FOCUS ON YOURSELF AND IMPROVE YOUR LIFE – Powerful Advice from Jordan Peterson
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If you want to know something about yourself, sit on your bed one night and say to yourself, you got to mean this, like you got to be desperate. This is no game, this. It's like, my life is not everything I want it to be. And perhaps it's not everything that I need it to be. And by need, I mean, my life is so unbearable that I can't

The suffering that's attendant upon that is make me nihilistic, cynical, bitter, resentful, homicidal, genocidal, unable to have a good relationship, prone to punish people for their virtues because of my jealousy, driving the proclivity to see evil everywhere except within my own heart. Like these are problems, man.

And you ask yourself, you sit on the bed and say, "Okay, man, I'm ready to learn something. Like what's one thing I'm doing wrong that I know I'm doing wrong that I could fix, that I would fix?" It's like you meditate on that, you'll get an answer. And it won't be one you want, but it'll be the necessary one. You know, and it's often something that will point you to small things.

So Carl Jung said, "People in the modern world don't see God because they don't look low enough." And so imagine you're in your messy bedroom, you know, and you're sitting on the edge of the bed trying to have an honest dialogue with yourself. And the little voice says, "You know, it's pretty disgusting in here." And you think, "Well, I'm way above such trivial niceties as organizing my room." It's like, "Well, that's pride. That's arrogance." If you're above

organizing what's actually yours. How in the world are you ever going to organize anything else? And so you get on your knees and you think, well, it's time to, you know, take a brush to the toilet and maybe that's where you start. And so, and that works like that works. You start making those micro improvements, like real micro improvements, real on the ground, actual micro improvements to things, you know, that are wrong.

you'll improve unbelievably rapidly. 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. 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.

Manner, 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

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 the, the,

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

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 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 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 how, look at what it is that people accrue that's valuable across the lifespan.

Look, look what? So you do a structural analysis of the sub components 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, et cetera. You know, those are, 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, that's a bad thing.

That's a bad deal for you. It was easier for people to be good at something when more of us lived in small rural communities. Someone could be homecoming queen

Someone else could be spelling "B-champ", "math-whiz" or "basketball star". There were only one or two mechanics and a couple of teachers. In each of their domains, these local heroes had the opportunity to enjoy the serotonin-fueled confidence of the victor. It may be for that reason that people who were born in small towns are statistically overrepresented among the eminent.

If you're one in a million now, but originated in modern New York, there's 20 of you, and most of us now live in cities. What's more, we have become digitally connected to the entire 7 billion. Our hierarchies of accomplishment are now dizzyingly vertical. No matter how good you are at something or how you rank your accomplishments, there is someone out there who makes you look incompetent.

You're a decent guitar player, but you're not Jimmy Page or Jack White. You're almost certainly not even gonna rock your local pub. You're a good cook, but there are many great chefs. Your mother's recipe for fish heads and rice, no matter how celebrated in her village of origin, doesn't cut it in these days of grapefruit foam and scotch tobacco ice cream. Some mafia Don has a tackier yacht.

Some obsessive CEO has a more complicated self-winding watch kept in his more valuable mechanical hardwood and steel automatic self-winding watch case. Even the most stunning Hollywood actress eventually transforms into the Evil Queen.

on eternal paranoid watch for the new Snow White. And you? Your career is boring and pointless. Your housekeeping skills are second-rate. Your taste is appalling. You're fatter than your friends. And everyone dreads your parties. Who cares if you are Prime Minister of Canada when someone else is the President of the United States?

Inside us dwells a critical, internal voice and spirit that knows all this. It's predisposed to make its noisy case. It condemns our mediocre efforts. It can be very difficult to quell. Worse, critics of its sort are necessary.

There is no shortage of tasteless artists, tuneless musicians, poisonous cooks, bureaucratically personality disordered middle managers, hack novelists, and tedious ideology-ridden professors. Things and people differ importantly in their qualities. Awful music torments listeners everywhere.

Poorly designed buildings crumble in earthquakes. Substandard automobiles kill their drivers when they crash. Failure is the price we pay for standards and because mediocrity has consequences both real and harsh, standards are necessary. We are not equal in ability or outcome and never will be. A very small number of people produce very much of everything.

The winners don't take all, but they take most, and the bottom is not a good place to be. People are unhappy at the bottom. They get sick there and remain unknown and unloved. They waste their lives there. They die there. In consequence, the self-denigrating voice in the minds of people weaves a devastating tale. Life is a zero-sum game. Worthlessness is the default condition.

What but willful blindness could possibly shelter people from such withering criticism? It is for such reasons that a whole generation of social psychologists recommended positive illusion as the only reliable route to mental health. Their credo: "Let a lie be your umbrella." A more dismal, wretched, pessimistic philosophy can hardly be imagined. Things are so terrible that only delusion can save you.

Here is an alternative approach, and one that requires no illusions. If the cards are always stacked against you, perhaps the game you are playing is somehow rigged, perhaps by you, unbeknownst to yourself. If the internal voice makes you doubt the value of your endeavors or your life, or life itself, perhaps you should stop listening.

