"TAKING ON THE ULTIMATE RESPONSIBILITY" - Jordan Peterson Motivation

[Music] i was trying to solve this terrible puzzle that confronted me for and many other people about how it was that human beings got themselves in such a tangle about what they believed such a tangle that we were pointing the ultimate weapons of destruction at one another which by the way we are still doing i thought okay well i understand that we need your belief systems they orient us and that means there will be conflict between belief systems and that can be a catastrophe and that's being played out everywhere again in very many ways what's the solution to that well one possibility is there's no solution it's just mayhem all the way around could be the case but it seemed to me as i delved into it that the proper solution to that was to live properly as an individual because you're more powerful than you think way more powerful than you think i mean god only knows what you are in the final analysis you're blind to your own weaknesses but you're also blind to your own strengths and so then i think well if you've got your act together it'd be better for you and instantly it would be better for your family assuming they wanted you to get your act together and not everyone does but and then it would be better for the community it's like how far could you take that if you stopped wasting time and if you stopped lying and if you oriented yourself to to the highest possible good that you could conceive of and you committed to that how much good could you do well i would say why do you find out so that's what i think you should do you should find out you don't have anything better to do and there's nothing in it as far as i've been able to tell there's nothing in it but good so maybe you could sort yourself out so that you wanted nothing but the good and and then maybe you could help make that manifest in the world and maybe we wouldn't have all these terrible problems then at least we'd have fewer of them and that would be a start so it's the it's the the answer to the problem of humanity is the is the is the integrity of the individual that's the answer so and states that are predicated on that realization are healthy so and states that aren't are doomed to stagnation and catastrophic collapse and personalities that are predicated on self tyranny and the tyranny of others are doomed and doomed to collapse so and then you think well what's the barrier and the barriers are you willing to accept the responsibility and part of the answer to that is reduce the damn responsibility until it's tolerable you don't have to fix everything at once you could just start by fixing the things that you could fix or you could even do it more you could do it with even less self-sacrifice you could start by fixing only the things that you want to fix god you can get a massive way that way so do it see what happens that's what you should have been taught in university right from the beginning it's like aim at the highest good tool yourself into something that can attain it and go out there and manifest it in the world and everything that everything that comes your way will be [Music] everything that comes your way will be a blessing and so all you have to do is give up your resentment and your hatred i know that's a hard thing to give up because you have plenty of reason for it you see the thing about disciplining someone let's say is that when you and i see this very clearly when i'm talking to young people is that i'm really on the side of the person that wants to do something positive with their life to make their own life better because i think that's where you should start you should start by making maximizing the quality of your own life that's not a selfish thing or if it is it's the right kind of selfishness and that you should figure out how to do that in a way that's of benefit to your friends and your family and your community and you should take that deadly seriously and the reason you should do that is because that just makes life better for everyone and it reduces a fair bit of the misery that would otherwise be part and parcel of life and it makes everything function smoothly and one of the things i'm really curious about is what the world would be like if everybody decided to do that because human beings are really remarkable creatures and we hobble ourselves very badly with deception and resentment and revenge and the desire to make things worse and arrogance and all those all those sins let's say that that that make us deviate from our true path and our true path should be something like imagine the noblest aim that you can conceptualize and then sacrifice your life to attempting to attain it and there's nothing in that that isn't good for everyone and so apart from the fact that it requires a lot of responsibility i just can't see why everyone wouldn't do that and when i'm talking to young people and you know shaking my finger and saying you know grow the hell up and get mature and take on some responsibility i'm not saying that because i'm an enemy of the person i'm saying it because i'm the best friend of the part of them that would really like to walk in the light and and it's an invitation to walk in the light and and it would be remarkable this is what we need to do as far as i'm concerned not only in the west but in the world at large but maybe in the west first is we have to consciously decide that we're going to do everything we can as individuals to walk in the light and to regard that as a noble and heroic endeavor and to make that first and foremost in our lives and that's what we should be educating young people to do and they can do that and so i have dozens of people writing to me and and talking to me all the time who are saying the same thing they're saying look i've really been trying to get my act together over the last six months i've been trying not to lie which is slightly different than trying to tell the truth right it's a more humble goal to not lie because you can tell when you're lying but you can't necessarily tell when you're telling the truth and i i've been coming up with a plan and i've been trying to discipline myself and i've been cleaning up my room which is like a nice humble act that that involves transforming chaos into order and they write and say god things are just