Jordan Peterson: 3 Hours for the NEXT 30 Years of Your LIFE (MUST WATCH)

[Music] don't overestimate yourself but don't underestimate who you could be that's a much better way of thinking about it you know psychologists of the careless sort i would say have been pushing the idea of self-esteem for a very long time probably since the early 60s you should be content with yourself the way you are it's like no you shouldn't seriously like you're nowhere near what you could be you're not even close right and so that's a that's a way more optimistic message like it's you ain't seen nothing yet that's the right message and so i would say don't overestimate yourself now but don't underestimate your future self and you have so much influence as an individual if you get your act together that you can't believe it there isn't anything that has more influence than that you have all the power that there is right where you are to put things right around you you start now you develop a noble vision right of who you could be you start to put that into practice develop some discipline familiarize yourself with the great works of the past learn to read learn to write learn to speak learn to think man you'll be deadly [Applause] [Music] what you could bring to the table that hasn't been brought to the table for years is an emphasis on individual responsibility and the the right way to do that as far as i'm concerned is to start with yourselves is develop a vision for your life you start to think about if you could be who you could be what would that look like that's the beginning of a mature philosophy of being if you could be the person that you would admire who would that person be how would you configure yourself how would you configure your career your education your family your your the use of time outside of work if you wanted to be the noblest person that you could be who was adopting the maximal amount of responsibility how would that look then you need a strategy to put that into place and that's the way you change things properly and also the way you do the least amount of harm while you're changing them and so it should be an individual's an individual focused set of ideas and that way you can sidestep the identity politics traps and that would be a very good thing and i think a modern conservatism which isn't really all that distinguishable from a classical liberalism as it turns out is to put tremendous stress on the responsibility of the individual and one of the things that's wonderful about that as far as i'm concerned and i made reference to this a few minutes ago is that you need a meaning to offset the tragedy of life otherwise you just suffer stupidly and you tend to make people around you suffer the same way the way that you find that meaning is by adopting as much responsibility as you can and what's also so fascinating about that is you know you you're you're characterized by an indefinite potential it isn't easy to understand exactly what that is that potential but you know it's what people call you on when they say you know you're not living up to your potential whatever that is that potential will be called forth from you as a consequence of adoption of responsibility because it won't manifest itself unless you take on a load you're not going to develop in all the ways you could develop unless you set yourself a serious challenge because it takes the challenge to pull that out of you and also to motivate you to rid yourself of all the weaknesses and personality flaws that you've accumulated across the years and to let those disappear and burn off you you need to load yourself up before the demands of life will be such that you will discipline yourself properly and a noble goal is a very good way of of beginning that the truth of the matter is as far as i'm concerned that each of us has enough potential character power of character let's say if it's properly manifested to contend with that in a noble way and to rise above it and to transcend and to deal with it in large part because we can make the world a much better place than it is for each of us individually and for our families and for our community and we can constrain the malevolence at least in our own hearts and and perhaps have a positive effect on those around us as a consequence and that actually does make things better and we actually can do that and that's where the meaning in life is to be found and that meaning you know that goes along with the adoption of that kind of responsibility is actually the antidote to the suffering you know that perfectly well because all of you need a reason to get out of bed in the morning especially on a rough morning you know when things aren't going so well in your life and there will be plenty of times when things aren't going so well in your life and you still need a reason to get up and get moving and get out there and if you have adopted the responsibility at an individual level to make things better given how bad they are if you've adopted the responsibility to make things better then you have a reason to get up and so one of the things that i've been stressing to people is that there's very little difference between the meaning in life that gives you fulfillment and that engages you in existence and the willingness to shoulder as much individual responsibility as you can possibly handle those are the same things and that's a really useful thing to know and you kind of know this right everybody knows this because first of all if you're not living up to your responsibilities even to take care of yourself the probability that you're going to be ashamed of that at some level is extraordinarily high and so your own soul tells you that you're in error so to speak but also if you look at who you spontaneously admire which is a good indication of where where your value system really sits you'll see that the people you admire are always people who take responsibility for themselves and responsibility for their family and responsibility for their community [Music] get your act together you've got things to do in the world the absence of your full being in the world leaves a hole that that is filled by terrible things at minimum so at minimum you have an ethical responsibility to ensure that the world doesn't evolve into something approximating hell and at maximum you have the responsibility again the ethical and it's a heavy ethical responsibility to do everything that's in your power to make things as good as you can possibly make them in this sophisticated manner that takes you and your family and your community into account and it's on you right and that's meaning you know people say well i'd like to have a meaningful life it's like well fair enough but the price that you pay for the meaning that transcends tragedy is the adoption of responsibility for the catastrophe of existence but that ennobles you right it makes you into someone strong and someone competent in someone who who's worthwhile and who lives in a manner that justifies their own suffering and that's what there's nothing better than you could possibly do than that [Music] although there is a very large number of ways of looking at the world or perhaps a near infinite number of ways of looking at the world there isn't a near infinite number of ways of acting in the world in a manner that actually is successful so and so there are constraints on how you can how you can interact with the world in a successful manner let's assume that you don't want undue pain and anxiety we could just start with that and i think that's a reasonable proposition you can tolerate some pain and anxiety if it's in the service of something greater obviously but i just mean pointless pain and anxiety we don't want any more of that than is necessary and that means that you have to take care of yourself to some degree but the manner in which you take care of yourself is severely constrained this is partly what why you have to be intelligent and careful and plot your way through life properly you have to take care of yourself today [Music] but you have to take care of yourself in it today in a way that doesn't interfere with you taking care of yourself tomorrow and next week and next month the next year and five years from now and 10 years from now so you can't do just what you want to in the next hour because if it's impulsive pleasure seeking let's say something like that excess alcohol use or excess drug use or careless sexual behavior or betrayal of people to to gain you some gain you something in the moment you're going to pay for that you're going to pay for it tomorrow you're going to pay for it next week and next month the next year so because you're going to exist in the future and because you have to live with yourself there's only a certain number of ways that you can act that are going to work but it's more than that it's not just that you're responsible to your future self or the set of all your future selves is that you also have to act in a way that works for your family because otherwise your family is going to disintegrate and break down and cause you and them all sorts of misery and grief and and not just your family now but also your family into the future and then not just your family either but also your community and so you have to set your aspirations so that they serve you in the broadest sense over a long period of time and they also serve your family and they also serve your community and that's a very tight set of constraints and i think that the best solution to that set of constraints from a philosophical perspective or maybe even a theological perspective is to view the world as a place not of groups but of individuals of sovereign individuals who are responsible for their destinies responsible for their families and for their communities you learn to use minimal necessary force it's like you don't defend yourself any more than you have to like be careful don't push any harder than you need to because all you do is you generate a counter force by by pushing harder than you need to and then and then you're in conflict and you think well i like a little conflict it's like look fair enough a little conflict man no problem it keeps your life kind of interesting and maybe that's on the problem-solving edge but a little conflict can become a lot of conflict very very rapidly and if you have any sense at all that's not what you want you know especially if you have i called the course personality transformation i think you could think about that as a restatement of the idea of being and becoming and that's what you are you're for whatever that means you're an entity that both is and is transforming and there's a rule that goes along with that which is don't sacrifice who you could be for who you are which means if you have to choose to transform in a positive direction or maintain your current position then it's better to transform in a positive direction who are you you're the thing that transforms who you are but on top of that you're the thing that transforms who you are you are the thing that isn't you're the thing that becomes and you should put the thing that becomes at a higher place than the thing that is that means you also have to allow yourself to shake off those things about you that you might be pathologically attached to habits and people for that matter ways of thinking all of those things you have to allow yourself to shake those off and that's more like a burning and you might say well i don't know what i should leave behind and the answer to that is that's a lie you know some of the things that you should leave behind you all you have to do is ask yourself you'll come up with a list instantly of 100 stupid things that you're doing that you know you could stop doing some of them maybe you don't know you could stop doing it's like well fine leave those alone for now but there's a bunch of things you perfectly know well that you could stop doing that would improve your life everything that makes you anxious or everything that makes you upset is the same as every other thing that's ever made you upset all those things that have made you upset that you've never dealt with they're all laying down there at the bottom of your nasty little soul waiting to pop themselves up in some in some random utterance right and so then you go in there at your peril because if you're the person who pokes around in that then you're going to get blasted with all of that stuff it's going to come out like almost uncontrollably then then you can sort it out what's behind the game you're playing and the answer to that is all the world that you're ignoring always you're trying to do well in a class and you get a bad grade why did i get this c minus what is it the answer is you don't know do you not know what you thought you knew are you not who you think you are do you not work hard enough are your values not organized properly do you misuse your time are you in the wrong field have is the way you're construing your life completely inappropriate are you acting out what your parents wanted you to do it and you're pissed off about it so you're only running at 40 percent despite them despite the fact that they're paying 25 000 a year for your education when you when you're in the world and something objects to you something that matters objects to you then in the entire unrealized world is in that thing that objects it's all tangled up inside it that's why it's the great dragon of chaos it's everything that's outside of your conceptual structure and what is that it's everything that lurks outside of your of your walled city well you get your c minus and you don't do anything about it maybe you're a little bitter and more resentful and your study habits get a little worse so the next time you get like a d plus and then you collect a bunch of f's and then you stop going to school then you stop showering right then you end up jumping off the bridge and so that's a that's that's how the dragon eats you when you don't pay attention to it and so it's no bloody wonder that people avoid you know it's really no wonder that they avoid because error messages contained within them the implicit world now the upside of that is well they contain within them the implicit world and the world isn't all negative the c minus can be the best gift you ever had and that's the gold that the dragon hoards right that's exactly what that means every time you try to learn something you're going to make a mistake because what do you know so you're going to make mistakes and if the rule is every time you make a mistake you're going to go jump off the bridge then that's not a useful problem-solving strategy and so when you make a mistake you don't get to beat yourself to death with a club you've got a problem something has objected to you then the question is well what does that mean well maybe you're not looking at the world right maybe your goals are wrong maybe you're not acting properly it's okay so the question that arises when an obstacle emerges is which part of this structure needs attention and the first answer can't be all of it right because there's a piece that's broken somewhere and then you might think well let's let's assume it's a little piece to begin with that's the right mechanism watch the people around you like a hawk whenever they do something that you think is good you tell them try to do something good and creep right back into their persona and they'll look around see if anyone noticed and sometimes they'll get punished for it and then well then they won't do it again so don't do that but then now and then you think hey i saw you do this it was actually that was actually pretty good i know you don't want to because you really want to dominate them and you don't you don't want them thriving because then they'd be a they'd be competition to you and you wouldn't be able to go complain to your mother about what a miserable partner you have and you know how delightful that is so you have to forego all that pleasure if you actually helped your person develop so you got to get over all that it's really annoying that's dangerous because they might outshine you well good then you have someone to compare yourself to that'd be a good deal it's really rough with kids you know because parents will stop their children from succeeding beyond them they get jealous and then they'll put them down and then they have kids that do not like them and they'll pay for it if if you aren't suffering from self-imposed misery and you're only suffering from inescapable misery maybe you could handle that and you know you could you could survive you could bear it and and even maybe without becoming irredeemably corrupt so the goal would be well yeah life is a rat's nest of miseries and maybe it has no ultimate meaning we could say that if we're feeling particularly pessimistic but it still leaves one question open which is if you didn't do everything you could to make it worse how good could you make it be and the least answer is well it it could be tragedy but maybe not hell that's the most pessimistic proper statement the worst case outcome in the worst of all possible worlds is that your life could be tragic but not hell you're at your mother's death bed and all you you and all your idiot siblings are arguing well that's the difference between tragedy and hell you walk away from a situation like that sick of yourself and sick of everything else too and you know it's often the case that tragic circumstances bring out the dragons because the stress is high and all those things that people haven't dealt with they don't have the energy to repress and and all the bitterness comes pouring forward if you were all gathered around the bed of someone close who was dying could you manage it if the answer is no it's like well put your life together because it's gonna happen and you should be the person who's there that can do it and do it properly and then maybe you'd find that it isn't the sort of thing that will undermine your faith in life itself don't want to be the thing that clings so desperately to the raft that you can't let go when someone comes to rescue you right you don't want to be that so then you think well exactly what are you you're not the chaos you're not the plan maybe you're the thing that confronts the obstacle and then when you know even further that the obstacle is not only an obstacle but opportunity itself are you so sure that this is a problem is that the only way that you can look at it or is it an opportunity and maybe you're in the order and maybe you're in the chaos but those can flip on you and maybe you shouldn't be in either of those places maybe you should be right in the middle that's when you go down you see when you're down in chaos and you don't know what the hell is going on you have to rediscover the values that orient people have oriented people forever that's what you have to discover so for example when i'm dealing with people who have post-traumatic stress disorder and they've usually encountered someone malevolent they have to relearn the description of good and evil because if they don't they have no framework they're lost they think well there's a malevolence afoot in the world because the only thing that a monster won't mess with is another monster and you might say well i don't want to transform myself into a monster it's like you don't have a choice you can either be a pathetic monster or you can be a monster with some power those are your options there's no non-monster alternative weak or strong and i don't mean strong like dominating tyrant strength that isn't what i mean at all i mean strength like functioning at a funeral strength and that's a kind of monstrosity and when you're down in chaos that's what you have to rediscover you want to be safe forget that that's not in the cards you're not going to be safe well then you have to be meta safe and that's way better because then you're not safe but you know how to cope with danger well fine that solves the problem and maybe it's even a better solution because if you're safe then you just have to stay in your burrow but if you can confront danger then you could go wherever you want and you can have an adventure and maybe that's what you need to do is to go out and have an adventure so you don't even want safety because how exciting is that let's say we made you perfectly safe all that you had to do is eat cakes and worry yourself with the continuation of the species what would you do you'd smash it all down as soon as you possibly could just so you had something interesting and challenging to do so you don't want safety you want to be able to cope with danger that's a whole different thing you don't get to be safe ever again well so what happens you get to be stronger well hey turns out that's a better bargain anyways i read this this piece of work by jung a long while back and it was a meditation on the injunction to treat your neighbor as as you would like to be treated and what jung pointed out which i really liked was that that wasn't an injunction to be nice to other people it was an invitation to reciprocity it was something like this it's like you should figure out how you would like to be treated like you were taking care of yourself it's like imagine you had a child that you really cared for and and someone said well people will treat this child exactly like you want them to but you have to figure out what that is how do you want your child to be treated you don't want everyone just to be nice