How to PUSH THROUGH the Hard Times in Life! | Jordan Peterson | Top 50 Rules for SUCCESS

stop doing the things that you know are wrong that you could stop doing if you're failing repeatedly it's possible that there's something wrong with the way that you're conceptualizing the world it's like we're built for struggle as human beings need motivation Watts a top ten with believe nation what's that belief nation it's Evan I believe in you and this channel is designed to be a part of your daily success routine so let's get your motivation to attend and get you believing in you grab a snack and join today's lessons from a man who went from being introduced to the writings of George Orwell at a young age to becoming a Harvard professor and through his thought leadership inspiring millions of people around the world he's Jordan Peterson and here's my take on his top 50 rules for success also if you want to know what Jordan Peterson and others have to say about building unstoppable confidence check out my 250 for confidence series where every day for the next 254 days I will send you a morning video for free to help you build your confidence the link to join is in the description below if you're gonna speak effectively you have to know way more than you're talking about okay let's kick it off with rule number one stop doing the wrong things stop doing the things that you know are wrong that you could stop doing right so it's it's a fairly it's a fairly limited attempt first of all we're not going to say that you know what the good is or what the truth is in any ultimate sense but we will presume that there are things that you're doing that for one reason another you know are not in your best interests there's something about them that you just know you should stop they're kind of self-evident to you other things you're gonna be doubtful about you're not gonna know which way is up and which way is down but there are things that you're doing that you know you shouldn't do now some of those you won't stop doing for whatever reason you don't have the discipline or maybe there's a secondary payoff or you don't believe it's necessary or it's too much of a sacrifice or you're angry or resentful or or afraid who knows so forget about those for now but there's another subset that you could stop doing it might be little thing well that's fine stop doing it and see what happens and what will happen is your vision will clear a little bit and then something else will pop up in your field of apprehension that you will also know you should stop doing and that you could stop doing because you've strengthened yourself a bit by stopping doing the particular stupid thing that you were doing before that just puts you together a little bit more and you could do that repeatedly for for an indefinite period of time and and you know that doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to ever be able to formulate a clear and final picture of what constitutes the truth and the good but it does mean that you'll be able to continually move away from what's untruth and what's bad and you know well that's not a bad start rule number two make a schedule make a damn schedule and stick to it okay so what's the rule with the schedule it's not a bloody prison that's the first thing that people do wrong is well I don't like to have follow a schedule it's like well what kind of schedule are you setting up well I should I have to do this then I have to do this then I have to do this you know and then I just go play video games because who wants to do all these things that I have to do it's like wrong set the damn schedule up so that you have the day you want that's the trick it's like okay I've got tomorrow if I was gonna set it up so it was the best possible day I could have practically speaking what would it look like well then you schedule that and obviously there's a bit of responsibility that's gonna go along with that because if you have any sense one of the things that you're gonna insist upon is that at the end of the day you're not in worse shape than you were then then at the beginning of the day right that's a stupid day if you have a bunch of those in a row you just dig you know you dig yourself a hole and then you bury yourself and it's like sorry that's just not a good strategy it's a bad strategy so maybe 20% of your day has to be responsibility and obligation or maybe it's more than that depending on how far behind you are but even that you can you can ask yourself okay well I've got these responsibilities I have to schedule the damn things in what's the right ratio of responsibility to reward and you can ask yourself that just like you'd negotiate with someone who is working for you it's like okay you gotta work tomorrow okay so I want you to work tomorrow and you might say okay well what are you gonna do for me that makes it likely that I'll work for you well you could ask yourself that you know maybe you'd do an hour of responsibility and then you play a video game for 15 minutes I don't know whatever turns your crank man but you know you have to negotiate with yourself and not tyrannize yourself like you're negotiating with someone that you care for that you would like to be productive and have a good life and and that's how you make the schedule it's like and then you look at the day and you think well if I had that day that'd be good great you know and you you're useless and horrible so you'll probably only hit it with about 70% accuracy but that beats the hell out of zero right and if you hit it even with 50% accuracy another rule is well aim for 51% the next week or 50 and a half percent for God's sake or because you're gonna hit that position where things start to loop back positively and spiral you upward rule number three clarify your thoughts sometimes you know oh I can't sleep at night because I'm thinking about something and usually what I'll do is go write it down I have some writing to do so I get up and I go down what I'm thinking and that usually does the trick but because I had been playing with YouTube I thought well I'll try making YouTube video and telling people what I'm thinking about and see if that performs the same function as writing and to me the function of writing while it's twofold one is conceivably to communicate with people although the fundamental purpose for me is to clarify my thoughts so that I know do you know because if you're if something is disturbing you what that means is that it needs to be articulated it what it's the emergence of unexplored territory something that disturbs you that that's the right way to think about it it's unmapped territory that's manifesting itself it's like a Vista of threat and possibility and you need to articulate a path through it and so that's what I was doing it's like I was thinking well this is bothering me and this seems to be why and here's what I think is going on and and so I made the videos and in some sense I I didn't think anything more of it Rula before take the meaningful path you don't have to necessarily have done anything wrong for things to get completely out of control it's a terrifying doctrine but it's not a hopeless doctrine because it still says that there's a way forward there's a pathway forward and the pathway forward is to adopt a mode of being that has some nobility so that you can tolerate yourself and perhaps even have some respect for yourself as someone who's capable of standing up in the face of that terrible vulnerability and suffering and that the pathway forward as far as the existentialists are concerned is by well certainly by the avoidance of deceit particularly in language but also by the adoption of responsibility for the conditions of existence and some attempt on your part to actually rectify them and the thing that's so interesting about that is though up to as far as I'm concerned and some of this is from clinical experience you know if you take people and I've told you this and you expose them voluntarily to things that they are avoiding and are afraid of you know that they know they need to overcome in order to meet their goals their self defined goals if you can teach be to stand up in the face of the things they're afraid of they get stronger and you don't know what the upper limits to that are because you might ask yourself like if for ten years if you didn't avoid doing what you knew you needed to do by the depth by your own definitions right within the value structure that you've created to the degree that you've done that what would you be like well you know there are remarkable people who come into the world from time to time and there are people who do find out over decades long periods what they could be like if they were who they were if they said if they spoke their being forward and they'd be get stronger and stronger and stronger and we don't know the limits to that we do not know the limits to that and so you could say well in part perhaps the reason that you're suffering unbearably can be left at your feet because you're not everything you could be and you know it and of course that's a terrible thing to admit and it's a terrible thing to consider but there's real promise in it right because it means that perhaps there's another way that you could look at the world in a number another way that you could act in the world so what it would reflect back to you would be much better than what it reflects back to you now my experience is with people that were probably running at about 51% of our capacity something mean you can think about this yourselves I often ask undergraduates how many hours a day you waste or how many hours a week you waste and the classic answer is something like 4 to 6 hours a day you know inefficient studying watching things on YouTube that not only do you not want to watch that you don't even care about that make you feel horrible about watching after you're done that's probably four hours right there no what do you think well that's 2025 hours a week it's a hundred hours a month that's two and a half full work weeks it's half a year of work weeks per year and if your time is worth twenty dollars an hour which is a radical under estimate it's probably more like 50 if you think about it in terms of deferred wages if you're wasting 20 hours a week you're wasting fifty thousand dollars a year and you are doing that right now and it's because you're young wasting fifty thousand dollars a year is a way bigger catastrophe than it would be for me to waste it because I'm not gonna last nearly as long and so if your life isn't everything it could be you could ask yourself all what would happen if you just stopped wasting the opportunities that are in front of you you be who knows how much more efficient 10 times more efficient 20 times more efficient that's the Pareto distribution you have no idea how efficient efficient people get it's completely off its off the charts well and if we all got our act together collectively and stop making things worse because that's another thing people do all the time not only do they not do what they should to make things better they actively attempt to make things worse because they're spiteful or resentful or arrogant or deceitful or or homicidal or genocide allure all of those things all bundled together in an absolutely pathological package if people start really really trying just to make things worse we have no idea how much better they would get just because of that so there's this weird dynamic that's part of the existential system of ideas between human vulnerability social judgment both of which are our major causes of suffering and the failure of individuals to adopt the responsibility that they know they should adopt it isn't merely that your fate depends on whether or not you get your act together and to what degree you decide that you're going to live out your own genuine being it isn't only your fate it's the fate of everyone that you're networked with and so you know you think well there's nine billion seven billion people in the world we're going to peak at about nine billion by the way and then it'll decline rapidly but seven billion people in the world and who are you you're just one little dust mote among that seven billion and so it really doesn't matter what you do or don't do but that's simply not the case it's the wrong model because you're at the center of a network you're a node in a network of course that's even more true now that we have social media you'll you know you'll know a thousand people at least over the course of your life and they'll know a thousand people each and that puts you one person away from a million and two persons away from a billion and so that's how you're connected and the things you do there like dropping a stone in a pond the ripples move outward and they affect things in ways that you can't fully comprehend and it means that the things that you do and that you don't do are far more important than you think and so if you act that way of course the terror of realizing that is that it actually starts to matter what you do and you might say well that's better than living a meaningless existence it's better for it to matter but I mean if you really ask yourself would you be so sure if you had the choice I can live with no responsibility whatsoever the price I pay is that nothing matters or I can reverse it and everything matters but I have to take the responsibility that's associated with that it's not so obvious to me that people would take the meaningful path now when you say well denialists suffered dreadfully because there's no meaning in their life and they still suffer yeah but the advantages they have no responsibility so that's the payoff and I actually think that's the motivation say well I can't help being nihilistic all my belief systems have collapsed it's like yeah maybe maybe you've just allowed them to collapse because it's a hell of a lot easier than acting them out and the price you pay is some meaningless suffering but you can always whine about that and people will feel sorry for you and you have the option of taking the pathway of the martyr so that's a pretty good deal all things considered especially when the or when the