How To Actually Fix Your Life - Jordan Peterson Motivation

What you discover in

your

life

when you are young and you need to know this is that you need to be good at at least one thing, so you need to be very good at at least one thing that you have to specialize in. something and that was really the goal of a right of learning because you submit to a teacher and I will use that term despite its connotations, let's say you voluntarily submit to discipline imposed in one direction, the nich philosophers pointed out that nothing can be done. achieve any value even on the front of freedom without first subjecting oneself to intense voluntary discipline and that is why I thought that voluntary slavery in a sense was the precondition for freedom and you can think about that, imagine that you are trying to learn to play a musical instrument or imagine what you had to go through when you learned to read.

There is that initial skill automation process that is very thorough and difficult, but once you master it to go through that disciplinary structure, then you have freedoms that you wouldn't have. I haven't had it before, once you learn to read music and place

your

hands correctly on the piano keyboard and play the appropriate scales and chords, then you can play music and you couldn't do that to begin with, so subjugation of yourself. to a disciplinary structure

actually

frees you, which is another thing conservatives have to tell young people and so on, the other thing you'll notice as you get older if you've been through a disciplinary process or a multitude of The main thing is that first they limit you as you specialize, but then as you go deeper and deeper into your specialization, the world expands in front of you and, for example, when I went to do my PhD, I studied alcoholism, but to study alcohol . and its effects on the brain, I had to study neuroscience and neuropsychology and once I started studying neuroscience and neuropsychology, neuroneuropharmacology, I also had to understand well, it turns out that I had to understand at least to the extent that I was capable. functioning of the whole brain because alcohol washes the whole brain like water and that's why I had to write a thesis that is a disciplinary process focused particularly on the genetic predisposition among men with multigenerational family history of alcohol from two alol rewards and that It's a very specific reward. topic, but it didn't matter because as I got deeper and deeper into it, it started to reconnect me with the whole world, so it's extremely useful to master something, choose something or more than one thing, but start with something and, in a certain way, sense, it doesn't really matter what it is, it just matters that you do it and what will happen is that you will also develop the discipline that accompanies that process of self-mastery and once you have instantiated that discipline because you voluntarily submitted to it for a particular goal, you can take that discipline and, as a consequence, subject yourself to other objectives, so you don't have to worry that if you become a master of one thing, you will become an expert at nothing.

The best people I have ever met. I knew a great artist in Montreal, he was a very good friend of mine and he was a licensed taxi driver, a licensed carpenter, a licensed boat pilot and a great interior decorator and extremely socially skilled and a great visual artist. He had all of that in his fingers and that was multiple Masters he had served multiple Masters and had become a master himself it's okay to wander around stupidly before setting your destiny now you'll see that was echoed in Exodus because what happens is that The Egyptians or the Hebrews escape from a tyranny which is kind of like what you do personally and psychologically when you escape from your previous set of stupidly ignorant and stubborn axioms it's like being away from that tyranny it's great I freed myself from that well then what? what do you think?

Well, now I'm in the way that no, now you're not, you're in the desert where you stupidly wander, knowing and worshiping the wrong things until you finally organize yourself morally again and go in the right direction, so it's worth knowing too because you think well. I got rid of a lot of things, excess baggage that I didn't need in my

life

and now everything is fine, it's like no, no, you've gotten rid of a whole set of scaffolding that kept you in your place even though they were pathological. now you have nothing and nothing

actually

turns out to be better than something pathological, but you are still stuck with the problem of nothingness and that is exactly why Exodus is structured the way it is, it is that you escape from maturity, it is today We are no longer slaves, yes, well, now you are nihilistic and lost, it is not necessarily an improvement, but it is, but it is the preview.

It's also useful to know that because you can also be fooled into thinking you are. trying to become enlightened, which might mean activating all those parts of you that could activate, you think well, that's just a linear uphill path, you know, it's just from one success to another, no, it's not, it's like you're here and you. You're not doing that bad and the first step is a complete bloody catastrophe, it's worse and then maybe you can pull yourself together and you hit a new LP plateau and then that thing falls apart and shakes and explodes, it's worse again and it's Part of the reason The People Don't Light Up is because it's marked by intermittent deserts, essentially by intermittent catastrophes, and if you don't know that well then you're basically screwed because you keep going with your forward movement and you collapse and you think that was So.

