12 Rules of Life

12 Rules of Life

Author: Jordan Peterson Created time: April 14, 2021 4:47 PM Page No.: 448 Progress: ✔️

Description

What I am going to to do after reading it?

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Points

• Facts
  • 90 percent of communication occurs using just 500 words.
  • We all have twice as many female ancestors as male (imagine that all the women who have ever lived have averaged one child. Now imagine that half the men who have ever lived have fathered two children, if they had any, while the other half fathered none).
  • Genghis Khan, conqueror of much of Asia, is forefather of 8 percent of the men in Central Asia—sixteen million male descendants, 34 generations later.
  • Anger is one of the most common reasons for crying. Careful analysis of the musculature patterns of crying children has confirmed this.
• You should not overlook the guidelines of your culture. Life is short, and you don’t have time to figure everything out on your own. The wisdom of the past was hard-earned, and your dead ancestors may have something useful to tell you.
• About ourselves
  • Order & Chaos
    • Order is not enough. You can’t just be stable, and secure, and unchanging, because there are still vital and important new things to be learned.
    • Chaos can be too much. You can’t long tolerate being swamped and overwhelmed beyond your capacity to cope while you are learning what you still need to know.
    • If it is not useful it will be forgotten.
  • Rules
    • We are rule generators. Humans can't live without rules.
    • Civilization only arises when some restraining rules and morality are in place.
  • Hierarchy of value
    • A hierarchy of value, where some things are given priority and importance and others are not. In the absence of such a system of value, people simply cannot act.
    • Dominance hierarchy, however social or cultural it might appear, has been around for some half a billion years. It’s permanent. It’s real.
  • Emotions
    • Self-protective anger necessary to defend themselves.
    • Anger when skillfully integrated, the ability to respond with aggression and violence decreases rather than increases the probability that actual aggression will become necessary.
  • About Women
    • Women have been making men self-conscious since the beginning of time.
    • They do this primarily by rejecting them—but they also do it by shaming them, if men do not take responsibility.
    • Since women bear the primary burden of reproduction, it’s no wonder.
  • Ideologies
    • Ideologies are simple ideas, disguised as science or philosophy, that purport to explain the complexity of the world and offer remedies that will perfect it.
    • Ideologues are people who pretend they know how to “make the world a better place” before they’ve taken care of their own chaos within.
    • Ideologues are always dangerous when they come to power, because a simple-minded I-know-it-all approach is no match for the complexity of existence.
  • Meaning
    • We are vulnerable and mortal, pain and anxiety are an integral part of human existence. We must have something to set against the suffering.
    • Meaning itself requires the difference between better and worse. How, then, can the voice of critical self-consciousness be stilled? Where are the flaws in the apparently impeccable logic of its message?
  • Why we are not equal?
    • We are not equal in ability or outcome, and never will be.
    • A very small number of people produce very much of everything. The winners don’t take all, but they take most.
    • The bottom is not a good place to be. People are unhappy at the bottom. They get sick there, and remain unknown and unloved. They waste their lives there. They die there. In consequence, the self-denigrating voice in the minds of people weaves a devastating tale.
    • Life is a zero-sum game. Worthlessness is the default condition.
  • Why you compare yourself?
    • When we are very young we are neither individual nor informed.
    • We have not had the time nor gained the wisdom to develop our own standards.
    • In consequence, we must compare ourselves to others, because standards are necessary.
    • Without them, there is nowhere to go and nothing to do.
    • As we mature we become, by contrast, increasingly individual and unique. The conditions of our lives become more and more personal and less and less comparable with those of others. -
  • Who are you?
    • You think you know, but maybe you don’t.
    • You are, for example, neither your own master, nor your own slave.
    • You cannot easily tell yourself what to do and compel your own obedience (any more than you can easily tell your husband, wife, son or daughter what to do, and compel theirs).
    • You are interested in some things and not in others.
    • You can shape that interest, but there are limits.
    • Some activities will always engage you, and others simply will not.
  • No one is more familiar than you with all the ways your mind and body are flawed.
  • If two people are fighting the third person have massive advantage.
  • We feel hurt and scared and ashamed and disgusted so we can avoid damage.
  • The majority of people who were abused as children do not abuse their own children.
• What not to do?
  • Low self-worth people
    • when people have a low opinion of their own worth
    • When they refuse responsibility for their lives—they choose a new acquaintance, of precisely the type who proved troublesome in the past.
    • Such people don’t believe that they deserve any better—so they don’t go looking for it.
    • They don’t want the trouble of better.
  • How internal critic puts you down?