alternative is to bear your burden properly and to live forthrightly in the world well what Solzhenitsyn figured out and so many people in the 20th century it's not just him even though he's the best example is that if you live a pathological life you pathologize your society and if enough people do that then it's hell really really and you can read the Gulag Archipelago if you have the four tit fortitude to do that and you'll see exactly what hell is like and then you can decide if that's a place you'd like to visit or even more importantly if it's a light if it's a place you'd like to visit and take all your family and friends because that's what happened in the 20th century rule number five specify your goals the next best predictor of lifetime success is conscientiousness well so and although of the two aspects of conscientiousness say orderliness and industriousness the better predictor is industriousness so the question is well what can you do about your in dose business and the answer to that is well that's kind of rough too because there's a strong genetic component but you can work on micro habits with regards to your conscientiousness and I think the best micro habits this is partly to do with this future authoring program processes I think the best thing you can do with regards to your conscientiousness is to set up some aims for yourself goals that you actually value and the future authoring program helps people do that and basically it does a situational analysis of it helps you do a situational analysis of your life more than a psychological analysis I would say and so the questions are something like well alright you're gonna 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 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 a disagreeable you want to win competitions if you're open you want to engage in creative activity if you're high in neuroticism you want security okay so those are all sources of potential motivation that you could draw on that you could tailor to your own you know your own personality but then there are dimensions that you want to consider your life across and so we ask people about well you know if you could have your life the way you wanted it in three to five years if you were taking care of yourself properly you know what would you want from your friendships what would you want from your intimate relationship how would you like to structure your family what do you want for your career well how are you going to use your time outside of your job and how are you gonna regulate your mental physical mental and physical health and maybe also your drug and alcohol use because that's that's a good place to auger down you know because alcoholism for example wipes out you know five to ten percent of people so you want to keep that under control and then and then so maybe you know you you you develop a vision of what your life what you would like your life to be and that associates the so the goal once the goal is established and then you break down the goal into micro processes that you can implement the micro process has become rewarding in proportion in relation to their causal association with the goal and that tangles in your your incentive reward system you know we talked about the dopaminergic consent of reward system and that's the thing that keeps you moving forward and the way it works is that it works better if it produces positive emotion win it can see you moving towards a valued goal okay well what's the implication of that better have a valued goal because otherwise you can't get any positive motivation working out and so the more valuable the goal in principle the more the micro process is associated with that goal start to take on a positive charge and so what that means is well you get up in the morning and you're excited about the day you're ready to go and so as far as I can tell what you do is you specify your long term ideal maybe you also specify a place you want to stay the hell away from so that you're terrified to fail as well as excited about succeeding because that's also useful you specify your goal you do that you do that in some sense as a unique individual you want to you want to specify goals that make you say oh if that could happen as a consequence of my efforts it would clearly be worthwhile because the question always is why do something because doing nothing is easy you just sit there and you don't do anything that's real easy the question is why would you ever do anything and the answer that has to be because you've determined by some means that it's worthwhile and then the next question might be well where should you look for worthwhile things and one would be well you could consult your own temperament and the other would be well you kind of look at how look at what it is that people accrue that's valuable across the lifespan look look what so you do a structural analysis of the subcomponents of human existence and already did that you need a family you need friends like you don't need to have all these things but you better have most of them family friends career educational goals plans for you know time outside of work attention to your mental and physical health etc you know those are that's what life is about and if you don't have any of those things well then all you've got left is misery and suffering so that's that's a bad that's a bad deal for you so so once you but once you set up that that goal structure let's say and that's really in many in many ways that's what you should be doing at universities is that's exactly what you should be doing is trying to figure out who it is that you're trying to be right and you aim at that and then use everything you learned as a means of building that person that you want to be and and I really mean want to be I don't mean should be even those things those things are going to overlap and it's important to distinguish between those because that's partly and this is back down to the micro routine analysis so as I saying well you're gonna try to make yourself more industrious okay number one specify your damn goals because how are you gonna hit something if you don't know what it is that isn't going to happen and often people won't specify their goals too because they don't like to specify conditions for failure so if you keep yourself all vague and foggy which is real easy because that's just a matter of not doing as well then you don't know when you fail and people might say well I really don't want to know when I fail because that's painful it's so I'll keep myself blind about when I fail that's fine except you'll fail all the time then you just won't know it until you've failed so badly that you're done and that can easily happen by the time you're 40 so so I would recommend that you don't let that happen so that's willful blindness right you could have known but you chose not to okay so once you get your goal structure set up you think okay if I could have this life it looks like that might be worth living despite the fact that it's going to be you know anxiety provoking and threatening and there's gonna be some suffering and loss involved in all of that obviously the goal is to have a vision for your life such that all things considered that justifies your effort rule number six stop saying things that make you weak I started to pay very careful attention to what I was saying I don't know if that happened voluntarily or involuntarily but I could feel a sort of split developing in my psyche and the split and I've actually had students tell me the same thing that has happened to them after they've listened to some of the material that that I've been describing to all of you but split into two let's say and one part was the let's say the old me that was talking a lot and that liked to argue and that liked ideas and there was another part that was watching that part like just with its eyes open and neutrally judge and the part that was neutrally judging was watching the part that was talking and going that isn't your idea you don't really believe that you don't really know what you're talking about that isn't true and I thought hmm that's really interesting so now I've and that was happening to like 95% of what I was saying and so then I didn't really know what to do I thought okay this is strange so maybe I've fragmented and that's just not a good thing at all I mean it wasn't like I was hearing voices or anything like that I mean it wasn't like that it was it was well people have multiple parts so then I had this weird conundrum it's like well which of those two things are me is it the part that's listening and saying no that's rubbish that's a lie that's you're doing that to impress people you're just trying to win the argument you know was that me or was the part that was going about my normal verbal business me and I didn't know but I decided I would go with the critic and then what I'd tried to do what I learned to do I think was to stop saying things that made me weak and now that I mean I'm still trying to do that because I'm always feeling when I talk whether or not the words that I'm saying are either making me a line or making me come apart and I think the alignment I really do think the alignment is I think alignment is the right way of conceptualizing it because I think if you say things that are as true as you can say them let's say then they come up they come out of the depths inside of you because we don't know where thoughts come from we don't know how far down into your sub structure the thoughts emerge we don't know what processes of physiological alignment are necessary for you to speak from the core of your being we don't understand any of that we don't even conceptualize that but I believe that you can feel that and I learned some of that from reading Carl Rogers by the way who's a great clinician because he talked about mental health in part as the coherence between the the the spiritual or the or the abstract and the physical that the two things were aligned and and there's a lot of idea of alignment in in psychoanalytic and clinical thinking but anyways I decided that I would start practicing not saying things that would make me weak and what happened was that I had to stop saying almost everything that I was saying I would say 95% of it as a hell of a shark to wake up and I mean this was over a few months but it's a hell of a shark to wake up and realize that you're mostly dead wood it's a shark you know and you might think well do you really want all of that to burn off it's like well there's nothing left but a little hospital it's like well if that 5% is solid then maybe that's exactly what you want to have happen rule number seven adopt the mode of authentic being adopt the mode of authentic being and that is something like refusing to participate in the lie in deception in the lie to orient your speech as much as you can towards the truth and to take responsibility for your own life and perhaps also for the lives of other people and there's something about that that's meaningful and responsible and Noble but also serves to mitigate the very suffering that produces say the nihilism or the flee into the arms of fleet or or the or the escape into the arms of totalitarians to begin with you need something to shelter you against your own vulnerability rule number eight learn from your errors you can think about the world this way you can think about it as your orderly little plan that's a place and you can think about it as the place that things that disrupt your plan comes from that's another place this is a bigger place than this because there's an endless number of things that can disrupt your plan and only a tiny number of them that can you know that will help you work it out so part of the question then too is like are you the friend of your plan or are you the friend of the thing that disrupts your plan and I would say you should work to become the friend of the thing that disrupts your plan because there's a lot of that and then if you become the friend of the thing that disrupts your plan then you start to develop strength in proportion to the to the disruptive force and that's really what you want you want to be able to implement your plan obviously but you want to be to take on the consequences of error and learn from it and then then you win constantly because even if something goes sideways you think there's something to be derived from this that's wisdom fundamentally rule number nine have a conversation with yourself plan a life you'd like to have and and you do that partly by referring to social norms that's more or less rescuing your father from the belly of the whale but the way other way you do that is by having a little conversation with yourself about as if you don't really know who you are because you know what you're like you won't do what you're told you won't do what you tell yourself to do you must have noticed that it's like you're a bad employee and a worse boss and both of those work you know for you you don't know what you want to do and then when you tell yourself what to do you don't do it anyway so you should fire yourself and find someone else to be but but you know what my point is is that you have to understand that you're not your own servant so to speak you're someone that you have to negotiate with and that's and you're someone that you want to present the opportunity of having a good life to and that's hard for people because they don't like themselves very much so you know they're always like cracking the whip and then procrastinating and cracking the whip and then procrastinating and it's like god it's so boring and such a pathetic way of spending your time rule number ten aim high if you configure your life so that what you are genuinely doing is aiming at the highest possible good then the things that you need to to survive and to thrive on a day to day basis will deliver themselves to you that's a hypothesis and it's not some simple hypothesis right because it what it basically says is if you dared to do the most difficult thing that you can conceptualize your life will work out better than it will if you do anything else well how are you gonna find out if that's true