to them you know you want people to challenge them and you want people to discipline them and you want people to tell them when he's wrong it's like you don't just want everyone to be nice that's that's pathetic it's pathetic there's there's no challenge in that you want to treat other people like you would like to be treated well then you have to figure out how would you like to be treated well you'd like people to fawn all over you and just lay everything at your feet it's like no that's that's not something you'd wish for for someone that you were taking care of then there's an additional problem which is it's often the case that people will treat other people better than they treat themselves it's a bit of a meditation on why people don't like themselves very much i think there's two reasons really and one is that we're we're fragile and damageable and imperfect in multiple dimensions all the time and that often just gets worse it gets lots of things get worse as you get old for example so it's not necessarily that easy for a self-conscious being who's extraordinarily aware of his or her own fragility and but not just fragility foolishness and errors his like you know yourself better than anyone else knows you and you might have a certain amount of dislike for someone you know because of something they did but you know everything you did jesus that's a drag man you know you have to carry that along behind like really i did that you know you're weak and kind of useless and prone to temptation and you know all those things you know that just shouldn't be that way and then you're also capable of pretty vicious acts of malevolence and so you also know that about yourself and so it's a real existential question for people it's like why the hell should you take care of something as sorry and wretched as you are despite the fact that you're not all that you could be the proper attitude to have towards yourself is the attitude that you would have towards someone that you genuinely cared for and that it's incumbent on you to act as if you genuinely care for yourself just like you would act towards someone that you actually cared about some other person it's a reversal in some sense of the golden rule right and it's a discussion of why that's necessary and also more than that it's a discussion of why why you have a moral obligation to do that it's not just that you should because it would be better for you it's you actually have a moral obligation to do that i think because you make the world a much worse place if you don't take care of yourself so you should bloody well take care of yourself you know [Music] it's partly because you have something valuable to bring into the world that's the thing about being an individual it's the thing that western civilization has always recognized that as an individual you have a light that you have to bring into the world and that if you don't bring it into the world the world is a dimmer place and that's a bad thing because when the world is a dim place it can get very very very dark you need to take care of yourself because you're in the best position to do that and it's necessary for you to take care of yourself despite the fact that we're mortal and vulnerable and self-conscious and capable not only capable of doing terrible things but actually do them despite all that you you're still you still have that responsibility i wanted to you know hit the question as hard as i can to try to figure out why people are have are contemptuous of themselves and there's plenty of reason that's for sure but the reasons do not justify the mistreatment of yourself make friends with people who want the best for you and that's a meditation on my own childhood and adolescence to some degree i had friends who wanted the best for me and friends who didn't and like you have an ethical responsibility to take care of yourself you have an ethical responsibility to surround yourself with people who have the courage and and faith and wisdom to wish you well when you've done something good and to stop you when you're doing something destructive and if your friends aren't like that then they're not your friends be careful about whom you share good news with a friend is someone you can share good news with you know you go to them and you say hey look this good thing happened to me and they say look i'm so happy that that happened to you like way to be and they don't think god dammit why didn't that happen to me and like you know you didn't deserve it here's a bunch of reasons you're stupid and why it won't work it's like that's not helpful [Music] you know what the other thing people are doing if they're trying to drag you down let's say is they're trying to see if you'll put up with it because they have this idea that maybe life isn't worth living and things aren't good and then if they can be smurch let's say to use an archaic term something that's pristine and good then they demonstrate to themselves that there is no true ideal and that there's no necessary reason to be responsible and to strive forward 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 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 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 because it's better than advice it's it's some practical knowledge about how to go about achieving an aim 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 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 compare yourself to who you were yesterday not to who someone else is today so here's a good goal it's something like well aim high but use as your control yourself 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 think okay well this is what i'm like yesterday if i did this little thing things would be just an increment better 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 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 to listen to your resentment is one of the best things you can possibly do you have to admit that it exists first and then you have to admit to the fantasies that it's generating and you have to admit to what you would regard as the way out of it so that's all very difficult because it means learning things about yourself that you probably don't want to learn but resentment only means one of two things it means either like shut the hell up grow up quit whining and get on with it that's one thing it means or someone is playing the tyrant to you might even be you you have something to say and do that you should say and do to put it to a stop one of the general rules of thumb about how to be successful is to confront things that frighten you forthrightly and with courage 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 that's what life without purpose and a goal does to you as well because life is very hard so you think okay well i need to adopt a motive being that would justify my suffering and you can ask yourself that question what would make this worthwhile there's this old idea that you go into the abyss it's an idea that you can gaze into the abyss you gaze long and what you find in the abyss is a monster that's the dragon at the bottom of the abyss let's say that's satan himself for that matter but if you go into that into that as deeply as you can what you find is you find your fragmented father in a in a comatose condition in a desiccated end and separated condition and then you revivify that well what does that mean it means something it means that if you look in the darkness you find the light that's one thing it means and that the light really stands out against the darkness but that the light is to be found in the darkness so that's a very interesting thing that's a quest narrative but it means more than that it means something fundamental so we know for example that if you take yourself out of your current state of predictability and safety you put yourself in a new situation you'll learn right you'll incorporate new information so that's a cognitive issue but that isn't all that happens what happens is that new genes turn on within you and code for the production of new proteins and that happens neurologically new parts of you turn on and so the idea is that if you can move yourself out into the world and push yourself out against a maximum array of challenges more and more of you turn on turns on and then the question would be well what would you be if all of you that could be turned on was turned on and the answer would be you would be the resurrection of the ancestral father that's what you would be and so that's why christ says i am the way and the truth and the life and no one comes to the father except through me what that means is that if you take on the unbearable burden of being voluntarily then that transforms you into the ancestral father and that's true and so that's unbelievably optimistic it's so interesting because it's it's dark beyond belief well the world is characterized by suffering and by malevolence of a depth that's virtually beyond comprehension but if you choose to comprehend that what you discover in that is the light that destroys the darkness and that's well that's and that's really something to discover it's there isn't a discovery that's more profound than that that's the search for the holy grail or the philosopher's stone all of that if you actually want something you can have it now the question then would be 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 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 justify itself in my estimation and i don't mean as a harsh judge exactly what is it that i would aim at you could try this this is a form of prayer knocking sit on your bed one day and ask yourself 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 you're perfectly capable of thinking god only knows how you're perfectly capable of of immense feats of imagination and and dream and fantasies god only knows how you do all of that what would happen if you consulted yourself about the best possible outcome for you you might get an answer [Music] in order for us to set things right we have to understand that we we have to take on that burden of ultimate responsibility not only as if it's ours which it is but as if there isn't anything better that we could do and 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 you need a meaning in your life to forestall the suffering and to make you strong enough to resist malevolence where's the meaning to be found rights impulsive pleasure and happiness no responsibility oh who would have guessed that it's not part of the narrative what makes life worth living is to pick up take its catastrophe and embrace it and carry it and to realize through that process who you are when i talk to audiences about the relationship between responsibility and meaning they inevitably go dead silent there's not a there's not a rustle there's not a cough it's like is that the secret is that the secret is that it's the voluntary adoption of responsibility it's like well that's the that's the central message of the west it's like to pick up your cross and bear it you know and everyone's been told that but they don't know what it means because it's not been articulated enough so that it becomes something that's practical it's like yes look at the terrible responsibilities you have right in front of you your family is hurting you're in trouble there's problems in the world it's like all of that's right there and all you have to do is all you have to do is take responsibility for it and then you've got what you need it's something so magnificent that happiness pales in comparison so it's it's it's thin gruel happiness and young people know that they're pursuing hedonistic pleasure and you know no wonder but there's nothing in it that's sustaining and all it does is make you cynical it's like is that's all there is another one night stand another another binge party you know and it's not like i have anything against in principle against some of that exuberant youthful hedonism look the universities have turned into places of parties why well because that's what the students find best to do there well that's not good what you want to offer them is a reason to not party it's like no you've got to understand you come to this class hung over you're not going to be able to get it you're not going to be able to write properly you're going to pay a price for that hedonism it's like and the price will be too high for you to bear it's like oh well enough hedonism for me then like i've got something important to do that's the way out of that [Music] before you can be a painter who can paint what's beyond mere memory you you have to inculcate that discipline skill and a lot of that is painful repetition and hard grinding work it's the sacrifice of the present for the future but once you manage that then things open up that's why we have disciplines right i mean the words aren't there by accident you have to narrow yourself first and then you can broaden outward and so that's and that's part of the process of maturation that's part of the sacrifice of childhood say in childhood you're nothing but potential but it's not realized and you don't know how to realize it and so then the question is well how do you get to a point where you realize the potential and the answer is you sacrifice almost all of it to a single direction and so that's the thing about growing up is that when you're a teenager and a young adult you have to sacrifice everything you could have been as a child to be the one thing that you're aiming at but then that opens up everyone in their right mind knows that there's a million ways of doing things wrong and one way if you're lucky to do things right and so the notion that it's a very very narrow pathway that you tread upon if you're doing things right that's wisdom that's the line between chaos and order that you're supposed to be on constantly right it's a very very thin line because if you're a little bit too far in one direction then it's too much chaos and if you're a little too far in the other direction then it's too much order and both of those aren't good it has to the balance has to be exactly right and you can feel that and i truly believe you can feel that and i think it's your deepest instinct it's your deepest instinct and i mean that i mean that biologically i don't mean that metaphorically i think that your psyche is arranged to exist in a cosmos that's composed of chaos and order i think that's why you have the hemispheric structure that you have and then when you feel as if you're meaningfully engaged in the world when the terror of your mortality strips away and you're engaged and it's timeless that's the deepest instinct you have telling you that you're in the right place at the right time and then what you do is practice being there practice being there and that's that that narrow spot that's so difficult to find you wander around it maybe if you're lucky you can watch you can watch this is an experiment watch yourself for two weeks like you don't know who you are because you don't so watch yourself for two weeks and notice there's going to be times when things are proper they're raid properly for you it's not easy to notice because when they're arrayed like that you're so engaged you don't exactly notice you know but you'll see oh i'm in the right place it's like okay how'd i get here what am i doing right you know how is it that this could happen more often i'd like this to happen more often how would i have to conduct myself in order for that to happen more often and then you practice that and then maybe instead of 10 minutes a month or 10 minutes a week it's like 15 minutes a day and then it's half an hour a day and then it's an hour a day and then it's four hours a day and maybe if you if you're extraordinarily careful then you get to a point where you're like that a good proportion of the time rule one is stand up straight with your shoulders back and it's about a general attitude towards life so hierarchies are very stable features of of life in general and certainly of human life and wherever you have any system of values you have a hierarchy because a system of values implies that one thing is better than another if you have a situation where one thing is better than another then some people are better at doing it than others and you get a hierarchy to stand up straight with your shoulders back is a literal injunction but also a metaphorical injunction because what you do when you stand up like that is you kind of expose the vulnerable surfaces of your body it's an act of courage it's an active it's an act of taking on the voluntary responsibility of contending with hierarchical organization and uncertainty and it's a very good it's a good physical manifestation of the moral courage that's necessary to live life properly and it's something that leaders naturally embody and that's true not only of human beings by the way it's it's also true of animals all the way down the biological chain so the more successful creatures let's say are also those who comport themselves in an upright manner and you know even in our common language to be upright is not only something that we think about physically but also morally right to be an upright person is to tell the truth and to act forthrightly and to do what you say you're going to do and all of those things so that's all of a piece and so that's rule one rule two which is treat yourself like you're someone responsible for helping that's an extension of rule one in some sense the idea would be that you know people are often ashamed and embarrassed and anxious because of their insufficiencies and failures and and and the incomplete nature of their characters and and all the things they don't know and all of that and so it's useful to to um develop and practice uh an ethic of detached self-regard like it's not narcissism it's not self-esteem it's it's it's it's not grandiosity it's none of that it's just the clear realization that as other people have value and as it's necessary to treat them that way if you want anything in your relationships whatsoever to go right so it's also necessary to develop that attitude towards yourself despite the knowledge you have of all your inadequacies and that's a really good thing to practice because it requires practice both the detachment and then that ethic of care so and then you want to act in accordance with your highest values now that means you have to figure out what those values are if you act in accordance with your highest values sometimes that makes your day-to-day operations difficult because you have to confront unpleasant truths you have to discuss things that you'd rather avoid it would be easier to act to decrease conflict in the moment but it's a very bad medium to long-term strategy you have to engage in a certain amount of conflict moment to moment if you're going to say and do the things that are necessary in order to set things right in the medium to long term and for an increasingly large number of people and that's also another guide to leadership i would say you need a broad scale vision you have to know what it is that you're doing with your life let's say generally speaking but more particularly in the next three to five years what do you want what do you want from your friends your family your intimate relationships your employment your education your care of your mental and physical health your response to temptations like drug and alcohol use if you could have what you wanted if you could lay your life out properly how would you be functioning across those seven dimensions why would that work for you why would it work for your family and why would it work for the broader community then that gives you a reason a reason and if you have a reason that's well thought through that you find compelling so that's a compelling story let's say the kind of compelling story a leader might tell then that will provide you with motivation to do the things that are difficult that you need to do so that's positive emotion that motivation it's a neurochemical system that runs on the chemical dopamine it's the neurochemical system that underlies people's willingness to undertake something voluntarily so we experience most positive emotion in relationship to a goal and what that means is if you don't have a goal then you don't have any motivation and so what that means is you better have your goals well delineated because that way you'll be maximally motivated now the additional advantage to that is that if you have your goals delineated and they're compelling goals for you it also makes you less anxious and uncertain and stressed because the your pathway forward into the future is mapped and that makes it more certain and uncertainty causes stress and and physiological uh load okay so you want to have your large scale vision you want to have it thought out on a three to five year basis you want to have it cover those seven or so dimensions that we already described you want to see how why it's relevant to you and your family in the broader community you want to break that down into your monthly weekly and daily practices and if they can be recognized and so much the better and then that becomes built into you so what happens neurologically is that when you do something new you use almost your whole brain that's a good way of thinking about it particularly the right side of it the right hemisphere and as you practice something the amount of your brain you use gets smaller and smaller until and moves