"Strive To Become 1% Better EVERY DAY" - Jordan Peterson Motivation

i'm a big fan of schedules and lists but you have to have the right attitude towards a scheduled little list so first of all you make a list of what things that you have to do that day what important things you have to do that day but you want to remember that that list should serve your higher interests right your higher value so that presupposes that you've already decided what your higher values are and that you have a vision in place then you want to decompose that into what's necessary that day aim high let's say and then concentrate on the day what are the most important things that i need to attend to so that i'm in better shape tonight than i was in the morning if you ask yourself that question you know you have to want the answer which is rather demanding let's say [Music] you're you're it's another example of orienting yourself properly so your aim is to get the answer to this question and your perceptions and your thoughts will organize themselves around that question and you'll get answers like they'll rise up you know in that mysterious way that thoughts rise up and some of them you'll find uncomfortable because your your mind will present you with demands to do things that you may have been avoiding or that you find difficult or challenging but you can you can train yourself to set yourself a list of tasks for the day that do put you in better shape that night than you were in the morning it it doesn't help to shy away from difficult issues because you're stuck with them they're not going away the best you can do is something worthwhile in the face of them and so you figure out what that worthwhile thing is and then that gives you and then you practice implementing that gives you some character and some strength and that's the sort of thing that can help transform you into a leader what you do is actually important and what you leave undone as well both of those things like each individual is more significant and more it has more impact than than they think for better or for worse i mean you can think about it this way you know in your lifetime you're gonna influence directly influence at least a thousand people and each of those thousand people will influence a thousand and so that's a million people one person separated from you and a billion people two people separated from you we live in a network and we're really tightly associated with one another and if you hold your head high and you confront the future courageously and you put your life together and you develop uh integrated and valuable plan and you implement it and you're a trustworthy person you have an unbelievably positive effect on everything around you and so it actually matters that you do these things and it doesn't i don't believe that it really matters where in the formal power hierarchy you sit you know because you might think well i'm at the bottom of the power rungs what influence do i have and i think that's a bad way of thinking about it because it doesn't take into account the networked issue and so if you don't want things to be worse which you wouldn't if you were a sensible person then it would probably be better to work hard to make them better and to also understand that you you're playing a determining role in how reality unfolds when you're doing so it's not a trivial thing people are far more powerful forces for good and evil than they believe so and i think that's more true and i haven't come to that realization lightly so so you want to be a leader in the best sense and a leader in the best sense is someone who makes things better and not worse and if we all made things better then they would be a lot better and that would be a good thing that's what we should be striving for to be precise in your speech does two things it specifies your goal and it reduces uncertainty you see what you aim at and i don't mean that metaphorically i really don't because you're a lot more blind than you think there's a lot of the world that you don't see you see most of what's in front of you in a very blurry way like your peripheral vision is extremely low resolution you see clearly a tiny focal area that that's where you're pointing your eyes and so and you point your eyes at what you want to pay attention to and what you want to pay attention to is generally associated with what you want so what that means is that the world reveals itself to you in relationship to what you want and so that's really helpful because you you want to see the world so you don't stumble blindly through it and fall into a pit you want to get to where you're going and so if you specify where you're going very clearly then that enables you to see the pathway forward now the upside to that is that you can probably get to where you want to go the downside is you also make your conditions of failure very explicit and that's hard on people in the short term you know it's it's easy to delude yourself and to leave everything vague because then you can't tell when you're failing but that doesn't stop you from failing it just stops you from seeing it while it's happening then the other advantage to being precise in your speech and your aims is that that helps you tell the difference between what's important and what isn't important and you want almost everything to be not important you know in times of crisis in your life everything becomes important so imagine that you have a a new physical symptom that's distressing and you don't understand it so then you're thinking oh my god what's happening am i collapsing physically am i have i got a serious illness is it a fatal illness what's going to happen to my family is my whole life going to fall apart like what happens when when something that you can't specify occurs is that everything becomes relevant and that's terrible no one no one ever wants that you want hardly anything to be relevant and so if you specify your goal then almost everything becomes irrelevant and only those things that are important stand up and sharp in sharp relief that's also a real boon to the people that you're communicating with because they know what you want then and so they even if you're harsh person let's say that you're pretty punitive and if people don't do a good job you you know you let them know if you specify what you want then they now how to avoid your harshness and the more precise you are in your formulation of the problem and in your presentation of a solution and the role you might play in that solution the more likely you are to advance on all fronts as far as i can tell there's nothing you can do that moves you and your agenda your vision let's say forward faster than precision in speech you have to know what it is that you're doing with your life let's say generally speaking but more particularly in the next three to five years what do you want what do you want from your friends your family your intimate relationships your employment your education your care of your mental and physical health your response to temptations like drug and alcohol use if you could have what you wanted if you could lay your life out properly how would you be functioning across those seven dimensions why would that work for you why would it work for your family and why would it work for the broader community then that gives you a reason a reason and if you have a reason that's well thought through that you find compelling so that's a compelling story let's say the kind of compelling story a leader might tell then that will provide you with motivation to do the things that are difficult that you need to do so that's positive emotion that motivation it's a neurochemical system that runs on the chemical dopamine and it's the thing that it's the neurochemical system that underlies people's willingness to undertake something voluntarily so we experience most positive emotion in relationship to a goal what that means is if you don't have a goal then you don't have any motivation and so what that means is you better have your goals well delineated because that way you'll be maximally motivated now the additional advantage to that is that if you have your goals delineated and they're compelling goals for you it also makes you less anxious and uncertain and stressed because the your pathway forward into the future is mapped and that makes it more certain and uncertainty