well it's a Kierkegaard ian's leap of faith there's no way you're gonna find out whether or not that's true unless you do it so no one no one can tell you either because just because it works for someone else I mean that's interesting and all that but it's no proof that it'll for you you have to be all-in in this game there is no more effective way of operating in the world than to conceptualize the highest good that you can and then strive to attain it there's no more practical pathway to the kind of success that you could have if you actually knew what success was the world shifts itself around your aim is you're you're a creature that has a name you have to have a name in order to do something you're an aiming creature you look at a point and you move towards it it's built right into you and so you have a name well let's say your aim is the highest possible aim well then so that sets up the world around you it organizes all of your perceptions it organizes what you see and you don't see it organizes your emotions and your motivations so you organize yourself around that aim and then what happens is the day manifests itself as a set of challenges and problems and if you solve them properly then you stay on the pathway towards that aim and you can concentrate on the on the 8 on the day and so that way you get to have your cake and eat it too because you can you can point into the distance the far distance and you can live in the day and it seems to me that that's that makes every moment of the day supercharged with meaning that that's how because if everything that you're doing every day is related to the highest possible aim that you can conceptualize well that's the very definition of the meaning that would sustain you in your life rule number 11 set up criteria for success but one of the main reasons that people do get what they want is because they don't actually figure out what it is and the probability that you're going to get what would be good for you let's say which would even be better than what you want right because you know you might be what wrong about what you want easily but maybe you could get what would really be good for you well why don't you well because you don't try you don't think okay here's what I would like if I could have it and and I don't mean I don't mean in a way that you manipulate the world to force it to deliver you goods for status or something like that that isn't what I mean I'm something like imagine that you were taking care of yourself like you were someone you actually cared for and then you thought okay I'm caring for this person I would like things to go as well for them as possible what would their life have to be like in order for that to be the case what people don't do that they don't sit down and think alright you know let's let's figure it out you've got a life it's hard obviously it's like three years from now you can have what you need you've got to be careful about it you can't have everything you can have what would be good for you but you have to figure out what it is and then you have to aim at it well my experience with people as being is if they figure out what it is that would be good for them and then they aim at it then they get it and it's strange because they don't necessarily an idea about what would be good for you and then you take ten steps towards that and you find out that your formulation was a bit off and so you have to reformulate your goal you know you're kind of going like this as you move towards the goal but a huge part of the reason that people fail is because they don't ever set up the criteria for success and so since success is a very narrow line and very unlikely the probability that you're going to stumble on it randomly is zero and so there's a proposition here in the proposition is if you actually want something you can have it now the question then would be well what do you mean by actually want and the answer is that you reorient your life in every possible way to make the probability that that will occur as certain as possible and that's a sacrificial idea right it's like you don't get everything obviously you obviously but maybe you can have what you need and maybe all you have to do to get it is ask but asking isn't a whim or today's wish it's like you have to be deadly serious about it you have to think okay like I'm taking stock of myself and if I was going to live properly in the world and I was going to set myself up such that being would just defy itself in my estimation and I don't mean as a harsh judge exactly what is it that I would aim at sit on your bed one day and ask yourself what's what remarkably stupid things am i doing on a regular basis to absolutely screw up my life and if you actually ask that question but you have to want to know the answer right because that's actually what asking the question means it doesn't mean just mouthing the words it means you have to decide that you want to know you'll figure that's out so fast it'll make your hair curl rule number 12 learn how to think critically the best thing you can do is teach people to write because there's no difference between that and thinking and one of the things that just blows me away about universities is that no one ever tells students why they should write something it's like well you have to do this assignment well why are you writing well you need the great it's like no you need to learn to think because thinking makes you act effectively in the world thinking makes you win the battles you undertake and those could be battles for good things if you can think and speak and write you are absolutely deadly nothing can get in your way so that's why you learn to write it's like what I can't believe that people aren't just told that it's it's it's like it's the most powerful weapon you can possibly provide someone with and I mean I know lots of people who've been staggeringly successful and watched them throughout my life I mean those people you don't want to have an argument with them they'll just slash you into pieces and then not in a malevolent way it's like if you're gonna make your point and they're gonna make their point you better have your points organized because otherwise you're gonna look like and be an absolute idiot you are not gonna get anywhere and if you can formulate your arguments coherently and make a presentation if you can speak to people if you can lay out a proposal god people give you money they give you opportunities you have influence rule number 13 don't be harmless if you're harmless you're not virtuous you're just harmless you're like a rabbit rabbit isn't virtuous it's just just can't do anything except get eaten it's not virtuous if you're a monster and you don't act monstrously then you're virtuous but you also have to be a monster while you see this all the time Harry Potter's like that too it's like he's he's flawed he's hurt he's got evil in him he can talk to snakes man he breaks rules all the time all the time he's not at OPD --nt at all but you know he has a good reason for breaking the rules and if he couldn't break the rules him in his little clique of rule breaking you know troublemakers if they didn't break the rules they wouldn't attain the highest goal so it's very peculiar but it's it's very there it's a very very very very common mythological notion you know the hero has to be the hero has to be a monster but a controlled monster Batman is like that you know I mean it's it's everywhere it's it's the Tor story you always hear rule number fourteen compare yourself to who you were yesterday rule 4 compare yourself to who you were yesterday and not to who someone else is today because if you're comparing yourself to someone else I mean first of all you don't know very much about the life of the person you're comparing yourself to you don't know in it you know it across all of its dimensions and second people are very different and so comparing yourself to someone else it's it's kind of useful I guess when you're young but as you get older and more singular and more particularly it becomes increasingly less useful better to compare yourself to a previous version of yourself and work for improvement in that way rule number 15 start small I know you stated in the last lecture that the importance for setting aims in life and to kind of have goals to work towards right so my question was where do you how do you do that if you don't know where you want to go because that's kind of where I got stuck on you're your future off authoring program because okay that's that's a good question that's a really good question so there's this notion in the Old Testament that morality is following a sequence of prohibitions there's a bunch of bad things you shouldn't do and then basically you're good enough and and and I think there's wisdom in that I think that's kind of where children start right you you I mean I love children and all that but they're they're they're crazy little creatures and they need to be you know civilized and partly what you do is you you lay prohibitions on them and mostly what you're trying to do is lay prohibitions on them for the behaviors that if they manifested would make their life miserable so this is why this thing that I've said the people has become this crazy internet meme but that's to clean up your room and which which is a lot better and more useful than people think it's a lot harder to but the thing the first thing you do I think and I learned this in part from Solzhenitsyn when he was trying to iron out his soul when he was in the gulag because he was trying to figure out how he got there how he contributed to how he got there you know not Stellan and Hitler even though they were kind of a blade you know but he wasn't much he could do about that I think what you have to do and this is part of humility is you have to look around you within your sphere of influence like the direct sphere of influence and fix the things that announce themselves as in need of repair and those are often small things you know and they can be like your room put it in order because the thing is it isn't exactly so important that your room is in order although it is what's important is that you learn how to distinguish between chaos and order and to be able to act in a manner that produces order and I think you can you can do something as simple as just sit on your bed and think okay there's probably like five things I could do today so that tomorrow morning is slightly better than this morning was at least or at least I'm not falling behind and those will usually be it's like having eat a toad in the morning right it's like it's not gonna be something you want to do there'll be things you're trying to avoid there's snakes essentially but if you ask yourself like you're asking someone which i think is a form of prayer if you ask yourself instead of telling yourself you know what is it that I could do to set things more right today that I would actually do it's usually some small thing because you're not that disciplined you know then you can go do it and then you you put the world together a little more when you do that and that spreads out but you also put your you also construct yourself into something that's better able to call order forth from chaos and that makes you just incrementally stronger and then the next day you can maybe take on a slightly larger task and like you get the benefit of compound interest if you do that it's a tremendously powerful technique and they think if you do that at some point instead of just having to fix things up that are not good you'll start to get a glimmer of the positive things that you could do you know the positive things that you could do that would actually constitute a vision and now that's what I would recommend rule number 16 don't make excuses when people are beset with a catastrophe like let's say the death of their father that they are prone to use that as an excuse for not going about the business that they should be going about because they can say to themselves well I would accept and accept there's always good reasons I mean believe me there's always good reasons for not doing what you should that's for sure the reasons pile up day after day to not do what you should especially because you're you're aiming at things in the future you can put them off indefinitely right because of the demands of the day like there's no excuse whatsoever for not getting at what it is that you should be doing it's absolutely reprehensible to justify you're in action with a catastrophe that extracts mercy from other people right there's a tricky tricky game that's going well of course I can't do that look at the terrible thing that's just happened to me it's see how okay I understand you're absolved of any necessity to move forward because of your current catastrophe it's like well actually you're not and it's rather rude of you to use it as an excuse and it's certainly counterproductive rule number 17 change yourself when I was 25 or so I probably weighed about 138 pounds I smoked like a pack of cigarettes day I drank tremendous amount of alcohol I was from northern Alberta this rough little town up and northern Alberta called Fairview and you know there were long winters there and my friends were heavy drinkers and most of them dropped out of school by the time they were 15 or 16 went off to work on the oil rigs and you know it was a rough town and we drank a lot I started when I was 14 and you know and so I was I had a lot of bad habits let's say and things that were and I wasn't in great shape physically and I was also still intellectually obsessed by as I am now and so that would have been that would have been in 85 but when I but I decided around that about 85 84 or something like that maybe a little earlier that I was really going to try to get my act together and so I started doing that I you know I first of all I quit smoking well that took a long time because I eventually had to quit drinking to in order to quit smoking and I started working out starting playing sports which I'd never done I had a fine town when I was a kid and but I needed really to get disciplined and I had to do it because I was working