Jordan Peterson: Fix Yourself Before It’s Too Late (Transcript)

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. Like, that works. You start making those micro improvements, like real micro improvements, real on the ground, actual micro improvements, the things you know that are wrong, you’ll improve unbelievably rapidly. The great people I know are brutally truthful to themselves and other people. And they have insanely adventurous lives.

The Importance of Truth in Communication

Get rid of everything you say that you only say to impress other people and just see if you can say what you believe to be true. That’s an adventure. That’s the thing about the truth, you know? Well, you have got to ask yourself, if you’re not speaking the truth, who is it that’s talking? If you’re saying something that you do not believe to be true, it’s not you talking.

It’s something else. It might be the part of you that wants to manipulate the other person into delivering what you think you want from them. Well, what is that spirit of manipulation that you’ve allowed to possess you? It’s not you. Let’s say you decide to live your whole life in that instrumental manner.

You’re going to craft your words like the student who says, “Well, I’m going to write what the professor wants to hear so I get the grade.” It’s like, well, you just turn yourself into that. Well, who is it that’s doing that manipulating? It’s not you because those aren’t your words. So, even if you get the grade, it’s not you that got the grade.

It’s the false you. It’s the manipulative you. So, you do that your whole life. You don’t have your life. And then you think, “Well, God, that was a miserable life.” I manipulated everybody. They were so damn stupid. They were sucked in by it. They’re all contemptible. Everyone does it, you know, which they don’t, by the way.

And so that’s a pathway to bitterness. Hardly because if you’re a manipulator and you use your language falsely, you don’t live your own life. You live the life of whatever possesses you when you think it’s you manipulating. And so you live the life of the spirit of manipulation.

Learning from Others’ Experiences

There’s a book. It is a book called “The Battle Face.” It’s about a guy that was in the Korean War and then he was in the Vietnam War, and his name is Colonel David Hackworth. When I was on deployment, I would open up that book anywhere and I would read two pages or three pages before I’d go to bed if I was in my bed that night. And there were so many lessons that correlated to what I was actually going through. And a real obvious example was when you read, you can learn, and you don’t have to go through the school of hard knocks.

You don’t have to get punched in the face repeatedly with things that turn out to be situations that other people have absolutely gone through. The level of capability increases so much by seeing something one single time. Well, if I see something one time, I’m infinitely better than if I’d never seen it before. It’s like those, you know, those little puzzles. They give you a little puzzle, some kind of a mind bender.

Right? The mind benders only work on you one time. The riddle only works on you one time. Then you go, “I know the answer to that. That’s the answer.” You know, you never get fooled by that again. So just knowing just seeing it one time, you’re infinitely better. So when you read enough, you’re capturing all these lessons. Of course, you want to put the book on. You want to become that person.

That can rattle you up, man. Especially if the person is thinking all sorts of things that you’ve never thought. I mean, I love reading for that reason. I could pick my peers too, which I really loved. It’s like, well, you know, I have these people around me, but then there’s these people who’ve lived before me and in different places and I can set them up on my shelf.

I can enter into their world and I can benefit from everything they’ve thought and saturate myself with that person. It’s and it’s very disruptive especially if the person that you’re reading has a mind that’s more powerful and more well developed than your own. It was very disruptive, but unbelievably useful unbelievably useful to try on other people like that. And you get the benefit of their entire life distilled into their book. You know, it’s thirty years of work.

The Value of Reading and Learning

I read this one book called “The Neuropsychology of Anxiety” which is a great scientific work. It’s a very hard book. I think it has eighteen hundred references, something like that. And this guy, Jeffrey Gray, he actually read all those references and he understood them. And so it took me six months to read the book, but I got an entire education out of it.

I got to experience in six months what it took him thirty years to learn. Like, what a gift that is. It’s unbelievable. What were you reading when you were in university? Was it fiction novels? Was it nonfiction? What were you focusing on? As trite as this may sound, it was actually the most impact was from Shakespeare. It was the most impact on multiple levels. And I’ll tell you the primary level.

