Jordan Peterson: Fix Yourself Before It's Too Late

you only have to ask a stupid question once you ask a stupid question and if you're in a crowd and you ask a stupid question 80% of the people in the crowd have the same question they're just too cowardly to ask but you ask and then someone actually tells you you never have to ask that question again you're no longer stupid what stupid thing am I doing that I could quit doing that I would quit doing cuz those aren't the same thing right cuz you know there stupid things that you're doing that you're just not

going to quit doing cuz you like them but there might be something on the edge there where you could stop that if you want to know something about yourself sit on your bed one night and say to yourself you got to mean this like you got to be desperate this is no game this my life is not everything I want it to be and perhaps it's not everything that I need it to be and by need I mean my life is so unbearable that the suffering that's attended upon that is make me nihilistic cynical bitter

resentful driving the BR City to see evil everywhere except within my own Heart Like These are problems man and you ask yourself you sit on the bed and say okay man I'm ready to learn something what's one thing I'm doing wrong that I know I'm doing wrong that I could fix that I would fix it's like you meditate on that you'll get an answer and it won't be one you want but it'll be the necessary one you know and it it's often something that will point you to small things like that works you start making

those micro improvements like real micro improvements real on the ground actual micro improvements to things you know that are wrong you'll improve unbelievably rapidly the the great people I know are brutally truthful to themselves and other people and they have insanely adventurous lives get rid of everything you say that you only say to impress other people and just see if you can say what you believe to be true that's an adventure that's the thing about the truth you know well you got to ask yourself if you're not speaking the truth who is it that's talking

if you're saying something that you do not believe to be true it's not you talking it's something else it might be the part of you that wants to manipulate the other person into delivering what you think you want from them well what is that Spirit of manipulation that you've allowed to possess you it's not you let's say you decide to live your whole life in that instrumental manner you're going to craft your words like the student who says well I'm going to write what the professor wants to hear so I get the grade it's like

well you just turn yourself into that well who is it that's doing that manipulating it's not you cuz those aren't your words so even if you get the grade it's not you that got the great it's the false you it's the manipulative you so you do that your whole life you don't have your life and then you think well God that was a miserable life I manipulated everybody they were so damn stupid they were sucked in by it they're all contemptible everyone does it you know which they don't by the way and so that's a

pathway to bitterness partly because if you're a manipulator and you use your language falsely you don't live your own life you live the life of whatever possesses you when you think it's you manipulating and so you live the life of the spirit of manipulation there there's a book it's there's a book called about face it's it's about a guy that was in the Korean War and then new was in the Vietnam War and his name is Colonel David hackworth when I was on deployment I would read open up that book anywhere and I would read

two pages or three pages before I'd go to bed if I was in my bed that night and and there was so many lessons that correlated to what I was actually going through and a real obvious example was when you read you can learn and you don't have to you don't have to go through the School of Hard Knocks you don't have to get punched in the face repeatedly with things that turn out to be situations that other people have absolutely gone through the the the the the level of capability increases so much by seeing

something one single time well if I see something one time I I'm I'm infinitely better than if I'd never seen it before it's like those you those little puzzles they give you a little puzzle some kind of a mind Bender right the mindbenders only work on you one time the riddle only works on you one time then you go I I know the answer to that that's the answer you you never get fooled by that again so just knowing just seeing it one time you're infinitely better so when you read enough you're capturing all these

lessons of course you want to put the book on you want to become that person that can rattle you up man especially if the person is thinking all sorts of things that you've never thought I mean I love reading for that reason I could pick my peers too which I really loved it's like well you know I have have these people around me but then there's these people who who've lived before me and in different places and I can set them up on my shelf I can enter into their world and I can benefit from

everything they've thought and saturate myself with that person it's and it's very disruptive especially if the person that you're reading has a mind that's more powerful and more well-developed than your own it was very disruptive but unbelievably useful unbelievably useful to try on other people like that and you get the benefit of their entire life distilled into their into their book you know it it it's 30 years of work I I read this one book called The neuros pychology of anxiety which is a it's a great scientific work it's very hard book I think it

