STOP CHASING HAPPINESS! - Jordan Peterson Motivation [MUST WATCH] | Mindset Motivation

you have to have a meaning in life that sustains you life is a serious business you're all in it's a fatal business right everyone's in it up to their neck and you need a meaning that can sustain you through that and that's to be found in responsibility we all know this that it's better to live courageously than cowardly everyone knows that that's what you teach people that you love [Applause] [Music] you wake up in the morning your consciousness re-emerges on on the stage of existence and what you're confronted by is the potential of the day you you see the day as a a set of possible pathways you could do this you could do that you could not do this you could not do that and and and your conscience speaks to you too almost immediately i would say upon awakening here's something i need to do today to keep things in order here's something i need not to do today to keep things in order here's my all my set of obligations that i need to undertake so that when i go to sleep tonight i can sleep with a clear conscience and things are better than they might have otherwise be and so what you see in front of you is the potential of the world and to me you see that's akin to the potential that god confronted in genesis at the beginning of time that's the meaning of that story is that there's a potential that is confronted by an attitude the attitude that is appropriate in relationship to that confrontation is the attitude of the logos and the logos is something like courage that that's one of its primary attributes and truth that's the other now there's more but but i would say if you had to boil it down to two it would be courage and truth and the idea there is that if you confront the potential that's in front of you with truth and courage that what you do is you take what could be and you transform it into what is and you do that and you transform it into what is that's good and then you have that that is you that's that's that's your soul that's the thing that as genesis points out that it gives you that affinity with god that the the fact that you're made in the image of god is the fact that you have that capability and that that that capability to take that potential and to make the world out of it is also dependent on your ethical choices and everyone knows that right i mean even if we can't articulate it you know you know perfectly well that you can wake up in a miserable mood bitter and and unhappy and do 25 things that day to make your life more like hell than it was and to share that delight with the people around you everyone understands that and you know as well that you can you can decide to face things courageously and truthfully and you can make tomorrow's morning somewhat better than today's morning was by by setting the world in in order you you can't be doing that because you want to be a good person in some sense and you can't be doing that because you want to be seen as being a good person that's not the right attitude you have to be doing it because it's the transcendentally right thing to do it's the thing that you do if you aim at the highest possible ideal and you know and then that is laid out in the sermon on the mount is that you should aim at the highest possible ideal and then that you should concentrate on the day and it's deadly serious psychological advice aim high lift your eyes above the horizon right lift your eyes to the stars that beck and above try to set things right and to orient your life and and there has to be a relationship with the transcendent that allows you to do that properly or it becomes an exercise in ego and then it doesn't work you you have to have a meaning in life that sustains you life is a serious business you're all in it's a fatal business right everyone's in it up to their neck and it's it's dreadful in some sense and you need a meaning that can sustain you through that and that's to be found in responsibility and that's something that we have not communicated i don't think well to ourselves but we certainly haven't communicated it to young people it's like well you're lost there's reasons that you could be lost and they're real you know god only knows what terrible things happen to you in your life it's like how are you going to get out of that well not by pursuing impulsive happiness that is not going to work not by thinking in the short term not by thinking in a narrowly selfish manner either but by taking on the heaviest load of responsibility that you can conceptualize and bear that will do it it'll do it for you it'll give you a reason to wake up in the morning it'll give you a bomb for your conscience when you wake up at night and ask yourself what you're doing with your life it'll make you a credit to yourself and to your family and it'll make you a boon to your community and more than that there's more than that you know it's said in the in genesis that every person is made in the image of god and there's an idea in genesis that god is that which confronts the chaos of potential with truth and courage that's the logos and if we're made in the image of god that's us that's what we do is we confront the potential of chaos the future the unformed future we confront that consciously and we we decide with every ethical choice we make what kind of world we're going to bring into being we transform that potential into actuality and we do that as a consequence of our ethical decisions and so it's not only a matter of putting yourself together and putting your family together putting your community together it's a matter of bringing the world in its proper shape into being and i truly believe that that's the case and i believe that we all believe that like we hold ourselves responsible you know that if you've made a mistake with your family you know because you were selfish or narrow-minded or blind in some manner that you regard yourself as culpable you could have done otherwise and now you've brought something into the world that should not be there and it's on you we we hold ourselves responsible in that manner and so what that indicates to me is that in a deep sense we believe that we are the agents that transform the potential of being into reality and that is a divine if anything is links us with divinity it's our capability to transform what is not yet into what is and the other thing that happens and i'll stop