on these hard problems that you know that I've been discussing with all of you and I've been working on them really you know obsessively since I was probably about 18 maybe even earlier than that got to the point around 25 when I was in graduate school trying to get my PhDs doing all my research like I published 15 papers by the time I graduated with my PhD which was but I think by a fairly large measure the most papers that any graduate student at that time had ever published at McGill I think that's right might have been twice as many or maybe twice as many maybe even three times as many and at the same time I wrote maps of meaning which was a terrible terrible terribly difficult thing to do because I was writing about three hours a day doing that and I couldn't do all that and continue with my misbehavior you know my sort of my what would you say my my my hedonistic my hedonistic my massive hedonistic consumption of alcohol and all of that I just couldn't keep it up and also work seriously on the issues that were at hand so you know I had to stop that's a sacrifice I had to stop messing about and straight my cell phone rule number 18 you're actually tougher than you think you never knew that and maybe you didn't want to take on the responsibility because you know people play a role in their own demise so to speak when you had opportunity to go out and explore or withdraw because you were afraid you chose to withdraw because you were afraid so it's not only that you were over protected often it's that you were willing to take advantage of the fact that you were over protected and run back there whenever you had the opportunity you know so maybe you're a kid in the playground right and you're having some trouble with other kids and you know in the back of your mind I should deal this with deal with this myself but you go and tell your mom and get her to intervene and you know that that's not right you know that you're breaking the social contract but it's easier and so that's what you do you run off to an authority figure and hide behind the Great Father right roughly speaking well the problem with that is you don't learn how to do it yourself so then you have to relearn it painfully when you're 40 so then you take people out you say well what are you afraid of rank it from 1 to 10 so 10 is what make a list of 10 things you're afraid of the least the thing you're least afraid of will call number 10 so we'll start with that okay well I'm afraid of elevators ok well let's let's look at a picture of an elevator let's have you imagine being in an elevator let's go out to an elevator and let you watch the terrible jaws of death open because that's how you're responding to it symbolically right and you're gonna do that at it at the the closest proximity you can manage you find out you go do that it works you're nervous as hell especially an it from an anticipatory perspective shaking you go out you stop you watch it happen and you actually calm down you do that 10 times it no longer bothers you well what you've learned that you didn't die but more importantly than that you've learned that you could withstand the threat of death that's what you've learned and then you move a little closer and then you move a little closer and then you move a little closer and finally you're back in what's no longer the elevator from a symbolic perspective it's a tomb right it's it's it's a place of enclosure and isolation and you learn hmm turns out I can withstand that and then you're met much more together much more confident and that's often one of the things that often happens in situations like that I've seen this multiple times is that if you run someone through an exposure training process like that and toughen them up they'll often start standing up to people around them in a way they never did before rule number 19 find your winning strategy if you concentrate solely on your career you can get a long way in your career and I would say that that's a strategy that a minority of men preferentially do that that's all they do they worked like 70 80 hours a week they go flat out on their career they're staking everything on the small probability of exceptional status in a narrow domain but it's it's hard on them they don't have a life it's very difficult for them to have a family they don't know how to take any leisure activity like they get very one-dimension now it may be that that unit dimensionality is the price you have to pay to be exceptional at one thing right because if you're going to be something like a genius level mathematician and you want to do that for a scientist say it's like you're in your lab you're in your lab all the time you're working 70 hours a week or 80 hours a week you're smart you're dedicated your unit dimensional and that's how you get to beat all the other people who are doing that it's the only way but the problem is you don't get life now if you love being a scientist and you have that kind of focus of mind well first of all you're a rare person and second you're gonna pay for it but find more power to you but but it's a it's a risky business to do that you sacrifice a lot for it you know and I would say most often if you're speaking about having a healthy life that isn't what you do you spread yourself out more so you know you have a family you have some things that you do outside of work that are meaningful to you and useful you you have a network of friends that that those three things alone are four things alone are plenty to keep you well oriented and then if one of those things collapses you know everything doesn't go now the price you pay for that is the more you strive to optimize that balance the less likely you are to be fantastic please successful at any single one of them but you might have a very you know if you consider your life as a whole that might be a winning strategy rule number 20 make yourself into something right a plumber once you know it was the night it was the night before we were putting drywall in our house we were redoing a house and he had put in all the plastic piping you know and I was going to test the joints steel are supposed to be glued together with this pipe glue right and I said I told him I had to test the joints and he said well you don't have to test my joints they never leak and I thought yeah that's okay how about if I test them so I went up on the third floor and filled the pipes with water capping them in the basement like you're supposed to and like half an hour later had two inches of water in the basement there were thirty leaking joints that was the night before the drywallers were supposed to show up so well so he wasn't particularly competent that's the point of that story but even more so he had put a bunch of the plastic pipe outside where the drywall would be so it would have been sticking through the wall so I spent a frenetic night you know sawing through plastic pipe and reglue in joints so that my well so that the dryer owners could come in what's the point if you're going to be a plumber man be a good plumber because otherwise all you do is go out there and cause trouble we don't need people to cause more trouble we need people to solve problems you know and so you can be a tradesman and you can be you can make a lot of money as a trades person it's a bloody reliable honorable forthright productive way of making a living and there is a hell of a lot of difference between a working man who knows what he's doing and one who doesn't both in terms of skill and ethics right and you work with someone who knows what they're doing it's a bloody pleasure they tell you what they're gonna do they tell you how much it will cost they go and do it it works and you pay them perfect everyone's happy and that's what happens when you have genuine hierarchies of competence and so you to listen to these panderers of egalitarian gely egalitarianism and equity and they fail to recognize completely that there are differences in rank between people it's not such a terrible thing man maybe you wouldn't be a great lawyer like it's certainly possible most people aren't but that doesn't mean there isn't something you could be great at there's lots of hierarchies to attempt to climb and if he in one go try in another but the point is you're still trying to aim for the top and what the hell are you gonna do if you don't try to aim for the top you know flap about uselessly and whine about your life it's not helpful it'll just make you miserable you're not reliable to anyone you can't help out in a crisis it's like so you tell young people and this is another message for conservatives like I don't care what you're gonna do but go out there and make something of yourself for God's sake be an honest person and work and get to the top of whatever it is that you want to get to the top of you know and and and and that you stand up for yourself like a respectable human being and be a bit of a light on the world instead of a blight you know and you can tell young people that and they haven't been told that by anyone now and so the young men are so hungry for that that it's it's painful to watch they're so relieved when finally someone finally comes up and says hey you know you get your act together a bit discipline yourself see if you can learn to tell the truth concentrate on something for a year or two you could be a bloody world beater they think really that's possible wow that would be that would be interesting that might make life or life worth living it's like yeah it might so why don't you go do it that's what the damn universities we're supposed to be teaching people they've forgotten that I went to Harvard a month ago a month and a half he used to teach there and I talked to a bunch of students you know and I told them it's not easy to get into Harvard you know like you're a valedictorian if you're at Harvard and not only are you a valedictorian you're way better than most people at at least two other things or you don't get in and so that gets I don't know what the acceptance rate is like 5% and believe me not everybody applies so it's a very selective school and so why am I saying that it's like these are high quality kids so I told them what I just told you it's like here you are at Harvard like get yourself educated man read some books learn to talk learn to think make yourself into something get the hell out there and make the world that put you here happy that you were put there in that great institution you know and they came up to me afterwards and said god I wish someone would have told us that when we were in our first year Jesus why didn't someone tell the math for God's sake it's supposed to be the greatest university in the world is it so difficult to figure that out rule number 21 encourage others I'm really sad to see that people are disenchanted and nihilistic and depressed and anxious and aimless and and perverse and vengeful and and all of those things it's terrible and then to see people question whether that's necessary and then to start to rise out of it it's like it's so fun like last night I was at after my talk it's overwhelming I don't usually think about these things but I was I was after my talk last night and so all these people line up and you know they have their 15 15 seconds with me and they're kind of tentative they're excited and a tentative when they come up to talk to me and then they have you know 15 seconds of time to tell me something I'm really listening to them and they're hesitant about whether or not to share the good news about their life you know and I think it's often because when people share good news about their life people don't necessarily respond positively you know they don't get encouragement and people need so little encouragement it's just unbelievable and so they tell me something good and I'm like ah that's so good you know somebody says well I'm getting along way better with my father I haven't seen him for 10 years and now we get along great and then the power of that you can't overstate the power of that for individuals to get their life together the individual is an unbelievably powerful force and every single person who gets their act together a little bit has the capacity to spread that around them it's it's a chain reaction and so it's a lovely thing to see rule number 20 to take responsibility one of the things that's really interesting about the Old Testament is that and the Jews in the Old Testament is that they don't take the path of Cain every time they're walloped by God which is like fairly frequently they say we must have done something wrong and we have to set our self right and that's a an unbelievably heroic attitude because that's the alternative to cursing fate it's like you take the risk instability for failure unto yourself and you think well if I was just maybe if I just had my act together a little bit more if I took advantage of every opportunity that was put in front of me if I wasn't resentful and bitter then I could have done something that would have tilted the situation in a different direction and like that's almost inevitably true Dostoevsky I think said something like every man is responsible for everything that happens to him and everything that happens to everyone else and that's you know that that's that's it's a crazy statement right it's a crazy statement and he was a pretty extreme person in many many ways but there's a level at which that's metaphysically true you know because what happens is that it's you its failure to act often that's the most catastrophic you know I mean it's it's it's to not do the right thing when the when the situation presents itself and it's very specific you know you're constantly in situations where you could do the right thing if you were willing to take a risk that's actually a relatively moderate size and you know that you could take the risk and you know that you should take the risk and you don't and that happens to people all the time and then what happens is the thing that they didn't oppose grows a little bit and they shrink a little bit and that starts a loop a rule number 23 know when to pull back I noticed that there's always a group of my friends who always criticize what