leftward until you basically build a effective little machine at the back that takes care of it automatically routinizing things decreases the cognitive and physiological load it's a big deal and if you recognize good habits then they become part of your character and part of what people come to expect of you to be precise in your speech does two things it specifies your goal and it reduces uncertainty you see what you aim at and i don't mean that metaphorically i really don't because you're a lot more blind than you think there's a lot of the world that you don't see you see most of what's in front of you in a very blurry way like your peripheral vision is extremely low resolution you see clearly a tiny focal area that that's where you're pointing your eyes and so and you point your eyes at what you want to pay attention to and what you want to pay attention to is generally associated with what you want so what that means is that the world reveals itself to you in relationship to what you want and so that's really helpful because you you want to see the world so you don't stumble blindly through it and fall into a pit you want to get to where you're going and so if you specify where you're going very clearly then that enables you to see the pathway forward [Music] now the upside to that is that you can probably get to where you want to go the downside is you also make your conditions of failure very explicit and that's hard on people in the short term you know it's it's easy to delude yourself and to leave everything vague because then you can't tell when you're failing but that doesn't stop you from failing it just stops you from seeing it while it's happening then the other advantage to being precise in your speech and your aims is that that helps you tell the difference between what's important and what isn't important and you want almost everything to be not important you know in times of crisis in your life everything becomes important so imagine that you have a a new physical symptom that's distressing and you don't understand it so then you're thinking oh my god what's happening am i collapsing physically am i have i got a serious illness is it a fatal illness what's going to happen to my family is my whole life going to fall apart like what happens when when something that you can't specify occurs is that everything becomes relevant and that's terrible no one no one ever wants that you want hardly anything to be relevant and so if you specify your goal then almost everything becomes irrelevant and only those things that are important stand up in sharp in sharp relief that's also a real boon to the people that you're communicating with because they know what you want then and so they even if you're harsh person let's say that you're pretty punitive and if people don't do a good job you you know you let them know if you specify what you want then they now how to avoid your harshness and the more precise you are in your formulation of the problem and in your presentation of a solution and the role you might play in that solution the more likely you are to advance on all fronts as far as i can tell there's nothing you can do that moves you and your agenda your vision let's say forward faster than precision in speech what's the meaning of life i think the meaning is to be found in that and as you as you put things together and as you take responsibility for things that meaning emerges from that and so it emerges from that the same way it emerges from a symphony in some sense you know because the symphony is composed of layers of patterns and they're all working harmoniously together and they speak directly to people of meaning which is why people love music so much i mean every form of music does that and it's a model for proper being which is the the placing of all the different levels of reality into harmonious relationship with one another and meaning emerges out of that naturally and meaning is actually an instinct this is another thing that people don't understand and it's a case i've been able to make because i i i know a fair bit about how the brain works the two the twin hemispheres of your brain interact to guide you through life which is a truism in some sense you use your brain to guide you to life but your brain does that fundamentally by instilling the the proper things that you do with a sense of meaning and that meaning is it's not something that's just a surface it's not on the surface of the world in some sense it's the deepest instinct that you have it's associated with a phenomenon that russian neuropsychologists discovered back in the 1960s called the orienting reflex and the orienting reflex is what orients you towards things of interest right and that happens unconsciously and so if something happens around you that's of significance often something you don't expect say something somewhat chaotic you'll orient towards it and that attracts your attention and then as you investigate what that is that's associated with the sense of meaning and if you put what you're investigating into proper order then that meaning continues to reveal itself so you can use meaning as a guide to proper being but you have to also be very careful to conduct yourself honestly if you're going to do that because if you conduct yourself dishonestly then you pathologize the mechanisms that orient you everybody is a strange mixture of victim and victimizer lots of terrible things happen to people that aren't justifiable in some sense you know well illness strikes people randomly i mean not entirely randomly obviously but there's a very there's a large random element in it where you're thrown into existence as a consequence of your birth that you're sort of thrown into reality with your particular set of predispositions and weaknesses and and then there's going to be times in your life where things twist in a manner that's unfair to you that you're not getting your just desserts but that goes along with all sorts of unequally distributed privileges as well and so that's the arbitrary nature of existence and but but you can't allow those sorts of things to define you because it's not it's not that useful strategically when you're playing a card game you're dealt you're dealt a hand of cards well what do you do you play the hand the best you can why because all the hands are equal no because you don't have a better strategy than playing the hand that you're dealt the best you can and that doesn't even mean it'll be a winning strategy but because people don't always win sometimes we lose and sometimes we lose painfully and sometimes we lose painfully and unjustly that's not the point the point is you don't have a better strategy and neither does anyone else and then it's also not so obvious how privilege and victimization are distributed you know if you take someone who's doing quite well in life and you scratch underneath the surface you generally don't have to scratch very far until you find one or more profound tragedies of the past or perhaps of the present you know no matter how well protected you are in the world you're still subject to illness you're still subject to aging you're still subject to the dissolution of your relationships the death of your dreams death itself so vulnerability is built into the structure of existence now if you start to regard yourself as a hapless victim or even worse an unfairly victimized victim well then things go very badly sideways for you it's not a good strategy you end up resentful you end up angry you end up vengeful you end up hostile and and that's just the beginning things can get far more out of hand than that so strategically it's a bad game it's better to take responsibility for the hand that you've been dealt there's no better you've got no better protection in life than doing that we've had a long conversation in our culture about the necessity for self-esteem and happiness and that's not what i'm talking about i tell my audiences and my readers very straightforwardly that life is difficult and that there's a lot of suffering in it and that you have to learn how to conduct yourself in the face of that the problem with the pursuit of happiness is that when life storms come along happiness disappears then you're left with nothing and so you need to pursue something that's deeper than happiness and if happiness comes along well then hooray for you you don't want to despise it because it's fleeting but it's much better to pursue things that are meaningful than things that make you happy it's deeper and and it orients you more appropriately and it and it keeps you centered in your own life it makes you more useful for your family and your community so that's one thing and it's a relief to young people to know that the baseline conditions of life are difficult but that you can still prevail so it's a funny message in some sense or a strange message because on the one hand it's somewhat pessimistic you know i talk about suffering and malevolence also but i also emphasize the fact that despite despite that being the base conditions of existence people are tough enough to prevail so that's that's one element of it the other element is the the necessity of responsibility so a lot of what people find in life that provides them with a sustaining meaning is a consequence of not the pursuit of rights or the pursuit of happiness or the development of self-esteem but the adoption of responsibility and the more responsibility in some sense the better responsibility for yourself for making sure that your life lays itself out like it should responsibility for your family responsibility for the community it's people who take responsibility that are the ones that you admire and that's the right pathway through life that's where meaning is to be found even though life is suffering if you're sufficiently courageous and forthright and honest let's say in your approach and you don't shy away what you'll find is that there's something within you that will respond to the challenge of suffering with the development of ability that will transcend the suffering so the pessimism is yeah well life is rife with problems at every level but the upside is if you turn and confront that voluntarily that you'll find something in yourself that can develop and master that and so the optimism is nested in the pessimism and that's extremely helpful to people especially people who are struggling because they think oh my god life is so difficult i don't know if i can stand this there must be something wrong with me does anybody else feel this way and you can say yes everyone feels that way at some time but that's and and and it is as bad as you think but you're more than you think you are you're more than you think you are the goal in life is to conduct yourself so that life improves at least so that undue suffering is forestalled but more than that so it's to constrain malevolence and suffering to the degree that that's possible but then also to work for a positive improvement in things at every level and that's that's how you should orient yourself one of the things about what i do is that i'm always trying to take high level abstract truths you know fundamental truths and to make them concrete and practical so that you can implement them in your day-to-day life because it's the connection between those abstractions and practical action that really cements their meaning and makes them comprehensible and this idea of incremental improvement is a great one you know if there are things about your life that are bothering you things about the world that are bothering you then you want to decompose them into solvable sub problems and you do this if you have a child this is the sort of thing that you do naturally right because you want to set your child a challenge that's sufficiently challenging to push them forward in their development so that makes it meaningful for the child that puts them in the zone of proximal development which is where where proper maturation takes place they'll find that intrinsically meaningful you want to make it challenging but also with a reasonable probability of success and that and there's an art to that so you want to set yourself a task that's difficult but not so difficult you can't attain it and then what happens is that you step up improvement across time incrementally and there's also a certain element of humility to it right which is don't bite off more than you can chew right don't set grandiose goals but incremental improvement will get you a tremendous distance what you do as a clinician as a clinical psychologist as a psychiatrist is if people are afraid of something afraid of something that's standing in their way as an obstacle like maybe you're trying to develop your career and you're afraid of public speaking well i could try to calm you down about your fear and protect you from the challenge that would be associated with public speaking and say well you never have to do that or i could say no no look you have to learn to present yourself more effectively in public if you're going to develop your career and you're afraid of it so let's break down what you're afraid of in into 10 steps or 20 steps and we can find a step that's small enough so that you can actually master it let's assume that with three years of diligent practice that you could become a competent public speaker at least one that isn't terrified with five years you could become an expert and let's decide how relevant that is to your future prosperity and thriving and then let's assume that if you break it down properly and take it on step by step in this incremental way that we discussed that you'll actually master every single bit of it and the thing that's cool about that is all the clinical evidence shows it works and not only that that's actually how you learn in life if you trust people that's an act of courage if you're not naive right if you're naive it's an act of stupidity because you might get bit and you probably will and if you're naive and you get bit you will suffer for it it'll traumatize you but if you're not naive and you know you can get bit then you might ask well what should you do with people and the answer is you should trust them not because you're naive and not because they couldn't betray you and not because you don't know that they could betray you but because if you hold out your hand in trust then you're inviting the best part of that person to step forward and that won't happen unless you take that initial step and that's courage not naivety and so to trust someone once your eyes are open that's an act of courage and that opens up the world you can withstand it a fair bit of the catastrophe of life by establishing the proper covenant and by acting in a trustworthy manner and extending your hand to people properly so then you might say well if what would be the upside if we really determined to act honestly what do you think it is that people would be able to do with the world if we stopped acting in a corrupt manner i mean what what's the like what is the upside do you think we could how far back could we push aging do you think if we hit it hard for 50 years could we triple our lifespan it wouldn't surprise me you know all these terrible diseases that beset the planet we could get rid of them there's no reason for hunger and starvation we make enough food it's like what would happen if we stopped acting badly how much better could things get well you start locally i think you start with yourself and you start with your family but what's the assumption here exactly what is the upper end for humanity i mean who's who's going to say right who's going to say especially in this day and age man there's so many things happening that you can't even comprehend them what can we do if we put all of our effort into it well you can experiment with that because you can start in your own household you can start in your own room and you can make miracles happen in the confines of your own space there's no doubt about that all you have to do is try you'll see that that happens it hap and people are writing to me and telling me that they're trying this and that that's exactly what's happening who knows how tough you are and maybe you find out by going out to find out how tough you are right so you take on a challenge one that you think you can master just that's just a bit beyond your grasp and you master it and then you're a little tougher and you think hey that worked out pretty well and so then you're more of a monster and then you go out and you find another challenge that's even bigger and you think well maybe i can do that too and all of a sudden you can and you get a little bit bigger and god only knows what the limit is of you [Music] who do you want to be when there's a crisis right do you want to be the person that everyone can turn to for strength it's like why the hell not why not that is a goal that would be a good goal because then if there's a crisis and there will be it won't be such a bloody crisis because there'll be someone there that can deal with it you have to contend with death and suffering and you have to be ready for it and you have to be there for the person because that's all they're gonna have and so there's a goal man and in this time of nihilism you know it's what's the point of life people ask and and they're taught that at universities what's the point of life everything's interpretation humanity's a cancer on the planet you know well how about no how about not that how about that there's something to us [Applause] it does require a leap of faith for you to move into the world because the world is a catastrophe self-evidently the world is a catastrophe and so there's every reason for you to assume that you should sit in your basement and hide from it but that's that's not it doesn't help it doesn't make things better and the thing is perhaps you're not built for that you're not built to hide i don't think that people are built to hide i think it destroys them it's a really tough thing to understand is like how much trouble would you want there not to be it's a weird question right because you want to have something to contend with you want to have something that that forces from you the best that you have and so you have to have real problems something like that would you dispense with all your real you could just lay down on a bed and have pablum infused into your mouth you know if all your problems were solved and so maybe you want difficult problems that you can solve something like that because there's some i don't know what it is about it there's there's the overcoming and the growth that comes along with that there's something about the nobility of the enterprise you certainly see that when you go about having children for example which is the people who don't have kids are happier and so psychologists who tend to get things wrong even when they make intelligent discoveries like that one immediately some of them jump to the conclusion that because happiness is the goal that well there's something about children that you know make you unhappy and that's not good it's like well wait a second and maybe that's the wrong metric it's like of course you're less happy once you have children because you have to worry about them you know my neighbor down the street who's very smart woman said to me once you can only be as happy as your unhappiest child you know that's really smart if having children doesn't make you happy the answer isn't don't have children it's like don't be so stupid about being happy that's the answer it's because there's a nobility in the pursuit right and of course now you're responsible you know you have a new baby you think what the hell is this and what am i gonna do with it you know it's like and and then you're you're done for the rest of your life you never sleep properly again because you're gonna be worried about this creature that you have to take care of but like what the hell good are you if you're not doing that or something else equally difficult because you just you just haven't been called out yet unless you take on a responsibility like that the idea that you know that happiness is the purpose of life it's like great for happiness man if it comes along you should be thrilled that it's visiting you but the notion that that's that that's what you should pursue that's that's the weakest possible notion first of all as soon as something terrible happens to you you're done it's like life is to be happy it's like well now you have cancer so how's that how's the happiness thing working out for you now it's like life is to be happy it's that's not right the rule is aim high and get your bloody act together that's the rule and establish this contractual covenant with the ultimate ideal and that will see you through the catastrophes and that's a much more mature way of looking at life as far as i'm concerned because all you have to do is have your eyes half open and you see that the fundamental reality of life is tragedy and suffering there's that's inescapable that doesn't mean that it it makes life unbearable or that it makes being something that shouldn't have existed right that isn't what it means but it means that you have to contend with it and you have to get ready and the willingness to adopt responsibility for yourself and for others is is the precondition for that and and then maybe if you do that properly then now and then you get some happiness you know you can sit at the end of the day and you have half an hour where