LIFE IS HARD! It's Time To Strengthen Your Character - Jordan Peterson Motivation

part of spiritual development is to recognize the satanic tendencies that characterize you and to fully wrestle with them and to and to integrate them that's the thing it's not so much to cast them away it's to transmute them you know and you can see the difference between people who've done that and people who haven't at least to some degree because people who haven't integrated the shadow at all are naive and you can tell that when you look at them and you can tell that when you talk to them and because they're naive they're often resentful as well because they get taken advantage of and someone who's integrated that more they're dangerous in in the martial arts sort of way which is they're dangerous but they don't have to be they don't have to use it because their presence [Music] radiates what would you say it doesn't radiate threat exactly well certainly strength but it's it's it's the potential for havoc that's the right way of thinking about it there's a there's an implicit potential for havoc and that's really necessary it's one of the things that gives people self-respect this is an interesting thing about the integration of the shadow because recognizing yourself as the locus of evil let's say actually in some sense gives you far more respect for yourself strangely enough because the same respect that you might have for a wild animal or even a monster it's like you know so then maybe you learn to treat yourself differently like i i think this is particularly true with regards to the discipline of children you know if you know that you're a monster and that that will manifest itself in your life consciously or unconsciously and if it's unconsciously it's it's it's not good then you become better at disciplining children and the reason for that is that you don't want to expose them to your dark side and so if they behave and don't provoke you which means they'll also behave for other people then you don't the monstrous part can stay in abeyance and then that's great but if you don't understand yourself as capable of wreaking havoc and that can be the kind of havoc that unfolds over decades right because if you're going to abuse a child it's the primitive form of abuse is the physical abuse the sophisticated form of abuse is the continual undermining of the child's courage across perhaps their entire life and that there's a terribly monstrous element to that and if you're not respected properly by the child say you will absolutely take revenge on them and you know that's the whole in some sense that's the whole freudian psychoanalytic story it's not all of it but it's a huge part of it so interesting that um you say that you have to accept the fact that you're dangerous or become dangerous because i'd also say that if you haven't done that kind of shadow work if you haven't made friends with your anger if you haven't integrated it you're actually more dangerous yes because then things will happen that will it will come out in a way that you don't expect right it comes out disintegrated so it comes out as an autonomous spirit right under no one's control and that's like a burst of rage let's say you know when you when you hear about a mother who's done something terrible to one of her children it's that's the reason is that you know she's maybe she's just been laid off maybe she went out and had too much too much to drink maybe she's hung over you know she's she's angry and lonesome and she's overwhelmed by the responsibility of the children and she has a child who's testing and she doesn't know how to limit it and one day the child tests at exactly the wrong time and it's like mayhem and everybody goes well what happened it's like well seven terrible things came together at the same time and produced this outburst of disintegrated rage and like look the hell out when that happens you know so yeah you you want to have that you any you either have that or it has you those are the options and you don't become safe by being castrated [Music] well what you want to do is face the dragon and get the damn gold that's what you want to do well you have to be a paradoxical being even to do that so you know in a hobbit it's bilbo in the hobbit you know he's kind of this little underdeveloped overprotected shire dweller and he's called on a great adventure to go and find the dragon and he has to become a thief in order to manage it well that's pretty weird you know it's like well it's because as a good citizen he's just not enough to conquer a dragon he has to also become a bad citizen in some sense he has to incorporate the part of himself that's monstrous let's say and develop that and hone it and and that's to say that well if you're harmless you're not virtuous you're just harmless you're like a rabbit rabbit isn't virtuous it's just just can't do anything except get eaten it's not virtuous if you're a monster and you don't act monstrously then you're virtuous but you also have to be a monster well you see this all the time harry potter's like that too it's like he's he's flawed he's hurt he's got evil in him he can talk to snakes man he breaks rules all the time all the time he's not obedient at all but you know he has a good reason for breaking the rules and it and if he couldn't break the rules him and his little clique of rule-breaking you know troublemakers if they didn't break the rules they wouldn't attain the highest goal so it's very peculiar but it's it's very