And when I’ve covered Shakespeare on my podcast, I explained this to people. People think, “Well, you know, I didn’t really understand. I’ve read it. I didn’t understand it.” If you think you’re going to just pick up Shakespeare, open it up, and read it and understand it, you’re not going to because it’s barely written in English.

It’s barely written in English. It’s almost another language. So what you have to do is you have to start to interpret it. And so what I realized with Shakespeare is, number one, the weight of the words. That these words were so pregnant with meaning that you had to pull those words and parse those words and pull those words apart to see all the depth that each individual word had and then the way that they’re put together.

And what was great about this was by the time I was back because then I went right back into the SEAL teams, and somebody would hand me a rules of engagement document that was written by some lawyer in Washington DC, and I’d pull it out and say, “Wait a second. This word I don’t know what this word means. Let’s pull this word out. Let’s see what this let’s see what this actual definition of this particular word is and how that changes my viewpoint of these rules of engagement and how can I translate that for my troops so that they actually know what to do?” So that part, for me was from a reading perspective, starting to read Shakespeare and saying, “Oh, okay.”

You’re not going to understand this. And if you don’t understand something, that’s okay. You pull out the Oxford English Dictionary and you look it up. And then you not just find out what the meaning of the word is, but what’s the root word and where does it come from and what kind of depth and what kind of… Yeah. Then that’s really the that’s unbelievably useful too.

Virtually every word is like that because word is an ancient artifact. It’s like it’s like an animal in some sense. It has an evolutionary history and it transforms across time. And each word kinda it carries the echoes of its past with it too because each word, attracts other words in a particular unique way. So it kinda lives in a word ecosystem as well.

And the ecosystem contain information about the history of that word. And you think, well, why is that important? It’s like, well, hey. Guess what? You think in words. You talk in words. You have all these archaic entities, these words, these living entities that you use. It’s like the more you know about them, the more you know about you, the more you know about other people, and the better you are at formulating and communicating your ideas. There’s nothing there’s nothing lost in that kind of investigation. Nothing.

There’s nothing but gain there. Your ambition, if you have any sense, is actually to become competent. Do you want to be competent and dangerous or do you want to be vague and useless? It is definitely the case that there is no more exceptional form of the capacity to be dangerous than to be articulate. It is advantage comes with a disadvantage.

Understanding Personality and Goals

So if you’re extroverted, you’re social and you’re positive, but you’re impulsive, and you can tilt towards hedonism, and you can’t stand being alone. No matter where you land in the temperamental landscape, you’re going to have your associated faults and temptations. You’ve got a goal, and you’ll see that as you progress towards the goal, there’ll some of them you don’t want to confront. That’s why it’s useful to order your room. Chaotic room makes you anxious.

Why? Too many pathways, man. People don’t really repress the things they don’t want to face. They just fail to unpack them. You want a horizon of ever expanding possibility.

We’re built to walk uphill. And when you reach the pinnacle of the hill, you want to stop and appreciate the vision, but the next thing you want is a higher hill in the distance. Beware of unintended consequences. It’s like, “Oh, no. This thing will just do what I want it to do and nothing else.”

It’s like, no. Turns out that not only is what we want from each other the real thing, but that’s also the adventure of your life. And so if you aren’t truthful, and that means, unfortunately, especially at the beginning, when you start to be truthful, it means deeply coming to terms with your inadequacies in humility. So it’s very painful. Without that, you don’t have the adventure of your life.

You have the role that you acquiesce to, and that’ll take all the meaning out of your life. It’s good for you to go take your place in the world. Have some ambition. Have a vision. Have a goal.

Have a strategy. Try to be a good person, not because it’s your duty precisely because that’s the proper way to live. You sit on the bed and say, “Okay, man. I’m ready to learn something. What’s one thing I’m doing wrong that I know I’m doing wrong that I could fix?”

You meditate on that, you’ll get an answer. You grow in proportion to the weight you take on voluntarily, and it’s also true that we have no idea what the upper limit to that is. It’s from the uphill climb that we derive our value, and I mean this technically. So almost all the positive emotion we feel, especially the emotion that fills us with enthusiasm, and that’s experienced in relationship to a goal. And so in some sense, you want a goal that you can never attain.

