START FIXING YOUR LIFE IN 2021 (change your life in 2021) - Jordan Peterson Motivation

[Music] let's say you go into uh you can do this in a room it's quite fun to do it just when you're sitting in a room like a room maybe your bedroom you can sit there and just sort of meditate on and think okay if i wanted to spend 10 minutes making this room better what would i have to do and you have to ask yourself that right it's not a command it's like a genuine question and things will pop out in the room that you know you like there's a stack of papers over there that's kind of bugging you and you know that maybe a little order there would be a good thing and you know you haven't there's some rubbish behind your computer monitor that you haven't attended to for like six months and the room would be slightly better if it was a little less dusty and the cables weren't all tangled up the same way and like if you if you allow yourself just to consider the expanse in which you exist at that moment there'll be all sorts of things that'll pop out in it that you could just fix and you know i might say well if you were coming to see me for psychotherapy the small easiest thing for us to do first would just be to get you to organize your room you think well is that psychotherapy and the answer is well it depends on how you conceive the limits of your being and i would say start where you can start you know if if something announces itself to you which is a strange way of thinking about it as in need of repair that you could repair then hey fix it you fix 100 things like that your life will be a lot different now i often tell people to fix the things you repeat every day because people tend to think of those as trivial right you get up you brush your teeth you have your breakfast you know you have your routines that you go through every day well those probably constitute 50 of your life and people think well they're mundane i don't need to pay attention to them it's like no no that's exactly wrong the things you do every day those are the most important things you do hands down all you have to do is do the arithmetic you figure it out right away so 100 adjustments to your broader domain of being and there's a lot less rubbish and there's a lot less rubbish around it a lot fewer traps for you to step into and so that's in keeping with jung's idea about erasing the dis once you've got your mind and your emotions together and once you're acting that out then you can extend what you're willing to consider yourself and start fixing up the things that are part of your broader extent now sometimes you don't know how to do that so you might say imagine you're walking down bloor street and there's this guy who's like alcoholic and schizophrenic and has been on the streets for 10 years he sort of stumbled towards you and you know incoherently mutters something that's a problem and it would be good if you could fix it but you haven't got a clue about how to fix that you just walk around that and go find something that you could fix because if you muck about in that not only is it unlikely that you'll help that person it's very likely that you'll get hurt yourself so you know just because while you're experiencing things announce themselves as in need of repair doesn't mean that it's you right then and there that should repair them you have to have some humility you know you don't walk up to a helicopter that isn't working and just start tinkering away with it you you have to stay within your domain of competence but most of the time if people look at their lives you know it's very interesting thing to do i like that i like the idea of the room because you can do that at the drop of a hat you know you go back to where you live and sit down and think okay i'm gonna make this place better for half an hour what should i do you have to ask things will just pop up like mad and it's partly because your mind is a very strange thing as soon as you give it a name a genuine name it'll reconfigure the world in keeping with that aim that that's actually how you see to begin with and so if you set it a task especially you have to be genuine about it which is why you have to bring your thoughts and emotions together and then you have to get them in your body so you're acting consistently you have to be genuine about the aim but once you aim the world will reconfigure itself around that aim which is very strange [Music] one of the things that's very strange about a phoenix is that well it's immortal but in a strange way you know it lives and lives i think 100 years and it gets older and older and then one day poof it bursts into flames and turns into an egg and then you get a new phoenix so that's a symbol of transformation it's a symbol of transformation the bird is a spirit or psyche and so here's what it means in part you know you know how when you learn a lesson in your life that that's not very pleasant right it's not like when you learn something important it's the best day of your life it's often [Music] the importance of what you learn is often proportionate to just how wretched it is to learn it you know you learn things the hard way you learn things by getting hit because obviously if what you're doing is working you get what you want there's no learning in that and that's happy it's when you're doing something and you hit an obstacle and maybe a bloody well hit it hard and then you know you recoil and then you down into the depths you go and you have to sort yourself out and you realize that you're you know this particular kind of idiot and that you should probably fix that and that's really annoying and difficult and you know and maybe you're down in the dumps and anxious for quite a while and then you get it repaired more or less and you know you put yourself back together that's the phoenix poof into flames bang egg new you and so you know that's the ability to learn now human beings are very strange creatures right because we're very malleable compared to most animals you know like grizzly bears now and grizzly bears a thousand years ago it's like whatever they're the