Jordan Peterson REVEALS His 12 Rules That Will CHANGE YOUR LIFE!

the first rule which is kind of a comical rule is stand up straight with your shoulders back and it's a meditation among other things on the habits of lobsters i was reading these these articles on lobsters and i i came across this this finding that lobsters lobsters governed their postural flexion with serotonin and i thought god that's so interesting it's so inflection is this is to stand up straight i thought wow that's so interesting because you know depressed people crouch over i wonder if there's any link between those two things and then i went and read a whole pile of papers on lobster and lobster neurochemistry lobster neurochemistry is actually quite well understood because they have a fairly simple nervous system right and and so if you want to understand a complex nervous system it's a good idea to understand a simple one first and then sort of elaborate upwards and it turns out that um serotonin governs status it governs status emotional regulation and posture in lobsters just like it does in human beings and so that would just blew me away and so one one one thing that the chapter one is about is the fact that if a lobster is defeated in a dominance battle you can give it essentially antidepressants and it will fight again and that just blew me away you know it's so it's so remarkable because one of the things that tells you is that so if you're imagine that you could be lobster top dog or bottom dog imagine there's 10 strata in the lobster hierarchy so you could be number one right top lobster number 10 bottom lobster if you're bottom lobster you have low serotonin levels and high octopamine levels that's a neurochemical that human beings don't produce and if you're a top lobster you have high serotonin levels and low octopamine levels and you can move a lobster in its dominant hierarchy by moderating its levels of serotonin and i thought that's so interesting because what it means is that the counter that keeps track of our status and we have a counter in a sense in our minds that keeps track of our status is a third of a billion years old and what that also means is that the the idea of the hierarchy let's call it a dominance hierarchy because it within lobsters it's it's kind of like a physical prowess hierarchy something like that the idea of the hierarchy is at least 350 million years old and so i read that and i think well so much for the idea that human hierarchies are a socio-cultural construct it's like no that's wrong it's not just a little bit wrong it's unbelievably wrong it's mind-bogglingly wrong right and it's right and so so hierarchies hierarchies have been around for a third of a billion years and and we have a neurochemical system that modulates our our understanding of those hierarchies and then also this is the interesting thing too and this is why people's reputations are so important to them among there's lots of reasons but this is one of them is that where this counter that you share with lobsters rates you in terms of your hierarchical position determines the ratio of negative emotion to positive emotion that you feel and that's also an absolutely mind-boggling idea for two reasons one is it tells you why it's so hard on people to be put down because it doesn't just upset them in the moment it changes the way their entire system responds to the world so that they now experience more positive emotion and less less negative emotion so that's really rough and then there's a corollary to that too which is like there's a very tight relationship between your belief system and your dominance hierarchy position it's complicated but it's worth going through like let's say that so i have a certain amount of status as a professor and and and and i have the let's call it the uh what would you say i've been granted the entitlement to a certain position in a in a social hierarchy now the question is why do i have a valid claim to that position and the answer hypothetically is because i know enough so that my claim to the position is valid so then if you stand up in the audience and challenge my beliefs and show that i'm wrong you might you might say well i get upset because i'm wrong but the more accurate reason that i get upset is because you're indicating to the crowd that my my position in the hierarchy of authority is invalid and by doing that you lower me in the hierarchy and you mess around with the neurochemical systems that are regulating my emotions you want to present yourself to the world in a manner that that doesn't disgrace you in some sense that that might be a good way to think about it and you don't want to disgrace yourself because the consequence of disgrace is is emotional dysregulation more pain less positive emotion and so the best way to present yourself is to stand up forthrightly and to stretch out you know and to occupy some space and to to to you make yourself sort of vulnerable by doing that because you open up the front of your body right but it's a sign of confidence and that way people are most likely to give you the benefit of the doubt and that's a good way to start regulating your mood but not only does it directly regulate your mood to stand up because it's so tightly associated like posture reflection is associated with serotonin and emotional regulation but also because if you straighten up and you present yourself in that manner then other people are more likely to take you seriously and that means they'll start treating you as if you're a number one lobster instead of a number 10 lobster and that's another way that you can at least give yourself the bloody benefit of the doubt right and and and and and and confront the world in a courageous manner and that's a really good way of also of of figuring out how to establish yourself in multiple competence hierarchies because one of the general rules of thumb about how to be successful is to confront things that frighten you forthrightly and with courage and that's kind of a universal strategy for success want to be happy build a life not just a business hey it's evan carmichael and this channel was created to help you overcome the number one challenge that is holding you back a lack of belief in yourself you watch these videos because you know there's something more inside you too you've got michael jordan level genius at something so today let's live your best believe life and learn the 12 rules from jordan peterson that will change your life enjoy rule number two treat yourself like you matter treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping i mean it's it seems pretty clear to me what this means yeah well that's an investigation into why people don't treat themselves well and the thing is is that you know human beings are self-conscious and we know about our limitations and we know about our weaknesses and so we can have contempt for human beings in general because you know we're just flawed and breakable in all of that and but we know ourselves better than we know everyone else and so unless you're narcissistic and some people are then you have a very acute sense of how you're not up to scratch in in on many of the dimensions along which you could be evaluated even by yourself and so that leads naturally to a sort of contempt self-contemptuous attitude and you can see that one of the stories i talk about is that people are more likely to give prescription medication to their pets than to take them themselves right right you know so even in the united states because we're pretty over medicated here even in the united states while people will get the prescriptions but they won't take the pills anyways the idea there is it's it's sort of a uh a variation that i learned from carl young on treat other people as it as you would like to be treated it's you reverse that it's like imagine someone that you treat well that you love then try to treat yourself that way you got to detach from yourself a bit you got to think okay well i'm a person among other people and i deserve at least as much respect as a person among other people and i should be trying to help myself across time and instead of being self-contemptuous and self-destructive i need to take care of myself as if i'm potentially valuable and to lay out my life that way and so that's what that's that chapter is about and it's it it's hard for people you know they don't take care of themselves as well as they should and i don't mean you know take care of yourself i mean that is what i mean it's like it's not a moralistic attack it's like it's an encouragement to give yourself a bit of the benefit of the doubt and and treat yourself as if you have some intrinsic value rule number three make friends with good people the next rule is 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 you know they were friends who some of them were aiming up and some of them were aiming down and if you have a friend that's aiming down and you do something that's aiming up then they're generally not that happy about it you know they try to top your accomplishment with one of their own hypothetical or real or put down what you're doing or offer you a cigarette if you're trying to quit and you've kind of done that successfully or a drink if you've been drinking too much and are trying to stop being an alcoholic you know or or yeah they're cynical and bitter and and devoted towards no good and sometimes that's family members too and sometimes it's even part of you you know but this chapter is a injunction to people is like 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 and maintaining your friendships with them might not even be in their interest and so it's a tricky argument to make because i'm not saying you know whenever anyone's in trouble you should you know push them into a ditch and then give them a couple of kicks that's that's not the idea the idea is that but i had a couple of rules i didn't write about one was be careful uh be careful about whom you share good news with and another was be careful about whom you share bad news with and everyone those rules ring in people's minds quite quickly 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 damn it 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 and so i would say like if people are 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 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 and so they use you it's a test case you know i'll just push you down into the low lobster bin and see how you respond and if you put up with it then yeah my cynicism is fully justified rule number four compare yourself to who you were yesterday compare yourself to who you were yesterday not to who someone else is today yeah well you've got to improve right and so and you might think well i'm a real fixer-upper and i'm really embarrassed about that because there's 50 things wrong with me and like look at that guy and so now i feel all terrible because of the comparison and all of that and first of all it's unfair because especially by the time you're about 30. when you're 17 you're like every other 17 year old and so that kind of social comparison is more appropriate by the time you're about 30 your life has become quite idiosyncratic you know like let's say your life has eight dimensions family friends intimate relationships health you know you can kind of lay them out you're individually positioned in all those dimensions your life isn't like anyone else's life and so you see someone who's doing better than you it's like you're only seeing one dimension at one slice of time so it's not reasonable you know what you don't have the whole picture you know so and then you you get down on yourself and and take the spirit out of yourself and you get bitter and resentful it's like there's nothing good about that yeah so so but you do need to improve because there's more to you than there's not as much of you as there should be so what's the comparison well that's easy you just say okay well here here's my position in time and space right now here's my virtues and faults it's like i can be a little bit better tomorrow in some minor way well that's the right comparison because you are very much like you you know you know what i mean everything's the same about you yeah and so it's a perfect comparison and then you get a trajectory going it's like well obviously i'm not perfect but i'm slightly less terrible than i was yesterday man