How To REALLY Start Fixing Your Life & Making EVERYTHING Better - Jordan Peterson Motivation

well i would say you know the first decision you have to make is whether you want things to be better or worse and it seems to me that better is a better aim and if that's what you want then you can orient yourself to becoming fully on board with that that's your motif and i would say that's love in the religious senses that love is the desire that all things flourish and you might think that's evident it's like it's not evident this is hard because things are difficult it's easy to become spiteful and bitter and resentment resentful and to be self-denigrating and not to work for your own furtherance because you're ashamed of who you are like deeply ashamed maybe even ashamed to be human the destructive species that we are constantly raping the planet you know that that self-loathing can go very very deep so this is this is hard and it and so but that's the first thing do you want things to be better or worse for you and for the people around you it's like well so that's your goal to make them better perhaps that's your goal when i was a clinician that's what i was always working on with my clients was like i'm on the side of you that's aimed at making things better no unconditional positive regard because there's going to be parts of you that are working at counter purposes to that and we're not on their side they're to be judged and dispensed with not in a not in a contemptuous or dismissive manner but with the knowledge that those elements of your personality are not serving the goal and that doesn't mean that that might be bringing them on board so if you're aggressive that can serve the good that can make you persistent and and and and committed you know and immo and immovable all those things and then the next thing i would say is um try not to try watch for resentment arrogance and deceit they're your enemies and see if you can reduce the influence they have over your life and that's where you have to watch and feel am i lying is this self-serving is what i'm saying making me weak can i feel that am i insisting that i'm right because i'd rather be i'd rather believe that i was right than learn um am i taking revenge in a resentful way [Music] those are good questions of conscience it's highly probable that you're doing that in many places maybe you can dispense with that carefully over time and see what happens [Music] so it's worth running the experiment yeah and and putting our everything into it because that's where we'll really learn you know by by giving giving that endeavor well that's where it's game it's a good aim you know you but you can start with even a little couple of percents of you aim towards that you can start badly and that's a useful thing to know too is like you you know you can improve your life a little bit at a time it's very difficult to be all in you know we talked about that earlier who knows who you could be if you were everything you could be that is that is a limitless case you know what would it be like if you stop doing all the stupid things that you're doing and took advantage of all the opportunities that com came your way and aimed at the highest good who knows what you could be you could certainly be more than you are everyone knows that i think and everyone suffers that knowledge you know that's from it's from that their feelings of inadequacy spread that can be pathologized too you know i mean i know people can have be way harder on themselves than is actually good for them that's not what i mean i i it's hard to distinguish between those even but but it can be done i think what can you be and that's inspiring that's a story that's going to be told and lived out in this life and everybody who watches you live that story will be inspired by that because they'll be inspired to live their own story and that's i think the most important message is you know live live as the hero and allow that to be you know the fable that has grandchildren saying i'm gonna be you know i'm gonna be whoever your name is you know i'm gonna be this person because you lived in such an inspiring way and that's uh you know that's what draws me forward and i think draws all the heroes forward of our of our time and and that's uh that's what we need right now and we don't that isn't done at someone's expense yeah you know not if it's done right it's done with the benefit of everyone else in mind and that's a case i try to make in the book too like if you're acting in your own self-interest because you're a community that stretches across time you have to take your own future self into account constantly and so impulsive selfishness is not useful even selfishly and and so you can make the most out of yourself i believe without taking anything away from anyone else it's it's only beneficial now you know people might be annoyed at you because you're more successful on some dimension than they are and perhaps that hurts but well if to deal with that we'd have to eradicate the possibility of ever being better at anyone of anyone ever being better than anyone else at anything and it doesn't seem to me that we want to push equality that far yes and i think at the darkest edges of the demand for equality have that horror at their root it's like well you're going to take away from everyone what they have to offer by insisting that everything is equal it's like no no you want people to be able to trade the best they have with other people that's a good deal for everyone every ideal is a judge and that makes perfect sense because an ideal is something to which you aspire and the gap between you and that ideal if it's your idea is felt as judgment and so that's one of the reasons people are very afraid to have an ideal to make it that's why i wrote do not hide things in the fog it's like well you should lay out an ideal you should pursue an ideal why wouldn't you well when you make your ideal explicit it turns into your judge well then you can listen to that judge and and move forward and transform but you know it's pretty damn harsh because especially to begin with be positive and ideal especially if you're in a mess god every bit of you is being judged as unworthy there's endless reasons not to want that [Music] the mercy comes from saying this is the ideal but the expectation of judgment that i'm going to be at that right away is false so let me appreciate myself right here where i am in this journey with all of my faults however many they are open up my entire closet of internal monsters pet them on the head and say okay here we go eliminating more of those and becoming more like the ideal surrendering to the journey rather than that