WATCH WHEN YOU FEEL LIKE GIVING UP! - JORDAN PETERSON [INSPIRING]

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'd been 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 sized course I think it was called 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 in 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 press 75 pounds and people used to keep coming over and helping me which was last thing I bloody well wanted but certainly needed 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 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 and 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 would you say 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 myself oh I I got married while my the woman who's my wife Tammy who I've known since she was eight 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 out 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 advice for students here yeah read great books mm-hmm really man you've got this four year period that has been carved out of your lives by society they it's given you an identity like a high quality identity and freedom at the same time and you're not gonna get that again in your life you've got a you've got a respectable identity University student and complete freedom associated with that or as near as you're ever going to get and you've got these unbelievable libraries that are full of the writings of people who are intelligent and articulate beyond comprehension and you know and and you can go there and you can learn all this and you might think well why should you learn it well you learn it to get a job or you learn it to get good grades or you learn it to get a degree and that's all nonsense it's nonsense the reason that you come to University to be educated is because there is nothing more powerful than someone who is articulate and think and speak its power and I mean power of the best sort its authority and influence and respectability and competence and so you come to university to craft your highest skill and your highest skill is to be found in articulated speech and if you're if you're if you're a master at formulating your arguments you win everything and better than that when you win everything everyone around you wins - because to transform yourself into let's consider you consider your transformation to something approximating the logos it means you shine a light on the whole world well there's nothing more exciting to do than that there's nothing better you can possibly do and to think that you're coming to university to be you know trained to have a job it's like great that's a hell of a lot better than being unemployed and covered with cheeto dust while you're snacking away in front of your video game in the basement but it's not it's not a and I don't have anything against video games by the way but it's hardly a triumphant call to to being in the world and that's what university should be calling forth it's like God you people you know I know what Harvard students are like I taught here for five years you people are spectacular you're spectacular your ear you're all capable of being world beaters you transform yourself into something that's articulated and sensible and grounded in history and knowledgeable and wise man you can do anything you want and hopefully anything you want for good because if you have any sense everything you want to do would be for the good because there's nothing more compelling or meaningful or or useful in combating the tragedy of life than to than to struggle with all your soul on behalf of the good and the universities have forgotten that it's why everyone's bailing out of the humanities and they should the humanities is corrupt and they're corrupt because they're not telling students this it's a bloody obvious it's like learn to think learn to speak learn to read it makes you a superpower an individual superpower you have it and I don't understand why that isn't just told to students it's not that hard to understand it everyone wants to hear it's like really I could I can do that like yeah really you could do that and the whole society around you is labored for really thousands of years to provide every single one of you with this spectacular opportunity that you have while you're undergraduates and graduate students here man they're just everyone's just praying that you would come here and manifest everything that you could manifest and that's what you should be doing instead of waving placards and complaining about how you're oppressed for God's sake you see these Yale students complaining about their oppression it's just it just leaves me aghast it's like well we're against the ruling class it's like no no no your baby ruling class members you're young the only reason you're not rich is because you're young you know that's the best really that's them if you look at the 1% even the dreaded 1% you know most of those people are all why well when you progress through life if you're reasonably successful you trade in your promising youth for your wealthy old age but you're still bloody old when you when you trade it would you trade your use for that like if you factor age out of the economic equation things look a lot different well of course older people have more money they have any sense they've been collecting it for their whole life is that somehow unfair it's not unfair unless you want to want to be poverty-stricken when you're 70 and you and you don't want to be poverty-stricken or poverty-stricken when you're 70 so I just don't understand what's happened to the universities I can't believe that you're not told when you come the first day look man you are out you're here on a heroic mission you're going to take your capacity to articulate yourself to levels that are undreamed-of you're gonna come out of here unstoppable you're going to be able to do anything you want it's like that's what you're here for instead you're taught that well you know the world's a pretty oppressive place and you're probably at the bottom of the victim pile and and and and