So you can always move closer to the goal that recedes as you move towards it. You think, well, that’s frustrating. It’s like Sisyphus pushing the rock uphill. But it’s not because as you pursue that goal, you put yourself together and your life does get better and richer and more abundant. That’s why the highest levels of virtue and goal are in some sense transcendent.

You want them to be above everything you’re doing so you can continually move towards something that’s more sublime and better. That’s what you are. You’re here to live, not to sleep. And the problem with the vision of Mai Tais on the beach is that well, first of all, that’s a vision of drug induced unconsciousness. Second, it’s only going to work for about a week.

Third, you’re going to be a laughingstock in a month and depressed and aimless and goalless. It’s no. That’s not it’s you want a horizon of ever expanding possibility. And so it does happen to people as they because they’ve staked their soul on the attainment of an instrumental goal. And it can be a pretty high order goal, but then you think, “Now I’m there. Now what?” Well, the answer can’t be, well, I’m going to live in the lap of luxury and never have to leave the faith. What do you want to be? A giant infant with a gold with a gold bottle? You never have to do anything but lay in your back and suck.

The Value of Pursuing Truth and Challenges

It’s like you see the problem with that as a conceptualization. It’s no. You want to be like an active warrior moving uphill with your sword in hand, and that’s that’s dynamic. That’s exciting. People are afraid of the truth because often if you reveal it, it causes conflict in the moment.

Telling the truth is definitely an adventure. Seeking for sure, but also telling. Another way of going about it is to just say what you think and see what happens. That’s an adventure because you don’t know what the outcome is going to be. So, look, there’s this old idea that it’s necessary to have faith in the truth.

And so here’s a way of thinking about that. Someone asks you a question and you might think, well, here’s the outcome I want. And so here’s how I’m going to answer that question. So that’s one way of approaching it. But another way of approaching it is you ask me a question.

I’m going to think about the answer, and I’m just going to tell you what I think. And it doesn’t matter what the outcome is because I’m willing to see what the outcome will be predicated on the idea that there isn’t a better outcome than the one that truth produces. Even if it’s harsh and terrible in the short term, and sometimes it is, it’s like there isn’t a better way of doing it. Now You might say well, how do you know that and answer is well, I don’t know that that’s why it’s an article of faith because I believe and I believe this deeply the being that you produce as a consequence of telling the truth is good by definition Even though it’s harsh and and often uncomfortable Because you get in trouble one of the things that I’ve really learned recently or learned to articulate better is that there’s a very tight relationship between Aspiration and responsibility The first question might be, do you need to aspire to something? And the answer is, well, yes, because you have to do something.

The Importance of Aspiration and Responsibility

Okay. If you just sit there, you’ll die. You can’t just sit there. You have to go act out in the world. Okay. So act towards what? Well, that’s whatever your aspiration is. You have to have an aim. Okay. Well, what should the aim be?

Well, it should be something worth doing, let’s say. Why do something that you don’t feel is worth doing? What do you think is worth doing? Well, if you watch other people and you judge when they’re doing something worthwhile, usually judge them positively if you see that they’re taking responsibility, at least for themselves. But you want to be completely useless so other people have to take care of you?

That’s pretty pathetic. And maybe you could get your act together so you’re taking care of yourself and your family. And maybe you could even do better than that and take care of yourself and your family and your community. Well, good for you. That’s responsibility and that’s an aim.

Well, here’s one of the things that’s cool about that is that your life doesn’t have meaning without aspiration or name. Okay. So you need a hierarchy of values. There’s got to be something at the top. It’s got to be something important.

If you don’t have that, your life doesn’t have any meaning. So if you criticize the hierarchy or even the ideas of idea of hierarchy, you destroy the idea of aspiration, and then people have nothing. Well, that’s not helpful. People are built for a struggle and they’re built for a weight, and you want to take on a heavy burden voluntarily. See if you can put yourself together.

See what you can do out in the world while you’re waiting to die. It’s an all in game. It better be worthwhile. If you gaze into the abyss long enough, you see the light, not the darkness. I’m betting my life on it.