with this in genesis and this is so interesting it's so fascinating is that as god conducts himself through this enterprise of the transformation of potential intellectuality he stops repeatedly and says and it was good and then that and that's a mystery why is it good and the answer is something like well if what if you conduct yourself with the courage that enables you to accept your vulnerability which is no trivial matter and if you're truthful then what you bring out of potential is what's good and that sets the world right and that's updas and to me that's the great that's the great story of of the west that's why we regard ourselves as sovereign individuals of value is that's what we are and we need to know that to take ourselves seriously and to act properly in the world you're actually strong enough to do that you just don't know it and you won't find out till you do it you can't find out till you do it but if you did it you'd find out that it was true it's a massive risk it's the ultimate in risks right you have to be willing to lose your life in order to find it it's like exactly right i mean buddha finds his enlightenment under a tree it's not fluke that that's the case that's his natural environment and he's sitting in the lotus here the lotus opens up it's this thing that springs up from the depths and he sits there illuminated the same way he's got a halo that's the son that stands for higher consciousness and he's he's transcended by accepting the fact that life is suffering he's transcended the limitations that are part of mortality this is the thing that this this idea is what enables people to transcend their suffering and buddha said well don't don't be too attached to things and what does that mean it doesn't mean deny the world it might mean deny the world if you're too in love with the material like with material well-being let's say then your pathway to transcendence and meaning might be to abandon that because it's it's constraining you it's making you less than you could be but the the fundamental lesson the more fundamental lesson that's underneath that is don't let what you are stop you from being what you could be right and so then the question is well what do you identify with do you identify with what you are then you're a tyrant do you identify with with chaos because that's the opposite of order say then you're nihilistic well you don't identify with either of those you know that they're both necessary you know that you have to live with both of them but you would you identify with the capacity to continually transcend what you are and then you seek out error that's what humility is it's like i'm error ridden it's like so i want to see i want to put myself in a situation where i can discover one of my errors hopefully not in a way that's going to knock me completely out of the game right i want to i want to seek out a challenge i want to find out where my limits are i want to find out where there's not enough of me yet and i want to do that in a way that's engaging because you know you can wear yourself out fighting dragons obviously you can exhaust yourself completely and that's not helpful you know one one of the things i learned for example when i was coaching when i was coaching lawyers who these were people who had very high end careers and so they had an infinite workload no matter how much they worked flat out there was always way more work that they should do it's very difficult thing to learn to manage and so they were exhausting themselves and and i said well you know you have to work less per day it's like well no that's not happening i can't do that and so what i learned over time was okay so this is what you have to do every three months you have to block off four days and go have a vacation you have to plan that in advance so it's in your calendar so that your secretary doesn't book your time and then you need that because you have to recuperate enough so that you can work as hard as you're going to work and of course they were nervous about that i said well look we can we can calibrate this let's keep track of your billable hours over the next year and see if they increase or decrease because i bet you if you take more time off you'll actually have more billable hours you'll actually have your cake and eat it too you'll get to have a vacation and you'll be more productive and that inevitably that was what happened and so that's a matter of calibrating the game properly right you want to play a game that you can play today but also one that you can play next week and next month we're not talking about you know your your career this week we're talking about you having a career that lasts 30 years that doesn't kill you that doesn't make you hate yourself or the job that doesn't make you better that doesn't wear you to a frazzle so it has to be optimized and so i think that you can in fact decide to take on the load that's optimally meaningful if you want and then you get to have your cake and eat it too you're on the pathway to continual incremental improvement you only have to burn off a feather at a time instead of having the whole bloody thing burst into flames but it's a constant it's a constant source of renewal and there's an idea that to be renewed you have to drink the water of life right that's an old mythological idea and what's the water the water of life chaos is water water water is chaos water is what washes away too much order and to stay continually let's say uh refreshed by the water of life is to take on exactly the right amount of chaos to make sure that your garden is properly nourished and i think meaning is actually the marker of that i'll tell you what it is that you need to do to be successful some of these things aren't so malleable but others are things that you can work on well iq well that's a rough one because there's no evidence as far as i can tell that you can do a damn thing about your iq i've reviewed that literature like six times in the last 15 years because i keep hoping that someone will crack the problem but it's always the same answer it's like you do brain training games you get better at the game a lot better at that game you get slightly better at similar games but distal games that are still heavily cognitively loaded doesn't affect your performance at all zero none so the issue of how to raise iq man that's a killer no one knows how to do it i can tell you how to stop