Jordan Peterson's Life Advice Will Change Your Future (MUST WATCH)

You don't need to have all these things, but you better have most of them. . family, friends, career, educational goals, plans for time outside of work attention to your mental and physical health etc.

and that's what life is about and if you don't have any of those things well then all you've got left is misery and suffering so that's a bad deal for you but once you've set up that goal structure lets say and that's really- in many ways. . that's what you should be doing at university that's exactly what you should be doing is trying to figure out who it is you are trying to be and you aim at that and then you use everything you've learned as a means of building that.

. person that you want to be and i really mean want to be i don't mean should be even though those things are going to overlap and it's important to distinguish between those because that's partly and this is back down to the micro routine analysis so while you're gonna try to make yourself more industrious, okay number 1 specify your goals. because how are you going to hit something if you don't know what it is that isn't going to happen and often people wont specify their goals too because they don't like to specify conditions for failure so if you keep yourself all vague and foggy which is real easy because that's just a matter of not doing as well then you don't know when you fail and people might say well i don't wanna know when i fail because that's painful so i'll keep myself blind about when i fail that's fine except you'll fail all the time then you just wont know it until you failed so badly that you're done and that can easily happen by the time you're 40 so.

. so i would recommend that you don't let that happen so that's willful blindness you could've known but you chose not to okay so once you get your goal structure set up you think okay if i get half this life looks like that might be worth living despite the fact that it's going to be. .

you know anxiety provoking and threatening and there's gonna be some suffering and loss involved and all of that. . obviously the goal is to have a vision for your life such that all things considered that justifies your effort okay so.

. then what do you do then you turn down to the micro routine its like okay this is what i'm aiming for how does that instantiate it self day to day, week to week, month to month and that's where something like a schedule can be unbelievably useful, Google calender make a damn schedule. .

. and stick to it okay so what is the rule with a schedule its not a bloody prison. .

. that's the first thing that people do wrong. .

is well. . i don't like to follow a schedule what kind of schedule are you setting up?

well. . i have to do this then i have to do this and then i just go play some video games because who wants to do all these things that i have to do it's like WRONG.

set the damn schedule up so that you have the day you want that's the trick, its like okay i've got tomorrow if i was going to set it up so it's the best possible day i could have practically speaking. . what would it look like then you schedule that, and obviously there's a bit of responsibility that's gonna go along with that because if you have any sense one of the things you're gonna insist upon is that at the end of the day you're not in worse shape than you were at the beginning of the day cuz that's a stupid day if you have a bunch of these in a row you'll just dig yourself a hole and then just bury yourself in it sorry that's just not a good strategy it's a bad strategy.

. so maybe 20% of your day has to be responsibility and obligation and maybe it's more than that depending on how far behind you are but even that you can ask yourself okay well i've got these responsibilities i have to schedule the damn things in what's the right ratio of responsibility to reward and you can ask yourself that just like you'd negotiate with someone working for you its like. .

okay you've got a work tomorrow . . okay so i want you to work tomorrow and you might say okay what are you gonna do for me that makes it likely that i'll work for you well you could ask yourself that you know.

maybe do an hour of responsibility and play a video game for 15 minutes i don't know whatever turns your crank man but. . you have to negotiate with yourself and not tyrannize yourself like you're negotiating with someone that you care for that you'd like to be productive and have a good life and.

. and that's how you make your schedule and then you look at the day and you think. .

if i had that day that'd be good. . Great!

and you know you're useless and horrible so you only hit it with about 70% accuracy but that beats the hell out of 0% and if you hit it even with 50% accuracy aim for 51% the next week or 50. 5% for god's sake because you're gonna hit that position where things start loop back positively and spiral you upward so that's one way you can work on your conscientiousness is to plan a life that you'd like to have. and you do that partly by.

. referring to social norms. that's more less than rescuing your father from the belly of the whale but the other way you do that is by having a little conversation with yourself as if you don't know who you are because you know who you're like.

