Jordan Peterson Leaves the Audience Speechless

0:00These people that you're comparing yourself to, you don't really know very well. What that means is that you see they're shiny outside, but you don't see the reality of their life. There's always people out there who are doing far better than you on pretty much anything you want to imagine. And if all you're doing is seeing yourself in their reflected light, let's say, then it's going to be pretty damn dismal. But it's not a good comparison because, well, first of all, there's danger in just comparing yourself to others' period because they're not you, and God only knows what struggles they had to undertake to get to where they were, or what burdens they're currently carrying that you're not aware of. But you can certainly contrast yourself with yourself. That's a lot better. It is the only way. Well, it's also the only way of really measuring anything approximating proper improvement. You can actually tell when you're a little better than you were yesterday. And you can actually do that. That's another thing that's so interesting about it is that you can actually make yourself

1:00a little better in some way, pretty much, well, I don't know if it's at every moment, but you can certainly do it every day. Be careful who you share good news with because you want to share good news with people who are going to be genuinely happy for you and be careful who you share bad news with because that's equally tricky. You want someone who will listen to you when you're having trouble and allow you your grief, beauty calls people to their higher being, I would say, and to make friends with beauty is to introduce yourself very carefully to one of the mysteries of life that make it worth living. There's never been a better time for the majority of people to be alive and the future, although we're vulnerable and terrible things can always happen to us, it's hard to make a case that the future doesn't look comparatively positive. We're becoming extremely technologically sophisticated and the world is changing at an incredibly

2:02rapid rate and the only way we're going to be able to manage that in a positive way is if each of us, or as many of us as possible, are capable of making wise and careful and truthful decisions and if we do that then maybe things can continue to improve. We don't get people to stand up on their own two feet and to adopt responsibility if everything is given to them and that's a real conundrum. Maybe you're in California, you see someone speeding down the road in a convertible Porsche and you think, oh man, what a lucky bastard. The truth of the matter is that he's thinking about wrapping his expensive sports car around the next cement pillar that he comes close to. You can't tell and people have hard lives and even people who are comparatively fortunate have hard lives and the ideal that you're observing that makes you jealous and resentful is in large part an illusion that's created by your own mind.

3:03You have to be careful of what you're jealous of because you don't really know what it is. The other thing that's kind of useful is to, well, to understand, you're quite different from other people and you shouldn't be comparing yourself to them because they're not like you. They don't have your family, they don't have your temperament, they don't have your troubles, they don't have your abilities, the only person that has those is you. One of the rules I think it's rule four is comparing yourself to who you were yesterday and not to who someone else is today and see that's a game you can win the possibility that you can make yourself slightly better on a continual basis is I think that's something that's accessible to everyone. I think that's equivalent to leading a virtuous life and there is something to be said for virtue and truth and that is one thing, another thing that I've noticed about people who've been phenomenally successful is that they really do everything they can to live a truthful life and you can get a bloody long ways by being honest.

4:08You've got to know that there are differences in intelligence, it's really important. If you go into a job and you're not smart enough for that job, you're going to have one bloody miserable time and you're going to make life wretched for the people around you because you won't be able to handle the position. But what you really want to do, as far as I can tell, if you want to maximize your chances for both success and let's say, well, being, is you want to find a strata of occupation in which you would have intelligence that would put you in the upper quartile. That's perfect. Then you're a big fish in a small pond and you don't want to be the stupidest guy in the room. It's a bloody rough place to be. You probably don't want to be the smartest guy in the room either because what that probably means is you should be in a different room. If you want to be the best at what you're doing, bar none, then having an IQ above 145 is a necessity and maybe you're pushing 160 in some situations and maybe that's making you one person in 10,000 or even one person in 100,000 and then also to really be good

5:08at it, you probably have to be reasonably stressed tolerant and also somewhat conscientious. Why is it that smart people are at the top of dominance arcies and the answer to that in part is because they get there first, right? I mean, everything's a race, roughly speaking and the faster you are, the more likely you are to be at the forefront of the pack and intelligence in large part is speed. That's not all of it is. So if you're moving towards something difficult rapidly, the faster people are going to get there first. You're going to have to put some effort into your life and you need to be motivated to do that. And so what are the potential sources of motivation? You could think about them in the big five manner, if you're extroverted, you want friends, if you're agreeable, you want an intimate relationship, if you're a disagreeable, you want to win competitions, if you're open, you want to engage in creative activity, if you're high in eroticism, you want security. So those are all sources of potential motivation that you could draw and that you could tailor to your own personality. But then there are dimensions that you want to consider your life across.

6:08And so we ask people about, well, if you could have your life the way you wanted it in three to five years, if you were taking care of yourself properly, what would you want from your friendships, what would you want from your intimate relationship, how would you like to structure your family, what do you want for your career, how are you going to use your time outside of your job, and how are you going to regulate your mental physical, mental and physical health, and maybe also your drug and alcohol use, because that's a good place to auger down. And that tangles in your incentive reward system, you know, we talked about the dopaminergic incentive reward system, and that's the thing that keeps you moving forward. And the way it works is that it works better if it produces positive emotion when it can see you moving towards a valued goal. Okay, well, what's the implication of that? Better have a valued goal, because otherwise you can't get any positive motivation. Most creative people fail at producing their creative product and monetizing it, right? So your default position, if you're a creative person, is you're going to fail.

7:11And so, and that's because it's hard to come up with something new, and it's, and it's hard to present it to the market at the right time, and it's hard to market it. But those things are really, really difficult, and so what successful entrepreneurs do is they just keep doing it over and over and over and over and over and over and over. And eventually, if they're fortunate, one of their ideas happens to hit the right place at the right time. Even if your idea is good, that doesn't mean it will be successful. There's so many things that have to be taken into account. So this is partly why persistence, and that's part of conscientiousness is so useful. It's like persistence is helpful because it enables you to run many, many experiments. And you need to know that the baseline is failure, you know, it's important because otherwise you'll blame that on yourself, you know, and some of that's useful because there's probably some things that you could improve about yourself, but it's very difficult to go from zero to one, you know.