your iq from decreasing as you get older that's not so bad because it does that fluid iq decreases from the time you're twenty and pretty rapidly it's uh physical health is the best preventative so exercise physical exercise weirdly enough you know we think well why well your brain uses oxygen like mad right and it needs to be kept clean and well oxygenated and physical exercise both like weightlifting so anaerobic and aerobic exercise both seem to be very very effective at staving off cognitive declines across the lifespan so that's a really useful thing to know because that's the only thing we know that does that so then the next best predictor of lifetime success is conscientiousness and of the two aspects of conscientiousness say orderliness 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 thing you can do with regards to your conscientiousness is to set up some aims for yourself goals that you actually value and so the questions are something like well all right you're gonna have to put some effort into your life and you need to be motivated to do that and so what are the potential sources of motivation well you could think about them in the big five manner you know if you're extroverted you want friends if you're agreeable you want an intimate relationship if you're disagreeable you want to win competitions if you're open you want to engage in creative activity if you're high neuroticism you want security okay so those are all sources of potential motivation that you could draw on that you could tailor to your own 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 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 how are you going to use your time outside of your job and how are you going to regulate your mental and physical health and maybe also your drug and alcohol use because that's that's a good place to augur down because alcoholism for example wipes out five to ten percent of people so you want to keep that under control and then maybe you develop a vision of what you would like your life to be then you break down the goal into micro processes that you can implement the micro processes become rewarding in relation to their causal association with the goal and that tangles in your incentive reward system the dopaminergic incentive reward system and that's the thing that keeps you moving forward and the way it works is that it produces positive emotion when it can see you moving towards a valued goal okay well what's the implication of that better have a valued goal because otherwise you can't get any positive motivation working out and so the more valuable the goal in principle the more the micro processes associated with that goal start to take on a positive charge and so what that means is while you get up in the morning and you're excited about the day you're ready to go and so as far as i can tell what you do is you specify your long-term ideal maybe you also specify a place you want to stay the hell away from so that you're terrified to fail as well as excited about succeeding because that's also useful you specify your goal you do that in some sense as a unique individual 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 answer that has to be because you've determined by some means that it's worthwhile and then the next question might be well where should you look for worthwhile things and one would be well you could consult your own temperament and the other would be well you kind of look at what it is that people accrue that's valuable across the lifespan so you do a structural analysis of the subcomponents of human existence and already did that you need a family you need friends like you don't need to have all these things but you better have most of them family friends career educational goals plans for you know time outside of work attention to your mental and physical health etc you know those are that's what life is about and if you don't have any of those things well then all you've got left is misery and suffering so that's a bad that's a bad deal for you but once you set up that goal structure let's say and that's really in many ways that's what you should be doing at university that's exactly what you should be doing is trying to figure out who it is that you're trying to be right you aim at that and then use everything you learned 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 and this is back down to the micro routine analysis so if i was saying well you're going to try to make yourself more industrious okay number one specify your damn goals because how are you gonna hit something if you don't know what it is that isn't gonna 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 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 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 have a vision for your life such that all things considered that justifies your effort so then what do you do 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 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 well what kind of schedule are you setting up well i have to do this then i have to do this then i have to do this you know and then i just go play video games because who wants to do all these things that i have to do it's like wrong set the damn schedule up so that you have the day you want that's the trick it's like okay i've got tomorrow if i was going to set it up so it was the best possible day i could have practically speaking what would it look like well then you schedule that and obviously there's a bit of responsibility that's going to go along with that because if you have any sense one of the things that you're going to insist upon is that at the end of the day you're not in worse shape than you were 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 you dig yourself a hole and then you bury yourself in it's like sorry that's just not a good strategy it's a bad strategy so maybe 20 of your day has to be responsibility and obligation or maybe it's more than that depending on how far behind you are but even that you can ask yourself okay well i've got these responsibilities i have to schedule the damn things in what's the right ratio of responsibility to reward and you can ask yourself that just like you'd negotiate with someone who was working for you it's like okay you gotta work tomorrow okay so i want you to work tomorrow and you might say okay well what are you going to do for me that makes