expectation and there the judge no longer carries the sting and the bite and the harshness because it's you're judging yourself according to a timeline where you're hoping to get closer to this yes well the hallmark starts to become improvement right right it's like and that's great that's that's that's a that's a really sustaining um um that's a really sustaining process too because technically speaking again um seeing yourself move towards a desired goal is the essence of the positive emotion that nourishes us and i mean that technically that's dopaminergically mediated incentive reward and so you don't have to get to the goal you have to aspire to the goal and move towards it and that then that doesn't even matter if the goal recedes which it will as you approach it because your you know your ability to conjure up what constitutes the ideal is going to become more sophisticated as you move towards it and you might think well that's terrible but it isn't because it means the game doesn't have to end right because if you may you'd hit the idea oh well game over reset you know but no no that isn't going to be how it works it's just it's going to get better and better and better and it's it's why it's life is the perfect game i mean if you have a really good for those of us who've played video games you have a really good video game or even a really good book or even a really good movie series or a show and it comes to the end and you're like oh there's a huge letdown at the termination of this thing that's been incredibly engaging especially if you win yeah exactly you win and you get this moment's satisfaction but it's replaced almost immediately by the disappointment of the cessation of the game and the recognition that you're in a finite game when you really want to be playing the infinite game and that's what life is the infinite game of renewal of life and that's why it's so good we'll never replace it it can't get better and it's hard as hell and it's hard as hell at the same time and that's that's the way we would want it well it seems like that's the way we want it i mean that's another thing i talk about a little bit in the new book is like well when you look back on your past it's generally having done something difficult that you remember positively i would say i'm in terrible pain almost all the time and i do mean terrible if if in my previous life when i was healthy i had ever felt like i always feel now i would have immediately gone to the emergency ward but it's not helpful as far as i can tell as far as i've been informed for that matter there isn't anything that can be done about the condition that i'm in and that's rough i have to remind myself all the time of what i should be doing even to continue living for that matter and i'm constantly reminding myself to be grateful as an act of courage and i i do explain that a little bit beyond order something i really realized about gratitude is that gratitude at one level is an act it's a voluntary act of courage and i'm not trying to make out a case for myself being particularly courageous that is what i mean i mean that it's a risk to be grateful it it's a decision that opens you up in some ways and you're sort of grateful despite it all it's an it's a great gratitude i suppose as a marker of faith and and that faith is even in some sense belief in the impossible despite all this it's good and i have to remind myself of that all the time and i you know i do i do that with prayer i mean i say grace with my wife and me and we only share one meal together but we always say grace and i actually think in some sense that's a really good part of my day that little the time we do that um and that comes as somewhat of a surprise and it's a relatively recent practice for the two of us not that we weren't trying to be grateful before but we've both gone through our respective hells in the last two years um because my wife had a very terrible cancer it was terrible and terrible surgical complications and she was on death's doorstep for months and months and months um and in any case we remind ourselves constantly constantly to be grateful and i'm always trying to watch what i say and and to feel it out so that i don't so that i use my words carefully yeah well in my new book i have a chapter which is rule 11 do not allow yourself to become resentful deceitful or arrogant it's kind of the evil triad as far as i've been able to determine resentment in particular it's bad it's a it's a bad emotion it's useful you can learn a lot by noticing that it occurs resentment tells you one of two things um one is that uh you're that someone's treading on your territory and something needs to be done about it or that you need to grow the hell up and stop complaining and it's hard it isn't necessarily obvious when you feel resentful which of those it is but you need to figure it out you know because you can you can harbor resentment for for unlived life for for a very very long period of time and all it does is corrupt you it hurts you it hurts you physically because it's a stressful emotion anger is a stressful emotion um because your body hyper prepares for action if you're angry because you might get into conflict so and that's a high that's a dangerous situation and so you burn off a lot of psychophysiological resources in anger if you're resentful there's probably something you need to say there's certainly something you need to figure out and so you can you can use it as a guide to further development it's very much useful to to aim at a resentment free existence and that means i suppose that you're taking up enough space [Music] you know you're not there's always a struggle between your domain and the domain of other people everyone competes for everyone else's attention everyone competes for everyone else's time you compete for your own time and if you're resentful it's highly probable that well as i said either you're not standing up for yourself sufficiently or someone is legitimately on your case in which case you well you need to do something about that or you know live with the consequences which is very unpleasant it's not optimal sometimes i suppose it's unavoidable but you know generally there's something that can be done about it some things if you don't address them they just get worse and i've i've been able to see where things are going to go it's kind of like what i mentioned to you earlier that if i watch someone i can generally figure out what they're up to i also can see where things are going and so you know if if if i walk into someone's house and there are things out of order in a particular way if i pay attention to that that's in that's often indicative of something not right