DON'T WASTE YOUR LIFE - Jordan Peterson’s Most Powerful Advice
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Sit on your bed one day and ask yourself,

What's... what remarkably stupid things am I doing on a regular basis to absolutely screw up my life? And if you actually ask that question, but you have to want to know the answer, right? Because that's actually what asking the question means. It doesn't mean just mouthing the words. It means you have to decide that you want to know. You'll figure that out so fast it'll make your hair curl.

There's no better pathway to self-realization and the ennoblement of being than to posit the highest good that you can conceive of and commit yourself to it. And then you might also ask yourself, and this is definitely worth asking is, do you really have anything better to do? And if you don't, well, why would you do anything else if you orient yourself properly?

and then pay attention to what you do every day, that works. And I actually think that that's in accordance with what we have come to understand about human perception, because what happens is that the world shifts itself around your aim. Because you're a creature that has an aim. You have to have an aim in order to do something. You're an aiming creature. You look at a point and you move towards it. It's built right into you. And so you have an aim. Well, let's say your aim is the highest possible aim.

Well then, so that sets up the world around you. It organizes all of your perceptions. It organizes what you see and you don't see. It organizes your emotions and your motivations.

So you organize yourself around that aim, and then what happens is the day manifests itself as a set of challenges and problems. And if you solve them properly, then you stay on the pathway towards that aim, and you can concentrate on the day. And so that way you get to have your cake and eat it too, because you can point into the distance, the far distance, and you can live in the day. And it seems to me that that's...

That makes every moment of the day supercharged with meaning. Because if everything that you're doing every day is related to the highest possible aim that you can conceptualize, well, that's the very definition of the meaning that would sustain you in your life. Well, and then the issue is, well, back to Noah. Well, all hell is about to break loose and chaos is coming. It's like when that's happening in your life, you might want to be doing something that you regard as truly worthwhile, because that's what will keep you afloat when everything is flooded.

And you don't want to wait until the flood comes to start doing that, because if your arc is half built and you don't know how to captain it, the probability is very high that you'll drown. Ask, and it shall be given you. Seek, and ye shall find. Knock, and it shall be opened unto you. For everyone that asketh receiveth, and he that seeketh findeth, and to him that knocketh it shall be opened. That sounded pretty optimistic again.

But again, I think it's a description of the structure of existential reality. When I'm in my clinical practice and I observe, and this is also the case with my students, is let's say people's lives aren't what they would like them to be. And so then you ask why? Well,

Forget about tragedy and catastrophe because that's self-evident and we're not going to discuss that. Although the degree to which you bring about your own tragedy is always indeterminate. But I would never say that every terrible thing that is visited on a person is something they deserved. I think that that's a very dangerous presupposition, especially because everyone gets sick and everyone dies. But

One of the main reasons that people don't get what they want is because they don't actually figure out what it is and the probability that you're going to get what would be good for you, let's say, which would even be better than what you want, right? Because, you know, you might be wrong about what you want easily, but maybe you could get what would really be good for you. Well, why don't you?

Well, because you don't try, you don't think, okay, here's what I would like if I could have it. And I don't mean in a way that you manipulate the world to force it to deliver you goods for status or something like that. That isn't what I mean. I mean something like imagine that you were taking care of yourself like you were someone you actually cared for. And then you thought, okay, I'm caring for this person. I would like things to go as well for them as possible.

What would their life have to be like in order for that to be the case? Well, people don't do that. They don't sit down and think, all right, you know, let's figure it out. You've got a life. It's hard, obviously. It's like three years from now, you can have what you need. You got to be careful about it. You can't have everything. You can have what would be good for you, but you have to figure out what it is. And then you have to aim at it.

Well, my experience with people has been is if they figure out what it is that would be good for them and then they aim at it, then they get it. And it's strange because they don't necessarily it's a strange thing. It's not quite that simple because, you know, you may formulate an idea about what would be good for you. And then you take ten steps towards that and you find out that your formulation was a bit off. And so you have to reformulate your goal, you know,

So you're kind of going like this as you move towards the goal. But a huge part of the reason that people fail is because they don't ever set up the criteria for success. And so since success is a very narrow line and very unlikely, the probability that you're going to stumble on it randomly is zero. And so there's a proposition here. And the proposition is if you actually want something, you can have it.

Now, the question then would be, well, what do you mean by actually want? What? And the answer is that you reorient your life in every possible way to make the probability that that will occur as certain as possible. And that's a sacrificial idea, right? It's like you don't get everything, obviously, but maybe you can have what you need.

And maybe all you have to do to get it is ask. But asking isn't a whim or today's wish. It's like you have to be deadly serious about it. You have to think, okay, I'm taking stock of myself. And if I was going to live properly in the world and I was going to set myself up such that being would justify itself in my estimation. And I don't mean as a harsh judge exactly what is it that I would aim at. And so the issue is,

not so much the blindness of others, even though there's as much blindness among others as there is for you. But the issue here, the advice here, the description here is you should be concerned about what's interfering with your own vision first and you

should leave other people to hell alone in relationship to that. And so if your mode of being in the world is if you would just act better, things would improve for me. Or if you identify the evil and the catastrophe as something that's outside that someone else needs to fix or that someone else is responsible for, then you're not going to fix that. And you're going to remain blind to the things that you're doing and not doing that make things not go well. And so it's just better to think, all right, I'm probably blind.

in many, many ways. And maybe there are some ways that I could rectify that because it's highly probable that you're blind in all sorts of ways. I mean, in fact, it's virtually certain. And so it's just more useful to think, how is it that I'm wrong in this situation? How do we come to know ourselves in terms of our personalities and more importantly, potential? One of the first ways to come to know yourself is to understand that you don't

You can learn to kind of watch yourself like you're watching a stranger. So you have to understand that you don't know who you are, and that's not easy to understand because you think you know. But then you remember you can't control yourself very well. You're not very disciplined. You're full of flaws. Maybe you don't know yourself as well as you think.

