Jordan Peterson: 30 Minutes for the NEXT 30 Years of Your LIFE

[Music] the next best predictor of lifetime success is conscientiousness well so and although of the two aspects of conscientiousness say orderliness and and industriousness the better predictor is industriousness so the question is well what can you do about your industriousness and the answer to that is well that's kind of rough too because there's a strong genetic component but you can work on micro habits with regards to your conscientiousness and I think the best micro habits this is partly to do with these future authoring program processes I think the best thing you can do with regards to your conscientiousness is to set up some aims for yourself goals that you actually value and the future authoring program helps people do that and basically it does a situational analysis of it helps you do a situational analysis of your life more than a psychological analysis I would say and so the questions are something like well alright you're gonna have to put some effort into your life and you need to be motivated to do that and so what are the potential sources of motivation well you could think about them in in the Big Five manner you know if you're extroverted you want friends if you're agreeable you want an intimate relationship if you're disagreeable you want to win competitions if you're open you want to engage in creative activity if you're high in neuroticism you want security okay so those are all sources of potential motivation that you could draw on that you could tailor to your own you know your own personality but then there are dimensions that you want to consider your life across and so we ask people about well you know if you could have your life the way you wanted it in three to five years if you were taking care of yourself properly you know what would you want from your friendships what would you want from your intimate relationship how would you like to structure your family what do you want for your career well how are you going to use your time outside of your job and how are you gonna regulate your mental physical mental and physical health and maybe also your drug and alcohol use because that's that's a good place to auger down you know because alcoholism for example wipes out you know five to ten percent of people so you want to keep that under control and then and then so maybe you know you you you develop a vision of what your life what you would like your life to and that associates the so the goal well once the goal is established and then you break down the goal into micro processes that you can implement the micro process has become rewarding in proportion in relation to their causal association with the goal and that tangles in your your incentive reward system you know we talked about the dopaminergic incentive reward system and that's the thing that keeps you moving forward and the way it works is that it works better if it produces positive emotion when it can see you moving towards a valued goal okay well what's the implication of that better have a valued goal because otherwise you can't get any positive motivation working out and so the more valuable the goal in principle the more the micro process is associated with that goal start to take on a positive charge and so what that means is well you get up in the morning and you're excited about the day you're ready to go and so as far as I can tell what you do is you specify your long-term ideal maybe you also specify a place you want to stay the hell away from so that you're terrified to fail as well as excited about succeeding because that's also useful you specify your goal you do that you do that in some sense as a unique individual you want to you want to specify goals that make you say oh if that could happen as a consequence of my efforts it would clearly be worthwhile because the question always is why do something because doing nothing is easy you just sit there and you don't do anything that's real easy the question is why would you ever do anything and the answer to that has to be because you've determined by some means that it's worthwhile and then the next question might be well where should you look for worthwhile things and one would be well you could consult your own temperament and the other would be well you kind of look at how look at what it is that people accrue that's valuable across the lifespan look look what so you do a structural analysis of the sub components of human existence and already did that you need a family you need friends like you don't need to have all these things but you better have most of them family friends career educational goals plans for you know time outside of work attention to your mental and physical health etc you know those are that's what life is about and if you don't have any of those things well then all you've got left is misery and suffering so that's that's a bad that's a bad deal for you so so once you but once you set up that that goal structure let's say and that's really in many in many ways that's what you should be doing at universities is that's exactly what you should be doing is trying to figure out who it is that you're trying to be right and you aim at that and then use everything you learned as a means of building that person that you want to be and and I really mean want to be I don't mean should be even those things those things are going to overlap and it's important to distinguish between those because that's partly and this is back down to the micro routine analysis so I should I saying well you're gonna try to make yourself more industrious okay number one specify your damn goals because how are you gonna hit something if you don't know what it is that isn't going to happen and often people won't specify their goals too because they don't like to specify conditions for failure so if you keep yourself all vague and foggy which is real easy because that's just a matter of not doing as well then you don't know when you fail and people might say well I really don't want to know when I fail because that's painful it's so I'll keep myself blind about when I fail that's fine except you'll fail all the time then you just won't know it until you've failed so badly that you're done and that can easily happen by the time you're 40 so so I would recommend that you don't let that happen so that's willful blindness right you could have