working out way better for me it's like whoa do it man that's just you keep that up for 15 years and you'll be unbeatable and that's what we should be convincing young people to be is to be unbeatable and not because that's what they should do or because they're bad if they don't but because there's nothing better you can possibly do with your limited and your limited and suffering bound life than to aim high and and sacrifice yourself to the attainment of those goals do you have problems in your life that you're not addressing that you could solve and the answer is yes and it's an easy thing to figure out you sit on your bed one morning and say okay there's some things that need to be done that i don't want to do that i could do that would make things better by the end of the day what are they well your your conscience will deliver those suckers no time flat man and then you might have to say okay well how do i entice myself into doing a few of those and if you ask instead of trying to force yourself to do it like you're a tyrant and a slave at the same time you can usually negotiate with yourself so that you'll start to sort those things out sort them out put your house in order and then move out move on and out yes that's a freudian slip by the way yeah so it's important because the thing is you you have a practice domain right there there are things that are within your grasp that you could fix fix them and you'll learn you'll learn because it's harder than it looks fix them and you'll learn how to fix things and then something else will beckon as another problem that you could fix you know you all have your problems what does that mean like there's an infinite number of problems in the world some of them happen to be yours why is that i don't know exactly but you have your problems great solve them you know one other thing i learned as a therapist every therapist has to learn this is because one of the things you wonder when you're first starting to be a clinician is how do you not take the catastrophes of your clients home with you and the answer to that is because it's immoral to they're not your problems they're their problems like they're they're their life you know your problems are your life you don't want to solve someone else's problems for them because you take away the the deep meaning that's to be found in having them work through the problems on their own and then you steal the credit well i can help you with that it's like well yeah maybe but i don't help you with the next problem then so in any case you sort sort out the problems that are right in front of you and you will it will make you grow very very rapidly and then you'll be able to sort out more complex problems without making them worse how does it feel to be viewed as a father figure by many people who grew up without one well i think it's an unbelievable honor how's that and that is really what i think it's like it's a tremendous honor and i'm doing absolutely everything i can to be worthy of that and i would like to say to all the people out there who grew up without a father that's really too bad because you need a father there to encourage you that's what fathers do is they encourage they help make you courageous and if i can help people develop the capacity to be courageous and to learn to tell the truth and to be responsible then that's great i i can't imagine a better outcome for me and so if people are willing to help me play that role and to use what i've been teaching to guide them in that manner then hooray i couldn't possibly imagine a better outcome than that [Music] you know when you know you should do something i mean everyone has the this experience i believe perhaps you would be willing to put up your hands if this experience is foreign to you okay this part of you telling you you should do something and it's hard to do it effortful and maybe you're afraid of it and so you don't do it you just procrastinate right and so how do you feel about that good i mean so what you feel that you're betraying yourself your anxiety actually gets worse not better even though you know you can put it off moment to moment but that doesn't help because every time you put it off the anxiety just grows a little bit you're not proud of yourself you have a sense that you're making things more chaotic than they should be you know and if you do that long enough and i'm sure many of you have had that experience if you do that long enough if that becomes habitual things will get so stormy around you that you'll fall right into the into the chaos into the watery chaos and maybe you'll drown so it's not a very good idea to run from your destiny let's say whatever that might be and you need a destiny you need a place to aim at because that's what gives your life meaning and you need meaning in your life because life is hard so you know you need something to buttress yourself against that so anyways they wake joan up and jonah says that's probably my fault because like i'm running away from something i'm supposed to do and you know god isn't very happy about that so why don't you just throw me over overboard and the crew isn't very happy about that but the waves are really starting to come up and jonah's pretty insistent that he's the cause of the problem and so they draw they draw lots and and jonah is chosen and so they decide to toss him into the ocean and immediately everything's calm so he's a center of chaos because he's not doing what he's supposed to do fine well then a whale comes up and swallows him then he's in the whale for three days that's a weird thing the whale that's the whale that the geppetto's in that's a dragon it's that thing that you have to go out there and conquer to get something of value now when you've made an error when you've fallen off the pathway when you deviated from what you know you should do it produces a state of internal chaos and worry and concern you're you're thrust into the unknown you're thrust into unknown territory and chaos you don't know what to do and that's often symbolized by the encounter with a with a monster like a dragon or something that lives under the water that's and i think the reason for that is as far as i've been able to tell is that human beings because we've been prey animals for forever we have a a system in our mind that's a threat predator detection