you keep that up for five years and you're wherever you should be that isn't where someone else should be right because you really are an individual you just don't have insight into the tragedy of someone else's life you know and you might think well he's rich and successful it's like yeah but you just don't know you don't know what his relationship is with his wife or his children you know you don't know that he's gone through two divorces and his daughter won't talk to him and one of his kids is schizophrenic and like most people's lives are pretty nicely saturated with tragedy you know and with a certain degree of malevolence and you might think well i'd trade places with him in a minute and i'm also not saying that some people don't have it really rough it's like look man some people have it rough yeah that's not the point it's not the point the point is you should be better than you are but it's not because you're worse than other people it's because you're not everything you should be and so you got to pick the comparison right and then that's also ennobling it's like an instantly hopeful there is absolutely no doubt that you can be slightly better tomorrow than you are today and then because of the pareto principle that you know that that movement towards the good increases exponentially that trajectory can just take you out of hell very very rapidly and so you know there's nothing but good about that rule number five don't let your children do anything that makes you dislike them do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them and i thought that would be contentious first of all because people would think well i never dislike my children it's like really really really you know you're going to really tell me that god you know when there's a more there's a more horrifying element to that too because as a clinical psychologist i've seen the full freudian nightmare i can tell you that and you know the i've seen families where it's like this is like the family members are standing in a circle let's say and each of them has their hands around each other's neck and they're squeezing hard enough to strangle the other person in 20 years and that's the family it's like and you know if you if you haven't met a family like that or well then you're not paying attention and there's there's some reasonable possibility that you're actually in a family like that so the idea that parents can't dislike their children it's like god how naive can you get it's just that's just if you think that man you i don't even know where you'd start to straighten yourself out i could never dislike my children's like yeah well those are the people who produce the most monstrous children too i can tell you that see i kind of knew this when i had my kids i had already undergone that to some degree and and understood what it meant to be a bad person a terrible person and one of the things i knew that was that that manifested itself in families all the time tyrannical father overprotective mother more rarely overprotective mother tyrannical overprotective father tyrannical mother it's usually the other way around um and the terrible pathological familial drama that freud made much of in the early 20th century i'd seen that in many many situations dismal brutal awful and i've seen parents punish their children and you can also take a page from nietzsche if you really want to punish your children or anyone else if you have someone you're interested in punishing um including yourself you don't you don't ever punish someone you really want to punish for doing something wrong because that's actually a bit of a relief to them you know that's the theme of dostoevsky's crime and punishment the murderer gets away with it and it's a relief to him when he gets caught it's like no if you really want to punish someone you wait till they do something good then you punish them because that'll teach them that's you maximize the hurt that way you decrease the probability that they'll ever do anything good again and i'll tell you man if you want to have a good relationship with someone that's one thing you don't do you open your bloody eyes and if they do something that you would like them to do again then you tell them how much you appreciated the fact that that happened and you hope that it replicates you know you see that that's if there's one thing you can take away from tonight's lecture that's that's an extraordinarily useful thing to know watch and when people do something that they should do more of say look i saw that you did this specific thing i saw that it took some effort here's what it meant here's here's how i observed it's like keep that up and man if you love someone you do that to them that's that's encouragement that's such a great thing so anyways back to children so i already knew that i was pretty decent monster by the time i had kids and i thought well my kid my kids little you know like a baby or two year olds like i'm a horrible monster and so there's an uneven power problem here i better not let that child do anything that really makes me angry you know now you hear now and then you hear about something horrible that happens i when i was in boston years ago i read about a woman who plunged her two-year-old daughter's arms into boiling water you think well how in the world can that happen it's like well you know she's probably hungover she probably just lost her job she was probably desperate in six different ways she probably didn't have any decent discipline at her disciplinary strategies for children she probably didn't have anyone helping her she was bitter and resentful and angry and the child misbehaved at exactly the wrong moment and like you're going to be around your children a lot and so you might want to have it so that they don't misbehave at exactly the wrong moment because all hell can break loose if they can and i didn't want that to happen so and i knew that it was easy for people to hate their children even though they mouth the words that they love them all the time i saw very little evidence of that many situations and so one of the things you know you have a natural affinity for children and even more maybe a more powerful natural affinity for your own children so that's a good start but you don't want to set them up as an enemy against you you don't want to allow them to engage in the kind of hierarchical challenge that makes you irritable and resentful that's not a good idea and if the things they do make you dislike them the probability that they will make other people dislike them is extraordinarily high and so you can consult your own irritability and you can say look kid i used to tell my kids this you know when they were three or four i'd say look i'm not in a very good mood and i'm likely to be unreasonable so it'd be best if you'd go in your room and play for a while it's like i like you man you're a great kid but like get the hell out of here for a while you know and they were fine with that we'd train them already at that point to be able to go play by themselves in the room you know which is something a kid should be able to do anyways but but you need to know what sort of monster you are if you're going to be a good parent and if you think oh i'm not a monster it's like oh yes you are you're just an unbelievably unconscious monster and that's actually the worst kind so and then the other thing about that chapter is there's an idea in it and and it's an idea that i think's well supported by the relevant literature which is that your fundamental job as a parent especially of a child from zero to four is to make that child eminently desirable socially so what you're you're a successful parent if when your child is four all sorts of other children want to play with him or her that's really the that's like if you want one marker of whether or not you've been successful that's it now some children are a lot harder to get along with than others and some children have a harder time playing and so i'm not saying that every parent who has a child that isn't popular at four is is at fault for that i'm not saying that i'm saying the reverse which is you can be sure that you've been successful if your child is not popular exactly but desirable as a playmate and so then you think well what have you done for your child well you've opened up the entire world of children to them so because they know how to play which is a very deep knowledge and it starts to become inculcated probably at the breast and certainly in the course of rough and tumble play at about two years of age it's a deep embodied knowledge they know how to play like a good well-trained dog knows how to play you know you meet a new dog and you go like this and the dog goes like this you think oh that dog it i can go like this and it won't bite me right it knows how to play and a kid who's awake and alert is just like that like a well-socialized kid if you know anything about kids is you can take a four-year-old and make a little play gesture at them and they'll smile right away and start playing just right now and that's what you want for your kids and then everywhere they go other kids like them and will include them in their play and play as the way the children develop and so if other children include them in their play then the children develop and the poor kids that don't get befriended at the age of four with the literature on this is crystal clear if your child is an outcast at the age of four the probability that anything can be done about that is almost zero no matter what you do and i hate to be so blunt about that but i know the literature and that's what the literature suggests and so and then the other thing is if if you don't allow your children to engage in dislikable behavior then adults will like them because adults actually like kids you know one of the things i loved about having little kids in montreal i lived in a poor area in montreal there's a lot of rough guys around there and we used to roll our daughter around in a stroller and these rough guys you know like god only knows what they were up to they're rough looking guys you know we'd roll our daughter by them and they'd they'd like smile and they'd crouch down and make little goo faces and you know they were you i tell you one of the great things about having little kids is they bring out the best in other people you see a whole side of humanity even among the darker parts of humanity you see a whole side of them that you wouldn't normally see and it's lovely and the thing is if you're good to your kid in the real way you can help them maintain that tremendous attractiveness that they have as young children and to respond to adults properly like a puppy that wags its tail instead of growls and you know goes for your ankle and then wherever they go adults welcome them and teach them things and pat them on the head and smile at them genuinely instead of saying oh my god here comes that couple with that goddamn brat again you know which is the horrible that's horrible thing to do to a child because then everywhere they go all the good all the good will is false you know there's nothing that you can do to someone that's more terrible than to put them in a world where all the good will directed towards them is false that's a terrible thing rule number six set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world rule number six set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world oh that's a rough one that's about us that's about a mass murderer and about mass murderers yeah so i didn't i didn't get this far because as i said i just got this yesterday man well there's plenty of things to criticize about being it's tragic and there's malevolence that's basically the issue and you can complain about that but the thing is if you complain about that if you adopt that attitude which is sort of an anti-being attitude you go places that if you knew you were going you probably wouldn't want to go it's the places where like the kids that showed up columbine went those are bad places like you if you read the writings of the columbine high school kids and you really read them if they don't make the hair stand up in the back your neck you are not paying attention like the one kid wrote things i cannot believe that people could write and i've exposed myself to a lot of crazy things that people have done and said you just can't understand it it's it's it's uncanny