I'm saying and not even try to understand what I'm wearing I'm coming from and I've always wondered how to deal with that I mean I want to listen to what they're saying but they are not understanding what I'm they're not trying to listen to what I'm saying so what would you do in that situation answer that very briefly okay there's a line in the New Testament that's relevant to that do not cast pearls before swine and what that means is that if people are not listening to you stop talking to them and that's really that is the best piece of advice that I can give you and what happens is is that if you stop talking to people who aren't listening to you and start watching them instead they will tell you what they're up to but so if you have things to say say them but you find people that will listen talk to them the ones who aren't listening pull back because you're you're devaluing what you have to say by offering it to an audience that does nothing but reject it and that's a good guideline to life in general so pull back rule number 24 change yourself psychologists have been not all psychologists obviously but the psychological profession is its neck deep in this in this pathology has been beating these self-esteem drum for 50 years oh no you're okay you should feel good about yourself like you're fine the way you are it's like you think well that's a calming message for people it's like no it's not it's not at all and I watch my audiences is like it's full of people in the audience who think I'm suffering a lot more than I think is tenable a whole bunch of it's my fault my life is not in the order it should be I know I'm doing 50 things wrong it's like what the hell's wrong with me what's wrong with the people around me this is really serious and some you know well-meaning person comes up and says oh you're okay just the way you are it's like no one wants that message it's like no I'm not okay the way I am I'm not okay at all the way I am I know that and so you know when I'm when I'm speaking to to when I'm speaking now I say to people oh you're nowhere near what you could be that's that that's the positive message it's like yeah you're a mess but you don't have to stay that way as you're a mess you know it obviously you're suffering away like like so much you can barely tolerate it it's like that's okay you can do something about it so yeah that's the thing that that turns the lights on it's like you had do something about it Oh rule number 25 find your purpose if you're hungry and you eat well that's good but it's over and then you're on to the next thing right it's not exactly sustaining it's just necessary that's called consume Ettore reward by the way this other reward system is incentive reward and the incentive reward system works on dopamine this neurochemical dopamine which is also the neuro chemical tracks that opiates and cocaine and amphetamines the drugs that people really like to abuse alcohol often for some people activate and so you might say if you don't have enough in your life then you're more prone to addiction and that's definitely the case even with rats if you take a rat you put him in a cage by himself and he has nothing to do and then you give him access to cocaine he'll get addicted to the point where he won't do anything but take cocaine but if you throw the rat back in with a bunch of other rats and he gets to do rat things then it's very hard to get him addicted to cocaine and so the purposeless rat is prone to addiction well it's the same with human beings now here's a corollary to that which is really cool so the magnitude of the reward you experience as you're moving towards a goal is proportionate to the importance of the goal so that means the more important the goal you pick the more possibility there is for the kind of reward let's say that it's really a state of being that is life-affirming and it is directly life-affirming in that you know like if you're in a football game and you're and it's an important football game and maybe you break a finger and you know normally that's that's a problem it hurts and you're gonna stop doing whatever you're doing but if you're right in the middle of the game then you'll be so amped up on this reward system that its analgesic it stops the pain it also suppresses anxiety so if you have a purpose then its analgesic it takes some of the pain out of life it's very positive in that it motivates and energizes you and focuses you and makes you able to remember and pay attention and it quells fear and so those things are all direct and so then you might think well what's the best possible goal well and that's that's the purpose I would say of religious training and philosophical training it's like just what the hell are you doing in the world rule number 26 tell the truth or at least don't lie tell the truth or at least don't lie yeah well it's not that easy to tell the truth because who knows about the truth but you can learn not to say things that you know to be false and if you stop saying things that you know to be false then your life will improve a lot simplifies it and it puts you in the linemen with reality and you should be in alignment with reality because there's a lot more of it than there is of you rule number 27 treat yourself like you matter first of all you have to yourself like you matter because if you don't then you don't take care of yourself and you become vengeful and and and cruel and you you take you take it out on people around you and you're not a positive force none of that's good so you suffer more and so does everyone around you and there's a malevolence that enters into it none of that's good so that's what happens if you don't treat yourself like you matter and then what happens if you don't treat other people like they matter well you lie to them you cheat them you steal you you you enter into impulsive relationships with them they can't trust you that doesn't go anywhere they don't like you you you end up alone at best and maybe like incarcerated at worst like that doesn't work and so you watch the people around you who thrive regardless of what they say they act out the proposition that everyone matters and then you have a functional society and I think okay well if if if when you act out the proposition that everyone matters you have a functional society maybe that's evidence that that proposition is true it's like I think it's I think it's true rule number 28 don't be arrogant if you're failing repeatedly then there's probably something wrong it's possible that there's something wrong with the way that you're conceptualizing the world because you have a choice right if if you keep making sacrifices and they don't work there's a binary choice and one is well there's something wrong with the structure of reality and the other is there's something wrong with your approach and so then you might say well let's take the first idea there's something wrong with the structure of reality it's like you're really gonna say that are you you're really going to come out and say I know enough to judge the nature of being and and then the alternative is also quite frightening because then you know you it's you that's making the mistakes and you might be wrong at a really deep level and that might mean that a lot of you has to burn off and be transformed maybe even things about yourself that you think are admirable and that you like because your position you know your your self conceptualization is so warped and wrong and that's really daunting but you know when people set themselves up as the judge of being I mean I've written about this a fair bit in my new book which is twelve rules for life when people set themselves up as the judge of being then they take on what can only be described as a kind of satanic arrogance because they've actually taken to themselves the moral right to criticize the structure of existence itself it's like you better be careful when you do something like that because you're setting yourself up as the judge of being rule number twenty-nine listen to others there's another rule in my book which is rule nine assume that the person that you're listening to knows something you don't well they do the person you're listening to knows some things you don't you can be sure of that now whether or not you can get to them is a different matter but if you do get to them it's a real deal for you that's why you want to listen to the other person's arguments it's because you're not everything you could be you don't know the pathway forward with as much clarity as you could and it's possible this is one of the wonderful things that I've had the privilege of experiencing as a clinician no because people it's like I live inside a Dostoyevsky novel as a clinician people come in and they tell me about their lives and I listen to them and they tell me things that are just absolutely beyond belief you know and I learn from my clients constantly there they're telling me honestly about their experience they tell me things they wouldn't tell anyone else because I actually listen to them but part of the reason I listen is because I'm desperate to listen it's like there's a possibility I'm gonna do something stupid in the next five years that's gonna be like fatal and there's some small possibility that if we have a decent discussion that you'll tell me something that will eliminate some of my blindness so that I don't have to fall into that particular pit and if you have a good sensitivity for the depth of the pit then you know you're pretty bloody motivated to avoid it and so and that and that and that dialogue is it's it's dialogic it's dial logos right it's shared logos it's the way that we redeem ourselves mutually moving forward rule number 30 be precise in your speech I like this one and I think I mean this is very clearly what you do be precise in your speech so in in Genesis one of the things God has Adam do first so God makes the world by speaking okay so that's the first thing to think about you're supposed to think like in a sophisticated way about this that the idea is that some integral relationship between communication and the structure of being it's part of the role that consciousness plays in the world whatever that role is language takes the chaos and makes it into things and so God has Adam named all the animals they're not even really real until they have names now those are more implicit that's another you know here's a here's an example let's say that you're having a rough patch in your relationship and you don't know why it's unnameable is it real well yeah it's manifesting itself in it like a physiological discomfort then you talk about it and you name it it's like it goes from this blurry thing that's kind of potential it goes snap and then it's this thing right and then that's a horrible thing it's like a little poisonous thing but it's not a whole foggy cloud of potential poison it's like this little sharp poison thing and then you think okay it's real it's a little monster but it's not it's little at least and now probably we can do something about it if we can admit to it so it's this precision that specifies and like so this is a little bit of the Voldemort effect right if you since you're a Harry Potter guy they wouldn't name right this problem we got to name them first oh yeah you got to name them first absolutely because the unnameable is far more terrifying than the nameable you see that in there was a great Blair Witch Project terrifying move oh yeah it's unnamed there's nothing terrible happens in that movie it's all there unnameable it's like what's goin on what's goin on what's goin on and no matter how terrible the actuality is it's rarely as terrible as your imagination because your imagination like it's an old thing it's seen a lot of terrible things in the history of life like it can put monsters everywhere and so it's almost always better it might be better without exception to name the thing no matter how terrible it is and if you can't name it what that means is that you're you're telling yourself that you're so terrified that you can't bring your attention to bear on it and that makes you you're the loser instantly if it's so terrifying that you cannot face it it's what rule number 31 pursue what is meaningful write in the book there is no faith and no courage and no sacrifice in doing what is expedient what do you say to those viewers that don't pursue their dreams and are locked into their careers because they are too afraid to take risks and pursue something meaningful well the first thing I would say is well you should be afraid of taking risks and pursuing something meaningful but you should be more afraid of staying where you are if it's making you miserable it's like the first thing you want to do is dispense with the idea that you get to have any any permanent security outside of your ability to contend and adapt it's the same issue with children it's like you're paying a price by sitting there being miserable and you might say well the devil I know is better than the one I don't it's like don't be so sure of that the clock is ticking yeah and if you're miserable in your job now and you change nothing in five years you'll be much more miserable and you'll be a lot older but this into the luxury to pursue what is meaningful our viewers have mortgages they have children yeah they have payments and loans it's a luxury to pursue because we lack the resources well I don't think I don't remember now I'm not talking about what makes you happy it's a luxury to pursue what makes you happy it's a moral obligation to pursue what you find meaningful and that doesn't mean it's easy it might require sacrifice if you need to change your job to let's say you have family and and and and children and a mortgage you have responsibilities you've already picked up those responsibilities you don't just get to walk away scot-free and say well I don't like my job I quit that's no strategy but what you might have to do is you think well this job is killing my soul all right so what do I have to do about that well I have to look for another job well no one wants to hire me it's like okay maybe you need to educate yourself more maybe you need