causes stress and and physiological uh load okay so you want to have your large scale vision you want to have it thought out on a three to five year basis you want to have it cover those seven or so dimensions that we already described you want to see how why it's relevant to you and your family in the broader community you want to break that down into your monthly weekly and daily practices and if they can be recognized and so much the better and then that becomes built into you so what happens neurologically is that when you do something new you use almost your whole brain that's a good way of thinking about it particularly the right side of it the right hemisphere and as you practice something the amount of your brain you use gets smaller and smaller until and moves leftward until you basically build a effective little machine at the back that takes care of it automatically routinizing things decreases the cognitive and physiological load it's a big deal and if you recognize good habits then they become part of your character and part of what people come to expect of you if you ask people what they regret especially as they get older what they generally report is things not done so they don't regret so much mistakes they've made although of course people obviously regret mistakes they've made as well so they don't exactly regret sins of commission right errors that they've actively made they they miss they they they torment themselves for opportunities that had presented themselves that they did not let's say exploit or engage in and i think that's worth thinking about too because one thing that i have become convinced about with regards to human consciousness which i think is equivalent to the spark of divinity in some sense that our fundamental stories insist has been placed within us is that human consciousness is that faculty that confronts potential itself i think there's good neurological evidence for this by the way for those of you who are scientifically minded because we build circuits within us for habitual action that we've practiced many times that seem to run in a very deterministic fashion and we are a strange combination of deterministic and non-deterministic as far as i can tell but what our consciousness seems to be for is to encounter those things that we have not yet encountered and those that we have not yet encountered seem to me to be those things that have not yet been brought into being and so you could say that what our consciousness is for is for the encounter with potential you know that our consciousness is for the it's not for the past it's not even for the present it's to transform the future into the present and and really that that's what our consciousness does when you wake up in the morning you have a new day ahead of you and the day could take you in very many directions and and the weeks and the years all of that can take you in very many directions and you have some apprehension about what those directions might be you have some apprehension about what role your choices might make in transforming that potential into one form of actuality or another i mean you certainly know that there are dreadful mistakes that you might be very tempted to make that would produce all manner of hell around you and still be tempted to do it it seems like it's sitting there right in front of you as a possibility you also know that you know you could haul yourself up out of bed and attend to your duties and do the sorts of things that you're supposed to said a few things right that day and that week and that likely things would at least not be worse and they would probably be better and i i believe that i do believe that i don't understand how this can be the case i don't understand how it is that consciousness consciousness can function in that way because i think to understand that we would have to understand what it means for the future to be only potential rather than actuality and who the hell understands that i mean no one and then we'd have to understand how it is that our conscious choices and our conscious ethical choices transform that potentiality into actuality into reality into the present and the past and we certainly but we certainly act as if we believe that that's what we do we upgrade ourselves for example when we do a bad job of it we're upset with our children and those we love if we don't believe that they're living up to their potential we're guilty and ashamed when we make choices that we feel are inappropriate we understand to some degree that the manner in which time lays itself out has something to do with the ethics of our choice and again i would say that's a very deep idea i think it's uh i think it's i think it's the most true idea i know that's very emphasized that idea emphasized in ancient religious stories such as those that are outlined in genesis or in genesis with strange insistence that you know god is that which brings order out of chaos formless potential generates the world out of formless potential and that we're somehow made in that image which which seems to me to be the case and that the proper way by the way to go about acting in that image is to act in relationship to the potential that confronts you with truth and with courage with careful articulation that's the logos and that if you do that then what you bring forth is is good [Music] you often give advice to young adults to help them avoid some of the pitfalls of life any advice for those of us who are 40 plus who have already faltered look first graham this is graham everybody who is 40 plus has already faltered but but i'm presuming that you mean faulted in a manner that appears to you to be above out above the average right well what i would really recommend is i think that you should if you haven't already you should go do the future authoring program and maybe the past authoring program too because you should figure out exactly how you faltered like what exactly did you do wrong by your own by your own analysis right i'm not saying well what social rules did you break although that's not a bad initial guideline it's like so in the self-authoring suite there's a past authoring module and it asks you to break your life into seven epochs and then to consider the emotionally significant or practically significant events within each epoch and detail out their emotional nature and their consequences and so on one of the things you might want to figure out is well when you say that you faltered like what do you mean exactly and i mean exactly go over your life with a fine-tooth comb this is what alexander solzhenitsyn did by the way in the gulag before he wrote the gulag archipelago he went over his life and said okay well like where did i go wrong what did i squander what mistakes did i make and what did i do right so that you can orient yourself now and then you want to think and this is why we built the future authoring program well look you got 40 years left man so what do you want them to be like so what do you want to aim at at least how are you going to minimize the misery if if if nothing else and so you need a plan and then what you need to do is to figure out how to work day to day so that you incrementally approach that plan so i have another chapter in this new book um called compare yourself to who you were yesterday rather than to who someone else is today that's really a useful psychological stance for someone who's 30 and over in particular 20 year olds can still kind of compare themselves to other 20 year olds because all 20 year olds in some way are the same but 40 year olds are really different from each other and so are 30 year olds for that matter so you might think okay well here here's a here's a meditative strategy for for ceasing to falter you could wake up in the morning or you could do this at night before you go to bed and you can think okay look i want to structure my day tomorrow so that when i when i'm done with the day my life is in slightly better order than it was when i woke up this morning it's just slightly better because incremental progress is massively massively effective because it bears exponential fruit just like a bank account compounds incremental progress compounds with time so you can get up in the morning and you can think okay there's some things in my life that i could put in order today there are usually things you don't want