Jordan Peterson - The Pain Of Unreached Potential

in rule two you say to imagine who we could be and then to aim single-mindedly at that but reality gets in the way of you reaching that potential and it can hurt how can people cope with the pain of unreached potential well part of oh that's a really good question look every ideal is a judge right so you posit an ideal and instantly you're in inferior position in relationship to that ideal and that can be crushing okay so what do you do about that well one answer is no ideals well that's not a good answer because then you don't have anything to do right so so and that deprives you of a main source of pleasure which is observed uh generated as a consequence of observed movement towards a valued goal so if you have a high goal and you see any movement towards it there's a potential there's a really powerful potential kick there so you don't want to dispense with that but then if you set up an ideal it can judge you very harshly so then you have to rearrange your reward philosophy and instead of punishing yourself from as a consequence of perceived distance you reward yourself for incremental movement forward and that's not just theoretical look i was stopped by three guys on the street this week three separate occasions and they all told me the same thing they you know they they said that they had read or something i wrote or listened to something or watched something and that it had been helpful and whenever ever anybody says that to me i always ask them okay exactly what was helpful and what changed because i want to know what's helping so that i can understand the target and hit it better and so and generally people are are pleased to tell me although sometimes it takes them a while to formulate exactly the description but they all three of them said um i stopped comparing myself to other people so i'll stop comparing what i didn't have to what other people had i left that off the table and then i started to reward myself for improving over what i was yesterday so they and that's profound change because it means that you actually get your reward structure transformed and that's a big deal because that's that's your source of positive emotion and enthusiasm encouragement all of that so now you can start to encourage yourself for for genuine improvement and it's also pragmatically extremely intelligent because incremental improvement repeated is virtually unstoppable and i that's like the hallmark of behavioral therapy that idea because what a behavior therapist does is you come and you say to me i'm not things aren't the way i want them to be and then i say well well how would you like them to be and how are they not that so we lay out the problem the territory and then the next thing we do is lay out a trajectory which is okay well here's something you're lonesome you don't have a partner okay so what are the what are incremental movements can you make towards that goal that you would do that would be helpful and so maybe you you you negotiate with the person because that's what you do if you're a reasonable therapist and you say well look why don't you uh you decide as a consequence of the conversation why don't you write out a description of yourself for a dating site don't post it or anything just write it out and and then let's see if you actually do that and so then the person comes back next week and they say i did that and not only that i posted it and you say great what's the next step or they say geez you know i just kept avoiding that and then you say okay well we need to break that down you avoided it well could you write one sentence about who you are right now while you're sitting here and sometimes they can do that right away or sometimes they can't and then you you make a microanalysis of that and what you do is you you reduce the magnitude of the move forward until you hit the point where you actually will do it and that's like the secret to good negotiation and as well if you're negotiating with your wife maybe you want one of her behaviors to change and then obviously she has to be on board with that and hypothetically that's going to be reciprocal process but what you want to do is find a small improvement that is measurable that's implementable that will be implemented that you can then reward and and that's that's that's how you can have your ideal you you can have whatever ideal you want as long as you're willing to reduce your movement forward to achievable increments but that's okay because they compound so and i really learned this as a therapist it was one of the things that was so fun about being a therapist is you can take someone through this process and start them on just the tiniest goal you know and it just seems trivial but they'll do it and then they start moving fast aft faster and faster after that point once once the direction has been established and people make incredible improvement over you know uh not unreasonable spans of time a few months maybe a few years but which is not nothing but it's not decades you know it's i saw that time and time again so aim high but reward yourself for small incremental improvements especially ones that repeat every day i think that's one of the challenges we have in the modern era because social media shows us the highlight reel of everybody else's life but we get to watch our own failings from a front row seat right we watch ourselves blunder through life we realize just how far away from our potential we are but nobody else actually knows that no one else knows the podcast you could have recorded the business that you could have built the book that you could have written in a very very real sense you are only ever competing against yourself but because yes and that's especially it's absolutely right that's why the individual that that's exactly why group categorization of people is so dreadfully wrong it's like you really are your only comparison group especially as you get older because your life is so idiosyncratic and peculiar that any compare i mean look you have to care what other people think it's stupid to think otherwise be because you have to be social and you have to be aware of what other people are doing and all of that so it's this is a psychopathic individual individuality but it is genuinely true that no one has your set of opportunities and limitations and so the the comparison just isn't real it can't be sufficiently multi-dimensional you know because maybe you see someone who's re i've dealt with i've i've met many people who are very very rich and you can look at their lives and they have these huge houses and material plenty but j and they're shielded from many catastrophes that would hit someone without those resources harder but their lives are still full of exactly the same troubles that characterize human life in general and so you you compare yourself on one dimension you don't see well the person's worked 80 hours a week for 40 years and it's blown all his relationships out of the water it's like yes he's rich but he's also old now you know he's 60. and one of the best predictors of wealth is age you know really do you want to be young and poor or old and rich it's like i'd pick young and poor because you can't buy youth thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that then press here for the full unedited episode and don't forget to subscribe makes me very happy peace

Channel: Chris Williamson

Views: 490,842

Keywords: modern wisdom, podcast, chris williamson, jordan peterson, life advice, maps of meaning, motivational speech, mental health, jordan b peterson, inspirational video, joe rogan, self help, jordan b peterson debate, jordan b peterson cathy newman, jordan b peterson clips, jordan peterson interview, jordan peterson 2021, jordan peterson motivation

Id: ePW5HeYm1MA

Length: 8min 19sec (499 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 14 2021