Jordan Peterson has hundreds of hours of interviews and lectures on YouTube
but with so much volume it can be tough to distill the essence of his life philosophy.
And to make things even more difficult, he sometimes uses abstract language like this.
It's within the individual that redemption can be... manifested, let's say.
And even in so far as the state is concerned because the state's proper functioning
is dependent on the proper functioning of the individual rather than the reverse, most fundamentally.
That is actually the most concise explanation of his life philosophy that I've heard but
what does it mean concretely?
Today we're going to break down the three things that you should and should not do
in order to live an exceptional life according to Dr. Peterson.
And I'm going to simplify as best as I can in order to keep this simple to understand; forgive me for that Dr. Peterson.
Also, at the end, I'm going to get some concrete actions to you
that you can take today in order to move forward on each point.
But first, the thing that you need to start with is fixing yourself before you fix the world — not the reverse.
So many of us think that life is unfair — that society that we've been born into is unfair —
and the only way to progress is to change things on a societal level but as Jordan says —
...so and can you even clean up your own room? No.
Well, you should think about that. You should think about that
because if you can't even clean up your own room, who the hell are you to give advice to the world?
Think of it in terms of leadership; if you want to lead other people, you need to prove that you can do it first by leading yourself.
You need to motivate yourself, you need to inspire yourself, and need to prove
that following your strategies is actually a desirable thing that leads to desirable results.
And the truth is, today, that might not be the case given where your life is at.
So where do you start leading yourself? Well, here's some suggestions.
Clean up your room. That's a good start.
Organize your local landscape. Schedule your time. Start taking control of yourself.
See if you can stop saying things you know to be lies.
To those suggestions, I would add — addressing your health,
repairing your relationship with family members, volunteering, meditating, moving forward in your career...
but certainly, the most fundamental tenet of fixing yourself up is to tell the truth
which is actually Jordans second-core tenet.
Here he is talking about how that is actually the highest good.
It's a deep idea; it's the deepest idea of the West, I would say and it's the deepest religious idea
The idea is that there's a way to bring order into being
that makes the order good and that's to bring it into being by spoken truth.
Now, we have all been told not to lie before but we were usually
commanded to tell the truth because it was the, quote-unquote, right thing to do
and it may have actually felt like telling the truth left you're worse off;
after all, it might have prevented you from getting what you wanted or forced you into making an uncomfortable confession.
But that is actually not Jordan Peterson's main reason for insisting on the truth; this is —
If I tell the truth as carefully as I can then whatever happens
is the best that could have possibly happened in that situation no matter how it looks.
That seems like a crazy idea. After all, there can be terrible consequences
to the truth sometimes which is why we avoid it in the first place.
So let's just take an example and play it out.
For instance, say that you have a boss who routinely verbally abuses employees.
Telling the truth and standing up for yourself saying that this isn't okay might get you fired
or if you don't get fired, it could get you singled out to receive even more punishment.
That would be bad but according to Peterson's philosophy, it would still be better
than not telling the truth because maybe getting singled out would force you
to actually live the truth — you'd have to quit because you just couldn't take it anymore.
And that might build self-esteem because you're betting on yourself to figure things out
despite the financial circumstances that were very dire.
And it might set an example for the other people in the company
and if you did make it back on your feet in six months,
that example might inspire them to escape such a tyrannical leader as well.
Even more, you would become the type of person who is honest despite their fear
and that is someone that other people gravitate towards and are inspired by.
And maybe, just maybe, the boss would actually reform his or her ways
and things would get better immediately.
The point is, you might not see how telling the truth is the best thing for you —
it might look like it's horrible idea — but it is inevitably good for you and good the world.
And there are plenty of archetypal stories that drive this point home including Aladdin
where Aladdin first refuses to tell the truth because it seems like he'd lose everything if he did.
Genie, I need help.
Alright, Sparky, here's the deal.
If you wanna court the little lady, you gotta be a straight-shooter. Do you got it?
What?
Tell her the TRUTH!
No, wait. If Jasmine finds out I'm really some crummy street rat, she'd laugh at me.