in the relationship you know maybe the kitchen's a mess it's like there's no there's food that isn't fresh in the fridge for example or or there's packages up in shelves that haven't been opened for like two years or since the wedding let's say um that's too much chaos in the kitchen something's wrong well what's wrong well there's something wrong in the domestic relationship there the bargaining about who does what in the kitchen hasn't been fought through and so you have to have those fights to put things in order and if you don't then you end up with a worse fight in the future and so the reason that i call things out as far as i can tell the positive reason who knows what the negative reasons are is because i don't want more conflict i'd rather have genuine peace which is very very very hard to obtain people generally obtain peace by sweeping things under the carpet i have another chapter in this new book called don't hide things in the fog and it that's what it concentrates on is pay attention to your negative emotions resentment particularly it's like it's so it's so uh informative you find out where you're immature well do you want to probably not who wants to find out that or you'll find out who's oppressing you and maybe then you can learn to stand up for yourself 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 a 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 it's failure to act often that's the most catastrophic you know i mean i've 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 of 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 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 hey and so and you say well how do you take responsibility for the world and the answer is well you also have to do it with a certain degree of humility because what do you know you know and and this is part of the reason that i'm so opposed to the activist culture on on college campuses you don't teach 18 year olds to go and demonstrate about capitalism you know because they don't know anything and they have problems in their own life that need to be solved that are local and and the local problems aren't trivial you know they're not disciplined they're they're they're not looking at the world in a straight way they're not taking responsibility for themselves or for their actions their sexual actions among others they're not taking responsibility for their family they're not looking at how they could contribute to the community they don't understand the fact that they don't know anything and so they should be taught to start locally and to put things together that they could put together you know to make their bed and to clean up the room and to attend their classes with regularity if they're going to university because that's part of the implicit contract and to straighten up the things around them that are actually within their power to straighten up and then what happens is that if you do that let's say religiously which i suppose would be the same as in a disciplined manner that your realm of influence starts to grow but it grows in a positive way just like you can go you can take you can end up in hell one step at a time and that's extraordinarily well documented you can end up at the opposite place of that one step at a time but it's also that same gradual process you don't get to leap from being a 17 year old not head who doesn't know anything and who isn't disciplined to the critic of judeo-christian society you just don't know enough to do that especially when you can look at your own life and think about how many things that you're doing that you know are wrong that you could fix that you aren't fixing and that's the crucial thing it's it's this isn't this this mode of thinking isn't asking people to stretch themselves beyond what they're capable of it's just asking them to stretch themselves to the point that they are capable of and seeing what happens and that works it works i've had many people write me over the last year and this is a great thing really it's a great thing who said that they stopped started to tell the truth or at least not to lie because who can tell the truth right but at least you cannot lie and that they started to put things in order around them that they could put an order and that you know the positive things just started to happen like mad and they're not nihilistic and they've got a purpose in their life and so you know thank god for that and it does work you are the you are the center of the world has center of the world it has many centers and you do partake in this process of casting the potential of the future into the reality of the present and the past that's what your consciousness does and the quality of what you produce is dependent on your on the ethics of your choice your choice between good and evil in every moment is what determines the course of the world and that's on you it's like well that's deeply meaningful but it's unbelievable it's in its ultimate responsibility in in the literal sense and i think that in order for us to set things right we have to understand that we we have to take on that burden of ultimate responsibility as if it's not only as if it's ours which it is but as if there isn't anything better that we could do and i and one of the things that i found so gratifying about the lecture tour that i've been doing is that and why i keep doing it the live events in particular because we've done about 100 of them now so far is that when i explained to the audiences and this is especially true it seems to be especially true of of men but of young men but not so young even to say look you you have you you have an ethical obligation to lift the heaviest load you can possibly conceive of and that's the primary call to adventure in life and that call to adventure is so worthwhile that it justifies the particularity everybody it's like lights go on oh i see so you need a meaning to set against the suffering and to protect you against that temptation towards malevolence you need that well where's the meaning to be found well it's not happiness it's not short-term pleasure it's not it's not self-development it's not self-esteem it's none of those things that are so focused on on on the individual psyche either it's it's literally the stumbling uphill towards the city of god yes with your burden people go yes well that's where the meaning is and they know that because they know responsible people they know they admire responsible people they already got that say well that's what you should become and they think and not only that that that's what you could become because that's what you are in the deepest sense all right what does my average daily schedule consist of