DESIGN THE LIFE YOU WANT – Jordan Peterson's Advice for Success
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First thing I would say is, well you should be afraid of taking risks and pursuing something meaningful. But you should be more afraid of staying where you are if it's making you miserable. It's like the first thing you want to do is dispense with the idea that you get to have any permanent security outside of your ability to contend and adapt. It's the same issue with children. It's like,

You're paying a price by sitting there being miserable. You might say, well, the devil I know is better than the one I don't. It's like, don't be so sure of that. The clock is ticking. And if you're miserable in your job now and you change nothing in five years, you'll be much more miserable and you'll be a lot older. It's a luxury to pursue what makes you happy. It's a moral obligation to pursue what you find meaningful.

And that doesn't mean it's easy. It might require sacrifice. If you need to change your job too, let's say you have a family and children and a mortgage, you have responsibilities.

You've already picked up those responsibilities. You don't just get to walk away scot-free and say, well, I don't like my job. I quit. That's no strategy. But what you might have to do is you think, well, this job is killing my soul. All right, so what do I have to do about that? Well, I have to look for another job. Well, no one wants to hire me. It's like, okay, maybe you need to educate yourself more. Maybe you need to update your curriculum vitae, your resume. Maybe you need to overcome your fear of being interviewed.

Maybe you need to sharpen your social skills. You have to think about these things strategically. If you're going to switch careers, you have to do it like an intelligent, responsible person. That might take you a couple of years of effort to do properly. I've dealt with hundreds of people in my clinical and consulting practice, and we set a goal, we develop a vision, and work towards it, and things inevitably get better for people.

So, it's not a luxury, it's difficult. It's a moral responsibility and it isn't happiness. The pursuit isn't for happiness. You need to know who you are so that you understand your armament and bolster yourself in respect to your limitations. You need to know where you are going so that you can limit the extent of chaos in your life, restructure order and bring the divine force of hope to bear on the world.

You must determine where you are going so that you can bargain for yourself, so that you don't end up resentful, vengeful and cruel. You have to articulate your own principles so that you can defend yourself against others taking inappropriate advantage of you and so that you are secure and safe while you work and play.

You must discipline yourself carefully. You must keep the promises you make to yourself and reward yourself so you can trust and motivate yourself. You need to determine how to act toward yourself so that you are most likely to become and to stay a good person. It would be good to make the world a better place. Heaven, after all, will not arrive of its own accord.

We will have to work to bring it about and strengthen ourselves so that we can withstand the deadly angels and flaming sword of judgment that God used to bar its entrance

Don't underestimate the power of vision and direction. These are irresistible forces, able to transform what might appear to be unconquerable obstacles into traversable pathways and expanding opportunities. Strengthen the individual. Start with yourself.

Take care with yourself. Define who you are. Refine your personality. Choose your destination and articulate your being. As the great 19th century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so brilliantly noted, "He whose life has a why can bear almost any how."

You could help direct the world on its careening trajectory a bit more toward heaven and a bit more away from hell. Once having understood hell, researched it, so to speak, particularly your own individual hell, you could decide against going there or creating that. You could aim elsewhere. You could, in fact, devote your life to this.

That would give you a meaning with a capital M. That would justify your miserable existence. That would atone for your sinful nature and replace your shame and self-consciousness with the natural pride and forthright confidence of someone who has learned once again to walk with God in the garden.

You could begin by treating yourself as if you were someone you were responsible for helping. If you're hungry and you eat, well, that's good. But it's over, and then you're on to the next thing, right? It's not exactly sustaining, it's just necessary. That's called consummatory reward, by the way. This other reward system is incentive reward. And the incentive reward system works on dopamine, this neurochemical dopamine, which is also the neurochemical tracks that opiates and...

Cocaine and amphetamines the drugs that people really like to abuse alcohol often for some people Activate and so you might say if you don't have enough meaning in your life, then you're more prone to addiction and that's definitely the case even with rats if you take a rat you put him in a cage by himself and he has nothing to do and Then you give him access to cocaine He'll get addicted to the point where he won't do anything but take cocaine But if you throw the rat back in with a bunch of other rats and he gets to do rat things then it's very hard to get him addicted to cocaine and

And so the purposeless rat is prone to addiction. Well, it's the same with human beings. Now, here's a corollary to that, which is really cool. So the magnitude of the reward you experience as you're moving towards a goal is proportionate to the importance of the goal.

So that means the more important the goal you pick, the more possibility there is for the kind of reward, let's say, it's really a state of being that is life affirming. And it is directly life affirming in that, you know, like if you're in a football game and it's an important football game and maybe you break a finger and, you know, normally that's a problem. It hurts and you're going to stop doing whatever you're doing. But if you're right in the middle of the game,

then you'll be so amped up on this reward system that it's analgesic. It stops the pain. It also suppresses anxiety. So if you have a purpose, then it's analgesic. It takes some of the pain out of life. It's very positive in that it motivates and energizes you and focuses you and makes you able to remember and pay attention. And it quells fear.

And so those things are all direct. And so then you might think, well, what's the best possible goal? Well, and that's the purpose, I would say, of religious training and philosophical training. It's like, just what the hell are you doing in the world? If your life is not going well, perhaps it is your current knowledge that is insufficient, not life itself. Perhaps your value structure needs some serious retooling. Perhaps what you want is blinding you to what else could be.