same thing they do the same thing there's no transformation but human beings we have this massive brain and you know it's a pain because it means you have to take care of human children until they're 40 and and that's a big burden and so you know we pay a big price for it it also makes childbirth very difficult and and it's costly you have to eat a lot because you have a big brain because it uses up a lot of energy and so you know you pay a price for it but the advantage is your plastic you can learn now learning is a strange thing because you can think of it as just acquiring more information but you could also think of it and this is more accurate as finding out something that you're doing wrong so that's sort of built into you like a character a care element of your character a presumption of your perception or a deep habit it's really built into you it's a neural structure right it's alive and you have to kill it because it's working properly and the pain that you go through in part when you're suffering because you did something stupid is it's something like your your the neurology i can never get this quite right it's the pain of the death of that structure and that could be a huge chunk of you you know if you really have to go through a massive revision it's like the person that comes out the other end might hardly be the same at all you know that happens for example if you're trying to combat alcoholism which is just you know a ratchet thing to do because well all your friends are alcoholic all your family drinks too much the only thing you know how to do when you're socializing is to go to the bar and drink too much you know you spend like 20 hours a week on it it's like it's not just that you're addicted to the substance it's like that's how you live and so if you want to stop being an alcoholic not only do you have to stop drinking alcohol but you have to stop seeing all your drunk friends and then maybe you've had them for your whole life and you have to have continual battles with your drunk family and then you have to figure out something to do with that 20 hours that's now like hanging around your neck like an albatross and so you have to let that whole part of your personality die and a new part has to spring forth and that's what the phoenix is and the phoenix is the capacity of the person to transform you have all seen this video where you watch the basketballs being tossed back and forth between members of the white team versus the black team and while you're doing that a gorilla walks up into the middle of the video and you don't see it it's like you know if you thought about that experiment for about five years that would be about the right amount of time to spend thinking about it because what it shows you is that you see what you aim at and that man if you can get one thing through your head and as a consequence of even being in university that would be a good one you see what you aim at and so because one inference you might draw from that is be careful what you aim at right it what you aim at determines the way the world manifests itself to you and so if the world is manifesting itself in a very negative way one thing to ask is are you aiming at the right thing now you know i'm not trying to reduce everybody's problems to an improper aim people get cut off at the knees for all sorts of reasons you know they get sick they have accidents there's a random element to being that's for sure but and so you don't want to take anything even that particular phrase too far you want to bind it with the fact that random things do happen to people but it's still a great thing to ask [Music] to navigate and there's two things you need to know the first is where the hell are you exactly precisely right razor sharp what's good about you and what's bad about you buy your own buy your own reckoning you don't have to you can ask other people but this is a game you play yourself it's like as far as i'm concerned i'm taking stock what is it that's okay about me and what needs some work and you got to watch to not be too self-critical when you're doing that too because that can just be another kind of flaw and then the next is okay well where are you going what's your destination well and that's what the frame is now you know you could do that in a very sophisticated way and you do that by thinking consciously about who it is that you are in an articulated manner and where you want to go and why and how you're going to get there and people hardly ever do that that is that's come as such an absolute shock to me as an educator i i just because one of the other programs i i use this in my classes one of the other programs in this suite of programs is called the future authoring program and i started developing in my maps of meaning class which is where some of this material is from and i got students to write about their past it's like okay we're we're talking about stories so let's tell your story who are you how do you get here and what are you now that usually helps people put things to rest although it's quite stressful while you're doing it stress goes up when you're doing it and maybe you feel miserable for a couple of weeks and then stress goes down and it stays down so that's and that's also why people don't do it because who the hell wants to have their stress go up but if it's temporary it's a sacrifice so then the next issue is well where are you going and one of the things that and this i just still i cannot understand these students that have been in education system for 15 years 14 years high-end students most of them not once in their whole bloody life did anyone ever get them to sit down for like a day and say all right justify your existence like well seriously it's like here you are in university you're taking a bunch of courses you've got some sort of vague career plan it's like defend the damn thing a bit since you're going to go live it and everything you're staking everything on it it's like what's your damn plan and why are you so convinced that it's not the plan of a babbling fool because if you haven't thought about it