Music] intimate relationship of course so you have do you want do you want a long-term stable intimate relationship and if you do then how would you like that to lay itself out you've got to have a vision for that because if you don't have a vision you're not going to aim at it and if you don't aim at it then you won't even see the opportunities when they arise that's the thing that's so cool i wrote about this in chapter 10 which is be precise in your speech it's a chapter about the fact that aims structure your perceptions so for example once you aim at something your brain literally the perceptual structures in your brain in your visual cortex reorient themselves to calculate a pathway to the aim and then what they show you in the world is obstacles to that path and and open pathways to the path that's actually how the world reveals itself just like just like when you're driving in a car and you have a map and you or you aim at a particular place then all the things that are related to that place show up in the world it's exactly the same thing because you are traveling through time and space right and you need a map and so so after you answer these seven questions and you're encouraged to do it badly because you don't have to get perfectionistic just complete it right because a bad plan is better than no plan gives you something to improve so even if your aim is vague and even if it's off target if you start aiming and you see you're off target then you can shift and you can make it more precise you'll start to recognize what you don't want in that yes exactly so i thought i wanted this but i don't so let me re-navigate and figure out what i do exactly and you might have to try a bunch of things well you will have to you can be that's why you shouldn't get perfectionistic about it you will absolutely be wrong but you won't be as wrong as you would have been if you were aimless [Music] you

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Keywords: success chasers, jordan peterson success chasers, jordan b peterson, jordan peterson, jordan peterson motivation, jordan peterson motivational video, success chasers jordan peterson, jordan peterson 2021, how to improve your life, how to improve yourself, improve yourself in 2021, don't waste your time, start improving your life, How To Become The Best Version Of Yourself, become the best version of yourself, the secret to becoming unstoppable, life advice

Id: h7sxGXye844

Length: 73min 48sec (4428 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 01 2021