there's and there's there's virtually nothing you can do about it except little deconstruct the patriarchy and it's so we need and so pathetic that that University should be embarrassed that that's what they're peddling to students I'm embarrassed by it you know I've gone on public record telling parents what do you well send your boys to train school because at least they'll learn something useful and that's a terrible thing for someone like me to say because I do believe that the argument that being articulated and educated in the highest possible manner is there's nothing that's better for you and for society and yry of the universities forgotten this well that's postmodern neo Marxism before you you know then the philosophy of intense resentment and oppression and group identity and God it's just panic dr. Pearson I think a lot of students here would agree with you that one of the main purposes of an education at college particularly at Harvard is to develop their sense of articulation their ability to read their ability to create critically think but then what comes after particularly at Harvard there's a big discussion on what is a good life what does it mean to use those skills that we get here and then we graduate what do we do from there stop unnecessary suffering mm-hmm that's what you do you know that that's your calling it's like you say well what do you do after you graduate well if you graduate articulated and powerful there will be people giving you so many opportunities you won't even be able to keep up with them you know and I've worked with caught very very competent people in many different domains in my life hyper competent people and I can tell you some very interesting things about hyper competent people the first thing is they are not selfish and they're not greedy and one of the great pleasures in their lives is to find people who have the capacity to also be hyper competent and to open doors for them as rapidly as they can possibly be open they delight in that because there is there's nothing very few things that are more intrinsically meaningful if you're an accomplished person then to find young people who have the possibility of being accomplished and say hey look here's an opportunity for you it's like go out there man kill it and then they go up there and kill it you think right on here's another opportunity for their nail back to anything no no they're holding their wealth and they're not going to share it with anyone it's like that's absolute complete rubbish and so you don't even have to worry about what you're going to do after you graduate from here if you if you turn yourself into half of what you could be because people will be dying to offer you every opportunity that you can possibly make use of so it's it's it's a moot point that the world is always desperately short of people who can think and speak and and you think well I I won't be made use of first of all you can't say that if you're already figured out who you are they've already figured it out and they're offering you the world on a on a gold platter take it it's yours take it it's like great man put yourself together and deserve it that would be great and that's what everyone wants it's what your parents want it's also what you want you've know it it's what you want it's what men it's what women want from men it's what men want from women it's like for you to be who you could be and then with the highest Faculty of the human being is articulated speech it's it's the divine faculty and there is nothing more powerful than that there's nothing that's even in the same league and so if you if you don't have faith in that then your then your priorities are misplaced and I can't even understand why you wouldn't have faith in that being say Harvard students because look where it's got you already you know you're already sitting on top of the world so make deserve it make use of it all right go out there and fix things up that's what you need to do there's lots of things that need to be fixed up and what you want to do is burden yourself with so much responsibility that you can barely stand and then you'll get stronger trying to lift it up and you'll be won't be asking what should I be doing with my life or what's the meaning of life or any of that will be self-evident its self-evident at minimum you can say there's more suffering in the world than there should be and I could probably do something about that and you can do something about that so go do something about him and then they'll be less suffering in the world and then when you're 80 you can look back on your life and say well you know there's less suffering in the world than there and there would have been had I don't exist and and you don't have to even have a sense of ultimate destiny or even any sort of theistic belief to regard that as a positive good like I think it goes beyond the mere pragmatic utility of addressing the world's ills because I think we do live in a you know in a world that has a transcendent reality as well as the reality that we can detect but even independently a fact it doesn't matter it's like I mean this is part of the reason I like people like Bill Gates is a great example man that guy is he's after five major diseases at the same time right he's trying to wipe out polio he's trying to wipe out malaria yeah exactly he's trying to wipe out malaria it's like well what should you do with your life well you know take a look at Bill Gates and see if you can do something like that and that would be good you know if you take people and I've told you this and you expose them voluntarily to things that they are avoiding and are afraid of you know that they know they need to overcome in order to meet their goals their self defined goals if you can teach people to stand up in the face of the things they're afraid of they get stronger and you don't know what the upper limits to that are because you might ask yourself like if for 10 years if you didn't avoid doing what you knew you needed to do by the depth by your own definitions