- What's up party people? Mark Manson here.
And unless you've been living under a rock
the past three years,
you have undoubtedly heard of Dr. Jordan Peterson.
Peterson has a big YouTube channel,
a very famous podcast,
and he wrote a huge bestseller called "12 Rules For Life."
He then follow that up with another bestseller called
well, "12 More Rules For Life."
Now, I've read Peterson's work, I've checked out his videos,
I even had the opportunity to speak to him at length about
my own work on his podcasts with his daughter Mikhaila,
and I'm very proud to say that I was able to elicit multiple
F-bombs from him.
- Fuck. Fuck.
Bullshit. Fuck.
- Now, while Peterson has a lot of interesting ideas,
perhaps the biggest benefit I've garnered from his work
is not any specific answer he presents,
but simply the framing of his answers.
This idea that we can create rules of life for ourselves.
I think this is an incredibly powerful and profound idea.
The idea that we can set our own guiding principles
and codes that can not only help us navigate
through the world,
but define us deeply as individual human beings.
I love this idea.
So I sat down and I asked myself,
what are my rules for life?
Stay tuned to find out.
(upbeat music)
Now, before we dive into it,
I've got to give a little bit of a disclaimer,
just because this is the internet
and people are fucking stupid.
These are my rules for life, okay?
They're not,
I'm not saying this has to be everybody's rule for life,
it doesn't have to be your rule for life,
these are mine.
If you like them, you can have them,
if you don't, nobody fucking cares.
Okay? Let's get started.
Rule number one,
you are responsible for everything in your own experience.
Even if it's not your fault.
This concept of radical responsibility,
it comes from existentialism.
John-Paul Sartre more specifically.
Now, Sartre had this amazing insight,
which is that, in every moment that we are conscious,
we are choosing.
We are constantly making choices,
not only of what to do, but also of how to see things.
You know, what if somebody says something
that pisses me off,
part of that is because I chose to see it in a way
that pisses me off.
I chose to have values that caused it to piss me off.
I chose to listen to the guy who pissed me off.
Now, Sartre said that this constant choosing,
this necessity for choosing of perception
and action in every single moment,
it is a massive load on us mentally and emotionally.
We are terrified
of shouldering this constant responsibility.
And so as humans,
what we tend to do is we find ways
to give other people responsibility.
To say, "Oh, well, it's not my fault, he made me do it."
Or to say, "Yeah, it's my, my boss fucked up.
I was just following rules.
It's not my fault we defrauded a charity
out of billions of dollars, he did it."
You can probably relate to this,
we all love to blame other people for our shit.
That's normal. That's just human nature.
But Sartre took this even further.
He said that we often look to other people
to adopt our values, to adopt our principles,
to adopt our belief systems and what we care about.
And this is a much more subtle shirking of responsibility.
You know,
it's saying like,
"My dad was a doctor and his dad was a doctor
and his dad was a doctor.
So of course I have to be a doctor."
It's saying like,
"Well, everybody else is doing it, so I should do it too."
It's this very subtle form of avoiding responsibility
that Sartre called living in bad faith.
It's basically like living for other people
rather than for yourself.
Now on the flip side of bad faith,
Sartre called living with responsibility,
making consciously,
making those choices based on your own principles and values
in every single moment,
and also being aware that you're making those choices
in each and every moment,
Sartre called this living in authenticity.
Today, we think of it just generally
as being yourself or finding who you are,
finding out what you care about,
what your values are, what you're willing to stand for,
and then be willing to make that choice when it comes,
even if you're gonna be punished socially for it.
Now, this is an extremely profound philosophical concept.
It's really changed how I see the world
and how I see my life.
But you know, if you've read my books,
I also present this in just a more pragmatic way.
Personal responsibility,
it's kind of just step one of any sort of self-improvement.
Because think about it,
you can't improve something
if you don't believe that you're responsible for it,
if you don't believe that you're capable of choosing
something different.
You can't improve yourself,
if you don't think you are empowered
to make different choices.
And so until you have that perception
of personal responsibility
of, I am the one who makes the choices,
I can choose differently next time,
then there's no path to improvement.
Responsibility is at the cornerstone of what I teach
and what I write about for this very reason.
Now, the biggest hangup that people have
about this whole responsibility thing
is what I call the responsibility fault/fallacy,
which is this assumption that if I'm responsible
for something, then it means it's my fault,
but that's not true at all, right?
Like I can go get hit by a bus tomorrow,
and it's not my fault I got hit by a bus,
but it's absolutely my responsibility
to recover from getting hit by a bus.
Somebody can leave a newborn baby on my doorstep.
It's not my fault that somebody left
a newborn baby on my doorstep,
but it is absolutely my fucking responsibility
to take care of that baby.
These things happen all the time throughout our lives.
We're often responsible for things
that we are not to blame for,
and understanding that and accepting that,
as upsetting as it can be,
it's so core and fundamental to doing anything else,
to improving yourself, to having mental health,
emotional health,
to being an ethical and reasonable person,
to having good relationships,
like the responsibility piece is right there,
front and center every single time.
So for me, that's rule number one, radical responsibility.
Rule number two, there is no such thing as a bad emotion.
There are only bad reactions to emotions.
For some reason, whenever I say this,
it reminds me,
so back when I was in music school, I was studying jazz.
And I remember I had a jazz teacher who said,
"There's no such thing as a bad note,
there's only bad musicians."
