Jordan Peterson's Life Advice Will Change Your Future — Most Underrated Speech

The Greeks had the maxim, know thyself. How do we come to know ourselves in terms of our personalities and more importantly potential? Well, one of the first ways to come to know yourself is to understand that you don't. You know, you can learn to kind of watch yourself like you're watching a stranger, but you have to adopt a position. It's a position of radical humility, I would say. Humility in two senses. So one sense would be the humility of recognizing your ignorance. So you have to understand that you don't know who you are. That's not easy to understand because you think you know, but then, you know, you remember you can't control yourself very well. You're not very disciplined. You're full of flaws. Maybe you don't know yourself as it's hard to get low enough to understand how deeply it is the case that you are ignorant about who you are. Now, there's an upside to that too, which also is that you're also ignorant about who you could be. And so the discovery of that, you know, is some reward for the horror of determining who you actually are. And then I would say, well, then you watch yourself and you attend to your conscience and you see, you watch yourself like you're watching a stranger. You watch what you say and you listen. You think, well, what sort of person would say that? And how am I reacting emotionally when I'm communicating in that manner? You know, is that making me feel stronger, weaker? Is it filling me with shame? Is it helping my confidence? Am I laying out a lie? Am I deceiving myself and other people? Am I adopting this personality at parties that is designed to impress and to amuse? And it comes across as nothing but self-centered narcissism. What are my dark fantasies? What are my aggressive fantasies? What is it that I'm willing to do? What am I interested in so that I'll spontaneously pursue it? What do I procrastinate about and why? What am I unwilling to do? What do I think is good? What do I congratulate myself for accomplishing? And what do I berate myself for failing to confront and to implement? Those are all incredibly complicated questions, and you don't know the answers to them. So that's the start. And then in terms of potential, well, you'll discover a little bit more about your potential as you discover who you are, especially the darker parts of yourself, because then you discover your potential for mayhem. There's some real utility in that. It's actually something that strengthens you because the first thing that a realization like that can in fact produce is the ambition to incorporate that dangerousness into a higher order of personality. And that can make you implacable. That can make you someone who can say no when you need to say no. You know, that can make you someone who won't avoid necessary conflict. And so that's unbelievably useful. And so that's one of the potentials that you might discover. You sort of have to detach yourself from your thoughts and what you say. So you've got to assume, you start by assuming that what you say and what you think is not necessarily you. And of course, that's just the case, because a lot of what you think, in fact, most of what you think and most of what you say are the opinions of other people. They're things you've read or things people have told you. And you know, that's a benefit in some ways, because you get all those thoughts that other people have spent a long time formulating. But it's a disadvantage in that it's not exactly you. Okay, so you detach yourself from that. You're no longer your thoughts or the things that you say. Or maybe you're no longer all of them. And now what you're going to try to find out is, which of your thoughts and things that you say are you? And maybe so you can not utilize the rest, or maybe so that you can correct the rest, because they're not representative of yourself as an integrated being. They don't take everything into account. My sense has been that you can tell when you're saying something that's not authentic by feeling out whether or not it makes you weak or strong. Now, you know, sometimes when you're conversing with people, you can say something that embarrasses yourself. Now, Nietzsche said, for example, everyone has perjured themselves at least once in the attempt to maintain their good name. Something like that. It's not an exact quote, but I've got the gist of it right. So maybe you're saying things to impress someone, or you're saying things to remain part of your political group, or your social group, or whatever. Or maybe you have attributes, personal attributes, that might be positive that you're ashamed of, and so you're not going to speak about them. So there's a falseness about your self-representation. Watch for two weeks and see. Make a rule that if you start to say something, and it makes you feel weak, it's hard to describe exactly what that means. To me, what it means is that I can feel things coming apart, sort of in my mid-section, so I think it's an autonomic phenomena. And the subjective sense is of falsehood. It's like I've just stepped off the solid ground and onto something that doesn't support me well, and it feels like a self-betrayal. So that's existential inauthenticity. You can feel it right away. And then the rule is, shut up. If that happens, stop talking. And then feel around and see if you can find some words that you can say in that situation that don't produce that sensation. And so then you can check yourself. You can see. All you have to do is listen, like you would listen to someone else. And you have to feel. You think, do I actually believe that? Is that actually my thought? And really, I'll tell you, what you'll find is 95% of what you say has nothing to do with you. So it's quite shocking to do this, because you'll start to say something, and you'll think, oh, that doesn't feel quite right. It doesn't make me feel solid when I say it. There's something about that, that I'm subordinating myself to something, or hiding in some way. It's very difficult to figure out exactly what you're