very it's a very very very very common mythological notion you know the hero has to be the hero has to be a monster but a controlled monster batman is like that you know i mean it's everywhere it's it's the story you always hear [Music] one question is you know you're kind of implicitly moral insofar as you're socialized but that's sort of procedural it's just built into you this is different this is also becoming conscious of it and expanding out your personality into dimensions that it wouldn't normally occupy so this happens to people all the time so for example lots of my clients my clinical clients are too agreeable and um they're generally women because women are more agreeable than men but not always because i've had agreeable men as clients as well and what happens is they're resentful and and they don't know how to stand up for themselves and it's because they're very compassionate by nature and so if you're entering into a negotiation with them they'll let you win well that's not so good because you know you need to win too especially if you're in an organization of adults where there's there's a struggle right with when you have kids you can let them win especially infants like you have to let them win and that's partly why compassion is so necessary but as a as a basis for negotiation between adults it's like sorry it's insufficient you have to you have to be a bit of a monster so that you can say no and so a lot of what you do in in psychotherapy is treat people's anxiety and depression that's a huge chunk of it help them straighten out the way they think that's a huge chunk of it but another chunk of it is well let's toughen you up you know let's put you in a position where you can bargain let's teach you how to assert yourself and stand up for yourself and that's assertiveness training and it's a huge chunk of psychotherapy and you need to you need to learn it it's like because part of how you regulate your interactions with other people is to negotiate and you cannot negotiate unless you can say no you can't do it and it causes conflict to say no and if you don't like conflict which is basically the definition of being agreeable then you can't tolerate the conflict and so then you can't negotiate on your own behalf and so then you keep losing and you're bullied and you know it's not good then you get resentful and and it's really not good so you have to develop your inner monster a little bit and and then that makes you a better person not a worse person it's weird it's weird but but that's just how it is [Music] so the question is why don't why do people pursue rewards that don't produce this resonance they don't have a value hierarchy so pleasure island it's a good example those kids that were brought there were lost so they didn't they didn't have anywhere to go they didn't have an identity so they default to local pleasure and that's better than none although the problem with local pleasure well as the narrative made clear is that you better look out if you're impulsive because it's going to kick back on you hard and the reason is you're only considering the immediate time frame and the problem is is that things propagate across all the time frames and so just because something works really well this second cocaine for example doesn't mean that it's a tenable solution to the class of all problems so usually often people pursue local pleasure because that's the best they can imagine it's the best they've been taught they don't see another alternative so it could be ignorance it can be they don't want to adopt the responsibility because part of the problem with working at every level of the hierarchy simultaneously is that it's it's well it's like dancing to a very complex waltz let's say you have to be paying attention to a very large number of things simultaneously and doing things right it requires responsibility and so you know that's it's a pain it's a weight part of the reason people drink alcohol is to get rid of their responsibility i mean that's you know you hear people drink because they have problems it's like yeah yeah no some people drink because they're anxious and alcoholics drink because they're in withdrawal but young people drink because they're sick and tired of being responsible because it's annoying it's like so i'll drink enough i won't care about the medium to long-term consequences because alcohol that's exactly what alcohol does it doesn't make you ignorant of the medium to long-term consequences but it makes you not care about them and partly it's because it dampens anxiety so it dampens anxiety leaves your positive emotion circuits intact so then you can go out there and do stupid fun things and that's like that's a party really let's go do stupid fun things that's a party but the medium to learn long-term consequences are it's risky it doesn't mean you shouldn't do it but it's risky so yeah they don't know better that's the answer i would say [Music] when i had talked to people about doing the future authoring program they often put it off and it's not surprising because it's hard and and but it's more than that they think well i don't know how to write i'm going to do a bad job i don't really like assignments i'm going to have to do it perfectly i need to wait till i have enough time and like one of those is enough to stop your cold and all five of them you're just done and so i tell people do it haphazardly a tiny bit at a time and badly because you can do that i tell my students when they're doing their