you know well that's where you end up if you're if you get bitter it's like well what can you do about that well the world is harsh it's like should you criticize it it's like not until you put yourself together you've got to bring everything you can to bear on the problem before you have any right to stand in judgment about being itself and that's what these mass murderers do that's what they're doing that's what they're acting out they're saying well i'm looking out in the world i don't like people they're full of flaws they act badly they're a cancer on the face of the planet it'd be better if they didn't exist at all so i don't like being it's too full of suffering and and evil i'm the judge of this it's like i'm going to make my goddamn case i'm going to take them out and then it's more than that it's like i'm going to take them out and i'm going to do it with the innocence first because that's the thing you got to get about the mass murderer types is like they're not hunting down the guilty that's too obvious right you're hunting down the innocent that's the best protest that's why the guy showed up the elementary school in connecticut it's like why do you shoot kids well think about it well i don't want to think about it well that's for sure you bloody well don't want to think about it but you better think about it it's like well that's where you go when you take that criticism of being approached it's like you don't get to do that not unless you want to end up there it's bad so what do you do instead it's like okay stop doing stupid things stop lying stop making things worse stop making yourself weak you know everyone does that they know it you know and i'm not saying follow the rules i'm not saying that i'm saying even in a day you'll see that you have choices in front of you and sometimes you don't know what to do it's okay you're ignorant maybe you make a mistake whatever that's just ignorance malevolence is when you know what you shouldn't do and you do it anyways and people do that all the time and that's arrogance that's i'll get away with it it's okay it's deceit because you're lying to yourself about whether you should do this or not you know you shouldn't right you know and then it's resentment because well it's like i'm gonna do this bad thing because that'll teach the people or whatever that'll teach god to treat me this way it's like that's that's the that's the terrible trinity deceit arrogance resentment it's like chase those out of your life also to make sure you're actually taking action after watching this video i've designed a special free worksheet just for this video the worksheet will highlight all the lessons learned in this video as well as pull out our three favorite learnings and quotes that will inspire you to actually do something the worksheet will also give you space to write down what your key takeaways are and your specific plan of action to make sure you're getting results if you want the worksheet designed specifically for this video absolutely for free there's a link in the description below go click on it and start building the momentum in your life and your business i'll see you there rule number seven do what is meaningful not what is expedient rule seven rule seven just about killed me like i i've had a lot of bad health in the last year and having to rewrite rule seven coincided with one of those periods that lasted about a month and it was was the hardest chapter by far and it went down the deepest by far and it was really hard to get right it's called do what is meaningful not what is expedited and i'll just tell you a little bit about the chapter because i figured something out in it that and then explained it something that took me decades to figure out so there's this idea it's a it's a very deep christian idea that the messiah is the person who takes the world's sins upon himself right that's a characteristic of christ right it's something the idea is something like christ died for your sins it's like what the hell does that mean exactly you know and partly what it means and i would say a slightly corrupted form of christianity is that you just have to believe that that happened in the and you're redeemed it's like well that's we'll leave that aside for a second but there's an idea there a psychological idea you know that because the idea doesn't go away it's lasted for thousands of years it's like well so the idea signifies something it has a psychological reality independent of its metaphysical reality whatever that might be and so i thought about that for a long time it's like what in the world does that possibly mean and then i realized and jung knew this carl jung knew this that it was associated with this idea of the shadow i had this client once who [Music] her parents man they were pieces of work she her parents taught her i swear to you that this is the truth her parents taught her that adults were angels literally and when i saw her she was about 30 and she had a lot of strange symptoms symptoms of sorts i'd never seen psychosomatic symptoms she she uh she had kind of like quasi-epileptic seizures at night and no but she stayed conscious during them it was very difficult to understand it and i won't walk through it but her parents told her that adults were angels and uh and she was like 28 she had a university degree and and i said well did he ever like wonder about that i said didn't you read any history and she said yeah what i read something about the terrible things that people did to each other and i would just compartmentalize it and that was actually the key that i used to unlock what was wrong with her which was eventually fixed and i won't go into that but but i said i gave her this book i gave her two books i gave her a book called uh the terror that comes in the night which is a book about um about sleep paralysis and nightmares because i thought that was what might have been bothering her turned out that wasn't it then i gave her this other book called ordinary ordinary men and it's a great book it's a terrible book terrible dark book about about this police battalion that was moved into poland during world war ii after the nazis had marched through and it was all made of middle-aged guys who weren't like victims of nazi totalitarian propaganda when they were kids they were just you know bourgeois middle class guys kind of like all of us let's say um and they went to to police poland and um they were going to have to do some terrible things essentially but their commander told them quite forthrightly that if being involved in wartime policing was too hard on them if they felt that it ethically violated them or psychologically violated they could just go back to policing in germany and very few of them did partly because they didn't want to abandon their comrades let's say they didn't want them to have to do the dirty work you know and they ended up they were normal policemen they ended up the sorts of people who could take naked pregnant women out into the middle of the field and shoot them in the back of the head that's how the book that's the culmination of their training it's very interesting to read about their training because they were absolutely sickened by what they learned to do like physically sick and vomiting shaking traumatized but they didn't stop and and if you want to know why then you can read the book and i said look read this book but don't bloody well compartmentalize it enough of that it's like read it like you're one of the damn policemen which is how you should read history right you read about nazi germany and you think well i'm oscar schindler i'd save the jews it's like no you wouldn't right you wouldn't because people didn't and the probability is very high that you wouldn't and all you have to do is think it through you know anne frank it's like you're really going to put your family at risk to hide a group of another family in your attic for like multiple years while there's nazis parading the street and where if you get exposed you all die you're going to do that are you it's like very unlikely and and no wonder it's not surprising that it's unlikely but you don't want to be inflating yourself with self you know with with fictional heroism without actually knowing the facts on the ground so i told her to read read it and to understand that the policemen were her and that's the thing to understand well the idea that the savior is the person who takes the world's sins upon himself is exactly that it's exactly the same idea it's like the way that there stops being nazis is for you to know that the nazis were you and for you to decide not to do that again but you have to know you see this is the thing that people won't do you have to understand that you could not only do what the nazi camp guards did in auschwitz but that you could actually enjoy it and then you have to decide that you're not going to do that anymore rule number eight tell the truth or at least don't lie tell the truth or at least don't lie this has been a sort of theme of everything we've been talking about well telling the truth because you have to know the truth and that's hard but you can know when you're lying you sometimes you don't know because what the hell do you know but sometimes you know and you can feel that that's a disjunction of meaning so you'll know you see this often with people who are very socially awkward you know they'll say something that's sort of grandiose and it really falls flat and everyone's a bit embarrassed including them it's like they've if they were paying attention they would notice that that disunited them and made them weak and then they wouldn't say it and so that's that's the thing about not lying is that lies make you weak and you can feel it it's it's the antithesis of meaning i would say because meaning is associated with the truth so if you're if you're lying you're you're at the opposite pole of that that's the deceit part and it makes you weak you think well i'll lie and i'll get away with it it's like no you won't you you cannot get away with warping the structure of being rule number nine assume that others know something you don't chapter nine is assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don't this is a chapter about conversation and about the different forms conversation takes it's a chapter about humility and it's a chapter about listening and the humility element is it took me a long time to understand why there's religious injunctions supporting humility to even understand what the word really meant in that sort of technical sense and it means something like this it means what you don't know is more important than what you know and that's a lovely thing to then then what you don't know can start to be your friend you see people are very defensive about what they know and for the reasons we've already discussed but the thing is you don't know enough and the re you can tell you don't know enough because your life is not what it could be and neither is the life of the people around you you just don't know enough and so what that means is that every time you encounter some evidence that you're ignorant someone points it out you should be happy about that because you think oh you just told me how i'm wrong it's like great like maybe i had to sift through a lot of nonsense to get through the real message that you're telling me but if you could actually tell me some way that i'm wrong and then maybe give me a hint about how to not be wrong like that well then i wouldn't have to be wrong like that anymore that that would be a good thing and you can you can you can embark on that adventure by listening to people and if you listen to people they will tell you they'll tell you amazing things if you listen to them and many of those things are little tools that you can put in your toolkit like batman and then you can go out into the world and use those tools and you don't have to fall blindly into a pit quite as often and so the humility element is well do you want to be right or do you want to be learning and then it's deeper than that it's do you want to be that the tyrannical king who's already got everything figured out or do you want to be the continually transforming hero or fool for that matter who's getting better all the time and that's actually a choice you know it's a deep choice and it's better to be the self-transforming fool who's humble enough to make friends with what he