to do as i mentioned earlier what could i do today that would help put my life in order that i would do you have to ask yourself you can't tell yourself you have to ask yourself what would you do and then maybe you have to say well or maybe you have to say under what conditions would i be willing to do something to put my life in further order today what little reward would i need to give myself and these have to be questions you can't like take out the whip and boss yourself around because you'll find that you're a terrible master and a worse slave and so you can get a long ways if you look low enough one of the things carl jung said which i really liked was that modern people don't see god because they don't look low enough they don't have the humility now you said that you have already faltered so it sounds like you've got the humility already intact so i would say think about what you want think about what you know around you isn't set right because you'll know make a list of things that around you that aren't right and then start thinking about small things you can do like trivial things that even a fool like yourself could manage that would orient you in the right direction and help straighten out your life and try that for a year before you decide that you're a failure you know because you'll find that if you put that into practice for a year that things will be a lot better and like i said you got 40 years left so you're not you're not done yet man the other thing i would say too is it isn't exactly that i would say forgive yourself because you know that's just a cliche but i would say that once you've decided once you what you've done wrong and you've put into practice some some strategies to rectify that that don't you don't have to be yourself any more than is necessary for you to learn which is a good rule of thumb with regards to treating yourself and also to treating other people so worth asking yourself it's like drop what you're doing that's foolish that you know is foolish and pick an aim that's worthwhile you know to make things better for yourself like you're worth taking care of like you're worth something you know and to surround yourself with people who who believe the same and who are what rejoicing in your accomplishments and unhappy when you fail right and you're comparing yourself to your accomplishments of yesterday and not to someone else's today so that you're not jealous and bitter and you put your own house in order so that you're not cursing the world when some of its disarray might be your fault and you're trying to pursue something meaningful and you're doing your best to tell the truth and all of that and then you see what happens who the hell are you you know you think you're a miracle of some bloody bizarre sort we've been around for three and a half billion years you know every single one of your relatives propagated successfully and here you are against all possible odds in this in this world of hell in some sense and and and bitterness and and and and and and tyranny and malevolence and yet god only knows what's inside you this capacity for consciousness the capacity to confront potential and to turn it into something good that's us man that's the western story that's the individual as the cornerstone of the state that's our responsibility and it really is who we are and so we need to know that and we need to remember it and we need to act it out and then maybe we can see what we can do about it you know and see how good we could make things and maybe that would be the purpose of your damn life right not to be happy it's like there's problems to be solved be happy after you solve the goddamn things right so i learned because i looked at dark things that i learned that the light was more powerful than the darkness as far as that i was concerned and that people were capable each of us of remarkable things and that we need to know that that's what we are we're this consciousness that confronts potential with all its catastrophe that's what we are that's what makes us in the image of god that's what gives us our intrinsic value and that idea that we have intrinsic value that's the bedrock presupposition of our state we're going to question that we're going to live it out better to live it out find out who you are thank you very much [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] you might be some say that someone who is incapable of cruelty is a higher moral being than someone who is capable of cruelty and i would say and this follows jung as well that that's incorrect and it's dangerously incorrect because if you are not capable of cruelty you are absolutely a victim to anyone who is and so part of the reason that people go watch anti-heroes and villains is because there's a part of them crying out for the incorporation of the monster within them which is what gives them strength of character and self-respect because it's impossible to respect yourself until you grow teeth and if you grow teeth then you realize that you're somewhat dangerous and or maybe somewhat seriously dangerous and then you might be more willing to demand that you treat yourself with respect and other people do the same thing and so that doesn't mean that being cruel is better than not being cruel what it means is that being able to be cruel and then not being cruel is better than not being able to be cruel because in the first case you're nothing but weak and naive and in the second case you're dangerous but you have it under control and you know a lot of martial arts concentrate on exactly that as part of their philosophy of training it's like we're not training you to fight we're training you to be peaceful and awake and avoid fights but if you happen to have to get in one and i guess the philosophy also is is that if you're competent at fighting that actually decreases the probability that you're going to have to fight because when someone pushes you you'll be able to respond with confidence and with any luck and this is certainly the case with bullies with any luck a reasonable show of confidence which is very much equivalent to a show of dominance is going to be enough to make the bully back off and so the strength that you develop in your monstrousness is actually the best guarantee of peace and that's partly why jung believed that it was necessary for people to integrate their shadow and he said that was a terrible thing for people to attempt because the human shadow which is all those things about yourself that you don't want to realize reaches all the way to hell and what he meant by that was it's through an analysis of your own shadow that you can come to understand why other people are capable and you as well of the sorts of terrible atrocities that characterized let's say the 20th century and without that understanding there's no possibility of bringing it under control when you study nazi germany for example or you study the soviet union particularly under stalin and you're asking yourself well what are these perpetrators like forget about the victims let's talk about the perpetrators the answer is they're just like you and if you don't know that that just means that you don't know anything about people including yourself and then it also means that you have to discover why they're just like you and believe me that's no picnic so that's enough to traumatize people and that's partly why they don't do it and it's also partly why the path to enlightenment and wisdom is seldom trod upon because if it was all a matter of following your bliss and doing what made you happy then everyone in the world would be a paragon of wisdom but it's not that at all it's the it's a matter of facing the thing you least want to face and everyone has that old there's this old story in king arthur where the knights go off to look for the holy grail which is either the cup that christ drank out of it the last supper or the cup into which the blood that gushed from his side was poured when he was crucified the stories vary but it's it's basically a holy object like the phoenix in some sense that's representation a representation of transformation so it's a it's an ideal and so king arthur's knights who sit at a round table because they're all roughly equal go off to find the most valuable thing and they and where do you look for the most valuable thing when you don't know where it is well each