But Aladdin is wrong. Sure, things appear to go the way that he wants for a little while
but his continued line nearly destroys the entire kingdom
and ends his relationship with Jasmine and Jordan makes this point.
It's that if your relationships have a conflict, that's often just the surface-level issue.
The deeper problem is that you're not being honest about how you feel
and what you need; you're not being honest about who you are.
Instead, like Aladdin, you're only doing and saying the things that you think will make the other person like you.
It's the principle when your relationships are working whether they're with yourself
or with one or many people — if they're working, they're working to the degree that they're guided by that principle.
So maybe that leads to you saying that you don't appreciate how someone close to you
has been treating you or maybe it leads to you telling someone how much they actually do mean to you.
Maybe it means putting down your pride and calling someone that you've fallen out of touch with
because you'd like a good relationship with them more than you'd like to act like you're beyond caring.
In any case, there are a number of traps that you could fall into when you start telling the truth.
First off, you can be an ideologue and that is someone who doesn't test ideas
against reality and who doesn't adjust their ideas based on reality.
They think they are telling the truth usually but really, they're just reciting
someone else's worldview. Peterson explains it this way —
People don't have ideas. Ideas have people.
One of the things that I learned from Jung was — you should figure out just exactly which ideas are possessing you
and then you should decide if those are your ideas and the probability that they are is zero.
They're not your ideas. It's hard to have your own ideas.
You have to derive them from your own experience.
This means that as good as an idea might sound, you should actually stress-test it
against the real world and that goes for everything you hear on this channel as well.
Instead of agreeing with me on this point and mindlessly telling the truth,
go out and live it in your life, see what happens, and then you'll have first-hand experience
of how it impacts your self-esteem and the results that you get in your interactions.
Second, you can know the truth but not live the truth.
You can know that something's wrong and just go along anyway because standing up would put you at risk.
Now, living the truth might be scary
but it is exactly what made Jordan Petersen famous.
He risked public ridicule and the legal system in order to defend
what he saw as the truth when it came to the legislation that insisted on the use of preferred gender pronounce.
Well, so what am I willing to do?
Well, I think that the Ontario Human Rights Tribunal is probably
obligated by their own tangled web to to bring me in front of it.
If they find me, I won't pay it; if they put me in jail, I'll go on a hunger strike.
I'm not doing this and that's that.
I'm not using the words that other people require me to use.
Then of course you can lie to yourself and deny aspects of yourself that you don't like.
This is refusing to acknowledge your shadow
and it's the third huge mistake that people make so we're going to treat it as its own.
Now, if you're unfamiliar, the shadow is a union concept that covers thoughts
and desires that we have that we find unacceptable so we stuff them down.
Jordan Peterson gives a concrete example of his own shadow here.
...and accused me of SIC-ing my internet trolls on the poor hapless journalists
and I thought, "This was the dark part of me," — that's the shadow-part thought.
If I wanted to SIC my internet trolls on channel 4 then there'd be nothing but broken windows and riots
and then there's a little part of me that thinks, "Wouldn't that be fun?"
This is the devil on your shoulder — the voice in your head that wants to rage, hurt and lie.
And if you don't acknowledge that it exists, it will run you without you realizing it
acting itself out as passive-aggressiveness or subtle social manipulations.
People who don't integrate their shadow creates suffering around them
but they do it in subtle enough ways usually to not be detected.
Oh my god, I love your skirt. Where did you get it?
Uh, it was my mom's in the eighties.
[Gasps] Vintage. So adorable.
Thanks!
That is the ugliest effing skirt I've ever seen.
Now, Regina George is a great example of a villain but in the movie Mean Girls,
it's actually the main character, Katie, who has the most trouble with her shadow.
She begins with good intentions wanting to right the wrongs
and serve justice to the bad people.
But because she can't admit that she craves popularity and that she is deep down
very much like the villain, Regina George, she begins to behave like the villain without even realizing it.
You know I couldn't invite you. I had to pretend you're plastic.