your conscience is clear and there's nothing that you need to be doing and you can relax and think you know that's all right things are okay and thank god for that and that's that's maybe where you get your happiness part of the reason that modern people have been able to escape from the catastrophe of tyranny and slavery is because we've agreed to make ourselves our own slaves right so instead of owning a slave you own yourself in a sense and so you trot yourself off to work and exploit yourself so that you can stay alive and maybe it's not something that you want to do but you've taken on the role of slave in some sense in relationship to your own survival instead of forcing someone else to do it if everything falls apart around you there's there's a couple of things you're going to want you're going to want someone standing beside you that's for sure that you can trust you're going to want your family around you and you want going to want them to have your back and you're going to want to know that you didn't do some goddamn stupid thing to bring all hell down on yourself and if you're lacking any of those when that crisis comes there's a high probability it will flatten you and you won't be able to get up you know it does seem to me you can ask yourself this question when things collapse around you how much utility is knowledge of your own moral virtue it's bad to be laid load but to be laid low and to know that you were the fault you were at fault for it and worse the things that you did that you knew you did that were wrong brought you there then i think you have nothing to stand on in that situation and that's also the circumstances under which i think you're more more likely at least to be abandoned by people around you so given that you know that the catastrophe is coming right that the tragedy of life will strike you the question is well how do you fortify yourself against that i've asked myself a lot of questions in the last eight months man i can tell you that and i'm still asking myself a lot of questions and i've been conferring with a lot of people because i had lots of people who were helping me negotiate whatever the hell this is that's happening and you know i could ask them how i was doing and they would tell me a bunch of things i was doing wrong and some things i was doing right and i could listen to them i was asking questions all the time about how the hell i should manage this properly and you know what what i was trying to do and what seemed to serve me properly was to figure out how to do it correctly that was the issue it's like i didn't really care what happened and i guess i really don't care what happens but i do care if i do it correctly because i don't want to screw it up i don't want to screw things up and that seems to be a reasonable goal for people i mean wouldn't you like that as a goal that you don't screw things up because you can't control to you know your life isn't fully under your control by any stretch of the imagination but it might be nice to to not have your conscience eating at you saying look you know you had a big opportunity there and you mucked it up because you're weak and blind and you didn't listen that's no good the cast the catastrophe is bad enough as i said without you being the bloody source of it tell the truth or at least don't lie and the reason for that is that that's a very good starting position to straighten out your life it's really helpful to be careful about what you say and to not say things that you know are false i mean it's not a straightforward thing to do and that doesn't mean you get to tell the truth to as a weapon that's not the truth that's a partial truth masquerading as truth to use as a weapon i mean it you have to be sophisticated about it but it's very useful to discipline yourself not to use your language in a manipulative manner it doesn't work it's a very very bad medium to long-term strategy and your life will become much simpler in a good way much less anxiety provoking and much more exciting and adventurous if you just say what you think or even more importantly don't say things you know to be untrue one one one suggestion i have for people is that they listen to what they say and feel how it makes them feel physically and what you'll see if you start to pay attention is that some things you say make you feel like you're standing on firm ground and other things that you say disconnect you and and produce a feeling of disunity and weakness and you might think well that's worth it because i'm manipulating the world in some particular way to get what i want and it'll probably work it's like it's not worth it it won't work it will kick back and you will be punished for it so one of the things that i've learned as a clinical psychologist which is actually quite a terrifying thing to learn is that it's terrifying when i think of my own life i've never seen anyone get away with anything ever everything you do that you know to be wrong will absolutely come back and haunt you and usually in a magnified way and so it's very useful to know that and to be terrified enough of that so that you become careful with what you say so telling the truth that presupposes you know the truth you can strive towards the truth i don't think you can know it but you can certainly know when you're about to say something that's patently untrue by your own definition and you can certainly not do that so and that's an excellent place to start it will it will if you do that for a number of years your life will change radically and and and positively classically speaking the two highest virtues are truth and love and it's difficult to put one of those ahead of the other love means something like hoping for hoping and striving for for the best for things despite the fact that they're inadequate and damaged and and perverse and often malevolent and that's part of say love your enemies is well what do you want for your enemies well you might say you want their defeat maybe you want their violent painful defeat but it's better to want their transformation that's that's it's better in all regards to want that and to hope for that and to act towards them in a manner that might facilitate that so and that's part of that courageous attitude towards existence that would manifest itself in positive regard for for living things and it's hard to talk about those things especially love because the word has been weakened by misuse which is why i offered the definition i offered it's like it's a it's an attitude of courage to want the best for life because life is very cruel and harsh and it's easy to become turned against it and bitter and and there are reasons for that but it's not helpful it's wrong despite the fact that there are reasons for it bitterness is of no utility so even though you know i've met many people who've had very very hard lives and to see them become bitter is not a surprise but there's no utility whatsoever in it all it does is make it worse so grin and bear it so to speak and that's part of aiming upward and it is an attitude of courage a voluntary attitude of courage and truth serves that goal best so how could it be otherwise you know you can think about you have an option you can either have reality on your side or against you if you if you if you abide by the truth then you have reality on your side you have reality against you it's like you think you're going to come out ahead in that dispute that's not that's well you only think that if you've developed a certain amount of arrogance which is also another very dangerous thing i can get away with it it's like no you can't you are so outmatched by reality that there's no contest i think the only real natural resource apart from air is honesty it's the it's the basis for wealth because if two people treat each other honestly they can take each other at their word and then they can cooperate otherwise you know like if i can't trust you god only knows what you're up to you're so complicated that we can't do something simple and straightforward and and directed together because we're going to spend all of our time trying to figure out what in the world is going on and and this is partly why so much poverty in the world is actually generated by corruption rather than an absolute lack of material well an absolute lack of material corruption is a is a force that produces poverty like nothing else so honesty integrity and then all the things that you can be gifted with intelligence hard work it takes a lot of rare traits generally speaking to to push you in the direction of success it also depends on what you mean by success so we could do this two ways we could go after classical success yeah well i mean often you need a set of gifts right that are given to you at birth to be spectacularly successful at something say like sports then discipline that's extraordinarily useful um intelligence that's very useful um the marriage of those two i mean if you have two people who are equally intelligent and one works twice as hard as the other then the one who works twice as hard is much more likely to be successful creativity is another useful attribute reciprocity the ability to reciprocate that's unbelievably useful almost all the people i know who are successful have very broad well-functioning social networks so even if they don't know how to do something they know someone who knows how to do it and they've maintained their relationships with those people and they've done it with integrity so they're trusted so they have a network of trusted people around them who are highly competent and so there's an ethical there's an ethical aspect to that because you don't gather a group of highly useful people around you to trade with unless they trust you and so honesty is a huge part of it and i mean i've seen people go into companies that were failing very dramatically uh competent people go in and with nothing other than their competence and their honesty turned the companies around completely and that's very interesting to to watch and i've consulted in situations where that's been the case decide what better means for you so and so you have to have a discussion with yourself as if you were someone you cared about so now we decide you're taking care of yourself three years down the road you get to have what you want but you have to figure out what it is okay so do you want an intimate relationship and if so what kind of relationship how are you going to structure it what about your family you know are you going to get along with your siblings and your parents are going to have kids is that going to be part of your life what are you going to do for your career or your job how are you going to educate yourself and keep your education updated how are you going to resist the sort of temptations that take people down how are you going to take care of yourself mentally and physically what are you going to do with your time outside of work that's productive and engaging imagine you could optimize all that okay so then you need a vision okay what would my life be like if i had that and what would it look like well then you have to make the right sacrifices to get there you need to make a strategy and so you lay out that strategy and then start to pursue it and and progress incrementally right little better tomorrow than you were yesterday and compare yourself to yourself which is rule 4 in my book that'll work you'll be in way better shape very very rapidly so but you can't just wait around for happiness to appear i mean unless you define it and pursue it i mean things don't happen good things tend not to happen randomly right things fall apart randomly so you need a vision you need a plan for the future and you know you don't want to make it rigid and tyrannical and you have to do it in negotiation with yourself but it's unbelievably effective [Music] there have been good personality studies done for i would say about 30 years and the reason for that is that we figured out a personality model about 30 years ago that's stable cross-culturally and it was mostly derived statistically and it required a fair bit of computational power to derive and basically the way that it was derived was that thousands of people were asked hundreds and hundreds of questions and then computers could figure out how the answers grouped so if you were likely to say yes to question a and also to question j um maybe that was a tendency across a large group of people and so you could assume that there was something similar about question a and j and you could sort the questions into groups and it turns out that questions about personality sort into five groups um and there's some argument about exactly the right number but it doesn't matter it's somewhere between five and seven and you can break the five down into ten but whatever we've got a pretty good overall descriptive structure like the periodic table of the elements for personality if you're an extrovert man it's like you want to be where the action is you want to be where the party is you're you're telling jokes and you're setting up social occasions and and you smile a lot and you talk a lot and you want people around you all the time and a tremendous amount of that is influenced genetically and you can tell that if you have children because your children are like that my son's quite extroverted well my daughter is as well but you know he was a flirt when he was nine months old it was ridiculous my wife used to pack him along on her back on one of those little i would do the same thing on one of those little uh you know those little baby carriers and i can remember one time we were on a cruise ship um just taking a small cruise from maine to to nova scotia and we got on the on the on the boat and we were wandering through a group of people it was like it was like being with a rock star because he was sitting in the back of the little baby holder smiling away you know like flirting like mad and waving at everyone and and that that was there right at nine months and so people different extroversion that's positive emotion they differ in neuroticism and that's negative emotion some people are much more sensitive to depression and grief and anxiety their threshold for threat is a lot lower some people are agreeable rather than disagreeable and agreeable people are very empathic and self-sacrificing and the empathic part is good because you know it's useful to be empathic especially if you're caring for people who are in real trouble but the self-sacrificing isn't so good that can make you resentful and and also um decrease the probability that you're going to be successful in your salary negotiations and so forth so those of you who are agreeable and to have a hard time standing up for yourself and fighting you know you'll fight for other people but not for yourself it's a very good skill to develop that ability to watch your resentment and see what you need and then make a case for it it's a hard thing to learn people different conscientiousness that's orderliness and industrious and the different creativity which is openness and so and a lot of that's genetic it's there to begin with now you can move that with the environment you know but but you know you have a character it's there liberals are higher in openness that's trait creativity and lower in conscientiousness especially orderliness and that seems to be because they believe or their their their let's say their niche is an informational niche they believe that the free flow of information is worth the risk so that'd be the free flow of people across borders the free flow of ideas across borders the the free flow of concepts across categories they'd rather that the borders were permeable now the conservatives are low in openness and high in conscientiousness especially orderliness and they take the opposite attack they think well yeah there's danger in too much openness there's danger in borders that are too permeable things can change too fast entire societies can become destabilized and everyone can end up not knowing which way is up and the thing is is that both of those attitudes are correct it depends on the time you know sometimes things are changing so fast that everybody's knocked off their feet and and things are falling apart and sometimes think things are so rigid that there isn't any new water flowing and and everything's ground to halt you see that in corporations very often um where they get ossified and then they collapse you know the average fortune 500 company only lasts i think now it's only 24 years and and the duration of their occupation of the top fortune 500 space is getting shorter and shorter every year you need liberals because now and then the right thing to do is to come up with something new and you need conservatives because now and then the right thing to do is to do what everybody's always done so you know silicon valley tends to be liberal every everyone knows that and the reason for that is that there's a tremendous number of entrepreneurs there and entrepreneurs tend to be high in openness and lower in conscientiousness so they're creative but they're also willing to break rules you know which you kind of have to do hopefully not to a criminal extent well you know it's tricky when you're trying to establish something new because look at a company like uber you know they had to bend the rules to to be successful and those companies that have rented those scooters out and put them on the streets everywhere you know they just kind of went ahead and did it it's not something an orderly person would do because they'd ask for permission whereas the people who started these scooter rental companies just said well what'll happen if we put them everywhere and the answer was that seemed to work but you have to have a rule-breaking proclivity in order to manage that but the thing is if you're an entrepreneur you need conservative people because once you've figured out how to do something and then you want to run it algorithmically you know you want to run it by the rules well then it's the conservative types that are going to be really good at doing that and making sure that the eyes are dotted and the t's are crossed and and show up for work on time and have stable marriages and be reliable and their their problem is it's easy for them to get stuck in a rut so attend to the person you listen to as if they might know something you don't it's like i really find it interesting to talk to people whose political opinions differ from mine for me that's mostly meant talking to really uh strong conservatives because i would say temperamentally i tilt in the liberal direction although it's very interesting to talk to people who don't share your political views if you listen to them because they'll tell you all sorts of things about why they think that you just don't understand and it's not that they're wrong it's that sometimes they're wrong and sometimes they're right and the the whole point of free speech as far as i can tell the deep point of free speech is that you know it's all as if we're riding on the back of a giant snake and it's twisting and turning all the time and we're trying to figure out how to stay in the center so that we don't fall off the sides you know and sometimes it's time for a bit of a tilt to the left and sometimes it's a bit time for a bit of a tilt to the right and the only way you can tell when that time is is by having a discussion about it it's not the fact that the conservatives are right or that the liberals are right they're both necessary annoying as that is i think there are times when there are objective facts that present themselves in the political sphere but most of the time political discussion is more it's more like marital negotiation you know and it's right it's it's right when it works in the world that would be the first thing like let's say you have a plan and you implement the plan and the plan turns out the way that you expected it to it's a pragmatic definition of truth okay that [Music] plan flawed no doubt it that it was imperfect no doubt that it was was accurate enough so that when you implemented it it justified its own structure that's a lot of the way we judge truth in the world right is you you think you're right if you do something and it works and that doesn't mean you're 100 right and it doesn't mean it's going to work forever but because you're ignorant and because your knowledge is limited that's kind of what you've got and so that's one form of truth and then another form is well can we agree in a negotiated manner i mean i've been trying to identify hundred percent truths the the hundred percent truths let's say that sit at the bottom of our societies and one of the things that i believe to be true is that the idea that the individual is properly sovereign i believe is as true as any idea that human beings have ever come up with i think that that ideal works um not everyone would agree with that but the more complex the situation the harder it is to extract out something approximating an objective truth and and and so then so much of it depends on negotiation and discussion [Music] identity to me is something that's practical it's like a dramatic role that you play out in the world and while playing that out it has to furnish you with a life it means that it has to be negotiated with other people when you're a very young child and you first start to play with who you are you live in a fantasy world and and so that means identity has to expand