It didn't work, I crashed, it's like no, that's par for the course, it's not an indication that you failed, it's just an indication that it's really hard and when you learn something, you also unlearn something and what you unlearned is probably useful. and unlearning it is actually painful for you. I know, let's say if you have to get out of a bad relationship, it's like not all, not all, there is no relationship that is 100% bad, so when you get out of it, maybe you're in better shape, but you're still . Lonely and disoriented you don't know what your past was and you don't know what your present is and you don't know what your future is that's why people stay with the devil they know instead of you know how to look for devils they don't know so anyway just because you're full of flaws doesn't mean you have to stop and thank God for it, that's a really useful thing and just because you're full of flaws doesn't mean you can't learn and then you can pause it like a ideal and you are going to be wrong about it, but it doesn't matter because what you are right about is in stating that the ideal moves towards it if the real ideal is It is not conceptualized perfectly well, first surprise, surprise, because what are you going to do is perfect , so it doesn't matter that it's imperfect, it just matters that you do it and that you move on, so it's really positive news as far as I'm concerned because you can actually do that right, you can do it wrong, anyone can do it, so that's useful, okay, if you were an efficient person you would have just done it, but you're not, but who cares.

I still end up in the same place and maybe the trip will be even more interesting, who knows, probably too interesting. um Yung, I began to understand that the goal of psychic development, as far as psychological development or spiritual development is concerned, is the self, there is no linear evolution. there is only a circumambulation of the self, an approach, it is as if you are entering a spiral towards something like that and what you are spiraling into recedes as you move towards it and becomes more and more sophisticated and well developed as you move. . towards that because you are not going to run out of objectives no matter how much you act together, there are probably, without a doubt, 30 Dimensions along which you could act together much more and some of them are not even conceivable for When you are in your initial uncarved state, let's say you begin the J journey towards becoming a master by submitting to other Masters and that is really what you are supposed to do when you educate yourself, particularly in the humanities, because that is an apprenticeship with Masters, for That's what they might think, as people often think when they don't discipline their children, that if they limit their creativity in a single extreme direction, they will eradicate their flexibility and their creativity, but they won't, just put order in your chaos and once you have it, Whatever you do, all that creative potential you have within you will be much more likely to manifest, so it is very useful to seriously discipline yourself voluntarily, especially when you are young, you can discover what limitations you can. stay within, you can discover how hard you can push yourself, you can discover how hard you can work, you can discover how productive and generous you can be and all of that is incredibly useful and then you can step back a little bit so that it becomes sustainable. you know, but it's good to wear yourself down to the bone if you can while you're young so you start to understand who you are and you can't do that without pushing yourself to the limit and I had another client who could be lucid in her dreams, which is more among women, you could ask the damn characters what they stood for and they'd tell you okay, that was pretty weird and a lot of the things they told you were actually helpful and weren't things. that she wanted to hear, basically one of them told her that if she was going to live she would have to go visit a slaughterhouse and the reason for that was because she was raised as a little princess and protected from horrible Mother Nature. until she hit puberty and at which point she became an evil villain because that's how the family worked like a perfect girl, an evil teenager overnight and then well that was hard for her and she wasn't prepared because she thought the world was the world of princesses and you know, her.

She couldn't walk past a butcher shop without having a fit and no wonder, you know, really Jesus, you know, no wonder, but you do, but she couldn't, so we used to go to butcher shops and it made her cry and and um, that she was a vegetarian, that made her cry and you know, Beman, the cruelty of the world and it's like, that's fair, man, those are fucking pieces of meat, it's like I don't know why everyone doesn't scream when they walk . the butcher shop, but you have to get used to it, man, because you can't live in the world any other way, so the character in the dream, who was a gypsy, told him that he had to go visit a slaughterhouse, which seemed impractical, so I asked him.

I asked her if she could think of anything else to do and she thought, well, why don't we go visit a funeral home and look and bomb? And I thought, "Oh, well, that sounds like a fun way to spend the day," so I called. I opened a funeral home and said I had a client who was terrified of death and I was a therapist who was also a little shaky with the concept, so they had no problem dealing with death all the time, which is really something to think about, right, a human being can have an occupation where they do nothing but deal with death and not go crazy like Stark, it's like what the hell is up with that?

