Jordan Peterson: What To Do To Be Successful

And I want you to know that I think about this because I will tell you

what

you need to do to be

successful

. Some of these things are not as malleable, but others are things you can work on. Well, IQ, well, that's hard. one because, as far as I know, there is no evidence that you can do anything with your IQ. I was reading an article by Dan Simon today. It is a relatively recent revision. Dan Simon did the invisible gorilla thing and I was watching because there's everything. these companies that claim that these online brain training exercises can produce cognitive improvements and he reviewed the literature again and I've reviewed that literature like six times in the last 15 years because I keep waiting for someone to solve the problem, but it's always the same thing. .

The answer is like you do mental training games to get better at the game. Much better in that game. You get a little better at similar games, but distilling games that still have a heavy cognitive load doesn't affect your performance at all. Zero. None. So he. question of how to increase IQ, man, that's deadly, nobody really knows how to do it. I can tell you how to prevent your IQ from decreasing as you age, that's not so bad because it does, fluid IQ decreases from the time you are 20 and quickly your physical health is the best preventative so do physical exercise , strangely enough, you know you think well why your brain uses oxygen like crazy, right, and you need to stay clean and well oxygenated, and physical exercise you both like. weight lifting, so anaerobic, anaerobic and aerobic exercise seem to be very, very effective in preventing cognitive decline throughout life, so it's really useful to know because it's the only thing we know that does it, making it the next best predictor of success in life.

It's conscientiousness, well, and although of the two aspects of conscientiousness, let's say orderliness and industriousness, the best predictor is industriousness, so the question is

what

can you do about your industriousness and the answer is well, that's also a not difficult because there is a strong genetic component, but you can work on microhabits regarding your conscientiousness and I think the best microhabits have to do in part with these future processes of the creation program. I think the best thing you can do regarding your conscientiousness is to set some goals that you really value and the future creation program helps people achieve them and basically does a situational analysis.

It helps you do a situational analysis of your life more than a psychological analysis, I would say, so the questions are something like Well, okay, you're going to have to put some effort into your life and you need to be motivated to do it, so, What are the possible sources of motivation? Well, you could think of them in a Big Five way, you know, if you're an extrovert. you want friends if you are agreeable you want an intimate relationship if you are unpleasant you want to win competitions if you are open you want to engage in creative activities if you have a high level of neuroticism you want security okay then that's it sources of potential motivation that you could draw on and that you could adapt to your own personality, you know your own personality, but there are also dimensions in which you want to consider your life, so we ask people, well, you know, if you could have your life as such.

How you would want it in three to five years if you took proper care of yourself do you know what you would want from your friendships what you would want from your intimate relationship how you would like to structure your family what 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 physical, mental and physical health and maybe also your drug and alcohol consumption? Because that's a good place to go down, you know, because alcoholism, for example, annihilates. You know five to ten percent of the people, so you want to keep that in check and then, then, maybe you get to know yourself, you develop a vision of what your life is like, what you would like your life to be and that associates the goal once.

You set the goal and then you divide it into microprocesses that you could implement. The microprocess has become rewarding in proportion to its causal association with the goal and that becomes entangled in your incentive reward system. You know, we talk about the dopaminergic incentive reward system and that's what keeps you moving forward and the way it works is it works best if it produces a positive emotion when it can see you moving towards a valuable goal, well what's the implication of that? You better have a worthwhile goal. because otherwise you can't get any positive motivation and therefore the more valuable the goal is in principle, the more the microprocess becomes associated with that goal, it starts to acquire a positive charge and what that means is that you get up in tomorrow and you're excited for the day you're ready to leave and from what I can tell what you do is you specify your long term ideal, maybe you also specify a place you want to stay away from so you're terrified to fail and excited to succeed because that's also useful you specify your goal you do it you do it in some sense as a unique individual you want you want to specify goals that make you say oh, if that could happen as a consequence of my efforts, it would clearly be worth it because the question is always why do something, because doing nothing is easy, you just sit there and don't do anything that is really easy, the question is why would you do something and the answer that has to be because you have determined in some way worthwhile way and then the next question might be where you should look for things that are worthwhile and one would be that you could consult your own temperament and the other would be well, in a way look how, look what it is that people accumulate that It is valuable throughout life, look, look what, then you do a structural analysis of the subcomponents of human existence and you already did it, you need a family, you need friends like you don't need them. you have all these things, but you better have most of them, family, friends, careers, educational goals, plans for yourself, you know, time away from work, attention to your physical and mental health, etc., you know that about that It's what life is all about and if you don't have any of those good things, then all you're left with is misery and suffering, so that's bad, that's bad business for you, so once you set that goal structure, Let's say, and that's really in many ways, that's what you should do in universities is exactly what you should do: try to figure out who it is that you're trying to be right and aim for that and then use everything that you learned as a means to build that person that I want to be and I really mean I want to be, I don't want to say that I should even be those things, those things will overlap and it's important to distinguish between them because that's partly and this comes down to analysis micro routine, like I say while you're trying to be more hard-working, okay, number one, specify your damn goals because how are you going to achieve something if you don't know what it is?