it likely that i'll work for you well you could ask yourself that you know maybe you do an hour of responsibility and then you play a video game for 15 minutes i don't know whatever turns your crank man but you 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 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 percent accuracy another rule is well aim for 51 percent the next week or 50 and a half percent for god's sake or because you're gonna hit that position where things start to loop back positively and spiral you upward so that's one way that you can work on your conscientiousness it's a plan a life you'd like to have 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 as if you don't really know who you are because you know what you're like you won't do what you're told you won't do what you tell yourself to do you must have noticed that it's like you're a bad employee and a worse boss and both of those work you know for you you don't know what you want to do and then when you tell yourself what to do you don't do it anyways you should fire yourself and find someone else to be but but you know what my point is is that you have to understand that you're not your own servant so to speak you're someone that you have to negotiate with and 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 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 your time and it depends on whether or not you think that your time is 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 less bliss what you do is you suffer existentially and so that seems like a stupid solution information that's being provided to you from your body sort of bottom up to determine when you were being inauthentic or non-congruent and i've thought about this for a long time and tried to sort it out in a practical manner and what i've concluded is this you could try this for a couple of weeks it's it's an extremely interesting exercise so you sort of have to detach yourself from your thoughts and your and and what you say so you got to assume you start by assuming that what you say and what you think is not necessarily you and of course that's just the case because a lot of what you think in fact most of what you think and most of what you say are the opinions of other people there are things you've read or things people have told you you know that that's a benefit in some ways because you get all those thoughts that other people have spent a long time formulating but it's a disadvantage in that it's not exactly you okay so you detach yourself from that you're no longer your thoughts or or or the things that you say or maybe you're no longer all of them and now what you're going to try to find out is which of your thoughts and things that you say are you and maybe so you cannot utilize the rest or maybe so that you can correct the rest because they're not representative of yourself as a as an integrated being they don't take everything into account my sense has been that you can tell when you're saying something that's not authentic by feeling out whether or not it makes you weak or strong now you know sometimes when you're conversing with people you can say something that embarrasses yourself now nietzsche said for example everyone has perjured themselves at least once in the attempt to maintain their good name something like that it's not an exact quote but i've got the gist of it right so maybe you're saying things to impress someone or you're saying things to remain part of your political group or your social group or whatever or maybe you have attributes personal attributes that might be positive that you're ashamed of and so you're not going to speak about them so there's a falseness about your self-representation watch for two weeks and see make a rule that if you start to say something and it makes you feel weak what it means is that i can feel things coming apart sort of in my midsection so i think it's an autonomic phenomena and the the subjective sense is of of falsehood it's like i've just stepped off the solid ground and onto something that that doesn't support me well and it feels like a self betrayal so that's existential in authenticity you can feel it right away and then the rule is shut up if that happens stop talking and then feel around and see if you can find some words that you can say in that situation that don't produce that sensation you see this played out in different forms of drama so it's not all that obvious why a cliche is a bad thing but a cliche is a bad thing in the same way that being possessed by the dead is a bad thing it's like a cliche isn't you it's something else it's like the crowd it's like the other it's it's not living it has nothing to do with you and part of the reason that students use cliches is because it's easier than than using your own genuine creative formulation so you can just default to cliche use but there's something more insidious than that is that if you write an essay that's nothing but a string of cliches and you get criticized then you're not being criticized what's being criticized is the cliches and you can hide behind that and and the part of you that's wise but but but treacherous thinks well the criticism doesn't really apply to me because you know i didn't really say what i thought and then there's this kind of sense you get that you've gotten away with something which is a terrible thing so when i read undergraduate essays what i see very frequently is especially the first essay it's just nothing but cliches it's awful it's it's dull you can hardly stand reading it because there's nothing in it that's gripping or alive and then maybe the second essay you can see there's a layer of cliche and then now and then the person will be brave enough to poke up a thought of their own it'll just sort of poke up somewhere maybe in three pages in it's like this little green chute that's barely alive and the the person is brave enough to pop it up in the hope that you know maybe it won't get walloped down with the sledgehammer and so one of the things i try to do is to point that out it's like look you know this is something there's a real thought here it's a real original thought it's something that you have the right to because it's derived from your own experience and your own knowledge and you formulated it in an original and compelling way but the problem with that is that if you get criticized for that you're just going to pull