or she doesn't know and to listen when people talk and listening is a transformative exercise like if if you listen to the people in your life for example if you actually listen to them they'll tell you what's wrong with them and how to fix it and what they want they can't even help it if you start listening because people are so shocked if you actually listen to them that they tell you also those sorts of things that they might not have even intended to things they don't even know and then you can you can work with that and so and the other thing that's so interesting you know now and then you have a meaningful conversation right you have a good conversation with someone you walk when you think geez you know what we really connected and i know more than i did when i came away from that conversation and during the conversation you're really engrossed in it and that that that feeling of being engrossed is a feeling of meaning and the feeling of meaning is engendered because you're having a transformative conversation your brain produces that feeling of meaning for you says oh yeah this is exactly where you should be right here and now it's it's the right place and time for you and that's a great place to occupy and so a good conversation where people are listening has exactly that nature and the reason it has that nature is because it is in fact transformative it's one of the truisms of clinical psychology like if you're a clinical psychologist a huge part of what you do is just listen to people it's like you know they come in they're unhappy and they'd rather not be something like that you say well why do you think you might be unhappy and they don't know they have some ideas they may have to ramble around for like a year before they figure out why they're unhappy they get rid of a bunch of reasons why they thought they were unhappy that are untrue and then you kind of get to the heart of the problem then you might ask them well if you could have what you wanted so that your life would be okay what would that look like then they have to ramble around a bunch about that because they don't really know but the listening will straighten them out because people think by talking and in order to think you have to have someone to listen because it's very hard to think hardly anyone can think and even the people who can think can only think about a limited number of things but almost everybody can talk and you can listen to yourself talk and if someone listens to you then well then you also have a foil for your thoughts right because you can watch the person when you're talking and see if you're boring or see if you're amusing or if you're engrossing all of those things and so listening that's a very good thing i outline a carl rogers victim he was a famous clinical psychologist this is another great little tip rogers said here's a trick to tell if you're listening so let's say someone lays out their perspective for you and then what you do is say look here's what i think you said i think you said this and this and this and this and then this is that right have i got what you're saying right and maybe the person says god you haven't been listening at all and you know then they have to straighten you out or maybe they say yeah yeah you got it and then the nice thing about that is that you summarize their argument for them which can be very helpful and for you but also you don't get to make the person into a straw man so like if you're arguing with your wife let's say or your husband big party is going to want to win that's stupid because if you win you get to be top lobster but they get to be bottom lobster and if you want to live with bottom lobster then like more power to you but i wouldn't recommend it right because you don't want that you want to you want to defeat your wife in an argument oh well great like if she was going to disappear tomorrow no problem but like you're going to like live with defeated miserable her for the next week that's no good so you listen and you think okay well here's here's what you what i think you said and maybe even make it a little stronger and more elaborated than was the case with the original utterance so that you get the damn argument right because you don't want to win you want to fix the problem that's the winning and so the summary with listening is so useful for that because the person can say well yeah that's what i meant it's like then well then you have to grapple with that and roger said well people usually won't because you know if you live with someone and they tell you the truth about the situation it usually means that there's something really stupid that you're doing you want them to but there's something stupid that you're doing that you know you're doing that you actually have to stop and you know that's difficult and unlikely but well if you don't stop then you get to have the same damn problem every day or every week for the rest of your life so it's probably better to undergo the misery of stopping it than the misery of continuing it but that's the injunction to listen rule number 10 be precise in your speech be precise in your speech so in in genesis one of the things god has adam do first so god makes the world by speaking okay so that's the first thing to think about you're supposed to think like in a sophisticated way about this the idea is that there's some integral relationship between communication and the structure of being it's part of the role that consciousness plays in the world whatever that role is language takes the chaos and makes it into things and so god has adam name all the animals they're not even really real until they have names now they're more implicit that's another you know here's a here's an example let's say that you're having a rough patch in your relationship and you don't know why it's unnameable is it real well yeah it's manifesting itself in like a physiological discomfort then you talk about it and you name it it's like it goes from this blurry thing that's kind of potential it goes snap and then it's this thing right and then that's a horrible thing it's like a little poisonous thing but it's not a whole foggy cloud of potential poison it's like this little sharp poison thing and then you think okay it's real it's a little monster but it's not it's little at least and now probably we can do something about it if we can admit to it so it's this precision that specifies and like so this is a little bit of the voldemort effect right if since you're a harry potter guy they wouldn't name it right this is a problem we got to name them first oh yeah you've got to name them first absolutely because the unnamable is far more terrifying than the nameable you see that in there was this great blair witch project terrifying movie well it's unnamed there's nothing terrible happens in that movie it's all the unnamable it's like what's going on what's going on what's going on and no matter how terrible the actuality is it's rarely as terrible as your imagination because your imagination like it's an old thing it's seen a lot of terrible things in the history of life like it can put monsters everywhere and so it's almost always better it might be better without exception to name the thing no matter how terrible it is and if you can't name it what that means is that you're you're telling yourself that you're so terrified that you can't bring your attention to bear on it and that makes you you're the loser instantly if it's so terrifying that you cannot face it it's one let's say we want to specify something that's threatening think well you know you shouldn't be prejudiced against an entire group of people it's like hey fair enough man of course yeah but ideas have consequences and there is religious conflict and there is terrorism it's like okay what do we make of that well the way you figure that out is you have a conversation about it stupidly you make all sorts of mistakes you might even make racist mistakes it's like well what is this thing how are we supposed to get our hands around it so how are we supposed to know what it is well you can't talk about it because that's bad it's like it's not as bad as what you conjure up if you can't talk about it okay then it's the devil himself i mean that's how we that's how we um demonize people the worst way of demonizing people is to not be able to say anything about them because then god only knows what they're unspeakable there isn't a better synonym for what's terrifying than that's unspeakable what you did was unspeakable it's like no no you want to bring things out of the realm of the unspeakable that's why i'm a free speech advocate yeah part it's like bring everything out of the realm of the unspeakable because it's also the direct attack on the intellect isn't it it's a direct attack if you can't speak about something you can't exercise it's just going to make that box around your brain that much deeper than the intellect it's an assault on whatever role consciousness has in being it's not just the intellect like that's that that's that's a shallower thing it's not like it's not important it's you can't even attend to it you can't bring it out of the chaos like it means you you can't participate in the process of creation it's something that deep not good for like freedom of speech that's that's the worship of the logos in many ways and you know that's a that's a very deep idea in our culture the deepest idea of our culture is the logos is creative and what it makes is good right that's that's god at the beginning of time saying you know he makes things as a consequence of the logos and he says it's good that's the idea is that to bring things out of the murk is a good thing you don't mess with that man not unless you want merc you don't mess with that it's the fundamental it's the most sacred principle of western civilization and not only western the taoists know this as well rule number 11 do not bother children when they're skateboarding rule 11 is don't bother children when they're skateboarding and that's a meditation on the difference between weakness and goodness you see one of the things that's happened in our society and especially with regards to our attitude towards men but also our attitude towards the masculinity in women so it's just as toxic for women is that we seem to have concluded that strong men are dangerous and that's partly because we think western culture is a tyrannical patriarchy and the only reason you get to the top is because you misuse power and so all the men who are at the top of the heart you're all misusing their power and they're all tyrannical and all the guys who have the aim and ambition to achieve that are just tyrants in training and that's sort of the basic attitude that we have towards our own culture and towards young men now and that's just there's everything about that is pathological and inexcusable and shameful i mean first the claim that western culture the idea that western culture is primarily a patriarchal tyranny is like well first of all it's it's historically ignorant beyond belief because what do you compared to what exactly like how many civilized countries are there in the world you know three dozen the rest of them are run by brutal thugs right and it isn't just thugs at the top man because that isn't how it works and in a country that's corrupt the corruption has spread through the entire country so and we're not like that and that's that i mean western culture is fundamentally honest and i can give an example of that because people don't like that idea ebay proved that because here it did it did it was a very interesting thing because when ebay first popped up like the cynic would say ebay is not going to work because i don't know you you live in the other side of the country you're going to send me junk and i'm going to send you a check that bounces and that'll be the end of ebay right right that's what a cynic would say and then what happened was that brokers popped up and they said well look we'll guarantee the exchange rights for a fee 10 we'll make sure that you don't send junk and we'll make sure your check doesn't bounce and what happened was the brokers couldn't find enough business and the reason for that was all the transactions were honest all of them you know it's like 19 if you were on ebay and you have a reputation of less than 99 there's actually something wrong with you you know okay 98 but really it's that it's