then it is and if you really want to go out there and live that out you know one of the things carl jung said was that you you're in a story whether you know it or not and and then he made two nice comments about that if it's someone else's story you're probably going to get a bit part and it might not be the one you want and if it's a story that you don't know it might be one with a really bad ending or maybe it's just bad period with a worse ending and if you don't know what the story that you're living out is maybe that's the one you know maybe you got that from your mother you got it from your grandmother you got it from your aunt or god only knows where you picked it up because you pick up things like mad because that's what human beings are like so maybe you're living a malevolent tragedy unconsciously and then one thing you might ask yourself is well how wretched and miserable is your life let's add futile to that how wretched miserable and futile is your life and you might say well yeah 70 percent on each count it's like then you're probably unconsciously living out a malevolent tragedy and maybe that's not for the best [Music] so anyways you know we got students to start writing in detail about not what they wanted it's not a career thing because that's the closest people usually get is they have a career plan it's like no no it's not a career plan that's that's peripheral important but peripheral it's like all right you got three years man you're gonna live them anyways devote those three years to setting the world up around you so that it's the best it could possibly be for you as if you were taking care of yourself as if you cared for yourself well what would that look like you know let's say just for the sake of argument if you figured out where you were that you could have what would be best for you well what is that i bet you never asked people don't ask and so life comes at them like random snakes and they sort of fend them off and life goes by and things don't work out the way people expected them to but a huge part of that is they didn't know where they were because they wouldn't look or didn't know that they should look ignorance and willful blindness right two great catastrophes and they never figured out where they wanted to go or why now there's a problem with figuring out where you want to go and the problem is is that you make your conditions for failure clear to yourself and people don't like that so if you keep yourself in the fog then you can't tell when you screwed up now that isn't so good because you're still screwing up you're just too blind self-blind to notice although in in the short term that's less painful if you make your criteria for success razor sharp then you know every time you screw up but that's great because then you could fix it you could either repair the the behavioral inadequacy or the conceptual inadequacy that you're using as a tool in that situation or maybe you could adjust your damn plan either way you can fix it abraham is self-conscious that's what this commentary says but the thing is is he moves forward despite that he's self-conscious and he knows the danger but he moves forward despite that and that's actually the appropriate response in the face of actual non-naive understanding of what constitutes life like if you're naive and you move forward it's like well what the hell do you know you know there's no courage in naivety because you don't know what there is to stop you you don't know what dangers you might apprehend but to be aware of what it is that your problem is so to be alert existentially let's say or to be fully self-conscious means that you're perfectly aware of your limitations and how you might be hurt and then to make the decision to move forward into the unknown and the land of the stranger anyways that's the i would say that's one of the secrets to a good life and i can say that really without fear of contradiction i would i would say because the clinical literature on this is very very very clear what you do with people who are afraid and to some degree depressed but certainly anxious is you lay out what what they're anxious about first of all in detail what is it that you're afraid of what might happen and then you decompose it into small problems hypothetically manageable problems and then you have the person expose themselves to the thing that they're afraid of and what happens isn't that they get less afraid that isn't what the clinical literature indicates exactly what happens instead is they get braver and that's not the same thing right because if you get less afraid it's like well the world isn't as dangerous as i thought it was you know silly me if you get braver that's not what happens what happens is yeah the damn world's just as dangerous as i thought or maybe it's even more dangerous than i thought but it turns out that there's something in me that responds to taking that on as a voluntary challenge and grows and thrives as a consequence and there's no doubt about this even the psychophysiological findings are quite clear if you if you can if you impose a stressor on two groups of people and on one group the stressor is imposed involuntarily and on the other group the stressor is picked up voluntarily the people who pick up the stressor voluntary voluntarily use a whole different psychophysiological system to deal with it they use the system that's associated with approach and challenge and not the system that's associated with defensive aggression and withdrawal and the system that is associated with challenges much more associated with positive emotion and much less associated with negative emotion it's also much less hard on you because the the defensive posturing system the prey animal system man when that thing kicks in it's all systems are go for you you know your the gas is pushed down to the or the pedals push down to the metal and the brakes are on you're using future resources that you could be storing for future time right now in the present to ready yourself for emergency so there's there's there's nothing simple or tricky at all about the