beyond its egocentric focus and increasingly be negotiated in the social world now imagine that you're you know you're lonely and you approach a young woman in a social situation attempting to make some contact with her you want to alleviate your loneliness and so you hope you make a good impression and you tell a joke let's say in a relatively awkward manner and you get rebuffed then you're no longer where you control you're no longer where you exercise control and that brings up all sorts of specters and immediately it's like well why were you rebuffed well maybe all women are to be despised that's one theory maybe there's something deeply wrong with you maybe you're having an off day maybe it wasn't a very good joke so when you don't get what you want then a landscape of questions emerge and those questions can resonate through different levels of your identity from the trivial oh i told the joke wrong to the profound there's nothing desirable about me and i'll be alone for the rest of my life it has to go through that period before you can emerge as a genuine individual which means you have to know the rules of the game before you can break them but not being able to abide by the rules is not anything like being a genuine creative individual those are not the same thing and there's plenty of attempt to confuse the two things because it's much better if you can't follow the rules to view yourself as a avant-garde revolutionary than as a failure [Music] and it's not like i don't know that that social molding crushes obviously it crushes and everyone feels that these are existential problems everyone deals with the tyranny of culture and the fact that it does want you to be a certain way and not other ways and those ways might not be in keeping with your the deepest elements of your nature well tough luck for you because you're also the beneficiary of culture and so you have to offer it your pound of flesh now you shouldn't do that at the expense of your soul but you shouldn't stay an immature child either so what happens is that if you act out your identity if you act out your beliefs in the world and what you want doesn't happen what happens is that your body defaults into emergency preparation for action and the reason for that is you've wandered too far away from the campfire and now you're in the forest and maybe you're naked and so what do you do then and the answer is well you don't know what to do so what do you do when you don't know what to do and the answer is you prepare to do everything and the problem with that is that it's unbelievably draining psychophysiologically like it hurts you people stay where what they do has the results they want that's partly why you want to be around people who share your cultural presuppositions it's very hard on us not to be where we know that what we want is going to happen we hate that by and large we're conservative creatures even if we're liberal and temperament there's not we can't tolerate that much uncertainty and you might ask well why and the answer is well because you can be hurt pain you can be damaged you can become intolerably anxious and you can die so it's no wonder you're sensitive or very sensitive to negative emotion and so functional identity regulates your emotion but you do that in concert with other people if you're acceptable to your peers and you behave well they'll accept you and then they tell you all the time if you're acting appropriately you know if your jokes are funny if you're dominating the conversation if you're bringing something of value to the table and all you have to do is pay attention to the social cues we've been social for so long that our social nature is programmed into our biology and so you'll be punished if you're not useful to other people by your conscience because you're a social creature what if you think that's all pointless well that doesn't seem very helpful okay so you need a sustaining meaning well where do you find that well you generally find it in responsibility to yourself and other people when i commit to something and make sacrifices you know if something's valuable you'll make sacrifices to attain it that discovery of sacrifice it's one of the primary factors separating human beings from animals because we discovered that we could let go of something we value in the present and we would gain something we value even more in the future we acted that out dramatically in all sorts of strange ways over thousands and thousands of years before it was formalizable psychologically but it's a massive discovery i can forego gratification in a particular way and benefit in the future you make sacrifices to make the future better well what if that doesn't pay off well you know think about that you know what that's like you endeavor to do something and it doesn't work you're not appreciated for who you are you fail maybe you failed despite your best efforts well are you rejected by god well it's as if you're rejected by god does it make you resentful does it make you bitter does it make you want to pull down the successful the answer to that happens to be yes you know it's a it's harsh that the rewards of life are indiscriminately distributed it's hard on everyone but it doesn't help doesn't help to become bitter and it's not like i don't understand the temptation and i see this in this culture war i see this resentment it colors the definition of identity this attack on meritocracy it's an attack on merit itself you're lucky that there's such a thing as a job or a better yet a career you're lucky that there's such a thing as friendship as marriage all of these social institutions how do we know when something needs to be changed we don't know so we have to argue about it and in order to argue about it effectively we have to be able to talk to each other across our identity boundaries and then we can decide well should this be maintained or should this be transformed we have to strive not to be wretched there's something that doesn't seem fair about that why couldn't we just be happy being who and what we are why is it that we're punished if we don't strive well i don't know we're negan tropic organisms right i mean we have to maintain this incredible complexity in the face of a dissipating universe it requires effort the positive emotion that we find sustaining is experienced in relationship to an unachieved goal it's hope that drives us forward we want something and if we see ourself moving towards that then we're we're in the grip of the positive emotion that we find sustaining it isn't the attainment attainment is satiating attainment shuts down the system that has been striving for that particular object of attainment if you're hungry and you eat you stop being hungry now that's good because the hunger is gone but that whole frame disappears you can no longer strive within that frame and you need a new frame to strive towards don't you have a conscience doesn't it bother you and then can you control it and answer that is almost inevitably no it calls you to account and why well because you've deviated from the ideal who's ideal an ideal that's making itself known within you at least in so far as the objection arises you wake up at three in the morning and torture yourself for your inequities and you would think well i could just shut that off it's me after all but you can't shut it off you're nothing compared to your conscience now it's strange because you can ignore it you cannot live according to its dictates but it's not going to leave you alone i took what i learned about what happened in the second world war seriously it's like wow we can be really bad we should do something about that like that was unacceptable we're getting so powerful that each individual is now a force of almost unimaginable destructive power if they so choose to be that power is going to continue to increase and what that means is that the degree to which each of us has our act together is going to be something upon which the world increasingly depends for its maintenance it's like discipline yourself in one dimension see what happens well that's exciting i don't understand really and it's really killing me i think i might might mean that literally i don't understand why i'm so controversial i can't figure that out it's very distressing to me i'm ashamed you know of what's happened to me and i'm very hurt i'm a very destroyed person in many ways and so i feel unworthy unworthy of what you name it i hope people find it useful you know i hope it alleviates some unnecessary suffering that's the goal i'm very fortunate in that regard i get letters from people all the time that they open up their hearts you know it's really something but i am somewhat nonplussed let's say for all this work i'm pretty broken [Music] it's not easy to know what to do with you know the cheers of a million people it's overwhelming it's dangerous i don't think i've unfairly benefited from it i'm not a hedonistic person my life style hasn't changed i think there's more of me outside of me now than there is inside of me when i put those first videos up you know i was this was bothering me this piece of legislation and i talked to my wife and my son sort of casually i said well i'm gonna make these videos see what happens and famous last words the best we have might not always work but it's still the best we have and the fact that it might not work doesn't mean we should throw it away it's still the best we have i mean everyone dies and so we fail in some sense the fact that a symphony ends doesn't mean that it wasn't worth listening to there's this idea in the old testament the fear of god is the beginning of wisdom it's a pretty harsh idea but but there's something really useful about it because one of the things you see with people all the time is that maybe they're trying to stumble forward towards their ideal as poorly defined as it might be but then they're afraid right they're afraid about what they might encounter and that stops them because fear does stop people it freezes you like a prey animal and so people move ahead but then they get afraid and then they stop moving ahead and so and that's not so good because negative emotion is a really powerful motivator so we're more motivated by negative emotion than positive emotion quantitatively speaking you can measure that and that's i think because we can only be so happy but we can really be suffering in debt you know so we have to pay more attention to the negative and that's bad because the negative can stop you and then in my clinical practice you know i often talk to people who are trying to make a difficult life decision and and they they're weighing out the costs and the benefits of making the life decision you know and one of the things i always talk to them about is wait a second that's an incomplete analysis you have to weigh out the benefits and the costs of doing this and you have to weigh out the costs and benefits of not doing it and that's not the same as the zero that you assume that you're starting with right because to not make a decision it also has a cost and sometimes the cost of not making a decision is far worse than the cost of making a decision even if the decision is risky and so one of the things you can derive from that and this is very useful i think is that this is also i think why it's so useful to contemplate your mortality so to speak because you're screwed no matter what you do you know and that actually frees you is that you you have path a that has catastrophes and you have path b that has catastrophes and you don't get to have the no catastrophe path but you get to pick which one and that's really something because if you know that there's terrible risk associated with everything that you do and don't do then you can afford to take some risks because you're not you know and this is all within the arc metaphor i'm still making the case that despite the fact that your life is essentially catastrophic you can you can make a covenant with the highest ideal and that will take you through it the best way possible i'm i'm still making that case so then you think okay well i'm trying to make this decision i'm going to go try to do something difficult and isn't that terrifying and then you think yeah but wait a minute what's really terrifying is not doing it and then you think about the cost of not doing it so in the future authoring program we have people do this little meditative exercise which is okay just think about your insufficiencies by your own definition right the way that you don't do what you know you should do about the things that you do that you shouldn't do that you know you shouldn't do beyond a shadow of a doubt right there's some things like that and that's bad habits and and poor aim and all of the resentment and hatred and aggression and unresolved conflicts and all those things that are dementing you and warping you and then think okay those things get the upper hand man they get the upper hand and they take you the worst possible place you could go in the next three to five years what exactly does that look like and so you sketch all that out you think hey i don't want to go there and so the next time that a temptation comes up you think well it'd be a lot better for me if i didn't succumb to this temptation it's like that's kind of weak you'd look a little better if you didn't eat like a cheesecake a day or something like that you know that's that's something but it's not the same as i'm gonna have diabetes and i'm going to lose my damn leg in in five years if i don't get my eating under control that's motivating and so then the temptation comes along and you think oh how about no seriously how about no not just because a higher good would be obtained if i avoided it but because a terrible catastrophe would be averted if i didn't and so well so you want to get your fear behind you right you want to get it behind you where it's pushing you forward instead of in front of you where it's stopping you and you get your fear behind you pushing you forward by actually thinking through the consequences of not putting your life together and the least of those is that you waste it and suffer right because you're gonna suffer anyways man so you waste it and suffer that's a bad deal because maybe if you're going to suffer you could at least do something noble and glorious and upright and powerful and honorable and admirable and helpful and difficult you know that's just so much better and maybe that's good enough so that you think hey you know little suffering it's basically worth it at least it's a way forward you know at least it's a way forward beauty is one pathway towards god and it's in it's saying if you can't find another pathway then why don't you use beauty i'm sure most of you do that with music because music is the one thing that modern people can't be cynical about thank god for that and being fascinated by music because of that it it speaks meaning to people right you know i've i've mentioned to people that they should clean up their rooms that's become quite the internet meme but i'm really serious about it because it's really hard to do that and i've been cleaning up my room by the way for about four months now because my life was thrown into such a catastrophe and and also we were renovating and so but it isn't just that you clean it up you also make it beautiful and you it's really hard to make something beautiful it's really worthwhile and what's really cool is if you learn to make something beautiful even one thing if you can just make one thing in your life beautiful then you've established a relationship with beauty and then you can start to expand that relationship with beauty out into into the world like into other elements of your life and that is so worthwhile it's just incredibly crazily worthwhile and that's an invitation to the divine you know you have to be daring to do that people are terrified of it people are terrified of color they paint their walls beige they're terrified of art they buy some mass-produced thing because they don't want anybody laughing at them for their lack of taste because what do you know right you have to develop it and so you're going to stumble along and make mistakes to begin with it's kind of hard on your self-esteem but you're stumbling towards the kingdom of god that's what you're stumbling towards when you try to make an aesthetic decision and to put something in your life that's beautiful and it's unbelievably worthwhile to do that man does not live by bread alone that's exactly right we live by beauty we live by literature we live by art and literally not metaphorically we cannot live without it because life is too dismal and and tragic in the absence of the sublime so and ourselves we have to be sharp so that we can survive properly and orient the world properly and not destroy things including ourselves [Music] you are somewhere you're a certain way you're moving forward something happens that you don't expect it blows you into pieces it introduces chaos right you you face the dragon you get the gold or maybe the bloody thing eats you and the story is over and then and then you get to where you're going but then the question is well what happens when you get to where you're going and that's a really important issue because one of the things that happens to people all the time in their life is that they get to where they're going and then they don't know what to do right so for example you graduate from university it's like okay story over who are you now who are you the next day and so so what happens is when you succeed then there's a success crisis and the success crisis is well i've run this story to its end now what what you should do when your story comes to an end when you've achieved what it is that you want to achieve when you've achieved what you need to achieve then the next question is okay well now i'm that person or i have that character what what do i need to do next and some of that is always what do i need to give up now what do i need to let go of so i can move to the next plateau right assuming that your life is a sequence of upward moving it's like sisyphus except you're actually each time you climb up the mountain you get a little higher on the mountain it's something like that so it's sizyphus with an optimistic bent and and maybe if you push the rock up the mountain properly and let it roll down then and if you do that right then it's okay every time you roll it back up it's it's better in some sense you know one of the experiences i've had in my life fairly commonly in a variety of different ways this is especially true when i was paying a lot of attention to my dreams which i did for about 15 years i guess something like that now and then i would feel like i'd learned some things and had sort of consolidated them and then before i went to sleep i'd think okay i'm ready to learn something else it's like and i didn't say that without trepidation and usually because usually when you learn something you know it's not that pleasant because you usually learn something about why you're wrong and the deeper the thing that you learn the more you learn about why you're wrong and there's a death that's associated with that because then you have to let that part of you that's wrong die and that's the sacrifice right and so you have to make a sacrifice you have to be willing to make a sacrifice before you're going to learn something perhaps what you'll learn is in proportion to your willingness to make a sacrifice and i really do believe that i do believe that as well because i also think that if you commit to something that means that you don't do a bunch of other things right so that's the sacrifice of all those other things you commit to it you set your sights on it if you really commit to it and you get the sacrifice right so to speak then the probability that that thing will be successful vastly increases and i think that that's also not a naive way of thinking or a foolish way of thinking my experience has been that that's the case [Music] one of the things i've noticed time and time again is that whenever i talk about the relationship between responsibility and meaning the crowds that i'm talking to go silent say look you need a meaning to sustain you through the vicissitudes of life okay well try to debate that it's like is life painful yes is it anxiety provoking yes is it uncertain yes is it painful beyond bearing sometimes yes it's difficult everyone agrees about that now they might disagree about how difficult but that doesn't matter that the central point holds okay what if you think that's all pointless well that doesn't seem very helpful okay so you need a sustaining meaning well where do you find that well you generally find it in responsibility to yourself and other people and people ask themselves those questions when when i'm talking because i ask them to ask themselves those questions and that's the answer well what's meaningful well i have a meaningful relationship with my father i have a meaningful relationship with my wife i have a meaningful relationship with my pet you know because i take care of that pet um when i commit to something and make sacrifices that sacrifice is something i also talk about a lot in both of the last two books you know if something's valuable you'll make sacrifices to attain it that that discovery of sacrifice i think that's what separates human it's one of the primary factors separating human beings from animals because we discovered