. you know what you're told you won't do what you tell yourself to do you must've noticed that. it's like you're a bad employee and a worse boss and both of those work for you you don't know what you want to do and then you tell yourself what to do you don't do it anyways.

you should fire yourself and find someone else to be. you have to understand that you're not your own servant. you're someone you have to negotiate with and you're someone that.

. that you want to present the opportunity of having a good life to and that's hard for people because they don't like themselves very much and they're always like. .

cracking the whip. . and then procrastinating X2 and it's like god.

. it's so boring and such a pathetic way of spending your time and you know what that's like. .

because you probably waste like 6 hours a day and i think we did an economic calculation about that a while back your time is probably worth $50 an hour something like that. . i mean you're not getting paid that now.

. but you're young. so this is investment time, what you do now is going to multiply its effects in the future so let's say it's $50 an hour which is perfectly reasonable so if you waste 6 hours a day and you are.

then you're wasting about $2k a week and about a $100k a year so go ahead but that's what it's costing you every hour. you need to know what your damn time is worth so let's say it's not $50 it's $30 whatever maybe it's a hundred it's somewhere in that range. one of the things you should be asking yourself is.

. when you spend an hour is that well. .

what if i paid someone $50 to have had that hour and if the answer is no then maybe you should do something else with your time it depends on whether or not you think that your time is worth while but the funny thing about not assuming that is if you assume your time isn't worth while what happens is you don't just sit around sort of randomly in a state of responsibility list bliss what you do is you suffer existentially and so that seems like a stupid solution you know if you take people and you expose them voluntarily to things that they are avoiding and are afraid of 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 ten years if you didn't avoid doing what you knew you needed to do by your own definitions 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'd 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 because it means that perhaps there's another way that you could look at the world and 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 today for example about 250k people will be lifted out of abject poverty and about 300,000 people are attached to the electrical power grid we're making people. . were lifting people out of poverty collectively at a faster rate that's ever ocurred in the history of humankind by a huge margin and that's been going on unbelievably quickly since the year 2000 the UN plan 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 tide is lifting everyone up and that's a great thing and we have no idea how fast we can multiply that if people got their act together and really aimed at it because you know. .

my experience is with people that were probably running at about 51% of our capacity. . 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.

. 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 after watching after you're done that's probably four hours right there now you think well that's 25 hours a week - 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 more like $50 if you think about it in terms of deferred wages if you're wasting 20 hours a week you're wasting $50k a year and you are doing that right now and it's. . because you're young wasting $50k a year is a way bigger catastrophe than it would be for me to waste it because i'm not gonna last nearly as long and so if your life isn't everything it could be you can ask yourself well.

. what would happen if you just stopped wasting the opportunities that are in front of you you'd be. .

who knows how much more efficient. 10x more efficient. .

20x 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 stopped making things worse because that's another thing people do all the time not only they do 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 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 major causes of suffering and the failure of the individuals to adopt the resposibility that they know they should adopt and that's the thing that's interesting too is that.

. and like. .

the another thing that i've often asked my undergraduate classes is you know. . there's this idea 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 happens so that you feel even stupider about it than you would if it happened by accident because 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 5yrs or for 10yrs. .

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 welcomed 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 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 tremendously large minority of cases well it's more than that too and this is what i'll close with and this is why i wanted to introduce social nets as ratings 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 seven billion people in the world (we're going to peak at about 9B by the way) and then it'll decline rapidly but.

. seven 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 no 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 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 it of course the terror of realizing that is that it actually starts to matter 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 asked yourself would you be so sure, if you had the choice: i can live with no responsibility whatsoever then 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 now when you say well nihilist suffered dreadfully because there's no meaning in their life and they still suffer yeah but the advantages 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 alternative is to bear your burden properly and to live forthrightly in the world 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 place you'd like to visit and take all your family and friends.

because that's what happened in the 20th century. how to think about motivation well think about it from the hypothalamic perspective so we could say one thing that motivation does is set goals we could say that emotions track progress towards goals. .

