Jordan Peterson: How to Set Goals the Smart Way

um this old client of mine he was about 85 when he came to see me and he was a financier in a kind of a mathematical genius he made these little pendants out of a mathematical symbol for the most beautiful mathematical equation that was ever written he made them out of gold and he would hand those out and and he he'd studies psychology as a young man and he introduced me to this concept that I didn't know about called the Pareto distribution which see I'd been taught as a psychologist that most human characteristics were normally distributed right so most people were average and some people were extreme that that's a priori our normal distribution intelligence is like that and height there's more people of average height than very tall or very short and weight is like that and lots of things are normally distributed and psychologists tend to assume that everything is but they didn't creative products are distributed in a Pareto distribution and that's a whole different thing and it's really important to know this it's another fundamental fact the knowledge of which can sort of transform the way you conceptualize let's say the political landscape so here's an example of the Pareto distribution huh you know there's a rule of thumb that if you run a company that 20 percent of your employees do 80% of the work or the 20 percent of your customers are responsible for 80% of your sales or the 20% of them are responsible for 80% of the customer service calls same thing but that's not exactly the rule the rule is worse than that the rule is in a given domain the square root of the number of people operating in that domain do half the productive work so you think well you have ten employees three of them do half the work it's like yeah okay what if you have a hundred employees then ten of them do half the work what if you have a thousand employees then it's thirty and if it's 10,000 employees then it's a hundred and this actually turns out to be a rather ironclad rule it it applies across very very many situations it applies for example to the mass of stars and the size of cities so you can see how universal it is as a law and it's it's something like those that have more get more and those that have less get less that's the Matthieu principle right to those who have everything more will be given from those who have nothing everything will be taken away and the economists sometimes call that the Mathieu principle and so what what that lays out is a wolf world that's rife with inequality so you know you you hear this idea that I think it's the 85 richest people in the world have more money than the bottom 2 billion that's a Pareto distribution phenomena and you might say to hell with capitalism for producing that it's like sorry you got your diagnosis wrong it's a natural law it's no no matter what society you study you get a purrito distribution of wealth you get a preeto distribution of number of records recorded you get a pre-tour distribution of number of songs written or goals scored like any creative product has that characteristic and it's partly because as you start to become successful let's say people offer you more and more opportunities and as you start to fail people move away from you and you plummet and so okay so that's rough so what it is what it means is that there is always a landscape of inequality and I'm not saying that we shouldn't do anything about it although I am saying that we don't know what to do about that's the thing you know because you can modify the pre dough distribution of wealth let's say but if you but we don't know how to do it without maybe disrupting the system so completely that it collapses which is what happened in the Soviet Union for example and in Mao's China they were trying at least in principle to adjust inequality but the Cure was far worse than the disease and the the truth of the matter is we actually don't know technically how much inequality there has to be to generate wealth we can guess and you could say well there should be less and you might say well there should be more if you're left-wing you'd say less and if there if you're right we need to say well we'll just let the inequality flourish but we do know that it's inevitable and we also know that we don't know how to regulate it so there is inequality what that means is there's always gonna 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 know because you look like looked like I have this this friend of mine he told me something so funny he was he was decrying his his lack of success in the world and he compared himself to his roommate and he said you know his roommate has called roommate was doing much better than he was and his bloody roommate was Elon Musk it's like really it's like oh you're not doing as well as Elon Musk well it's I mean you can see MIT would take it rather personally because they were roommates and everything it wasn't like he was doing badly like he wasn't doing pretty damn well it's like I'm not as good as Elon Musk it's like yeah well you and like seven billion other people you know but but I thought it was instructive because well yes you have to be careful who you compare yourself to now you can't just not compare yourself to others to successful people right because then you don't have anything they mapped and one of the things I learned from young this was a cool thing I'm gonna make a real lateral move here young thought the book of Revelation was appended to the Bible because the Christ in the Gospels was too merciful he was too nice a guy now he's an ideal right and young said wait a second an ideal is always a judge that's the thing about an ideal because you're not as good as your ideal so your ideal as a judge Revelation has Christ coming back as a judge and that was Young's explanation at the level of the collective unconscious for the pasting of that remarkably strange and terrible book on to the end of the of the of the of the Bible so anyways my point is is an ideal is it you need an ideal because you have nothing to aim at but an ideal as 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 is insufficient so I was trying to work that out in the chapter and this is something I've had to work out a lot as a clinical psychologist it's like well let's say you need a goal but we don't want to eat let your distance from the goal crush you so you got to set up a goal and then you go 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 a bit of practical I wouldn't say advice it's it's because it's better than advice it's it's some practical knowledge about how to go about achieving 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 it's also what you do with children right you you want to push them because they need to grow up and be more than they are right but you don't want to crush them with constant failure so what you do is aim high and make the goal procs difficult but proximal so anyways so that's one one one one way of looking at it but then the next thing is you know I've had clients many clients in their 30s who are trying to this is more true with women I would say a lot of women who were very high achieving and who established their career goals at 30 and then want a differentiator differentiate out their life they want to have a husband they won't have a family they're trying to figure out how to do that and one of the things I've noticed that around 30 you really have to stop comparing yourself in some ways to other people and the reason for that is that the particular it is of your life or so I do synchronic that there isn't anyone really all that much like you you know because the details of your life happened to matter and so maybe you compare yourself to some rock star or something like that and you know the person is rich and famous and glamorous and all that but you know they're alcoholic and they use too much cocaine and they've had three divorces and it's like how the hell do you make sense out of that is that someone that you should judge yourself harshly against or not the answer is you don't know because you don't know all the details of their lives and who do you know that you can compare yourself to that's easy you yesterday so here's a good goal it's something like well aim high and I really mean that it's like talk about that a little bit to aim high but use as your control yourself it's like so your goal is to make today some tiny increment better than yesterday and you can use better you can define better yourself this doesn't have to be some imposition of external morality you know you know where you're weak and insufficient where you could improve think okay well this is what I'm like yesterday if I did this little thing things would be just an increment better and well that's a great thing because you get the ball rolling and incremental improvement is unstoppable you can actually implement it and it starts to generate purrito distribution like consequences it starts to compound and I've seen that happen in people's lives over people writing all the time and tell me that they're doing that but I've seen that happen in people's lives continually they make a goal a goal that the goal should be how could I conceive of my life so that if I had that life it would clearly be worth living so I wouldn't have to be bitter resentful deceitful arrogant and vengeful like that's sort of the bottom line right because that's what endless failure does to you it's not good and and and that's what life without purpose and the goal does to you as well because life is very hard so you think okay well I need to adopt a mode of being that would justify my suffering and you can ask yourself that questions what would make this worthwhile need a quote Nietzsche I think in that chapter he said he who has a why can bear almost any how that's a lovely line man I mean it's a lovely line and it's really worth thinking about so you think well how do I manage all this misery and suffering and futility it's like well I need to figure out what I would have to do in order to make that clearly worthwhile and so then you have your goal and then you think well I need to move towards that incremental II because I'm kind of useless and can only do so much and maybe not even that and but all I have to do is be a little bit better than my my miserable self yesterday and that'll propel you forward very rapidly and and you can succeed at it which is also really lovely because why not send yourself up for success you know because otherwise you droop around like a number-10 lobster and you know that's just not good you get all pinchy when that happens and it's not a good thing so that was that was Chapter four

Channel: PhilosophyInsights

Views: 513,817

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, goal, setting, set, goals, aim, meaning, life, work, ideal, lession, talk, 2018

Id: 5WX9UEYZsR8

Length: 10min 30sec (630 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 20 2018