that we could let go of something we value in the present and we would gain something we value even more in the future we acted that out dramatically in all sorts of strange ways over thousands and thousands of years before it was formalizable psychologically but it's a massive discovery i can forego gratification in a particular way and benefit in the future so i can share the proceeds of my hunt and i store up future food in the form of reputation and the favors i've owed i'm owed now by other people it's a massive discovery it took me a long time to understand that belief regulated emotion so what happens is that if you act out your identity if you act out your beliefs in the world and what you want doesn't happen what happens is that your body defaults into emergency preparation for action and the reason for that is you've wandered too far away from the campfire and now you're in the forest and maybe you're naked and so what do you do then and the answer is well you don't know what to do so what do you do when you don't want know what to do and the answer is you prepare to do everything and the problem with that is that it's unbelievably draining psychophysiologically like it hurts you and there's there's an immense physiological literature detailing the the cost of of of exactly that kind of response people stay where what they do has the results they want that's partly why you want to be around people who share your cultural presuppositions is because you know that for example even in small ways let's say you're a country music aficionado and you're hanging around with your cowboy hatted buddies and you throw on a tape and everyone says great tunes man and you you know you're happy about that but you know you throw on a piece by tchaikowski and you're you're in a different subculture and who the hell are you and people the people in your group will say man who listens to music like that and like that's a trivial example in some sense but i believe it's one that everyone can resonate to we like we it's very hard on us not to be where we know what we know that what we want is going to happen we hate that we hate that and no wonder so and then you know there are there are varying degrees of that obviously you can really be where you don't know what's going to happen or you can only be there to some degree but by and large by and large we're conservative creatures even if we're liberal and temperament there's not we can't tolerate that much uncertainty and you might ask well why and the answer is well because you can be hurt pain you can be damaged you can become intolerably anxious and you can die so it's no wonder you're sensitive we're very sensitive to negative emotion and so our identities rape functional identity regulates your emotion but you do that in concert with other people in the first chapter of the new book beyond order the rule is uh don't casually denigrate social institutions or creative achievement that's that balance again i make the case that most of your sanity is socially distributed and what i mean by that is well let's say that you know how to behave you're well socialized you can play with others now i said already in this conversation if you didn't learn to play with others between the time you were two and four you will never learn and psychologists have beat their heads against the wall trying to rehabilitate antisocial children they can't do it after the age of four well it seems to be partly because the kids fall farther and farther behind so let's say you make the leap from egocentric dependence on your mother at two and three to immersion in a peer group well then then you you pick peers that are at your same development level and you chase each other up the developmental ladder and the longer you're out of that the farther you fall behind and so you know kids five-year-old kids might come across another five-year-old kid who tends to cry too much if they don't get their way and they'll say we don't want to play with the baby and what they're saying is we have to find someone who's at our developmental level shares our developmental horizons so that we can mutually scaffold our further development now they're not going to say that obviously but that's the situation and kids test each other out when they first meet so do adults game game game game can you play are you playing at the same level as me i'm playing my game at the level that will further my development can you play along with me if not well maybe you're lower in status and i can pull you up as a mentor maybe you're higher in status and i can learn from you but if you're a peer we can play together anyways if you're acceptable to your peers and you behave well they'll accept you and then they tell you all the time if you're acting appropriately you know if your jokes are funny if you're dominating the conversation if you're bringing something of value to the table and all you have to do is pay attention to the social cues and you'll keep yourself regulated do not allow yourself to become arrogant deceitful or resentful i might have the order wrong there but that's the chapter yeah it opens with a discussion of why you would get resentful it's like well cultures are raid against you so you're the target of tyrannical forces that are beyond your control they're arbitrary they don't work in your interest at least not entirely and the more eccentric you are let's say the more tyrannical culture will be to you and so you're stuck with that and then nature conspires to destroy you constantly and is going to do that with pain and anxiety and aging and then there's the uncontrollability and darkness of your own psyche and everyone faces those now we face the positive elements of those two the beneficence of culture the beauty of nature the glory of the human spirit that's there as well you have reasons to be deceitful resentful and arrogant but [Music] it's not a good game unless you want to produce hell you know i took the idea that we were supposed to learn something from the horrors of the second world war seriously never forget okay you can't remember what you don't understand so what are we supposed to remember what are we remembering the fact that all these people were murdered no we're supposed to remember that that was a revelation of the genocidal nature of the human psyche that's partly why i'm so impressed let's say with the story of cain and abel i dealt with that in my biblical lecture series and in my writings you know the first two human beings according to the book upon which our culture is predicated for better or worse the first two human beings brothers the adversary and the hero the the archetypal adversary and the hero put right at the beginning of that amazing book it's the beginning of history cain's sacrifices are rejected by god okay well how do we understand that that's easy once you know the key you make sacrifices to make the future better well what if that doesn't pay off well you know think about that you know what that's like [Music] you endeavor to do something and it doesn't work you're not appreciated for who you are you fail maybe you failed despite your best efforts well are you rejected by god well it's as if you're rejected by god does it make you resentful does it make you bitter does it make you want to pull down the successful does it want does it make you want to pull down the successful out of spite does it make you want to pull down the successful out of cosmic spite the answer to that happens to be yes you shake your fist at god you say i'm gonna harm those whom you blessed and no wonder it's no wonder you know it's a it's harsh that the rewards of life are indiscriminately distributed it's hard on everyone but it doesn't help doesn't help to become bitter and it's not like i don't understand the temptation i mean i think part of the reason i get away with being so bloody preachy is because i'm talking to myself you know it's not like i don't put myself in the boat of the damned and lost [Applause] we have to strive not to be wretched there's something that doesn't seem fair about that why couldn't we just be happy being who and what we are why is it that we're punished if we don't strive well i don't know we're negan tropic organisms right i mean we have to maintain this incredible complexity in the face of a dissipating universe it requires effort it's the it's this it's the second law of thermodynamics i believe that's why we have to strive well why is the world constituted that way couldn't i guess it's an infantile paradise wish in some regard couldn't we just be rewarded for who we are i can understand that [Music] but i don't think that it works i don't think that's how things i don't think things function like that and i don't think probably in the final analysis we really want them to i don't know if anyone enjoys undeserved reward you know it feels kind of creepy doesn't it to be rewarded for something you didn't do the positive emotion that we find sustaining is experienced in relationship to an unachieved goal it's hope that drives us forward we want something and if we see ourself moving towards that then we're we're in the grip of the positive emotion that we find sustaining it isn't the attainment attainment is satiating attainment shuts down the system that has been striving for that particular object of attainment if you're hungry and you eat you stop being hungry now that's good because the hunger is gone but that whole frame disappears you can no longer strive within that frame and you need a new frame to strive towards and so technically and this is well established as far as i'm concerned we even know the drugs that people abuse cocaine let's say amphetamines the ones that are potent sources of positive emotion activate the system that regulates our emotional response to evidence that we're moving towards a desired goal so cocaine for example is an exhilarating drug it makes you feel that things are worthwhile because it hijacks the system that does make indicate that things are worthwhile so this is deeply this this striving aspect is deeply rooted in in our in our biology for obvious reasons pick something aim at it as you move toward it you'll get wiser then maybe your aim will change that's okay but at least it'll change in an informed way it's like discipline yourself in one dimension see what happens the best we have might not always work but it's still the best we have and the fact that it might not work doesn't mean we should throw it away [Music] if you stand up and do something correctly people who care about that sort of thing will notice they will notice and they will open doors for you that's how the world works don't underestimate the utility of of proper action the goal for young people is to turn themselves into someone to for each person to turn themselves into a person who stands up straight and who pays attention and who can think and who can speak and who can act in relationship to the to the highest good they can conceive of and that i believe that that's a way of being that's noble enough so that if it's enacted it also takes the sting out of the tragedy of life there's something noble about bearing up under a heavy load and human beings have a heavy load there's no doubt about it now the question is can you build yourself up into something that's strong enough to lift that without without complaint and without corruption well that's a noble goal that's what young people should be doing they should have an a conception of who they could be and that conception should be something like if i could be like that everything would be worthwhile that's what you want to aim at because you want to make everything worthwhile and so so do it money has done as much for you as it can do by the time you can pay your bills it's like well define wealth all right that's easy heat in the winter air conditioning in the summer running water right reliable shelter and the provision of high quality food once you've got those and and then we could add to that access to all the world's information okay everyone has that virtually unless you've fallen right out of society maybe we could add reasonable access to health care to that although for most people especially if they're young and healthy that's irrelevant but once you have those first six things indoor plumbing for example you're you're already overwhelmingly rich by by historical and even worldwide standards you're already in the top one tenth of one percent of all the human beings that have ever lived and incremental movement past that just doesn't make that much difference you know so maybe you have a ten-year-old uh hyundai sonata i have one of those it's like well i could have a um a mclaren but the incremental difference when we're stuck in a traffic jam is zero so the the radical left leftists overestimate the utility of wealth in relationship to its capacity to solve the fundamental problems that beset human beings so rich people get cancer rich people get divorced rich people get estranged from their children they develop drug and alcohol problems like they're they're they're sued constantly for what they're doing they're engaged in legal battles and their lives tend to be extraordinarily complex because it's not easy to handle money it disappears man if you don't keep an eye on it if you're not watching it and and monitoring it and earning it generally speaking it disappears and that most family fortunes disappear in three generations and most fortune 500 companies only last 30 years and there is a one percent but it churns you know the the one percent ten years ago they're not the same people that are the one percent now people don't understand very well because they don't look into it at all is that most of the people who are in the one percent are old so that what do you want to be you want to be young and poor old and rich you know like what happens is if you're lucky as you move through life you trade your youth for security yeah roughly speaking but you know you're 75 and you have five million dollars well yeah okay you're 75. and of course the the amount of wealth people have accumulates as they get older well you know if they if the person is fortunate and and sensible because they save up their money and they've had much more time to work and so so most of these things are multivariate problems right why is there a one percent well because the patriarchy is oppressive it's like yeah okay that accounts for five percent of the variance or 10 of the variance if you want to really like push your argument but then all sorts of other things kick in health is a good one um and intellectual power and conscientiousness and and good luck and social network and and well and timing is a huge part of it and a lot of that's just random there's endless numbers of contributors to wealth disparity not the oppression of the patriarchy jesus you know people who think that should be embarrassed at their stupidity and the reason i'm saying that is because you don't really start talking that way till you've been educated a little bit but to to to turn everything into a univariate problem like a one variable problem is it's the it's the hallmark of a tremendously ignorant and weak mind because things are complicated and so are the solutions man things are complicated enough but the solutions are even worse [Music] money has its utility primarily as a tool for doing things really you know you can think about it as a as a means for obtaining luxury items but that gets dull pretty quickly for most people that have any sense it's like i've been to the houses of very wealthy people and some of them are quite remarkable but most of the because they're creative people but most of the time i remember going to a gated community for example in california it was a huge house it was probably ten thousand square feet but it was no different than a two thousand square foot house it was just bigger like the stoves were bigger the fridge was bigger the wine cellar was bigger the rooms were bigger who cares it's more to take care of it's not helpful for anything unless you're using it for a creative purpose and you know they also lived in a gated community and you can hardly imagine anything duller than that you know like there's nothing there there's no bars there's no nightlife there's no nightclubs there's no there's no corner stores there's no churches there's nowhere for people to hang out there's not even any sidewalks so so who who cares males who occupy positions of power are much more attractive to women so there's a famous canadian psychologist team of canadian cell ecologist margot wilson and martin daley who worked at at uh out at hamilton um at mcmaster canada's most outstanding evolutionary psychologists did a study at one point showing that uh first of all they established the relationship between inequality and male aggression the correlations like point eight it's off the charts man it's like it's it's it's it's one of maybe it might be the most powerful relationship between two hypothetically independent variables that that psychologists or social scientists have ever discovered it's off the charts so inequality fosters mail-on male violence and it's because of competition for scarce resources and it's driven by sexual selection pressures roughly speaking um one of the things that daley and wilson did and i believe this was in chicago as well they did an ethnological anthropological study of the consequence of uh interracial murder in the gang setting in chicago so basically what would happen is two gangs were were vying for territorial dominance let's say and there was some kind of violent exchange so let's call it a fight well the thing is if you're in one gang and i'm in another and we engage in a violent altercation one of us perhaps might die but who's gonna die is a toss-up right so that means that i can plead self-defense if i'm involved in that altercation well and so generally what happened was that the plea was self-defense the the charge was plea bargained down to involuntary manslaughter or to manslaughter the person was thrown in jail for or sentenced for perhaps three years and served something like 18 months and then when they re-entered the fray when they were back on the streets their credibility had had increased substantially and so had their probability of success so the left's concern with inequality is a justifiable concern the problem is we don't know what to do with it we don't know what to do about it it's very difficult to shovel money and other resources because it isn't only money that this sort of process applies to it's very difficult to shovel resources from the the pile at the top down to the many at the bottom who are hovering around zero yeah so uh it's something that has to be taken into account because well first it's not good for everybody to be stacking up at zero and second it destabilizes the society itself so but that doesn't mean we know what to do about it that's the critical thing it also doesn't mean that the reason that the people at the top have most of the resources regardless of what those resources are it doesn't mean that the reason they have them is because they're exploiting the people at the bottom now there is an element of exploitation in any complex productive system always because they don't operate completely fairly right so yeah [Music] suffering is built into the fabric of human existence and so you are vulnerable and you will die and you can you know that's harsh that's tragic i would say and and tragedy is built into into being and so to the degree that you partake in that tragedy you could consider yourself although i think it's the wrong way of conceptualizing it you could consider yourself as a victim among the universality of victimhood i think that's not a helpful way of looking at it because it leads to despair but to think of yourself as a particular victim or to think of yourself as a victim among the privileged i think that gets dangerous extraordinarily rapidly how can failing to align yourself with reality work how is that possibly going to work well you say well i can you know if i lie i get away with something it's like no you don't i i tell you i swear this is true in all of my clinical practice i have never ever seen anyone ever get away with anything even once you think the chickens won't come home to roost it's like all that that means is you're too stupid to see what your lies cause or too blind or too self-deceptive you just don't see it and so you don't get away with anything nothing it's terrifying to actually understand that it's terrifying what if you can't get away with anything ever you know well that's the judgmental god fundamentally and of course you can't get away with anything because imagine that you took a flexible plastic comb you know you bent it backwards and you say well i got away with that it's like well what's going to happen when you let go it's going to snap back and hit you in the face and that's that's life man you warp the structure of reality you think you are someone who can warp the structure of reality with your words and get away with it really no man that should that should terrify you right to the core of your soul you're not god tell the truth or at least don't lie because you can't tell the truth right because who are you to tell the truth that's a that's a mighty tall order man but you can stop saying things that you know are lies and that will change your life if you do that why would it