known but you chose not to okay so once you get your goal structure set up you think okay if I could have this life looks like that might be worth living despite the fact that it's going to be you know anxiety provoking and threatening and there's gonna be some suffering and loss involved in all of that obviously the goal is to have a vision for your life such that all things considered that justifies your effort okay so then what do you do well then 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 that's the first thing that people do wrong is say well I don't like to have follow a schedule it's like well what kind of schedule are you setting up well I should I have to do this then I have to do this then I have to do this you know and then I just go play video games because who wants to do all these things that I have to do it's like wrong set the damn schedule up so that you have the day you want that's the trick it's like okay I've got tomorrow if I was gonna set it up so it was the best possible day I could have practically speaking what would it look like well then you schedule that and obviously there's a bit of responsibility that's gonna go along with that because if you have any sense one of the things that you're gonna insist upon is that at the end of the day you're not in worse shape than you were that then at the beginning of the day right that's a stupid day if you have a bunch of those in a row you just dig you know you dig yourself a hole and then you bury yourself in it's like sorry that's just not a good strategy it's a bad strategy so maybe 20% of your day has to be responsibility and obligation or maybe it's more than that depending on how far behind you are but even that you can you can ask yourself okay well I've got these responsibilities I have to schedule the damn things in what's the right ratio of responsibility to reward and you can ask yourself that just like you'd ago she ate with someone who is working for you it's like okay go I work tomorrow okay so I want you to work tomorrow and you might say okay well what are you gonna do for me that makes it likely that I'll work for you well you could ask yourself that you know maybe you do an hour of responsibility and then you play a video game for 15 minutes I don't know whatever turns your crank man but you know you have to negotiate with yourself and not tyrannize yourself like you're negotiating with someone that you care for that you would like to be productive and have a good life and and that's how you make the schedule it's like and then you look at the day and you think well if I had that day that'd be good great you know and you you're useless and horrible so you'll probably only hit it with about 70% accuracy but that beats the hell out of zero right and if you hit it even with 50% accuracy another rule is well aim for 51% the next week or 50 and a half percent for God's sake or because you're you're gonna hit that position where things start to Lou back positively and spiral you upward and so so that's one way that you can work on your conscientiousness it's a plan of life you'd like to have and and you do that partly by referring to social norms that's more or less rescuing your father from the belly of the whale but the way other way you do that is by having a little conversation with yourself about as if you don't really know who you are because you know what you're like you won't do what you're told you won't do what you tell yourself to do you must have noticed that it's like you're a bad employee and a worse boss and in both of those work you know for you you don't know what you want to do and then when you tell yourself what to do you don't do it anyway so you should fire yourself and find someone else to be but but you know my point is is that you have to understand that you're not your own servant so to speak you're someone that you have to negotiate with and that's and you're someone that you want to present the opportunity of having a good life to and that's hard for people because they don't like themselves very much so you know they're always like cracking the whip and then procrastinating and cracking the whip and then procrastinating and it's like god it's so boring and such a pathetic way of spending your time and you know what that's like because you probably waste like six hours a day and I think we did an economic calculation about that a while back right your time is probably worth 50 bucks an hour something like that 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 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 $2,000 a week or about $100,000 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 so let's say it's not 50 bucks it's 30 whatever maybe it's a hundred it's somewhere in that range one of the things you should be asking yourself is 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 respond on sibility lists bliss what you do is you suffer existentially and so that seems like a stupid solution so okay so anyways as far as I can tell that's how you can improve your conscientiousness Hannah you know 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 could say if you're kind of pessimistic you'd say well we have to negotiate an agreement I'd like to walk away not miserable and resentful okay let's call that a baseline and that's how you're going to negotiate with your wife or your husband that's a good thing to know you want to negotiate so that you don't walk away miserable and resentful because that makes you hostile and then you'll work to hurt them and I would say that's unless you want to hurt them and then of course they'll happily return the favor unless you if you want to exist in a place where you're basically hitting each other in the head repeatedly for thirty years you go right ahead but I wouldn't say that that's a particularly good way of living so you might say well the minimal precondition for a successful negotiation is that you don't walk away resentful and angry and so that's also how you know when you have something to say to someone because the rule has to be if you're gonna walk away resentful and angry you've got something to say it doesn't mean you're right by the way but it does mean that you have something to say but it's kind of a low bar you know like if I wanted to live with you for thirty years maybe we should say how about we walk away from our mutual negotiations thrilled well