12 Rules for Life
By Jordan PetersonRule 1: Stand up straight with your shoulders back
Confidence
Lobsters battle for mating rights and in the aftermath of loosing battle, no matter how aggressive it was before, the lobster become unwilling to fight further, even against other losers. The lobsters will sometimes loose confidence for days. In severe cases, the dominant lobsters brain essentially dissolved and it grows a new one more suited to its new subordination.
Anyone who has experienced a painful transformation after a serious defeat in romance or career may be able to empathize with the once successful crustacean.
Anxiety
It does not matter so much what time you go to bed at but waking up at the same time each morning is very important. Anxiety and depression cannot be easily treated if the sufferer has unpredictable daily routines. The systems that mediate negative emotions are tightly tied to the circadian rhythms. Eat a high fat and protein breakfast after waking.
Alcohol
During a hangover, anxiety levels generally increase after they had been suppressed during intoxication. A hangover is a withdrawal from alcohol which causes the anxiety system to hyper respond.
Running Away
Our anxiety systems are very practical. They assume that anything you run away from is dangerous. With the proof being that you ran away.
Standing Up For Yourself
The ability to respond with aggression decreases rather than decreases the probability that actual aggression will be necessary. If you say no early on in an oppressing interaction and you mean what you say then you limit the scope of oppression.
Rule 2: Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping
Strengthen the individual. Start with yourself. Take care of yourself. Define who you are. Refine your personality. Choose you destination and articulate your being.
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“He wholes life has a why, can bear almost any how.” - Nietzsche*
Chaos and Order
You want to have one foot in that which you have mastered and understood and the other where you are currently exploring and mastering. This is where the terror of existence is under control, this is where meaning is to be found.
Rule 3: Make friends with people who want the best for you
When you place a delinquent teen amongst comparatively civil peers to reform the delinquent, the delinquency spreads, not the civility.
When you and the people you surround yourself with people who aren’t doing shit, you normalize not doing shit with your life and make taking the easy path. You normalize indulgence and sacrificing your future for today.
If you have a friend or friendship you wouldn’t recommend to your sister, or your father, or your son, why would you let yourself have such a friend. You should choose people who want things to be better, not worse. It’s a good thing, not a selfish thing to choose people who are good for you. If you surround yourself with people who support your upward aim they will not tolerate your cynicism and destructiveness.
People who are not aiming up will do the opposite, they will drag you down because your improvements cast their faults in an even dimmer light.
Rule 4: Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today
You can either use tyrannical will to force yourself to do things and cause anger and resentment or your can entice yourself into sustainable, productive activity. Do you ask yourself what you want? Do you negotiate fairly with yourself?
Depending on your state of mind you may have to make deals with yourself to get the things you need to get done, done. But if you make a deal with yourself, you better keep it on both sides. You should often ask yourself, what bit of chaos in my life might I eradicate in my office or kitchen that will set the stage for a better play.
Beliefs
A properly disciplined person is a like a well forged tool. But a well forged tool still needs a purpose. You must have a vision for the future.
It is impossible to every truly know what you believe, the only way to find out what you actually believe is by watching how you act.
Rule 5: Do lot let your children do anything that makes you dislike them
A patient adult can always defeat a child.
Old age and treachery can always overcome youth and skill.
Often children will cry out of anger, you can tell the difference between sad crying and anger crying by studying the facial expression. Anger crying is often an act of dominance and should be dealt with as such.
Operant Conditioning
- Figure out what you want.
- Watch the people around you like a hawk.
- Whenever you see anything a bit more like what you want, swoop in and deliver a reward.
Example: You want your reserved daughter to talk more. On morning over breakfast, she shares some anecdote about school. Pay attention. That’s the rewards. Stop doing whatever you are doing and listen.
No
No only means anything when it means, “If you continue to do that, something you will not like will happen to you.” If you allow it to mean nothing, children learn that all adults are ineffectual and weak which is a particularly bad lesson to learn since the child is destined to become and adult. Why would the child want to grow up at all?
Rule 6: Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world
The questions you should be asking yourself are:
- Have you taken full advantage of the opportunities offered to you?
- Are you working hard on your career or are you letting bitterness and resentment hold you back or drag you down?
- Have you made peace with your brother?
- Do you have habits that are destroying your health and well-being?
- Are you truly shouldering your responsibilities?
- Have you said what you need to say to your friends and family members?
- Are there things that you know you could do that would make things around you better?
Rule 7: Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)
Sacrifice will improve the future. So the question becomes, what would be the largest, most effective–most pleasing–of all possible sacrifices? How good might the best possible future be, if the most effective sacrifice could be made?
What is the highest sacrifice that can be made? something intensely personal and painful to give up.
On Making Friends
Benjamin Franklin once suggested that newcomers to a new neighborhood should ask new neighbors to do them a favor, on the maxim: He that has once don you a kindness will be more ready to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged.
Wanting
You don’t want to be striving or grasping at things in life. When you do, you loose your power and your sovereignty. You can rise above worldly desires by cultivating pure attention.
He who contrives defeats his purpose; and he who is grasping, loses. The sage does not contrive to win, and therefore is not defeated; he is not grasping, do does not loose.
Rule 8: Tell the truth–or, at least, don’t lie
If you say untrue things to win over peoples favour or to frame the world in a manner that is more suitable to you own desires, then you are not a real person. You are fake. Start by telling the truth, or at least not lying.