system that's the thing that makes little kids think about monsters in the dark right because while there is monsters in the dark parents always say well there's no monsters in the dark it's like that's not true the dark is full of monsters there might not be any in your room right at that moment but that doesn't mean there aren't monsters in the dark and crimes take place like criminals don't get up at six in the morning and like you know have breakfast and go rob a bank they do it they do that sort of thing at night people do the things that are fit for the night in the night and lots of predators are nocturnal and you can't see very well in the dark and kids aren't stupid you know they've evolved to stay pretty damn close to the fire [Music] when you're feeling terrible you don't say well i'm feeling up you say i'm feeling down well why is that well down is worse i guess you're flat on the ground when you're down or you're in a hole or something like that you're hiding in a hole you know it's down and you're threatened by something you know maybe you're threatened by your own inadequacy that might be part of it maybe that's partly what you imagine as a monstrous force because you know your proclivity towards procrastination and your weakness of character is part and parcel of why you happen to be in the underworld and that's the underworld the mythological underworld that's where you go when things fall apart and if you understand that if you know that that's what that means then you have one of the keys that opens up ancient stories to you and you understand things your life can be organized going very well and then something comes up and poof everything changes some axiom that you were living by and it might be the existence of a partner it might be a job it might be your health any of those things go on and you go somewhere when that happens you go somewhere it's a state of being you're still in the same world but it's not the same at all anymore everything about it is different it's all negative and dark and you don't know what to do you're confused and so what do you do down there in the underworld when things have fallen apart especially if if it's the worst possible case scenario and you realize that you actually had something to do with your demise that's really annoying you know when something bad happens to you and then you know you grind yourself into bits trying to figure out what the hell happened and then you realize that well you are playing a causal role now sometimes you're so depressed you assume you're playing a causal role and you weren't it's not easy to figure out by any stretch of the imagination and it isn't that everyone who does something terrible is at fault for it but sometimes you find that you were off the path somehow and maybe even that you knew it and didn't attend to it and that's why all of this hit the fan and so then down there in that chaos you decide that you're going to do what you're supposed to do instead and then maybe you get to rise up again renewed if you're lucky and then you can go fix the city and that's what this story is about and that's why i picked the image to represent the course because really what happens you see with the psychoanalysts the road to to health if you're not doing well which means that as you act in the world you're not getting what you want there's something wrong with your the match between your presuppositions and your actions habitual and the way the world is responding to you and so it's not turning out for you and the question is well what can you do about that and one answer might be to examine yourself for presuppositions and action patterns that are not serving you well and to find out what they are and what to do about them and maybe some of that is maybe you're not moving forward because of fear and maybe that fear is grounded in terrible experiences that you had in the past that you've never been able to understand and maybe one of the ways of gluing yourself back together and expanding your personality so that you could in fact live properly in the world is to go back to those terrible events and untie them and straighten them out and understand them and drop them and that's what psychotherapy is about in large part psychoanalytic behavioral doesn't matter what are you afraid of what are you avoiding what are you failing to develop maybe from fear maybe from avoidance god only knows maybe from disgust [Music] how can you get over it how can you reclaim those parts of your self [Music] so the question is why don't why do people pursue rewards that don't produce this resonance they don't have a value hierarchy so pleasure island it's a good example those kids that were brought there were lost so they didn't they didn't have anywhere to go they didn't have an identity so they default to local pleasure and that's better than none although the problem with local pleasure well as the narrative made clear is that you better look out if you're impulsive because it's going to kick back on you hard and the reason is you're only considering the immediate time frame and the problem is is that things propagate across all the time frames and so just because something works really well this second cocaine for example doesn't mean that it's a tenable solution to the class of all problems so usually often people pursue local pleasure because that's the best they can imagine it's the best they've been taught they don't see another alternative so it could be ignorance it can be they don't want to adopt the responsibility because part of the problem with working at every level of the hierarchy simultaneously is that it's it's well it's like dancing to a very complex waltz let's say you have to be paying attention to a very large number of things simultaneously and doing things right it requires responsibility and so you know that's it's a pain it's a weight part of the reason people drink alcohol is to get rid of their responsibility i mean that's you know you hear people drink because they have problems it's like yeah yeah no some people drink because they're anxious and alcoholics drink because they're in withdrawal but young people drink because they're sick and tired of being responsible because it's annoying it's like so i'll drink enough i won't care about the medium to long-term consequences