well that's fairly straightforward i get up around somewhere between six and eight and then i work till 10 as as hard as i can flat out every single day so and i've been doing that for with very little variation although it's been much more extreme in the last year for like since 1985 like i work probably well i work i would say 14 hours a day at least 14 hours a day and so that's about 100 hours a week and the time that i don't do that i spend with friends and but mostly with my family and so um yeah and i work as efficiently as i possibly can i'm always trying to do everything i can as fast as i possibly can and i'm accustomed to that because like i said i've been doing it for i've been doing it for 30 years so that's my daily schedule and and i don't know even what i would do if i didn't do that um i have this cottage that i go to although i generally spend time writing up there and i go swimming with my wife and we go canoeing and and i can take a break in that way but most of the time if i take a break even up at the cottage generally what i do is like carpentry and fix the place up and i don't like to be unoccupied i have to be occupied doing something productive all the time because otherwise i'm not pleased with myself and so and you know i decided a long time ago that i was going to try to live a hyper efficient and hyper productive life and so it's been a challenge i it's an enjoyable thing for me to some degree because i'm very interested in trying to figure out how much i can possibly do in the shortest period of time all the time and that keeps you alert and awake and it's a great challenge and it lends my life a substantial amount of meaning and it's it's been very successful so and that efficiency thing is really fun if you guys who are listening are out for a challenge like one of the things that you can i think this heightens the meaning in your life is to try to do difficult things right aim high don't aim so damn high you can't manage it and make sure you break down your aims into reasonably attainable sub goals but you want to aim high and then you want to see how hyper efficient you can get that's a great thing to do in your early 20s is to see okay like discipline yourself you think okay how much work can i do if i load myself right to the maximum how far do i how far can i work how hard can i work until i exhaust myself and then you back off obviously because the optimal amount of working productive engagement let's say is that which is sustainable across decades so you have to you have to learn that but you don't learn that without stretching yourself to your limits to begin with and you know if your life isn't everything it could be and if you're suffering from an excess of meaninglessness well it means you're not oriented in the world of chaos and order properly it's like you could learn to discipline yourself look figure out what figure out what it is that you need to do and that you want to do and then see how efficient you can get because one of the things that's quite fun is to figure out if you have a task i always tell my graduate students this if they're doing an experiment too if you have a task that you have to do it's really interesting to spend a few minutes sometimes hours depending on how long the task is see if you can figure out how to do it from from five to ten times faster it means you'll have to rearrange the way you think about it but you can often do it and that's how extremely productive people get so hyper efficient you know sometimes it means you have to delegate it means sometimes it means you have to bring other people aboard that's delegation as well i suppose um but there's a lot of preconceptions that you hold about who you are and who the world is that you could dispense with that would make you a way more efficient actor in the world it's it's unbelievable the degree to which our sanity depends on our functioning sociological structure and and here's why well first of all you kind of need to know what to do every day you have to have a routine because you're an animal you know and you know if you have a dog or a cat dogs are a really good example this dogs like routine they like to be walked the number of times a day that they're supposed to be walked and they get quite sick very rapidly if you don't if you don't recognize their their days children are exactly the same way now you can overdo it right but still you know you need to know approximately when you should get up should be approximately the same every day you need to know approximately you're going when you're going to eat you need to know what you're going to eat you need to know who you're going to eat with you need to know where to buy your food it's like 80 percent of your life seventy percent of your life something like that consists of those things that you do every single day that you repeat well so you need structure you need predictability and you need more of it than you think just to keep you sane now if you're lucky and and maybe a bit odd you can deviate five percent from the norm or ten percent from the norm or something like that carefully and cautiously as long as the rest of you is all well ordered in a normative manner you might be able to get away with that and you might be able to sustain it across time and people might be able to tolerate you if you do it or maybe you'll get really lucky and you happen to be creative but reasonably well put together people will actually be happy that there's something idiosyncratic and unique about you but even under those circumstances mostly what you want is to have a routine that's disciplined that's predictable and bloody well stick to it you're going to be way healthier and happier and saner if you do that and then the other thing that you need because this is one of the things the psychoanalyst got wrong i think is that they overestimated the degree to which sanity was a consequence of internal of being properly structured internally you know because from the psychoanalytic point of view you're sort of an ego and that ego is inside you and of course it rests on an unconscious structure but the purpose of psychoanal analysis is to sort out that unconscious structure and the ego on top of it and to make you a fully functioning and autonomous individual but there's a problem with that because the reason that you're saying as a fully functional and autonomous human being isn't because you've organized your psyche even though that's important the reason that you're saying if you're away if you have a well organized unconscious and ego is because other people can tolerate having you around for reasonably extensive periods of time and will cuff you across the back of the