right within the value structure that you've created to the degree that you've done that what would you be like well you know there are remarkable people who come into the world from time to time and there are people who do find out over decades long periods what they could be like if they were who they were if they said if they spoke their being forward and they'd be get stronger and stronger and stronger and we don't know the limits to that we do not know the limits to that and so you could say well in part perhaps the reason that you're suffering unbearably can be left at your feet because you're not everything you could be and you know it and of course that's a terrible thing to admit and it's a terrible thing to consider but there's real promise in it right because it means that perhaps there's another way that you could look at the world in a number another way that you could act in the world so what it would reflect back to you would be much better than what it reflects back to you and then the second part of that is well imagine that many people did that because we've done a lot as human beings we've done a lot of remarkable things and I've told you already I think before that today for example about 250,000 people will be lifted out of abject poverty and about 300,000 people attached to the electrical power grid we're making people were lifting people out of poverty collectively at a faster rate that's ever occurred in the history of humankind by a huge margin and that's been going on unbelievably quickly since the year 2000 the UN a plan to have poverty between 2000 and 2015 and it was accomplished by 2013 so there's inequality developing in many places and you hear it lots of political agitation about that but overall the the tide is lifting everyone up and that's a great thing we have no idea how fast we could multiply that if people got their act together and really aimed at it because you know my my experience is with people that were probably running at about 51% of our capacity something mean you can think about this yourselves I often ask undergraduates how many hours a day you waste or how many hours a week you waste and the classic answer is something like 4 to 6 hours a day you know inefficient studying watching things on YouTube that not only do you not want to watch that you don't even care about that make you feel horrible about watching after you're done that's probably four hours right there no you think well that's 2025 hours a week it's a hundred hours a month that's two and a half full work weeks it's half a year of work weeks per year and if your time is worth twenty dollars an hour which is a radical underestimate it's probably more like 50 if you think about it in terms of deferred wages if you're wasting 20 hours a week you're wasting fifty thousand dollars a year and you are doing that right now and it's because you're young wasting fifty thousand dollars a year is a way bigger catastrophe than it would be for me to waste it because I'm not gonna last nearly as long and so if your life isn't everything it could be you could ask yourself well what would happen if you just stopped wasting the opportunities that are in front of you you'd be who knows how much more efficient 10 times more efficient 20 times more efficient that's burrito distribution you have no idea how efficient efficient people get it's completely it's off the charts well and if we all got our act together collectively and stop making things worse because that's another thing people do all the time not only do they not do what they should to make things better they actively attempt to make things worse because they're spiteful or resentful or arrogant or deceitful or or homicidal or genocide alors all of those things all bundled together in an absolutely pathological package if people start really really trying just to make things worse we have no idea how much better they would get just because of that so there's this weird dynamic that's part of the existential system of ideas between human vulnerability social judgment both of which are major causes of suffering and the failure of individuals to adopt the responsibility that they know they should adopt and that's the thing that's interesting too is that and like one of the another thing I've often asked my undergraduate classes is you know there's this idea that that people have that people have a conscience and you know what the conscience is it's it's this feeling or voice you have in your head just before you do something that you know is stupid telling you that probably you shouldn't do that stupid thing you don't have to listen to it strangely enough but you go ahead and do it anyways and then of course exactly what the conscience told you was going to happen inevitably happen so that you feel even stupider about it than you would if it happened by accident because you know I knew this was going to happen I got a warning it was going to happen and I went and did it anyways and the funny thing too is that that conscience operates within people and we really don't understand what the hell that is so you might say well what would happen if you abided by your conscience for five years or for ten years what sort of position might you be in what sort of family might you have what sort of relationship might you be able to forge and you can be bloody sure that a relationship that's forged on the basis of who you actually are is going to be a lot stronger and more welcome than one that's forged on the basis of who you aren't now of course that means that the person you're with has to deal with the full force of you and all your ability under your catastrophe and that's a very very difficult thing to negotiate but if you do negotiate it well at least you you have something you have somewhere solid to stand and you have somewhere to live you have a real life and it's a great basis upon which to bring children into the world for example because you can have an actual relationship with them instead of torturing them half to death which is what happens in a