But it's hard to get low enough to understand how deeply it is the case that you are ignorant about who you are. Now, there's an upside to that, too, which also is that you're also ignorant about who you could be. And so the discovery of that is some reward for the horror of determining who you actually are. Then you watch yourself. You watch yourself like you're watching a stranger. You watch what you say and you listen and you think, well, what sort of person would say that?

And how am I reacting emotionally when I'm communicating in that manner? You know, is that making me feel stronger, weaker? Is it filling me with shame? Is it helping my confidence? Am I laying out a lie? Am I deceiving myself and other people? Am I adopting this personality at parties that is designed to impress and to amuse and it comes across as nothing but self-centered narcissism? What are my dark fantasies?

What are my aggressive fantasies? What is it that I'm willing to do? What am I interested in so that I'll spontaneously pursue it? What do I procrastinate about and why? What am I unwilling to do? What do I think is good? What do I congratulate myself for accomplishing? And what do I berate myself for failing to confront and to implement? Those are all incredibly complicated questions, and you don't know the answers to them.

So that's a start. And then in terms of potential, well, you'll discover a little bit more about your potential as you discover who you are, especially the darker parts of yourself, because then you discover your potential for mayhem. There's some real utility in that, you know, a discovery that you're dangerous. It's such a useful discovery.

It's actually something that strengthens you. Because the first thing that a realization like that can in fact produce is the ambition to incorporate that danger into a higher order personality. And that can make you implacable. I can make you someone who can say no when you need to say no. You know, that can make you someone who won't avoid necessary conflict. And so that's unbelievably useful. And so that's one of the potentials that you might discover.

The other thing you do to discover your potential is to, well, you challenge yourself. It's like take a bit of a look at yourself and think about what's not so good that you could improve.

that you should improve by your own standards and that you would improve and set yourself a little goal. Maybe you're not studying at all at your university, or maybe you're at work and you've got this stack of paper there, and you haven't looked at that damn stack for like a month that you should be, and you're bothering yourself at night because you're avoiding that. It's like maybe think I've avoided that stack of paper completely for one month.

I'm quite a coward when it comes to whatever snakes might be hidden in that stack of paper. How about tomorrow? I just put that stack of paper in front of me on my desk and I glance through it for 15 seconds. See if I can do that. It's like, well, you set yourself a goal of improvement. It's a humble goal. There's things you could do to improve, and you know what they are.

And there's small steps that you could take, that you might take, that would put you in that direction. And then the question is, are you big enough to take those small steps? Are you capable of grappling with the fact that you're fundamentally flawed to the point where you have to break things down into almost childlike steps in order to manage them?

And the answer to that is, yeah, you are. Most people have things they avoid and they're afraid of. So I would say to some degree, it's the lot of everyone. People vary in the degree to which they've conquered that.

and you do meet people from time to time who are extraordinarily disciplined but most of the time they've got disciplined in exactly this manner it's through slow incremental improvement and then you challenge yourself it's like well could I do this? that would be better and you find out and then you think well is there something slightly larger and more challenging that I could do? that would be better and you try it and you find out and as you try it and you find out generally

You get better at it and you can take on larger and larger challenges. You take responsibility for yourself. That's part of standing up straight with your shoulders back.

It's like take on the world, man, but only at the level that you can manage. When you're ignorant and biased and deeply flawed and immature, it's where everyone starts. You don't want to bite off more than you can chew, but it doesn't mean that you can't wrestle with. It's part of reality. Some part that's small enough so that you have a good shot at victory. Then you attain victory over some small part of the chaos. And then you're the person who's victorious over chaos.

You're just a beginner, but that's who you are. And then maybe you can get unbelievably good at that. And you do that by challenging yourself humbly at the level that you're able to function.

It's easier to understand if you think about a child that you're trying to rear properly and you want to make that child help that child reveal their highest potential, whatever that is, whatever that means. And what you do is you don't set them a series of impossible tasks in the hope of undermining their self confidence. You form a relationship with them that is predicated on your interest in their highest mode of being.

And then you offer them challenges that are precisely optimized to their ability. Right? So they can do them, but they have to stretch the two elements of their ability would be what they can do and what and how much they're capable of transforming what they can do. And an optimal challenge stretches you to the end of what you can do and then into the domain of how you can transform.

You have to be humble and wise enough to understand that you might have to aim pretty damn low, especially in those places where you're not functioning well. And it might be so embarrassing that you can't bring yourself to fathom that that's actually who you are. You need the loss of that ergot ego because it's precisely what's interfering with your movement forward.

It's part of the adversarial process, mythologically speaking, that stops moral progress. You're too proud of who you think you are to notice what you're like so that you could change properly. You don't want to sacrifice that part of yourself. It's probably associated with some delusion that helps you maintain a positive, although very fragile, self image.

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