
April 14, 2021
Jordan Peterson – Take Control Of Your Life (#307) | Modern Wisdom with Chris Williamson
Check out The Modern Wisdom Episode Page & Show Notes
Key Takeaways
- If Jordan Peterson could add a rule to his original list of 42 it would be: “set aside some time for play”
- Seek sustainable improvement
- If you push yourself too hard you destroy the sustainability across time
- “You can’t push yourself any further than you’re capable of going in the long run” Jordan Peterson
- “Unless you take time away from the urgent, you never get on to the important tasks” Chris Williamson
- It is critical to ask yourself what you want
- Your conscience will torment if you don’t move towards your ideals, even if they are implicit
- Instead of punishing yourself for your distance from your ideal, you reward yourself for incremental moving forward
- “Do not make the assumption that inaction has no price” Jordan Peterson
- Taking action now is scary and difficult
- Inaction may seem easy right now
- If you think about the long-term consequences of inaction, it may be much more frightening
Key Books Mentioned
- Jordan Peterson’s books:
- Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief revolutionized the psychology of religion
- 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos was published in 2018 and has sold more than 4 million copies internationally
- His latest book is Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life
Intro
- Jordan B. Peterson (@jordanbpeterson) is a Canadian clinical psychologist and a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto
- Check out Dr. Peterson’s website
- Check out these notes from Dr. Peterson’s appearance on the Tim Ferriss Show
- Host: Chris Williamson (@Chriswillx)
- In this chat, Jordan talks about balancing self-improvement with play, the importance of properly rewarding yourself, shares some more rules for life, and much more
Over-optimization, Play, and Sustainable Improvement
- In self-improvement, there’s a risk of over-optimization
- “If we are unduly absorbed in improving our lives we may forget altogether to live them” Alan Watts
- Social life and play provide us a way to snap out from the over-optimizing mindset
- Rekindling our capacity to play allows us to enjoy the moments where we are not being “productive”
- If Jordan could add a rule to his original list of 42 it would be: “set aside some time for play”
- The value of play
- In rat experiments, playing increased frontal lobe development
- They have to play a lot to develop properly
- The ability to play socially leads to social integration
- A good conversation is a form of play
- A playful mood is a sign that things are going right
- Play is easily inhibited by other motivational states
- In rat experiments, playing increased frontal lobe development
- We don’t need to learn how to play, but to remember it
- “Play is so deeply embedded in human beings it’s one of our primary modes of cognition and adaptation” Jordan Peterson
- It is difficult to find the right balance between play and productivity
- To do this Jordan includes family time, dancing, and going on walks in his day
- Seek sustainable improvement
- If you push yourself too hard you destroy the sustainability across time
- “You can’t push yourself any further than you’re capable of going in the long run” Jordan Peterson
- You also have to push yourself over your limits to know what they are
- If you push yourself too hard you destroy the sustainability across time
The Pain of Unreached Potential
- Every ideal of who you can become is a judge
- Instantly you’re in an inferior position compared to that ideal
- That can be painful
- Instantly you’re in an inferior position compared to that ideal
- Not having ideals deprives you of the powerful pleasure of moving towards a goal
- You need to have an ideal but re-arrange your reward philosophy
- Instead of punishing yourself for your distance from your ideal, you reward yourself for incremental moving forward
- “Incremental improvement, repeated is virtually unstoppable” Jordan Peterson
- Incremental improvements compounds, especially the ones you repeat every day
- Some people have a hard time rewarding themselves for small successes
- It makes them feel pathetic and they punish themselves for it
- It’s ok to admit one’s patheticness and reward yourself for small improvements
You are Only Competing with Yourself
- On social media, we see the highlights of other people’s lives but never see their struggles
- We continuously see our struggles and failures
- You are your only comparison group
- Your life is so peculiar that it’s impossible to compare yourself to someone under all dimensions of life
- We tend to compare ourselves to others under one only dimension
- “You don’t know what burdens the people you are jealous of are carrying” Jordan Peterson
- You may envy someone rich, but you don’t see that by working too much they destroyed all their relationships
- “You don’t know the price you need to pay to be the person that you admire” Chris Williamson
- “You don’t know what burdens the people you are jealous of are carrying” Jordan Peterson
Is Self-Consciousness a Blessing or a Curse?