has 1800 references something like that and this guy Jeffrey gray he actually read all those references and he understood them and so it took me six months to read the book but I got an entire education out of it I got to experienceing 6 months what it took him 30 years to learn like what a gift that is it's it's it's unbelievable what were you reading when you were in University was it was it fiction novels was it non-fiction what what were you what were you focusing on as trit as this may sound it was

actually the the most impact was from Shakespeare the most impact on on multiple levels and I'll tell you the primary level and when I've covered Shakespeare on my podcast I explain this to people people think well you know I didn't really understand I read it I understand it if you think you're going to just pick up Shakespeare open it up and read it and understand it you're not going to because it's barely written in English it's barely written in English it's almost another language so what you have to do is you have to start to

interpret it and so what I realized with with Shakespeare is number one the weight of the words that these words were so pregnant with meaning that you had to pull those words and parse those words and pull those words apart to see all the depth that each individual word had and then the way that they're put together and what was great about this was by the time I was back cuz then I went right back into the SEAL Teams and somebody would hand me a Rules of Engagement document that was written by some lawyer in

Washington DC and I'd pull it out and say wait a second this word I don't know what this word means let's pull this word out let's see what this let's see what this actual definition of this particular word is and how that changes my viewpoint of the Rules of Engagement and how can I translate that for my troops so that they actually know what to do so that part uh for me was from a reading perspective starting to read Shakespeare and and saying oh okay you're not going to understand this and if you don't understand

something that's okay you pull out the Oxford English Dictionary and you look it up and then you not just find out what the meaning of the word is but what's the root word and where does it come from and what kind of depth and what kind of yeah and that's really that's that's unbelievable useful too virtually every word is like that because a word is an ancient artifact it's like it's it's it's like an it's like an animal in some sense it has an evolutionary history and it transforms across time and each word kind of

it carries The Echoes of its past with it too because each word um attracts other words in a particular unique way so it kind of lives in a word ecosystem as well and the ecosystem contain information about the history of that word and you think well why is that important it's like well hey guess what you think in words you talk in words you have all these archaic entities these words these living entities that you use it's like the more you know about them the more you know about you the more you know about other

people and the better you are at formulating and communicating your ideas there's nothing there's nothing lost in that kind of Investigation nothing there's nothing but gain there your ambition if you have any sense is actually to become competent do you want want to be competent and dangerous or do you want to be vague and useless it is definitely the case that there is no more exceptional form of the capacity to be dangerous than to be articulate and so it's a moral Endeavor in some real sense right to become articulate is to become the master of

your own tongue every Advantage comes with a disadvantage so if you're extroverted you're social and you're positive but you're impulsive and you can tilt towards Hedonism and you can't stand being alone no matter where you land in the temperamental landscape you're going to have your Associated faults and temptations you got a goal and you'll see that as you progress towards the goal there'll be obstacles that emerge and some of them you don't want to confront it's why it's useful to order your room chaotic room makes you anxious why too many Pathways man people don't really

repress the things they don't want to face they just fail to unpack them you want a horizon of ever expanding possibility we're built to walk uphill and when you reach the Pinnacle of the Hill you want to stop and appreciate appreciate the vision but the next thing you want is a higher Hill in the distance beware of unintended consequences it's like oh no this thing will just do what I want it to do and nothing else it's like no turns out that not only is what we want from each other the real thing but that's

also the adventure of your life and so if you aren't truthful and that means unfortunately especially at the beginning when you start to be truthful it means deeply coming to terms with your inadequacies in humility so it's very painful with without that you don't have the adventure of your life you have the role that you've acquiesced to and that'll take all the meaning out of your life it's good for you to go take your place in the world have some ambition have a vision have a goal have a strategy try to be a good person

not because it's your duty precisely because that's the proper way to live you sit on the bed and say okay man I'm ready to learn something what's one thing I'm doing wrong that I know I'm doing wrong that I could fix you meditate on that you'll get an answer you grow in proportion to the weight you take on voluntarily and it's also true that we have no idea what the upper limit to that is it's from the uphill climb that we derive our value and I mean this technically so almost all the positive emotion we