thesis master's thesis write a really bad first draft and then we have a little conversation about that because they don't think i mean that because it sounds like a cliche in some sense it's not a cliche it's not a cliche at all it means you're a terrible writer but but if someone put a gun to your head and said you have to have your 100 page thesis done by next monday or i'll shoot you but i don't care how terrible it is you would sit down and write it and the thing is then you have it right then then you have something and then you can fix it you can iterate and fix it that bad first draft that's the most valuable thing and so that's what you need you need a bad first draft of yourself and there's there's an idea that jung developed about the trickster and the jester the comedian right that the trickster is the precursor to the savior that's one of the things i learned from jung that was just it's so unlikely you'd never think that it's so amazing that that might be the case but the the the the the satirical and the aaronic and the and the troublemaker the comedian the fool the fool is the precursor to the savior why because you're a fool when you start something new and so if you're not willing to be a fool then you'll never start anything new and if you never start anything new then you won't develop and so the willingness to be a fool is the precursor to transformation and that's the same as humility and so if you're going to write your destiny you can do a bad first job you're going to get smarter as you move forward that's the thing is that so something beckons to you that's what happens here maybe the star that geppetto wished on was the wrong damn star but at least it was a star right at least it was in the sky at least it moved him forward and so you say in your life well something grips you and and and fills you with interest and you think well should i do that and the answer is if not that then something what if it's a mistake it's a mistake rest assured what do you know you're going to stumble around right and what's going to happen is this you're going to move to you're going to not stay in stasis you're not going to wander around in circles and i see people like that they said well i never knew what to do and now i'm 40. it's like that's not so good that's not so good and you might say well and there is a literature too that suggests that people are a lot more unhappy when they look back in their lives about the things they didn't do than they are about the mistakes they made while they were doing things and so that's really worth thinking about too because there's redemptive mistakes and a redemptive mistake would be a mistake that you make when you go out and try to do something you know you actually you think okay i'm going to try to do this and you're not good at it you make a bunch of mistakes it's like what what's the consequence if you pay attention is you're not quite so stupid anymore that's the thing is you've been informed by your by the results of your errors and so what happens is you you you follow the beacon you follow the light and you're blind so you don't know where the light is it's it's dimly apprehended only and you're afraid to follow it but you decide to take some stumbling steps towards it and as you take stumbling steps towards it you become illuminated and enlightened and informed [Music] what are you afraid of well okay you're afraid of everything well let's get something specific you're afraid of well i'm afraid of an elevator okay an elevator so i have a client she's afraid of elevators the elevator door opens she goes that's a tomb and i thought oh wow i thought it was an elevator but for you it's not a bloody elevator it's death and so that's what you're afraid of it's worse than that you're afraid of being trapped inside there in the dark alone alone not knowing if anyone is going to rescue you stuck there with your damn imagination freaking out it's like and if that's not and then maybe you have a heart attack because you're so terrified and you die it's like you know so that's the elevator well it's no bloody wonder no one's going to get into something like that and then maybe underneath that is your distrust in the mechanisms of society right because you know a normal person those weird creatures they'll get an elevator what the hell they don't care and partly it's because they have an implicit belief even if the thing stops somebody will come along and rescue them and usually you don't even think about it right it's like yeah what the hell it's an elevator it's like the danger is invisible to you and it's partly because you implicitly trust the structure and so maybe you go into the unconscious presuppositions of the person who is terrified of the elevator in the subways and you find out they have a real problem with trusting authority and that's partly why they don't get along with their husband why they've never been able to stand up for themselves so then you say okay well you're afraid of the damn elevator but it's not an elevator it's a tomb and the tomb is partly you and partly it's partly the elevator and partly your unconscious mind and so well what can you handle can you go and look at an elevator from 10 feet away it's like yes okay how about nine feet away yes five feet yes four feet no okay no problem four and a half feet we're gonna go from that elevator we're gonna look at the damn thing until you're bored of it because that's what we're trying to you should be bored of the elevator