that tight and so the default position was you're offering this i'll buy it we'll make the exchange fairly and what happened was a bunch of capital that was frozen technically speaking junk that people had that other people could need got freed up and ebay freed up a tremendous amount of money for people and it was all a consequence of default honesty we also know that one of the best predictors of success in western world is conscientiousness and conscientious people are honest and have integrity and are dutiful and do what they say they'll do and that's a really good predictor of long-term life success especially as a manager and administrator something like that so also chapter 11 is a discussion about the assault on the on the positive masculine and i read it partly as a continuation of what nietzsche announced back in the late 1800s as the death of god right because in western culture god was a masculine figure and the idea that the divine masculine had been decimated which was basically nietzsche's pronouncement has filtered all the way down to masculinity itself and i think that's an absolutely appalling outcome it's it's it's something that could only be desired by someone who is a true enemy of humanity and so partly chapter 11 is a call to encouragement it's like you want and i've been telling young men in particular but young women as well though they don't seem to be quite as in need of the message to adopt responsibility for their life to tell the truth and to understand that their failure to participate fully in being leaves a hole that's precisely the size of their soul in the cultural landscape it's no joke we need all the light we can possibly bring to bear on the situation and well and i firmly believe that and i believe that for all sorts of reasons and i think there are very deep reasons um and that's partly why i would say rules to life also has it's a funny book because it has a very religious core but it's also very heavily grounded in evolutionary biology so but that's what chapter 11 is about and it's about people who are the enemy of the human spirit the people who restrict children's play for example which is a particularly pathological thing to do there's a movement now to not let children have best friends it's like really what the hell man and rule number 12 the last one before some very special bonus clips is pet a cat when you encounter one on the street pet a cat when you encounter one on the street well it's funny that you said you're a dog guy because about the first three pages of the chapter are actually an apology for not including dogs okay all right very good very good i start by talking about dogs quite a bit actually but well that is a bit autobiographical i talk a fair bit about my daughter in that and she's actually vetted the chapter and and helped me write it um because i wrote about tragedy really about pain and and well the pain of of caring for someone especially with children you know and what you have to do when you're in a situation where tragic things are happening in front of you and you're somewhat powerless in in the face of them you know and part of that is you have to keep your eyes open for for the little opportunities for the redemptive elements of being to sort of pop themselves up so i talk a little bit about this cat that's across the street named ginger ginger is this um siamese cats really friendly made friends with our dog just by refusing to be afraid it would come over and the dog would sort of bark and it would roll over and like paw at him you know so they were friends in no time and the cat would just come over and like let you pet it and be happy with it for a minute and that's when things are not good and hard then you get these little moments where a little bit of possibility still shines through and you got to take those moments when you get them and so that's what that chapter is about it's about how to manage when things are too much and there's some practical advice in there like one of the things you have to do when things are just going to hell in a hand basket let's say is you got to also shrink your temporal horizon it's like you know you think well i'm planning three months out it's not not if you're on fire you're planning for the next two seconds you know and if things are really harsh in your life someone's suffering around you and you got too many problems it's like you shrink your time frame to the day and you try to or the hour or the minute you say okay well we've got to have the best next minute we can have we've got to have that's a deathbed thing too right it's like you sure you shrink the time until you can handle it there's no not any more going on in that tiny fragment of time than you can bear that's how you adjust to the catastrophe and you try to stay on your feet and react during those periods of time and so it's a bit of a discussion about how you reconfigure your perceptions of things when when when there's too much pain and trouble in your life so it's it's actually a very positive chapter even though it deals with very you know harsh things it was the most emotional chapter to write i would say and my daughter's actually doing quite well she's figured out a lot of what was wrong with her that's great an amazing tour de force of of concentration and care you know i can't believe she's managed it um so it's a positive thing that the chapter and and you know it's a reminder to look for what's meaningful and soul satisfying soul sustaining even when you're where you'd rather not be stop doing the things that you know are wrong that you could stop doing right so it's a fairly it's a fairly limited attempt first of all we're not going to say that you know what the good is or what the truth is in any ultimate sense but we will presume that there are things that you're doing that for one reason or other you know are not in your best interests there's something about them that you just know you should stop they're kind of self-evident to you other things you're going to be doubtful about you're not going to know which way is up and which way is down but there are things that you're doing that you know you shouldn't do now some of those you won't stop doing for whatever reason you don't have the discipline or maybe there's a secondary payoff or you don't believe it's necessary or it's too much of a sacrifice or you're angry or resentful or or afraid who knows so forget about those for now but there's another subset that you could stop doing it might be little thing well that's fine stop doing it and see what happens and what will happen is your vision will clear a little bit and then something else will pop up in your field of apprehension that you will also know you should stop doing and that you could stop doing because you strengthened yourself a bit by stopping doing the particular stupid thing that you were doing before that just puts you together a little bit more and you could do that repeatedly for for an indefinite period of time and and you know that doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to ever be able to formulate a clear and final picture of what constitutes the truth and the good but it does mean that you'll be able to continually move away from what's untruth and what's bad 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 they 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 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 that than at the beginning of the day right because 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 negotiate with someone who was working for you it's like okay you got to work tomorrow okay so i want you 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 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 percent the next week or 50 and a half percent for god's sake or because you're you're going to hit that position where things start to loop back positively and spiral you upward when i was a teenager i mean i i did god if i had to write a book about the stupid things i did when i was a teenager it'd be a very thick book and it'd be a worse book if there were photographs accompanying it and you know but but i had this advantage that young people today don't have which was well when my day of stupidity was over i could go home and it was not there you know like it wasn't on twitter it wasn't on facebook there wasn't 20 of my friends communicating to me about you know what foolish thing i did at the party the night before and um and young people now they're just followed by paparazzi essentially and and i've watched that with the young teenage daughters of many of my friends uh because my kids were a little too old for that to have actually have happened to them but god it's miserable and um we know that there is some relationship between the amount of time people use facebook for example and their mental health which me the more they use facebook the more depressed they are and it might be that the depression is driving the facebook use but the causal pathway seems to be the other way around which is you know it's just playing that unbelievably exposed social game that's hard on people and these aren't trivial technologies you know i mean they're sha they're they're transforming the way we communicate with one another and that's and they're they're completely uncontrolled experiments we have no idea what the medium or long-term consequences are going to be and we'll never find out either because of course the communication landscape changes so quickly that by the time you get adapted to one communication technology another one has come along that's even more confusing that you now have to master and so well that's why it's necessary for everyone to develop their own modicum of wisdom i believe because i i don't know how else we're going to be able to deal with this technological transformation that's going to come acro is already coming across us like a tidal wave and you know you ain't seen nothing yet the other people in silicon valley have plans that well that that make you think that the whole place should probably be bombed just for the safety of the rest of us you know because there's there's tremendous danger in that rapid acceleration of machine intelligence and and we have no we have absolutely no idea where that's headed so and maybe it'll be great it's it's possible it'll be great but power cuts both ways so hopefully we can we can control it with our wisdom and that's pretty much up to each of you to put your lives together so you can make good decisions the other thing you should do if you're not very industrious industrious is discipline yourself and so what do you do with that eat three times a day at regular meal times that's a good thing to practice because that starts to put some stability into your life get up at the same time i would highly recommend all those young people out there who are listening like you want to get a jump on life get the hell out of bed in the morning you know as i've got older i've got up earlier and earlier now that's partly because you don't need as much sleep but it's also partly because i've got more and more disciplined like get up early in the morning and get your things done man learn to get up at six in the morning and you'll be one deadly creature especially if you can get to work you'll have half your damn day done by the time other people haul their sorry asses out of bed and so that's a massive massive advantage look will ferrell warren farrell not the comedian warren farrell the author he outlined data in why men earn more which is a book i would recommend by the way showing that if you work 13 longer hours you make 40 percent more money it's non-linear so you think why is that well imagine you had 10 employees and one of them works an extra 10 percent it's not much well how often is that person going to be promoted assuming you have a clue as a boss it's like you're going to look at the 10 people and you're going to think oh that guy's always here like 45 minutes early it's like why don't we give him the promotion obviously right so these tight these small edges that you can manage like that work an extra 10 percent extra 13 have non-proportional payoffs that's part of the pareto distribution so get get your sleep cycle organized so you get up in the morning learn how to do it no excuses i'm too tired in the morning i don't like mornings who cares that's not relevant it's like