YOU OWE IT TO YOURSELF IN 2025 - Jordan Peterson Motivation

You say you are morally obligated to do remarkable things. Why? Well, I think partly because life is so difficult and challenging that unless you give it everything you have, the chances are very high that it will embitter you and then you'll be a force for darkness and not good. You know, the fact that life is short and can be brutal can terrify you into hiding and avoiding, but it can also, you can flip that on its head and understand that since you're all in anyways, you might as well take the risks that are adventurous and that's a very good thing to understand and what is also useful to understand in that manner is that there isn't anything more adventurous than the truth. This is something that took me a long time to figure out. Well, you can craft your words to get what you want, you know, and people do that all the time. They craft their words so they can avoid taking responsibility for things they should take responsibility for. They can craft the words to gain an advantage that they really don't deserve. That's what you do when you manipulate and the problem with that, you might say, well, why not do that if I can get what I want? And the answer to that is you aren't necessarily the best judge of what you need and it's easy to be deluded in what you want and that's the sort of delusions that people chase if they chase power. If you decide instead that you're going to just say what you believe to be true, you have to let go of the consequences and you might think, well, I don't want to let go of the consequences because I want to control what's going on, but what you miss then is adventure because if you don't control what's going on, you don't know what the hell is going to happen. And maybe that's exciting and actually there's no doubt about it. And then you have the additional advantage if you're attempting to say what you believe to be true and attempting to act in the manner that you think is most appropriate. That's genuinely you and you have the force of reality behind you. Obviously, that's what you have if you're trying to say live in the truth is you have the force of reality behind you. That seems like a good deal. Then you have the reality and the adventure. So why is that a moral obligation? Well, if you hide and you don't let what's inside of you out and you don't bring into the world what you could bring and you become cynical and bitter, you will start doing very dark things. So you'll start, not only will you not add to the world what you could add, but you'll start being jealous of people who are competent and doing well and work to destroy them. So that's the pathway to hell. The ultimate ideal is also the ultimate judge because the ultimate ideal is something against which you fall far short. And that might be so painful that you can barely stand it. But then what you do is you, two things I suppose, is you lower the ideal and you raise your estimation of your potential. And what do I mean by lower the ideal? Well, if you're comparing yourself to someone or even to a future self and the gap is so painful that it paralyzes you, then you've created a dragon that you don't have the tools to master. And so what you have to do is you have to scale the dragon down to size. And you want to scale the dragon down to size until it's a size that you are willing to move toward, however small that is. Now, you know, if you're here and your ideal is here and that gap is unbearable, then you reduce the gap because you're not going to move from where you are to perfect in one fell swoop. There's going to be incremental steps. So you have to fill in that hierarchy of progression with a high enough resolution representation so that you can start to move forward. And then you should be buttressed. There's another gospel comment that's very interesting. It has to do, it's called the Matthew principle. And the Matthew principle is, to those who have everything, more will be given. And from those who have nothing, everything will be taken. Now, it's brutal because it implies that reality works like this. When you're moving up, you go like this, right? And that's pretty nice. That's a lot better than this. But when you're going down, you go like that, right? It's like downhill, downhill cliff. Okay. So you want to avoid the downhill path. Well, if the uphill path is like this, which is like exponential, let's say, or geometric, then what that means is that it doesn't matter how big the first steps you take uphill are. Even if they're trivial, even if they're shameful in their size, because you're so useless, that if you're disciplined in that, you'll speed up extraordinarily rapidly. And so that's the good news, you might say, is that you can take very small steps, even ones that might be shameful in their size. And you have to admit that to yourself. But once you get the ball rolling, it doesn't roll in a linear fashion, it rolls in a geometric fashion. And this is a really good thing to know, because it can take the sting out of the realization of your own stupidity. It's like, yeah, you know, everybody has their weak sides, let's say, things they're embarrassed about. When I first started going to the gym, I was like, how old was I? 1985, 23. And I think I weighed 135 pounds, and I was about six foot one, very, very thin. I smoked like mad, and I drank too much, like I wasn't in good shape. The first attempts forward I took in the gym, I went to this swimsercise class. It was me and this like really fat guy, young guy, probably not in any worse shape than me, and like seven old women, over 70. And they could out swim