The Choice We All Have , But Only a Few Apply It | Jordan Peterson

[Music] what do you say to those of us that don't pursue their dreams and are locked into their careers because they are too afraid to take risks and pursue something meaningful well the first thing I would say is well you should be afraid of taking risks and pursuing something meaningful but you should be more afraid of staying where you are if it's making you miserable it's like the first thing you want to do is dispense with the idea that you get to have any any permanent security outside of your ability to contend and adapt it's the same issue with children it's like you're paying a price by sitting there being miserable you might say well the devil I know is better than the one I don't it's like don't be so sure of that the clock is ticking yeah and if you're miserable in your job now and you change nothing in five years you'll be much more miserable and you'll be a lot older but this into the luxury to push you what is meaningful our viewers have mortgages they have children yeah they have payments and loans it's a luxury to pursue because we lack the resources well I don't think I don't remember now I'm not talking about what makes you happy it's a luxury to pursue what makes you happy it's a moral obligation to pursue what you find meaningful and that doesn't mean it's easy it might require sacrifice if you need to change your job - let's say you have family and and and and children and a mortgage you have responsibilities you've already picked up those responsibilities you don't just get to walk away scot-free and say well I don't like my job I quit that's no strategy but what you might have to do is you think well this job is killing my soul all right so what do I have to do about that well I have to look for another job well no one wants to hire me it's like okay maybe you need to educate yourself more maybe you need to update your your curriculum vitae your resume maybe you need to overcome your fear of being interviewed maybe you need to sharpen your social skills like you you have to think about these things strategically if you're going to switch careers you have to do it like an intelligent responsible person that might take you a couple of years of of effort to do properly when you say pursue something meaningful is it to have a location I think it's more important to to have a an ethos an ethic so I have a program for example called the Future authoring program which is a writing program that enables people to develop a vision for their life and then to develop a strategy and so it's based on the idea imagine that and it's an extension of the ideas in the book or at least something along the same lines the first thing that you want to do is figure out imagine you were taking care of yourself like you were someone you cared for which is rule number two by the way essentially then you should figure out well if you could have what you needed and wanted what would it be what sort of friends would you have what would your family relationships look like how would you conduct yourself with your children how would you educate yourself you need to think through how it is that your life could be properly arranged if you had that ability and then you can aim at that and the funny thing is is that if you do pause it a goal of that sort and work towards it you will move towards it the goal will change because you'll learn things along the way but I mean I've dealt with hundreds of people in my clinical and consulting practice and we set a goal we develop a vision and work towards it and it things inevitably get better for people so it's not a luxury it's it's difficult it's a moral responsibility and it isn't happiness it's it's not the pursuit isn't for happiness it's a moral responsibility to pursue what is meaning absolutely so when you know if you watch yourself you say well I had a particularly good day at work and what does that mean well it means that you lost your sense of time right because when you're having not a good day at work it's like first it's one minute to three and then it's 45 seconds 2 3 and then it's 30 seconds that's what school was like for me it was like clique so funny no I went to I went to my daughter's school I used to get in trouble for talking all the time it's probably surprised when I was a kid and and I was bored stiff in school and and so I would misbehave upon occasion out of pure boredom and vote 21 years ago I went to my daughter's school to sit for a class it was about an hour long and I was sitting there and the teacher had all the kids on the floor and was having some of the kids read to the others and some of the kids who were reading couldn't read at all and I had exactly the same experience I was sitting there it was like being it's like being seven years old again I could see the clock going tick tick and I thought you know if I was in this classroom for three days I would misbehave fit 40 years old I would misbehave exactly like I did when I was when I was six well that's no place to be right because that's you don't want to be in a place that's stultifying you don't want to be in a place where there's no challenge you might even quit your job if there's no challenge say well that's a good job it gives you security and you think god I can't stand this it's eating away at my soul it's all security and no challenge so why do you want to challenge because that's what you're built for that's what you're built for you're built to take on a maximal load right because that's what strengthens you and you need to be strong because life is extraordinarily difficult and because the evil king is always whittling away at the structure of the state and you have to be awake and sharp to stop that from happening so that you don't