Bring it on. The adventure along the route, man. And I would say, where’s that adventure to be found? You don’t want someone else’s fate. Man, your fate’s enough, and your adventure’s enough.

It’s plenty. It’s more than you can ever fully realize. And so that’s also part of the reason that we all believe that the individual has some intrinsic dignity. It’s don’t be so sure that your position in your room is so damn trivial. It might be your attitude towards it that’s trivial.

And if you’re in dire straits and dire circumstances, just look at how much opportunity you have to make things better. Well, maybe the same thing’s true of life. Right? You bind yourself to it. And that tighter you bind yourself to it, the more you find out what it is.

And that’s like a radical embrace. We’re built to walk uphill. And when you reach the pinnacle of the hill, you want to stop and appreciate the vision, but the next thing you want is a higher hill in the distance because it’s from the uphill climb that we derive our value. Almost all the positive emotion we feel, especially the emotion that fills us with enthusiasm. That’s experienced in relationship to a goal.

And so in some sense, you want a goal that you can never attain. There’s nothing that makes you more formidable than verbal competence and being able to articulate, be able to think, to marshal your arguments. Right? Aim yourself in one direction and you might say, well, I’ve gone halfway down this path and I found out it’s wrong. Well, how do you distinguish that from just giving up?

Well, that’s a really hard question. Right? It’s it’s a moral hazard. 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 least one of them, and then that’s not a relative proposition. And I I believe that’s true. 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 it’s a unifying act.

Becoming Dangerous in a Positive Way

You said that a harmless man is not a good man. A good man is a very dangerous man who has that under voluntary control. How should people become more dangerous? Oh, becoming more articulate is definitely, I would say, that’s the primary array of weapons. I mean, physical prowess is something and and it’s not nothing.

That physical confidence that comes along with that as well. But the same thing replicated at the level of the ability to communicate and to think, that’s way broader field of of battle and opportunity. In a world with seemingly infinite options, it can be challenging to decide on the best course of action for one’s life. Peterson suggests that a useful approach is to focus on what bothers you or what you find most challenging. These discomforts or challenges can be an indication of where one should focus their time and energy.

By leaning into what is difficult or uncomfortable, individuals can discover their strengths and find direction in their lives. Be honest with yourself about your interests, abilities, and limitations, and pursue the path that aligns most closely with your values and passions. There’s a lot of things you could be bothered by, like a million things, man. But some things grip you. They bug you, and they might make you resentful and bitter because they bug you so much.

Like, they’re your things, man. They’ve got you. So then I look for a question that I would like the answer to. I would really like the answer to it, so I don’t assume I already have the answer. Because I would actually really like to have the answer. So if I could get a better answer, great. And so that’s the first thing. And that’s like a prayer. It’s like, okay. Here’s a mystery.

I would like to delve into it further. Well, so that’s humility. It’s like, here’s a mystery, which means I don’t know. I would like to delve into it further, which means I don’t know enough already. And then then comes the revelation.

It’s like, well, what’s a revelation? Oh, if you ask yourself a question, it’s a real question. You get an answer or not. And answer is, well, yeah, thoughts start to appear in your head. So From somewhere. That’s right. From somewhere. Where where do they come from? Do you have a sense? Depends on what you’re aiming at.

It depends it depends on your intent. So imagine that your intent is to make things better. Then maybe they come from the place that’s designed to make things better. Maybe your intent is to make things worse. Then they come from hell.

Embracing Challenges and Responsibility

Let’s say you want to become who you could be in the fullest sense. So let’s say you’re someone who’s going to solve some serious problems. Okay. The first thing you have to do is admit to the seriousness of the problems. That’s no joke.

And so the first thing is just the terror of the problem itself and that’s enough to paralyze you. And that’s the hydra. That’s the Gorgon with the head of snakes. It’ll paralyze you and and turn you to stone. That’s the basilisk in the Harry Potter series. Mhmm. You look at it and turns you to stone and lurks underneath everything. Right? And it’s malevolence and tragedy. And and so and so there’s that.

And then the next is well, you’re going to take responsibility for that? You’re really going to do that, are you? That’s a hell of a load, man. And so it’s daunting to even consider that. And then there’s the discipline and responsibility that that necessitates, which is also daunting.