because then you're not afraid of it obviously it's like it's an elevator you just don't notice it right so this week they're four and a half feet from the elevator next week they're a foot from the elevator the week after that the horrible gates of hell open and they look inside and they don't run and so hey they're tougher than they thought they were and that's what you're teaching them actually you're not teaching them that the world isn't dangerous because that's a stupid thing to teach someone bloody right the world is dangerous it's terrifying and sometimes people under they realize that and the veil lifts and they see horror everywhere they see that and then they think well i'm just a little rabbit i'm over here in the corner i can't move i'm petrified and then they can't move they hide at home they cower at home because everything has become a predatory domain and so what you teach them is you're not as much of a rabbit as you think and part of that is that you help them grow some teeth so that they can go home and have that fight with their husband that they should have had 25 years ago it happens very frequently with agrophobic clients that you get them so they can go on the damn elevator and they can go in the subway and they can take a taxi maybe they learn to drive wow they get some autonomy and then they're a little tougher and so then they can stand up from them for themselves and they go back and like their husband might not be very happy with any of this really it depends on what sort of guy he is you know if he's a real tyrant he might be just perfectly happy that he's married to someone who you know is afraid of her own shadow because then she won't ever leave and so that's a nasty little story and believe me it's not uncommon so she gets tougher by facing what she fears and what she finds out is there's a hell of a lot more to her than she thought and that's really what happens when you do behavior therapy with someone who's agrophobic it isn't really that they get less afraid it's that they get braver that's way different it's because brave is alert and able to cope and you learn something and so what happens then is the star moves you move 10 feet towards it you think no that's not right i didn't get it right it isn't there it's actually there and so then you you see it somewhere else and you shift yourself slightly and you move forward and that's what happens is that you continue as you change the thing that guides you forward moves right it's like god in the in the in the desert in egypt the pillar of light that you're following it's moving it's not a permanent thing you move towards it it moves away it guides you forward and so you say well is what i'm aiming at paradise itself and the answer to that is no because what do you know you you couldn't see paradise if it was right in front of you but you might get a glimmer of it and so you move towards it and you grow and then the next time you open your eyes you see a little bit more clearly and that's what happens is that just happens over and over right it keeps moving and so you move like this but the thing that's so cool is that all those zigs and zags you say and each of those zags is and ziggs is a catastrophe i hit a wall my god and then i had to die a little bit and i barely got back up it's a phoenix transformation at each at each turn and it's painful but the thing is is that even though you've you've traveled 20 miles let's say on that road and you've only moved three miles forward you've moved three miles forward instead of falling backwards because that's the thing too is that if you stand still you fall backwards you cannot stand still because the world moves away from you if you stand still and there's no stasis there's only backwards and so if you're not moving fast back forwards then you're moving backwards and that's more more of the underlying truth of the matthew principle to those who have everything more will be given from those who have nothing everything will be taken it's a warning do not stay in one place well as you zig and tag maybe then maybe the cataclysm of each transformation starts to lessen there's not so much of you that has to die with every mistake and maybe you end up oriented at least reasonably properly and if you were sensible that would have been your trip but it wasn't right it's that and perhaps it's a lot worse than that perhaps there's no shortage of backtracking but it doesn't matter because as you stumble forward you you illuminate and inform yourself and perhaps that's partly because the world is made of information and if you encounter it and tangle with it then it informs you and then you become informed and then you're in formation and then you're ready because it could be that there are ways of being in the world that justify the world and their ways of being in the world that make the world unbearable and i believe that the narrative that runs through the biblical stories is precisely a dialogue between those two types of being and the optimistic part of the story is that being requires limitation and suffering there's no escape from that but there are modes of being that allow that to be perhaps even more than tolerable perhaps there are modes of being that allow that to be good and it's a straight and narrow road it's a very difficult road to tread so so i think well that that's possible you know i'm i'm not an optimist by nature and but uh that's that's one of the things that i've conceptualized and read about that i actually