of the knights looks at the forest surrounding the castle and enters the forest at the point that looks darkest to him and that's a good thing to understand because the gateway to wisdom and the gateway to the development of personality which is exactly the same thing is precisely through the porthole portal that you do not want to climb through and the reason for that is actually quite technical this is a union presupposition too is that well there's a bunch of things about you that are underdeveloped and a lot of those things are because they're things you've avoided looking at because you don't want to look at them and there's parts of you you've avoided developing because it's hard for you to develop those parts and so it's it's by virtual necessity that what you need is where you don't want to look because that's where you've kept it you have to master a new skill but you're avoiding it because you know that you'll be bad at it when you first do it and if you're perfectionistic you're going to say well i can't allow myself to be bad at anything i can't allow myself to be a fool and no wonder but the problem is is when you try something new you're always a fool and so unless you're willing to be a fool you can't learn anything new and that's also why you regarded the trickster as the precursor to the savior archetypally speaking is because you cannot do the right thing unless you're willing to be a fool first and that's really worth knowing lots of times you guys are going to make a stage transition in your life and you're going to feel like an imposter when you get a new job or when you get a promotion or something like that you're going to feel like an imposter and you are because what do you know when you make that first transition right but it's going to make you embarrassed and it's going to make you ashamed and all of those things but you have to understand that you are a fool when you first try something new but you're a worse fool if you don't try it that doesn't mean you should you know make like you know everything as soon as you're promoted or or you have some transition in status that's that's foolish of the wrong sort but to know that to know that you have to be fallible in order to progress it's an unbelievably useful thing it can free you up you know what i was talking to a writer the other day about his process for beginning writing he's written many books he writes a very very very bad first draft right and that's a good way to think about things is throughout your life you're going to be doing that is writing the next draft of you and it's pretty bad to begin with but that's okay because it isn't going to get any better unless you put yourself out into the domain of the unknown to begin with your brain can tell you when you're optimally situated between chaos and order and the way it tells you that is by producing the sense of engagement and meaning so let's say there's a place in the environment you should be okay what should that place be well you don't want to be terrified out of your skull like what good is that and you know you don't want to be so comfortable that you might as well sleep you want to be somewhere where you know you're kind of on firm ground here but over here you're kind of testing out new territory and some of you who are exploratory and emotionally stable you know you're gonna go pretty far out into the unexplored territory without destabilizing yourself and other people are gonna just put a toe in the chaos and you know that's neuroticism basically that's your sensitivity to threat that's calibrated differently in different people and more some people are more exploratory than others that's kind of extroversion and openness working together and and intelligence so some people are going to tolerate a larger admixture of chaos in their order those are liberals by the way and i mean that technically liberals are more interested in novel chaos and conservatives are more interested in the stabilization of the structures that already exist and who's right well it depends on the situation and that's why conservatives and liberals have to talk to each other because one of them isn't right and the other wrong sometimes the conservatives are right and sometimes the liberals are right because the environment's going like this you can't predict the damn thing so that's why you have to communicate and that's what a democracy does it allows people of different temperamental types to communicate and to calibrate the damn societies so anyways so let's say you're optimally balanced between chaos and order so what does that mean well you're stable enough but you're interested right because a little novelty heightens your anxiety that wakes you up a bit that's the adventure part of it but it also focuses the part of your brain that does exploratory activity and that's actually associated with pleasure that's the dopamine circuit and so if you're optimally balanced and you know that you know you're there when you're listening to an interesting conversation or you're engaged in one it's a real conversation you know you're saying some things you know and the other person is saying some things they know but the both of what you know is changing it's like wow that's so interesting you'll have a conversation like that forever or maybe you're reading a book like that or you're listening to a piece of music that models that because what music does is provide you with predictable forms multi-level predictable forms that transform just the right amount and so music is a very representational art form it says this is what the universe is like you know there's a dancing element to it repetitive and then cute little variations that sort of surprise and delight you and and you think wow that's so cool and it doesn't matter how nihilistic you are you know music still ins infuses you with a sense of meaning and that's because it models meaning that's what it does that's why we love it and you know you can dance to it and that sort of symbolizes you putting yourself in harmony with these multiple layers of reality and positioning yourself properly and you like that too you know you'll pay for it oh boy i get to go dancing you know oh boy i get to listen to music like what the hell are you doing listening to music what good is that well you think that's a stupid question i don't care about your dopey criticism i'm going to listen to some music right there's no rational there's no rational argument against music it's like you just don't even think about him you just walk away from someone who's stupid enough to ask that question it's like as far as i'm concerned that and i really believe this is that every single person who sets out to put themselves together ethically is a net positive to everyone around them there's no downside to that you know my book has been criticized by people who've read it very poorly especially chapter one when i talk about hierarchies that i'm somehow supporting the idea that power in a hierarchy is the right way to be and that's there's absolutely nothing and what i've written that suggests that at all like i'm suggesting that human hierarchies are very complex and that the way that you win in a human hierarchy is by being competent and reciprocal and so and so i mean for example even if you're selfish let's say you got to think very carefully about what that would mean if you were selfish and awake because you have to work to take care of yourself and what you want say in this moment but then there's you tomorrow and there's you next week and there's you next month the next year and 10 years from now and when you're old so because you're self-conscious and because you're aware of the future you're actually a community unto yourself and if you're selfish and impulsive all that means is that you're serving the person you are right now you know in that impulsive way but not the person you're going to be and so that's not a good grounds for any sort of ethical behavior and i see that if you serve yourself properly there's no difference between that serving your family properly and serving your community properly that those things all mesh in a kind of a harmonious manner and one of the things that's really been effective in the lecture tour is a discussion about that idea and its relationship between the relationship between that and meaning and responsibility