because alcohol that's exactly what alcohol does it doesn't make you ignorant of the medium to long-term consequences but it makes you not care about them and partly it's because it dampens anxiety so it dampens anxiety leaves your positive emotion circuits intact so then you can go out there and do stupid fun things and that's like that's a party really let's go do stupid fun things that's a party but the medium to learn long-term consequences are it's risky it doesn't mean you shouldn't do it but it's risky so yeah they don't know better that's the answer i would say as you improve the probability that each improvement will produce a further improvement increases and so perhaps the the downside is the cataclysmic catastrophe that you can engage upon if you reproduce your moral failings but the upside is that each improvement produces an increment in the probability of the next improvement and i've seen that it's a truism among behavioral psychologists i mean although they don't generally phrase it that way if you're a behavioral psychologist and i am a behavioral psychologist what you do is you find out what essentially you help per a person establish their aim then you break down what they're trying to do into attainable units and you negotiate with them you say well look you know um well i'm not me they say i'm not making use of my time very well spending three hours a day playing video games you say well okay hypothetically how much time would you like to spend playing video games and they say well i could probably spend an hour a day without it interfering with the rest of my life which is kind of the issue right because if you play video games fine but maybe three hours means that you're not doing your homework or something and that's not a good game so you say okay well i want to play for an hour a day it's like okay well can you shift to an hour a day right now and this is supposed to be an honest conversation and the person says no i've tried that lots of times every time i try i just fail and so you don't say well quit failing go play one hour a day and the problem will be solved that's a stupid strategy you say okay well look you think about this and don't agree to do this unless you think you will do it because otherwise it's just a waste of both of our times it's like do you think that you could track how much time you've spent playing video games for one week don't change anything just track it and they think yeah i could probably do that but i might miss a couple of days and think okay fine so here's the deal five out of the next seven days you just track how much time you spend playing video games and the person says i think i can do that because that's what you want them to say you want them to succeed at the improvement it's not much of an improvement but it's something right then they come back and they say well yeah i was playing about four hours a day and so you say okay well fine good work man you gotta track now we know what we know the parameters of your problem it's actually a little worse than you thought but at least you had enough sense to measure it we know where you're at okay do you think you could cut that down to three and a half hours every day and the person thinks no i'm pretty weak-willed i don't think i can manage that you say well how about this do you think that two of the next seven days you can only play for three hours you think you can manage that you don't you're not cynical about this you're not insulting the person any of that it's like because you don't care all you care is that they make some incremental movement towards their goal and the person thinks about that if they have any sense and they take their weakness into account and they think i think i could probably do that and then they come back the next week and they say i managed to spend three hours a day playing video games for three days and the rest were four hours and you say good work man you've just got rid of twelve and a half percent of your problem you're one eighth of the way to fixing it in one week and you know the person isn't going to be all that thrilled with themselves because they don't do the arithmetic they and they don't do the projection they think well i'm still pretty damn useless i'm playing 25 hours worth of video games a week it's nothing to pat myself on the back for it's like yes it is it's definitely it's a marked measurable improvement and it's a move in the right direction you know and then you say okay well on the days you succeeded how did you manage to succeed and is there a way that you could do it for four days next week how about that or or maybe you could even try five days you think you could do that and then you also tell the person look the other thing you've got to understand is you're not going to improve like this you're going to improve like this so some weeks you're going to come back and say jesus i backslid completely and i like played for four hours a day for seven days but doesn't matter because that doesn't mean you failed it just means that you slid back you want to calculate it over a month or something like that and you know generally speaking a month later the person's down to something like two hours a day and you've figured out ways of filling their time in with something productive otherwise and they're on their way and the general consequence of that is that every time they manage an accomplishment they get a little stronger in character they get a little bit more confident in their ability to get a little bit less racked with self-disgust they get a little bit more hopeful about the future and they get more confident that they can make another change and if you're patient and you have to be patient with yourself that way it's like you reward those incremental improvements and you don't get all cynical about them and you think okay just imagine what would happen if you kept doing that every week for ten years and the answer to that is things would be so much better for you that you can't even imagine it life is suffering right indisputable [Music] what do you do about that you you voluntarily accept it and then strive to overcome the suffering that's a consequence of that and you do that for you and you do that in a way that makes it better for other people and then that works and one question might be well how