FOCUS ON YOU. NOT OTHERS. – Brutally Honest Motivation from Jordan Peterson
20:28 Share

This episode is brought to you by Amazon Business. How can you free up your team from time-consuming office tasks? Amazon Business empowers leaders to not only streamline purchasing, but better support their teams so they can focus on strategy and growth, free up your teams, and focus on your future. Learn more about the technology, insights, and support available at amazonbusiness.com.

At GMC, ignorance is the furthest thing from bliss. Bliss is research, testing, testing the testing, until it results in not just one truck, but a whole lineup.

The proper comparison group for you is you yesterday. Because you can make, first of all, you're the only control group that's appropriate to you.

because you have a certain set of talents and possibilities and limitations and tragedies that are truly unique to you. And so you might be comparing yourself to someone else on some dimension, but it's not a reasonable comparison because you don't know what talents they were blessed with and you also don't know what opportunities they had that you didn't, etc. It's just not a reasonable comparison.

It's a lot better to think about who you were and then to think, well, could you be somewhat better in some dimension? And the positive thing about that is the answer is almost always yes. Now, you can orient that transformation towards some stellar target, and that's a reasonable thing to do. But that doesn't exactly mean that you should compare yourself to that target. Aiming at something and comparing yourself to it are not exactly the same thing.

Plus your bloody comparison is also a delusion. You know, that's another thing that you have to understand is that you look at the person you're jealous of and really what you're doing is you're looking through a very narrow aperture at a very thin slice of their life. You're looking at the thin slice of their life that's turning out the best, but you're also looking at a thin slice of their life that's marketed to be the best.

And you have no idea what the horror of that person's life might be in its totality. And you have no idea if, like, if the deal was, say, you wanted to be Russell Brand. There's a good example. You wanted to be Russell Brand. You wanted to be as charismatic and as famous as he is. Well, your real wish is that you get to have everything Russell Brand has, but none of his problems. Well, come on. I mean, that's just, it's just...

It's no wonder that a vision like that would make you despondent because it's naive, it's resentful, it's jealous, it's bitter, and it's unreasonable. You have to take the good with the bad. You have to take the bad with the good. And people rarely think about that when they're thinking about, you know, the famous people they think they'd like to be. We deserve some respect.

You deserve some respect. You are important to other people as much as to yourself. You have some vital role to play in the unfolding destiny of the world. You are therefore morally obliged to take care of yourself.

You should take care of, help, and be good to yourself the same way you would take care of, help, and be good to someone you loved and valued. You may therefore have to conduct yourself habitually in a manner that allows you some respect for your own being and fair enough. But every person is deeply flawed. Everyone falls short of the glory of God.

If that stark fact meant, however, that we had no responsibility to care for ourselves as much as others, everyone would be brutally punished all the time. That would not be good. That would make the shortcomings of the world, which can make everyone who thinks honestly question the very propriety of the world, worse in every way. That simply cannot be the proper path forward.

To treat yourself as if you were someone you were responsible for helping is instead to consider what would be truly good for you. This is not what you want. It is also not what would make you happy. Every time you give a child something sweet, you make that child happy. That does not mean that you should do nothing for children except feed them candy. Happy is by no means synonymous with good. You must get children to brush their teeth.

They must put on their snowsuits when they go outside in the cold, even though they might object strenuously. You must help a child become a virtuous, responsible, awake being capable of full reciprocity

able to take care of himself and others and to thrive while doing so. Why would you think it acceptable to do anything less for yourself? You need to consider the future and think, what might my life look like if I were caring for myself properly? What career would challenge me and render me productive and helpful so that I could shoulder my share of the load and enjoy the consequences? What should I be doing when I have some freedom

to improve my health, expand my knowledge, and strengthen my body. You need to know where you are so you can start to chart your course. 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 meaning.

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. You're going to have to put some effort into your life.

And you need to be motivated to do that. And so what are the potential sources of motivation? Well, you could think about them in the big five.

You know, if you're extroverted, you want friends. If you're agreeable, you want an intimate relationship. If you're disagreeable, you want to win competitions. If you're open, you want to engage in creative activity. If you're high neuroticism, you want security. Okay, so those are all sources of potential motivation that you could draw on, that you could tailor to your own, you know, your own personality. But then there are dimensions that you want to consider your life across. And so we ask people about that.

Well, you know if you could have your life the way you wanted it in three to five years if you were taking care of yourself properly You know, what would you want from your friendships? What would you want from your intimate relationship? How would you like to structure your family? What do you want for your career? Well, how are you going to use your time outside of your job? And how are you going to regulate your mental physical mental and physical health and maybe also your drug and alcohol use because that's

that's a good place to auger down, you know, because alcoholism, for example, wipes out, you know, five to 10% of people. So you want to keep that under control. And then, and then so maybe, you know, you, you, you develop a vision of what your life, what you would like your life to be. And that associates

So the goal, once the goal is established and then you break down the goal into microprocesses that you can implement, the microprocesses become rewarding in proportion in relation to their cost.

causal association with the goal. And that tangles in your incentive reward system. You know, we talked about the dopaminergic incentive reward system, and that's the thing that keeps you moving forward. And the way it works is that it works better if it produces positive emotion when it can see you moving towards a valued goal.