find plausible because it's certainly the case everyone knows this that there are ways that you can act that make things worse everyone knows that and so if that's the case there has to be the opposite right there has to be ways that you could act that make things better and obviously you can act in ways that make things really way worse and so the question is well are there ways that you can act that make things really much better and i think that's the question is can we have our cake and eat it too can we have the being that requires limitation and suffering and also simultaneously transcend that by our mode of being and i believe that the biblical stories and perhaps not only the biblical stories but the biblical stories are the human imagine one of the human imaginations best attempts to address and answer that question that's what the entire story is about so the first of it is the catastrophe of the collapse of self-consciousness and the entrance of humanity into history and the rest of it is okay now we're in history now we know that we're going to die we know about our mortality we're conscious of our own being is there a mode of acting in the world that allows that to be justifiable or maybe even more that allows that to be triumphant and then i would also say maybe it's worth finding out you know that that's the other thing that's so interesting because you've got this short time on earth and there's lots of things that are very very difficult to contend with and and you have the problem of tolerating yourself even in all your insufficiency and one of the things that seems to me to be the case is that if you adopt a sufficiently profound mode of being if you attempt to do that then the mere act of lifting up that weight is enough to justify the fact that you're insufficient and mortal and and and and bound by tragedy and i believe that and i believe people believe that because if you watch how people act they look for people they admire and they do admire people right it's a natural it's a natural phenomena you see it starting with children children admire and then they imitate and we look to people who seem to be able to bear the burden of being in a heroic manner and there's something inside of us that calls to that and that makes us want to to mimic that and to follow it and i think that that's a i think that that's the deepest and most profound of instincts and i think it's right the notion that the notion that it was good well even if you don't believe that and you know because maybe it's not as good as it could be i would say it's incumbent on you as someone who participates in the process of of furthering creation to act as if it could be good at least and to further that with with all of your efforts partly because what the hell else do you have to do that could possibly be better than that that could possibly justify your existence more than that and you know perfectly well if you if you have any sense at all if you think clearly about it at all is that that's what you want to see in everyone else you know it's you're desperate and maybe you're cynical and now and then someone appears that acts at least momentarily like a light in the darkness and that lifts your spirit up and gives you a little bit of hope and maybe helps you continue on it's well that's obviously a call to being it's a it's a statement from your own soul that says well there's something about that that's how you should be and maybe then well we get a chance to to participate in what is good you might have heard about bf skinner you know he used food pellets to motivate his rats but what you don't know about skinner is that those rats were starved to three quarters of their normal body weight so they would they would work for food man so skinner's rats were kind of oversimplified but you can get rats to work for food they don't have to be that hungry you can get them to work for food and they'll do all sorts of things they'll press levers and and they'll open bar oh open doors and they'll solve problems and you know they'll do all sorts of things and one of the things you can do to kind of measure how much the rat is motivated is let's say you've run him through a maze and he knows there's some food at the end of the maze you can tie a little spring to his tail and see how hard he pulls when you open the door to the maze so that's because that's how much rat work the rat is willing to do so you can measure that or you can see how fast he skitters down the maze and you can get an estimate about the rat's motivation and so then you might say well how motivated is a hungry rat and the answer would be depends on how hungry is but there's another answer it also depends on what's chasing him when he's going after the food so if you have a rat and you you have food over here and you waft in some cat odor rats hate cat odor and it's innate they never have to see or smell a cat to be absolutely petrified by cat odor and so if you waft in some cat odor and then open the door that rat will zoom to that food a lot faster than it will if it's just hungry so a rat running away from something that it doesn't want towards something that it does want is a very motivated rat and so one of the things we did with the future authoring program that's germane to this idea of terror because there's this idea in the old testament the fear of god is the beginning of wisdom and it's a pretty harsh idea but but there's something really useful about it because one of the things you see with