head every time you do something so stupid that people will dislike you permanently if you continue and so what people are doing to each other all the time just non-stop is broadcasting sanity signals back and forth right it's like you smile at people if they're well if they're not not only behaving properly but behaving in a way that you would like to see them continue to behave you frown at them if they're not you ignore them if they're not you shun them you you roll your eyes at them you manifest a disgust face you don't listen to them you interrupt them you won't cooperate with them you won't compete with them it's like you're blasting signals at other people about how to regulate their behavior so frequently well it just makes up all of your social interaction that's why we face each other and we have emotional displays on our face and we're looking at each other's eyes and we know exactly we know as much as we can about what's going on with each other given that we don't have immediate access to the contents of their consciousness and so partly what you're doing with your routine is establishing yourself as a credible reliable trustworthy potentially interesting human being who isn't going to do anything too erratic at any moment and everyone else is around there tapping you into shape making sure that that's exactly what you are and that's how you stay sane and so what happens to people too if they don't have a routine and they get isolated is they start to drift and they drift badly because the world is too complicated for you to keep it organized all by yourself you just cannot do it so a lot of our so we outsource the problem of sanity and it's very intelligent that we outsource the problem of sanity because sanity is an impossibly complex problem and so the way that we manage the incredibly complex problem is we have a very large number of brains working simultaneously on the problem all the time [Music] do you plan your day much or your time generally does this lead to higher productivity yes i plan my day obsessively my calendar is always absolutely full and often weeks in advance and i plan in the morning especially when i'm on top of things and i plan each hour and i probably plan each minute and yes it leads to way higher productivity you know you you decide what your goals are going to be you place them in the calendar use the calendar as your friend eh because what you want to do with the calendar is design a day that you want to have or a day that would be good for you and a day that would be good for you is one that you're that you're uh you know when you end the day you feel that you've moved moved yourself ahead towards your valued goals and that you've kept chaos under control that enables you to sleep soundly and with a good conscience and to know that the next day is going to be at least not worse than that day planning is unbelievably useful you need to figure out what it is that you're aiming at and why and then you need to figure out how you're going to break that down over the months and the weeks and the days but i would approach your calendar like it's your best friend you think okay i'm going to design a week man that i really want to have and that means you can schedule in leisure and all the things that you want to do which which you absolutely should do and it's also quite fun to um give yourself minimal time to do something complicated because it's quite challenging to see if you can do far more than you thought in far less time and so that's a fun game and the other thing you can do is like if you're avoiding something you could schedule in five minutes of it say well like if you're avoiding looking at some bills because you're afraid of them you know your first step might be to schedule in five minutes where you just look at the bill you don't do anything else and you know you might be able to entice yourself into doing that so but i would say learning to plan is unbelievably useful to schedule your time because that's your life you know but schedule the life you want that means you have to schedule your responsibilities off obviously because responsibilities are those things that ruin your life if you don't fulfill them maybe you decide you want to clean your room and it's a hell of a mess and you're working with the therapist and you know he says look just open one of the drawers and look at it because you've been avoiding it for five years just that's all you have to do this week open it and look at it and you know on the one hand that's so trivial and it's pathetic but on the other hand no it's not and so often the person will come back and say well that i did it but it was just stupid it's like no it wasn't your room isn't clean but you opened the damn drawer and now it's time to give yourself a pat on the back and but to do that you have to admit in some sense you have to admit how pathetic you actually are you know you have to admit how pathetic you are before you can reward yourself and that's okay because that that patheticness well it's sort of built in to your to the fact that you're vulnerable you know and you need a small step and you need a reward that's okay it's okay that that's the case you know when you see people what they'll do is they'll say well that you know that's just a good indication of how useless i am you know that that's all i can do so they punish themselves well then you have an opportunity you say to them look there's two things going on here you can't clean up your room that's a problem but you also can't reward yourself properly so we need to take that apart and fix that so that you can reward yourself properly and that's also why you know when i suggested to people that they clean up the rooms the reason i did that was because i actually knew how difficult that is because to get your room in order you there's no way you can get your surroundings in order without simultaneously getting yourself in order at least to some degree and it's exact for exactly the reasons i just discussed what you'll find is the reason the mess is there is because of psychological mess you know assuming it's not you didn't just move or something you know what i mean there might be obvious situational contributors but generally speaking is the mess the external mess is absolutely isomorphic with the in individual mess and so it's really powerful to order and beautify something in your immediate environments it's unbelievably powerful to do that you learn a tremendous amount you also may find for example maybe your family is dysfunctional and part of the reason that your room is such a bloody mess is because if you ever took any steps to address it they would punish you because as soon as you