discipline yourself so you can manage it schedule your meals because that's a good disciplinary routine and then learn to use a calendar like google calendar most of you many of you out there do not use a calendar okay a calendar is not a prison and it's not a tyrant not if you use it properly a calendar keeps anxiety at bay it makes sure that you do what you need to do which is important because otherwise you fall behind but if you use it properly though it's also helps you plan what you want to do so i could say well lay out your damn calendar and design the days you would like to have that's what your calendar is is for so you can put in all sorts of things in there you want to do and that would be good for you and that's a really good really good way to start being more industrious make a plan you need a plan for three years you need a plan for the next year you need to plan for the next six months you need to plan for the next three months you need a plan for the week you need a plan for the day you need to plan for the hour all of that all of that i make lists constantly of what i have to do and they're like daily weekly monthly yearly right now i can't look out more than about six months you know because my life is too complicated and chaotic but but you need a vision of who you could be what character you could have three to five years out you can't go much farther than that because life is too unpredictable i think to make vision that's longer term than that subject to there's two too much chance associated with it to spend a lot of time on maybe you can stretch it to five years and in rare cases you can have a 10-year goal but it has to be pretty low resolution but you want plans at all those levels of resolution you want to write the things down and what because what are you going to do you're going to stumble around and get get what you need you're going to stumble around and be useful to other people and it's useful to be useful to other people you know they want to work with you then they want to do things with you they want to have you around they trust you they open up opportunities for you and if you stumble around like you're blind you're not going to get anywhere and then you're going to suffer and then you're going to be bitter and then you're going to be cruel so that's a that's hell that's a bad outcome sometimes you know i can't sleep at night because i'm thinking about something and usually what i'll do is go write it down i have some writing to do so i get up and i go right down what i'm thinking and that usually does the trick but because i had been playing with youtube i thought well i'll try making youtube video and telling people what i'm thinking about and see if that performs the same uh function as writing and to me the function of writing well it's twofold one is conceivably to communicate with people although the fundamental purpose for me is to clarify my thoughts so that i know to you know because if something is disturbing you what that means is that it needs to be articulated it what it's the emergence of unexplored territory something that disturbs you that that's the right way to think about it it's unmapped territory that's manifesting itself it's like a vista of threat and possibility and you need to articulate a path through it and so that's what i was doing it's like i was thinking well this is bothering me and this seems to be why and here's what i think is going on and and so i made the videos and in some sense i i didn't think anything more of it there is no faith and no courage and no sacrifice in doing what is expedient what do you say to those viewers that don't pursue their dreams and are locked into their careers because they're too afraid to take risks and pursue something meaningful well the first thing i would say is well you should be afraid of taking risks and pursuing something meaningful but you should be more afraid of staying where you are if it's making you miserable it's like the first thing you want to do is dispense with the idea that you get to have any any permanent security outside of your ability to contend and adapt it's the same issue with children it's like you're paying a price by sitting there being miserable you might say well the devil i know is better than the one i don't it's like don't be so sure of that the clock is ticking and if you're miserable in your job now and you change nothing in five years you'll be much more miserable and you'll be a lot older but isn't it the luxury to pursue what is meaningful our viewers have mortgages they have children yeah they have payments and loans it's a luxury to pursue because we lack the resources well i don't think i don't remember now i'm not talking about what makes you happy it's a luxury to pursue what makes you happy it's a moral obligation to pursue what you find meaningful and that doesn't mean it's easy it might require sacrifice if you need to change your job too let's say you have a family and and children and a mortgage you have responsibilities you've already picked up those responsibilities you don't just get to walk away scot-free and say well i don't like my job i quit that's no strategy but what you might have to do is you think well this job is killing my soul all right so what do i have to do about that well i have to look for another job well no one wants to hire me it's like okay maybe you need to educate yourself more maybe you need to update your your curriculum vita your resume maybe you need to overcome your fear of being interviewed maybe you need to sharpen your social skills like you you have to think about these things strategically if you're going to switch careers you have to do it like an intelligent responsible person that might take you a couple of years of of effort i've dealt with hundreds of people in my clinical and consulting practice and we set a goal we develop a vision and work towards it and it things inevitably get better for people so it's not a luxury it's it's difficult it's a moral responsibility and it isn't happiness it's it's not the pursuit isn't for happiness you don't have to necessarily have done anything wrong for things to get completely out of control it's a terrifying doctrine but it's not a hopeless doctrine because it still says that there's a way forward there's a pathway forward and the pathway forward is to adopt a motive being that has some nobility so that you can tolerate yourself and perhaps even have some respect for yourself as someone who's capable of standing up in the face of that terrible vulnerability and suffering and that the pathway forward as far as the existentialists are concerned is by well certainly by the avoidance of deceit particularly in language but also by the adoption of responsibility for the conditions of existence and some attempt on your part to actually rectify them and the thing that's so interesting about that is that well two as far as i'm concerned and some of this is from clinical experience you know if you take people and i've told you this and you expose them voluntarily to things that they are avoiding and are afraid of you know that they know they need to overcome in order to meet their goals their self-defined goals if you can teach people to stand up in the face of the things they're afraid of they get stronger and you don't know what the upper limits to that are because you might ask yourself like if for 10 years if you didn't avoid doing what you knew you needed to do by the deaf by your own definitions right within the value structure that you've created to the degree that you've done that what would you be like well you know there are remarkable people who come into the world from time to time and there are people who do find out over decades-long periods what they could be like if they were who they were if they said if they spoke their being forward and they get stronger and stronger and stronger and we don't know the limits to that we do not know the limits to that and so you could say well in part perhaps the reason that you're suffering unbearably can be left at your feet because you're not everything you could be and you know it and of course that's a terrible thing to admit and it's a terrible thing to consider but there's real promise in it right because it means that perhaps there's another way that you could look at the world and the number another way that you could act in the world so what it would reflect back to you would be much better than what it reflects back to you now my experience is with people that we're probably running at about 51 percent of our capacity something i mean you can think about this yourselves i often ask undergraduates how many hours a day you waste or how many hours a week you waste and the classic answer is something like four to six hours a day you know inefficient studying watching things on youtube that not only do you not want to watch that you don't even care about that make you feel horrible about watching after you're done that's probably four hours right there you know you think well that's 20 25 hours a week it's 100 hours a month that's two and a half full work weeks it's half a year of work weeks per year and if your time is worth twenty dollars an hour which is a radical underestimate it's probably more like 50 if you think about it in terms of deferred wages if you're wasting 20 hours a week you're wasting 50 000 a year and you are doing that right now and it's because you're young wasting 50 000 a year is a way bigger catastrophe than it would be for me to waste it because i'm not going to last nearly as long and so if your life isn't everything it could be you could ask yourself well what would happen if you just stopped wasting the opportunities that are in front of you you'd be who knows how much more efficient 10 times more efficient 20 times more efficient that's the pareto distribution you have no idea how efficient efficient people get it's completely it's off the charts well and if we all got our act together collectively and stop making things worse because that's another thing people do all the time not only do they not do what they should to make things better they actively attempt to make things worse because they're spiteful or resentful or arrogant or deceitful or or homicidal or genocidal or all of those things all bundled together in an absolutely pathological package if people stopped really really trying just to make things worse we have no idea how much better they would get just because of that so there's this weird dynamic that's part of the existential system of ideas between human vulnerability social judgment both of which are are are our major causes of suffering and the failure of individuals to adopt the responsibility that they know they should adopt it isn't merely that your fate depends on whether or not you get your act together and to what degree you decide that you're going to live out your own genuine being it isn't only your fate it's the fate of everyone that you're networked with and so you know you think well there's nine billion seven billion people in the world we're going to peak at about nine billion by the way and then it'll decline rapidly but seven billion people in the world and who are you you're just one little dust mote among that seven billion and so it really doesn't matter what you do or don't do but that's simply not the case it's the wrong model because you're at the center of a network you're a node in a network of course that's even more true now that we have social media you'll you you'll know a thousand people at least over the course of your life and they'll know a thousand people each and that puts you one person away from a million and two persons away from a billion and so that's how you're connected and the things you do they're like dropping a stone in a pond the ripples move outward and they affect things in ways that you can't fully comprehend and it means that the things that you do and that you don't do are far more important than you think and so if you act that way of course the terror of realizing that is that it actually starts to matter what you do and you might say well that's better than living a meaningless existence it's better for it to matter but i mean if you really asked yourself would you be so sure if you had the choice i can live with no responsibility whatsoever the price i pay is that nothing matters or i can reverse it and everything matters