FOCUS ON YOU – Jordan Peterson's Speech That Will Reshape Your Future
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what it is that you did wrong or insufficiently that led to the collapse of your plan. So that's the first investigation. I made some sacrifices. I attempted to bring about a particular form of the future. It didn't happen. Okay, why? Well, the world is set against me and the cosmos is evil and there's no God and I'm bitter and cynical. That's one potential explanation. Poor me.

And I'm not trying to be flippant about this because sometimes people's dreams are quite realistic and they still fail catastrophically. It can be brutal. Maybe you did make a lot of good decisions and you suddenly got ill or someone in your family did and everything went to hell on you. It doesn't have to be because you've done something cardinally foolish that you fail. It's built into the structure of the world.

but doesn't matter you can also retreat into yourself and you can say something like all right i need to retool my conception of strategy but also potentially my conception of goal you know maybe i'm looking in the wrong place maybe i have to look somewhere else and you can open yourself up to a revelation so there's a gospel statement that's very relevant to this so christ tells his followers that if they knock the door will open if they ask they'll receive and if they seek they'll find

And so it sounds magical. It sounds like the sort of thing that the new atheists would have a field day with. But that's not a wise interpretation of that saying. The proper interpretation is something more like a recognition of the way thought works. So imagine your plans didn't work out. Okay, now you sit down and you say to yourself, I'd like to know, even if the world was conspiring against me and my failure was...

95% the fault of external occurrences and other people. What did I do that wasn't as good as it could have been? And where did I fail to look so that the probability of my failure was higher? Now, to ask that question, you have to want the answer. That's what it means to knock or to ask or to seek. This is no joke. It's like you have to want to know. And it's a very painful thing to do because especially if you had given it your all,

to the degree you are able, and you have reason to be bitter, you're going to be searching for the errors that you still made. And discovering your own errors is always extremely painful, right? Especially if they're errors that you're in love with. And so you have to be willing to strip yourself down. That's what humility means fundamentally. And then, but the advantage is, this is why it's so useful to listen to people. You might find out where you're stupid.

And then you could stop being stupid. And so one of the reasons you confess your sins, let's say, is because you want to discover

where you're insufficient. Now, it's painful. It's painful to encounter an impediment in the form of someone else's opinion that might show you where you're blind and ignorant or willfully blind even. But the advantage to that is you can rectify the error. And then as you move forward, you're stronger. What happens if instead we decide to stop lying?

What does this even mean? We are limited in our knowledge after all. We must make decisions here and now, even though the best means and the best goals can never be discerned with certainty. An aim, an ambition provides the structure necessary for action. An aim provides a destination, a point of contrast against the present and a framework within which all things can be evaluated. An aim defines progress and makes such progress exciting.

An aim reduces anxiety, because if you have no aim, everything can mean anything or nothing. And neither of those two options makes for a tranquil spirit. Thus, we have to think and plan and limit and posit in order to live at all. How then to envision the future and establish our direction without falling prey to the temptation of totalitarian certainty? Some reliance on tradition can help us establish our aims.

It is reasonable to do what other people have always done, unless we have a very good reason not to. It is reasonable to become educated and work and find love and have a family. That is how culture maintains itself. But it is necessary to aim at your target, however traditional, with your eyes wide open. You have a direction, but it might be ill formed. You may have been led astray by your own ignorance and worse, by your own unrevealed corruption.

You must make friends, therefore, with what you don't know instead of what you know. You must remain awake to catch yourself in the act. You must remove the beam in your own eye before you concern yourself with the moat in your brothers. And in this way, you strengthen your own spirit so it can tolerate the burden of existence and you rejuvenate the state.

It is our responsibility to see what is before our eyes courageously and to learn from it, even if it seems horrible, even if the horror of seeing it damages our consciousness and half blinds us. The act of seeing is particularly important when it challenges what we know and rely on upsetting and destabilizing us.

It is the act of seeing that informs the individual and updates the state. You are by no means only what you already know. You are also all that which you could know if you only would. Thus, you should never sacrifice what you could be for what you are. You should never give up the better that resides within for the security you already have, and certainly not when you have already caught a glimpse, an undeniable glimpse of something beyond.

In the Christian tradition, Christ is identified with the Logos. The Logos is the word of God. That word transformed chaos into order at the beginning of time. In his human form, Christ sacrificed himself voluntarily to the truth, to the good, to God. In consequence,

He died and was reborn. The word that produces order from chaos sacrifices everything, even itself, to God. That single sentence, wise beyond comprehension, sums up Christianity. Every bit of learning is a little death. Every bit of new information challenges a previous conception, forcing it to dissolve into chaos before it can be reborn as something better. Sometimes such deaths virtually destroy us.

In such cases, we might never recover, or if we do, we change a lot.

A good friend of mine discovered that his wife of decades was having an affair. He didn't see it coming. It plunged him into a deep depression. He descended into the underworld. He told me at one point, I always thought that people who are depressed should just shake it off. I didn't have any idea what I was talking about. Eventually, he returned from the depths. In many ways, he's a new man and perhaps a wiser and better man. He lost £40.

He ran a marathon. He traveled to Africa and climbed Mount Kilimanjaro.

Set your ambitions, even if you are uncertain about what they should be. The better ambitions have to do with the development of character and ability rather than status and power. Status you can lose. You carry character with you wherever you go, and it allows you to prevail against adversity. Knowing this, tie a rope to a boulder, pick up the great stone, heave it in front of you and pull yourself towards it. Watch and observe while you move forward.

articulate your experience as clearly and carefully to yourself and others as you possibly can. In this manner, you will learn to proceed more effectively and efficiently towards your goal. And while you are doing this, do not lie, especially to yourself. If you pay attention to what you do and say, you can learn to feel a state of internal division and weakness when you are misbehaving and misspeaking.