change your life well how can you adapt to reality when you falsify it and you think well i'm just lying to other people no you're not you can't just lie to other people because what you say becomes you especially if you practice it because we build ourselves out of words and that can be lies in action too it's like don't don't say things you know to be false that's a that's a good start man and it allies yourself with the truth and like how can that be a bad idea how could you possibly defend the idea that you could warp the structure of reality and get away with it i mean who who like i said who do you think you are reality is you don't mess with it like it kills you and it'll torture you quite a lot before doing that if you're not if you're on particularly unlucky so beware you know they say the fear of god is the beginning of wisdom that's that judgmental god it's like you violate your conscience man you will pay that's hell do you want the horror of failure or the certainty of failure the horror of potential failure or the certainty of failure because if you don't do this you will fail now it'll be put off but it will absolutely happen and so that fear i understand why that stops people there's it's no joke to be rejected and it's going to happen while you practice and it's a real fear but you're deluding yourself by thinking that there's a no fear option there's just a delayed fear option right because if you don't get this right well you're going to fail for sure and then you're going to be miserable and vindictive and bitter and anxiety ridden and you're going to cause trouble for yourself and you're going to take it out on women and other men and like that's an ugly path man and so i see why you're afraid but you should be way more afraid of that and that's a nice way to help people get their thinking straight about fear it's like no zero fear path there is nothing that will make you more powerful than your words and so if you think that reading and writing is for pansies and dimwits you know or teachers pets you're seriously misinformed and so you know i talked to people like jocko willing and choco's as tough a guy as you could ever hope to encounter about literacy and a number of other people too who are also seriously tough guys they all know perfectly well that literacy is a huge part of what's made them unstoppable and you don't take that lightly you know it's really serious and it's a failing of our education system that it's not that literacy isn't marketed properly to young men it's like straighten up speak properly write learn to write why because that's the same as learning to think and why should you think well because you won't do as many stupid things and your horizons will widen and then two when you need to entice people along your journey hopefully somewhere good you'll be able to do it because you'll be compelling let's say the marketing association between toughness and dangerousness and literacy there's something wrong about that we think some weird way and it's just it's that's wrong it's like sure you should be physically tough and you should be tough in your temperament as well as having the capacity for play and compassion you know that has to be developed too but that's not enough and i don't care how tough you are physically you're nowhere near as tough as you would be if you were physically tough and really literate and then you're you're an unstoppable force and hopefully for for good and that's a much tougher battle than you know being tough for your own idiotic selfish ends that's just pathetic and so get your words together and then see what you can do and don't be thinking that that's somehow beneath you that just means you're stupid that you think that you don't know anything you think that it's wrong and you're limiting yourself so much you can't even imagine it you might not even figure it out till you're 60 or and then it's too late so read write think why should you read well do you want to be stupid you want to be stupid what happens when you're stupid you walk into walls because you don't see them and if someone comes along who's more educated than you more literate and cannier they'll just you'll lose man you'll lose and you'll lose too because you can't think properly so you won't aim at the right things and you won't be informed by the great individuals of the past and you need that where historical creatures this isn't optional it helps you become who you could be it helps you move out into the world and have your great adventure and to bring people along god only knows what you can do if you've got your words lined up properly and young men would listen to that if someone who knew what they were talking about was telling them that there's no safe path there's noble path there's an honorable path there's no safe path and possibly you wouldn't want that anyways because well who are you exactly you know look at you you know warrior stalk every single one of your ancestors has stayed alive for three and a half billion years it's like good work man that's a lot and so what makes you so sure you're built for safety what makes you so sure that that's what we should strive for and then if you want adventure i'll tell you an adventure what an adventure is you tell the truth as nearly as you can and you'll have the adventure of your life that's for sure and that isn't that isn't trying to fit in because you're naive or you know because you're too afraid to lie that doesn't make you telling the truth if you're too afraid to lie that's you know in a cowardly sort of way there's a wise way of being too afraid to lie it's lies that turn competence into tyranny so don't lie unless you want to be an incompetent tyrant and you think that's easier it's like in some ways i suppose it's easier because you can slide into that but existentially it's hell and hell has this weird quality because it feels like it's eternal if you have your sights set on a goal you'll move towards it if you break the steps down small enough so that even someone is useless as you will do it and that also requires a fair bit of humility because what you might find especially if you're avoiding something is that the step you are actually willing to take is so small that you're embarrassed to admit it to yourself so you won't take any steps at all well that's completely counterproductive and the reason that's not proper thinking let's say or productive thinking is that while small steps get bigger real fast and you it doesn't matter where you start if you're doubling your utility every you know a few weeks who cares where you start it starts to take off real quick so you don't want to be embarrassed you don't want to be so embarrassed by where you are that it stops you from becoming who you could be and that's tough it can be re that's real tough i'm not making light of that i see exactly why people avoid but it's it's not a it's not a good solution so for assertiveness that's what you do you know and maybe you practice how people maybe they're afraid to you know ask a woman for a phone number and so you practice that and and then you use exposure training it's like well go out and practice that say hi to a pretty woman when you pass her on the street that's your task for this week and see how you do see how you respond see if you can do that see if you avoid and if you do avoid see what you're thinking when you avoid and we practice these tiny things because they are not tiny man you wouldn't believe how many people don't have friends because they don't know how to introduce themselves and shake hands i bet you there's five percent of the population has no friends at all because they don't know how to do that it's really sad [Music] there's an unrecognized danger of our technology i don't suppose it's entirely unrecognized but you know the miracle of memory is not that we remember the miracle of memory is that we forget and that we only remember what is necessary and because we can forget we don't drag the past along with us right so we can get free of the past like all you need is three sleepless nights to understand what kind of hell life would be if you couldn't dispense with the past because each night when you sleep you dispense with that day and and that renews you and so that that story of of dissent into the depths and redemption i mean that's part of our natural biological rhythm that's the descent into unconsciousness at night into deep sleep and then our re awakening in the morning that's associated with solar mythology with the setting of the sun and the rising of the sun all that's tangled together but that definitely does renew us and it enables us to start afresh in the morning the problem with technology a problem with technology is that it's becoming increasingly difficult to shed our past and without that you can't redeem yourself and that that is a mistake it is a problem because everyone makes mistakes and everyone mistake makes mistakes all the time and you might ask yourself well why isn't it appropriate for you to be crushed by the weight of your own stupidity you know given that it's immense and that you make all sorts of mistakes that's right no one can live under those conditions we need to be able to let go and to forget and to forgive forgetting and remembering are very very sophisticated processes so normally what we do with an experience is we reduce it to its significance then we remember the significance and we let go of the details when you write fiction you don't write down every single thing a character does or thinks that would bore your reader to death you write down what's significant and important about what they're experiencing and about what they do and if you get that right then the story is interesting we do the same thing with our own lives like we boil our lives down to the gist of the story and then we remember that and then we're not crushed by the weight of the detailed recollection and that's actually a consequence of very sophisticated psychological processing that ability to reduce and forget so one of the things you do in therapy for example so if you have a memory for example that's more than 18 months old for technical reasons i won't go into and it still produces a negative emotion when it comes to mind whether voluntarily or involuntarily then that memory has information in it that has not yet been unpacked so imagine the purpose of your memory is to extract wisdom from the past that you can apply to the future so that you don't do the same stupid thing over and over or so that you repeat things that worked well that's the purpose of memory not not recollection as such it's the extraction of wisdom the lesson well if you have a memory that's more than 18 months old and it's still hurting you making you anxious disappointed ashamed guilty any of that it means that you have not undertaken the complex process of analyzing that memory pulling out from it the moral and dispensing with the details so that's why you say in the book you have a bad memory it won't leave you alone write it out write it write it out yup write it out write it out everything you can remember about it star wars there is darth vader all dressed in black you know he's a bad guy the minute he walks in then you have the reluctant hero skywalker then you kind of have everybody else um you know that that are on the side of the empire are they doing it out of fear or do they actually believe it you know you're you're either on this side or that side you can't move and nobody moves nobody wants to recognize you know they're on the wrong side nobody's making case they're just killing each other there is a growth of the reluctant hero in all stories there is this arc of that hero and they they something happens and they change and they become heroic but they're not heroes and so many people don't think that they have what it takes they're not the hero and and the people who are standing around are looking and just following the crowd how do you get or what's happening to us to where so many people are seeing what's going on how do you get people to recognize and then have the courage to stand you've taken a beating nobody wants to do that why is that worth it and how do you get there well i think it's worth it because the alternative i believe the alternative is worse i mean that's that's why i think it's worth it it's a decision to make to stay silent when you have something to say you know you don't know what it is within you that that requires your voice right because you feel i have something to say it's like well where does that come from exactly that feeling that you have something to say you're disgruntled at work and you're choking on your own bile because the situation is not just in your estimation you're dying to say something but you won't well you'll die if you don't say it maybe it's a death of a thousand cuts i don't like deferred punishment i'd rather take it now and keep the future clean which is why i encourage people to to have the fights now don't not to hide things in the fog for later because they grow and metastasize it's better to confront what you need to confront when it's small and when you have some possibility of victory the instinct for meaning is a genuine instinct and it it it underlies even our attention it's unbelievably deep it's the deepest thing about us what if that meaning instinct goes wrong it's like yeah what if what if okay how do you make it go wrong lie and see what happens because you'll pathologize that instinct and then you're lost so if you understand that there isn't anything more frightening than understanding that because your your stability as an entity as a soul is dependent on your relationship with that instinct for meaning and if you pathologize that with deceit you're you will find yourself in the hands of things that you do not want to be in the hands of put it that way if you tell the truth to the best of your ability then you can trust your instincts to some to some degree to the to the greatest degree that you're capable of and then that can help orient you in the world properly you can rely on your instincts if you don't pathologize the information that you're feeding yourself so you know if you want to live in harmony with yourself which you would assume to be somewhat desirable rather than a hellish disharmony then don't feed yourself what's on indigestible and certainly don't warp the world around you with deceit you know to be deceitful it's extraordinarily damaging and dangerous where do you find the hope and the strength to continue to fight or for those who are listening to get the motivation to stand up and say what's on their mind people have to have a dialogue with their own conscience imagine that you get upset with something when you recognize an obstacle in your path and then imagine that you need a path and that you've chosen reasonably wisely let's say not perfectly but reasonably wisely an obstacle arises you're frustrated disappointed ashamed afraid well you have something to do to clear out the obstacle you have something to say well then you don't clear out the obstacle because you're afraid to speak or you're unwilling to speak you want to defer the conflict because you hope will go away all that will happen is that the obstacles will pile up but then your life will be nothing but obstacles well you need to know that you have to ask yourself if you believe that's true if it's true then you don't you don't want to remain silent imagine too that as you remain silent you get smaller because you're not manifesting the courage necessary to live by your own standards and the problem gets bigger well if you're not going to speak now what makes you think you're going to be more prepared in the future why is that going to happen when does that ever happen generally what happens is people cave very rapidly and they apologize like mad even if they haven't done anything wrong and i think that's a mistake i understand why people do it i mean i really do understand why people do it but it it it isn't i don't think it's a good idea if you haven't done anything so that's the thing about the presumption of innocence and it really is a miracle right because if you think that you know if i accuse you my tendency is to think that you're bad and you might think well my tendency is to think that i'm good but you know that isn't the tendency for most people people have a pretty guilty conscience almost everyone and it does tie itself up with this idea of monstrosity that you just described the only person for whom public opinion means nothing is a psychopath right the rest of us regulate ourselves by watching our impact on others and we're doing that all the time and generally even if the fault is relatively trivial i mean we're capable of denial in all of that but generally we take our impact on other people very seriously and so the presumption of innocence is a very difficult thing even to apply to yourself but it's it's unbelievably useful it's like wait a sec you're innocent unless you're proven guilty [Music] you're gonna have to put some effort into your life and you need to be motivated to do that what are the potential sources of motivation you know if you're extroverted you want friends if you're agreeable you want an intimate relationship if you're disagreeable you want to win competitions if you're open you want to engage in creative activity if you're high in neuroticism you want security those are all sources of potential motivation that you could draw on that you could tailor to your own personality but then there are dimensions that you want to consider your life across and so if you could have your life the way you wanted it in three to five years if you were taking care of yourself properly 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 going to regulate your mental and physical health and maybe also your drug and alcohol use because that's a good place to auger down because alcohol wipes out 5 to 10 percent of people so you want to keep that under control so maybe you develop a vision of what you would like your life to be once the goal is established then you break down the goal into micro processes that you can implement the micro processes become rewarding in relation to their causal association with the goal and that tangles in your your incentive reward system and that's the thing that keeps you moving forward it produces positive emotion when it can see you moving towards a valued goal 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 processes associated with that goal start to take on a positive charge and so what that means is while 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 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 what it is that's valuable across the lifespan 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 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 a bad deal but once you set up that goal structure and that's really who it is that you're trying to be and you aim at that and then use everything you learned as a means of building that person that you want to be and i really mean want to be i don't mean should be even those things are going to overlap and specify your damn goals because how are you going to 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 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. 