start to clean up your room then you cast a dim light on their mess and so they see you taking a step forward they're going to whack you because now you're an ideal that's judging them so you deal with someone who is in a dysfunctional family and you ask them to do something positive to move forward and then you watch the resistances that emerge and you've got a picture of the pathology in the family and that can help the person to start to sort that through because maybe they can say it like you have to do a lot of negotiating and thinking before this is a possibility but maybe you say well look you have to have a talk with your mom you have to say look mom i'm doing something good here and your reaction is to punish me what the hell is up with that now that's a complicated conversation and maybe you have to start with something even smaller than that but you get the point you know these things aren't simple they're not simple at all and luckily though they're right in front of you you can in fact do it and you'll learn a lot from doing it if you feel like you're built for more if you want to grow if you want to improve if you want to become a better human but you don't have people around you that also want to you're scared that you're going to lose friends you're scared that you're going to be alone as you start to go out on a journey of self-improvement how can people find the courage to do that well one thing they can do is contemplate the consequences of not doing it you lose friends well [Music] you're going to lose the friends who don't want the best for you those the friends you want in 10 years i mean you lose friends well maybe you gain new friends maybe you gain better friends or maybe miracle of miracles your friends pick up their their mess too and move forward maybe not and i'm not i'm not naively optimistic about such things but you have to contemplate the price you pay for inaction and this is something i did with my clients all the time it's like well i don't want to change jobs well no wonder it's like you have to go put yourself out to be interviewed you have to send out 500 resumes you have to be rejected 499 times you have to polish your interview skills you have to update your cv which means you have to take a real look at the inadequacies in your preparation um and maybe you won't find a better job it's like no wonder you're afraid of that okay you're in this job you hate and it's 10 years from now how does that look think about that you already know you're in a little hell you know perfectly well it's going to get worse which is more frightening action or inaction well the thing about inaction is you're blind to it eh so you can hide from it well that's chapter three again do not hide things in the fog do not make the assumption that inaction has no price and so then you think i'm terrified of this but i'm even more terrified of that and you know people have asked me for example [Music] i suppose why i was willing or am willing to engage in the troublesome process of objecting when i think something isn't going well because i'm more afraid of the consequences of inappropriate silence it's not that i'm brave it's that i'm more terrified of the alternative so so i don't engage in the alternative and i i don't know maybe i have a knack for that to some degree maybe it's a consequence of clinical training but you know i can walk into people's houses and look around and i think okay there's something up here and i i mean people have that ability you know i walked into a house once and and the dishwasher was in the middle of the kitchen and and it was undone and had obviously been there for a couple of weeks and the fridge had food in it that shouldn't was no longer food and the cupboards had unopened wedding gifts in them like five years after the marriage i thought there's a lot of things in this household that are being swept under the rug and that was all laid out in in the in the practical environs it's like they hadn't negotiated who was responsible for cleaning the fridge they hadn't even been able to open their wedding gifts it's like something's rotten deeply so and so i i could see where that was headed without a tremendous amount of effort on the part of the p and it didn't work they were divorced you know a couple of years after that in a very ugly manner for very ugly reasons well i knew where that was headed you know and under different circumstances i would have said what the hell is that box doing there oh you know it's nothing yeah no wrong it's not nothing that's a little portal to hell i can see it and so could you if you looked but you won't and i mean that literally because people won't look they'll walk into a room like that and they will not look at that thing absolutely and that's because if they look they'd see and they don't want to see and no wonder but the consequence of blindness is worse it's it's worse i mean i have this you know my family is would like some peace because i seem to be embroiled in one thing after another and you know they have a point but peace is very hard to obtain and i can't be blind to what i see in the broader world around me not if i see it i see it it's like there it is i'm gonna say something the better or worse life is short how can we add a sense of urgency to it well i i would say by reminding yourself that life is short that's that's that'll add a sense of urgency by noticing you know i calculated i don't know my parents are when my parents were in their 70s 60s perhaps i i usually saw them about once every two years we communicate a lot more than that but we live a long ways apart so i calculated you know well my dad's probably going to live till his mid 80s or late you know somewhere in there and he's six he's 70 let's say i'm going to see him 40 more times it's like okay 40 more times that's urgent so you better get it right because you don't have it you don't have that many opportunities you know it's the same when you're formulating relationships in your adolescence late adolescence in early adulthood you don't have that many experiments to run you know and you get you get old a lot faster than you think so attempt attention attention attention is an underrated um faculty it's not the same as thinking it's watching to see what's there in front of your eyes and and to guide yourself as a consequence of what you perceive it's the it's the faculty that transforms thought if you let it so and your conscience alerts you as well tick tick tick you know you're wasting time and very few people are happy with that some are burdened by it more than others but virtually no one escapes that voice of conscience i suppose to some degree that's that's the willingness