Plan a Life You'd Like to Have

the next best predictor of Lifetime success is conscientiousness well so and of the 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 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 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 well you get up in the morning and you're excited about the day you're ready to go and so as far as I can tell what you do is you specify your long-term ideal maybe you also specify a place you want to stay the hell away from so that you're terrified to fail as well as excited about succeeding because that's also useful you specify your goal you do that you do that in some sense as a unique individual you want to you want to specify goals that make you say oh if that could happen as a consequence of my efforts it would clearly be worthwhile because the question always is why do something because doing nothing is easy you just sit there and you don't do anything that's real easy the question is why would you ever do anything and the answer to that has to be because you've determined by some means that it's worthwhile and then the next question might be well where should you look for worthwhile things and one would be well you could consult your own temperament and the other would be well you kind of look at how look at what it is that people accrue that's valuable across the lifespan look look what so you do a structural analysis of the sub-components of human existence and already did that you need a family you need friends right 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 but once you set up that that goal structure let's say and that's really in many in many ways that's what you should be doing at universities is that's exactly what you should be doing is trying to figure out who it is that you're trying to be right and you aim at that and then use everything you 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 started 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 okay so then what do you do well then then you turn down to the micro routines it's like okay well this is what I'm aiming for how does that instantiate itself day to day week to week month to month and that's where something like a schedule can be unbelievably useful Google Calendar it's like make a damn schedule and stick to it okay so what's the rule with the schedule it's not a bloody prison that's the first thing that people do wrong 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 sh 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 then 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 percent 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 is 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 so maybe you do an hour of 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 percent accuracy but that beats the hell out of zero right and if you hit it even with 50 accuracy another rule is well aim for 51 the next week or 50 and a half percent for God's sake or because you're you're going to hit that position where things start to loop back positively and spiral you upward and so so that's one way that you can work on your conscientiousness is 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 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 my point is is that you have to understand that you're not your own servant so to speak you're someone that you have to negotiate with and that's and you're someone that you want to present the opportunity of having a good life to and that's hard for people because they don't like themselves very much so you know they're always like cracking the Whip and then procrastinating and cracking the Whip and then procrastinating and it's like God it's so boring and such a pathetic way of spending your time and you know what that's like because you probably waste like six hours a day and I think we did an economic calculation about that a while back right your time's probably worth 50 bucks an hour something like that I mean you're not getting paid that now but you're young and so this is investment time and what you do now is going to multiply its effects in the future so so let's say it's 50 bucks an hour which is perfectly reasonable so if you waste six hours a day and you are then you're wasting about two thousand dollars a week or about a hundred thousand dollars a year so like go ahead but that's what it's costing you every hour and you need to know what your damn time is worth so let's say it's not 50 bucks it's 30. whatever maybe it's a hundred it's somewhere in that range one of the things you should be asking yourself is when you spend an hour was that well what have I paid someone 50 bucks to have had that hour and if the answer is no it's like well maybe you should do something else with with your time and it depends on whether or not you think that your time's worthwhile but the funny thing about not assuming that is if you assume your time isn't worthwhile what happens is you don't just sit around sort of randomly in a state of responsibility list Bliss what you do is you suffer existentially and so that seems like a stupid solution

Channel: Jordan B Peterson Clips

Views: 177,662

Keywords: psychology, philosophy, Jordan B. Peterson, Jordan Peterson, JB Peterson, jordanbpeterson, jordanpeterson, personality, understandmyself, selfauthoring, neuropsychology, jordan peterson clips, jp peterson clips, jp clips, jordan peterson podcast clips, jordan peterson live, jordan peterson livestream, jordan peterson shorts, jordan peterson tiktoks, jordan peterson motivational clips

Id: Mi68ZAD_Ggs

Length: 11min 9sec (669 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 27 2022