become corrupt and so that your family doesn't become corrupt and so that your state doesn't have to become become corrupt you have to have your eyes open and your wit sharp and your words at the ready and you have to be educated and you have to know about your history and you know have to know how to think and you have to know how to read and you have to know how to speak and you have to know how to aim and you have to be willing to hoist the bubbles of the world up on your shoulders and what's so interesting about that so remarkable and and this is something that's really manifested itself to me as I've been doing these public lectures I've been talking about responsibilities to people which doesn't seem to happen very often anymore and the audience's are dead quiet and I lay out this idea that life is tragedy tainted by malevolence and everyone says yeah well we already always suspected that but no one has ever said it quite so bluntly and it's quite a relief to hear that I'm not the only person who has those suspicions and then the second part of that is the better part and it's the optimistic part which is despite the fact that life is a tragedy tainted by malevolence at every level of existence there's something about the human spirit that can thrive under precisely those conditions if we allow that to occur because as difficult as life is and as horrible as we are our capacity to deal with that catastrophe and to transcend that malevolent spirit is more powerful than than that reality itself and that's the fundamental issue I think that's the fundamental issue of the judeo-christian ethic with its emphasis on the divinity of the individual as catastrophic as life is and as malevolent as people can be and that's malevolent beyond belief fundamentally the person has in spirit the nobility to set that right and to defeat evil and that and that more than that and that the antidote to the catastrophe of life and the suffering of life and the tragedy of life that can drive you down and destroy you is to take on exactly that responsibility and to say well there's plenty of work to be done and isn't that terrible and there isn't anything so bad that we can't make it worse and certainly try very hard to do so but I have it within me to decide that I'm going to stand up against that I'm going to strive to make the world a better place I'm going to strive to constrain the malevolence that's in my own heart and to set my family straight and to work to work despite my tragic loss for the betterment of anything of everything that's in front of me and the consequence of that the immediate consequence of that is that when you make the decision to take on all of that voluntarily which is to stand up straight by the way with your shoulders back to take on that all that on voluntarily as soon as you make that decision then all the catastrophe justifies itself in the nobility of your striving and that's what it means to be an individual thank you when I was 25 or so I probably weighed about 138 pounds I smoked like a pack of cigarettes day I drank tremendous amount of alcohol I was from northern Alberta this rough little town up and northern Alberta called Fairview and you know there were long winters there and my friends were heavy drinkers and most of them dropped out of school by the time they were 15 or 16 went off to work on the oil rigs and you know it was a rough town and we drank a lot I started when I was 14 and you know and so I was I had a lot of bad habits let's say and things that were and I wasn't in great shape physically and I was also still intellectually obsessed by as I am now and so that would have been that would have been in 85 but when I but I decided around that about 85 84 or something like that maybe a little earlier that I was really going to try to get my act together and so I started doing that I you know I first of all I quit smoking well that took a long time because I eventually had to quit drinking to in order to quit smoking and I started working out starting playing sports which I'd never done I was a small kid I mean skipped a grade and I was a small small for my age so sports were never especially team sports were never really a domain of expertise for me although I skied and went trapping with my dad went you know cross-country skiing and camping and all that so but when I went to graduate school I started swimming the first the first physical exercise routine I did I enrolled in a swim sir sighs course I think it was called so it was me and this like really overweight kid and like these 60 year old women and men they could out exercise me like mad it was really embarrassing me and the overweight kid you know we'd be just panting ourselves 3/4 to death at the end of the bloody work out and these 60 year old women who weren't great shape or like you know chatting away as if nothing was going on at all in the pool so that was quite embarrassing and as was going to the weight room you know because when I started I could barely best benchpress 75 pounds and people used to keep coming over and helping me which was last thing I bloody well wanted but certainly needed it I got to the point where I could benchpress 225 pounds I think that was the best I did and I gained about 30 pounds of muscle in a year and a half so that was good thing so like I was kind of a wild man and you know I'm a little bit manic in my in my temperament and so you know I was I was kind of going every direction at the same time so and you know I don't regret that I had a fine time when I was a kid and but I needed really to get disciplined and I had to do it because I was working on these hard problems that you know that I've been discussing with all of you and I've been working on them really you know obsessively since I was probably about 