right back into your shell right because that hurts because it's actually part of you that you've exposed and that's a terrifying thing to expose yourself like that but it's an absolute prerequisite to genuine communication and thought but the ancient mesopotamians had figured out 5 000 years ago or so that the the highest god in the hierarchy of god so sort of like the highest value or the thing that should be imitated most carefully was a god that whose uh whose head had eyes all the way around it and who spoke magic words and so the words he spoke could make the sun rise and make the sun set very very powerful speaker and the reason the mesopotamians had figured this out to the degree they had was because they realized that the capacity to pay attention which is the eyes of course because we really pay attention with their eyes and then the capacity to speak properly is in fact the highest virtue and so then you can check yourself you can see all you have to do is listen like you would listen to someone else and you have to feel you think do i actually believe that is that actually my thought and really i'll tell you what you'll find is 95 percent of what you say has nothing to do with you so it's quite shocking to do this because you'll start to say something and you'll think oh that doesn't feel quite right like it doesn't make me feel solid when i say it there's something about that that i'm subordinating myself to something or hiding in some way it's very difficult to figure out exactly what you're doing but you'll find out that almost everything that's abstractly represented so in some sense you know way more than you can actually know the reason that i think people believe what i say is that i'm very pessimistic most times when you when you listen to someone who's who's a motivational speaker let's say it fills you with a temporary optimism but you go home and and the wiser part of you knows that mostly it's it's the painting over of rotten wood with with a fresh coat of paint and i tell my audiences very clearly that their life is going to be difficult and sometimes difficult beyond both imagining and tolerance and that that is definitely in your future if it isn't in your present and for many people it's in their present and that that and that and that can be unbearable that enough to turn you against life itself to corrupt to corrupt you to drive you to nihilism to drive you to suicide and worse to drive you to thoughts of of vengefulness of of infinite scope to not only be turned against yourself and your fellow men but to be turned against being itself because of its intrinsically brutal in some sense nature and and that is worse than that actually because it's not only that we suffer and and that that will necessarily occur but that we all make our suffering worse because of our ignorance and our malevolence and everyone knows that to be true and so the discussions start let's say on a on an unshakable foundation but then i can tell people look despite that despite that we're remarkable creatures you know we're capable of taking up the burden of that suffering and facing the reality of that malevolence voluntarily we can actually do that and all of the psychological evidence suggests and this is independent of your school of psychology if you're a practical psychologist a clinical psychologist of any sort the evidence is crystal clear that if people voluntarily confront the problems that face them and the malevolence that surrounds them that they can make headway against it and not only psychologically so it's not only meaningful to do that psychologically which which it is to to confront the problems that that torment you voluntarily that's meaningful psychologically but it's also practically useful in that you can actually solve some of the problems that beset you and god only knows how good we could get at that you know i mean i don't know what percentage of human effort is spent in counterproductive activity you know i i'm i'm not an absolute cynic about that but i mean when i talk to undergraduates i ask them you know how much time do you waste every day by your own reckoning and it's somewhere between five and eight hours i walked the stu students through an economic analysis of that i said well you know why don't you value your time at fifty dollars an hour and calculate for yourself just exactly what you're doing to your future by your inability to discipline yourself it's worth thinking through in any case people do waste a lot of time and they are they also act counterproductively a lot of the time regardless we do make progress and and and we can thrive under the difficult conditions that make up our lives and we can resist the malevolence that entices us that's within our power and we don't know the limits to that and we also know that it's better to we all know this that it's better to live courageously than cowardly everyone knows that that's what you teach people that you love and and and we know that it's better to live truthfully than in deceit and you can tell that too because that's also what you tell people that you love and we know that you should pick up your damn responsibility and move forward everyone knows that it's it's part of our intrinsic moral nature and that nature is there and it's not difficult to communicate to people about this like everyone knows that you wake up at three in the morning when you've left let your life go off the rails and that you berate yourself for your uselessness and your cruelty and your failure to take the opportunities that are in front of you and if you were the master in your own house in some sense the captain of your own destiny if there was no intrinsic nature well that would never happen you'd just let yourself off the hook there'd be no voice of conscience tormenting you but no one escapes from that and what that indicates to me is that at least psychologically we live in a universe that's characterized by a moral dimension and we understand that well and that moral failings have consequences and that they're not trivial they destroy you they destroy your family they destroy your community and and you can tell people that and they listen because they know they don't know they know that's the thing and maybe that's the thing about being an intellectual you have the opportunity to articulate ideas that other people know they embody but they can't articulate and that's what people