    • First, it selects a single, arbitrary domain of comparison (fame, maybe, or power).
    • Then it acts as if that domain is the only one that is relevant.
    • Then it contrasts you unfavourably with someone truly stellar, within that domain.
    • It can take that final step even further, using the unbridgeable gap between you and its target of comparison as evidence for the fundamental injustice of life.
  • Consequence of remaining silent.
    • Because the consequence of remaining silent is worse.
    • Of course, it’s easier in the moment to stay silent and avoid conflict.
    • But in the long term, that’s deadly. When you have something to say, silence is a lie—and tyranny feeds on lies.
  • What people do that they don't think they do?
    • I soon divided myself into two parts: one that spoke, and one, more detached, that paid attention and judged.
    • I soon came to realize that almost everything I said was untrue.
    • I had motives for saying these things: I wanted to win arguments and gain status and impress people and get what I wanted.
  • Manipulate the World
    • It’s the specialty of unscrupulous marketers, salesmen, advertisers, pickup artists, slogan-possessed utopians and psychopaths.
    • It’s the speech people engage in when they attempt to influence and manipulate others.
    • It’s what university students do when they write an essay to please the professor, instead of articulating and clarifying their own ideas.
    • It’s what everyone does when they want something, and decide to falsify themselves to please and flatter.
  • What to stop doing?
    • Start to stop doing what you know to be wrong . Start stopping today.
    • Don’t waste time questioning how you know that what you’re doing is wrong, if you are certain that it is.
    • You can know that something is wrong or right without knowing why.
    • Simply stop, when you apprehend, however dimly, that you should stop.
    • Stop acting in that particular, despicable manner.
    • Stop saying those things that make you weak and ashamed.
  • About Children
    • Children who cry more easily, for example, are more frequently bullied.
    • Children can be damaged as much or more by a lack of incisive attention as they are by abuse, mental or physical.
  • About lies
    • For the big lie, you first need the little lie.
    • One of the greatest dangers: apparently everyone is fooled, so everyone is stupid, except me. Everyone is stupid and fooled, by me—so I can get away with whatever I want.
    • If you look close enough, the biggest of lies is composed of smaller lies, and those are composed of still smaller lies—and the smallest of lies is where the big lie starts. It
    • Broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.
    • During such a conversation, which often tends toward the ideological, the speaker endeavours to
      • Denigrate or ridicule the viewpoint of anyone holding a contrary position.
      • Use selective evidence while doing so and, finally.
      • Impress the listeners (many of whom are already occupying the same ideological space) with the validity of his assertions.
  • Problem with Man & Women
    • Men are often accused of wanting to “fix things” too early on in a discussion.
    • Women are often intent on formulating the problem when they are discussing something, and they need to be listened to—even questioned—to help ensure clarity in the formulation.
    • Too-early problem-solving may also merely indicate a desire to escape from the effort of the problem-formulating conversation.)
  • If the person seeking help did not want to improve. It was impossible to convince someone to change for the better. The desire to improve was, instead, the precondition for progress.
  • The poor and stressed always die first, and in greater numbers. They are also much more susceptible to non-infectious diseases, such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease. When the aristocracy catches a cold, as it is said, the working class dies of pneumonia.
  • Sometime people misery is your attempt to prove the world’s injustice, instead of the evidence of there own sin, your own missing of the mark, your conscious refusal to strive and to live.
  • Don’t tell yourself, “I shouldn’t need to do that to motivate myself.” What do you know about yourself? You are, on the one hand, the most complex thing in the entire universe, and on the other, someone who can’t even set the clock on your microwave.
  • Person’s private trouble cannot be solved by a social revolution.
  • Insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.
  • You should never sacrifice what you could be for what you are.
  • You should never give up the better that resides within for the security you already have—and certainly not when you have already caught a glimpse, an undeniable glimpse, of something beyond.
• What to do to change or improve the world and yourself?
  • About Truth
    • If you ever wonder how perfectly ordinary, decent people could find themselves doing the terrible things the gulag camp guards did, you now have your answer. By the time no seriously needed to be said, there was no one left capable of saying it.
    • If you betray yourself, if you say untrue things, if you act out a lie, you weaken your character.
    • Insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.
    • You are telling the truth, instead of manipulating the world.
    • You no longer have to be envious, because you no longer know that someone else truly has it better. You no longer have to be frustrated, because you have learned to aim low, and to be patient.
    • Do not lie especially to yourself.