well does it work and the answer is you the only way that you can find out is by trying it that's it that's the existential element of it the proof is to be derived by the incarnation of the attitude in your own life no one can tell you how it will work for you it's the thing that your destiny is to discover that and you have to make you have to make the decisions to begin with it's like because you can't do this without commitment you have to commit to it first that's the act of faith that that kierkegaard was so insistent upon you have to say i'm going to act as if being is good i'm going to act as if truth is the pathway to enlightenment i'm going to act as if i should pursue the deepest meaning possible in my life and there's there's reasons to do none of those they're real reasons so it's really a decision but you you can't find out what the consequence of the decision is unless you make the decision i think the same thing happens when you get married by the way he said if you think you might leave you're not married and then you think well the marriage didn't succeed it's like well maybe you were never married because the rule is you don't get to leave and there's a reason for that rule now i'm not saying that there aren't situations where there should be exceptions made for that that's not the point the point is that there's some games you don't get to play unless you're all in and the other thing that's so interesting about being alive is that you're all in no matter what you do you're all in this is going to kill you so i think you might as well play the most magnificent game you can while you're waiting because do you have anything better to do really why not pick the best thing possible that you could do why not do that maybe you could justify your wretched existence to yourself that way i think you could that's what it looks like you know people find such meaning in the responsibilities they adopt it stops making them ask questions about what life is for if you have a newborn child for example like unless you're really in a bad way psychotically depressed or maybe your personality really needs some retooling you stop thinking about anything but ensuring that that baby is doing well and if someone comes along and asks you an existential question about your commitment to that the right response is why are you asking me such stupid questions when when the when this this is manifesting itself right in front of your eyes like how blind can you be that isn't a time for for questions about the meaning of life the answer is right in front of you and if you can't see it it's not because life has no meaning it's because you're blind i mean that's what the image of of of the virgin mother and the child is all about it's like what's the answer to the meaning of life here's an answer it's like well i'm going to criticize that well go right ahead you know it's like it's like what what you're like a you're like a what do you call that a termite gnawing on a temple there's no there's no utility in that sort of criticism you're it's blindness and it's the same thing with regards to the path of the hero it's like it glistens in front of you and you can criticize it it's like fine put the cart before the horse and and see how far you get you know when you hear people like joseph campbell say things like follow your bliss you know and so that sounds pretty easy you want to develop your personality just do what you love you know it's a corruption of carl jung's thinking because jung would say well follow what you're interested it'll take you somewhere you really don't want to go and then maybe you'll learn something so and that's a whole different that's a whole different proposition so human beings if you talk about a human being you tend to use something that's like a story and when you recount your own being you tend to use something like a story and that sort of begs the question you know does that mean in fact that your experience is either a story or something like a story one of the things jung said i really like this is you should figure out which story you're living because you're living a story and it might be a tragedy and so you know you want to find out because if it's a tragedy you don't come to a very good end another thing jung said was this is also worth thinking about people don't have ideas ideas have people and so what jung would say is that if you're living out a tragedy the tragedy has you you don't have it and if you can figure out what the tragedy is that has you in its grip then you have a fighting chance of escaping from it into a more pleasing plot but it's no easy thing you know so if you're one of those people to whom the same terrible thing keeps happening over and over after the third time approximately you might ask yourself you know is this the world or is this me i like the triangle idea i mean i don't know why god is wearing a triangular hat it's kind of a strange fashion choice but i think it's associated with the idea of the pyramid and i think that's associated with the idea of the hierarchy of authority and i think that's why the egyptians put their pharaohs inside pyramids i know there's more to it than that but i think some of that has to do with the notion of this hierarchical structure you see this on that now that's speculative obviously and i don't want to make too much of it but but i can't help but think that there's something to that see that's on the back of the american dollar bill i like that a lot that's like the eye of horus from the egyptians and so the idea here is something like at the top of the hierarchy is something that is no longer part of the hierarchy right so if you move up the hierarchy enough what happens is that you develop the ability as a consequence of moving up that hierarchy to be detached enough from the hierarchy so you're no longer really part of it and so that you can move in all sorts of different hierarchies and the thing the idea here is that the thing that you're really developing is the capacity to pay attention and i would say from a from a mythological perspective the the one thing that seems to compete with the idea of the spoken word as the as the source of the extraction of habitable order from chaos is the eye is the capacity to pay attention so marduk for example the mesopotamian creator god who who