It's like working in a hospice ward where If they're your clients, you know they're in a relationship, all they're going to do is die this week next week, the week after people do that, it's like those people tough men, they're tough, so anyway we went and watched this EMB blitz that "I have a pretty high level of disgust sensitivity, so it was a little tough for me, but she sat there and first, while I didn't was, we were outside this little room, she wasn't looking at that man in any way and she." She did something like that and you know she was pretty good and then she did this and then she did this and then she looked at him and then she asked if she could come in and she put on a glove. and she touched her body and she didn't have an attack, she didn't have a panic attack, so she walked away from there and realized that there was a lot more to her than she thought and that she could see things. that she didn't believe that she could see and live and after that she had a kind of touchstone it's like well, I'm a little afraid of this well, is it as bad as going to see the ab bombing?

No, it's not that bad, well, I guess I can do it, it's like an initiation, right, she had an initiation and so did I. You know this, and I learned a lot by doing it. I learned that one of the things you have to do if you're going to be a human being is prepare to be useful in the face of death, and that's why when you have a parent who dies and you know that it shatters people's ideas, often they don't even they can think about it if you can't even think about that man you have thinking about doing because you need to be able to at least think about it because otherwise you will be a wasteland when it happens and you never know you might even have a greater ambition, maybe you might even be useful when it happens to be part of the pile of destroyed people who also have to be taken care of, you know, and that's brutal, you have to be brutal to be useful after the death of your parents, you know, you can't fall apart and fall apart And I know that you have every reason to do it, so you have to be some kind of tough monster to handle that, but do you want to be useful in the face of tragedy or do you want to be pathetic?

I have worked in emergency medicine for 11 years and have seen many deaths, but I am very afraid of dying. Any advice on how I can do it? be at peace with IM's dying morals, well, I don't know if anyoneis he ever really at peace with that, I mean, I think what you can take away read Socrates' apology, there are two versions, there is uh, there is the pl, there is Plato's version and there is what was his name Aristophanes there is another version I don't think it's correct anyway there are two versions of Socrates' apology it's very short it's only a few pages 15 pages or so read them both why good because Socrates presents a very interesting proposal and I really don't know what to make of this , so I once asked my parents if they could take a medication that would physically return them to 18, but they said they had all the wisdom they had gained over the years and they wouldn't do it.

I would lose that if they did it and didn't say yes right away, you know, and I don't know if they ever told me what they had decided, but it was interesting to me that they didn't say they did. I also don't say no right away, but it's interesting that they had to think about it because you would think that if they offered you something close to immortality and health, you would accept it and maybe do it, but here is an alternative proposal and I don't know, It's not like I'm not trying to support myself, you know?

If I could get another decade or 20 more years to stay healthy, that seems like a good thing. I would like to live 500 years, that is a lot. time man, a thousand years, I don't know, it's a long time, but the alternative is that you know existence cut short with death and that's not particularly acceptable either and therefore is there a medicine for mortality? Well, Socrates, but implicit in Socrates' apology is the following idea, go figure. You lived your life fully, that would mean that you said what you had to say when you had to say it, you did what you had to do when you needed to and you took advantage of every opportunity that came your way, so that you would exhaust yourself in the service of your life, let's say that maybe by the time you were old you would have had enough, you know, and you could just let it go, and you know you see this with people is that and we know this. even when we're grieving, you know maybe you have a relative who's 95 and they die and people are sad, but you say well, you know they lived a full life and the fuller the life, the less in some ways the less catastrophic it seems. missing. so it could be that if you completely exhausted yourself, your life would be enough, so I know you know the people I said, I mentioned this, and the people who are older and look back on their life, they are often sad and regretful for the things that they didn't do, you know the things that they left undone and that maybe now they can't do, you know, you can imagine those of you who have been parents, maybe you have adult children, now you think well, if you could have children again, would they?

Maybe the answer is yes, but another answer is well, you know, I already had children, I already did that and and and if you did it right, maybe that's enough, you know we have grandchildren now and that's not exactly the same as having children, it's something like this. They are light children, right, and it's wonderful, but you made a joke about that when you were on stage, you know you said that they have all the advantages of children, grandchildren, without any of the disadvantages, and that's a joke, but everyone laughs because everyone understands that and it's great to have grandchildren and I would like us to go back to our youth and do it again.