why not you know you gotta aim for something you could aim for that 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 well I actually really like to have someone round who'd be so thrilled to work that I can't get rid of them it's like maybe uh well I can't give you all of that I'll give you seventy five percent maybe we can renegotiate it in a year it's like hey good deal or you can you know be some weaselly coward and go in there and snivel about how awful your life is and walk away barely able to tolerate the outcome of the negotiation it's like I wouldn't recommend that and it's funny because I've watched people do this repeatedly in my clinical practice because I do we do we plan all the time because the rule is you're gonna come and see me I'm gonna try to help you figure out how to have the life that you want to have and we're going to think about that strategically so you're making $50,000 a year right now maybe you should be making a hundred and fifty thousand dollars in three years and they think well that couldn't happen it's like not with that attitude that's the first thing it's like no that's not gonna happen if you if you don't ask people for the damn money if you don't look for a better job but they're gonna come along and just shovel a boat full of money at you it's like no that's not going to happen but if why is that impossible lately look at you you people in here it's like what the hell is wrong with you nothing so you can probably have what you want if you could figure out what the hell it was and then you know you diligently pursued it so and then maybe you wouldn't whine about being alive that'd be good because people who whine about being alive are dangerous to themselves and other people so you might think I can have what I want but you better well figure out what it is and you can't just wait for the like have what you want ferry to show up at your doorstep and grant it because obviously that's not going to happen so so okay conscientiousness well we talked about how you could prove that social networking that's another big deal it's one of the advantages that older people have over younger people and so for example now that I'm in my fifties roughly speaking I know a bunch of other people who are you know relatively well positioned in the dominance hierarchy and they know all sorts of people and so when I go to one of them and say you know can you do X or do you know X they say no but I know someone who can and that's a huge advantage so another thing that you want to think about as you move through life and and this is is that use your ability to network properly and that doesn't mean schmooze and it doesn't mean go out and impress people that's all just complete bloody rubbish it means you you you try to surround yourself with people who are competent in multiple different dimensions and you maintain your Asian ships with them and that's a trading relationship - right it involves reciprocity but it's a huge advantage a social network is a huge advantage and that's something extroverted people can be really good at because you know they have that sort of social ability and that goes along with the ability to sell so another place that you can pick up power and power for the good for the right things is to is to consciously develop and maintain your social networks and that also means well let's talk about friendships for a minute here's how you know if someone's your friend a you can tell them bad news and they'll listen they won't tell you why you know you're stupid and why that bad thing happened to you and how something worse happened to them once and you know derail the whole conversation you can actually tell them bad news and they'll listen so that's a good thing and then this is a weirder thing you can tell them good news and they'll help you celebrate and that's a really good way of deciding who you should have around you because if you have someone around you you know something good happens to you you're kind of afraid to even admit it because you know God something good happen to you it's like you let that be known and it'll certainly be taken away so you know you you come out and you sort of tell someone half-heartedly that something good happened to you and they they give you a whack and then talk about you know the great thing that happened to them three years ago or worse the great thing that happened to someone that they knew three years ago you know it's like go away from that person they're not helpful to you and they're not helpful to themselves either and so you want to surround here so you got to think about this you got to surround yourself with people who want the best for the best part of you you can hang around with weasels and losers that are trying to pull you down to justify the fact that they're spiraling downhill as well and you know the upside of that is you don't have to have any responsibility and you can all whine about how wretched life is you know so that's pretty attractive but I would say it's also a meet bad medium to long term plan and so it's it's acceptable and desirable to try to surround yourself with people who are facilitating your development you know and you might say well I've got people around I know them well you know they're they're not doing that well and and they're and they don't fit into that category it's like what's your point what are you gonna do with them exactly if they'll if they'll listen and cooperate with you and move towards a better future great if they don't pay any attention and they keep doing the same damn things over and over and they're not going anywhere and it's painful then maybe the proper thing to do is say you just have your misery I'll go off and have my life and maybe you'll wake up at some point in the future and think that's a better way of being because just putting up with it is oh well they call that enabling right you put up with that sort of behavior you're providing tacit consent for it and even tacit approval it's like it's bad idea you have I would say both the right and the responsibility to surround yourself with people who are good for the best part of you and that's not the same as you know I don't have to elaborate on that you can figure out what that means skills that's another thing you can do and if you want to increase your probability of success every time you have an opportunity to take an opportunity that