It’s like, oh my god. The problem’s that serious. I’m really going to have to get my act together in order to not contribute to it, much less solve it. And so the problem is terrible, and then the the solution is daunting. But but the upside of that is is, like, well, there isn’t anything better to have than a problem that’s worth solving.

Like, that’s really worth solving. Right? And so the more of that you take on, the more you have a reason to get out of bed in the morning no matter what. Like, I’m getting up. I’m trudging forward.

Doesn’t matter what I’m suffering from. I’ve got things that need to be done. They’re necessary. And that gives you that sense of purpose that is the antidote to bitterness. K. Well, let’s say you want your life to be meaningful. It’s like, okay. Then what you do matters. It actually matters. So that’s an interesting thing.

Well, so let’s say you go over your past with a fine tooth comb, and you decide you’re going to take responsibility for everything that you did that was wrong and everything that you failed to do that you could have done that was right. Like, does that change the world? It’s like, depends on how thoroughly you do it. You might say it changes the world like nothing else possibly can. And I think that that’s actually right.

Making Plans and Self-Comparison

You have to allow yourself a certain latitude for error. That’s a useful thing to know too. One of the things I tell people when they’re trying to develop a vision for their life or an implement plan is, make a bad plan. Make the best when you can, but don’t get obsessive about it. It’s like make a plan, implement it.

You’ll figure out when you implement it, why it’s stupid. Exactly. And then you can fix it a little bit. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday and not to who someone else is today. The same basic idea, right, is that you have to get your markers for success right because otherwise, you can end up in the situation you described, which is that, like, there’s always people out there who are doing far better than you on pretty much anything you want to imagine.

And if all you’re doing is seeing yourself in their reflected light, let’s say, then it’s going to be pretty damn dismal. But it’s not a good comparison because you shouldn’t just compare it. Well, first of all, there’s danger in just comparing yourself to others, period, because they’re not you. And God only knows what struggles they had to undertake to get to where they were or what burdens they’re currently carrying that you’re not aware of. You just don’t know any of that, but you can certainly contrast yourself with yourself.

The Value of Self-Improvement

And that’s a lot better. It is the only way. Well, it’s also the only way of really of really measuring anything approximating proper improvement. You can actually tell when you’re a little better than you were yesterday. Right.

So and and you can actually do that. That’s another thing that’s so interesting about it is that you can actually make yourself a little better in some way pretty much. Well, I don’t know if it’s at every moment, but you can certainly do it every day. It’s funny. I mean, you know, obviously, if you have a problem and you think about it, you can think up a solution.

And it’s not obvious how you do that. No. I mean, it’s not like you know how you’re manipulating your neurons or something. Mhmm. It it it it happens of its own accord in some sense, like, you can participate within it, I guess, and you can interfere with it.

And it seems to take a certain amount of willpower, but it still all happens mysteriously behind the scenes. One of the things that I’ve been so so, you know, there’s lots of different ways to interpret the world and you can maybe even make a case that there’s an endless number of ways to interpret the world and the problem with that is that kind of disorients you in terms of what you should be doing but Just because there’s a very large number of ways to interpret the world doesn’t mean there’s a very large number of productive meaningful and sustainable ways to interpret the world and one of the things you do have to do is figure out how you Conduct yourself today so that you don’t upset the Apple card in a week or a month or a year and So you know what what you do in some sense psychologically is you admit to yourself that your current frame of reference is faulty? And then you start opening the door to a different kind of thinking which is more creative thinking It’s more lateral thinking think well I’m wrong, but that’s not necessarily a problem because I could be right if I thought some other way.

Well, you know, that’s great. Often it works. Yeah. There’s there’s almost no lack. There’s almost no end to the utility of trying to figure out which ways that you’re wrong.

Yeah. Because there’s lots of them and every time you discover one then you don’t have to be quite so wrong anymore. That’s a really good deal. Yeah. What’s your time worth?