That's not going to happen and often people don't specify their goals. also because they don't like to specify conditions for failure, so if you stay vague and confused, which is very easy because it's just a matter of not doing that well, then you don't know when you fail and people might say well, yo. I don't really want to know when I fail because it's painful, so I'll stay blind to when I fail. That's fine, except you'll fail all the time and then you won't know until you've failed so much. that you're done and that can easily happen when you're 40, so I would recommend that you don't let that happen, so that's willful blindness.

You could have known, but you chose not to accept it, so once you get your goal structure in place, you think okay, if I could have this life, it seems like it would be worth living despite the fact that, you know, it's going to be anxiety-inducing. and it will be a threat, and there will be some suffering and loss involved in all of that, obviously. The goal is to have a vision of your life that considers all the things that justify your effort. Okay, so what are you doing right? Then, you turn to microroutines. Alright. Well, this is what I aim for.

As? That's instantiated day by day, week by week, month by month and that's where something like a schedule can be incredibly helpful. Google Calendar is like making a damn schedule and sticking to it. What is the rule with the schedule? It's not a fucking prison, that's the The first thing people do wrong is, well, I don't like following a schedule, it's like, well, what kind of schedule are you setting? Well I should have to do this so I have to do this so I have to do this you know and then I'm just going to play video games because who wants to do all these things that I have to do?

It's wrong to set the damn schedule so that you have the day you want, that's the trick, okay, I have tomorrow if I was going to set it to be the best possible day I could have, practically speaking, what would that look like? Well, then you schedule it and obviously there's going to be a little bit of responsiveness that goes along with that, because if you have any sense, one of the things you're going to insist on is that at the end of the day you're not in any worse shape than what you were on and then at the beginning of the day, that's a stupid day if you have a bunch of those in a row you just dig, you know, you dig yourself a hole and then you dig yourself in it, I'm sorry, but that's not a good strategy, It's a bad strategy, so maybe 20% of your day has to be responsibility and obligation or maybe it's more than that, depending on how. you're way behind, but even that you can, you can ask yourself, well, I have these responsibilities, I have to schedule the damn things in what is the right proportion of responsibility and reward and you can ask yourself that just like you would negotiate with someone who is working for you is like , okay, you have work tomorrow, okay, so I want you to work tomorrow and you could say, okay, what are you going to do for me that will make it likely that I will work for you?

Well, you might ask yourself. that you know, maybe you do an hour of accountability and then you play a video game for 15 minutes. I don't know what drives you crazy, but you know that you have to negotiate with yourself and not tyrannize yourself as if you were negotiating with someone. that you care about that you would like to be productive and have a good life and that's how you make the schedule and then you look at the day and you think well, if I had that day it would be good, great, you know? You're useless and horrible, so you'll probably only get it right with about 70% accuracy, but that's a lot better than zero, and if you get it right even with 50% accuracy, another rule of thumb is to aim for 51% next week. or 50 and a half percent for the love of God or because you're going to get to that position where things start to positively recede and spiral you upwards and that's one way you can work on your consciousness, It's a life plan that you would like to have and you do it in part by referring to social norms which are more or less rescuing your father from the belly of the whale, but the other way to do it is to have a little conversation with yourself about like if you wouldn't do it you really know who you are because you know what you like you won't do what you're told you won't do what you tell yourself you must have noticed that it's like you're a bad employee and a worse boss and you know both jobs, you don't know what you want to do and then when you tell yourself what to do, you don't do it anyway, so you should say goodbye and find someone else to do it, but