emerged in the hierarchy of mesopotamian gods and came out at the top right he was the victor of the gods he had eyes all the way around his head and he could speak magic words and i really like that i really like that idea and the egyptians developed that idea too because their god horus was the eye everyone knows the eye of horus that image is so compelling that we still know about everybody has seen the eye of horus with a really open pupil and what the egyptians learned was that the open eye was what revivified the dead society it's so smart so what do you do if your life isn't in order bloody well pay attention that isn't the same as thinking it's a different process paying attention thinking is like the imposition of structure in some sense i know i'm oversimplifying but paying attention is something like watching for what you don't know and so like one of the things i often recommend to my clinical clients if they're having trouble with a family member is number one shut up don't tell them anything about yourself just and i don't mean in a rude way it's just like no more personal information number two watch them like a hawk and listen and if you do that long enough they will tell you exactly what they're up to and they will also tell you who they think you are and then you'll be shocked because they think you're something generally speaking that's not like you what you are at all and when they tell you it's like a revelation to both of you but attention is an unbelievably powerful force and you see this in psychotherapy too because a lot of what you do and in any reparative relationship is really pay attention to the other person pay attention and listen and you would not believe what people will tell you or reveal to you if you watch them as if you want to know instead of watching them so that you'll have your prejudices reinforced that's usually how people interact it's like i want to keep thinking about you the way i'm thinking about you and so i'm going to filter out anything that disproves my theory that's not what i'm talking about at all it's like i'm going to watch you and figure out what you're up to not in a rude way none of that i just want to see what's there and that'll be good for you probably and also be good for me and so well so that's the idea that you know climbing up a hierarchy of authority can give you vision and that vision can transcend the actual hierarchy more ideas of hierarchy same idea this is right gold silver bronze why gold gold is the sun gold is pure right so the idea is that the thing that's at the top of the hierarchy is incorruptible because gold doesn't mix with anything else right it's this sort of metal that doesn't ever become corrupted it's a noble metal it doesn't become corrupted and so it shines like the sun and it's associated with what's ever at the top of the hierarchy and the gold the gold medal is a disc like the sun and it's awarded to those people who've who've occupied the top position and who are manifestations of the ideal and he and here's here's i'll tell you a quick story so imagine that you're watching an olympic contest i i found this happens to me very often with gymnastics because the gymnasts are so absolutely unbelievable you know so you go you watch a gymnastic performance and uh the person's out there bouncing around like [Music] you know you can't even imagine doing it they're so perfect at it so you see this person they're going through this routine they're just absolutely spectacular and flawless at it you know at the end they stop and everybody claps and and they're all excited to see what a human being can do and that's why we're in the audience watching because we want to see what a human being can do and the judges go like 9.8 9.8 9.8 everybody's thrilled and then the next contestant comes out and it's like well they're just basically screwed right it's like this person came out there and was perfect how are you going to top that that's an interesting question because this is a representation of what you do to top perfection itself and you can do it and here's how you do it and you know this even though you don't know you know it so let's say the next contestant comes out and they're kind of shaky because it's like oh man the bar has been raised high so what they do is they put themselves right on the edge of chaos and you can tell by watching them that they are one bloody fraction of a second from catastrophe they're pushing themselves farther than they've ever gone in the direction of their perfection and everyone in the room is so tense they can hardly stand it right you can hear a pin drop and that person is flipping around and they're just it's just right on the edge of catastrophe and at the end they go like this you know and there's that gesture that the triumph that goes along with that and everybody rises in one instant and just claps like mad it's like well why what are you doing what are you doing when you're doing that right you can't even help it it grabs you right in the core of your being and you stand up and it's it's an act of worship that's what it is and you saw someone go beyond their perfection into the domain of chaos and establish order right in front of your eyes and you're so thrilled about that you know you're happy to be alive and everyone's celebrating it all at the same time and and it's an absolutely amazing thing and that's what well sometimes that's what this represents and sometimes that's what this represents and that's what we're trying to get at that because that's at the pinnacle of the hierarchy right not only are you doing what you should be doing but you're doing it in a way that increases the probability that you'll do it better the next time you do it and then you could say here's another thing to think about along the same lines you tell your kids to play fair right you say it's not a it's not whether or not you win it's how you play the game and you say that you don't really know what you mean you feel kind of stupid saying it even though you know it's true and your kid looks at you like there's something wrong with you because he doesn't know what you're talking about either but you know it's true and so here's why it's true life isn't a game it's a set of games and the rule is never sacrifice victory across the set of games for victory in one game