- Self-consciousness is both a blessing and a curse
- As an experience, self-consciousness is associated with negative emotions
- Highly self-conscious people often experience embarrassment and anxiety
- At the same time, self-consciousness is highly informative about your inadequacies
- You should focus on removing the inadequacy, not the self-consciousness
- It reminds you to not act in counterproductive or anti-social ways
- Too much self-consciousness can get out of hand
- People have a constant voice in their head pointing out their inadequacies
- In therapy, over time, Jordan helps people formulate counter-arguments to the inner critic’s voice
- This voice can be seen as the average criticism you expect from other people, but also the voice of your ideals
- As you develop, this voice becomes more effective at speaking directly to you
- People have a constant voice in their head pointing out their inadequacies
Taking Time for The Important, Knowing What You Truly Want
- Self-consciousness allows us to step back from our thinking patterns and contemplate the direction of our life
- “Unless you take time away from the urgent, you never get on to the important tasks” Chris Williamson
- Simply satisfying your present moment impulses and craving won’t lead to a life well-lived
- Jordan developed a Self-authoring program to help people think about their lives
- Past authoring you write about your history
- You think you know who you are but you don’t because you’re complicated
- Present authoring helps you assess your virtues and faults
- Future authoring makes you think about what you truly want
- Past authoring you write about your history
- It is critical to ask yourself what you want
- Your conscience will torment if you don’t move towards your ideals, even if they are implicit
- If you don’t know what’s your implicit ideal, you’re at its mercy
- “Everybody acts out a myth, but very few people know what their myth is. And you should know what your myth is because it might be a tragedy and maybe you don’t want it to be” Carl Jung
- Even when people say they want to be happy, they don’t really know what that means
- If you deconstruct it, most people just want to avoid suffering
- Your conscience will torment if you don’t move towards your ideals, even if they are implicit
- Questioning your assumptions is very disquieting
- For example, asking yourself whether you are in the right relationship, immediately puts into question all the time dedicated to it
- The more fundamental the assumption you’re questioning, the more uncertainty it will release
- Yet, not questioning them may only postpone the issue and make it worse
More Rules for Life
- Set aside some time for play
- Do not practice what you don’t want to become
- Do not punish what you want to have to happen
- For example, if you get married to someone very attractive, you may find it threatening that others find your partner attractive
- You may end up attacking your partner for manifesting their attractiveness
- When you punish someone for manifesting a desirable virtue it truly hurts them
- We might do this because of envy
- For example, if you get married to someone very attractive, you may find it threatening that others find your partner attractive
Finding The Courage to Grow
- Self-improvement can be scary if people around you don’t want to grow
- It makes you fear you will lose your friends if you change
- Chris discussed a similar question in the podcast with John Vervaeke (check out the notes from that episode)
- You should think about the consequences of not improving
- “Do not make the assumption that inaction has no price” Jordan Peterson
- Taking action now is scary and difficult
- Inaction may seem easy right now
- If you think about the long-term consequences of inaction, it may be much more frightening
- The friends you lose are the ones who don’t want the best for you
- Are those the friends you want in 10 years?
- Can you find new friends?
- Is it possible that your friends will be inspired by you and mirror your improvement?
The Media Revolution
- Legacy media is done
- The big magazines, the newspapers, the TV stations used to have a monopoly on information flow
- “(They) are so dead to people under 30 that it’s as if their death isn’t even noticed” Jordan Peterson
- New media forms have so much potential
- We all have immediate access to high-quality conversations among elite researchers and thinkers
- In legacy media every interview is scripted
- You’re never talking to a person, you’re talking to a corporation
- With podcasts, you can risk exploration of new topics, engage in dialectical thinking, and make the conversation available to millions of people
- Then you can split the conversation into clips and share it on different channels
- “It’s as if you can write a book and sell it by the sentence” Jordan Peterson
- Then you can split the conversation into clips and share it on different channels
- Podcasts also provide a huge potential for politicians to speak directly to constituents in nuanced ways
- They can also be seen as a genuineness test, as long-form interviews can’t be scripted
Additional Notes
- A recent Captain America Comic depicted the Nazi villain Red Skull, in close association to Jordan’s ideas (chaos and order, rules for life)
- There is the idea that the hierarchical structures of society are based on power
- Actually, we see that as children become socialized their tendency to aggression decreases
- Tyranny and oppression are ineffective strategies in our society
- “They are only employed by people who don’t have the sophistication to do things in a better way” Jordan Peterson
- Remind yourself of the shortness of life to add a sense of urgency
- In the past, Jordan calculated he’d get to see his dad more or less 40 more times
- That gave him a strong sense of urgency
- You don’t have that many experiments to run
- In the past, Jordan calculated he’d get to see his dad more or less 40 more times
- Attention is an underrated quality
- It is about seeing what’s in front of your eyes and guiding your actions based on it
- Paying attention to your emotions can be surprisingly informative if you unpack them