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
• 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

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
• 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

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

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
• 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
• 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

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
• 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)
  • People are spreading memes and videos showing the absurdity of the comparison
  • In response, Jordan is marketing a t-shirt with the “Hail Lobster” logo (a variant of Hail Hydra) and donating all the proceeds to charity
• 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
• 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

Modern Wisdom : philosophy, psychology, self-improvement
Notes By Giorgio Parlato