tell me you know they say well you help me give words to things that i always knew to be true but couldn't say or they say i've been trying to put some of your precepts into practice responsibility being a main one vision another honesty i i suppose bringing up the pack and saying this is the fun part of doing all of this fun is a weak word that it's it's it's a it's the remarkable part of doing all this i mean i have people tell me constantly wherever i go it's so delightful that you know they're in a pretty dark place and they tell me why and there's plenty of dark places in the world and they decided well maybe they were gonna develop a bit of a vision and take a bit more responsibility and start telling the truth and putting some effort into something and they come up and they say well you can't believe how much better things are it's like i've i got i got three promotions i had one guy tell me this was a lovely story you know 15 seconds he came up after a talk he said two years ago i got out of jail i was homeless he said i own my own house i have a six-figure income i got married and i have a daughter thank you that was the whole conversation it's like he decided he decided he was going to put his life together and you know and so you can look at that pessimism that that constitutes let's say the core of what well i think it's the core religious message really is the is the tragic nature of the world the reality of suffering it's part of the core religious message but what emerges out of that properly conceptualized is a remarkable appreciation for what human beings are capable of like we are unbelievably resilient and and able creatures and we do not have any conception of our upper limits i would say for the last 45 years we've told psychologists have been have been certainly to blame for this at least in part you're okay the way you are that's what we tell young people oh you're okay the way you are it's like and there's nothing worse than you can tell that you can tell someone who's young than that especially if they're miserable oh i'm miserable and aimless and sometimes i'm suicidal and i'm nihilistic and i don't have any direction in your life it's in my life it's like well you're okay the way you are they don't want to hear that they want to hear look you know you're and you know this you're useless you haven't got started you've got 60 years to put yourself together and god only knows what you could become and that's so that message is so much more it's so funny because it's so it's such an attack but it's so positive because there's faith there in the in the potential that makes up the person rather than the miserable actuality that happens to be manifesting itself at the moment and young people respond extraordinarily well to that because when you know that if you're a parent and you love your your child your son your daughter what you're trying to foster is the best in them you want that to manifest itself across the course of their life you want them to become continually more than they are to see what they could be and well and i think that's part of the great message of the west is that that's that's the that's the ethical requirement of individual being in in in the proper sense is to constantly note that you're not what you could be to take responsibility for that and to and to commit yourself like body and soul to the attainment of that ideal if you concentrate solely on your career you can get a long way in your career and i would say that that's a strategy that a minority of men preferentially do that that's all they do they work like 70 80 hours a week they go flat out on their career they're staking everything on the small probability of exceptional status in a narrow domain but it's hard on them they don't have a life it's very difficult for them to have a family they don't know how to take any leisure activity like they get very one dimensional now it may be that that unit dimensionality is the price you have to pay to be exceptional at one thing right because if you're going to be something like a genius level mathematician and you want to do that for or a scientist say it's like you're in your lab you're in your lab all the time you're working 70 hours a week or 80 hours a week you're smart you're dedicated you're uni-dimensional and that's how you get to beat all the other people who are doing that it's the only way but the problem is you don't get a life now if you love being a scientist and you have that kind of focus of mind well first of all you're a rare person and second you're going to pay for it but fine more power to you but it's a risky business to do that you sacrifice a lot for it you know and i would say most often if you're speaking about having a healthy life that isn't what you do you spread yourself out more so you know you have a family you have some things that you do outside of work that are meaningful to you and useful you you have a network of friends those four things alone are plenty to keep you well oriented and then if one of those things collapses you know everything doesn't go now the price you pay for that is the more you strive to optimize that balance the less likely you are to be fantastically successful at any single one of them but you might have a very you know if you can consider your life as a whole that might be a winning strategy one of the things carl jung said i really like this he thought that men went after perfection and when women went after wholeness there's something different at the top of the value hierarchy so perfection would be stake it all on one thing and look for radical success not not that all men do that because they don't but we're talking about extremes at least with regards to the men that do that the wholeness idea is more like well i want it's like i want one thing in my life to be 150 or i want five things in my life to be 80 there's a lot more richness in a life where you have five things operating at 80 but you're not operating in any at any of them at 150 so and i really believe this because i've watched men and women go through their careers now for a long period of time and one of the things that there's lots of things that produce this but one of the things that i've noticed is that mostly women in their 30s bear bail out of uni-dimensional careers they won't do them they won't put in the 80 hours a week that they would have to put in in order to dominate