18 maybe even earlier than that got to the point around 25 when I was in graduate school trying to get my PhDs doing all my research like I published 15 papers by the time I graduated with my PhD which was but I think by a fairly large measure the most papers that any graduate student at that time had ever published at McGill I think that's right might have been twice as many or maybe twice as many maybe even three times as many and at the same time I wrote maps of meaning which was a terrible terrible terribly difficult thing to do because I was writing about three hours a day doing that and I couldn't do all that and continue with my misbehavior you know my sort of my what would you say my my my hedonistic my hedonistic my massive hedonistic consumption of alcohol and all of that I just couldn't keep it up and also work seriously on the issues that were at hand so you know I had to stop that's a sacrifice I had to stop messing about and straight my cellphone I I got married while my the woman who's my wife Tammy who I've known since she was 8 years old she lived across the street from me in this little town called Fairview and I was in love with her like the first time I saw her which is quite bloody thing so that's worked out pretty well for me but she came to live with me about the same time and you know we decided jointly to get her act together and we swore that we tell each other the truth which I think she's actually done better than me like I don't think I don't think she's lied to me ever in our entire marriage which is unbelievable you know and it's been so useful because I can really tell her things that we can really talk so I tell you if you want to have a good relationship man you embedded in the truth because if you don't embed it in the truth you don't have a relationship it's it's just lies it's it's a tissue of lies and it will it will dissolve in the chaos as soon as the crisis comes along so the truth is a terrible thing but not not compared to falsehood so all right so let's look at the live chat here you hear the egalitarian clarion call everywhere everything should be equal everything should be equally distributed we should strive for equity it's like wrong especially if you're a conservative wrong what we want are just hierarchies of competence not everyone's a neurosurgeon you know if your father has a brain tumor you probably want a hierarchy of competence for neurosurgeons so you can pick the one that's the best so that he might not die that's what a hierarchy of competence is for for the postmodernist there's no hierarchy that isn't based on power well because they think the world runs on power and that's why they're willing to use power to get what they want because it's the only thing they believe it but a valid hierarchy of competence it's God we need those things man we need the best plumbers we need the best contractors we need the best we need we need the best carpenters we need the best lecturers there has to be a hierarchy of quality not only so that we know who the best are and can reward them properly but so that we can reward them so they keep being the best it's like you know if if you have a great educator if you have a great leader if you have a great thinker you want to reward them so they keep thinking and they keep educating so they can tell you something it's not a reward for their intrinsic being it's a calculated move on your part to suck everything out of them that's valuable as fast as you can that's what a hierarchy of competence is for and the idea that hierarchies of competence don't exist is it's so cynical it's such a pathologically cynical idea and it's actually quite patently untrue because here's an interesting tidbit from the psychological literature let's say you want to determine what the best predictors are for lifetime success in a Western society well what would you hope for how about intelligence there would be a good one let's hope the smart people occupy more positions of complexity right because they're smarter would you want it any other way ok and then so and that's great the number one predictor of accomplishment in Western societies is intelligence so that means the system works what's the number two predictor conscientiousness well what's that it's a trait marker for hard work so hookah hookah Ted smart people who work hard now that doesn't account for every bit of the difference between people in terms of their hierarchical structure because hierarchies aren't perfect they're corrupt people get to the top sometimes because they're psychopathic although believe me a hell of a lot less than you think because a psychopath has to keep moving from place to place because once he reveals himself as deceitful and untrustworthy he has to go find new suckers to fleece so the idea that you know there's no distinction between a CEO and a psychopath it's like that's only made by someone who a knows nothing about Psychopaths B knows nothing about CEOs and C has something fundamental against the entire capitalist structure because it's simply not true corrupt sometimes greedy sometimes short-sighted sometimes running companies that are doing their best to augur themselves into the ground and so you know it's bad people running a dying organization but generally speaking it's not the case our hierarchies of competence are reasonably functional and not only are they functional they're valuable we need to know who the comp people are and we need to reward them and even more importantly we need to tell young people hey there's some hierarchies of competence out there like a thousand of them go be a plumber man but be a good one you know be an honest one be I had a plumber once you know it was the night it was the night before we were putting drywall in our house we were redoing