would provide you with a new skill do it right learn to program learn to write learn to read read new things learn to public speak learn how to introduce yourself to people learn how to social network learn how to go talk to your boss in a manner this is the right way to go talk to someone who's supervising you I see this problem and here's the solution and so I'm come to talk to you about the problem and the solution it's like that person is going to want to talk to you a lot it's like because the other people they're talking to you are going to come and say I've got a problem can you do something about it it's like they don't want to do something about they're only got 50 things to do you know so if you're the person who constantly brings forth a problem even if they're accurate problems is why are they going to want to have you around it's you're just - you're just another problem don't be a problem for the people who want to give you money that's a good rule of thumb man you know if someone wants to give you money then help them do that and if they want to give you status and success then help them do that right and you do that in part by bringing them solutions and partly you do that by developing your skills and so if things aren't going very well for you this is also a good way of evaluating an opportunity should you take an opportunity well here's the rule take the opportunity if it will teach you something that you can use for other opportunities because then even if it fails that you probably will doesn't matter because you've accrued something of value that you can bring forward to the next situation so now there's this old Union idea that I told you about and then the shark Cathedral for example mmm the cathedrals made in the form of a cross and the cross signifies the center of the world and the dome signifies the sky and so right below the dome at the center of the world and it's a cross because the cross is the place of suffering so that's the center of the world because that's what you are you're the place of suffering right you're the place of conscious suffering that's the center of the world and so inscribed on the floor is a maze and you ain't it's big maze and it's a Mandela and and there's a kind of a flower shaped resting place right in the center and what you're doing is walking in the maze and you walk all four quadrants and you get to the middle which is where you want to be you want to be in the middle well how do you get there you walk everywhere and what does that mean it means every bloody time you're offered an opportunity take it and develop your skills and that that's better than wealth by the way in fact it actually constitutes wealth because wealth constitutes what you have when someone takes all your money away right that's real wealth and so the way that you build up that sort of wealth is you turn yourself into someone who's competent in multiple directions and you can be doing that all the time right especially with the kind of technology that you people have access to I mean you can learn anything you want whenever you want so what a good deal that is man and so there's there's easy fruit hanging that you could pick and I would recommend that you do that so here's an example let's say you're not doing too bad so maybe you're in the middle of the normal distribution then you lose your job okay and so and let's say you're a conscientious person and we can say just for the sake of argument that you lose your job because of mass layoffs in your company so it has nothing to do with you it's fundamentally it's just like luck of the draw basically but then what happens to you well if you're conscientious you're gonna you're going to go after yourself pretty hard so you're gonna and especially if you're also high in neuroticism it's going to depress you to lose your job and maybe you're in a situation where you're just for one reason or another you don't have that many other opportunities now maybe you should look for them but maybe you're in a depressed strata of the economy or you're geographically located somewhere that makes moving difficult or so on and so forth you know so but you lose the job and then you start to get depressed because of that well then as you start to get depressed you know it decreases the probability that you're gonna look for a job but also maybe starts to put stress on your family and it also starts to decrease the probability that you're in gonna engage in positive social interaction so now not only are you unemployed and suffering from economic stress but your marriage is starting to suffer and you're starting to isolate yourself from your friends and then of course as your marriage suffers and the stress builds up then that's going to make you more depressed and that's going to keep you even farther away from your friends and that's going to decrease the likelihood that you're going to have enough positive emotion and enthusiasm to look for another job and then you know maybe you want to add a bit of a drinking problem to that just for fun and you can see that you can get a spiral going that's just taken you down right and there's all sorts of things because lots of times people conceptualize let's say you know you're unemployed guy and you go to counseling and you get a diagnosis of depression and the thing about a diagnosis of depression it's sort of like the assumption is there's something gone wrong with your psychological structure it's like if you're unemployed and you were you're depressed it isn't obvious at all that the problem is in your head you know you know what I mean it's it doesn't it doesn't even obvious that it's a psychological problem it's just a problem and problems can take you out and so the you know if you're unemployed and and you're under economic stress and your marriage is starting to shake and you're isolating yourself from your friends and you're less likely to be motivated to go look for a job you can sort of think about that as a depressive spiral but you can also think of it as a conspiracy in some sense of external forces that are ordering you into the ground and we don't tend to conceptualize psychological disorders that way but we should because lots of times when people are suffering from something that you could describe in Psychological terminology and depression is a very good example of that it isn't obvious that there's something wrong with