It's an embodied sensation, not a thought. I experience an internal sensation of sinking and division rather than solidity and strength. When I am incautious with my acts and words, it seems to be centered in my solar plexus, where a large knot of nervous tissue resides. I learned to recognize when I was lying, in fact, by noticing this sinking and division and then inferring the presence of a lie.

It often took me a long time to ferret out the deception. Sometimes I was using words for appearance. Sometimes I was trying to disguise my own true ignorance of the topic at hand. Sometimes I was using the words of others to avoid the responsibility of thinking for myself. If you pay attention when you are seeking something, you will move towards your goal.

More importantly, however, you will acquire the information that allows your goal itself to transform. A totalitarian never asks, what if my current ambition is in error? He treats it instead as the absolute. It becomes his God for all intents and purposes. It constitutes his highest value. It regulates his emotions and motivational states and determines his thoughts. All people serve their ambition.

In that matter, there are no atheists. There are only people who know and don't know what God they serve. If you bend everything totally blindly and willfully towards the attainment of a goal and only that goal, you will never be able to discover if another goal would serve you and the world better. It is this that you sacrifice if you do not tell the truth. If instead you tell the truth, your values transform as you progress.

If you allow yourself to be informed by the reality manifesting itself as you struggle forward, your notions of what is important will change. You will reorient yourself, sometimes gradually and sometimes suddenly and radically. 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 and you reduce the gap. And you're going to have to do that anyways, because you're not going to move from where you are to perfect in one fell swoop, right? There's going to be incremental steps. So you have to fill in that hierarchy of progression with...

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, you

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. Imagine.

You go to engineering school because that is what your parents desire, but it is not what you want. Working at Cross purposes to your own wishes, you will find yourself unmotivated and failing. You will struggle to concentrate and discipline yourself, but it will not work.

Your soul will reject the tyranny of your will. How else could that be said? Why are you complying? You may not want to disappoint your parents, although if you fail, you will do exactly that. You may lack the courage for the conflict necessary to free yourself.

You may not want to sacrifice your childish belief in parental omniscience, wishing devoutly to continue believing that there is someone who knows you better than you know yourself and who also knows all about the world. You want to be shielded in this manner from the stark existential aloneness of individual being and its attendant responsibility. This is all very common and understandable. But you suffer because you are truly not meant to be an engineer. One day you have had enough.

You drop out. You disappoint your parents. You learn to live with that. You consult only yourself, even though that means you must rely on your own decisions. You take a philosophy degree. You accept the burden of your own mistakes. You become your own person. By rejecting your father's vision, you develop your own. And then as your parents age, you've become adult enough to be there for them. When they come to need you, they win too.

But both victories had to be purchased at the cost of the conflict engendered by your truth. As Matthew 10:34 has it, citing Christ, emphasizing the role of the spoken truth. Think not that I have come to send peace on Earth. I came not to send peace, but a sword. As you continue to live in accordance with the truth,

As it reveals itself to you, you will have to accept and deal with the conflicts that mode of being will generate. If you do so, you will continue to mature and become more responsible in small ways.

Don't underestimate their importance and enlarge. You will ever more closely approach your newer and more wisely formulated goals and become even wiser in their formulation. When you discover and rectify your inevitable errors, your conception of what is important will become more and more appropriate.

As you incorporate the wisdom of your experience, you will quit wildly oscillating and walk ever more directly towards the good. A good you could never have comprehended if you had insisted, despite all evidence that you were right, absolutely right at the beginning. If existence is good, then the clearest and cleanest and most correct relationship with it is also good.

If existence is not good, by contrast, you're lost. Nothing will save you. Certainly not the petty rebellions, murky thinking and obscurantist blindness that constitute deceit. Is existence good? You have to take a terrible risk to find out. Live in truth or live in deceit. Face the consequences and draw your conclusions. This is the act of faith whose necessity was insisted upon by the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard.

You cannot know ahead of time. Even a good example is insufficient for proof, given the differences between individuals. The success of a good example can always be attributed to luck. Thus, you have to risk your particular individual life to find out. It is this risk that the ancients described as the sacrifice of personal will to the will of God. It is not an act of submission.

at least as submission is currently understood. It is an act of courage. It is faith that the wind will blow your ship to a new and better port. It is the faith that being can be corrected by becoming. It is the spirit of exploration itself.

Perhaps it is better to conceptualize it this way. Everyone needs a concrete, specific goal, an ambition and a purpose to limit chaos and make intelligible sense of his or her life. But all such concrete goals can and should be subordinated to what might be considered a meta goal, which is a way of approaching and formulating goals themselves.

The Meta goal could be live in truth. This means act diligently towards some well articulated, defined and temporary end. Make your criteria for failure and success timely and clear, at least for yourself and even better if others can understand what you are doing and evaluate it with you while doing so. However, allow the world and your spirit to unfold as they will while you act out and articulate the truth.

This is both pragmatic ambition and the most courageous of faiths. Why does the United States pay higher drug prices than other countries? Because America's the only country in the world where 340B hospitals mark up drug prices, and PBM middlemen charge billions in hidden fees. Meanwhile, Americans subsidize the research and development for new cures. Other countries benefit, but don't pay their fair share.

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