to update your your curriculum vitae your resume maybe you need to overcome your fear of being interviewed maybe you need to sharpen your social skills like you you have to think about these things strategically if you're going to switch careers you have to do it like an intelligent responsible person that might take you a couple of years of of effort to do properly I've dealt with hundreds of people in my clinical and consulting practice and we set a goal we develop a vision and work towards it and it things inevitably get better for people so it's not a luxury it's it's difficult it's a moral responsibility and it isn't happiness it's it's not the pursuit isn't for happiness it's a moral responsibility to push you what is meaningful absolutely rule number 30 to fight for your beliefs the first way in which you captured the world's attention was that University and that's what I want to talk about now because the c16 law in Canada was being proposed contextualized for us what it is precisely that you were being that you were opposed to in that well bill c16 purported to do nothing but extend human rights provisions to an excluded group let's say to the transgender and non gender binary types and and that was the federal legislation it also made it a hate crime to to to discriminate or harass essentially so now then the question is well what exactly do you mean by discriminator harass and why exactly is that a hate crime under the Criminal Code well there was an answer to that the answer was well this bill will be interpreted in light of the policies generated by the Ontario Human Rights Commission very large set of policies now the Ontario Human Rights Commission is a radically leftist organization I think it's the most dangerous organization in Canada although you could debate that and they said are all sorts of policies about how this these LED this legislation was going to be interpreted and the federal government linked to their website to state that bill 16 c 16 would be interpreted in light of those guidelines so i went and read all the policies well one of the policies was that if you didn't use the preferred pronouns of a given group that you could be charged essentially with a hate crime and i thought no that group is that you can talk about transgender people yeah and so there's all these pronouns that have come up there's 70 different sets of pronouns approximately to to hypothetically describe people who don't fit anywhere on the gender spectrum which is also something that I don't really under Stan I don't understand that conceptually like okay so now I'm comin is compelled under Canadian law to use the pronoun of another individuals choice pipe on pain of law and I thought well no that's not acceptable it's one thing to put limits on what a person can't say like say with hate speech laws which I also don't agree with by the way but that's a different argument I think it's a narrower argument but to compel me to use a certain content when I'm formulating my thoughts or my actions under threat of legislative action I thought no what's happened there is the government has introduced compelled speech legislation into the private sphere it's never happened in the history of English common law and so I said there's no way I'm abiding by that I don't care what your damn rationale is we're compassionate it's like no you're not no you're not you're playing this radical collectivist left-wing game you're trying to gain linguistic you're trying to gain linguistic supremacy in the in the area of public discourse you're doing that using compassion as a guise and you're pulling the wool over people's eyes and you're not going to do it with me rule number 33 take on challenges we're built for struggle as human beings you know you're not after the bubbles of bliss that Dostoyevsky described in in notes from underground we're built to contend with the world we're built to contend with reality you want a challenge and the best way that you can take on a challenge because the challenge fortifies you so you don't want to be secure you want to be strong and you get strong by taking on optimal challenges and so you lay out your destiny in the world and you take the slings and arrows of fate and you make yourself stronger while you're doing so and you might fail and fortune might do you in but it's your best bet and you know people have also people that have extracted unbelievable successes out of catastrophic failures and so and I'm not saying that in a naive way I know perfectly well what happens to people you know you're doing fine in life and then you get cancer and then six months later you're dead and all the heroism in the world isn't going to save you at that point but that's not the point that's not the point life is bounded by mortality but that doesn't mean that you don't get out there and 10 and you develop by contending and you minimize the net amount of suffering in the world and that's something man that's something to do rule number 34 don't compare yourself with others rule 4 compare yourself to who you were yesterday and not to who someone else is today because if you're comparing yourself to someone else I mean first of all you don't know very much about the life of the person you're comparing yourself to you don't know it in it you know what across all of its dimensions and second people are very different and so comparing yourself to someone else it's it's kind of useful I guess when you're young but as you get older and more singular and more particular it becomes increasingly less useful better to compare yourself to a previous version of yourself and work for improvement in that way rule number 35 develop resilience life is difficult and you cannot protect your children what you can do is prepare them and you can prepare them to be strong and courageous and truthful and resilient and reciprocal in their interactions with other people and that means you equip them for what life will be which is at minimum a series of difficult challenges and and often more than that because of course people go through very difficult times in their lives and a resilient person is capable of standing up to things in the face of fear and moving forward voluntarily convinced of their own competence and ability to prevail and so the primary your primary goal as a parent apart from facilitating your child's social desirability which is a major obligation on your part is to encourage your children and to and I mean that literally to instill in them a sense of courage in the face of the difficulties of life and not to protect them from that we don't even want to be protected from those difficulties because a major part of life and its meaning is the the challenge that comes with confronting difficulties rule number 36 get your act together I said with Bill c16 that I wouldn't speak the language of the radical leftist because I don't think that that language should define the game but let's say it does so here's the game the world is a battleground of groups and the they're battling for power that's it that's the game and some of them win and they oppress those who don't win so that's how we're gonna view the world okay now the left is say okay well here's the oppressed people the oppressors the patriarchy type patriarchal types they should be ashamed of themselves and give up some power the right-wingers the radical right wingers look at that and they say oh I see so the game is ethnic identity is it its identity politics okay we're white males we're not gonna lose that's the right wing version of identity politics it's like screw you if we're gonna divide into groups if we're gonna divide into tribes and I'm in my tribe I'm not gonna get all guilty and lose I'm gonna get all cruel and win and that's like then you think well there's people in the middle they're kind of looking back and forth which side of the identity politics spectrum I am I going to fall in do I want to go with do I want to go what do I want to be driven primarily by compassion and I'm am I going to accept guilt for my historical privilege so that's one possibility and then I'm the oppressor I'm the member of the oppressor group or am I going to say Oh to hell with that I'm just gonna play to win well then I'm gonna go to the right it's like well my sense is how about we don't play either of those games and the reason we shouldn't play them is well the Soviets played the left-wing game and like killed who knows how many tens of millions of people you can't even count it accurately the estimates range from twenty to a hundred million those are pretty big error bars and that in the Maoists maybe a hundred million certainly 60 million so okay that didn't work out so well and then there's the Nazis like they played ethnic identity politics and racial superiority it's like what do we want to play that game see what I've been trying to do really what I've been trying to do for the last 30 years is say look there's heavy temptations to play those sorts of games but that's not the only game in town it's a much better game to play individual it's like get your act together stand up in the world make something of yourself stay away from the ideological over simple vacations set your house in order that's rule 6 in the in this book so I have a book rule in there says set your house in perfect order before he criticized the world and it's a very dark chapter about the motivations of the Columbine High School killers and this other guy named carl panzram who is a serial rapist and arsonist and murderer and these he wrote an autobiography and the Columbine kids also wrote about why they did what they did they're resentful to the core bitter bitter resentful terrible and well I'm suggesting that people stay away from that resentment resentfulness and bitterness even though life is hard and and there's malevolence in the world it's like yeah you can you can tell a story where everyone's a victim because we all die we all get sick you know and and and things happen to us that are bitter and terrible betrayal deceit lies like people hurt us on purpose you know so it's not just the tragedy of life it's malevolence as well it's everyone's a victim you can tell that story the problem is if you tell that story and you start to act it out you make all of that worse that's the problem and it's so this is why partly I got attracted to Christian imagery at least in part because there's an idea in Christianity that you should pick up your goddamn cross and like walk off the hill and that's dramatically that's correct that's the right answer it's like you've got a heavy load of suffering to bear and a fair bit of it's going to be unjust it's what are you gonna do about it accept it voluntarily and try to transform as a consequence that's the right answer it's the right answer because the rest of it is tribalism and we're we're too technologically powerful to get all tribal again rule number 37 concentrate on who you could be people have an unspecified potential for development educationally obviously with regards to the skills they have but also in relationship to their character and it's it's much it's much more encouraging for people I think to concentrate on who they could be rather than who they are especially when they're young because they still have most of their life ahead of them and and they're not everything they could be and so to tell people even something like well you should feel good about yourself the way you are is like well that there's something there that's seriously lacking because there's so much more that you could be that you need to be and that you should be aiming at the Sun you're the problem with being okay the way you are is that you don't have a goal then and people need to have a goal in order to to come to terms with their life rule number 38 leave your comfort zone now this baboon here who's supposed to be basically just a fool when the story was first written he turned into what's essentially a shaman across time and then so he represents the self from the Union perspective now the self is everything you could be across time so you imagine that there's you and there's the potential inside you whatever that is you know and potential is an interesting idea because it's represents something that isn't yet real yet we act like it's real because people will say to you you should live up to your potential and that potential is partly what you could be if you interacted with the world in a manner that would gain you the most information right because you build yourself out of the information in the piagetian sense but it's deeper than that too because we know that if you take yourself and you put yourself in a new environment new jeans turn on in your nervous system they encode for new proteins and so you're full of biological potential that won't be realized unless you move yourself around in the world in two different challenging circumstances and that'll turn on different circuits so it's not merely that you're incorporating information from the outside world in the constructivist sense it's that by exposing yourself to different environments you put different physiological demands on on yourself all the way down to the genetic level and that manifests new elements of you and so one of the things that happens to people and this is a very common cultural notion is that you should go on a pilgrimage at some point to somewhere central and that would be say like the rock in the Pride Rock and The Lion King because you take yourself out of your dopey little village and that's just a little bounded you that everyone knows and that isn't very expanded and then you go somewhere dark and dangerous to the central place and while you do that you have adventures and they toughen you and pull more out of you like partly because you're becoming informed which means information' it means you're becoming more organized at every level of analysis but there's also more of you to rule number 39 find your why by primary motive as a clinical psychologist and educator is to help individuals live more meaningful and productive lives in harmony with their families and their community that's my motive and the evidence