idea of being called to move forthrightly forward into the strange and the unknown and there's a real adventure that's associated with that right so that's an exciting thing which is part of the reason why people travel and then also to see yourself as the sort of creature that can do that is willing to do that on a habitual basis is also the right kind of tonic for i hate this word for your self-esteem you know because the self-esteem has nothing to do with feeling good about yourself as i already mentioned there isn't necessarily a reason why a priori you should just feel good about yourself but if you can view yourself acting in a courageous and forthright manner and encountering the world and trying to improve your lot and and and taking risks you know in a non-naive way well then you have something that you can comfort yourself with a night when you're wondering what the whole damn point of is of your futile and miserable life [Music] and so and that's necessary because it's often the case that you wake up at four in the morning or at least sometimes the case that you wake up at four in the morning when things haven't been going that well and wonder just what the hell the point is of your futile and miserable life you have to have something real to set against that it can't be just rationalizations about how you know you're a valuable person among others even though that's true that's not good enough you need something that's more realistic to set it against that and observing courage in yourself is definitely one of the things that that that can help you sleep soundly at night when when things are destabilized a little bit around you [Music] how do you reach a young person who's bought into the notion that life is meaningless well the first thing is you tell them why they think that it's like they've got all sorts of reasons to think that it's like life is hard it's it's it's a crucifixion that's right and so it's no wonder they think that it's like okay fine first of all we're going to take it seriously yeah you're suffering and adrift and you have your reasons but and so you take those reasons seriously and you say despite that despite that there's more to you than you think and you know that too because you upgrade yourself for not manifesting it and you say to people well i ask people for example who do you admire because that's that instinct for admiration is part of the instinct for imitation it's like who do you admire you admire people who are completely irresponsible you admire people who can't take care of themselves they can't even take care of themselves here's the per at most admirable person completely useless to themselves maybe even counterproductive just a bloody catastrophe for their family and like uh what would you call a social danger like no one admires that no one admires that it's like you start minimally can you take care of yourself at least that that'd be the first thing and then is there more now is there enough to you so that maybe someone else could rely on you now and then maybe maybe a number of people maybe your family you could be a you could be the glue that holds them together and and amends them and then maybe there could be more to you than that maybe you could be someone for your community and god only knows how far you could go with that those are the people you admire it's like well try that out see what happens start locally young carl jung said uh this is one of my favorite carl jung quotes he said modern man does not see god because he will not look low enough i really like that and so you know i've been telling the people that i talk to the same thing it's like you have a certain amount of potential within your grasp you may find what you have contemptible because you're not in a position of power this modicum of possibility that's been granted to you is beneath you and so you do nothing with it and so you get nothing from it you take that seriously you do the small things you can the humble things that you can to put yourself together in that in those tiny embarrassing ways that are real and if you do that enough you'll you'll for you'll fortify yourself and that will work and you know one of the things that's been unbelievably heartening to me it's ridiculous really like normally now if i go out during the day if i go to any city i've been to like 150 cities in the last year and if i'm walking around on the street or in an airport someone will come up to me about every 10 minutes or so and they'll say the same thing they always say the same thing they first of all apologize for bothering me and they're very polite so all my interactions with people you'd never guess this from like my reputation in the press but all my interactions with people in public are unbelievably positive and the people will come up and say you know i was in this small domain of hell a year ago or six months ago whatever it is addiction alcoholism i wasn't getting along with my family i'd been living with my girlfriend for five years and we were stuck i didn't have any direction for my career i was nihilistic you know i was whatever you know all the different ways that people can fall into a pit and and and and be miserable he said i read your books or i watched your lectures and i decided i was gonna i was gonna try to put my family together i was gonna i was gonna make a vision and pursue it i was gonna try telling the truth i was just gonna try one of these things and things are way better way better [Music] one of the things i've been suggesting to my audience is it's one of the rules in my book is that you should tell the truth or at least you shouldn't lie it's like you can't tell the truth because what the hell do you know but but you cannot lie you know like each of us knows when we're about to utter something that isn't true now sometimes maybe you're confused about it because you're ignorant and you're biased and and so you say something and it might be true it might not be but you're not clear about it but sometimes it's pretty damn clear that you say something or you do something that you know perfectly