feel especially the emotion that fills us with enthusiasm and that's experienced in relationship to a goal and so in some sense you want a goal that you can never attain so you can always move closer to the goal that recedes as you move towards it you think well that's frustrating it's like sfus pushing the rock uphill but it's not because as you pursue that goal you put yourself together and your life does get better and richer and more abundant that's why the highest levels of virtue and goal are in some sense Transcendent you want them

to be above everything you're doing so you can continually move towards something that's more Sublime and better that's what you are you're you're here to live not to not to sleep and the problem with the vision of my Ties on the beach is that well first of all that's a vision of of drug induced unconsciousness second it's only going to work for about a week third you're going to be a laughing stalk in a month and depressed and aimless and and goalless it's no that's not it's it's you want a horizon of ever expanding possibility

and so it does happen to people is they because they've Stak their soul on the attainment of an instrumental goal and it it can be a pretty high order goal but then you think now I'm there now what well the answer can't be well I'm going to live in the lp of luxury and never have to leave a f what do you want to be a giant infant with a gold with a gold bottle you never have to do anything but lay in your back and suck it's like you see the problem with that as

a conceptualization it's no you want to be like an active Warrior moving uphill with your sword in hand and that's that's Dynamic that's exciting people are afraid of the truth because often if you reveal it it causes conflict in the moment telling the truth is definitely an adventure seeking for sure but also telling another way of going about it is to just say what you think and see what happens that's an adventure CU you don't know what the outcome is going to be so look there's this old idea that it's necessary to have faith in

the truth and so here's here's a way of thinking about that someone asks you a question and you might think well here's the outcome I want and so here's how I'm going to answer that question so that's one way of approaching it but another way of approach approaching it is you ask me a question I'm going to think about the answer and I'm just going to tell you what I think and it doesn't matter what the outcome is because I'm willing to see what the outcome will be predicated on the idea that there isn't a

better outcome than the one that truth produces even if it's harsh and terrible in the in the short term and sometimes it is it's like there isn't a better way of doing it now you might say well how do you know that and the answer is well I don't know that that's why it's an Article of Faith cuz I believe and and I believe this deep the being that you produce as a consequence of telling the truth is good by definition even though it's harsh and and often uncomfortable because you get in trouble one of

the things that I've really learned recently or learned to articulate better is that there's a very tight relationship between aspiration and responsibility the first question might be do you need to Aspire to something and answer is well yes because you have to do something you can't if you just sit there you'll die you can't just sit there you have to go act out in okay so act towards what well that's whatever your aspiration is you have to have an aim okay well what should the aim be well it should be something worth doing let's say

why do something that you don't feel is worth doing what do you think's worth doing well if you watch other people and you judge when they're doing something worthwhile you usually judge them positively if you see that they're taking responsibility at least for themselves but you want to be completely useless so other people have to take care of you that's pretty pathetic and maybe you could get your act together so you're taking care of yourself and your family and maybe you could even do better than that and take care of yourself and your family and

your community well good for you that's that's responsibility and that's an aim well here's one of the things that's cool about that is that your life doesn't have meaning without aspiration or an aim okay so you need a hierarchy of values there's got to be something at the top it's got to be something important if you don't have that your life doesn't have any meaning so if you criticize the hierarchy or even the ideas of idea of hierarchy you destroy the idea of aspiration and then people have nothing well that's not helpful people are built

for a struggle and they're built for a weight and you want to take on a heavy burden voluntarily see if you can put yourself together see what you can do out in the world while you're waiting to die it's an all-in game it better be worthwhile if you gaze into the abyss long enough you see the light not the darkness I'm betting my life on it bring it on the adventure along the Route man and I would say where's that adventure to be found you don't want someone else's fate man your Fate's enough and your

adventure is enough it's plenty it's more than you can ever fully realize and so that's also part of the reason that we all believe that the individual has some intrinsic dignity it's don't be so sure that your position in your room is so damn trivial might be your attitude towards it that's trivial and if you're in Dire Straits and dire circumstances just look at how much opportunity you have to make things better well maybe the same thing's true of life right you bind yourself to it and the tighter you bind yourself to it the more