Perhaps you are holding on to your desires in the present so tightly that you cannot see anything else, even what you truly need. Imagine that you are thinking enviously, I should have my boss's job. If your boss sticks to his post stubbornly and competently, thoughts like that will lead you into in a state of irritation, unhappiness and disgust. You might realize this. You think I am unhappy.

However, I could be cured of this unhappiness if I could just fulfill my ambition. But then you might think further. Wait, you think maybe I'm not unhappy because I don't have my boss's job. Maybe I'm unhappy because I can't stop wanting that job. That doesn't mean you can just simply and magically tell yourself to stop wanting that job and then listen and transform. You won't. Can't. In fact, just change yourself that easily.

You have to dig deeper. You must change what you are after more profoundly. So you might think, I don't know what to do about this stupid suffering. I can't just abandon my ambitions. That would leave me nowhere to go. But my longing for a job that I can't have isn't working. You might decide to take a different tack. You might ask instead for the revelation of a different plan.

One that would fulfill your desires and gratify your ambitions in a real sense, but that would remove from your life the bitterness and resentment with which you are currently affected. You might think, I will make a different plan. I will try to want whatever it is that would make my life better, whatever that might be, and I will start working on it now. If that turns out to mean something other than chasing my boss's job, I will accept that and I will move forward.

Now, you're on a whole different kind of trajectory. Before, what was right, desirable and worthy of pursuit was something narrow and concrete. But you became stuck there, tightly jammed and unhappy. So you let go. You make the necessary sacrifice and allow a whole new world of possibility hidden from you because of your previous ambition to reveal itself. And there's a lot there.

What would your life look like if it were better? What would life itself look like? What does better even mean? You don't know. And it doesn't matter that you don't know exactly right away, because you will start to slowly see what is better. Once you have truly decided to want it, you will start to perceive what remained hidden from you by your presuppositions and preconceptions. By the previous mechanisms of your vision, you will begin to learn

This will only work, however, if you genuinely want your life to improve. You can't fool your implicit perceptual structures, not even a bit. They aim where you point them to retool, to take stock, to aim somewhere better. You have to think it through bottom to top. You have to scour your psyche. You have to clean the damn thing up.

And you must be cautious because making your life better means adopting a lot of responsibility. And that takes more effort and care than living stupidly in pain and remaining arrogant, deceitful and resentful. Let's return to the situation where your aim is being determined by something petty. Your aforementioned envy of your boss. Because of that envy, the world you inhabit reveals itself as a place of bitterness, disappointment and spite.

Imagine that you come to notice and contemplate and reconsider your unhappiness. Further, you determine to accept responsibility for it and dare to posit that it might be something at least partly under your control. You crack open one eye for a moment and look. You ask for something better. You sacrifice your pettiness, repent of your envy and open your heart. Instead of cursing the darkness, you let in a little light. You decide to aim for a better life.

instead of a better office. But you don't stop there. You realize that it's a mistake to aim for a better life if it comes at the cost of worsening someone else's. So you get creative. You decide to play a more difficult game. You decide that you want a better life in a manner that will also make the life of your family better, or the life of your family and your friends and the strangers who surround them. What about your enemies?

Do you want to include them too? You bloody well don't know how to manage that. But you've read some history. You know how enmity compounds. So you start to wish even your enemies well, at least in principle, although you are by no means yet a master of such sentiments. And

The direction of your sight changes. You see past the limitations that hemmed you in unknowingly. New possibilities for your life emerge, and you work toward their realization. Your life indeed improves. And then you start to think further, better. Perhaps that means better for me and my family and my friends, even for my enemies. But that's not all it means.

It means better today in a manner that makes everything better tomorrow and next week and next year and a decade from now and a thousand years from now and forever.

and then better, means to aim at the improvement of being with a capital I and a capital B, thinking all of this, realizing all of this. You take a risk. You decide that you will start treating Old Testament God with all his terrible and oft arbitrary seeming power as if he could also be New Testament God, even though you understand the many ways in which that is absurd.

In other words, you decide to act as if existence might be justified by its goodness, if only you behaved properly. And it is that decision, that declaration of existential faith that allows you to overcome nihilism and resentment and arrogance. It is that declaration of faith that keeps hatred of being with all its attendant evils at bay. And as for such faith, it is not at all the will to believe things that you know perfectly well to be false.

Faith is not the childish belief in magic, that is, ignorance or even willful blindness. It is instead the realization that the tragic irrationalities of life must be counterbalanced by an equally irrational commitment to the essential goodness of being. It is simultaneously the will to dare set your sights at the unachievable and to sacrifice everything, including and most importantly, your life.

You realize that you have literally nothing better to do. But how can you do all this, assuming you are foolish enough to try? You might start by not thinking or more accurately, but less trenchantly by refusing to subjugate your faith to your current rationality and its narrowness of view.

This doesn't mean make yourself stupid. It means the opposite. It means instead that you must quit maneuvering and calculating and conniving and scheming and enforcing and demanding and avoiding and ignoring and punishing. It means you must place your old strategies aside. It means instead that you must pay attention as you may never have paid attention before.

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