people all the time is that they're maybe they're trying to stumble forward towards their ideal as poorly defined as it might be but then they're afraid right they're afraid about what they might encounter and that stops them because fear does stop people it freezes you like a prey animal and so people move ahead but then they get afraid and then they stop moving ahead and so and that's not so good because negative emotion is a really powerful motivator so we're more motivated by negative emotion than positive emotion quantitatively speaking quantitative quantitatively speaking you can measure that and that's i think because we can only be so happy but we can really be suffering and dead you know so we have to pay more attention to the negative and that's bad because the negative can stop you and then in my clinical practice you know i often talk to people who are trying to make a difficult life decision and and they are weighing out the costs and the benefits of making the life decision you know and one of the things i always talk to them about is wait a second that's an incomplete analysis you have to weigh out the benefits and the costs of doing this and you have to weigh out the costs and benefits of not doing that not doing it and that's not the same as the zero that you assume that you're starting with right because to not make a decision it also has a cost and sometimes the cost of not making a decision is far worse than the cost of making a decision even if the decision is risky and so one of the things you can derive from that and this is very useful i think is that this is also i think why it's so useful to contemplate your mortality so to speak because you're screwed no matter what you do you know and that actually frees you is that you you have path a that has catastrophes and you have path b that has catastrophes and you don't get to have the no catastrophe path but you get to pick which one and that's really something because if you know that there's terrible risk associated with everything that you do and don't do then you can afford to take some risks because you're not you know this is all within the ark metaphor i'm still making the case that despite the fact that your life is essentially catastrophic you can you can make a covenant with the highest ideal and that will take you through it the best way possible i'm i'm still making that case so so then you think okay well i'm trying to make this decision i'm going to go try to do something difficult and isn't that terrifying and then you think yeah but wait a minute what's really terrifying is not doing it and then you think about the cost of not doing it so in the future authoring program we have people do this little meditative exercise which is okay just think about your insufficiencies by your own definition right the way that you don't do what you know you should do about the things that you do that you shouldn't do that you know you shouldn't do beyond a shadow of a doubt right there's some things like that and that's bad habits and and poor aim and all of the resentment and hatred and aggression and unresolved conflicts and all those things that are dementing you and warping you and then think okay those things get the upper hand man they get the upper hand and they take you the worst possible place you could go in the next three to five years what exactly does that look like and so you sketch all that out and you think hey i don't want to go there and so the next time that a temptation comes up you think well it'd be a lot better for me if i didn't succumb to this temptation it's like that's kind of weak you'd look a little better if you didn't eat like a cheesecake a day or something like that you know that's that's something but it's not the same as um i'm gonna have diabetes and i'm gonna lose my damn leg in in five years if i don't get my eating under control that's motivating and so then the temptation comes along and you think oh how about no seriously how about no not just because a higher good would be obtained if i avoided it but because a terrible catastrophe would be averted if i didn't well so you want to get your fear behind you right you want to get it behind you where it's pushing you forward instead of in front of you where it's stopping you and you get your fear behind you pushing your forward you forward by actually thinking through the consequences of not putting your life together and the least of those is that you waste it and suffer right because you're gonna suffer anyways man so you waste it and suffer that's a bad deal because maybe if you're going to suffer you could at least do something noble and glorious and upright and powerful and honorable and admirable and helpful and difficult you know that's just so much better and maybe that's good enough so that you think hey you know little suffering it's basically worth it at least it's a way forward you know at least it's a way forward what should move forward in time with me and what should be let go as if it's dead wood and the more dead wood that you let go of and burn off when you have the opportunity the less it accretes around you here's something interesting about forest fires you know people have been trying to prevent forest fires for a long time the forest fire can burn so hot that it burns this top soil right off in which case you don't have a forest at all anymore you just have a desert and lots of trees are evolved to withstand forest fires of a certain intensity and some won't even release