well not to be true and you do it anyways and the proposition that genesis puts forward is if you act in truth then the order you produce is good regardless of how it appears it's an axiomatic statement of ethical it's an axiomatic ethical proposition that you're that the job of whatever extracts order from chaos is properly done if it's done in truth and that's that's worth thinking about because it might be true and then the question is like well do you believe it's true that's a good question it's not a religious question even it's a practical question as far as i'm concerned and my sense is that people just believe that this is true deeply and the way you can tell that is not by what they say but by what they do and so for example one of the things that you might observe is that you know if you love someone your children let's say you don't tell them that the best way to get through the world is to lie about everything all the time you don't sit down you don't sit them down and say look this is a corrupt enterprise and all together and you can't trust anyone because they're always lying about everything and your job is to become the best liar you possibly can become because that's the way to get to where you need to get to and to set the world straight no one ever does that and so if they don't do that which would be belief in the lie then they must assume something that's approximately opposite and i would say that most people are not pleased when they catch their children in a lie and so then you have to ask well why is that it has to be because people believe that the truth is the proper way to proceed and it isn't obvious why they believe that but it's obvious that they act as if they do believe that [Music] it's an unbelievably positive thing to see and and it's a real thing you know it's like it's so interesting to watch the fact that all people have to do is put some of these things into practice and all of a sudden that little modicum of potential that they had because they got humble enough to deal with it properly starts to expand and expand like i believe and i do believe this and i think this is part of the christian message fundamentally is that there's actually no limit to that expansion you know because in some sense like we are this weird combination of finite and infinite like we're related to the infinite in some manner obviously because the infinite exists and here we are and so we're related to it in some manner and i don't know what manner that is but i don't know what the limits are it's like if you were the best person you could be you know truly if you decided to live by truth and to aim at the good and you really did that you put your whole heart and soul into it like you were like that's what you were staking your life on because you're staking your life on something who the hell could you be and no one knows you know you know perfectly well you could be far more than you are and you don't know what the upper limit of that is and we certainly don't know what the upper limit would be if there were lots of people doing that god only knows what problems we could solve you know there's lots of suffering and misery in the world plenty and it's no wonder that people get bitter but god as you pointed out before you know we've got no shortage of ingenuity and possibility and if we were serious about making things less wretched than they are who knows what miracles we could pull off talking to my 19 year old students 20 year old students who'd been in the formal education system for say 18 15 years and what i realized look it was within a course i was teaching called maps of meaning which was based on the first book that i wrote um and it's just it's a book about how our existence our even our perceptions our motivations our emotions are grounded in narrative they're grounded in stories you'll go we'll pay money to go see movies to be instructed by stories it's it's a very deep part of our character in any case i realized that my students hadn't ever really been asked to write their own stories and you know you can write a story about who you've been and you can write a story about who you are now but you can also write a story about how you who you could be and you know they had they had written essays on all sorts of abstract topics and been asked to think to some degree deeply about those topics but no one had ever sat them down and said explicitly okay look kid like here's the deal you can have what you want and need assuming you're taking care of yourself right assuming that you're you're starting out with the proper attitude towards yourself which is that you're worthy of care and respect and and there's something to you that that's valuable that at least could be developed you need to give yourself that amount of credit like like you would with anyone that you might be willing to attempt to care for and love and then the next question is all right you can have what you want but you have to specify it what would you like from your friends three to five years down the road what would you like your friendship network to look like what would you like to do how would you like your career to to shape itself how are you going to take care of your family your your and what about children and a long-term mate a wife or a husband what are you going to do with your time outside of work that's useful and engaging and meaningful and productive how are you going to take care of yourself mentally and physically and how are you going to withstand temptation so that it doesn't take you down in the particular way that temptation might take you down and so you're asked to write a few sentences not to be obsessive about it but to sketch it out like a bad first draft you know and then you're asked to write for 15 minutes it's like okay it's three to five years down the road and you have what you need and want to to make your life what it needs to be so that you can be a good person in in the face of the suffering of life what does it look like and then we ask people to do the contrary which i think is also useful which is all right