Okay, well, what's the implication of that? Better have a valued goal, because otherwise you can't get any positive motivation working out. And so the more valuable the goal, in principle, the more the microprocess is associated with that goal, start to take on a positive charge. And so what that means is, well, you get up in the morning and you're excited about the day, you're ready to go. And so as far as I can tell, what you do is you specify your long-term ideal, right?

maybe you also specify a place you want to stay the hell away from so that you're terrified to fail as well as excited about succeeding, because that's also useful. You specify your goal. You do that. You do that in some sense as a unique individual. You want to specify goals that make you say, oh, if that could happen as a consequence of my efforts, it would clearly be worthwhile. Because the question always is, why do something? Because

Because doing nothing is easy. You just sit there and you don't do anything. That's real easy. The question is, why would you ever do anything?

And the answer to that has to be because you've determined by some means that it's worthwhile. And then the next question might be, well, where should you look for worthwhile things? And one would be, well, you could consult your own temperament. And the other would be, well, you kind of look at what it is that people accrue that's valuable across the lifespan. So you do a structural analysis of the subcomponents of human existence and already did that.

You need a family. You need friends. Like, you don't need to have all these things, but you better have most of them. Family, friends, career, educational goals, plans for, you know, time outside of work, attention to your mental and physical health, etc. You know, that's what life is about. And if you don't have any of those things, well, then all you've got left is misery and suffering. So that's a bad thing.

That's a bad deal for you. In my own periods of darkness, in the underworld of the soul, I find myself frequently overcome and amazed by the ability of people to befriend each other, to love their intimate partners and parents and children, and to do what they must do to keep the machinery of the world running. I knew a man injured and disabled by a car accident who was employed by a local utility.

For years after the crash, he worked side by side with another man who for his part suffered with a degenerative neurological disease. They cooperated while repairing the lines, each making up for the other's inadequacy.

This sort of everyday heroism is the rule, I believe, rather than the exception. Most individuals are dealing with one or more serious health problems while going productively and uncomplainingly about their business. If anyone is fortunate enough to be in a rare period of grace and health personally, then he or she typically has at least one close family member in crisis.

Yet people prevail and continue to do difficult and effortful tasks to hold themselves and their families and society together. To me, this is miraculous. So much so that a dumbfounded gratitude is the only appropriate response.

There are so many ways that things can fall apart or fail to work altogether. And it is always wounded people who are holding it together. They deserve some genuine and heartfelt admiration for that. It's an ongoing miracle of fortitude and perseverance.

In my clinical practice, I encourage people to credit themselves and those around them for acting productively and with care, as well as for the genuine concern and thoughtfulness they manifest towards others. People are so tortured by the limitations and constraint of being that I am amazed they ever act properly or look beyond themselves at all.

but enough do so that we have central heat and running water and infinite computational power and electricity and enough for everyone to eat and even the capacity to contemplate the fate of broader society and nature, terrible nature itself.

All of that complex machinery that protects us from freezing and starving and dying from lack of water tends unceasingly towards malfunction through entropy. And it is only the constant attention of careful people that keeps it working so unbelievably well.

Some people degenerate into the hell of resentment and the hatred of being, but most refuse to do so despite their suffering and disappointments and losses and inadequacies and ugliness. And again, that is a miracle for those with the eyes to see it. Humanity.

In toto, and those who compose it as identifiable people deserve some sympathy for the appalling burden under which the human individual genuinely staggers, some sympathy for subjugation to mortal vulnerability,

tyranny of the state, and the depredations of nature. It is an existential situation that no mere animal encounters or endures, and one of severity such that it would take a god to fully bear it. It is this sympathy that should be the proper medicament for self-conscious self-contempt, which has its justification, but is only half the full

and proper story. Hatred for self and mankind must be balanced with gratefulness for tradition in the state and astonishment at what normal everyday people accomplish to say nothing of the staggering achievements of the truly remarkable

When you hear Lululemon, you probably think of Align yoga pants. Weightlessly soft, like you're wearing next to nothing. That's why you see them in class, at the grocery store, and in the park. But did you know about skirts with built-in liner shorts so you can still jump for the frisbee? And tanks and bodysuits? With Align's iconic stretch, you won't want to take it off. And with endless style options, you don't have to. Shop in-store or online at lululemon.com.

I think you're on mute. Workday starting to sound the same? I think you're on mute. Find something that sounds better for your career on LinkedIn. With LinkedIn Job Collections, you can browse curated collections by relevant industries and benefits, like FlexPTO or hybrid workplaces, so you can find the right job for you. Get started at LinkedIn.com slash jobs. Finding where you fit. LinkedIn knows how.

Summer is coming right to your door. With Target Circle 360, get all the season go-tos at home with same-day delivery. Snacks for the pool party? Delivered. Sun lotion and towels for a beach day? Delivered. Pillows and lights to deck out the deck? That too. Delivered. Just when you want them. Summer your way, quick and easy. Join now and get all the summer fun delivered right to your home with Target Circle 360. Membership required. Subject to terms and conditions. Applies to orders over $35.

Savor every last drop of summer with Starbucks. From bold refreshers to rich cold brews, the sunniest season only gets better with a handcrafted ice beverage in your hand. Available for a limited time. Your summer favorites are ready at Starbucks.