The Most Eye Opening 10 Minutes Of Your Life Jordan Peterson

sit on your bed one day and ask yourself

uh

what’s what remarkably stupid things am

i doing on a regular basis to absolutely

screw up my life

and if you actually ask that question

but you have to want to know the answer

right because that’s actually what

asking the question means

it doesn’t mean just mouthing the words

it means you have to decide that you

want to know

you’ll figure that’s out so fast it’ll

make your hair curl

there’s no better pathway to

self-realization

and the ennoblement of being than to

posit the highest good that you can

conceive of and commit yourself to it

and then you might also ask yourself and

this is definitely worth asking is

do you really have anything better to do

and if you don’t well why would you do

anything else

if you orient yourself properly

and then pay attention to what you do

every day that works

and it i actually think that that’s in

accordance with with what we have come

to understand about human perception

because what happens is that

the world shifts itself around

your aim because you’re you’re a

creature that has an aim

you have to have a name in order to do

something you’re an aiming creature you

look

at a point and you move towards it it’s

built right into you

and so you have a name well let’s say

your aim is the highest possible aim

well then so that sets up the world

around you it organizes all of your

perceptions it organizes what you see

and you don’t see it organizes your

emotions and your motivations

so you organize yourself around that aim

and then what happens is

the day manifests itself as a set of

challenges and problems

and if you solve them properly then you

stay on the pathway towards that ape

and you can concentrate on the on the on

the day and so that way you get to have

your cake and eat it too

because you can you can point into the

distance the far distance

and you can live in the day

and it seems to me that that’s that

makes every moment of the day

supercharged with meaning that that’s

how because if everything that you’re

doing every day is related to the

highest possible aim that you can

conceptualize

well that’s the very definition of the

meaning that would sustain you in your

life

well and then the issue is well back to

noah well all hell’s about to break

loose and chaos is coming it’s like when

that’s happening in your life

you might want to be doing something

that you regard as truly worthwhile

because that’s what will keep you afloat

when when everything is flooded

and you don’t want to wait until the

flood comes

to start doing that because if your

ark’s half built

and you don’t know how to captain it the

probability is very high that

that you’ll drown ask and it shall be

given you

seek and ye shall find knock and it

shall be opened unto you for everyone

that asketh receiveth

and he that seeketh findeth and to him

that knocketh it shall be opened

that sounded pretty optimistic again but

but again i think it’s a description of

the structure of

existential reality and and by by which

i mean

when i’m in my clinical practice and i

observe and this is also the case with

my students is let’s say

people’s lives aren’t what they would

like them to be

and so then you ask why well forget

about

tragedy and catastrophe because that’s

self-evident and

we’re not going to discuss that although

the degree to which you bring about your

own tragedy is

always indeterminate but i would never

say that

every terrible thing that is visited on

a person is something

they deserved i think that that’s a very

dangerous presupposition

especially because everyone gets sick

and everyone dies

but one of the main reasons that people

don’t get what they want is because they

don’t actually

figure out what it is and the

probability that you’re going to get

what would be good for you let’s say

which would even be better than what you

want

right because you know you might be

wrong about what you want

easily but maybe you could get what

would really be good for you

well why don’t you because you don’t try

you don’t think okay here’s what i would

like if i could have it and and i don’t

mean

i don’t mean in a way that you

manipulate the world to force it to

deliver you goods for status or

something like that that isn’t what i

mean

i mean something like imagine that you

were taking care of yourself like you

were someone you actually cared for

and then you thought okay i’m caring for

this person i would like things to go as

well for them as possible

what would their life have to be like in

order for that to be the case

well people don’t do that they don’t sit

down and think all right you know let’s

let’s

figure it out you’ve got a life it’s

hard obviously

it’s like three years from now you can

have what you need

you got to be careful about it you can’t

have everything

you can have what would be good for you

but you have to figure out what it is

and then you have to aim at it well my

experience with people has been is

if they figure out what it is that would

be good for them and then they aim at it

then they get it and it’s strange

because they don’t

neces it’s a strange thing it’s not

quite that simple because

you know you may formulate an idea about

what would be good for you and then you

take

10 steps towards that and you find out

that your formulation was a bit off and

so you have to reformulate your goal

you know you’re kind of going like this

as you move towards the goal

but a huge part of the reason that

people fail is because

they don’t ever set up the criteria for

success

and so since success is a very narrow

line and very unlikely the probability

that you’re going to stumble on it

randomly is zero

and so there’s a proposition here and

the proposition is

if you actually want something

you can have it now the question then

would be well what do you mean by

actually want

and the answer is that you reorient your

life

in every possible way to make

the probability that that will occur as

certain as

possible and that’s a sacrificial idea

right it’s like

you don’t get everything obviously you

obviously but maybe you can have what

you need

and maybe all you have to do to get it

is ask

but asking isn’t a whim

or or today’s wish it’s like you have to

be

deadly serious about it you have to

think okay like i’m taking stock of

myself

and if i was going to live properly in

the world and i was going

to set myself up such that being would

justify itself in my estimation and i

don’t mean as a harsh judge

exactly what is it that i would aim at

and so the issue is not so much the

blindness of others

even though there’s as much blindness

among others as there is

as there is for you but the issue here

the advice here the description here is

you should be concerned about what’s

interfering with your own vision first

and you should leave other people to

hell alone in relationship to that

and so if your mode of being in the

world is if you would just act better

things would improve for me

or if you identify the evil and the

catastrophe as something that’s

outside that someone else needs to fix

or that someone’s response someone else

is responsible for

then then you’re not going to fix that

and you’re going to remain blind to the

things that you’re doing and not doing

that make things not go well

and so it’s just better to think all

right i’m probably blind

in many many ways and maybe there are

some ways that i could rectify that

because it’s highly probable that you’re

blind in all sorts of ways i mean

it’s in fact it’s virtually certain and

so

it’s just more useful to think

how is it that i’m wrong in this

situation i’ll tell you something that i

learned to do

when i was arguing with my wife which

happened quite frequently

because when you actually communicate

with people you find out that there’s

many things that you don’t agree on

and that’s because you’re actually

different creatures and so

if you’re actually going to have a

truthful conversation then you’re going

to find out that

you don’t see things the same way and

then you can either pretend

that that’s not the case and gloss over

it and then end up in a 30-year

silent war or you can or you can have

the damn

fight when you need to have it and see

if you can straighten it out

so now and then we’d get in a situation

where we were at loggerheads we couldn’t

move

and you know it would spiral up into

hate speech let’s say

because yeah everyone laughs because

they know they manifest plenty of hate

speech towards those they love

so one of the things we learned to do

was when we

hit an impasse was to separate and

to go our own ways and to go sit and

think okay look

we’re at this unpleasant situation we

can’t figure out how to move forward

i’d always think of course it’s her

fault obviously it’s her fault

at least 95 but

maybe there was something i did that

contributed like

five percent to it

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you