not to engage in self-deception chapter 3 and beyond order is about that people don't really repress the things they don't want to face they just fail to unpack them you know like maybe you're on youtube regularly and every time you shut the computer off you feel somewhat disgusted but you don't pay any attention to that for a while for two years but then you decide you're going to pay attention then you find out well the reason you're disgusted is because you're wasting your life and you know it and that disgust is indicating that but unless you attend to the disgust and unpack it let it reveal itself as informative you don't know what the message is you just have a sense of disquiet it's not easy to transform that sense of disquiet into an actionable plan and often you have to talk to someone about it as well you have to discover so it's not like you're repressing the emotion exactly it's that you don't undergo the difficult process necessary to unpack it here's an example of the pareto distribution huh you know there's a rule of thumb that if you run a company that 20 of your employees do 80 of the work or the 20 percent of your customers are responsible for 80 of your sales or the 20 of them are responsible for 80 of the customer service calls same thing but that's not exactly the rule the rule is worse than that the rule is in a given domain the square root of the number of people operating in that domain do half the productive work so you think well you have 10 employees three of them do half the work it's like yeah okay what if you have 100 employees then 10 of them do half the work what if you have a thousand employees well then it's 30 and if it's 10 000 employees then it's a hundred and this actually turns out to be a rather iron-clad rule it it it applies across very very many situations it applies for example to the mass of stars and the size of cities so you can see how universal it is as a law and it's it's something like those that have more get more and those that have less get less that's the matthew principle right to those who have everything more will be given from those who have nothing everything will be taken away and the economists sometimes call that the matthew principle and so what what that lays out is a world that's rife with inequality so you know you you hear this idea that i think it's the 85 richest people in the world have more money than the bottom two billion that's a pareto distribution phenomena and you might say to hell with capitalism for producing that it's like sorry you got your diagnosis wrong it's a natural law it's no matter what society you study you get a pareto distribution of wealth you get a pareto distribution of number of records recorded you get a pareto distribution of number of songs written or goals scored like any creative product has that characteristic and it's partly because as you start to become successful let's say people offer you more and more opportunities and as you start to fail people move away from you and you plummet and so okay so that's rough so what it is what it means is that there is always a landscape of inequality and i'm not saying that we shouldn't do anything about it although i am saying that we don't know what to do about it that's the thing you know because you can modify the pareto distribution of wealth let's say but if you but we don't know how to do it without maybe disrupting the system so completely that it collapses which is what happened in the soviet union for example and in maoist china they were trying at least in principle to adjust inequality but the cure was far worse than the disease and the the truth of the matter is we actually don't know technically how much inequality there has to be to generate wealth we can guess and you could say well there should be less and you might say well there should be more if you're left-wing you'd say less and if they're if you're right-wing you'd say well we'll just let the inequality flourish but we do know that it's inevitable and we also know that we don't know how to regulate it so there is inequality what that means is there's always going to be people around that are better at something than you are and the and that's a that's a problem because you can get jealous and you can get bitter and you can get resentful and worse you can get hopeless i have this this friend of mine he told me something so funny um he was he was decrying his his lack of success in the world and he compared himself to his roommate and uh he said you know his roommate his college roommate was doing much better than he was and his bloody roommate was elon musk it's like really like it's like oh you're not doing as well as elon musk well it's i mean you can see it would take it rather personally because they were roommates and everything it wasn't like he was doing badly like he was doing pretty damn well it's like i'm not as good as elon musk it's like yeah well you and like seven billion other people you know but but i thought it was instructive because well because you have to be careful who you compare yourself to now you can't just not compare yourself to others to successful people right because then you don't have anything to aim at and one of the things i learned from jung this was a cool thing i'm going to make a real lateral move here jung thought the book of revelation was appended to the bible because the christ in the gospels was too merciful he was too nice a guy now he's an ideal right and jung said wait a second an ideal is always a judge that's the thing about an ideal because you're not as good as your ideal so your ideal is a judge revelation has christ coming back as a judge and that was jung's explanation at the level of the collective unconscious for the pasting of that remarkably strange and terrible book onto the end of the of the of the bible so well anyways my point is is an ideal is you need an ideal because you have nothing to aim at but an ideal is a judge and you always fall short of the ideal so how the hell can you have the benefits of having an ideal without having the crushing blow that goes along with having the judge that always regards you as insufficient so i was trying to work that out in the chapter and this is something i've had to work out a lot as a clinical psychologist it's like well let's say you need a goal but we don't want to let your distance from the goal crush you so you got to set up a goal and then you got to make the goal break the goal down into parts so that you can move towards it you have a fairly high likelihood of doing it so that's a bit of practical i wouldn't say advice it's it's because it's better than advice it's it's some practical knowledge about how to go about