a house and he had put in all the plastic piping you know and I was going to test the joints steel are supposed to be glued together with this pipe glue right and I said I told him I had to test the joints and he said well you don't have to test my joints they never leak and I thought yeah that's okay how about if I test them so I went up on the third floor and filled the pipes with water capping them in the basement like you're supposed to it like half an hour later had two inches of water in the basement there were 30 leaking joints that was the night before the drywallers were supposed to show up so well so he wasn't particularly competent that's the point of that story but even more so he had put a bunch of the plastic pipe outside where the drywall would be so it would have been sticking through the wall so I spent a frenetic night you know sawing through plastic pipe and reglue in joints so that my hope well so that the dryer owners could come in what's the point if you're going to be a plumber man be a good plumber because otherwise all you do is go out there and cause trouble we don't need people to cause more trouble we need people to solve problems you know and so you can be a tradesman and you can be you can make a lot of money as a trades person it's a bloody reliable honorable forthright productive way of making a living and there is a hell of a lot of difference between a working man who knows what he's doing and one who doesn't both in terms of skill and ethics right and you work with someone who knows what they're doing it's a bloody pleasure they tell you what they're gonna do they tell you how much it will cost they go and do it it works and you pay them perfect everyone's happy and that's what happens when you have genuine hierarchies of competence and so you till you listen to these panderers of egalitarian egalitarianism and equity and they fail to recognize completely that there are differences in rank between people it's not such a terrible thing that maybe you wouldn't be a great lawyer like it's certainly possible most people aren't but that doesn't mean there isn't something you could be great at there's lots of hierarchies to a attempt to climb and if you fail in one go try in another but the point is you're still trying to aim for the top and what the hell are you gonna do if you don't try to aim for the top you know flap about uselessly and whine about your life it's not helpful they'll just make you miserable you're not reliable to anyone you can't help out in a crisis it's like so you tell young people and this is another message for conservatives like I don't care what you're gonna do but go out there and make something of yourself for God's sake be an honest person and work and get to the top of whatever it is that you want to get to the top of you know and and and and then stand up for yourself like a respectable human being and be a bit of a light on the world instead of a blight you know and you can tell young people that and they haven't been told that by anyone now and so the young men are so hungry for that that it's it's painful to watch they're so relieved when finalists someone finally comes up and says hey you know you should get your act together a bit discipline yourself see if you can learn to tell the truth concentrate on something for a year or two you could be a bloody world beater they think really that's possible wow that would be that would be interesting that might make life or life worth living it's like yeah it might so why don't you go do it that's what the damn universities were supposed to be teaching people they've forgotten that I went to Harvard a month ago a month and a half you used to teach there and I talked to a bunch of students you know what I told them it's not easy to get into Harvard you know like you're a valedictorian if you're at Harvard and not only are you a valedictorian you're way better than most people at at least two other things or you don't get in and so like it's I don't know what the acceptance rate is like 5% and believe me not everybody applies so it's a very selective school and so why am I saying that it's like these are high quality kids so I told them what I just told you it's like here you are at Harvard like get yourself educated man read some books learn to talk learn to think make yourself into something get the hell out there and make the world that put you here happy that you were put there in that great institution you know and they came up to me afterwards and said god I wish someone would have told us that when we were you know first year it's like Jesus why didn't someone tell the math for God's sake it's supposed to be the greatest university in the world is it so difficult to figure that out well it is if that is what you want to have happen in the university you want to make cringing melt shops who whine about being victims while they're going to Ivy League institutions Jesus it's pathetic [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Motivation Madness

Views: 2,715,897

Rating: 4.8883896 out of 5

Keywords: motivational video, motivation for 2018, motivational video for 2018, motivation, motivational speech, speech, 2018, motivational, success, motivational video compilation 2018, inspirational video, motivational speeches, motivational speech for success, be inspired, motivation madness, jordan peterson interview, life advice, change your future, jordan peterson, jordan peterson motivation, jordan peterson speech, study motivation, mental health, work

Id: dJyz6iK8VXE

Length: 22min 26sec (1346 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 12 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/YOUREABOT]

Jordan Peterson: Go outside and be a triumphant! Me: But how? Jordan Peterson: Do whatever it takes! Ok.