Well, that's a very difficult question to answer correctly because you simply don't have the, you can't say what you decide unless that option is actually available. for you and maybe the answer is yes and maybe the answer is no because you know you've already done it in whatever happens next, so I would say if you're afraid of death, look at how you're living and you'll see. . if you're all the way in and maybe if you're all the way in, that's good enough, I think that's right, I think that's right, and then I think also if you're all the way in and death visits you and you know it's imminent, you might say yourself I did everything I was here to do at least then you're not going to torture yourself with it while you face death that's also something you have to be tough as a damn boot to be good because you have to hold your own when you need to. stand your ground and you have to be able to say no when it's time to say no and you have to mean it and then you have to think and plan strategically so that when you go to say no you can mean it and it will stick, you know, and that requires a certain amount of built-in malevolence, I would say, and once it's built-in it's not malevolence, it's strength, it's strength of character, it's the ability to stand your ground. and you have to cultivate that and you cultivate it at least in part by telling the truth and so you take your place in the world as a decent person and as a decent citizen and then you play the hierarchical game appropriately and that is standing tall with your shoulders back is as if the world were an attack you have to deal with the tyranny of culture you have the catastrophe of nature you have your damn malevolence and ignorance coming at you plus the incredibly complicated undetermined potential of the future coming at you and it is all your responsibility and You can turn away from it and be afraid of it and be a victim of it and be bitter and cynical about it and no wonder it can be painful or I can turn around and you can say man, go ahead because there's more to me than the catastrophe and this It's what I discovered when I looked at what I looked at.

I looked at the darkest things I could really look at for 30 years. It was actually really fun to be around. I can tell you that I looked at the darkest things I could think of, not just what happened at Owitz and what happened in the gag, but also personal issues, you know, it's like I wasn't that interested in totalitarians as a group. He was interested in the people who committed the terrible acts that the totalitarians demanded. You know the people. I was rereading Ordinary Men and it was a story about a police battalion in Poland that trained ordinary police officers.

To take naked pregnant women into the countryside and shoot them in the back of the head, by the way, it takes a lot of training before you can bring yourself to do that and you're not the same person at the end of It's Pretty Horrible, you know? And I was trying to figure out what it would be like to be that person because we are that person and then what it would be like to not be that person, to be right to refuse to do that, to not participate in that you know, and what I discovered by making personal that total Arian propensity.

It was that there was more to us than the horror, nature is bent on our destruction, bad as a culture, tyrannical and bloody as far as you can see. Malevolent as you are in the darkest part of your heart and that is quite malevolent. The possibility within you can bring forth courage and truth and ability and ability and will to set things right if you are willing to set them right is more powerful than all that and that is why it is so interesting that it was a test for me from an old saying I read by Carl Yung, it's an alchemical motif in Squalus Inventor, which is what you most want to be.

What you find will be found where you least want to look and it is very interesting because it means that if you are willing to turn around and stand up, for example, stand up straight and face the darkness as if what you discovered in the darkest part is the part darker. the brightest light and that is something that is very much worth discovering because there will be a terrible darkness in your life and it will make you cynical and bitter and it could easily be that you are not looking at it enough because if you looked at it enough and you didn't get scared and put everything you had to endure, you would discover that there was more to you than the horror.

I have people writing to me from all over the world saying they're doing that, they're saying, well, you know, I cleaned my room and then I stopped saying stupid things and, oh my God, it's like things are so much better, it's like who? I would have guessed it, you know? So it's hanging the fruit, man because there's one that's the other thing if there's a lot of things wrong with you then it's very easy to start fixing it you know you have so much there's so much territory you can inhabit I'll make you a great nation I'll bless you that's good, I mean the whole nation, that's positive, but having God on your side, that's what you know, you might wish that when things get tough, that it would be good and make your name great and you will be a wonderful blessing, That's a good deal and I.

