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
[Music]
you