that particular area and it isn't the reason that they won't do it is because they decide it's not worth it and no wonder because why would that be worth it you have to ask yourself that it's like well you want to be an outstanding scientist it's like okay really really that's what you want because that means that's what you do because you're competing with other people you know they're smart they're hard working and if you want to be at the top you have to be smarter and work harder than any of them and working hard means working long hours i mean it also means working diligently but in in the final analysis it's all also an additive issue if i'm smart and hard hard-working and i can crank out for 70 hours a week and you do it for 30. it's like in two years i'm so far ahead of you you will never ever catch up and i think partly maybe part of the reason too that women are oriented that way more than men i think there's two reasons is one is socioeconomic status does not make women more attractive on the mating market but it does make men more attractive and the second is women's time frame is compressed right because guys can always say well i'll have kids later and they can say that until they're like 80. whereas women it's like no way man you got to get it you got to get it together by the time you're let's say 40 but really probably by 35 but definitely by 40 because otherwise it ain't happening and that's bloody dreadful one of the common routes to extreme unhappiness is to want children and not have them i wouldn't recommend that you know you see couples who are in their 30s one couple in three over the age of 30 has fertility problems that's defined as inability to conceive after one year of trying one in three it's worth thinking about because people are very very unhappy if they want to have kids and then they can't man you're in the medical mill for 10 years if that's if that's what happens to you we all have difficult lives you know that life is characterized in in large part by suffering that there's an inevitable element of suffering in life and not only is life sorrowful in in in part but it's also touched by malevolence and malevolence of each of us and the malevolence of our social creations our societies and even in some sense the kind of blind malevolence of nature and so it's it's it's it's it's a demanding occupation to to exist as a human being and you need something to sustain yourself through that it's not optional because the the price of existence is so high that without that sustaining meaning it it it corrupts you it embitters you and and once you're embittered things go downhill rapidly you get vengeful and and you get angry and you get destructive and then there's really no limit to that and i've been suggesting to people that the sustaining meaning that they can find in their life isn't to be found through happiness let's say because happiness doesn't work when you're not happy when when when things have gone badly for you for for even for accidental reasons but you can find sustaining meaning and responsibility and you can take responsibility for yourself you can do that and if you take responsibility for yourself you treat yourself as if you're someone that's worthy of care and and discipline and then that has nothing to do with being soft on yourself or the pursuit of pleasure any of those things you can take responsibility for yourself and that works and then if you do that properly you can take responsibility for your family and then if you do that properly you can take responsibility for your community and you can continue to burden yourself voluntarily let's say with with a greater and greater range of existential challenges and all that that does is make more and more and more of you and that works as an antidote to the catastrophe of life and you know so i i speak to my audiences seriously and pessimistically in some sense about part of the substructure of existence the the mortal side the fragile side but there's more to you than there is to what faces you and i believe that to be true and and then i'm encouraging people to to attempt that and then i think part of the reason that the book has been perhaps particularly popular among men is because i don't think we do a very good job at the moment of encouraging men we have this idea that there's something intrinsically oppressive about the patriarchy and about masculinity in general and i think that's nonsense i think that strong honest truthful courageous men pursuing noble goals is of great benefit to everyone male and female alike i've always looked at things i think in some ways from the opposite perspective of most and maybe even most psychologists like it's never been a mystery to me why people are depressed it's never been a mystery to me why people are anxious and unsettled it seems obvious why they're concerned and hurt and anxious and unsettled i i think the mystery is how it is that we can conduct ourselves so that that can remain under control i mean people deal with very heavy burdens in their life you know you you don't have to talk to someone for very long someone you might might be thinking is doing quite well in the world and and sometimes people are but you don't have to scratch very deep beneath the surface before you find out that they have a family member who has a serious illness or someone who's suffering through a economic crisis of one form or another or or who there's some source of genuine tragedy one degree removed from them if it's even removed and most people even as individuals have at least one serious problem that they're dealing with and so it's no mystery that people find it difficult to orient themselves in the world and the mystery is well what can you do about it and we do know what you can do about it what you help people do is to identify their problems that's the first thing is to confront what's there that the reality of what's there and as bluntly as possible and so you often end up as a psychotherapist talking to people about their array of problems as it's as if they're putting their cards on the table and and you sort out their problems it's like and no they often decide that many of the things that are bothering them are not really that important they can wait but that there are crucial life challenges that present themselves to them and they're not just psychological problems although sometimes they are there there are