The Value of Time

You’re a university student. Well, it’s certainly worth minimum wage because obviously, but it’s worth way more than that because if you spend a productive hour when you’re twenty, then you gain the benefits of that hour for the rest of your life. So there’s the compounding effect of time spent when we were young. So I say, well, let’s assume your time is worth fifty bucks an hour, which I think is an underestimate, but whatever. Let’s call it fifty.

Call it twenty five, but we’ll call it fifty. That’s two thousand dollars a week. You’re wasting it’s a hundred thousand dollars a year. It’s like, how much better would your life be if you weren’t wasting a hundred thousand dollars a year? The DaVinci code.

Everyone liked that. It’s sold a lot. And, you know, it was full of little mysteries and it’s full of hints that there was more to the world than you think. And which is definitely true. And that, you know, there was a way of getting access to that knowledge and then it would really be worthwhile. And people like that. They like that idea. And the reason for that is because it’s actually it’s true. Learn to write. I’m I’m dead serious.

The Importance of Writing

Like, I’m dead serious about that. Because writing is formalized thinking. And so the way you write is first of all, you need a problem. Because why write if you don’t have a problem? So this is good advice if you’re just writing an essay by the way for your classes.

It’s like pick a bloody problem that you want to write about. Otherwise, it’s false right from the start. It’s up to you to engage with the material until you find something that grips you that you desire to investigate. Okay. So you need a problem.

Well, the next thing you need to do is, well, you need to have something to say about the problem. So reading reading is really good for that. Read as much as you can. Get your your hands on that addresses the problem. Okay.

So now now you now you know a bunch of things or at least provisionally know you at least have access to them. Well, now you start you start sorting through it. It’s like, okay. Well, maybe I need to summarize what I’ve learned and then I need to iron out the contradictions between what I’ve learned. And I need to elegantly formulate that.

And I need to get my word choice right and my phrase choice right and my sentence choice right. And I need to organize the sentences into proper paragraphs and the paragraphs into proper sequence so that I have a coherent argument. And at the same time, what you’re doing is is you’re you’re you’re you’re integrating your own personality at the highest and most abstract level of organization. And you’re sharpening your tools and you’re putting yourself straight because you’re learning to think. You learn to do that by writing many many years.

You hone your words. They’re they’re the most powerful thing about you bar none. If you are an effective writer and speaker and communicator, you you have all the authority and confidence that there is. And so you’re at university. Maybe you’re taking humanities degree.

Well, then what’s the humanities degree for? It’s to teach you how to think. You learn to think by writing. Now there’s more to read, to speak, and all of that. But the best thing you can do is read and write every day.

Couple of hours every day. Write about things you find important and see if you can see if you can discover what you believe to be true. And that’ll build you a foundation. And it’s unbelievably practical. Like if you look at people who are phenomenally successful across life, there’s various reasons but one of them is is that they’re unbelievably good at articulating what they what they’re aiming at and strategizing and negotiating and and and enticing people with a vision forward.

It’s like, get your words together, man. That’s that makes you unstoppable. And that that’s really That’s the core of the humanities, that idea. Get your words together. Make yourself an articulate creature.

And then you’re you’re deadly in the best possible way. So And take that seriously. The best thing you can do is teach people to write because there’s no difference between that and thinking. And one of the things that just blows me away about universities is that no one ever tells students why they should write something. It’s like, well, you have to do this assignment.

Well, why are you writing? Well, you need the brain. It’s like, no. You need to learn to think. Because thinking makes you act effectively in the world.

Thinking makes you win the battles you undertake and those could be battles for good things. If you can think and speak and write, you are absolutely deadly. Nothing can get in your way. So that’s why you learn to write. It’s like Boy, I can’t believe that people have just told that.

It’s like — it’s the most powerful weapon you could possibly provide someone with. And I I mean, I know lots of people who’ve been staggeringly successful and watched them throughout my life. Those people, you don’t want to have an argument with them. They’ll just slash you into pieces and not in a malevolent way. It’s like, if you’re going to make your point and they’re going to make their point, you better have your points organized because otherwise, you are going to look like and be an absolute idiot.