their seeds unless there's been a fire and so a little bit of fire at the right time can stop everything from burning to the ground and that's also a really useful insight a metaphorical insight into the nature of sacrifice right it it's also a lot easier to let go of something when you're deciding to let go of it because you've decided yourself that it's you're done with that it's a weak part of you it needs to disappear you do that yourself it's much better and much easier than it is if it's taken away from you forcibly in which case you're very much likely to fight it these other there's another interesting thing here a motif that runs through the entire bible it's a very very powerful motif and it's partly associated with this idea of walking with or walking before god and you know in in the new testament christ says something like thy father's will be done and he means that that will should be done through him and so i i can't i won't be able to state this exactly right but it's something like this you know a lot of what people regard as their own personalities and are proud of about their own personalities aren't their own personalities at all they're useless idiosyncrasies that differ them differentiate them trivially from other people but they have no value in and of themselves they're more like quirks i remember once i was trying to teach a particularly stubborn student about how to write and she had written a number of essays in in university and and got universally walloped for them and the reason for that was she couldn't write really at all she was really really bad at writing and so i was sitting down with her trying to explain to her what she was doing wrong and she was being very annoying about it very recalcitrant very very unwilling to listen that was a pearls before swine thing you know and at one point she said it i can write perfectly well this university professors just don't like my style and i can feel my hands creep towards her neck yeah well that would be funny if it wasn't true but it was also true you know and i thought what the hell's with you you can't even write and you think you have a style and not only do you think yeah no not knowing how to write is not a style that's the other part right and so you know she she instead of humbling herself which was necessary and okay right because she was a new university student like of course you don't know how to write when were you going to learn in school i don't think so well so she was proud of her insufficiency that's arrogance right that's not humility it's self-deception and arrogance to be proud of your insufficiency that's a very foolish thing and that means to cling to the parts of you that are dead [Music] back to the walking with god idea you know as you elevate your aim you create a judge at the same time right because the new ideal which is an ideal you even if it's just an ideal position that you might occupy even if it's still conceptualized in that concrete way that becomes a judge because it's above you right and then you're you're terrified of it maybe that's why you might be afraid when you go start a new job right because you're this thing is above you and you're terrified of it and it judges you and that's useful because the judge that you're creating by formulating the ideal tells you what's useless about yourself and then you can dispense with it and you want to keep doing that and then every time you make a judge that's more elevated then there's more useless you that has to be dispensed with and then if you create an ultimate judge which is what the archetypal imagination of humankind has done say with the figure of christ because if christ is nothing else he is at least the archetypal perfect man and therefore the judge you have a judge that says get rid of everything about yourself that isn't perfect of course that's also what abraham that's also what god tells abraham right he says to be perfect to pick an ideal that's high enough and you can do this the thing that's interesting about this i think is you can do it more or less on your own terms you have to have some collaboration from other people but you don't have to pick an external ideal you can pick an ideal that fulfills the role of ideal for you you can say okay well if things could be set up for me the way i need them to be and if i could be who i needed to be what would that look like and you can figure that out for yourself and then instantly you have a judge and i also think that's part of the reason people don't do it right why don't why don't people look up and move ahead and the answer is well you know you start formulating an ideal you formulate a judge it's pretty easy to feel intimidated in the face of your own ideal that's what happens to cain versus abel for example then it's really easy to destroy the ideal instead of to try to pursue it because then you get rid of the judge but it's way better lower the damn judge if it's too much like if your current ambition is crushing you you know then maybe you're playing the tyrant to yourself and you should tap down your ambitions not get rid of them by any stretch of the imagination but at least put them more reasonably within your grasp you don't have to leap from point one to point fifty in one leap right you can do it incrementally but i really like this idea i think it's a profound idea that the process of recapitulating yourself continually is also the process of it's a phoenix-like process right you're shedding all those elements of