How to Maximize Your Chance for Success | Jordan B Peterson

You gotta know that there are differences in intelligence. It's really important. If you go into a job, and you're not smart enough for that job, you're gonna have one bloody miserable time. And you're gonna make life wretched for the people around you, because you won't be able to handle the position. And as you climb hierarchies of competence, the demand on fluid intelligence increases. And so, unless you wanna fail, you don't put yourself in over your head. Well, what's over your head? Well, that's a tricky thing to figure out. I mean, you have to figure that out with intelligence, you have to figure it out with conscientiousness, you have to figure it out with creativity, you have to figure it out with stress tolerance, with agreeableness, because you wanna go into a cooperative environment, and not a competitive one, if you're agreeable. And with neuroticism, you probably wanna keep the stress level of your job relatively low. Because those are all places that you can break down. And most people have at least one significant weakness in their intelligence personality makeup. And you gotta be careful not to place yourself in a position where that's gonna be a fatal flaw. But what you really wanna do, as far as I can tell, if you wanna maximize your chances for both success and, let's say, well-being, is you wanna find a strata of occupation in which you would have an intelligence that would put you in the upper quartile. That's perfect. Then you're a big fish in a small pond. And you don't wanna be the stupidest guy in the room. It's a bloody rough place to be. So, and you probably don't wanna be the smartest guy in the room either, because what that probably means is you should be in a different room. Right? You should look at a place where, if you're right at the top, it's, you've mastered it. It's time to go somewhere where you're a little lower, so that you've got something to climb up for. So, and I can, if you're not hyper-conscientious, for example, you're probably not gonna want a job that you have to work 70 hours a week at. Because you're just not wired up that way. You'd rather have some leisure and, like, more power to you. If that's how you're wired up, there's nothing wrong with having some leisure. But if you're someone who can't stand sitting around doing nothing, ever, then maybe you can go into a job that's gonna require you to work 75 hours a week. And almost all jobs that are at the top of complex dominance hierarchies require very high intelligence and insane levels of conscientiousness. As well, generally speaking, as pretty damn high levels of stress tolerance. You know, because that can knock you out too, because there's gonna be sharp fluctuations in your career, generally speaking, at the higher levels of a structure. And you have to make very complicated decisions, often with very short time horizons. So you have to decide if that's what you want.