You are not going to get anywhere. Truth of the matter is is that you have a lot of potential as a child, but none of that is capable of manifesting itself as freedom before you become disciplined. And discipline is a matter of the imposition of order, and the order is necessary, especially for people who are hopeless and nihilistic. And what does it mean? Well, it doesn’t mean, jeez, I hate getting up at eight o’clock in the morning to get ready for work.

The Importance of Discipline

That just means that you’re not very disciplined, you know, or or maybe that it might mean something deeper. But I’d start with lack of discipline before, you know, rearranging your whole life. Because you might say, well, I hate getting up at eight o’clock in the morning no matter what I’m doing, and then it’s not your job. I don’t mean don’t do difficult things. I I mean, watch yourself.

And if you see that you’re doing things that make you hate yourself, then consider the cost of continuing. You know, if something’s valuable, you make sacrifices to attain it. That that discovery of sacrifice, I think that’s what separates human. It’s one of the primary factors separating human beings from animals. Because we discovered that we could let go of something we value in the present and we would gain something we value even more in the future.

Lay a disciplinary structure on yourself. Get the chaos in in in check and then you can move towards a state that’s freer. It’s discipline first. Like, look, if you’re going to become a concert pianist, there’s going to be several thousand hours of extraordinarily disciplined practice. That’s the imposition of order on your potential, let’s say.

But what comes out of that is a much grander freedom. So in virtually every freedom that you have in life that’s true freedom is purchased at the price of your discipline. But it’s not some casual self help doctrine. It’s that if you don’t organize yourself properly, you’ll pay for it and in a big way and so will the people around you. And I would say start where you can start, you know.

If if something announces itself to you as in need of repair that you could repair, then, hey, fix it. You fix a hundred things like that, your life will be a lot different. Now, I often tell people to fix the things you repeat every day because people tend to think of those as trivial. You get up, you brush your teeth, you you have your breakfast, you know, you you have your routines that you go through every day. Well, those those probably constitute fifty percent of your life and people think, well, they’re mundane.

I don’t need to pay attention to them. It’s like no no that’s exactly wrong. The things you do every day those are the most important things you do. Hands down. Well, there isn’t anything better to have than a problem that’s worth solving.

Like, that’s really worth solving. Right? And so the more of that you take on, the more you have a reason to get out of bed in the morning. No matter what. I’m getting up.

I’m trudging forward. It doesn’t matter what I’m suffering from. I’ve got things that need to be done. They’re And that gives you that sense of purpose that is the antidote to bitterness. So, yeah, there’s lots of reasons to you know, because I thought for a long time, imagine that imagine you have a choice in front of you because because you do.

The Choice Between Meaningfulness and Meaninglessness

So here’s the choice. Your life life is either meaningful or meaningless. Okay. So let’s go through the meaningless part first. Because you think, well, of course, I don’t want it to be meaningless.

It’s like, yeah. Just hold on a second. Nothing you do matters. And so impulsive pleasure is the order of the day. No responsibility.

That’s you can do whatever you want. It’s like Pleasure Island in Pinocchio. Right? Or it’s it’s like Neverland in in in Peter Pan. You’re still a kid. You can play all the time. Impulsive pleasure and and no responsibility. That’s the reward for meaninglessness. Well, but then the the other side is, okay. Well, let’s say you want your life to be meaningful.

The Consequences of Meaningful Action

It’s like, okay. Then what you do matters. It actually matters. Right? Make a mistake, hurts you, hurts your family, hurts the world in a deeper way than you think.

And you have to be awake to that, And then you have to take it on yourself. So you’re at a particular stage right now. And that stage would involve a particular world view and the behaviors that go along with that. So the perceptions and behaviors. But it’s not enough because you haven’t mastered the whole world and you’re making mistakes all the time.

And then there’s other neurological mechanisms that so maybe that’s a more left hemisphere phenomena, the instantiation of that identity. Then there’s right hemisphere mechanisms that are tracking your errors and sort of and keeping track of them. And the errors are an indication that your theory is incomplete. So it the errors accumulate and the information around the errors accumulate and another identity starts to become formulated and it it solves all the problems your previous identity did but also some additional ones. When you have an moment like that, it’s the manifestation of that next identity that’s that’s making itself known.