for that I think is well if people go online and first of all you can watch the lectures and decide for yourself but you can also go there's I suspect probably maybe 250,000 people have commented on the lectures and their effects on them and so that's what people say I'm watching the lectures yeah I'm trying to develop a vision for my life I'm trying to become more responsible and it's really helping and that's and that's what I hear all the time when I do these public lectures which aren't political but when we gain success we raise the bar we set our ambitions higher I mean what is your end game what do you want that's all that's what I want I want I want to help as many individuals as possible become more courageous more truthful and more engaged in the pursuit of individual familial and social harmony that's what I want rule number forty pick the lesser risk you're doing a great job of modeling courage in the face of fog well there's something I'd like to say maybe in closing about courage people say that to me and you know I don't think it's exactly right doesn't there's a line in the Old Testament the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom and I think it's more like that it's not that I'm courageous it's that I'm afraid of the right things so when I made my videos it wasn't like that didn't make me nervous but I was less nervous about going back to bed and not saying what I had to say that I was about making the videos because I know where this is going I don't want to go there and so it's it's not so much courage it's that it's a matter of I it's it's it's less risky to say something than to remain silent when you know there's something to be said I know that to be the case and so lots of times in life it's like there's no pathway forward that's going to shield you from risk you get to pick this risk or you get to pick this risk and I think I picked the lesser risk and that might be wise but I'm not so sure it's courageous rule number 41 set goals properly tell your kid here is an impossible thing why don't you go out and fail you say here's something worth going after here's a step you could take that would push you beyond where you are but that you also have a reasonably high probability of succeeding at right they called that within a time frame if then some time frame that's the other thing you have to parameterize it with regards to time frame that's right and that puts you in the zone of proximal development and that's that's a concept that was generated by a guy named Vygotsky he was a Russian developmental psychologist and the smart one that's where the idea of the zone comes from to be in the zone and when you're in the zone you're expanding your skills in a manner that's intrinsically rewarding because you're succeeding and so you want to set if you're good to yourself you think okay I need to set a goal but I need to set a goal that someone is stupid and useless as me could probably attain if they put some effort into it and then you got it then you've got it perfectly because it's not so high that it's grandiose or impossible that you fail necessarily and then justify your bitterness it's like well I couldn't do it well because that happens to Pete how much all the time yeah it's like this all the time you know it's like it's yes exactly well I set a goal and I didn't attain it so I'm not gonna set any more goal right it's like no you set a goal that was inappropriate for the time frame that's right you didn't calibrate it properly and and you're playing a trick on yourself because you wanted to fail so that you could justify not having to try that's why I've been a victim mmm yeah it's just in helpful you're still gonna be a victim right there's no way out of that man so you know because life is this life is a challenge that in some sense can't be surmounted so there's no way out of your problem but there are certainly proper ways of dealing with it yeah Lee number 42 find your why not only do you have to move from point A to B in life but point a is often a very difficult place to be because we're four and bounded and mortal and limited and because we know that and so one of the implications of that as many great religious traditions are at pains to illustrate or demonstrate or proclaim is that life is essentially suffering and I believe that to be a fundamental truth but but perhaps not the most fundamental truth because I think the most fundamental truth is that despite the fact that life is suffering people can transcend that and partly the way they transcend that is by pursuing things of value and so that if there is no value proposition at hand then you have no meaning to justify the difficult conditions of your life and that's brutally difficult for people no Nietzsche said he who has a why can bear anyhow and you see and I've certainly seen this as a clinical practitioner that people who have no purpose in their life are embittered by the difficulties of their life and they become first bitter and then resentful and then revengeful and then cruel and there's plenty of places to go past cruel that's just where you start if you're really on a downhill path rule number 43 eat a little poison every day the more radical than necessary change the more pain that accompanies it like the more opportunity as well but and a lot of what we learn we learn painfully and so it's not surprising that people shrink away from learning we learn in pain and anxiety very frequently everyone knows that like the things that really that you really learned in life it's like there was no joy man like it took you out and so the fact that people flee from that is hardly surprising but it doesn't help that's the thing it just stores up the catastrophe for later and so the better the better idea is to eat a little poison every day so that you don't have to overdose in a month it's something like that and it is the case that I think because you don't you aren't forced first of all you don't learn unless you're forced to learn I know there's alternatives to that there's the voluntary search for knowledge and that's a fine thing and that is an antidote to this but apart from that speaking more practically you tend not to learn unless you're forced to learn and it's and what you tend to learn by force are difficult lessons and so people are very prone to not do not seek that out it's not surprising but it's because they don't understand the consequences very well you know you you it's because maybe it's because they're convinced that there's some way of for stalling the necessary learning and there isn't any way of for stalling it all you do is make it worse in the future you make yourself smaller and you make the lesson harder and so that's why in so many religious doctrines there's emphasis on humility you know and humility isn't to debase yourself it's to understand that you don't know enough so that your life isn't going to be miserable and so every chance you get to grab something new that will help you along your way you should take it as fast as you can but you have to have a very tragic I would say view of reality and also a harsh one because it's not just tragedy it's also malevolence you have to understand that those are waiting for you and that makes you desperate enough to learn and that might be make you desperate enough to fall out of your ideology but that's that's a hard way of looking at the world it beats living through it though rule number 44 take responsibility so one of the things I've been talking to my audiences about is the relationship between responsibility and meaning which is there and what would you say it's a it's a constant refrain in the book it's one of its underlying messages let's say or themes is a better way of thinking about it you know if you start with the presumption that there's a baseline of suffering in life and that that can be 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 it 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 a clear conscience is different than happiness that's better yeah that's not other guilting yourself you're not feeling bad about your sister right you feel that you've just acclaimed you've justified your existence right and so you're not waking up at 3 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 my you acted or what opportunity you lost 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 an existential weight that goes along with that rule number 45 become disciplined we kind of have this idea that while you're free as a child and then you let me see if I can if I can put this properly that you have a certain delightful wonderful positive freedom as a child and then that's given up as you approach adulthood but 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 lots of people are hopeless and nihilistic we more people than you think and part of that is because no one's ever really encouraged them and so the book is in part a matter of encouragement it's like lay yourself lay a disciplinary structure on yourself get the chaos in in in check and then you can move towards a state that's freer because it's disciplined 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 rule number forty-six be truthful your best that is truth but that doesn't necessarily mean that's always going to do the trick right I mean sometimes you go fight a dragon and it eats you and if the if you being eaten wasn't a real possibility it wouldn't be a real fight and so you see people like I've seen people in my clinical practice sometimes I had one client in particular who was undergoing a particularly vicious divorce with someone who was really seriously inclined to take him out and would do pretty much everything at her disposal to do so and I strategized with him for about three years and we did everything like and hyper carefully he was a very conscientious and diligent person and he put into practice everything that we discussed and strategized and he still pretty much he got backed into a corner so hard that I didn't know how to help him anymore so I would say however that he like he was a very truthful person throughout that and one thing he did do was part of it was a custody battle and he did manage despite his decline in consequence of being repeat cornered I would say he did manage to establish what I think was a lasting relationship with his kids so he might have got enough out of what he did to justify it even though the whole landscape was pretty awful I think that not lying is your best bet but life is hard and people get run over and it doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to emerge in any obvious sense triumphant but if you take the alternative path path especially when you're facing severe tribulations let's say and you complicate those with deceit you can be sure that whatever tragedy that you're confronting is going to turn into not only tragedy but something very much akin to hell and so you might be able to at least minimize the degree of suffering even if you can't overcome it or transcendent and that's something you know rule number 47 provide value people came to my website because they were interested in well before the political stuff blew up I had a million views on YouTube which isn't nothing a million of anything is a lot but then when the political scandal started to break yeah then people came for them but stayed for the content and so and that's really useful yeah well it's all well and it's not that surprising well you know because of what you do it's like people there's a great hunger for information that is practical and useful and that helps people find meaning in their lives and orient themselves there's a great hunger for that and most of my lectures were derived from solid psychology some of it experimental some of it biological some of it from from from the domains of neuroscience a lot of it from great clinicians it's not surprising that people find it helpful because well great clinicians were great because they were really helpful and so to distill doubt and to offer it to people in a digestible form to have that have a good effect on them well that's that's what you'd expect that's what the whole discipline is about and so that's been that's been great rule number 48 just start doing a circumambulation that Jung talked about was continual will return to this this continual circling in some sense of who you could be you might notice for example that there are themes in your life you know when you go back across your experiences you see you kind of have your typical experience that sort of repeats itself and there might be variation on it like a musical theme but it's it's like you're circling yourself and getting closer to yourself as you move across time that's the circumambulation now you remember that for a second we'll go back to it okay so imagine that something glimmers before you it's an an interest that's dawning and you decide well first of all you're paralyzed you think well how do I know if I should pursue that it's probably a stupid idea and the proper response to that is you're right it probably is a stupid idea because almost all though all ideas are stupid and so the probability that as you move forward on your adventure that you're gonna get it right the first time is zero it's just not gonna happen and so then you might think well maybe I'll just wait around until I get the right idea and which people do right so they're like 40 year old thirteen year olds which is not a good idea so they wait around until it's waiting for godot until they finally got it right but the problem is you're too stupid to know when you've got it right so waiting around isn't gonna help because even if it the perfect opportunity manifested itself to you in your incomplete form the probability that you would recognize it as the perfect opportunity is zero you might even think it's the worst possible idea that you've ever heard of anywhere highly likely highly likely so so you had there's a niche of Nietzsche called that a will will to stupidity which I really liked so because he thought of stupidity as being it you know it's it's you have to take it into account fundamentally and work with it and so and so you can take these