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 looks like that might be worth living despite the fact that it's going to be anxiety provoking and threatening and there's going to 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 then you turn down to the micro routines it's like okay well this is what i'm aiming for how does that instantiate itself day to day week to week month to month and that's where something like a schedule can be unbelievably useful google calendar it's like make a damn schedule and stick to it okay so what's the rule with the schedule it's not a bloody prison well what kind of schedule are you setting up 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 going to 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 going to go along with that because if you have any sense one of the things that you're going to insist upon is that at the end of the day you're not in worse shape than you were at the beginning of the day if you have a bunch of those in a row 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 got to work tomorrow and you might say okay well what are you going to do for me that makes it likely that i'll work for you well you could ask yourself that maybe you 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 that's how you make the schedule and then you look at the day and you think well if i had that day that'd be good you'll probably only hit it with about 70 percent accuracy but that beats the hell out of zero right and if you hit it even with fifty percent accuracy another rule is well aim for fifty one percent the next week or fifty and a half percent because you're going to hit that position where things start to loop back positively and spiral you upward so that's one way that you can work on your conscientiousness plan a life you'd like to have having a little conversation with yourself you have to understand that you're not your own servant so to speak you're someone that you have to negotiate with 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 you know what that's like because you probably waste like six hours a day your time's probably worth 50 bucks an hour i mean you're not getting paid that now but you're young and so this is investment time and what you do now is going to multiply its effects in the future so let's say it's 50 bucks an hour which is perfectly reasonable so if you waste six hours a day and you are then you're wasting about two thousand dollars a week or about a hundred thousand dollars a year so like go ahead but that's what it's costing you every hour and you need to know what your damn time is worth when you spend an hour was that well what have i paid someone 50 bucks to have had that hour and if the answer is no it's like well maybe you should do something else with your time and it depends on whether or not you think that your time is worthwhile but the funny thing about not assuming that is if you assume your time isn't worthwhile what happens is you don't just sit around sort of randomly in a state of responsibility less bliss what you do is you suffer existentially as far as i can tell that's how you can improve your conscientiousness outline a goal that you actually would like to hit and even better here's something else you can think about when you're negotiating in your life you want to negotiate with your boss for a new salary you might think okay i've got this damn job how much would i have to be paid so i'd be so bloody excited to go to work i could hardly stand it well you could at least know what that number is and then you could go there and say well look you know you like to have me around i've been doing some thinking i think if you paid me this amount of money i'd be so thrilled to go to work that you could hardly even keep me away from here and your boss might think wow i'd actually really like to have someone around who'd be so thrilled to work that i can't get rid of them well i can't give you all of that i'll give you 75 maybe we can renegotiate it in a year we plan all the time and we're going to think about that strategically you learn through voluntary contact with that that frightens or disgusts you carl jung said his primary dictum was instir qualis inventor which i'm sure i'm massacring because it's latin but it meant in filth that will be found [Music] you always learn when you're wrong which is very annoying now what do you learn when you're correct you you're walking in the world you're operating in the world you have a sense of what you want to have happen you're always looking at the world through this sense of what you want to have happen you're acting so that what you want to have happen will happen and when it happens well then you're happy because well first of all you get what you want and that's good maybe depending on what you want but it's also good because if you get what you want when you act then it turns out that your model of how to act is valid right the outcome that you get what you want indicates no error on the part of your model but it's very frequently the case that when you act to get what you want you don't get what you want and then that's unpleasant because you don't get what you want but it's even more unpleasant because it brings with it the hint of a suggestion that the manner in which you're construing the world is incorrect at some indeterminate level so for example if you tell a joke at a party you presume that people will attend and then when they hear the joke they will laugh and then if you tell the joke and it goes flat or even worse disgusts and offends people then you're going to be taken aback and that's partly because you didn't get what you want and that's not so good but it's more because there's something wrong with the way you conceptualize the situation and then you're faced with a problem and the problem is the emergence of a domain of the unknown it's like well what kind of mistake did you make maybe you're not as funny as you think you are that that could be a big problem um maybe you're not around people that who are the way you think they are maybe they don't like you as much as you thought they liked you i mean the potential for various paranoid thoughts of increasing severity to come welling up at you in a situation where you make even a trivial social mistake is quite broad and when you make an error of that sort you have to face it and sort through all the possibilities so that you can find out what it was that you did wrong and how to retool it so that in the future you don't make the same mistake you have nothing to rely on in your life that's more crucial to your success as you move through life than your character and your personality that's what you bring to every situation and the more sophisticated you are in relationship to yourself and others the more you understand people the deeper you understand the nature of your own being the more likely it is that you're going to proceed through your life in a manner that will make you pleased to exist rather than displeased to exist as you interact with other people you inevitably tell them what you want and what you don't want when they give you what you want and what you admire you respond positively to them you pay attention to them you smile at them you focus you focus your thoughts on them you interact with them and you reward them for acting in a particular manner and when they don't respond the way that you want then you punish them with a look or by turning away or by rejecting their friendship or when you're a child by refusing to play with them and so we're engaged in the co-creation of personalities our own and others and that also brings up the same question what is it that we are all collectively trying to be and trying to create honest communication between two people can produce personality transformation and you know you might think well you kind of know that already because there's something very engaging about a deep honest conversation where you're able to say things that you wouldn't normally say where you're being listened to by someone who's actually listening to you and you're listening to them and in the conversation you're moving both of you further to a different point that's different than a conversation where you're right and you're trying to convince me or i'm right and i'm trying to convince you which i would say is the typical conversation the healing conversation is more well what's up with you you know how are you doing what how's your life going where what sort of problems are you facing what do you think about those problems can you conceptualize what a solution might be is there a way we could figure out how to get there you know it's so it's a problem-solving conversation and it's predicated on the presupposition that the person that you're conversing with has the capacity to grow in a positive direction if they so choose there's lots of different places that you can act in the world and there's lots of different ways you can look at it and survive that's why you can be a plumber and a lawyer and an engineer and those all work right even though they're very different modes of being and you can have different personalities and survive as long as you're capable of finding the place where your particular filters and behavioral proclivities match the demand of the environment and a huge part i would say of successful adaptation is precisely that [Music] i believe that you need to know what the world is made of and i suppose that's the proper domain of science but then you need to know how to act and that's a whole different thing and you need to know how to act that's the thing you need to know most of anything because of course you're a living creature and action in relationship to desired goals is is everything to you and you can think about that from a darwinian perspective you have to act at least so that you can survive at least so that you can find a partner that's that's life and so part of the question is well how does the world look if you think about it as a place to act and the answer isn't a place of value-free objects that's not what the world looks like and you can't act in a world of value-free objects because there's no way of choosing between them if everything has zero value why would you choose one thing over another you live in a world where things present themselves to you as of different value you make yourself out of the information that you gather in the world so you're an exploring creature you explore specifically when the maps that you're using in the world are no longer orienting yourself properly when they're producing errors you go out gather information and assemble yourself from the information that you discovered [Music] there's some relationship between your personality and the manner in which your brain functions i've often found it useful when i'm trying to remember something to have a story to hang the facts on otherwise you're faced with the necessity of doing nothing but memorization and it isn't obvious to me that memorization actually constitutes knowledge what constitutes knowledge is the generation of a cognitive structure that enables you to conduct yourself more appropriately in life and so i suppose you might say that you could argue that of course in psychology especially in personality is of course in applied wisdom as well assuming that wisdom is in part your capacity to understand yourselves so that you don't present too much of an intolerable mystery to yourself and also to understand others so that you can predict their behavior understand their motivations negotiate with them listen to them and formulate joint games with them so that you can integrate yourself reasonably well with another person and with a family and in society you have to figure out ways of simplifying the world right because you just can't do everything and so people are specialized they have specialized niches that they occupy you can think about them as social niches the niche is a place where your particular skills would serve to maintain you and so if you're extroverted you're going to look for a social niche because you like to be around people and if you're introverted you're going to spend much more time on your own and so if you're an introverted person for example you're going to want a job where you're not selling and where you're not surrounded by groups of people who are making social demands on you all the time because it'll wear you out whereas if you're extroverted that's just exactly what you want and so the extrovert sees the world as a place of social opportunity and the introvert sees the world as a place to retreat from and spend time alone and it turns out that both of those modes of being are valid the issue at least to some degree is whether or not you're fortunate enough to match your temperament with the demands of the environment what exactly is personality or what exactly is a trait think of a trait as an element of personality and i think the best way to think about a trait is as a sub personality so you're you're made up of some personalities that are integrated into something vaguely resembling a unity but the unity is is diverse part of the reason it's useful to know what your traits are is because it can help you figure out how you should orient your life like so for example if you're hired extroversion you know you've got a proclivity towards sales for example and you're going to like you're going to like occupations where you have a lot of opportunity for social interactions and social networking you're not going to be happy if your job requires you to sit alone by you know for for extended periods of time and work in the absence of social interaction so and you want to be in a position that capitalizes on your traits because it's really difficult to work contrary to your traits imagine that you're looking for a stable partner right so you might think well what do you want in a stable partner and at least in principle one of the things you don't want is too much mismatch between you and that person so for example if you're really extroverted and you have a really introverted partner you're going to engage in continual conflict about how much social activity the two of you should should subject yourself to and it's very very difficult for people who broadly differ widely differ on those dimensions to come to consensus because it's not just a matter of opinion right it's really a matter of different if you're looking at extremes of really different types of people and the thing about introverts is they just don't enjoy large-scale social interaction that much one-on-one they're often fine but in a group they don't like that and they it tires them out whereas a real extrovert it's like you isolate them and they just wither on the vine because a huge part of what actually motivates them in a positive way is tangled up with social interaction and so if you're an agreeable person and you have a particularly disagreeable partner you're also going to run into problems because the agreeable person will say whatever you want whenever and the disagreeable person will say well i'd like to know what the hell you want for a change and be much more harsh and much more demanding in the situation the agreeable person is going to find the disagreeable person harsh and unpleasant and the disagreeable person is going to find the agreeable person wishy-washy and unable to stand up for themselves and again that's a that's actually one of the primary sources of tension between men and women because women tend to be higher in agreeableness than men well if you're conscientious you're industrious and orderly and orderly people seem to be sensitive to disgust industrious people find it unpleasant and unsettling to to not be doing something industrious people can't stand sitting around doing nothing in a in a community where everyone knows everyone the people who work hard are going to be pretty irritated on a fairly chronic basis with the people who are completely unproductive and my suspicions are that plenty of people who were completely unproductive in the history of of our of the evolution of our species were wiped out by people who were unhappy with their lack of productivity and so i think generally speaking human beings have this sense of ethical obligation with regards to one another to share labor and people who are conscientious really really feel that so they feel bad if they're not busily working on something that's productive all the time and so the advantage to being with someone conscientious is well they're going to work like mad but the disadvantage is they're they're going to work like mad so you know if you're looking for a partner that you want to relax with or have fun with or who isn't uptight then a conscientious person is probably not a very good choice on the other hand if you're a conscientious person and you're living with someone who's really unconscientious that's good because they might be able to help you relax but you're not going to be happy with them because they don't work nearly as hard as you do so if you're a really orderly person and you live with a disorderly person well good luck getting along with them they're gonna regard you as like uptight and and uh over concerned with details and and well and unwilling to relax that's for sure and they're gonna regard you as well just a bloody mess and how can anyone possibly live with someone like you so another reason why it's useful to understand your personality is because i think it gives you a better crack at finding someone that you can actually live with over the long run and i don't think you want to live with someone who's exactly like you because then both of you have the same strengths and weaknesses and there's a bit of a problem there right because maybe an agreeable person can use a bit of disagreeable person around them to balance each other out and vice versa right so we don't understand the optimal balance for for for long-term thriving in a relationship but i think we do understand the fact that if you're too different in your traits that where you're different is going to constitute a chronic source of conflict if you're an extrovert does being around groups of people make you energetic or does it exhaust you and if if you're the sort of person that you know will go to a party and interact with 20 people and then you have to go home and be by yourself for like two weeks then you're introverted introverts are exhausted by social interactions extroverts are the opposite they're energized by social interactions and you know you might be in the middle so that you can take it or leave it with regards to social interactions but you're happy to go to them and you're happy to spend time by yourself that's a pretty canonical question for for extroversion versus introversion it's a very stable trait by the way it manifests itself early in life and it's it's stable across the age span not completely introverts can learn to be extroverted the extroverts can learn to spend time on their own i think that actually your capacity to expand your ability past the initial constraints of your biological temperament is something like the development of character or wisdom you know so if you're an introvert by nature and you learn how to be extroverted then that expands your domain of competence and if you're extroverted and you learn to be introverted the same thing well since you're extroverted you value being with people and so you're going to look at the world for example if you're extroverted you come into a room like this you think oh look it's a whole field of opportunity for social interactions and if you're introverted you think well maybe i'll go sit up in the corner and hope everybody leaves me the hell alone but so so it's an a priority set of perceptual structures that you bring to bear on a whole sequence of of environments so for example maybe you're high in openness versus low in openness that's the creativity dimension people are high in openness tend to be artists and entrepreneurs and open people will look at other people as opportunities to engage in interesting intellectual conversations and so you can tell when you're talking to someone's oh someone open especially if they're very high in openness because they're going to want to talk to you about ideas or about aesthetics that's what it's going to go right away so that's how they view you as a source of that sort of conversation that's how they view the landscape someone who's high in neuroticism which is a negative emotion dimension is more likely to view the world as a place of threats to be to be protected against because they're they're more anxious and more prone to emotional pain so so that's the frame of reference issue so there's there's something about underlying fundamental psychological traits that determine or influence at least your value structures and they they do it at the level of perception they also tend to set your goals so extroverted people have as one goal the opportunity to engage with other people so extroverts love parties they live for parties they love to tell jokes as well it's a that's a very good behavioral marker of extroversion and so because they value those sorts of things they set them as goals in their life or you could say the extroversion operating within them sets them as goals within their life depending on how deterministic you want to be about it it's very necessary for people at some point in their life to dedicate themselves to a single game of some sort you know you have to become one thing at some point in your life and the sacrifice of course is that you give up all the other things that you could become but you don't really have a choice because if you don't decide voluntarily to become one thing you know to become a a disciplined adherent of some specific uh practice or profession or viewpoint then you risk just aging chaotically and you don't get away with not aging so you might as well age into something that's that's actually something rather than just remaining or then just becoming an old child which is really not not a good thing it's not a good thing to see especially by the time people hit about 40 it's not it's not pretty for them or anyone else and even at 30 it's getting pretty old at that point 40 it's like it's almost irreparable at 40. and the reason for that is you run you start running out of opportunities when you're young and stupid people don't care because they think well you've you know whatever you've got decades of possibility still ready to unfold in you but if you're in the same unspecified position at 40 people are much less forgiving especially because if they're going to hire someone who doesn't know what's going on or engage them in some sort of productive activity they might as well take a chance on someone young and full of potential rather than someone who's really lived more than half of their life already because of course you have by the time you're 40. [Music] you

Channel: Motivation Madness

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Keywords: motivational video, motivation, motivational speech, speech, motivational, success, inspirational video, motivational speeches, be inspired, motivation madness, jordan peterson, jordan peterson motivation, jordan peterson debate, jordan peterson lecture, jordan peterson motivational speech, jordan peterson speech, jordan peterson 12 rules, jordan, peterson, motivation for 2022, jordan peterson compilation, motivational compilation, 2022 motivation, jordan peterson 2022, 12 rules

Id: 7ymfgEHOY1s

Length: 185min 15sec (11115 seconds)

Published: Mon May 09 2022