If you will not reveal yourself to other, you cannot reveal yourself to yourself. This means that you will suppress who you are and stifle you potential. This is a biological and conceptual truth.
Researchers have found that new genes in the central nervous system turn themselves on when and organism is placed in a new situation. These genes code for the building blocks of the brain. This means a lot of what you could become is still nascent and will not be called forward by stasis. You have to say something, go somewhere, and do things.
Each time you say untrue things, betray yourself or act out a lie, you weaken your character.
Motherhood
The inability of a son to thrive is exploited by a mother bent on shielding her child from all disappointment and pain. She play’s the martyr, doomed to support her sone, and garners nourishing support from friends. He broods in his basement, imagining himself oppressed. He fantasizes about the havoc he might wreak on the world that rejected him for his cowardice, awkwardness and inability.
Goals
Set you ambitions, even if you are uncertain about what they should be. The better ambitions have to do with character and ability rather than status and power. Knowing this, tie a rope to a boulder. Pick up the great stone and heave it in front of you. Watch and observe as you move forward. Articulate your experience as clearly and carefully to yourself and others as you possibly can. In this manner, you will learn to proceed more effectively and efficiently towards you goal. And, while you are doing this, do not lie. Especially to yourself.
Living with the Truth
As you continue to live in accordance with the truth, as it reveals itself to you, you will have to accept and deal with the conflicts that mode of Being will generate. If you do so, you will continue to mature and become more responsible in small and large ways. You will ever more closely approach your newer and more wisely formulated goals, and become even wiser in their formulation. You will stop oscillating wildly and walk ever more directly towards the good.
Rule 9: Assume the person you are listening to might know something you don’t
People think they think, but it’s not true. It’s most self-criticism that passes for thinking. True thinking is rare–just like true listening. Thinking is listening to yourself. It’s difficult. To think you have to be at least two people at the same time. Then you have to let those people disagree. Thinking is an internal dialogue between two or more different views of the world.
When you listen properly to another person, it’s as if you are listening to yourself. You are describing how you are responding to the new information they have imparted, what new things it has made appear within you and how it has changed you presuppositions. This has the same effect on them. In this manner, you both move towards somewhere newer and broader and better. You both change as you let your old presuppositions die, as you shed your skins and emerge renewed.
Dealing with Disagreement
Next time you find yourself in a dispute try this: Stop the discussion for a moment and institute this rule: “Each person can speak for himself only after he has first restated the ideas and feelings of the previous speaker accurately to the speaker’s satisfaction.
By restating the speaker’s ideas you can find find value from them and learn from the process of summarizing their view and you will be able to properly hone your position against them. This should lead to an overall, more productive discussion.
Rule 10: Be precise in your speech
When we don’t talk about the problems in our relationships, they become like a dragon then grows when you deny its existence. Eventually the dragon grows so large is rips your house from it’s foundation and forces you to deal with it. But the dragon would never have grown to such a size had you had the small conversations required to keep it at bay.
Communication requires admission of terrible emotions and often leads to difficult conversations, but never underestimate the power of sins of omission.
Marriage
There is little in a marriage that is so little it is not worth fighting about. You are bound to this person by oath, in theory forever. The oath exists so you take it seriously. Do you really want the same petty annoyances tormenting you every single day of your marriage for the decades of its existence?
Rule 11: Do not bother your children when they are skateboarding
Any hierarchy creates winners and losers. And
- The collective pursuit of any valued goal produces a hierarchy (as some will be better and some worse at the pursuit).
- It is the pursuit of goals that in large part lends life it’s meaning. The price we pay for involvement in things that bring us meaning is the formation of hierarchies and the inevitable difference in outcomes for participants.
Post-Modern Logic
Gender is constructed, but and individual who desires gender re-assignment surgery is to be unarguable considered a man trapped inside a woman’s body (or vice versa). The fact that both of these cannot logically be tree, simultaneously, is just ignored (or rationalized away with another appalling post modern claim: that logic itself–along with the technique of science–is merely part f the patriarchal system.)
Rule 12: Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street
If you pay careful attention, even on a bad day you amy be fortunate enough to find something that reminds your of the absurdity and the beauty of existence.
When you go for a walk and your head is spinning a cat will show up and if you pay attention to it then you get a reminder for just fifteen seconds that the wonder of Being might make up for the ineradicable suffering that accompanies it.
CODA
Arguments
When you find yourself trapped in an emotional, angry and anxious argument, try and separate yourselves briefly. Sit alone, calm down, and ask yourself, what had we each done to contribute to the situation? However small, however distant…you have each made some error. Then reunite and tell each other all they ways in which you we wrong.
Orientation
Orient yourself properly. Then–and only then–concentrate on the day. Set your sights at the good, the beautiful and the true and then focus pointedly and carefully on the concerns of each moment. Aim continually at Heaven while you work diligently on Earth. Attend fully to the future in the manner, while attending fully to the present. Then you have the best chance of perfecting both.
Enemies
What does the bible verse about loving your enemies really mean? It means learn from the success of your enemies; listen to their critiques so that you can glean from their opposition whatever fragment of wisdom you might incorporate to your betterment; adopt as your ambition the creation of a world in which those who work against you see the light and wake up and succeed, so that the better at which you are at aiming can encompass them tool