Author : Jordan B Peterson
Rule 1 : Stand up straight with your shoulders back
Sleep on predictable schedule and eat fat, protein breakfast. If you present yourself as defeated, then people will react to you as if your are losing.
Attend carefully to your posture. Speak your mind. Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them. Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead. Dare to be dangerous. Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural pathways.
Rule 2 : Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping.
People often treat better their pets than themselves. To treat yourself as if you are someone you are 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”.
Rule 3 : Make friends with People who want the best for you
If you have a friend whose friendship you wouldn’t recommand to your sister, or you father, or your son, why would you have such a friend yourself? You should chose people who want things to be better, not worse, people that are good for you.
Rule 4 : Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not who someone else is today.
No matter how good you are at something, or how you rank your accomplishements, there is someone out there who makes you look like incompetent.
I should be winning at everything! But winning at everything might only mean that you are not doing anything new or different, you are not growing.
Notice something that bothers you, that concernsa you, which you could fix, that you would fix. Ask yourself 3 questipons : “what is that is bothering me ?”, “Is that something I could fix?”, “Would I actually be willing to fix it ?”. If the answer is no, look elsewhere, aim lower. Search until you find and fix it. That might be enoigh for the day.
Rule 5 : Do not let your Children do anything that makes you dislike them
Two years olds are very violent, they push forward, they discover the actual boundaries, they explore. Sometimes they cry of Anger.
Discipline : Limit the rules + use the least force necessary to enforce those rules.
Parents should understand their own capacity to be harsh, vengeful, arrogant, resentful, angry and decitful.
Parents have a duty to act as proxies for the real world. Merciful, caring, but proxies. This obligation supersedes any responsibility to ensure hapiness, foster creativity or boost self esteem. It is the primary duty of parents to make their Children socially desirable.
Rule 6 : Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world
A hurricane is an act of god. But failure to prepare, when the necessity if well known – that’s sin. That’s failure to hit the mark.
Have you cleaned up your life ? If no, start to stop doing what you know to be wrong. Start stopping today. Don’t waste your time wondering, just do it.
Rule 7 : Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient).
Don’t lie, it was great and small lies that led to communism and nazism.
“What should I do today?” “How could I use my time to make things better, instead of worse?”l
To have meaning in your life is better than to have what you want, because you may neither know what you want, nor what you truly need. Meaning is something that comes upon you, of its own accord.
Rule 8 : Tell the truth, or at least don’t lie
Everyone needs a concrete, specific goal, an ambition and a purpose to limit chaos and mnake intelligible sense of his or her life. But all concrete goals can be subordonated to a “meta-goal”. Act dilligently towards some well articulated, defined end. Make your criteria for failure and success clear and timely, at least for yourself. While doing so, allow the world and your spirit to unfold as they will. While ypou act and articulate the truth. Tell the truth.
Rule 9 : Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t
If you listen instead, without premature judgment, people will generally tell you everything they are thinking and with very little deceit. People will tell you the most amazing, absurd, interesting things. Very few of your conversations will be boring.
Rule 10 : Be precise in your speech
When things breakdown, what has been ignored rushes in. Confront the chaos of being. Take aim against a sea of troubles. Specify your destination, and chart your course. Admit to what you want. Tell those around you who you are. Narrow and gaze attentively, and move forward, forthrightly. Be precise in your speech.
Rule 11 : Do not bothewr children when they are skateboarding
Not trying to be sage : trying to be competent. Overprotected we will fail when something dangerous, unexpected happens (and full of opportunity).
Girls can be winning in girls and boys hierarchy. If a boy wins in what girls value, they will lose status (reputation, attractiveness).
Competence not power is prime determiner of status. Personality traits predicators of success : Intelligence + conscientiousness.
Group identity can be fractioned right down to the level of the individual. Each of us is unique, group membership cannot capture that.
It’s a good idea to tell the person you are confronting exactly what you would lile them to do instead of what they have done or currently doing. Assument ignorence before malevolence.
Rule 12 : Pet a at when you encounter one on the street
When you love someone, it’s not despite their limitation, it’s becaise of them.
Set aside some time to talk and think about illness/crisis every day. Do not talk or think about it otherwise. If you do not limit its effect, you will get exhausted and everything will spiral into the ground. When wories arise, you will think them through during the schedule period. If you meet a cat pet him.
Aim for paradise, concentrate on today