me. Like it was pretty damn humiliating. And so I did a semester of that and got myself in somewhat better shape. And then I started to go to the gym to work out, to lift weights. And that was also rough, because, you know, I'd be underneath the bloody bench press, trying to lift 75 pounds off the, off the rests. And you know, some muscle headed bastard would come over and tell me how to do it. And it's like, yeah, thank you. But, you know, it's embarrassing. And lots of times people won't do things like go to the gym, because they're so embarrassed about how they look, or what sort of shape they're in. And it's a pain to start at the bottom. But you start at the bottom where you're weak. And if you want to rectify what's weak, you have to accept the fact that you're at the bottom, and that the first steps are going to be painful. You know, I, it took me about three years, but I stopped smoking. And then I stopped drinking and I gained 40 pounds of muscle in like three and a half years, something like that. I got a lot more physically confident and a lot more coordinated, because working out with dumbbells makes you coordinated, right? Because it exercises all the small ligaments and the tendons. And so my lower body in particular got a lot more coordinated. Then I could dance. So that was better when I was going out dancing, because I did a lot of that in graduate school. But the point of all this is, if you're going to rectify your weaknesses, you have to admit your insufficiency to your own shame. Now, if the gap between you and your ideal is so great that it paralyzes you, you shrink that, right? One of the things I've been talking about in the live shows is your comparison group is incorrect. The fact that, you know, we have the opportunity to sit down and listen to anybody on the planet, right? The best minds, the best athletes, the best thinkers, the most articulate that are alive right now, or listen to the people that have died that were around when video cameras existed. And you can compare yourself to that group. But that's not your comparison group. If you have the impetus to sit down and listen to me and you waffle on for three hours about these deep topics, these interesting ideas, you are so already selected out of the normal group. You're already asking yourself questions that almost nobody else is, right? But because your comparison group are people that are unbelievably high performing, is that really who you're going to compare yourself to? And it's unfair. And the problem that I see is people who have big dreams for themselves and want to do great things, they like to set their sights high, and yet they feel despondent in the comparison. Well, there's a pride in that too, right? I can be, I want to be. Well, or that's who I should be comparing myself to, right? That's the pride. And the pride is something like, I should be that, or even I could be that. It's like, well, maybe you could, but you're certainly not going to do it, as you already pointed out, without the apprenticeship, right? So you could say that the despondency is actually, is in proportion to the to the false pride. Now, I wrote a chapter in, I think, my first book, which was compare yourself to who you are today, not to who someone else is. Sorry, I mangled that to some degree, but you get the point. The proper comparison group for you is you yesterday. Because you can make, first of all, you're the only control group that's appropriate to you. Because you have a certain set of talents and possibilities and limitations and tragedies that are truly unique to you. And so, you might be comparing yourself to someone else on some dimension, but it's not a reasonable comparison, because you don't know what talents they were blessed with, and you also don't know what opportunities they had that you didn't, etc. It's just not a reasonable comparison. It's a lot better to think about who you were, and then to think, well, could you be some, what better, in some dimension? And the positive thing about that is, the answer is almost always yes. Now, you can orient that transformation towards some stellar target, and that's a reasonable thing to do, but that doesn't exactly mean that you should compare yourself to that target group. Aiming at something and comparing yourself to it are not exactly the same thing. Plus, your bloody comparison is also a delusion. You know, that's another thing that you have to understand, is that you look at the person you're jealous of, and really what you're doing is you're looking through a very narrow aperture, at a very thin slice of their life. You're looking at the thin slice of their life that's turning out the best, but you're also looking at a thin slice of their life that's marketed to be the best, right? And you have no idea what the horror of that person's life might be in its totality, and you have no idea if, like, if the deal was, say, you wanted to be Russell Brand. There's a good example. You wanted to be Russell Brand. You wanted to be as charismatic and as famous as he is. Well, your real wish is that you get to have everything Russell Brand has, but none of his problems. Well, come on. I mean, it's no wonder that a vision like that would make you despondent, because it's naive, it's resentful, it's jealous, it's bitter, and it's unreasonable. You have to take the good with the bad. You have to take the bad with the good, and people rarely think about that when they're thinking about, you know, the famous people they think they'd like to be. If you could have what you wanted in this moment and I could deliver it, what would it be? How much of the mess that you see