right and that's what it means to play properly you want to play so that people keep inviting you to play because that's how you win right you win by being invited to play the largest possible array of games and the way you do that is by manifesting the fact that you can play in a reciprocal manner every time you play even if there's victory at stake and that's what makes you successful across time and we all know that and we even tell our kids that but we don't know that we know it and so we're not adapting ourselves to the game and victory in the game we're adapting ourselves to the meta game and victory across the set of all possible games and that's what that well that's exactly what as far as i can tell that's exactly what this is aiming at too that's the same idea that there's that there's a transcend there's a mode of being that transcends the particularities of this of the localized contest that's the other way to think about it and to act morally is not to win today's contest at the expense of the rest of possible contests there's an absolute moral there's an absolute moral stance there and everyone recognizes it and and i also think it's the key to success and i would also say it's very much akin in a strange way like the the the person who is the master at being invited to play the largest possible games number of games is also the same person i haven't quite figured out the precise relationship between these two is also the same person that goes out forthrightly to conquer the unknown before it presents itself as the enemy at the door they're the same thing [Music] and it's a critique in some sense also of the idea of the patriarchy i know because the patriarchy is this dominant oppressive hierarchy that everyone's embedded in and you know the social constructionist social justice warrior post-modernist types think about that as a social construction it's like how about no that's just wrong lobsters have hierarchies that's a third of a billion years ago okay that's not a social construction it's part of being itself and if you only see a hierarchy as power and tyranny then you're looking at the world wrong like it's true that hierarchies can be tyrannical and dominant and and a degenerated hierarchy is nothing but tyranny but in a functional society that the hierarchy is actually the structure of the society and you're actually protected within it well then how you relate to that hierarchy is very important but that's part of personal development that's part of standing upright you know and then people in the hierarchy think oh well you're someone who could do good things for the hierarchy let's promote you yeah you know like men don't struggle for power that isn't what men do not if they're civilized they size each other up and elect the competent to lead them and they do that at every level of society like i tell a story in there about might be later in another chapter it doesn't matter i worked in a rail crew in southern saskatchewan they're rough guys like a lot of them have been in prison you know and when you first came onto the rail crew you got a stupid nickname and people teased you and i remember this one kid called lunch bucket that was his nickname because he came to the rail crew with a lunch bucket that looked like his mom had packed it that was a bad idea you bring your damn lunch in kind of a you know ratty paper bag right you don't make too big a thing out of it and it's dirty and smelly that's exactly right it's like you're not pronouncing your status with your life you don't have a barbie lunchbox exactly yes yeah so they named him lunch bucket which he wasn't very happy about yeah well that was a mistake he should have taken it with a smile and then he was always peevish and irritable and if he asked him to do something he'd whine and so like this was soon after i joined the royal rail crew well soon there's about 60 men on this crew it stretched out about a quarter of a mile down the tracks soon anonymous harassers were throwing pebbles at him during work we had hard hats on so the game was let's see if we can hit a lunch bucket in the in the hard hat with a pebble because it's anonymous yeah well because you don't know where it's coming from yeah and that was purposeful because he didn't couldn't take a joke it's like well let's see if he can take this joke clunk can everybody go you know and then it just got more and more peevish and the pebbles got bigger and bigger and you know a week later lunch bucket was gone having not learned anything from the experience but you know the men were testing him out it's like can you take a joke can you can you can you be useful can you at least be amusing like is there something worthwhile about you it's like no it's like okay well then you're out of here because you never know when we actually might need to depend on you the nicknames that that are in the seal teams like i can't with good conscience repeat them because they're just they're just horrible horrible names but there's a camaraderie around that and there's also though as i was reading what you had written about these guys working on a railroad crew yeah there's a test it's a test it's a test to see where you're at it's right tomatoes right can we rely on you can you can you tolerate a little bit of irritation the answer to that is no it's like well maybe we don't want you around then because some irritating things are likely to come down the pipe yeah and it's it's not just um to me to me it proves if you've got someone that can take it right it's not just that they can take some random joking insults like they can they can take it they can take it yeah that's what you're testing for it's like can you take it lunch bucket couldn't right because people would laugh at his lunch bucket and he'd get all upset it's like well you have a stupid lunch bucket it's like you know your mom packed it how about you laugh at yourself yeah my mom packed this i know it's kind of stupid that would be the end of it he would have just had to say that yeah it's like but i didn't want to hurt her feelings it's like oh okay you know fine you got your stupid lunch bucket but no he couldn't handle that you know so yeah it was it was horrible and comical to watch at the same time because the level of and people have written me about that and they said oh you know