because one of the things that strikes the audience is silent constantly because i'm always listening to them to see you know when when the attention is maximally focused is whenever i point out to people that the antidote to the meaninglessness of their life and the suffering and the malevolence that they might be displaying because they're resentful and bitter about how things have turned out the antidote to that is to take on more responsibility for themselves and for other people and that that's aspirational which is kind of cool you know the conservative types the duty types and i'm not complaining about them you know they're always basically saying well this is how you should act because in some sense that's your duty right that's how a good citizen would act and that's a reasonable argument but the case that i've been making is more that well there is a there is value distinctions between things some things are worth doing and some things aren't and you can kind of discover what that is for yourself and then you should aim at the things that are most worth doing and what you'll find if you watch carefully is that the things that you find worth doing are almost always associated with an increase in responsibility because if you think about the people you admire for example you spontaneously admire people and that's a manifestation of the instinct to imitate and people are very imitative you don't admire people who don't take care of themselves like unless there's something wrong with you you at least want an admirable person to be accountable for themself and then if they've got something left over so they can be accountable for their family well then that's a net plus obviously that's someone you think is solid and then maybe they take care of some more people they have a business or they're involved in the community in some positive way you see well that's a person whose pattern of being is worth imitating and so and that's all associated with responsibility and it's so interesting because it's as if it's as if everybody kind of knows this but that it hasn't crystallized it's like well you should be responsible because that's what a good citizen is it's not no no you should be responsible because you need to have a deep meaning in your life to offset the suffering so you don't get bitter and the way you do that is to bear a heavy load you know to get yourself in in check for you now and for you in the future and then to do the same for your family and your community and that there's real nobility in that and there's real meaning and more the other thing that i've been suggesting to people and i also believe this is that and i think that the guys that have come to talk to me especially the ones that have had real life real rough lives they really understand this if you don't get your act together and you let yourself slide then what kind of moves in to take the place of what you could have been is something that's really not good at all so it's not only that if you're living uh like a dissolute life that you're not aiming at anything positive and so you don't have any real meaning and you're subsumed by anxiety and all of that hopelessness but something kind of hellish moves in there too to to occupy that place and so then you end up making things worse and when you know one of the things i learned about studying totalitarian systems whether they were on the right or the left was that part of the reason that the totalitarian horrors of the 20th century manifested themselves was because average people didn't take on the proper responsibility they shut their eyes when their eyes should have been opened even though they knew it and they didn't said things they knew they shouldn't have done and said and that was what supported those horrible systems so you know if you don't get your act together then you leave a little space for hell you know people often accuse me and they say well most of the people that listen to you are men and i think and that you know when you're accused like that your automatic response is well you wouldn't be accused if you weren't doing something wrong so there must be something wrong about that it's like why isn't it 50 women and so i've said things like well you know 80 percent of the people who watch youtube videos are men and so the fact that 80 percent of the people who watch my videos are men isn't that surprising given that base rate but then about three weeks ago i started thinking what what the hell am i doing it's like what is there something wrong with talking to man is that actually a problem it's like i'm trying to i'm trying i mean i didn't set out to do that specifically but if that's the way it's working out and and there is a majority of men coming to my shows say then is that why is that's all of a sudden supposed to be a bad thing i'm asking men to you know to be more honest and especially in their speech and their thinking and to be more responsible for themselves and for their family and for their community and to grow up and to shoulder their burden and to live a responsible and meaningful life and putting those two things together conceptually and it's like and then there's an accusation about that as if there's something wrong and i thought why am i even playing into this it's like fine i'm talking to men i'm encouraging them and i am absolutely thrilled like every time someone comes up to me um and that's happening i mean maybe a hundred times a week or something like that and tells me one of these stories about how they put their life together it's like i'm absolutely thrilled about that and so i don't see it's just a sign of how pathological our times have become in some sense that there would have been any guilt about that to begin with because how is that not a good thing man sometimes things do not go well that that's self-evident but here's the rub sometimes when things are not going well it's precisely that which is most valued that is the cause why it's because the world is revealed through the template of your values if the world you are seeing is not the world you want therefore it's time to examine your values it's time to rid yourself of your current presuppositions there's a famous experiment that i've alluded to a couple of times i believe in this lecture series the invisible gorilla experiment and in the invisible gorilla experiment there's two teams of players each with three members one dressed in black and the other dressed in white and each team is passing a basketball back and forth to the team members and milling about um you see a video of them doing so they basically fill the video screen and the white team is passing a basketball to the white team members and the black team is passing a basketball to the black team members and your job as as far as the experimenter is concerned is for you to count the number of times that the black black team yes black team passes the basketball back and forth so that's what you do so now you have an ambition and an aim and a value and the ambition and the aim and the value they're all the same thing and that is to perform well at the task now the thing that's so cool about this and this is really so cool it's just unbelievably it's just unbelievable that this is the case it's like a complete validation of a certain element of the buddhist worldview so they passed the ball for a couple of minutes and then the experimenter says to you how many and you say 15 and because you're happy and you're happy with yourself because you've been paying attention and and the experimenter says yeah that's right or maybe not maybe you missed one and then the experimenter says did you see the gorilla and half of you say what gorilla like really and he and the experimenter says yes and then he rewinds it and plays the video and sure enough in walks this guy in a gorilla suit six foot three or so stands in the middle of the game right in the middle of the game the same size as the players perfectly obviously evident beats his chest for like a second and a half and then sort of saunters off and half the people who watch the video don't see the gorilla which is absolutely shocking and what that means is that your ambitions blind you to the nature of reality now they illuminate some reality but they blind you to most of it and that's fine because you're not there's not a lot of you in some ways you're a very