but i have to take the responsibility that's associated with that it's not so obvious to me that people would take the meaningful path you know when you say well nihilists suffer dreadfully because there's no meaning in their life and they still suffer yeah but the advantage is they have no responsibility so that's the payoff and i actually think that's the motivation say well i can't help being nihilistic all my belief systems have collapsed it's like yeah maybe maybe you've just allowed them to collapse because it's a hell of a lot easier than acting them out and the price you pay is some meaningless suffering but you can always whine about that and people will feel sorry for you and you have the option of taking the pathway of the martyr so that's a pretty good deal all things considered especially when they are when the alternative is to bear your burden properly and to live forthrightly in the world well what solzhenitsyn figured out and so many people in the 20th century it's not just him even though he's the best example is that if you live a pathological life you pathologize your society and if enough people do that then it's hell really really and you can read the gulag archipelago if you have the fortitude to do that and you'll see exactly what hell is like and then you can decide if that's a place you'd like to visit or even more importantly if it's a light if it's a place you'd like to visit and take all your family and friends because that's what happened in the 20th century you can think about the world this way you can think about it as your orderly little plan that's a place and you can think about it as the place that things that disrupt your plan comes from that's another place this is a bigger place than this because there's an endless number of things that can disrupt your plan and only a tiny number of them that can you know that will help you work it out so part of the question then too is like are you the friend of your plan or are you the friend of the thing that disrupts your plan and i would say you should work to become the friend of the thing that disrupts your plan because there's a lot of that and then if you become the friend of the thing that disrupts your plan then you be you start to develop strength in proportion to the to the disruptive force and that's really what you want you want to be able to implement your plan obviously but you want to be able to take on the consequences of error and learn from it and then then you win constantly because even if something goes sideways you think there's something to be derived from this that's wisdom fundamentally plan a life you'd like to have and and you do that partly by referring to social norms that's more or less rescuing your father from the belly of the whale but the way other way you do that is by having a little conversation with yourself about as if you don't really know who you are because you know what you're like you won't do what you're told you won't do what you tell yourself to do you must have noticed that it's like you're a bad employee and a worse boss and both of those work you know for you you don't know what you want to do and then when you tell yourself what to do you don't do it anyways you should fire yourself and find someone else to be but but you know what my point is is that you have to understand that you're not your own servant so to speak you're someone that you have to negotiate with and that's and you're someone that you want to present the opportunity of having a good life to and that's hard for people because they don't like themselves very much if you configure your life so that what you are genuinely doing is aiming at the highest possible good then the things that you need to to survive and to thrive on a day-to-day basis will deliver themselves to you that's a hypothesis and it's not some simple hypothesis right because it what it basically says is if you dare to do the most difficult thing that you can conceptualize your life will work out better than it will if you do anything else well how are you going to find out if that's true well it's a kierkegaardian leap of faith there's no way you're going to find out whether or not that's true unless you do it so no one no one can tell you either because just because it works for someone else i mean that's interesting and all that but it's no proof that it'll work for you you have to be all in in this game there is no more effective way of operating in the world than to conceptualize the highest good that you can and then strive to attain it there's no more practical pathway to the kind of success that you could have if you actually knew what success was the world shifts itself around your aim because you're you're a creature that has a name you have to have a name in order to do something you're an aiming creature you look at a point and you move towards it it's built right into you and so you have a name well let's say your aim is the highest possible aim well then so that sets up the world around you it organizes all of your perceptions it organizes what you see and you don't see it organizes your emotions and your motivations so you organize yourself around that aim and then what happens is the day manifests itself as a set of challenges and problems and if you solve them properly then you stay on the pathway towards that aim and you can concentrate on the on the on the day and so that way you get to have your cake and eat it too because you can you can point into the distance the far distance and you can live in the day and it seems to me that that's that makes every moment of the day supercharged with meaning that that's how because if everything that you're doing every day is related to the highest possible aim that you can conceptualize well that's the very definition of the meaning that would sustain you in your life i said with bill c-16 that i wouldn't speak the language of the radical leftists because i don't think that that language should define the game but let's say it does so here's the game the world is a battleground of groups and the they're battling for power that's it that's the game and some of them win and they oppress those who don't win so that's how we're going to view the world okay now the leftists say okay well here's the oppressed people the oppressors the patriarchy type patriarchal types they should be ashamed of themselves and give up some power the right wingers the radical right-wingers look at that and they say oh i see so the game is ethnic identity is it it's identity politics okay we're white males we're not going to lose that's the right wing version of identity politics it's like screw you if we're going to divide into groups if we're going to divide into tribes and i'm in my tribe i'm not going to get all guilty and lose i'm going to get all cruel and win and that's like then you think well there's people in the middle they're kind of looking back and forth which side of the identity politics spectrum am i going to fall in do i want to go with uh do i want to go do i want to be driven primarily by compassion and am i going to accept guilt for my historical privilege so that's one possibility and then i'm the oppressor i'm the member of the oppressor group or am i going to say no to hell with that i'm just going to play to win well then i'm going to go to the right it's like well my sense is how about we don't play either of those games and the reason we shouldn't play them is well the soviets played the left-wing game and like killed who knows how many tens of millions of people you can't even count it accurately the estimates range from 20 to 100 million those are pretty big error bars and the maoists may be 100 million certainly 60 million so okay that didn't work out so well then there's the nazis like they played ethnic identity politics and racial superiority it's like why do we want to play that game see what i've been trying to do really what i've been trying to do for the last 30 years is say look there's heavy temptations to play those sorts of games but that's not the only game in town it's a much better game to play individual it's like get your act together stand up in the world make something of yourself stay away from the ideological oversimplifications set your house in order that's rule six in the in the in this book so i have a book rule in there says set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world and it's a very dark chapter about the motivations of the columbine high school killers and this other guy named carl panzram who was a serial rapist and arsonist and murderer and these he wrote an autobiography and the columbine kids also wrote about why they did what they did they're resentful to the core bitter bitter resentful terrible and well i'm suggesting that people stay away from that resentment resentfulness and bitterness even though life is hard and and there's malevolence in the world it's like yeah you can you can tell a story where everyone's a victim because we all die we all get sick you know and and and things happen to us that are bitter and terrible betrayal deceit lies like people hurt us on purpose you know so it's not just the tragedy of life it's malevolence as well everyone's a victim you can tell that story the problem is if you tell that story and you start to act it out you make all of that worse that's the problem and it's so this is why partly i got attracted to christian imagery at least in part because there's an idea in christianity that you should pick up your goddamn cross and like walk up the hill and that's dramatically that's correct that's the right answer it's like you've got a heavy load of suffering to bear and a fair bit of it's going to be unjust so what are you going to do about it accept it voluntarily and try to transform as a consequence that's the right answer it's the right answer because the rest of it is tribalism and we're we're too technologically powerful to get all tribal again people have an unspecified potential for development educationally obviously with regards to the skills they have but also in relationship to their character and it's it's much it's much more encouraging for people i think to concentrate on who they could be rather than who they are especially when they're young because they still have most of their life ahead of them and they're not everything they could be yet and so to tell people even something like well you should feel good about yourself the way you are it's like well that there's something there that's seriously lacking because there's so much more that you could be that you need to be and that you should be aiming at just telling you the problem with being okay the way you are is that you don't have a goal then and people need to have a goal in order to to come to terms with their life this the baboon here who's supposed to be basically just a fool when the story was first written he turned into what's essentially a shaman across time and so he represents the self from the union perspective now the self is everything you could be across time so imagine that there's you and there's the potential inside you whatever that is you know and potential is an interesting idea because it represents something that isn't yet real yet we act like it's real because people will say to you you should live up to your potential and that potential is partly what you could be if you interacted with the world in a manner that would gain you the most information right because you build yourself out of the information in the piagetian sense but it's deeper than that too because we know that if you take yourself and you put yourself in a new environment new genes turn on in your nervous system they encode for new proteins and so you're full of biological potential that won't be realized unless you move yourself around in the world into different challenging circumstances and that'll turn on different circuits so it's not merely that you're incorporating information from the outside world in the constructivist sense it's that by exposing yourself to different environments you put different physiological demands on on yourself all the way down to the genetic level and that manifests new elements of you and so one of the things that happens to people and this is a very common cultural notion is that you should go on a pilgrimage at some point to somewhere central and that would be say like the rock in the pride