achieving a name set a high aim but differentiate it down so you know what the next step is and then make the next step difficult enough so you have to push yourself past where you are but but also provide yourself with a reasonable probability of success it's also what you do with children right you want to push them because they need to grow up and be more than they are right but you don't want to crush them with constant failures so what you do is aim high and make the goal proc difficult but proximal so anyways so that's one one one one way of looking at it but then the next thing is you know uh i've i've had clients many clients in their 30s who are trying to this is more true with women i would say a lot of women who are very high achieving who establish their career goals at 30 and then want to differentiate their differentiate out their life they want to have a husband they want to have a family they're trying to figure out how to do that and one of the things i've noticed that around 30 you really have to stop comparing yourself in some ways to other people and the reason for that is that the particularities of your life are so idiosyncratic that there isn't anyone really all that much like you you know because the details of your life happen to matter and so maybe you compare yourself to some rock star or something like that and you know the person's rich and famous and glamorous and all that but you know they're alcoholic and they use too much cocaine and they've had three divorces and it's like how the hell do you make sense out of that is that someone that you should judge yourself harshly against or not the answer is you don't know because you don't know all the details of their lives and who do you know that you can compare yourself to that's easy you yesterday so here's a good goal it's something like well aim high and i really mean that it's like and we'll talk about that a little bit too aim high but use as your control yourself it's like so your goal is to make today some tiny increment better than yesterday and you can use better you can define better yourself this doesn't have to be some imposition of external morality you know you know where you're weak and insufficient where you could improve you think okay well this is what i'm like yesterday if i did this little thing things would be just an increment better and well that's a great thing because you get the ball rolling and incremental improvement is unstoppable you can actually implement it and it starts to generate paredo distribution like consequences it starts to compound and i've seen that happen in people's lives over and over people write me all the time and tell me that they're doing that but i've seen that happen in people's lives continually they make a goal a goal that the goal should be how could i conceive of my life so that if i had that life it would clearly be worth living so i wouldn't have to be bitter resentful deceitful arrogant and vengeful like that's sort of the bottom line right because that's what endless failure does to you it's not good and and and that's what life without purpose and the goal does to you as well because life is very hard so you think okay well i need to adopt a mode of being that would justify my suffering and you can ask yourself that question what would make this worthwhile need i i quote ninja i think in that chapter he said he who has a why can bear almost any how that's a lovely line man i mean it's a lovely line and it's really worth thinking about so you think well how do i manage all this misery and suffering and futility it's like well i need to figure out what i would have to do in order to make that clearly worthwhile and so then you have your goal and then you think well i need to move towards that incrementally because i'm kind of useless and can only do so much and maybe not even that and but all i have to do is be a little bit better than my my miserable self yesterday and that'll propel you forward very rapidly and and you can succeed at it which is also really lovely because why not set yourself up for success you know because otherwise you droop around like a number 10 lobster and you know that's just not good you get all pinchy when that happens and it's not a good thing there's this cat that lives across the street from us called ginger and ginger's a siamese cat and cats really aren't domesticated technically speaking they're still wild animals but they kind of like people god only knows why but they do you know and so ginger will come wandering over and our dog looks at her but they're friends and and then she'd kind of mosey over and let you pet her if she was feeling like it that day and you know you have to look for those little bit of that little bit of sparkling crystal in the darkness when things are bad you have to look and see where things are still beautiful and where there's still something that's sustaining and you know you narrow your time frame and you be grateful for what you have and that can get you through some very dark times and maybe even successfully if you're lucky but even if unsuccessfully then maybe it's only tragic and not absolute hell and you can do that you know in the worst situation you can make it only tragic and not hell and there's a big gap between tragedy and hell you know there's nothing worse at a deathbed than to see the people there fighting the death is bad enough but you can take that as terrible as it is and make it into something that's absolutely unbearable and maybe i think and this is sort of what i closed the book with is this idea is that if we didn't all attempt to make terrible things even worse than they are then maybe we could tolerate the terrible things that we have to put up with in order to exist and maybe we could make the world into a better place you know and it's what we should be doing and what we could be doing because we don't have anything better to do and that's what the book is about and that's the end of 12 rules for life [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: SUCCESS CHASERS

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Keywords: success chasers, jordan peterson success chasers, jordan b peterson, jordan peterson, jordan peterson motivation, jordan peterson motivational video, success chasers jordan peterson, jordan peterson life advice, jordan peterson 2021, how to improve your life, jordan peterson fix your life, how to fix your life, start fixing your life in 2021, start fixing your life, How To REALLY Start Fixing Your Life & Making EVERYTHING Better, how to start fixing your life, live as the hero

Id: GswLWGOl_1o

Length: 58min 41sec (3521 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 28 2021