tremendous a tremendously large minority of cases well it's more than that too because and this is what I'll close with and this is why I wanted to introduce socialnet since Redding's to you you see because it isn't merely that your fate depends on whether or not you get your act together and to what degree you decide that you're going to live out your own genuine being it isn't only your fate it's the fate of everyone that you're networked with and so you know you think well there's nine billion seven billion people in the world we're going to peak at about nine billion by the way and then it'll decline rapidly but seven billion people in the world and who are you you're just one little dust mote among that seven billion and so it really doesn't matter what you do or don't do but that's simply not the case it's the wrong model because you're at the center of a network you're a node in a network of course that's even more true now that we have social media you'll you know you'll know a thousand people at least over the course of your life and they'll know a thousand people each and that puts you one person away from a million and two persons away from a billion and so that's how you're connected and the things you do there like dropping a stone in a pond the ripples move outward and they affect things in ways that you can't fully comprehend and it means that the things that you do and that you don't do are far more important than you think and so if you act it way of course the terror of realizing that is that it actually starts to matter what you do and you might say well that's better than living a meaningless existence it's better for it to matter but I mean if you really ask yourself would you be so sure if you had the choice I can live with no responsibility whatsoever the price I pay is that nothing matters or I can reverse it and everything matters but I have to take the responsibility that's associated with that it's not so obvious to me that people would take the meaningful path now when you say well nihilist suffered dreadfully because there's no meaning in their life and they still suffer yeah but the advantages they have no responsibility so that's the payoff and I actually think that's the motivation say well I can't help being nihilistic all my belief systems have collapsed it's like yeah maybe maybe you've just allowed them to collapse because it's a hell of a lot easier than acting them out and the price you pay is some meaningless suffering but you can always whine about that and people will feel sorry for you and you have the option of taking the pathway of the martyr so that's a pretty good deal all things considered especially when they are when the alternative is to bear your burden properly and to live forthrightly in the world well what Solzhenitsyn figured out and so many people in the 20th century it's not just him even though he's the best example is that if you live a pathological life you pathologize your society and if enough people do that then it's hell really really and you can read the Gulag Archipelago if you have the four tit fortitude to do that and you'll see exactly what hell is like and then you can decide if that's a place you'd like to visit or even more importantly if it's a light if it's a place you'd like to visit and take all your family and friends because that's what happened in the 20th century if you're hungry it's not a deterministic Drive it's a subpersonality that has a goal and then it has a bunch of action patterns that are going to work in reference to that goal it has a bunch of perceptions that that suit that goal and it organizes your emotional responses around that goal and so to think about it as a personality isn't much it's a much more intelligent way to look at it one other thing about Skinner's rats you know Skinner could get rats to do almost everything and he would reward them with food and so he had a simple rat model but his rats were starved down to 75% of their normal body weight so not only were they not social gregarious rats like rats are because they were isolated they were genetically altered from wild rats but they also weren't as complex as a real rat because they were starving and so but you know a starving rat is a pretty good model of a rat and a rat is a pretty good model of a person but are a lot of our models of simple behavioral learning were based on starving isolated rats so anyways how to think about motivation well think about it from the hypothalamic perspective so we could say one thing that motivation does is set goals we could say that emotions track progress towards goals and I'm gonna use that schema even though it's not exactly right so you say well the motivation determines where you're gonna aim so if you're hungry you're gonna aim at something to eat and then that will organize your perceptions so that you zero out everything that isn't relevant to that task which is almost everything you concentrate on those few things that are going to facilitate your movement forward when you encounter those things that produces positive emotion as you move through the world towards your goal and you see that things are laying themselves out that facilitate your movement forward those things cause positive emotion and if you encounter anything that gets in the way then that produces negative emotion and it can be like threat because you're not supposed to encounter something that gets in the way it can be anger so that you move it away it can be frustration disappointment grief those would if you had a response that's serious to an obstacle it would probably punish the little motivated frame right out of existence you know so you walk down stairs and I don't know the contracting company and set a wrecking ball through your kitchen like that's going to be disappointing you're not gonna keep eating the peanut butter sandwich in the rubble that little frame is going to get punished out of existence and some new goal is going to pop up it instead and you know one of the things we're gonna try to sort out is how do