I will bless those who bless you, that is also good and I will curse those who curse you and in you all the families of the earth will be blessed that is something, that is something, wouldn't it be something if you could wake up and your day was composed in part of people thanking you for all the good things you've done in the world, wouldn't that be nice? It is not impossible for that to happen, so Abram left, yes, as the Lord had spoken to him and a lot left with him and Abram was 7 and 5 years old. when he left Heran, that's old, now Abraham lives a long time, but this is also part of the story, so he has a wife who can't have children, she has nothing, obviously, she's been hanging around daddy's hut for too long, given that he's 75 years old, it's time to light the fire under him a little bit, so he doesn't have much to offer, but he still decides to move on and I've seen this too, you know, if you don't have your destiny in your hand when you are 30 years old, it is difficult, you start to suffer and if you do not have your destiny in your hand when you are 40, then you really start to suffer and 40 is a real fork in the road. fork in the road that's always where you meet the devil by the way and that's because every time you have to make a decision the possibility of evil calls you, that's why I had a friend, I told you a little about him and he killed.

He himself, shortly after 40, had published a book and it was a very small publishing house. He was a pretty good writer, but he couldn't pull himself together and that affected him too much at 40 and I'm not saying he's useless at 40. I'm not saying that and I'm not saying that partly because of these verses but also partly because of what I have seen in my clinical practice. I have had people come to me and have had very chaotic and sick lives. Let's say who was in that neighboring neighborhood of Age and it's true for the older people too that they decided to make a real effort and try to get to where they were better off, you know, instead of being bitter about where they weren't because that's the bitterness that really gets you. it really affects it is not good it is the opposite of gratitude it is the manifestation of resentment it makes you malicious it is very, very bad to be bitter it is not it is not hell to be bitter and if you are 40 and you are not successful then you have to accept your luck and You have to start improving what is in front of you and if you do it it won't take you long, it's very interesting to watch people, things can be much better. in 6 months and they can be much better in 2 years like it's an uphill struggle but it's by no means impossible and again I don't know what the limit of that is.

I guess it depends to some extent on the grade. of your commitment, but anyway, Abra is another indication of the true validity of this story. God is not setting this up to be easy, right. Abraham is old and he and his wife are also old and more than that, she is barren, what is he like? he is going to be the father of nations, how is he going to succeed? Well, the initial starting point is insufficient, radically insufficient and that is very inspiring because it means that you can start from where you are and it is worth asking yourself, it is like "Leave what you have." you're doing that thing that's dumb that you know is dumb and pick a name that's worth it you know to make things better for yourself like you're worth taking care of yourself like you're worth something you know and surround yourself with people who believe the same thing. and who is to be happy about your achievements and unhappy when you fail in the right and you are comparing yourself with your achievements of yesterday and not with someone else's today so as not to be jealous and bitter and put your own house in order so that you are not Cursing the world when some of its mess could be your fault and you're trying to pursue something meaningful and you're doing your best to tell the truth and all that and then you see what happens, who the hell are they?

You know, you think you're a miracle of some damn weird kind. We have existed for 3 and 2 billion years. You know that each of your relatives was successfully propagated and here you are, against all possible odds in this hell world. in a sense and and and and bitterness and and and and and tyranny and malevolence and yet God only knows what is inside you this capacity for Consciousness the capacity to face potential and turn it into something good that is us the man that is Western history that is the individual as the cornerstone of the state that is our responsibility and it really is who we are if there is something you want, you need about five arguments as to why you want it because the likelihood is that the person who opposes you has five arguments as to why you shouldn't have it. is very low, they just won't have thought about it enough, so the other thing What happens in the future when writing ex is that they ask you to articulate the reasons for all the goals that arise from your vision of the future, so they ask you why it would be good for you, why it would be good for you. family, whyWould it be good for society in general?

That gives you three levels of argument right there and if you've got it articulated in detail and it's related to other important goals, then you're a great topic to argue with. because people just aren't that deep, meaning they don't have as many levels of explanation or objection and it's also very useful in relation to your own mind because if you want to do something that is difficult and requires energy many different subsystems in your mind are going to raise objections, well maybe that's not what you should be doing right now, maybe you should be doing the dishes or vacuuming or watching TV or watching YouTube or if you're really clever when you're trying to do something difficult what your doing brain is to give yourself something harder to do that's not that hard so you can feel justified in not doing what you're supposed to do because you're doing something. is useful and if you give in to that Temptation, which you often will, then she wins and because she wins she gets a little boost of dopamine and she gets stronger every time you let her win, the internal argument grows and whatever that you let be defeated is reduced because it is punished. he doesn't get his way, so another thing you really have to remember is not to practice what you don't want to become and because those are neurological circuits, you build those things in there, man, they're not. going anywhere you can build another little machine to inhibit them, that's the best you can do once they are there, you can't take them out, then the ones you build to inhibit them can be eliminated by stress and the old habits will disappear.