well consider for a moment your the multitude of your faults and the direction those faults could pull you in and everyone knows that everyone has a sense of how they would fall apart in their own particular manner with their own particular weaknesses it's three to five years down the road and you've let that part of your character dominate what particular corner of hell is it that you're now occupying and so now you have something to aim at you have a purpose right and and that that's motivating people need a purpose in life it it you need a purpose neurochemically because without a purpose you don't feel any positive motivation or any positive emotion like our positive emotion is linked to our pursuit of valuable goals that's how our brains are are are set up and and so you need that that positive goal and also to stop you from being unduly uncertain and and anxious because nothing is specified enough and you need something to run away from and so you can run away from the worst in you you can escape from the worst in you and you can move towards the best and then we have people write out a strategic plan for the accomplishment of their of their goals it's called the future authoring program by the way it's available online at a site called selfauthoring.com and we've we've tried it with thousands of university students now and it's had a remarkable effect on their retention the effect is approximately 25 we decreased drop out by 25 percent and it seems to be most effective for the most disaffected students so it works better for men because women are outperforming men academically and it actually works better for non-west non-western ethnic minority men having a tremendous impact on their likelihood of staying in university and also on their grades and so we were speaking this morning about the potential utility of well of offering that to your to your online students and in the hope that that would but but the thing that was so strange to me when i was developing that program and this was like it was a miracle negative miracle of sorts it it just struck me as so palpably surreal that we would spend 15 years educating people and never once sit them down seriously and say okay look you can craft yourself to some degree you have the capacity to write your destiny not not in its entirety but at least as a sequence of aims and having done that you you need also to justify it so for example one of the things we ask people to do once they've specified a goal is to say well okay imagine you achieved this goal okay so why is that good for you why is it good for your family why is it good for your community you know because if you want to be locked in on a goal in a manner that's sufficient to take you through the trials that will occur while you're pursuing this goal especially if it's a high order goal and it's difficult then you need an explicit philosophy a rationale for why this is worth pursuing it's like well here's what it'll do for me in in in the sense of the development of my character and my capacity to deal with the world and here's how it'll strengthen my family and here's how it will benefit the community and then having formulated those arguments you have that you have that that that body of carefully articulated thought that enables you to chase away the doubts that will inevitably accrue as you're attempting to do something difficult you have to negotiate with yourself and you have to justify what you're doing carefully and philosophically deeply so that you have the commitment and the strength of character that enables you to push through times that are difficult and so well so we discovered that that hadn't been done um except in in in isolated cases there are some business people who are working on similar projects and a man at the university of texas at austin uh james pennebaker and the program has been phenomenally successful and thousands of people have now done it online and so and i could i'll close this by saying if you have any interest in doing this which i would recommend it's also okay to do it badly because a good first draft aim for your life is incomparably better than vague nihilistic hopelessness and and you're not going to get it right anyways because what do you know you know you're going to pursue your goal avidly for a year or so especially at your age and you're going to learn a bunch and then your trajectory is going to shift but it doesn't matter because the trick is to get the process of moving forward toward the aim started and then to have the humility to make course changes along the way as you inform yourself [Music] i noticed that there's always a group of my friends who always criticize what i'm saying and not even try to understand what i'm where i'm coming from and um i've i've always wondered how to deal with that i mean i want to listen to what they're saying but um they're not understanding what i'm they're not trying to listen to what i'm saying so what would you do in that situation very briefly okay there's a line in the new testament that's relevant to that do not cast pearls before swine and what that means is that if people are not listening to you stop talking to them and that's really that is the best piece of advice that i can give you and what happens is that if you stop talking to people who aren't listening to you and start watching them instead they will tell you what they're up to but so if you have things to say say them but you find people that will listen talk to them the ones who aren't listening pull back because you're you're devaluing what you have to say by offering it to an audience that does nothing but reject it and that's a good guideline to life in general so pull back [Music] 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, meaning of life for men, motivation, motivational video, jordan peterson life advice, write your goals, improving yourself in 2021, 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, set goals for 2021, how to reset your life in 2021

Id: tMPUOm7s7jI

Length: 39min 43sec (2383 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 01 2021