you find out what it is and that's like a radical Embrace we're built to walk uphill and when you reach the Pinnicle of the Hill you want to stop and appreciate the vision but the next thing you want is a higher Hill in the distance because it's from the uphill climb that we derive our value almost all the positive emotion we feel especially the emotion that FS us with enthusiasm that's experienced in relationship to a goal and so in some sense you want a goal that you can never attain there's nothing that makes you more

formidable than verbal competence than being able to articulate be able to think to Marshal your arguments right aim yourself in One Direction and you might say well I've gone halfway down this path and I found out it's wrong well how do you distinguish that from just giving up well that's a really hard question right it's it's a moral hazard but then the Absol is yeah but you have to play one of them you have to learn to play one of them you have to become an expert at at least one of them and then that's

not a relative proposition and I I believe that's true so you want to commit to something and then when you commit to something you require yourself to bring all of your desperate components moving in a single Direction United in a single Direction so it's a unifying it's a unifying act you said that a harmless man is not a good man A Good Man is a very dangerous man who has that under voluntary control how should people become more dangerous oh becoming more articulate is definitely I would say that's the primary array of weapons I mean

physical prowess is something and and it's not nothing that physical confidence that comes along with that as well but the same thing replicated at the level of the ability to communicate and to think that's way broader field of of battle and opportunity in a world with seemingly infinite options it can be challenging to decide on the best course of action for one's life Peterson suggests that a useful approach is to focus on what bothers you or what you find most challenging these discomforts or challenges can be an indication of where one should focus their time

and energy by leaning into what is difficult ult or uncomfortable individuals can discover their strengths and find direction in their lives be honest with yourself about your interests abilities and limitations and pursue the path that aligns most closely with your values and passions there's a lot of things you could be bothered by like a million things man but some things grip you they bug you and they might make you resentful and bitter cuz they bug you so much like they're your things man they've got you so then I look for a question that I would

like the answer to I would really like the answer to it so I don't assume I already have the answer cuz I would actually really like to have the answer so if I could get a better answer great and so that's the first thing and that's like a prayer it's like okay here's a mystery I would like to delve into it further well so that's humility it's like here's a mystery which means I don't know I would like to delve into it further which means I don't know enough already and then then comes the Revelation

it's like well what's a revelation well if you ask yourself a question it's a real question do you get an answer or not the answer is well yeah thoughts start to appear in your head so from somewhere that's right from somewhere where do they come from do you have a sense depends on what you're aiming at it depends it depends on your intent so imagine that your intent is to make things better then maybe they come from the place that's designed to make things better maybe your intent is to make things worse then they come

from [Music] Hell let's say you want to become who you could be in the fullest sense so let's say you're someone who's going to solve some serious problems okay the first thing you have to do is admit to the seriousness of the problems that's no no joke and so the first thing is just the terror of the problem itself and that's enough to paralyze you right and that's the Hydra that's the Gorgon with the head of snakes it'll paralyze you and and turn you to Stone that's the Basilisk in the Harry Potter series you look

at it and turns you to Stone and lurks underneath everything right and it's malevolence and tragedy and and so and so there's that and then the next is well you're going to take responsibility for that you're really going to do that are you that's a hell of a load man and so it's daunting to even consider that and then there's the discipline and responsibility that that necessitates which is also daunting it's like oh my God the problem's that serious I'm really going to have to get my act together in order to not contribute to it

much less solve it and so the problem is terrible and then the the solution is daunting but but the upside of that is is like well there isn't anything better to have than a problem that's worth solving like that's really worth solving right and so the more of that you take on the more you have a reason to get out of bed in the morning no matter what think I'm getting up I'm trudging forward doesn't matter what I'm suffering from I've got things that need to be done they're necessary and that gives you that sense

of purpose that is the antidote to bitterness okay well let's say you want your life to be meaningful it's like okay then what you do matters it actually matters so that's an interesting thing well so let's say you go over your past with a fine tooth comb and you decide you're going to take responsibility for everything that you did that was wrong and everything that you failed to do that you could have done that was right it's like does that change the world it's like depends on how thoroughly you do it you might say it