It goes back up, so you have to be careful what you say and what you do because you build yourself that way and you become what you practice, so if you have a high level of neurotic ISM, you will need a lot of practice to achieve it. calm them all down, but that's what is done in psychotherapy with people all the time because a lot of people who are in therapy have higher than average levels of negative emotion and you help them become stronger and the way How you do it is strategize with them and encourage them to confront the things that they fear and avoid and avoid and they become more capable and braver as a result of doing that and you can change people a lot by doing that and that's what you do. you do when you learn and that's how you teach children and it's the universal coping mechanism and you try to speed that up in psychotherapy and you can do it yourself, you know this is really helpful, what would you call the ritual routine Ro?

Look, you have a goal and you will see that as you move towards the goal, obstacles will arise and some of them you will not want to face, you will avoid them, you know that, so maybe I have a client and he is being bullied at work and he needs to get another job and for this he has to put his CV in order and he is ashamed of his CV and does not even want to open it. the file on their computer that contains their CV that they haven't looked at for 10 years and that contains nothing more than a record of their pitiful failures in the past as far as they are concerned and that is a closed box, that is the Pandora with a dragon on it and they don't want to go near it and it's no wonder you know that but if they're going to get another job unless they get the resume together they'll be stuck under the control of their local Tyrant and that's not it a good deal and very often what you do with someone like that is say, uh, just print out your resume don't even look at that damn thing, just print it out, turn it face down, put it in an envelope and take it to the session. next week and then the person will come back and say, you know the task we agreed to because you have to agree on these things.

I did not do it. I couldn't even sit in front of the computer and so on then. you say well, do you think this week you could just sit in front of the computer and think about opening your resume and they could say yes and then come back the next week and say you know? I didn't even sit at the computer and think about my resume, then you guide the person to turn on their computer and then they open the scary folder and then they read the title of Dragon's horrible resume and then maybe they open it and then you say that is good enough for this week and then maybe the person can go home and just open up their damn resume and then maybe they can print it out and bring it to you and then maybe you can go through the sub reptiles one by one, you know, and clean the snakes, it's like, well, what were you doing between 2011? in 2013 and the answer is that it's the last thing I want to discuss with anyone, so there's a lacuna, there's a hole in the autobiographical narrative and Chaos itself is running through it with all that mess and shame and malevolence lurking around. the record and no one wants to look at that and think, well, you didn't do a very good job between 2012 and 2013 and you have a hole in your record and we have to do something about it now, so you know how we address that so you have an account coherent of yourself.

Look, this could take a while. Recompose everything. That's all your past. Put it back together in a way that you can move forward with confidence. to a potential new employer, but it's worth it if you escape the tyranny and now have a coherent account of yourself and have atoned for your past inadequacies, let's say, and are ready to move on and partly what you do in therapy and partly , what you need to do with yourself is not hide all that in the fog, what you know, to know where you are, to figure out where you are going and then practice how to do it and then as you practice, that is what you become and that it will definitely reduce your propensity for negative emotions as you organize your life that's why it's helpful to tidy up your room the chaotic room makes you anxious why so many Pathways man what you walk into someone's room and think what the hell is going on Maybe That's your teenager's room and you've summed it up pretty well in the question: "Yes, there's a little bit of hell in that room, you know, and how you feel when you're there the way you'd rather be." anywhere else and it's not surprising because everything in the room gives you chaos and disorder, so that's another thing I used to do with the typical behavioral maneuver of my clients, which is, if you're anxious, organize your room a little bit. environment, you know, simplify the order, organize little by little. bit order habitable order the habitable order that's good all that is a recreation of the original Eden metaphysically speaking and you can do it in a very practical way and then you practice that and that will solve you