poor lunch bucket it's like because they're all compassionate i think no no not poor lunch bucket it's like clue the hell in buddy you had your chance you know that was a desirable job that rail crew job in the summer because it was high-paying you know and they weren't easy to come by those jobs and so the fact that he got hired onto that crew was a real opportunity for him you could make a pile of money in the summer at working on the rail crew and all you had to do was take some ribbing with good grace not suck up to the management too badly and not have other people do your job that was all that was all you had to do but he couldn't do that and so he got run off and it was like grow the hell up buddy you know these guys when 100 people are teasing you then probably they're not wrong yeah when you are getting teased like that as well well when you when you when you stop reacting it's no longer fun yeah yeah you know yeah it also gives you an opportunity to tease back it's like you can show your wit and one of the things that working class guys in particular which is what one of the things i really loved about working-class jobs is that they're always looking for some humor so it's like if if person a is teasing person b that's kind of comical but if person b comes back with a good comeback it's like that's even better you know so i think that's a lot of how those jobs are rendered tolerable right it's their their hard dirty jobs dishwasher's a good example that's not dangerous although cooking is is you know you've got to watch your step i got burned a lot when i was cooking um but what makes those jobs not only tolerable but even desirable is that you can develop a tremendous amount of camaraderie around them i've never really experienced that at a professional level job that just doesn't happen the same way and it's really there's a real loss in that so it's it's it's fun to be part of a team that's doing you know grubby hands-on things and and having a ridiculously entertaining vicious cruel and evil time while you're doing it that's very entertaining i had an experience with that about three years ago i put my videos up online and people kept saying that i sounded like kermit and i thought well one person said it and i thought well whatever but then like five people said it and i thought oh my god like this kermit thing so then i went and listened to kermit i thought oh no it's like it's like really i really sound like kermit you know and so then well then i started to play with it a little bit you know i used the puppet and when i when when i went to speak to university students and i made frog jokes and then i made a vid i made a couple of videos that sort of featured me as a frog and i mean it's crazy right it's ridiculous but but that's and but but the teasing never got mean because of that you know and the same things happened online to a larger degree as people keep making memes of me like and there's i don't know there's lots of them there's way too many to even keep track of and i was watching that happen and i thought okay this is a good thing because there's humor and wherever there's humor that's a good thing and they're making fun of me but it's gentle you know most of it was pokey you know like well you sound like this damn puppet what do you think of that it's like well if i had to pick someone to sound like probably wouldn't be a puppet but if it had to be a puppet kermit's not a bad one it could be a lot worse like it could be miss peggy it could have been that you know so thank god that didn't happen but the memes have never got vicious because you know i'll post them if they're funny and satirical and then they won't get vicious because they don't have to it's like can we poke fun at you it's like yeah please do and the more the better really because that'll also help keep my feet on the ground and keep me awake and plus it's funny and like one of the things about life is that a sense of humor that's a good thing to to arm yourself with because sometimes you just don't have anything other than that [Music] if you're going to face a threat if you face it voluntarily what happens is your body activates itself for exploration and mastery but if you face it involuntarily same size threat then you you you revert to prey mode and you're frozen and that's way way way more stressful it's way harder on your body and so it's better to keep your eye open and watch for emergent threats because you all know you know what you're not doing quite right and where your life is likely to unravel you all have a sense of that and the best thing to do is to not ignore that to pay attention to it to watch it and to take corrective action early and then you know you stay on top of things and things your little trip to the underworld might be a few minutes long instead of a catastrophe that produces post-traumatic stress disorder knocks you out for four or five years and maybe you never recover so and that's where you know that's what these kind of symbolic representations mean it's those are states of being that that that indicate being devoured and you can be devoured by your own unconscious jesus that happens all the time what does that mean well you know and it's an autonomous thing in some sense you know like if you if you get depressed or if you get really anxious you don't have any control over that it's like it sweeps up over you and pulls you down wide down well down is where you go when you're sad you don't go up man i'm up today oh that's too bad no it's man i'm down today and well that's partly this and it's partly because this is subordinate and it's partly because down is closer to the ground and farther from the sky like there's all sorts of reasons you're feeling down rather than up up is where you're aiming right you aim up you don't aim down [Music] you

Channel: SUCCESS CHASERS

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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 life advice, jordan peterson 2021, improve yourself in 2021, how to improve yourself, how to reinvent yourself, how to improve your life, motivation for 2021, TAKING ON THE ULTIMATE RESPONSIBILITY, taking responsibility, jordan peterson responsibility, take responsibility

Id: nl8hDlcHMTE

Length: 52min 42sec (3162 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 26 2021