You're not pretending anymore; you're plastic. Cold shiny hard plastic.
You know what? You're the one who made me like this so you could use me for your eighth-grade revenge.
God. See, at least me and Regina George know we're mean; you try to act like you're so
innocent like, "Oh, I used to live in Africa with all the little birdies and the little monkeys."
...so why are you still messing with Regina, Katie?
I'll tell you why — because you are a mean girl.
It's only in accepting her vain desires that she can overcome them and the same is true for all of us.
So think of the person that you dislike the most or at least
are the most easily agitated by especially if this person is in your family.
Now, I know this might sound crazy but chances are
the exact trait that you dislike in that person is one that you have in spades
and it's usually without realizing it so solution here is not to deny those attributes
in yourself or else you wind up acting on them without even realizing it.
The solution is to integrate your shadow and to let your shadow make you even stronger.
That's how you tap into assertive power and you can see it
in Jordan's face when he becomes severe with the people that he's talking to.
Now, he's often kind but when he feels that someone has crossed the line,
he is able to tap into a restrained but serious communicative power.
The market sets the damn game; it's like—
And the market is dominated by men. Now what I'm asking—
No, it's not. It's not. The market is dominated by women.
They make 80% of the consumer decisions. That's not the case at all.
And because of this integration, he doesn't stay angry or resentful; it can pass when the moment does.
Now, Jordan speaks about the shadow often in terms of its capacity to do harm.
But I think it's also important to include
all the things in yourself that you just prefer not to identify as being part of you.
This means — your fear, your guilt, your sexuality, and sometimes even your joy.
I spoke about the idea of the repressed inner child in another video —
I'm gonna link to that in the description — but for now, just know that part of self-love
means integrating and accepting all aspects of yourself.
So we have, first, fixing yourself before you go out and try to fix the world.
Secondl, telling the truth instead of lying to avoid reality.
And third, integrating your shadow so that it doesn't run the show without you knowing.
Now, this isn't everything that it takes to live an exceptional life but it forms a strong foundation.
And the more you practice these three points, the more you become an honest
integrated individual which is exactly what the world needs you to be.
The answer to the problem of humanity is the integrity of the individual. That's the answer.
So now, some concrete advice on how to implement these three tips and
I'm going to keep it very simple; there's of course, more you can do
but just one thing that you can do today that has elements of all three of these points.
It's this — pick something that you have been afraid to do —
a conversation that you should have had but backed out of,
a confrontation that you've been avoiding, telling someone who's been treating you badly
that they need to stop or telling someone you how you feel and do that thing.
Live the consequences of telling and acting out the truth.
Now, do it with some tact that you've hopefully learned from our videos
but the best advice that I can give you is to do the thing that popped into your mind
maybe as you were watching this video, get it done today and let us know how it went
tomorrow on the Facebook livestream 11:00 a.m. if you're interested.
If you're looking for more on how to live a good life, I have a recommendation
courtesy of our sponsor for this video, Audible.
And what I'm recommending today is called kick ass with Mel Robbins and
she is a best-selling motivational speaker so this is actually a recording
of one-on-one coaching sessions where she helps people to break out of their
stuck patterns in relationships and business and health.
And it's very cool because you're actually getting real-time advice on how to transform
in your own life but I also like it because if you're paying close attention,
you can learn how to coach other people so that they can begin to shift in their life.
And if you can start to identify common patterns of dysfunctional behavior
and you can help people to break out of those, you have a superpower.
So if you want to listen to this and maybe learn something fantastic,
go ahead check out this audible-exclusive at audible.com/charismaMel
or text charismamel - 500 500.
Also, I have seen that Jordan Peterson is actually going to be speaking / debating
Sam Harris in the next few weeks and I'm guessing that there's gonna be some good
breakdown material there so if you want to make sure that you do not miss that,
go ahead and click the subscribe button to our channel and go ahead and hit that
notification bell as well so you won't miss the video that we eventually do on that
and of course everything else in between.
I hope that you enjoyed this video, I hope that you actually go out
and do that first action step and I look forward to seeing you in the next video.