problems in life right existential problems and then what you do is you help people break them down into manageable units let's say strategically and confront them voluntarily you know and there's an echo of that idea there's an echo of that in in christian thinking and the echo for that is to pick up your cross voluntarily which is that you have an you have a an unavoidable mortal burden to bear in life there's no escape from it except to directly confront it and to take it on voluntarily and what's so fascinating about that two things one is that psychotherapists of every stripe understand that this is one of the primary reasons that psychotherapy works there's no dispute about that among all the different psychotherapeutic schools is that the confrontation of existential problems voluntary confrontation is curative and that's really something and so and and and and the practical aspect of that is quite straightforward it it also indicates practical and philosophical it also indicates to you that there's far more to you than you think because it turns out that you have substantial problems genuine deep problems of malevolence and suffering but that if you decide that you will take that on as your responsibility that you can put yourself together psychologically be just the courage and you can actually solve the problems and then and and that seems to be true it's it's it's not a naive wish it seems to be well within our capacity and i mean that's part of the message i would say of 12 rules for life is that dark as things are there's more light in you than you know what to do with and there's more light in you than you can possibly manifest and and then the way to find that out is to to challenge yourself against these massive problems and to find out that you're the one that can deal with them there's probably something that i'm doing wrong or not doing well enough that i'm being blind to that i could fix and that i would fix you know you know you need both of those right because there's lots of things about your life that you know aren't right that you could fix but you won't who knows why you don't have the discipline or the vision or the courage or or the integrity of character or the maturity or god only knows the reasons but there are some things that you're doing wrong or not doing that you could fix that you would fix if you actually want to know something and you actually want to devote yourself to something if you're willing to make the proper sacrifices right and reorient yourself that you can move towards what you're aiming at and i can tell you that if you ask yourself in all humility how it is that you could be better and what you could do in a small way to move in that direction that first of all you will receive an answer about what you're doing wrong it's not that much different than thinking we don't regard that as particularly miraculous like you could ask yourself a question and come up with an answer but if you ask yourself a question about how it is that you're lesser than you could be and what you could do about that you'll find out and then if you do that then you won't be lesser and that works and it especially works it's a nice form of humility as well because what you're going to find out if you ask that question is not going to be something you're proud of it's going to be some little rotten element of your character that you're ashamed of in 15 different ways and and for good reason and it's it's and even the attempt to triumph over it isn't going to be something that you're going to be able to trumpet proudly to your friends and your family because you know to fight off something that's shameful is a private affair in some sense but you can do it and if you can improve your life incrementally in that manner if you have the humility one of the things carl jung the famous psychoanalyst said about modern people which i loved was that modern people can't see god because they won't look low enough and a lot of that lowness is internal it's like well what's not good enough about me and the other thing that's so lovely about that is you're not going to do anyone any harm you know if you find out something that you're lacking if you discover something you're lacking well first of all great you've discovered something you're lacking and you need that thing you're lacking because life is difficult it's going to call everything that there is out of you so you need that thing that you're lacking and then you can work on it incrementally and and humbly you know humbly meaning you can work on it in the way that someone has flawed as you could work on it successfully and then and then you and then it works and then things get better and as they get better they tend to get better and better and so that's very practical and and very much in keeping with psychotherapeutic practice and wisdom and and i would say with ancient wisdom in general my fervent hope and and perhaps this is something that could be transformed into a prayer is that the the that the mistakes that i am inevitably going to make while i'm pursuing that i don't pay an undue price for the mistakes that i'm inevitably going to make as i pursue what i'm pursuing that's my fervent hope you know and it has been since all of this has broken around me that i would be careful enough in my speech so that i would stay on the right track on the straight narrow path and and and and fulfill whatever obligations are my privilege to fulfill and and what i hope from the people that are supporting me is that if they wish to pray for me is that i'm careful enough i remain careful enough and fortunate enough so that my inevitable faults don't interfere too catastrophically with whatever good i might be able to do [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you

Channel: Mindset Motivation

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Keywords: jordan peterson, jordan peterson motivation, how to get your life together, Jordan Peterson Motivational Video, jordan peterson speech, jordan peterson motivational speech, jordan peterson life advice, jordan peterson depression, jordan peterson anxiety, getting my life together, how to reset your life, how to get your life back on track, how to organize your life, get my life together, habits that changed my life, habits to change your life, mindset motivation

Id: xIxynPscy1M

Length: 60min 5sec (3605 seconds)

Published: Sun Aug 23 2020