doing. But you'll find out that almost everything that's abstractly represented, Carl Jung said, people don't have ideas. Ideas have people. And that's something to really think about, because then you want to watch and see what ideas there are floating around in your head, and start to figure out where they came from. Because it's highly probable that they're controlling you, just like a marionette is controlled by the puppeteer. It's very, very similar. The other thing you do to discover your potential is to, well, you challenge yourself. You know, it's like rule four in my book, 12 Rules for Life, is compare yourself to who you were yesterday, and not to who someone else is today. And that's kind of a good way to start this. It's like, well, take a bit of a look at yourself, and think about what's not so good, that you could improve, that you should improve by your own standards, and that you would improve. And set yourself a little goal. Maybe you're not studying at all at your university, or maybe you work, and you've got this stack of paper there, and you haven't looked at that damn stack for a month, and you know that you should be. And you're bothering yourself at night, because you're avoiding that. Think, I've avoided that stack of paper completely for one month. I'm quite a coward when it comes to whatever snakes might be hidden in that stack of paper. How about tomorrow, I just like put that stack of paper in front of me on my desk, and I glance through it for 15 seconds. See if I can do that. It's like, well, you set yourself a goal of improvement. You know, it's a humble goal, because really, are you such a coward that the best that you can bloody well manage after a month of avoidance is 15 seconds of exposure to a stack of paper? You know, it could easily be. You've been avoiding it. You're obviously afraid of it. And so, the situation could be that dismal and dire. And you might think, well, geez, it's no bomb to my ego. It's not fostering the strength of my ego to recognize in myself someone who could only withstand 15 seconds of exposure to that thing I'm afraid of. And so, that's a form of humility too. It's like, there's things you could do to improve, and you know what they are. And there's small steps that you could take, that you might take, that would put you in that direction. And then the question is, are you big enough to take those small steps? You know, are you capable of grappling with the fact that you're fundamentally flawed to the point where you have to break things down into almost childlike steps in order to manage them? And the answer to that is, yeah, you are. And that's the lot of, I don't know if it's a lot of everyone. Most people have things they avoid, you know, and they're afraid of. So, I would say to some degree, it's the lot of everyone. People vary in the degree to which they've conquered that. And you do meet people from time to time who are extraordinarily disciplined. But most of the time, they've got disciplined in exactly this manner, through slow incremental improvement. And then you challenge yourself. It's like, well, could I do this? That would be better. And you find out. And then you think, well, is there something slightly larger and more challenging that I could do? That would be better. And you try it, and you find out. And as you try it, and you find out, generally, you get better at it. And you can take on larger and larger challenges. You know, you take responsibility for yourself. That's part of standing up straight with your shoulders back. It's like, take on the world, man, only at the level that you can manage. You know, when you're ignorant and biased and deeply flawed and immature, it's where everyone starts. You don't want to bite off more than you can chew, but it doesn't mean that you can't wrestle with the part of reality, you know, some part that's small enough so that you have a good shot at victory. And to put yourself together, the first step towards that is to allow yourself to be a fool, right? It's because you don't know what you're doing. You have to admit that. And there's going to be a loss of ego or destruction of ego, arrogant ego that necessarily accompanies that. But you need the loss of that arrogant ego, because it's precisely what's interfering with your movement forward. You know, it's part of the adversarial process, mythologically speaking, that stops moral progress. You're too proud of who you think you are to notice what you're like so that you could change properly. You don't want to sacrifice that part of yourself. It's probably associated with some delusion that helps you maintain a positive, although very fragile self-image, you know, in the absence of genuine effort. It's not to be recommended. You know yourself by watching and paying attention. It's watching like you're a snake, because a snake watches, like, cold-bloodedly, with no emotional reaction, just to see what's there. It doesn't allow, symbolically speaking, doesn't allow what is wanted or desired to interfere with what is observed. So you watch yourself like that, as if you don't know who you are. Well, that's the beginning. And then you challenge yourself, continually, to see how far past yesterday you can push today and tomorrow, and to continually experiment with expanding the domains, not only of your competence, but of your ability to increase that competence. And the upper limit to that is proportional to the moral effort that you put into it. The more that's guided by the highest of all possible visions, right, the alliance with the highest of all possible conceivable good, the more it's accompanied by truth in speech and action, the more you will develop your potential. You also, I suppose, have to be willing to undertake that as an adventure, because it's a hell of a thing to bear that kind of responsibility. It takes a person out of the ordinary. It takes them out of themselves. There's an alienation and an isolation that goes along with that, and a great sorrow, all of that together. But there's deep meaning to be had in it, and there isn't anything better that you can do.