pinpoint thing like a laser beam and so you just can't be attending to everything all the time but one of the things that you might ask yourself once you know that is that if you're suffering dreadfully then one possibility is that you're so fixed on the point you're so fixed on a point the fact that you're so fixed on the point that you're fixed on might be integrally related to why things are going so catastrophically wrong now perhaps not because you know there's a lot of arbitrariness about life and perhaps you suffer even when you don't deserve to that seems to happen in the book of job for example because job is a good guy and god has a bet with satan which seems like another relatively nasty thing to do to let satan just torture him and he does quite nicely to see if he'll turn against god and it seems like a rather playground sort of thing for god to engage in but the point is is that even in a document like the old testament there's ample suggestion that sometimes people just get wiped out and hurt even if they're living good moral lives aiming properly and all that there's an arbitrariness in life you that's not irradicable but it's possible that it's what you're clinging to that's hurting you and it's even possible that's the thing that you're clinging to the hardest that's hurting you the most that could easily be someone you love like lots of times i see people in therapy and they're miserable for one reason or another sometimes it's because they have a very close relationship with a family member and that just isn't working you know the family member for the sake of simplicity will say is not really oriented towards helping them have a good life the family member is instead oriented towards making them as bloody miserable as you can possibly make anyone and and what would you say exploiting the the bond between family members in order to enable that and then sometimes the sacrifice that's necessary is either merely distancing yourself from that person sometimes substantively and sometimes seriously distancing yourself from like we don't talk anymore ever and so that's pretty damn rough and it hurts and all of that but but it's a good example of the fact that sometimes in order to extract yourself from the miserable bit of chaos that you happen to be enmeshed in you have to let go of what you love best if the world you are seeing is not the world you want therefore it's time to examine your values that's really worth it's really worth thinking about you know because the alternative to is to curse fate right because if it isn't you and there's nothing you can do to change there isn't something you're doing that's wrong then it's fate itself it's the world itself it's other people let's say because they're a huge part of the world or it's the nature of the world itself or or it's god himself in whatever form you either believe in or don't believe in because it's fundamentally all the same in the sort of situation that i'm describing so and one of the things that's really interesting and i mentioned this before about the israelites in the old testament is that they they got this right it's really something because what happens to the israelites over and over in the old testament is that they get all puffed up about how wonderful they are and then they make moral errors because they're arrogant and then god comes along and just cuts them into pieces for like generation after generation and they wobble back to their feet and but they always maintain the same attitude which is we did something wrong we did something wrong it's like it's like a it's like an axiom rather than observation is that if we're not if things are not laying themselves out for us as they should be then we cannot curse god we have to look to ourselves well and you think well why not curse god because maybe it's his fault that's a really good question and one of the things that i've tried to figure out over the last 30 years is well why not just curse god because there is this arbitrary element to existence and we are vulnerable and there is plenty of suffering and things are unfair like there's problems right there's injustice and unfairness and all of these things and endless suffering so why not just lay it at the feet of god and the whether god exists or not in some sense by the way with regards to the metaphysics of this particular discussion is not relevant it's the point remains the same either way and the answer is as far as i can tell that if you refuse to take on the responsibility yourself and you attempt it to lay it at the feet of either society or being itself then you instantly start to act in a way that makes everything much worse not only for you but for everyone else and maybe even for being itself and so no it's not helpful now if you're if you decide that it's you you've got the problem maybe that's not even true like maybe you are someone who's being tortured by the bet between god and satan and like too bad for you if that happens to be the case but it still seems to be the appropriate thing for a human being who's standing on his or her own two feet in a proper manner to take the responsibility on for themselves regardless of the counter arguments that might be made against it that's really something it's time to rid yourself of your current presuppositions i also think of that it's a deadwood issue you know one of the things you see with motifs like the the pair the the phoenix remember when harry potter goes off to fight the basilisk that turns you to stone when you look at it's a dragon for all intents and purposes well when he gets bitten by the by the dragon and and poisoned that's the dragon of chaos right the thing that turns you to stone when you look at it when he gets bitten by it then he's going to die and yeah well if you get bitten by the thing that turns you to stone when you look at it if it bites you man if you're not dead you're going to wish you are it's one of the two and then the phoenix flies in and cries tears into the wound and that heals them and the phoenix is the thing that allows the dead wood to burn off occasionally let's say well it's i think it's once every hundred years with the phoenix and of course it's pretty dramatic the whole damn bird has to go up in flames and then there's nothing left but an egg but there's a very serious message there too which is that you know you can compare yourself in some sense to a forest fire to a forest you know when a forest has to burn now and then for the dead wood to clear so that the forest can actually maintain its continued existence and if you stop the forest from burning for a prolonged period of time which happened in the united states when they were trying to manage the forest fires too tightly then all that happens is the dead wood accumulates and accumulates and accumulates and accumulates and accumulates until the whole damn forest is dead wood and then lightning hits it and it burns so hot that it burns the top soil off and then there's nothing left nothing grows and so that's a good moral lesson which is don't wait too long to let the damn dead wood burn off you know maybe a little self-immolation on a daily basis might be preferable to burning yourself all the way down to the bedrock you know once every 20 years or so because maybe there won't be anything left of you when you do that that happens to people all the time i've seen that happen to people many many times the dead wood accumulates the mess around them gathers the chaos that they haven't dealt with accumulates and then one day the spark comes and they burn so far and so fast that there's not enough left of them to recover and then they're the people who've been eaten by the beast they're the people who've been eaten by the dragon and now are inside its belly another very common archetypal motif and while maybe a hero will come along and rescue them or maybe they'll just stay in there forever and that's a precursor to the idea of hell and it's not something i would recommend so a little medicine on a regular basis is a lot better to than total immolation on terms other than your own [Music] we have to move forward towards things because we have requirements there are things that we require to keep us alive and to keep us wanting to be alive as well and those are different things and we move forward towards things that we value so there's two propositions there