    • You are less concerned with the actions of other people, because you have plenty to do yourself.
    • Attend to the day, but aim at the highest good.
    • A man’s worth was determined by how much truth he could tolerate.
    • Truth builds edifices that can stand a thousand years.
  • About Self
    • Why to take care of yourself?
      • You are important to other people, as much as to yourself.
      • You have some vital role to play in the unfolding destiny of the world.
      • You are, therefore, morally obliged to take care of yourself.
      • You should take care of, help and be good to yourself the same way you would take care of, help and be good to someone you loved and valued.
      • The better ambitions have to do with the development of character and ability, rather than status and power.
    • Steps to improve yourself.
      • Making your life better means adopting a lot of responsibility, and that takes more effort and care than living stupidly in pain and remaining arrogant, deceitful and resentful.
      • Quit drooping and hunching around.
      • Speak your mind.
      • Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them—at least the same right as others.
      • Walk tall and gaze forthrightly.
      • Dare to be dangerous.
      • Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural pathways desperate for its calming influence.
    • Improvement Steps
      • Start with yourself.
      • Take care with yourself.
      • Define who you are.
      • Refine your personality.
      • Choose your destination and articulate your Being.
      • You could begin by treating yourself as if you were someone you were responsible for helping.
    • How to know yourself?
      • You can only find out what you actually believe (rather than what you think you believe) by watching how you act.
      • You simply don’t know what you believe, before that. You are too complex to understand yourself.
      • It takes careful observation, and education, and reflection, and communication with others, just to scratch the surface of your beliefs.
  • What to do to not be in a resentful, vengeful and cruel?
    • You must determine where you are going, so that you can bargain for yourself, so that you don’t end up resentful, vengeful and cruel.
    • You have to articulate your own principles, so that you can defend yourself against others’ taking inappropriate advantage of you, and so that you are secure and safe while you work and play.
    • You must discipline yourself carefully. You must keep the promises you make to yourself, and reward yourself, so that you can trust and motivate yourself.
    • You need to determine how to act toward yourself so that you are most likely to become and to stay a good person.
  • Why life is a game?
    • To begin with, there is not just one game at which to succeed or fail.
    • There are many games and, more specifically, many good games—games that match your talents, involve you productively with other people, and sustain and even improve themselves across time.
    • Lawyer is a good game. So is plumber, physician, carpenter, or schoolteacher.
    • The world allows for many ways of Being.
    • If you don’t succeed at one, you can try another.
  • How to win?
    • Winning at everything might only mean that you’re not doing anything new or difficult. You might be winning but you’re not growing, and growing might be the most important form of winning.
    • To realize that the specifics of the many games you are playing are so unique to you, so individual, that comparison to others is simply inappropriate.
    • Perhaps you are overvaluing what you don’t have and undervaluing what you do. There’s some real utility in gratitude.
    • It’s also good protection against the dangers of victimhood and resentment.
  • Good Posture & Bad Posture
    • If you slump, shoulders forward and rounded, chest tucked in, head down, looking small, defeated and ineffectual (protected, in theory, against attack from behind)—then you will feel small, defeated and ineffectual.
    • If you start to straighten up, then people will look at and treat you differently.
  • To improve your life aim small.
    • Aim lower. Search until you find something that bothers you, that you could fix, that you would fix, and then fix it. That might be enough for the day.
    • You don’t want to shoulder too much to begin with, given your limited talents, tendency to deceive, burden of resentment, and ability to shirk responsibility.
    • Thus, you set the following goal: by the end of the day, I want things in my life to be a tiny bit better than they were this morning.
    • Then you do what you have decided to do, even if you do it badly.
  • How you deal with the overwhelming complexity of the world?
    • You ignore it, while you concentrate minutely on your private concerns.
    • You see things that facilitate your movement forward, toward your desired goals.
    • You detect obstacles, when they pop up in your path.
    • You’re blind to everything else (and there’s a lot of everything else—so you’re very blind).
    • And it has to be that way, because there is much more of the world than there is of you.
    • You must shepherd your limited resources carefully. Seeing is very difficult, so you must choose what to see, and let the rest go.
  • What should you do, when you don’t know what to do?
    • Tell the truth.
    • Taking the easy way out or telling the truth—those are not merely two different choices.
  • Listening to other people
    • You can be pretty smart if you can just shut up.
    • Two people tell each other the truth—and both listen.
    • I routinely summarize what people have said to me, and ask them if I have understood properly.