you decide when you've encountered an obstacle that's so big that you should just quit and go do something else because that's not obvious you know and you can you can get into counter productive persistence pretty easily so we don't know how people solve that problem it's a really complicated one so anyways we're gonna work on that scenario your hypothalamus pops up micro goals that are directly relevant to biological survival that produces a frame of reference so it's not a goal it's not a drive and it's not a collection of behaviors it's of little personality and the personality has a viewpoint it has thoughts that go along with it it has perceptions it has action tendencies all of that you can see this in addiction most particularly so one of the things that you find often with people who are alcoholic is they lie all the time and that's because when they're they built a little alcohol dependent personality inside of themselves or a big one it might maybe it's 90 percent of their personality and one of that one of the things that component consists of is all the rationalizations that they've used over the years to justify their addiction to themselves and to other people and so the addiction has a personality you know and so when the person is off well maybe they're addicted to meth or something like that where we know the addiction is more it's more short-term powerful that I would say that an alcohol addiction they'll say anything and the the the words are just tools used to get towards the goal and if they happen to be deceptive whatever it doesn't matter they're just practical tools to get towards the goal and then when you get towards the goal and you take a nice shot of meth or something like that you reinforce all those rationales that you use to get the drug and then the next time you're even a better deceiver and liar so okay so we're gonna say motivations one way of thinking about as they set goals but it's not the right way of thinking about it they produce a whole framework of interpretation and so we're going to think about that framework of interpretation and then emotions emerge inside of that so that's it so the world is framed motivation set goals you could say the world has to be framed so motivation sets that frame whose goals emotions perceptions and actions and then actions track progress so positive emotion says you're moving forward properly towards your goal and if you encounter something you don't expect you stop that's anxiety it's like oh we're not where we thought we were and so we don't know what to do so we should stop because we don't know where we are what we're doing stop frozen and then the more powerful negative emotions like pain they might make you get out of there so emotions forward stop reverse that's your emotions within that motivated frame so and that's another example of how your mind is embedded in your body you know emotions are like they're they're offshoots of action tendencies that's that's the right way to think about it because action is everything fundamentally so what are some basic motivations most of these are regulated by the hypothalamus by the way and that tells you just how important a control system it is the other thing that's useful to know about the hypothalamus is that it has projections going up from it that are like tree trunks and inhibitory projections coming down that are like grape vines so you can kind of control your hypothalamus as long as it's not on too much but if it's on in any serious way it's like it it wins so partly what you do to stop yourself from falling under the Dominion of your hypothalamus is to never ever be anywhere where it's action is necessary right you don't want to go into a biker bar because you might find yourself in a situation where panicked defensive aggression is immediately necessary you probably don't want that you don't want the panic you don't want the terror you don't want the frenzied fight you don't want any of that you don't want to have to run away in absolute panic so you just don't go there and then a huge a huge part of how we regulate our emotions is just by never going anywhere where we have to experience them and so that has very little to do with internal inhibitory control and everything to do with staying where you belong so okay so basic motivations hunger thirst pain pain is not regulated by the hypothalamus that's a different circuit anger / aggression thermoregulation panic and escape affiliation and care sexual desire exploration play and you can kind of break those in you can kind of break those into the classic Darwinian categories too and say well there's a set of motivations that go along with self maintenance gotta be your survival ingested and defensive see I've sort of coded them there so the the self maintenance there's anna jest of set of basic motivations that go with self maintenance you say that's hunger thirst there's a set of defensive motivations paying anger thermoregulation panic and escape and then there's there's motivations that are associated with reproduction affiliation care and sexual desire and then I put exploration and plays sort of outside of that I would say because those two things serve both of these approximately equally

Channel: Mulligan Brothers Interviews

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Keywords: Mulliganbrothers, mulligan brothers, motivational videos, motivational speech, jordan peterson, motivation, jordan b peterson, motivational video, motivational, peterson, best motivational video, jordan, success motivation, you need to learn to think - jordan b peterson, motivational speeches, jordan b. peterson, dr. jordan peterson, jordan peterson speech, motivation for success, morning motivation, inspirational, jordan peterson motivation

Id: XICqcAac9jg

Length: 32min 25sec (1945 seconds)

Published: Wed May 23 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/goodhabitsaccount]

It’s really annoying the slander this guy gets because of his stance on one law when 99% of his content has nothing to do with politics.