and psychologically often they just are in trouble and there isn't a category in in psychological diagnosis for client in serious trouble but my experience has been almost without exception that the people that come to see me come to see me because something's gone wrong with their life not because they have a psychological problem now you could say well there are psychological inadequacies such as they might be are interfering with their ability to recover or maybe even served as precursors to you know increase the probability of the catastrophe but it's still not exactly the appropriate way to conceptualize it and you know because you're there's you inside you and as a personality psychologist and as a clinical theorist most of what I've talked to you guys about is your psyche and its structure as if it was like a soul that inhabited you and and there's some real utility in that you know you're an individual demarcated from the community you can be set up in a healthy manner or a non healthy manner the problem with that is that you're not just an individual you're connected to all these external network dynamic networks that are really really important and it isn't even easy to separate them from you you know like you might say well this is especially true once you become a parent it's like is your child more you than your arm you know well you think it's pretty obvious that parts of you that are physically linked are more key to you to you as an entity but that's by no means obvious I think many people would much more happily sacrifice an arm than a child you know and so your boundaries are not where your boundaries are located are not precisely isomorphic with the outline of your body it's not that simple at all and so you're embedded in all sorts of networks that can pull you down rapidly or elevate you because the other thing that happens is that well let's say I've never traded with anyone and I go up to someone and I say well do you want to trade and they say well why how can I trust you and the answer to that is well you have to take my word for it with that's not that's not a very good argument you might say instead well here's what I have to offer and you can be evaluated but the purse is likely to say well I don't know how to evaluate it and so I'm still stuck with taking your word so that's a bad problem and you'll see that if you ever try to sell a product in the market if you don't if if the product is new and it's complex then you're forcing the person that wants to buy it to evaluate it and then you're forcing them to take the risk of being wrong as well as the time it would take to evaluate it and they don't like that what they want is what's often called social proof which is okay well you want to trade with me who else have you traded with and if the answer is zero then they are gonna say well you're an interesting person all that but I've got these other people over here who've already traded with a bunch of people and therefore the risk is lower in part because let's say I have a supervisor and I'm gonna make a decision and my primary concern is that my supervisor will not hate me for making the decision it's not my that my primary concern is to make the best decision it's not the same thing it's that I want to make a decision that I'm not going to get in trouble for okay so how do I do that because I need a post-hoc justification so I buy something from you and it turns out to be terrible and and I get called for it called on the table for it and what do I say I said well you know that person was buying from it and that person was buying from from from him and and that person was buying from him like all these other people were doing the same thing so it's not like the error is localized in me and that's often a very credible story but if the answer is well you know why I have held you ated it and took a writ decided to take a risk it's like cool out the door with you Sonny because you know that's just that's an indication that you're not capable of doing that sort of thing so I think part of the reason that people spiral downhill into Xero is because positive feed a feedback loop is a loop that increases the probability that the loop will continue right a positive feedback loop is you've experienced this when you hear microphone feedback in an amplified system so you know the microphone sends a message to the speakers and then the speakers send out the message amplified and then the microphone picks up the message and and it gets amplified again and you get this howling occur which is can be deafening but can also destroy the system because it'll keep amplifying upward until the speakers blow for example that's a positive feedback loop and a positive feedback loop can spiral you upward or it can spiral you downward and so a virtuous circle a virtuous positive feedback loop is win well I've traded with him and I've traded with him and I've traded with him and now I can say to you I've traded with these three people and you go talk to them and they say good things and so then you say well I'll trade with you and then because of that then you're even more likely to trade with me and it's like the thing starts to spiral uphill and it does that I think in a nonlinear form and so because one of the things you guys are going to be asking yourself as you mature because what's happening is that income inequality is increasing right and you might ask well why that why is that the first thing you need to know is that that's what income does so it's not like you need an explanation for it that this is the explanation it's like a natural rule if you run a trading game to its logical conclusion one person ends up with all the money and everyone else ends up with zero

Channel: Motivation Madness

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Keywords: motivational video, motivation for 2018, motivational video for 2018, motivation, motivational speech, speech, 2018, motivational, success, motivational video compilation 2018, inspirational video, motivational speeches, motivational speech for success, be inspired, motivation madness, video advice motivation, video advice jordan peterson, change your life, jordan peterson motivation, jordan peterson success, jordan peterson debate, jordan peterson, jordan peterson depression

Id: HLP7jEVIh8U

Length: 30min 0sec (1800 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 22 2018