(Mark laughs)
Which is fucking brutal.
But the analogy kind of works.
Like, there is no bad emotion, there's just bad people.
Like, everybody gets angry, everybody gets upset,
everybody gets sad, everybody gets depressed,
everybody gets anxious.
These are all normal, basic human functions.
What determines whether it's good or bad or not
is how the person responds to those emotions.
So there are people who handle anxiety extremely well,
and there are people who handle anxiety extremely poorly.
There are people who handle their anger extremely well,
and there are people
who handle their anger extremely poorly.
The term emotional intelligence has been in the lexicon
for a long time.
I actually think of it more
in terms of like emotional skill.
The same way some people are naturally very talented
at like basketball but are terrible at,
I don't know, water polo,
some people are just naturally very talented
at managing guilt and terrible at managing, you know,
sadness or whatever.
So we've all got our strong spots and our weak spots,
but we all need to train ourselves
to deal with emotions better
and to train ourselves to become better
at dealing with our emotions.
We have to be willing to experience those emotions.
We can't label or judge those emotions as bad or wrong
or shameful or assume that we're fucking losers
'cause we're like so sad at the end of that Pixar movie,
no, this is just life.
You feel things and you get on with it.
The truth is,
is that emotions are really
just biological feedback mechanisms.
They are ways that our nervous system evolved over thousands
or millions of years to help us survive better.
When we get scared it's because our body detects
some sense of danger,
some threat to our ability to preserve our own lives.
If we get angry it's to motivate us
to overcome some sort of obstacle or to strike back,
you know, at a foe or something like that,
like these are all intrinsically useful tools
in our biology.
I think step number one to emotional health
is simply learning not to block any of them.
Let it out, be willing to experience them.
Step two is then to experience or express these emotions
in a way that is healthy,
or at least not damaging to yourself and others.
Now, I wanna take a little detour here
because it's become very popular in the last few years
to kind of celebrate people
who are vulnerable with their emotions, publicly.
Athletes who are very open about their mental health issues
or business leaders or politicians who talk
about mental health problems or different feelings
that they had,
the royal family doing fucking interviews
about their depression and the shit,
like overall, this is a good development.
I think it's more,
it's emotionally healthy for prominent people
and leaders in the world to be very open
about their emotions.
But, you knew a but was coming,
one danger that I see is that there's starting
to be a glorification of those people.
You know, so it's like an athlete comes out
and says that they're struggling with depression.
And not only is that okay,
but now there's like a certain segment of people
who are like applauding that person saying,
"You're a hero.
This person is the best because they came out and admitted
that they feel depressed."
Well, that's also a problem, right?
Remember, you don't wanna judge your emotions negatively.
You don't wanna be like, "I'm a loser for being sad,"
but you also don't wanna judge
your emotions positively either.
Like you don't wanna be like,
"I'm the fucking greatest for being sad,"
because then what that does is it unconsciously,
kind of incentivizes people
to start feeling sad all the time
or to kind of dig and find their own like
find that one fucked up thing in their own life
that they're so sad about,
and then like make that their identity.
The whole point of not judging emotions
is not judging emotions.
That means, you're not a loser for being sad,
but you're not a fucking saint either.
You're not a mess 'cause you're anxious,
but you're also not brave either.
Like you're just a human, you're just a fucking person.
I think we're starting to lose sight of that.
You know, 10 years ago,
I started writing about vulnerability
and I think the culture was very under vulnerable.
Sometimes I wonder if maybe we're becoming
a little bit over vulnerable
that the celebration of vulnerability
is kind of negating any benefits
that come from vulnerability.
All right.
Rule number three,
every action and decision you make should be motivated
to improve lives, both yours and others'.
Now, obviously this is a very difficult rule to uphold.
Not only just 'cause, you know,
fuck, sometimes we just wanna sit on the couch
and drink beer all day,
but like also because it's very hard to know,
like, what is improvement?
What makes a life better?
Are you pampering that child
or are you simply giving them opportunity?
Are you actively loving somebody
or are you smothering them and making them feel trapped?
It's very difficult to know where the line is,
pretty much in everything we do,
but that's why the rule here is intention.
You know, the intention is always towards growth
and improvement.
It's always towards greater health
and greater functionality.
You know, I just think of this as like having
a value towards radical growth.
You know, if the first rule is radical responsibility,
the second rule is radical acceptance,
the third rule is radical growth or radical improvement.
Always maintaining that intention,
that in everything I do in life,
it's for the benefit of some living being,
whether it's me or somebody else
or the furry squirrel down the street.
So those are my three rules,
simple, straight to the point,
pretty much impossible to live up to,
I think that's probably every rule
for life should be like that.
You know, it's like,
you don't want a rule for life that you can like easily hit,
and then a year later you're like,
"Well, that was easy, fuck that shit."
And then you go back to drinking beer on the couch.
I think one of the reasons why the virtues are the virtues
is that in ancient Greece,
they realized that like some of these things
like require a constant effort.
Like honesty, like you can never stop trying to be honest,
you know, always,
it doesn't matter how honest you were yesterday,
you have to try to be honest today.
And I think any good rule for life is like that.
So those are mine,
radical responsibility,
radical acceptance, radical growth.
What are yours?
Leave them in the comments below,
and if you jive with these rules,
be sure to subscribe to the channel, maybe like this video,
share it with a friend or two,
'cause that will make their life better.
It'll make mine better too.
So until next time, peace.
(upbeat music)