changes the world like nothing else possibly can and I think that that's actually right you have to allow yourself a certain latitude for error that's a useful thing to know too one of the things I tell people when they're trying to develop a vision for their life or an implementable plan is um make a bad plan make the best one you can but don't get obsessive about it it's like make a plan implement it you'll figure out when you implement it why it's stupid exactly and then you can fix it a little bit compare yourself

to who you were yesterday and not to who someone else is today the same basic idea right is that you have to get your markers for Success right because otherwise you can end up in the situation you described which is that like 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 you shouldn't just compare 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 you just don't know any of that but you can certainly contrast yourself with yourself and that's a lot better it is the only way well it's also the only way of really of really measuring anything approximating proper Improvement you can actually tell when you're a little better than you were yesterday right so and and you can

actually do that that's another thing that's so interesting about it is that you can actually make yourself a 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 it's funny I mean you know obviously if you have a problem and you think about it but you can think of a solution and it's not obvious how you do that you know I mean it's not like you know how you're manipulating your neurons or something it it it it happens of its own accord

in some sense like you can participate with in it I guess and you can interfere with it and it seems to take a certain amount of willpower but it still all happens mysteriously behind the scenes one of the things that I've been so so you know there's lots of different ways to interpret the world and you can maybe even make a case that there's an endless number of ways to interpret the world and the problem with that is that it kind of disorients you in terms of what you should be doing but just because there's

a very large number of ways to interpret the world doesn't mean there's a very large number of productive meaningful and sustainable ways to interpret the world and one of the things you do have to do is figure out how you conduct yourself today so that you don't upset the apple card in a week or a month or a year and so you know what what you do in some sense psychologically is you admit to yourself that your current frame of reference is faulty and then you start opening the door to a different kind of thinking

which is more creative thinking it's more lateral thinking saying well I'm wrong but that's not necessarily a problem because I could be right if I thought some other way well you know that's great often it works yeah there's there's almost No Lack there's almost no end to the utility of trying to figure out which ways that you're wrong cuz there's lots of them and every time you discover one then you don't have to be quite so wrong anymore that's a really good deal yeah what's your time worth you're a university student well it's certainly worth

minimum wage cuz obviously but it's worth way more than that because if you spend a productive hour when you're 20 then you gain the benefits of that hour for the rest of your life so there's the compounding effect of time spent when you're young so I say well let's assume your time's worth 50 bucks an hour which I think is an underestimate but whatever let's call it 50 we can call it 25 we'll call it 50 that's $2,000 a week you're wasting it's $100,000 a year it's like how much better would your life be if

you weren't wasting $100,000 a year the DiVinci Code everyone liked that it sold a lot and you know it was full of little Mysteries and was full of hints that there was more to the world than you think and which is definitely true and that you know there was a way of getting access to that knowledge and that it would really be worthwhile and people like that they like that idea and the reason for that is cuz it's actually it's true learn to write I'm I'm dead serious like I'm dead serious about that um because

writing is formalized thinking and so the way you write is first of all you need a problem cuz why write if you don't have a problem so this is good advice if you're just writing an essay by the way for your classes it's like pick a bloody problem that you want to write about cuz otherwise it's false right from the start it's up to you to engage with the material until you find something that grips you that you desire to investigate okay so you need a problem well the next thing you need to do is

well you need to have something to say about the problem well so reading reading is really good for that read as much as you can get your your hands on that addresses the problem okay so now now you now you know a bunch of things or at least provisionally know them you at least have access to them well now you start you start sorting through it it's like okay well maybe I need to summarize what I've learned and then I need to iron out the contradictions between what I've learned and I need to elegantly formulate

that and and I need to get my word choice right and my phrase choice right and my sentence choice right and I need to organize the sentences into proper paragraphs and the paragraphs into proper sequence so that I have a coherent argument and at the same time what you're doing is is your your your you're um you're integrating your own personality at the highest and most abstract level of organization and you're sharpening your tools and you're putting yourself straight because you're learning to think you learn to do that by writing many many years you hone

your words they're they're the most powerful thing about you bar are none if you're an effective writer and speaker and Communicator you you have all the authority and confidence that there is and so you're at University maybe you're taking Humanities degree well that what's the humanities degree for it's to teach you how to think you learn to think by writing now there's more to read to speak and all of that but the best thing you can do is read and write every day couple of hours every day write about things you find important and see

