STOP Wasting Time And Opportunities Jordan Peterson Life Advice
you know if you take people
and i’ve told you this and you expose
them voluntarily to things that they are
avoiding and are afraid of you know that
they know they need to overcome in order
to meet their goals their self-defined
goals
if you can teach people to stand up in
the face of the things they’re afraid of
they get stronger and you don’t know
what the upper limits to that are
because you might ask yourself like
if for 10 years if you didn’t avoid
doing what you knew you needed to do
by the depth by your own definitions
right within the value structure that
you’ve created
to the degree that you’ve done that what
would you be like
well you know there are remarkable
people who come into the world from time
to time and there are people who do
find out over decades-long periods what
they could be like if they were who they
were
if they said if they spoke their being
forward and they get stronger and
stronger and stronger and we don’t know
the limits to that we do not know the
limits to that
and so you could say well in part
perhaps the reason that you’re suffering
unbearably
can be left at your feet because you’re
not everything you could be and you know
it
and of course that’s a terrible thing to
admit and it’s a terrible thing to
consider
but there’s real promise in it right
because it means that
perhaps there’s another way that you
could look at the world and the number
another way that you could
act in the world so what it would
reflect back to you would be much better
than what it reflects back to you now
and then the second part of that is well
imagine that many people did that
because
we’ve done a lot as human beings we’ve
done a lot of remarkable things and i’ve
told you already
i think before that today for example
about 250 000 people will be lifted out
of abject poverty
and about 300 000 people attached to the
electrical power grid
we’re making people we’re lifting people
out of poverty collectively at a faster
rate that’s ever occurred in the history
of
humankind by a huge margin and that’s
been going on unbelievably quickly since
the year 2000
the u.n had planned to have poverty
between 2000 and 2015
and it was accomplished by 2013. so
there’s
inequality developing in many places and
you hear lots of political agitation
about that
but overall the the tide is lifting
everyone up and that’s a great thing and
we have no idea how fast we could
multiply that
if people got their act together and
really aimed at it
because you know my my experience is
with people that we’re probably running
at about 51 percent of our capacity
something i mean you can think about
this yourselves i often ask
undergraduates how many hours a day you
waste or how many hours a week you waste
and
the classic answer is something like
four to six hours a day
you know inefficient studying uh
watching things on youtube that not only
do you not want to watch that you don’t
even care about that make you feel
horrible about watching after you’re
done
that’s probably four hours right there
you know you think well that’s
20 25 hours a week it’s 100 hours a
month that’s two and a half full work
weeks
it’s half a year of work weeks per year
and if your time is worth
20 an hour which is a radical
underestimate it’s probably more like 50
if you think about it in terms of
deferred wages if you’re wasting
20 hours a week you’re wasting 50 000
a year and you are doing that right now
and it’s because you’re young wasting
thousand dollars a year is a way bigger
catastrophe than it would be for me to
waste it because i’m not going to last
nearly as long
and so if your life isn’t everything it
could be you could ask yourself well
what would happen if you just stopped
wasting the opportunities that are in
front of you
you be who knows how much more efficient
10 times more efficient
20 times more efficient that’s the
pareto distribution
you have no idea how efficient efficient
people get
it’s completely it’s off the charts
well and if we all got our act together
collectively and stop making things
worse
because that’s another thing people do
all the time not only do they not do
what they should to make things better
they actively attempt to make things
worse because they’re spiteful or
resentful
or arrogant or deceitful or or homicidal
or genocidal or all of those things all
bundled together in an absolutely
pathological package
if people stopped really really trying
just to make things worse
we have no idea how much better they
would get just because of that
so there’s this weird dynamic that’s
part of the existential
system of ideas between human
vulnerability
social judgment both of which are are
are are major causes of suffering and
the failure of individuals to adopt the
responsibility
that they know they should adopt and
that’s the thing that’s interesting too
is that
and like one of the another thing i’ve
always often asked my undergraduate
classes is
you know there’s this idea that that
people have that people have a
conscience
and you know what the conscience is it’s