the first is that we have to move forward because there are things to move forward too because there are things we need and want and the second is that to move forward towards something is simultaneously to value it and so one of the implications of that is that we always live in a framework of value there's no escaping that and that we're moved forward i detailed this out quite substantially in my book maps of meaning but we're always at a place and and and we're always moving towards a place that in principle has some advantage over the place we're at otherwise why move towards it and so what that means is that there's no life without value at least there's no human life without value of necessity and also not only out of necessity at the physiological level but also out of necessity at the psychological level because another thing that you might point out that i think is usefully pointed out is that not only do you have to move from point a to b in life but point a is often a very difficult place to be because we're fragile and bounded and mortal and limited and because we know that and so one of the implications of that as many great religious traditions are at pains to illustrate or demonstrate or proclaim is that life is essentially suffering and i believe that to be a fundamental truth but but perhaps not the most fundamental truth because i think the most fundamental truth is that despite the fact that life is suffering people can transcend that and partly the way they transcend that is by pursuing things of value and so that if there is no value proposition at hand then you have no meaning to justify the difficult conditions of your life and that's brutally difficult for people you know nietzsche said he who has a why can bear any how and you see and i've certainly seen this as a clinical practitioner that people who have no purpose in their life are embittered by the difficulties of their life and they become first bitter and then resentful and then revengeful and then cruel and there's plenty of places to go past cruel that's just where you start if you're really on a downhill path all right so so those are the first propositions the second proposition would be well if you're going to pursue something of value because you're a social creature you're going to pursue that thing of value in a social space and that means you're going to compete and cooperate with people around you in the pursuit of that value and what that inevitably means is that given that the pursuit of anything valuable is going to be a collective enterprise that you're going to produce a hierarchy or maybe more than one hierarchy but at least a hierarchy of competence in relationship to that pursuit so it doesn't matter what you decide to pursue maybe you're going to do that cooperatively you're going to find that you and other people vary in your ability to manage that pursuit effectively and and efficiently and so there's going to be a hierarchy of people from those who are very good at the pursuit maybe it's pole vaulting maybe it's delivering massages maybe it's delivering groceries maybe it's setting up an enterprise it doesn't matter but if it's a valuable pursuit and you pursue it socially you're going to produce a hierarchy and the hierarchy is going to be one of competence and so if you're going to pursue value then you're going to construct a hierarchy and then there's an implication for that which is that if you construct a hierarchy most of the people within that hierarchical structure are a minority of people are going to be fantastically successful at the pursuit and a very large number are going to stack up at the bottom and that's a manifestation of pr what's what's known as price's law it's mapped by the pareto distribution it's an expression of what's been known among economists as the matthew principle from the new testament to those who have everything more will be given from those who have nothing everything will be taken away and it's an it's an iron law of the distribution of success in hierarchies 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 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 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 trivial 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 at night when you're wondering what the whole damn point of is of your futile and miserable life 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 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 so zazu the eyes of the king comes to check out the king and that's uh what's his name what's the king's name mufasa yeah and he's he's a very regal looking person uh lion and he stands up straight and tall and that means that he's high in serotonin because serotonin governs postural flexion and if so if you're dominant and near the top of hierarchies you tend to expand so that you look bigger than than you could if you shrunk down and so if you're low dominant person you wander around like this so that you look small and weak and you don't pose a threat to anybody but if you're at the top you expand yourself so that you can command the space and that's why he has that particular kind of regal posture and if you look at his facial expression you see that it's quite severe like he's he's capable of kindness but he's also harsh and judgmental and that's what society is like that's what the super ego is like and what that means is that he's integrated his aggression and i've seen this happen in my clinical clients when they come in and they're too agreeable they look like simba looks later in the movie when he's an adolescent and he's sort of like a deer in the headlights everything is coming in and nothing is coming out but when the person integrates their shadow and gets the aggressive part of themselves integrated into their personality their faces hardened and if you look at people you can tell because the people who are too agreeable look childlike and innocent and the people who well a hyper aggressive person will look you know mean and cruel but i've seen people's face changes change face change in the course of therapy men and women so and what happens is they start to look more mature and it's it's more like they're they're judging the world as well as interacting with it properly once they integrate that more disagreeable part of them it's very very necessary and that's part of the incorporation of the union shadow or the incorporation of the unconscious from a freudian perspective but old musa musafa there he's already got that he's already got that covered assuming that there is something specific that is attracting man i think that what it is is a call to responsibility essentially i think that people are especially young men are sick and tired of being fed a constant diet of you're good enough you should feel happy with who you are um an endless diet of rights and freedoms will give you a meaningful life and that's on that that's on the sort of pat you on the back even though you don't deserve it side of reality and then there's the lack of call to adventure i would say and the accusation that men face increasingly that their active presence in the world does nothing but contribute to tyranny and oppression which i think is absolute it's not only nonsense it's it's pernicious and destructive nonsense of the worst kind and so you know i've been telling men instead or suggesting to them explaining it more than telling that it's necessary for them to grow up and get their act together and to adopt some responsibility and to bear a burden and to speak truthfully and to take responsibility because there's important things to do in the world and that the world will be a lesser place if they don't allow what's within them to come forward and i think that that's true and so i think that that's a message that reasonable young men who are somewhat lost are desperate for well if you're not going to be rewarded for your virtues and instead you're going to be punished for them then what's your motivation to continue especially when it takes a fair bit of effort to say truthful things and to shoulder responsibility and if the consequence of that so there's there's reason to avoid it to begin with just as a consequence of the difficulty but if the net effect of doing that is that your accused before you even do anything wrong of being a an upholder of rape culture and the patriarchal