If the critical voice within says the same denigrating things about everyone, no matter how successful, how reliable can it be? Maybe it's comments or chatter, not wisdom. There will always be people better than you.

That's a cliche of nihilism, like the phrase "in a million years, who's going to know the difference?" A proper response to that statement is not "well, then everything is meaningless." It's "any idiot can choose a frame of time within which nothing matters." Talking yourself into irrelevance is not a profound critique of being. It's a cheap trick of the rational mind. Pick up your damn suffering.

and bear it and try to be a good person so you don't make it worse. Well, that's the truth. I read a lot about the terrible things that people have done to each other. You just cannot even imagine it. It's so awful. So you don't want to be someone like that. Now, do you have a reason to be? Yes, you have lots of reasons to be. God, there's reasons to be resentful about your existence. Everyone you know is going to die.

You know, you too. And there's going to be a fair bit of pain along the way. And lots of it's going to be unfair. It's like, yeah, no wonder you're resentful. It's like, act it out and see what happens. You make everything you're complaining about infinitely worse. There's this idea that hell is a bottomless pit. And that's because no matter how bad it is, some stupid son of a bitch like you could figure out a way to make it a lot worse. So you think, well, what do you do about that?

Well, you accept it. That's what life is like. It's suffering. That's what the religious people have always said. Life is suffering. Yes. Well, who wants to admit that? Well, just think about it. So what do you do in the face of that suffering? Try to reduce it.

Start with yourself. What good are you? Get yourself together for Christ's sake so that when your father dies, you're not winding away in a corner and you can help plan the funeral and you can stand up solidly so that people can rely on you. That's better. Don't be a damn victim. Of course you're a victim. Jesus, obviously.

Put yourself together. And then maybe if you put yourself together, you know how to do that. You know what's wrong with you. If you'll admit it, you know, there's a few things you could like polish up a little bit that you might even be able to manage in your insufficient present condition. And so you might shine yourself up a little bit. And then how do you overcome the suffering of life? Be a better person. That's how you do it. Well, that's hard. It takes responsibility. And I think, you know, if you said to someone, you want to have a meaningful life,

Everything you do matters. That's the definition of a meaningful life. But everything you do matters. You're going to have to carry that with you. Or do you want to just forget about the whole meaning thing? And then you don't have any responsibility because who the hell cares? You can wander through life doing whatever you want, gratifying impulsive desires for how useful that's going to be. And you're stuck in meaninglessness, but you don't have any responsibility. Which one do you want?

Well, ask yourself, which one are you pursuing? And you'll find very rapidly that it isn't the majority of your soul that's pursuing the whole meaning thing, because look what you have to do to do that. You have to take on the fact that life is suffering. You have to put yourself together in the face of that.

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 and the state in astonishment at what normal everyday people accomplish.

to say nothing of the staggering achievements of the truly remarkable. I had a rule with my clients because you know, you might say, well, I've gone halfway down this path and I found out it's wrong. So how do you distinguish that from just giving up? Well, that's a really hard question, right? It's a moral hazard.

Because it's inappropriate to continue in a direction you now realize to be wrong. But it's also inappropriate to give up and use that rationalization as an excuse. And how do you distinguish? Especially seeing as we're not transparent to ourselves. Well, right, exactly. So that is genuinely a moral hazard. So one of the principles that I tried to abide by in my therapeutic discussions was you can change course as long as the next thing you do is equally or more difficult. Because that's a check against just giving up.

So, you want to discipline yourself so you can get yourself organized so that you can go in a particular direction, so that when you find the right direction, you can really go in that direction. And that does require an apprenticeship of sorts. And it might not matter in some sense exactly what the apprenticeship is, as long as it is rigorous, right? And so, that's sort of a bridge between moral relativism and moral absolutism. There's lots of games you can play.

It's not that obvious a priori which is the best game. So that's kind of a morally relative stance. There's multiple playable games. But then the absolute is, yeah, but you have to play one of them. You have to learn to play one of them. You have to become an expert at at least one of them. And then that's not a relative proposition. And I believe that's true. That seems to me to be the case. So you want to commit to something.

And then when you commit to something, you require yourself to bring all of your disparate components moving in a single direction, united in a single direction. So it's a unifying act. And then once having been unified, well, then you can bring that unity to bear on a variety of different tasks. But you have to bring it together first.

So, and that makes sense developmentally. You see children start out as a disparate bundle of motivations and emotions sort of warring with one another. And then they can integrate that into single games that they can play with themselves. And then they integrate that with games they start to play with other people. And all of that is integration. It's not subjugation. It's not repression. Not if it's a good game. It's integration. You want to get integrated because then you have

all the horses that are pulling your chariot pulling in the same direction and you're much more likely to get to where you want to go then and also much more likely to specify a good place to go. So that's another, that's something else conservatives have to teach young people which is well get yourself disciplined. Well why? Well not so you're a slave but so that you could be a master. To use a terminology that you're not supposed to use anymore. You know this is in relationship to yourself not to others.

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