    • If you listen, instead, without premature judgment, people will generally tell you everything they are thinking—and with very little deceit. People will tell you the most amazing, absurd, interesting things.
    • Very few of your conversations will be boring.
    • When a genuine listening conversation is taking place, one person at a time has the floor, and everyone else is listening.
    • The person speaking is granted the opportunity to seriously discuss some event, usually unhappy or even tragic.
  • What saves is the willingness to learn from what you don’t know .
  • Don't blame other for your problem you have to first solve your own problems first then go and solve the world problems.
  • Encourage people to credit themselves and those around them for acting productively and with care, as well as for the genuine concern and thoughtfulness they manifest towards others.
  • If we wish to take care of ourselves properly, we would have to respect ourselves.
  • Small wins can add up to big and small loses will add up to bigger loser.
  • No simple carbohydrates, no sugars, in the morning as they are digested too rapidly, and produce a blood-sugar spike and rapid dip.
  • If one wants to live a full life, one first sets one’s own house in order; and only then can one sensibly aim to take on bigger responsibilities.
  • Discuss your likes and dislikes with regards to your children with your partner or, failing that, a friend.
  • If you’re going to insist on bending the world to your way, you better have your reasons. If you’re going to stand your ground, you better have your reasons.
• Relationship
  • Why we save people?
    • You are saving someone because you’re a strong, generous, well-put-together person who wants to do the right thing.
    • But it’s also possible—and, perhaps, more likely—that you just want to draw attention to your inexhaustible reserves of compassion and good-will.
    • Or maybe you’re saving someone because you want to convince yourself that the strength of your character is more than just a side effect of your luck and birthplace.
    • Or maybe it’s because it’s easier to look virtuous when standing alongside someone utterly irresponsible.
  • Why not help some people?
    • Before you help someone, you should find out why that person is in trouble.
    • You shouldn’t merely assume that he or she is a noble victim of unjust circumstances and exploitation.
    • If you buy the story that everything terrible just happened on its own, with no personal responsibility on the part of the victim, you deny that person all agency in the past (and, by implication, in the present and future, as well). In this manner, you strip him or her of all power.
  • Why people stay in unhealthy relationship?
    • If I stay in an unhealthy relationship with you, perhaps it’s because I’m too weak-willed and indecisive to leave, but I don’t want to know it.
    • I continue helping you, and console myself with my pointless martyrdom. Maybe I can then conclude, about myself, “Someone that self-sacrificing, that willing to help someone—that has to be a good person.” Not so.
    • It might be just a person trying to look good pretending to solve what appears to be a difficult problem instead of actually being good and addressing something real.
  • Bad Friends
    • If you have a friend whose friendship you wouldn’t recommend to your sister, or your father, or your son, why would you have such a friend for yourself?
    • They will become jealous when you succeed, or do something pristine.
    • They will withdraw their presence or support, or actively punish you for it.
    • They will override your accomplishment with a past action, real or imaginary, of their own.
    • Maybe they are trying to test you, to see if your resolve is real, to see if you are genuine. But mostly they are dragging you down because your new improvements cast their faults in an even dimmer light.
    • Don’t think that it is easier to surround yourself with good healthy people than with bad unhealthy people. It’s not.
  • Good Friends
    • Friends make to informed of your shortcomings.
    • You might say: out of loyalty. Well, loyalty is not identical to stupidity. Loyalty must be negotiated, fairly and honestly.
    • Friendship is a reciprocal arrangement.
    • 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.
    • It’s appropriate and praiseworthy to associate with people whose lives would be improved if they saw your life improve.
    • If you surround yourself with people who support your upward aim, they will not tolerate your cynicism and destructiveness.
    • They will instead encourage you when you do good for yourself and others and punish you carefully when you do not.
    • This will help bolster your resolve to do what you should do, in the most appropriate and careful manner.
    • It requires strength and daring to stand up near such a person. Have some humility. Have some courage. Use your judgment, and protect yourself from too-uncritical compassion and pity.
  • A child who can’t share—who can’t trade—can’t have any friends, because having friends is a form of trade. You need to trust your friends before they trust you. You need to give love before you receive it.
  • When someone does something you are trying to get them to do, reward them.
• About Culture
  • You need good, even great, reasons to ignore or defy general, public opinion.
  • You should do what other people do, unless you have a very good reason not to.
  • The crowd is by no means always right, but it’s commonly right. It’s typically right. If you say something that takes everyone aback, therefore, you should reconsider what you said.