tyranny and the oppressive west then why in the world would you want to contribute to that especially if you start to believe it you know some of it's just a matter of accepting excuses and and taking the easy way out but some of it's a matter of becoming guilty enough to actually believe it withdrawing from active engagement in the world the people who are going after masculinity let's say as toxic can't distinguish between tyrannical power and competence in fact for them there is no distinction between those two things which shows you just how adult they really are because it's extraordinarily important to discriminate between competence and power you know in the post-modern types especially the neo-marxists think oh well competence that's just how you justify your claim to your position it's really just power you're just defining competence in a way that benefits you but that's idiotic so it doesn't really require much of an argument and certainly no one ever acts like that if you have a car and it doesn't work you take it to a competent mechanic if you if your father's heart is failing you take him to a competent surgeon and you don't think oh well that person is just there because of the you know the western patriarchy and the privilege of of the oppressor so it's nonsense it's resentful cowardly ideologically possessed pathological nonsense and it's extremely dangerous and so i've been saying that about as bluntly as i just said it and i think that more and more people are realizing that it's gone far enough i'm sure hoping they are life is very difficult life there's an old one of the most ancient of religious ideas that emerges everywhere i would say is that life is essentially suffering and what that means is that while people are fragile and vulnerable and mortal and prone to physical decay and mental illness and to a fair share of malevolence as well we're fragile creatures and that means that life is hard and painful and anxiety provoking and you need something to set against that that's worthwhile and that's that's your destiny in the world say your positive destiny in the world and if you don't have something positive to set against that and your life is nothing but struggle and pain and with with the occasional foray into malevolence or victimization by malevolence then all you do is suffer stupidly and that makes you bitter and resentful and then you know that's just the beginning of your trouble because bitter and resentful that's just where you start the descent into hell you know you go from bitter and resentful to vengeful and to and to cruel and and and and way past that if you really want to pursue it and and people pursue that all the time it's not like it doesn't happen it's not like this is some abstract dream all those high school shootings all these mass shootings they're all carried out by people who've walked down that road a very long distance i wrote about that in chapter six it's rule six is called set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world and it's about the motivations of people like the columbine high school shooters and the mass rapist the serial rapist carl panzram who features very heavily in that chapter and it's a meditation on people's motivation for for evil which is which exists in all of us and and no wonder like it's understandable that doesn't make it right so the book 12 rules for life is a very serious book there's there's elements of humor in it but you know i'm trying to struggle with things at the deepest possible level and to explain to people why it's necessary to live a upstanding and noble and moral and truthful and responsible life and and why there's hell to pay if you don't do that tell people life is hard and here's how to handle it well that's it well everyone knows life is hard and it's not just hard it can be unbearably hard and and it's it's worse than hard because sometimes the hardship is inflicted upon you by yourself or by someone close to you or or sometimes by an enemy or but sometimes by a friend you know you get betrayed and it's not just that it's hard you're you're also subject to evil you're subject to malevolence and that makes it even worse and and everyone knows this and so you need something to set against that you need a noble way of being to set against that and the thing is you know all of everything i've said so far in this program i would say in some sense is very dark and pessimistic you know but what's optimistic is that having established the truth of the matter the suffering of life and the malevolence that's part of it you can also discover that living a meaningful life in the face of that a responsible meaningful truthful life is actually possible and it actually works that's the thing that's the optimistic thing you know it's not so bad to say to people look we've got a real problem here it's no joke it's a dead serious problem it's the fragility of your life and hell all bald up into one thing but that's okay because there's an antidote to it there's something you can do about it and you could start today and well that's what i try to detail out 12 rules for life and in my lectures online as well and i believe it to be the case as pessimistic as i am about the nature of human beings and our capacity for atrocity and malevolence and betrayal and and laziness and inertia and all those things i think we can transcend all that and set things straight and i think that people can literally start today i believe that the experience of meaning is an instinct and you could think about it as the ordering instinct it's more like the balancing instinct but we'll start with ordering there's a lot inside of you that needs to be ordered and set straight like you're a collection of motivations and emotions and thoughts and and proto-actions and desire desires well i suppose those are the same as motivations you're a loose collection of all those things and something has to bring all of that into a functioning order and the experience of deep engagement the experience of meaning i think is the manifestation of the instinct that orders you and it orders you and it orders your family and it orders the world the broader world as well and that instinct isn't some secondary consequence of some more important biological function let's say it's it is that very function and i think we know enough about neuroscience now i think we know enough about how the brain operates to just make that statement categorically so my hypothesis has been and this is this is not a fully original hypothesis it's based on the work of neuroscientists whose research i know well and respect greatly very hard-headed people they believe for example that the left hemisphere is specialized for operation in explored territory and that the right hemisphere is specialized for operation in unexplored territory well you need to practice things you need to know what you're doing and you have to have a place where that works so that would be explored territory or or order or routine and so part of your brain works well there but then that's surrounded always by things that you don't understand and so there's another part of your brain that has to work with the things you don't understand and the sense of meaning occurs when you get those two systems working properly together so that you're partly stable and secure and operating where you know what's going to happen next and it's going to be something that you want but also expanding your competence at the same time and pushing yourself and stretching yourself so that if things shift on you then you're going to be ready and prepared and that's a deep instinct that's the instinct of meaning as far as i can tell and it's it's an unerring guide to proper action in the world you

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Keywords: success chasers, jordan peterson success chasers, jordan b peterson, jordan peterson, jordan peterson motivation, jordan peterson motivational video, success chasers jordan peterson, jordan peterson 2021, how to improve your life, how to improve yourself, improve yourself in 2021, Strive To Become 1% Better EVERY DAY, get 1 percent better each day, how to get better everyday, how to become unstoppable, jordan peterson routines, jordan peterson how to get better

Id: HE_sXVVY4a0

Length: 75min 39sec (4539 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 01 2021