It’s, you know, because it’s being built from the bottom up. It isn’t explicit yet. Then you’ll encounter an explicit statement. You you mentioned a couple there, and they map onto that. And that’s the It’s like, oh, yes.

Oh, yes. That’s what ties together these things that I’ve been wrestling with in the back of my mind. Right? Someone made it explicit. And that’s what well, that’s one of the great things about language.

That can also help fill in the gaps too. Because you didn’t you know, you you can start to make arguments based on that observation that I have. That’s that’s that’s that’s the manifestation. What is the consequence, the long term consequence of acting? So many people, especially because of the world I live in, in Instagram and social media, we we kind of build out these personas and then Yeah.

We almost follow the implicit instructions that come with those personas. Well, that’s the problem right there is that I think Pinocchio is brilliant work of art. If you’re a puppet and an actor, and Pinocchio is both at times in that movie, both a puppet and an actor. So why an actor? Like, why is there why is there something wrong with being an actor?

The Danger of Crafting Personas

Well, the first question is, well, who sets your role? And then the second question is, who’s pulling your strings? So you put on this front that is there to make you popular and sexy and desirable and to mask from yourself your own inadequacies, but that’s a role. Who wrote it and for what purpose? And, you know, maybe you’re acting out a tragedy.

Maybe you’re acting out narcissus. You don’t know because you put that you put that on yourself in an attempt in some ways to deliver to people what they want or more accurately to look as though you’re delivering to people what they want. And it’s not nothing to do that. Right? Because at least you’re attempting in some sense to adapt to the social world.

Someone who’s really infantile and dependent, someone who’s never left home, part of their problem is that they haven’t crafted a persona. So you don’t want to denigrate it entirely, but it’s no substitute for the real thing. And it turns out that not only is what we want from each other the real thing, but that’s also the adventure of your life. And so if you aren’t truthful and that means unfortunately, especially at the beginning when you start to be truthful, it means deeply coming to terms with your inadequacies in humility. So it’s very painful.

Without that, you don’t have the adventure of your life. You have the role that has been that you acquiesced to. And that’ll take all the meaning out of your life. Right. Imagine that the world was constituted so that the true adventure of your life emerged as a consequence of truth in speech and action.

Because that would be reflective of the real you, so it would be you living. And then imagine that the adventure that would occur if you dwelled in the truth would be so overwhelming that it would justify all the suffering. I really contended with this idea of struggle rid my life of chaos and struggle. I thought that’s why I was trying to get rich and get the Ferrari. Mhmm.

And the blonde, I thought that would create a life, free of free of struggle. But then I looked at some studies, and I sort of heard about this thing called gold medal depression when Olympians come back from the Olympics, and they’ve lost orientation. And I Yeah. And I tried to understand the role that struggle would would would have to play for me to be a fulfilled human being for the rest of my life. We’re built to walk uphill.

The Importance of Struggle and Goals

And when you reach the pinnacle of the hill, you want to stop and appreciate the vision. But the next thing you want is a higher hill in the distance because it’s the uphill climb that it’s it’s from the uphill climb that we derive our value and I mean this technically. So almost all the positive emotion we feel especially the emotion that fills us with enthusiasm that’s experience in relationship to a goal And so in some sense, you want a goal that you can never attain. Right? So you can always move closer to the goal that recedes as you move towards it.

You think, well, that’s frustrating. It’s like Sisyphus pushing the rock uphill. But it’s not because as you pursue that goal, you put yourself together and your life does get better and richer and more abundant. That’s why the highest levels of virtue and goal are in some sense transcendent. You want them to be above everything you’re doing so you can continually move towards something that’s more sublime and better.

That’s what you are. You’re here to live, not to sleep.

Related Posts

• Transcript of The Secret To Becoming A Confident Speaker: Matt Abrahams
• Transcript of Anxiety & Overthinking Are Habits You Can Break: Dr Julie Smith
• Transcript of How to Succeed Without Confidence, Motivation, or Healing: Evy Poumpouras
• Transcript of How Great Leaders Make People Feel Seen: Dr. Stella Dellamora
• Transcript of 3 Simple Ways To Improve Your Communication – Joel Ellis