if you can see if you can discover what you believe to be true and that'll build you a foundation and it's unbelievably practical like if you look at people who are phenomenally successful across life there's various reasons but one of them is is that they're unbelievably good at articulating what they what they're aiming at and strategizing and negotiating and and and and enticing people with a vision forward it's like get your words together man that's that makes you Unstoppable and that that's really that's the core of the humanity that idea get your words together make

yourself an articulate creature and then you're you're deadly in the best possible way so and take that seriously the best thing you can do is teach people to write cuz there's no difference between that and thinking and one of the things that just blows me away about universities is that no one ever tells students why they should write something it's like well you have to do this assignment well why are you writing well you need the grade it's like no you need to learn to think because thinking makes you act effectively in the world thinking

makes you win the battles you Undertake and those could be battles for good things if you can think and speak and write you are absolutely deadly nothing can get in your way so that's why you learn to write it's like and I can't believe that people aren't just told that it's it's it's like it's the most powerful weapon you can possibly provide someone with and I I mean I know lots of people who've been staggeringly successful and watched them throughout my life I mean those people you don't want to have an argument with them they'll

just slash you into pieces and not in a malevolent way it's like if you're going to make your point and they're going to make their point you better have your points organized because otherwise you are going to look like and be an absolute idiot you are not going to get anywhere the truth of the matter is is that you have a lot of potential as a child but none of that is capable of manifesting itself as Freedom before you become disciplined and discipline is a matter of the imposition of order and the order is necessary

especially for people who are hopeless and nihilistic and what does it mean well it doesn't mean gez I hate getting up at 8: in the morning to get ready for work that's just means that you're not very disciplined you know or or maybe that it might might mean something deeper but I'd start with lack of discipline before you know rearranging your whole life because you might say well I hate getting up at 8:00 in the morning no matter what I'm doing and then it's not your job I don't mean don't do difficult things I mean

watch yourself and if you see that you're doing things that make you hate yourself then consider the cost of continuing you know if something's valuable you'll make sacrifices to attain it that that discovery of sacrifice I think that's what separates human it's one of the primary factors separating human beings from animals because we discovered that we could let go of something we value in the present and we would gain something we value even more in the future lay a disciplinary structure on yourself get the chaos in in in check and then you can move towards

a state that's Freer cuz it's discipline first like look if you're going to become a concert pianist there's going to be several thousand hours of extraordinarily disciplined practice that's the imposition of order on your potential let's say but what comes out of that is a much grander freedom and so virtually every freedom that you have in life that's true freedom is purchased at the price of discipline but it's not some casual self-help Doctrine it's that if you don't organize yourself properly you'll pay for it and in a big way and so will the people around

you and I would say start where you can start you know if if something announces itself to you as in need of repair that you could repair then hey fix it you fix a hundred things like that your life will be a lot different now I often tell people too fix the things you repeat every day cuz people tend to think of those as trivial you get up you brush your teeth you you have your breakfast you know you have your routines that you go through every day well those probably constitute 50% of your life

and people think well they're mundane and I don't need to pay attention to them it's like no no that's exactly wrong the things you do every day those are the most important things you do hands down well there isn't anything better to have than a problem that's worth solving like that's really worth solving right and so the more of that you take on the more you have a reason to get out of bed in the morning no matter what think I'm getting up I'm trudging forward doesn't matter what I'm suffering from I've got things that

need to be done they're necessary and that gives you that sense of purpose that is the antidote to bitterness so yeah there's lots of reasons to you know cuz I thought for a long time imagine that imagine you have choice in front of you cuz you do so here's the choice your life life is either meaningful or meaningless okay so let's go through the meaningless part first because you think well of course I don't want it to be meaningless it's like yeah just hold on a second nothing you do matters and so impulsive pleasure is

the order of the day no responsibility that's you can do whatever you want it's like Pleasure Island in pinio right or it's it's like Neverland in in in in Peter Pan you're still a kid you can play all the time impulsive pleasure and and no responsibility that's the reward for meaninglessness well but then the other side is okay well let's say you want your life to be meaningful it's like okay then what you do matters it actually matters right make a mistake hurts you hurts your family hurts the world in a deeper way than you