Meaning

Thinking - Thinking is an internal dialogue between two or more different views of the world and with the people you disagree with.

Psychotherapy - Psychotherapy is genuine conversation. Genuine conversation is exploration, articulation and strategizing.

Advice - Advice is what you get when the person you are talking to wants to revel in the superiority of his or her own intelligence. If you weren’t so stupid, after all, you wouldn’t have your stupid problems.

Ideologies - are simple ideas, disguised as science or philosophy, that purport to explain the complexity of the world and offer remedies that will perfect it. Ideologues are people who pretend they know how to “make the world a better place” before they’ve taken care of their own chaos within.

Stories

There is the conversation, for example, where one participant is speaking merely to establish or confirm his place in the dominance hierarchy. One person begins by telling a story about some interesting occurrence, recent or past, that involved something good, bad or surprising enough to make the listening worthwhile. The other person, now concerned with his or her potentially substandard status as less-interesting individual, immediately thinks of something better, worse, or more surprising to relate. This isn’t one of those situations where two conversational participants are genuinely playing off each other,

Therapists with a little second-hand knowledge of Freud often axiomatically assume that a distressed adult in their practice must have been subject to childhood sexual abuse. Why else would they be distressed? So, they dig, and infer, and intimate, and suggest, and overreact, and bias and tilt. They exaggerate the importance of some events, and downplay the importance of others.

A THREE-YEAR-OLD boy trail his mother and father slowly through a crowded airport. He was screaming violently at five-second intervals—and, more important, he was doing it voluntarily. He wasn’t at the end of his tether. As a parent, I could tell from the tone. He was irritating his parents and hundreds of other people to gain attention. Maybe he needed something. But that was no way to get it, and his parents should have let him know that. You might object that “perhaps they were worn out, and jet-lagged, after a long trip.” But thirty seconds of carefully directed problem-solving would have brought the shameful episode to a halt. More thoughtful parents would not have let someone they truly cared for become the object of a crowd’s contempt.

Someone supervising an exceptional team of workers, all of them striving towards a collectively held goal; imagine them hardworking, brilliant, creative and unified. But the person supervising is also responsible for someone troubled, who is performing poorly, elsewhere. In a fit of inspiration, the well-meaning manager moves that problematic person into the midst of his stellar team, hoping to improve him by example. What happens?—and the psychological literature is clear on this point. 64 Does the errant interloper immediately straighten up and fly right? No. Instead, the entire team degenerates. The newcomer remains cynical, arrogant and neurotic. He complains. He shirks. He misses important meetings. His low-quality work causes delays, and must be redone by others. He still gets paid, however, just like his teammates. The hard workers who surround him start to feel betrayed. “Why am I breaking myself into pieces striving to finish this project,” each thinks, “when my new team member never breaks a sweat?” The same thing happens when well-meaning counsellors place a delinquent teen among comparatively civilized peers. The delinquency spreads, not the stability. 65 Down is a lot easier than up.

Resources

• Nicomachean Ethics — Aristotle
• Orphan X — Gregg Hurwitz
• Notes from Underground — Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Beyond Good and Evil — Friedrich Nietzsche
• Lord of the Flies — William Golding
• The Gulag Archipelago — Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Quote

The Word that produces order from Chaos sacrifices everything.

— Jordan Peterson

The first of these rules is that the game is important. If it wasn’t important, you wouldn’t be playing it.

— Jordan Peterson

If you cannot bring peace to your household, how dare you try to rule a city?

— Jordan Peterson

Person’s private trouble cannot be solved by a social revolution,

— Jordan Peterson

To journey happily may well be better than to arrive successfully….

— Jordan Peterson

Don’t overestimate your self-knowledge.

— Jordan Peterson

life doesn’t have the problem. You do

— Jordan Peterson

Talking yourself into irrelevance is not a profound critique of Being. It’s a cheap trick of the rational mind.

— Jordan Peterson

You are not morally obliged to support someone who is making the world a worse place.

— Jordan Peterson

To fail, you merely have to cultivate a few bad habits.

— Jordan Peterson

Faulty tools produce faulty results. Repeated use of the same faulty tools produces the same faulty results.

— Jordan Peterson

He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.

— Friedrich Nietzsche

Being was understood as a place of action, not a place of things.

— Jordan Peterson

Allow others to find strength alongside you when they would otherwise be overwhelmed with despair.

— Jordan Peterson

Over a hundred million people were murdered in the name of utopia.

— Jordan Peterson