tentative steps on your pathway to destiny and you can assume that you're gonna do it badly and that's really useful because you don't have to beat yourself up it's pretty easy to do it badly but the thing is it's way better to do it badly than not to do it at all so you you start your path and you think that you're heading you know towards your star and so you go in that direction and then because you're here the world looks a particular way but then when you move here the world looks different and you're different as a consequence of having made that voyage and so what that means is that now that thing that glimmers in front of you is going to have shifted its location because you weren't very good at specifying it to begin with and now that you're a little sharper and more focused than you were it's it's going to reveal itself with more accuracy to you and so then you have to take a you know it's almost like 180 degree reversal but it isn't because you know you've I mean you've gone this far and that's a long ways to get that far but that's a lot farther than you would be if you just stayed where you were waiting and so it doesn't matter that you overshoot continually because as you overshoot even if you don't learn what you should have done you're going to continually learn what you shouldn't keep doing and if you learn enough about what you shouldn't keep doing then that's tantamount at some point to learning at the same time what you should be doing so it's okay so it's like this now what's cool about it though I think is that as you progress the degree of overshooting starts to decline right and that we know that there's nothing hypothetical about that as you learn a new skill like even to play it play a song on the piano for example you over shoot madly you're making all sorts of mistakes to begin with and then the mistakes they disappear so anyways the fact that you're full of faults doesn't mean you have to stop and thank God for that that's a really useful thing and the fact that you're full of faults doesn't mean that you can't learn and so you can pause it an ideal and you're gonna be wrong about it but it doesn't matter because what you're right about is positing the ideal moving towards it if the actual ideal isn't conceptualize perfectly well for surprise surprise because like what are you going to do that's perfect so it doesn't matter that it's imperfect imperfect it just matters that you do it and that you move forward so that's really that's really positive news as far as I'm concerned because you can actually do that right you can do it badly anyone can do that so that's that's useful rule number 49 develop communication skills I'm incredibly nervous to talk in front of you because you've got to be one of the most formidable people that I've ever heard up or ever listened to ever seen so my question is again you're one of the best communicators that I've ever listened to if I could be half as good at you or at communicating as you are I would be set how can I teach myself to do that practice you know really like well there's a couple of things is helps to read a lot it really helped to write so if you want to make yourself articulate which is a very good idea then not only should you read but you should write down what you think and if you can do that a little bit every day 15 minutes maybe you could steal 15 minutes and do it every day but if you do that for 10 years you really straighten out your thinking if you're gonna speak effectively you have to know way more than you're talking about you know so if you this is often difficult for beginning lecturers at university because they'll do a lecture on a topic but they only know as much as they're saying in the lecture and they get kind of stuck to their notes because of it but you want to know 10 times as much as you are saying in the lecture and then you can specify a stepping path through it and elaborate with the other things that you know but to do that you have to do a lot of reading but you also have to do a lot of reading because that's where the synthesize that's where the synthesizing comes so that's on the input side and then on the output side well there's some tricks techniques let's say is like if you're speaking in front of a group you are not delivering a talk to a group that's not what you're doing the talk isn't a hich thing that you present to a group there isn't a group there's a bunch of individuals and you talk to them so when I talk to a group I always talk to people one at a time and that makes it easier to because you know how to talk to a person it's like can you talk to a thousand people well probably not because it's too intimidating but there isn't a thousand people there there's a thousand individuals and so you just look at an individual and you say something and you can tell if they're engaged they look confused or they look interested or they look angry or they look bored or maybe they're asleep in which case you look at someone else and they give you feedback about how you're doing and so one thing is to to have something to say yeah but the next thing is pay attention to who you're talking to because unless you're very badly socialized and that seems unlikely in your case because you know you present yourself at least moderately well you know and well I mean I don't know you very well but at first but on first sight you know you're doing fine so the probability that if you pay attention to the individuals that you're talking to that your natural wealth of social skill will manifest itself is extremely high and so you don't deliver a talk to an audience that's a really bad way of thinking about you're actually engaged in a conversation with an audience even if they're not talking they're nodding and shifting position and you know looking like this or and you can you can pull that in and and and use it to govern the level at which you're addressing the entire audience so the last thing I would say is well having the aim to be a good communicator is a good start and you think well I could but just that to some degree there isn't anything that you can possibly this is the whole point of a liberal education there isn't anything that you can possibly do that makes you more competent in everything you do then to learn how to communicate I don't care if you're gonna be a carpenter I mean being a carpenter by the way is very difficult especially if you're a good carpenter but if you're good at communicating as a carpenter you're like ten times better as a carpenter so the and this is something that the liberal arts colleges I think I don't know if they forgotten it but they don't do a very good job of marketing it's like what's the use of a bachelor's degree Bachelor of Arts it's like well you can think you can write you can speak you've read something it's like the economic value that is incalculable the people that I've watched in my life would be spectacular ly successful are they have skills clearly that that's a minimum precondition but they're also very very good at articulating themselves and so whenever they negotiate they're successful well that's kind of like the definition of success in life right you negotiate and you're six it doesn't mean you win because if you're a good negotiator if you're really good negotiator everybody walks away from the negotiation thrilled and so then people line up to do things with you so and that's all that's all dependent on your ability to communicate so practice and rule number 50 the lasts only for a very special bonus clip is fight for what you stain for with our topic is the rising tide of compelled speech in Canada my baby [Music] [Applause] that's pure narcissism at work by the way [Applause] you don't to hijack to hijack an event like this that other people put time and effort into and to use they there are their civility of the crowd and the civility of the organizers as an excuse to blatantly yell out your ill informed opinions is no way to conduct a civil dialogue it's absolutely appalling the people who do that should be embarrassed these people are not your friends do you see you know that's that that and mark my words that's the sounds of the barbarians pounding at the gates right you know that's all I'll tell you again too that you soon inchoate what would you call it inchoate sensation is the best formulation of their argument and there's not much difference between knocking on the doors and knocking on you so keep that in mind it's not amusing there's nothing to it there's nothing for it the thing that's also quite appalling is that there's no evidence whatsoever that the people who are conducting these protests know what it is that they're protesting against you know I was in alright I was in the midst of a discussion attempting to make the case that it's freedom of speech that's that is what people who have nothing still have right so if you look at the tyrannical structure of our society let's say the people at the top have access to means of communication everyone knows that it's the people at the bottom who have the right to say what they think however badly they say it that enables them to get a toehold into the system into and to make their suffering known that's what freedom of speech is for and so like what's the protest against that and I'll tell you you know that the radical neo-marxist types they speak the language of power and that's what they're speaking right now and if you want to live in a world where everyone speaks the language of power then just let them do what they're doing and see what happens I wouldn't recommend it it's not a pretty road and you're all in a position you're on a situation in your life now where you have to make decisions about this sorts of things like is this the sort of institution that you want this to be now I've got a special bonus clip from Jordan Peterson on how to take risks that I think you're going to really enjoy but before that it's time for the three-point landing questions time to move from just watching another video to taking action in your life or your business and if you're feeling bold and to the questions in the comments below here we go question number one what do you stay in for number two what will you start doing today and number three what poison will you eat this week there is definitely an epidemic of overprotective parenting but it's useful to ask why and my suspicions are is that this is driven by very fundamental biological and cultural phenomena that aren't generally considered in relationship to this issue we don't have very many children we don't have 12 you know six of whom die we have one or two and that makes them very precious right we're unwilling to take risks with them and no wonder and then we also have them much later in life and so like if you have a kid when you're 18 you're still a kid you know you're gonna go out and have your life right because you're so well you're in the in the height of your exploratory your ear in the height of the exploratory part of your life you're not gonna over protect your kid because you're still a kid but if you're 40 and you have one child it's like all your eggs are in one basket and the probability that you're going to take undue risks with that precious person is very very low now obviously there's some advantages to that because great you would devote resources to your child you know and foster their development but the downside is that you have every motivation to hover and maybe you're also extraordinarily desperate as a mother to maintain that bond with your child because you've struggled so long to achieve it it's highly highly valuable you can't take a risk well so these so we might say well perhaps overprotective parenting is a secondary and unintended consequence of the birth control pill and the fact that people now have children later in life could easily be you know if you have six kids it's like what are you gonna do hi helicopter parent them it's like little yeah you're so tired you can't even get off the couch if you have six kids and there they outnumber you right there raising each other they're competing and they're taking each other down a peg they're not there's no overprotection there but with it with a single child landscape or dual child landscape mostly a single child landscape then you're gonna over protect and then that ethos starts to permeate the schools and it starts to permeate the higher education institutions as those children mature and then that all reinforces it not good it's not obvious what to do about it either because if it is driven by demographics and not in that sense it's a much more intractable problem than we think so I did some of that in 12 rules for life you know I said look you what you have to understand is that you're a danger to your children no matter what right you can let them go out in the world and be hurt or you can over protect them and hurt them that way so you here's your choice it can make your children competent and courageous or you can make them safe but you can't make them safe because life isn't safe so if you sacrifice their courage and competence on the altar of safety then you disarm them completely and all they can do is pray to be protected if you had to think of one word that's most important to you that sums you Apple that would be collect a little beacon if you want more Jordan Peterson check out the video we did on him and his 12 rules for life it's right there next to me I think you're gonna enjoy it continue to believe and I'll see you there people in general now have very poor posture very bad for the junction is like take a look at the people that are around you

Channel: Evan Carmichael

Views: 1,066,083

Keywords: entrepreneur, jordan b. peterson, jordan b. peterson top 10 rules for success, entrepreneurship motivation, jordan b. peterson lecture, jordan b. peterson advice, jordan b. peterson motivation, success advice, success motivation, jordan b peterson rules for life, best of jordan b. peterson, jordan b. peterson interview, jordan b. peterson speech, entrepreneurship, entrepreneur advice

Id: ol6jZFFfyn8

Length: 117min 28sec (7048 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 22 2018