think and you have to be awake to that and then you have to take it on yourself so if you're at a particular stage right now and that stage would involve a particular world view and the behaviors that go along with that so the perceptions and behaviors but it's not enough because you haven't mastered the whole world and you're making mistakes all the time and then there's other neurological mechanisms that so maybe that's a more left hemisphere phenomena the instantiation of that identity um then there's right hemisphere mechanisms that are tracking your errors and sort

of and keeping track of them and the errors are in indication that your theory is incomplete so it ACC the errors accumulate and the information around the errors accumulate and another identity starts to become formulated and it it solves all the problems you're previous identity did but also some additional ones when you have an AA moment like that it's the manifestation of that next identity that's that's making itself known it's you know because it's being built from the bottom up it isn't explicit yet then you'll encounter an explicit statement you you you mentioned a couple

there and they map on to that and that's the Ahab it's like oh yes oh yes that's what ties together these things that I've been wrestling with in the back of my mind right someone made it explicit and that's what well that's one of the great things about language that can also help fill in the gaps too because you then you know you you can start to make arguments based on that observation that I have that's that's that that's the [Music] manifestation what is the consequence the long-term consequence of acting so many people especially because

of the world I live in in Instagram and social media we we kind of build out these personas and then we most follow the implicit instructions that come with those personas well that's the problem right there is that I think Pinocchio is brilliant work of art if you're a puppet and an actor and Pinocchio is both at times in that movie both a puppet and an actor so why an actor like why is there why is there something wrong with being an actor well the first question is well who sets your role and then the

second question is who's pulling your strings so you've put on this front that is there to make you popular and sexy and desirable and to mask from yourself your own inadequacies but that's a role well who wrote it and for what purpose and you know maybe you're acting out a tragedy may maybe you're acting out narcissist you don't know because you've put that you've put that on yourself in an attempt in some ways to deliver to people what they want or more accurately to look as though you're delivering to people what they want and it's

not nothing to do that right because at least you're attempting in some sense to adapt to the social World someone who's really infantile and dependent someone who's never left home part of their problem is that they haven't crafted a Persona so you don't want to denigrate it entirely but it's no substitute for the real thing and it turns out that not only is what we want from each other the real thing but that's also the adventure of your life and so if you aren't truthful and that means unfortunately especially at the beginning when you start

to be truthful it means deeply coming to terms with your inadequacies in humility so it's very painful without that you don't have the adventure of your life you have the role that has been that you've acquiesced to and that'll take all the meaning out of your life right imagine that the world was constituted so that the true adventure of your life emerged as a consequence of Truth in speed in action cuz that would be reflective of the real you so it would be you living and then imagine that the adventure that would occur if you

dwelled in the truth would be so overwhelming that it would justify all the suffering I've really contended with this idea of struggle and Chaos in my life and the role it plays and once upon a time I thought I was trying to rid my life of chaos and struggle I thought that's why I was trying to get rich and get the Ferrari and the blonde I thought that would create a life um free of Free of struggle but then I looked at some studies and I S heard about this thing called gold medal depression when

Olympians come back from the Olympics and they've lost orientation and I and I tried to understand the role that struggle would would would have to play for me to be a fulfilled human being for the rest of my life we're built to walk up hill and when you reach the Pinnacle of the Hill you want to stop and appreciate the vision but the next thing you want is a higher Hill in the distance because it's the uphill climb that it's it's from the up up hill climb that we derive our value and I mean this

technically so almost all the positive emotion we feel especially the emotion that fills us with enthusiasm that's experienced in relationship to a goal and so in some sense you want a goal that you can never attain right so you can always move closer to the goal that recedes as you move towards it you think well that's frustrating it's like szipus pushing the rock uphill but it's not because as you pursue that goal you put yourself together and your life does get better and richer and more abundant that's why the highest levels of virtue and goal

are in some sense Transcendent you want them to be above everything you're doing so you can continually move towards something that's more Sublime and better that's what you are you're you're here to live not to not to [Music] sleep [Music]