around you would vanish if the mess that you could put straight was put straight? The question always is, why do something? Because doing nothing is easy. You just sit there and you don't do anything. That's real easy. The question is, why would you ever do anything? And the answer to that has to be because you've determined by some means that it's worthwhile. In many ways, that's what you should be doing at university. That's exactly what you should be doing, is trying to figure out who it is that you're trying to be, right? And you aim at that, and then you use everything you learn as a means of building that person that you want to be. And I really mean want to be. I don't mean should be. Even those things are going to overlap. You know perfectly well that if you put your mind to it and you make the proper sacrifices, there are things you can set straight. What advice do you have for a young man in his 20s? Make a plan. Look at what you're interested in. Get disciplined about something. Allow for the possibility that you have something important to contribute to the world, and that the world would be a lesser place without that contribution. Don't be afraid of taking on responsibility. It's where you find what sustains you in your life. You can take on too much responsibility. You have to be cautious in that regard, but that's a less common problem than not taking on enough. A lot of the things that people regard as traps are actually the means to their life. And then the next question might be, well, where should you look for worthwhile things? And one would be, well, you could consult your own temperament. And the other would be, well, look at what it is that people accrue that's valuable across the lifespan. But the other way you do that is by having a little conversation with yourself about as if you don't really know who you are, because you know what you're like. You won't do what you're told. You won't do what you tell yourself to do. You must have noticed that. It's like you're a bad employee and a worse boss, and both of those work for you. You don't know what you should fire yourself and find someone else to be. You have to understand that you're not your own servant, so to speak. You're someone that you have to negotiate with, and you're someone that you want to present the opportunity of having a good life to. And that's hard for people because they don't like themselves very much. So, you know, they're always like cracking the whip and then procrastinating and cracking the whip and then procrastinating. And it's like, God, so boring, such a pathetic way of spending your time. And you know what that's like, because you probably waste like six hours a day. You have to believe that your action has some redemptive possibility, because why would you do it otherwise? And you might say, well, I kind of believe that. It's like, well, that's not good enough. You kind of got to throw yourself all into it. And what's the cost anyways? It's not like you're going to get out of this alive. So you're pretty much all in whether you want to be or not. And maybe if you were voluntarily all in, things would be a lot better than they are. If the world isn't everything that you want it to be, maybe you're not acting the way you should. One of the things people do to buttress themselves against failure is to never let themselves really gain clarity about what they need and want. Let's say you try something, but you only do it half-heartedly. And then you fail and you think, well, I didn't really fail because I held a bunch back in reserve. And so I didn't get what I wanted, but maybe had I been all in, I would have. And so you don't have to upbraid yourself too much for the failure. Now, it's a catastrophic way to live, to sit on the fence, and to not commit. Because instead of risking the possibility of failure, you engage in what's essentially the absolute certainty of failure. Because if you want something worthwhile and difficult, which you probably do if you want to have an adventure and go somewhere, then what's the chance you're going to get it if you're halfway in? You can't be halfway in, but that sort of protects you against failure. Because you can tell yourself, well, if I tried, I could have done it. It's like, you know, you tell yourself that 200 times and your life's over. Okay, so once you get your goal structure set up, you think, okay, if I could have this life, it looks like that might be worth living, despite the fact that it's going to be, you know, anxiety-provoking and threatening, and there's going to be some suffering and loss involved in all of that, obviously. The goal is to have a vision for your life such that, all things considered, that justifies your effort. Okay, so then what do you do? Well, then you turn down to the micro-routines. It's like, okay, well, this is what I'm aiming for. How does that instantiate itself day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month? And that's where something like a schedule can be unbelievably useful. Google Calendar. It's like, make a damn schedule and stick to it. Okay, so what's the rule with the schedule? It's not a bloody prison. That's the first thing that people do wrong. They say, well, I don't like to follow a schedule. It's like, well, what kind of schedule are you setting up? Well, I have to do this, then I have to do this, then I have to do this, you know, and then I just go play video games because who wants to do all these things that I have to do? Set the damn schedule up so that you have the day you want. If I was going to set it up so it was the best possible day I could have, what would it look like?