you that are no longer worthy of the pursuits that you're that you're valuing and then i would say the idea here is that as you do that you shape yourself ever more precisely into something that can withstand the tragedy of life and that can act as a as a beacon to the world that's the right way of thinking about it maybe first to your friends and then to your family it's like it's a hell of a fine ambition and there's no reason that it can't happen you know every one of you knows people who are really bloody useful in a crisis and people that you admire right those are all you can think of all those people as you admire that you admire us partial incarnations of the archetypal messiah that's exactly right and the more that that manifests itself in any given person then the more generally useful and admirable that person is in a multitude of situations and we don't know the limit to that but people can be unbelievably good for things you know it's really something to behold [Music] in order to have any positive meaning in your life you have to have identified a goal and you have to be working towards it and there is a technical reason for that and the technical reason as far as i can tell is that the circuitry that produces the kind of positive emotion that people really like is only activated when you notice that you're when you're proceeding towards a goal that you value and so that means that if you don't have a goal that you value you can't have any positive emotions so technically that's the incentive reward system and it's the underlying circuitry is dopaminergic and when that circuitry is activated then it's part of the exploratory circuit it makes you it gives you the sense of being actively engaged in something worthwhile and that's you know you tend to think of positive emotion as something produced by reward but there's two kinds of positive emotion one is the reward that's associated with satiation and that's consumatory reward and that's the reward you get when you're hungry and you eat but the thing about eating when you're hungry is that it destroys the framework within which you were operating right it's time to eat while you eat and then that framework's no longer relevant so the consumatory reward eliminates the value framework and then you're stuck with what are you going to do next and so the consumatory reward has with it its own problems but the incentive reward is constantly what keeps you moving forward and incentive reward because it's dopaminergic also is analgesic literally analgesic so if you're in pain you take opiates and that that will cut the pain but so will psychomotor stimulants like cocaine or amphetamines and so it's literally the case that if you're engaged in something that's engaging and you're working towards a goal that you're going to feel less pain and you can see this happening with athletes who you know they'll break their thumb or something or maybe sometimes even their ankle and they'll keep playing the game of course afterwards they're suffering like mad but the fact that they're so filled with goal directed enthusiasm means that well the pain systems are in some sense shut off so that's an interesting thing because what it suggests i mean then you could imagine i might say well how happy you are you that you've made a certain amount of progress and if you think about it what you'd say is well it depends on how much progress and in relationship to what so hypothetically you're going to be happier if you've made quite a bit of progress towards a really important goal and then you have to think through what it means for a goal to be really important because that's not obvious now you could say you're in this class and you're listening to some information and maybe there's two reasons for that you might find the information interesting per se but let's forget about that for a minute you need to listen to the information so that you can do well on the assignment so that you can do well in the class you need to do well in your classes so that you can finish up your degree you need to finish up your degree so that you can find your place in the world you need to do that so that you're financially stable and maybe you can start a family and have a life and that's all part of being a good person something like that and so that's a hierarchy of goals and you might say that being a good person would be the thing however vaguely thought through that's at the top of that hierarchy and then when you're doing things that serve the that ultimate purpose then you're going to find those more meaningful and that meaning is actually produced as a consequence of the engagement of this exploratory circuit that's nested right down in your hypothalamus it's really really old it's as old as thirst and it's as old as hunger it's really an old system you

Channel: WisdomTalks

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Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Advice, young people, how to, Psychology, Jordan B. Peterson, success, jordan peterson interview, jordan peterson speech, jordan peterson motivation, motivation, motivational video, jordan peterson life advice, START FIXING YOUR LIFE IN 2021, fix your life, change your life in 2021, improve your life in 2021, how to reinvent yourself in 2021, LIFE IS HARD! It's Time To Strengthen Your Character, strengthen your character, jordan peterson suffering

Id: MV078z5fwds

Length: 45min 13sec (2713 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 11 2021