rock and the lion king because you take yourself out of your dopey little village and that's just the little bounded you that everyone knows and that isn't very expanded and then you go somewhere dark and dangerous to the central place and while you do that you have adventures and they toughen you and pull more out of you like partly because you're becoming informed which means in formation it means you're becoming more organized at every level of analysis but there's also more of you too the next best predictor of lifetime success is conscientiousness well so and of tho 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 this future authoring program processes i think the best thing you can do with regards to your conscientiousness is to set up some aims for yourself goals that you actually value and the future authoring program helps people do that and basically it does a situational analysis of it helps you do a situational analysis of your life more than a psychological analysis i would say and so the questions are something like well all right you're going to 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 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 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 going to regulate your mental physical mental and physical health and maybe also your drug and alcohol use because that's that's a good place to auger down you know because alcoholism for example wipes out you know five to ten percent of people so you want to keep that under control and then and then so maybe you know you you you develop a vision of what your life what you would like your life to be and that associates the so the goal once the goal is established and then you break down the goal into micro processes that you can implement the micro processes become rewarding in proportion in relation to their uh 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 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 specify your goal you do that you do that in some sense as a unique individual you want you want to specify goals that make you say oh if that could happen as a consequence of my efforts it would clearly be worthwhile because the question always is why do something because doing nothing is easy you just sit there and you don't do anything that's real easy the question is why would you ever do anything and the answer that has to be because you've determined by some means that it's worthwhile and then the next question might be well where should you look for worthwhile things and one would be well you could consult your own temperament and the other would be well you kind of look at how look at what it is that people accrue that's valuable across the lifespan look look what so you do a structural analysis of the subcomponents of human existence and already did that you need a family you need friends like you don't need to have all these things but you better have most of them family friends career educational goals plans for you know time outside of work attention to your mental and physical health etc you know those are that's what life is about and if you don't have any of those things well then all you've got left is misery and suffering so that's that's a bad that's a bad deal for you so so once you but once you set up that that goal structure let's say and that's really in many in many ways that's what you should be doing at universities is that's exactly what you should be doing is trying to figure out who it is that you're trying to be right and you you aim at that and then you use everything you learn 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 saying well you're going to try to make yourself more industrious okay number one 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. so so i would recommend that you don't let that happen so that's willful blindness right you could have known but you chose not to okay so once you get your goal structure set up you think okay if i could have this life it looks like that might be worth living despite the fact that it's going to be you know anxiety provoking and threatening and there's going to be some suffering and loss involved in all of that obviously the goal is to to have a vision for your life such that all things considered that justifies your effort i started to pay very careful attention to what i was saying i don't know if that happened voluntarily or involuntarily but i could feel a sort of split developing in my psyche and the split and i've actually had students tell me the same thing has happened to them after they've listened to some of the material that that i've been describing to all of you but i split into two let's say and one part was the let's say the old me that was talking a lot and that liked to argue and that liked ideas and there was another part that was watching that part like just with its eyes open and neutrally judging and the part that was neutrally judging was watching the part that was talking and going that isn't your idea you don't really believe that you don't really know what you're talking about that isn't true and i thought hmm that's really interesting so now i've and that was happening to like 95 of what i was saying and so then i didn't really know what to do i thought okay this is strange so maybe i've fragmented and that's just not a good thing at all i mean it wasn't like i was hearing voices or anything like that i mean it wasn't like that it was it was well people have multiple parts so then i had a this weird conundrum is like well which of those two things are me is it the part that's listening and saying no that's rubbish that's a lie that's you're doing that to impress people you're just trying to win the argument you know was that me or was the part that was going about my normal verbal business me and i didn't know but i decided i would go with the critic and then what i'd tried to do what i learned to do i think was to stop saying things that made me weak and now that i mean i'm still trying to do that because i'm always feeling when i talk whether or not the words that i'm saying are either making me align or making me come apart and i think the alignment i really do think the alignment is i think alignment is the right way of conceptualizing it because i think if you say things that are as true as you can say them let's say then they come up they come out of the depths inside of you because we don't know where thoughts come from we don't know how far down into your substructure the thoughts emerge we don't know what processes of physiological alignment are necessary for you to speak from the core of your being we don't understand any of that we don't even conceptualize that but i believe that you can feel that and i learned some of that from reading carl rogers by the way who's a great clinician because he talked about mental health in part as the coherence between the the the spiritual or the or the abstract and the physical that the two things were aligned and and there's a lot of idea of alignment in in psychoanalytic and clinical thinking but anyways i decided that i would start practicing not saying things that would make me weak and what happened was that i had to stop saying almost everything that i was saying i would say 95 of it as a hell of a shock to wake up and i mean this was over a few months but it's a hell of a shock to wake up and realize that you're mostly dead wood it's a shock you know and you might think well do you really want all of that to burn off it's like well there's nothing left but a little husk five percent of you it's like well if that five percent is solid then maybe that's exactly what you want to have happen adopt the mode of authentic being and that is something like refusing to participate in the lie in deception in the lie to orient your speech as much as you can towards the truth and to take responsibility for your own life and perhaps also for the lives of other people and there's something about that that's meaningful and responsible and noble but also serves to mitigate the very suffering that produces say the nihilism or the flea into the arms of flea or or the or the escape into the arms of totalitarians to begin with you need something to shelter you against your own vulnerability my primary motive as a clinical psychologist and educator is to help individuals live more meaningful and productive lives in harmony with their families and their community that's my motive and the evidence for that i think is well if people go online and first of all you can watch the lectures and decide for yourself but you can also go there's i suspect probably maybe 250 000 people have commented on the lectures and their effects on them and so that's what people say i'm watching the lectures yeah i'm trying to develop a vision for my life i'm trying to become more responsible and it's really helping and that's and that's what i hear all the time when i do these public lectures which which aren't political but when we gain success we raise the bar we set our ambitions higher i mean what is your end game what do you want that's all that's what i want i want i want to help as many individuals as possible become more courageous more truthful and more engaged in the pursuit of individual familial and social harmony that's what i want if you're failing repeatedly then there's probably something wrong it's possible that there's something wrong with the way that you're conceptualizing the world because you have a choice right if if you keep making sacrifices and they don't work there's a binary choice and one is well there's something wrong with the structure of reality and the other is there's something wrong with your approach and so then you might say well let's take the first idea there's something wrong with the structure of reality it's like you're really going to say that are you you're really going to come out and say i know enough to judge the nature of being and and then the alternative is also quite frightening because then you know you it's you that's making the mistakes and you might be wrong at a really deep level and that might mean that a lot of you has to burn off and be transformed maybe even things about yourself that you think are admirable and that you like because your position you know your your self conceptualization is so warped and wrong and that's really daunting but you know when people set themselves up as the judge of being i mean i've written about this a fair bit in my new book which is called 12 rules for life when people set themselves up as the judge of being then they take on what can only be described as a kind of satanic arrogance because they've actually taken to themselves the moral right to criticize the structure of existence itself it's like you better be careful when you do something like that because you're setting yourself up as the judge of being and the columbine kids did that because you made it this far in a video i want to celebrate you most people start and don't finish most people never actually follow through most people say they want something but they don't ever do the work to actually get it but you're different you're special believe nation you made it here all the way to the end and i love you so it's a special celebration if you put a hashtag believe down in the comments below on this video i will showcase you and celebrate you somewhere on the screen in a future video because you are awesome if you want to see my recent top 10 rules success video from jordan peterson check the video right there next to me i think you'll love it continue to believe and i'll see you there it doesn't disgrace you in some sense that that might be a good way to think about it and you don't want to disgrace yourself because the consequence of disgrace is emotional dysregulation more pain less positive emotion

Channel: Evan Carmichael

Views: 509,474

Keywords: entrepreneur, yt:cc=on, evancarmichael, jordan peterson, jordan peterson motivation, evan carmichael top 10 rules for success, evan carmichael motivation, best of jordan b peterson, jordon peterson top ten rules, top ten rules for, top ten rules for success, evan carmichael top 10 rules, rules to follow, success rules, to do things, how to ensure success, how to achieve your goals, jordan b peterson, self improvement, how to become successful

Id: WLH6CPTQT9g

Length: 102min 57sec (6177 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 18 2022