it’s this
feeling or voice you have in your head
just before you do something
that you know is stupid telling you that
probably you shouldn’t do that stupid
thing
you don’t have to listen to it strangely
enough
but you go ahead and do it anyways and
then of course exactly what the
conscience told you was going to happen
inevitably happened so that you feel
even stupider about it than you would if
it happened by accident
because you you know i knew this was
going to happen i got a warning it was
going to happen
and i went and did it anyways and the
funny thing too is that that conscience
operates within
people and we really don’t understand
what the hell that is
so you might say well what would happen
if you abided by your conscience for
five years or for ten years
what sort of position might you be in
what sort of family might you have
what sort of relationship might you be
able to forge and you can be bloody sure
that a relationship that’s forged
on the basis of who you actually are is
going to be a lot stronger and more
welcome than one that’s forged on the
basis of who you aren’t
now of course that means that the person
you’re with has to deal with
the full force of you in all your
ability and your catastrophe and that’s
a very very difficult thing to negotiate
but if you do negotiate it well at least
you you have something
you have somewhere solid to stand and
you have somewhere to live you have a
real life
and it’s a great basis upon which to
bring children into the world for
example because you can have an actual
relationship with them instead of
torturing them half to death which is
what happens in
a tremendous a tremendously large
minority of cases
well it’s more than that too because and
this is what i’ll close with and this is
why i wanted to introduce social
nissan’s writings to you you see
because it isn’t merely that your fate
depends on whether or not
you get your act together and to what
degree you decide that you’re going to
live
out your own genuine being it isn’t only
your fate
it’s the fate of everyone that you’re
networked with and so you know you think
well
there’s 9 billion 7 billion people in
the world we’re going to peak at about 9
billion by the way
and then it’ll decline rapidly but 7
billion people in the world and who are
you you’re just one little dust mote
among that seven billion and so it
really doesn’t matter what you do or
don’t do but that’s simply not the case
it’s the wrong model because you’re at
the center of a network
you’re a node in a network of course
that’s even more true now that we have
social media
you’ll you’ll know a thousand people at
least over the course of your life
and they’ll know a thousand people each
and that puts you one person away from a
million
and two persons away from a billion and
so that’s how you’re connected and the
things you do
they’re like dropping a stone in a pond
the ripples move outward
and they affect things in ways that you
can’t fully comprehend and it means that
the things that you do and that you
don’t do are far more important than you
think and so if you act that way of
course the terror of realizing that is
that it actually
starts to matter what you do and you
might say well that’s better
than living a meaningless existence it’s
better for it to matter
but i mean if you really ask yourself
would you be so sure if you had the
choice
i can live with no responsibility
whatsoever the price i pay is that
nothing matters
or i can reverse it and everything
matters but i have to take the
responsibility that’s associated with
that
it’s not so obvious to me that people
would take the meaningful path
you know when you say well nihilists
suffer dreadfully because there’s no
meaning in their life and they still
suffer yeah but the advantage is they
have no responsibility
so that’s the payoff and i actually
think that’s the motivation say well
i can’t help being nihilistic all my
belief systems have collapsed it’s like
yeah maybe maybe you’ve just allowed
them to collapse because it’s a hell of
a lot easier than acting them out
and the price you pay is some
meaningless suffering but you can always
whine about that and people will feel
sorry for you
and you have the option of taking the
pathway of the martyr so that’s a pretty
good deal all things considered
especially when the when the alternative
is to
bear your burden properly and to live
forthrightly in the world well
what solzhenitsyn figured out and so
many people in the 20th century it’s not
just him even though he’s the best
example
is that if you live a pathological life
you pathologize your society and if
enough people do that then
it’s hell really
really and you can read the gulag
archipelago if you
have the fortitude to do that and you’ll
see exactly what hell is like
and then you can decide if that’s a
place you’d like to visit
or even more importantly if it’s a light
if it’s a place you’d like to visit
and take all your family and friends
because that’s what happened in the 20th
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you