I'm gonna use that schema even though it's not exactly right so you say well motivation determines where you're gonna aim so if you're hungry you're gonna aim at something to eat and then that will organize your perceptions so that you zero out everything that isn't relevant to that task which is almost everything. . you concentrate on those few things that are going to facilitate your movement forward when you encounter those things that produces positive emotion as you move through the world towards your goal and you see that things are laying themselves out that facilitate your movement forward those things cause positive emotion.

and if you encounter anything that gets in the way then that produces negative emotion and it can be. . like threat because you're not supposed to encounter something that gets in the way it can be anger so that you move it away it can be frustration, disappointment, grief those would.

. if you had a response that serious to an obstacle it would probably punish the little motivated frame right out of existence you know. .

so you walk down stairs and the contracting company is set a wrecking ball through your kitchen. . it's like, that's going to be disappointing.

. you're not going to keep eating the peanut butter sandwich in the rubble. .

that little frame is going to get punished out of existence and some new goal is going to pop up instead and you know, one of the things we're going to try to sort out is how do you decide when you've encountered an obstacle that's so big that you should just quit and go do something else because that's not obvious. you know and. .

you can get into counter productive persistence pretty easily so. . we don't know how people solve that problem it's a really complicated one so anyways we're gonna work on that scenario.

. . your hypothalamus pops up micro goals that are directly relevant to biological survival that produces a frame of reference.

. so it's not a goal it's not a drive and it's not a collection of behaviors it's of little personality and the personality has a viewpoint. .

it has thoughts that go along with it, it has perceptions, it has action tendencies, all of that. . you can see this in addiction, most particularly.

so one of the things that you find often with people who are alcoholic is they lie all the time and that's because they built a little alcohol dependent personality inside of themselves. . or a big one, maybe it's 90% of the personality and one of the things that consists of is all the rationalizations that they've used over the years to justify their addiction to themselves and to other people.

. and so the addiction has a personality and so when the person is off maybe they're addicted to meth or something like that where we know that the addiction is more. .

short-term powerful that I would say than an alcohol addiction they'll say anything. . .

and the words are just tools used to get towards the goal and if they happen to be deceptive, whatever, it doesn't matter they're just practical tools to get towards the goal and then when you get towards the goal and you take a nice shot of meth or something like that you reinforce all those rationales that you use to get the drug then the next time you're even a better deceiver and liar so okay so we're gonna say motivations. . one way of thinking about them is they set goals but it's not the right way of thinking about it they produce a whole framework of interpretation.

. and so we're gonna think about that framework of interpretation and then emotions emerge inside of that so that's it so the world is framed, motivation set goals. you could say the world has to be framed.

so motivation sets that frame whose goals emotions perceptions and actions and then actions track progress so. . positive emotion says you're moving forward properly towards your goal and if you encounter something you don't expect you stop that's anxiety it's like oh we're not where we thought we were and so we don't know what to do?

so we should stop because we don't know where we are, what we're doing, stop, frozen. and then the more powerful negative emotions like pain they might make you get out of there so emotions, forward, stop reverse. that's your emotions within that motivated frame.

and that's another example of how your mind is embedded in your body you know emotions are like they're- they're offshoots of action tendencies that's the right way to think about it because action is everything. . fundamentally so what are some basic motivations?

most of these are regulated by the hypothalamus by the way and that tells you just how important a control system is the other thing that's useful to know about the hypothalamus is that it has projections going up from it that are like tree trunks and inhibitory projections coming down that are like grape vines so you can kind of control your hypothalamus as long as it's not on too much but if it's on in any serious way it's like- it. . it wins.

so partly what you do to stop yourself from falling under the Dominion of your hypothalamus is to never ever be anywhere where it's action is necessary you don't want to go into a biker bar because you might find yourself in a situation where panicked defensive aggression is immediately necessary you probably don't want that you don't want the panic you don't want the terror you don't want the frenzied fight you don't want any of that you don't want to have to run away in absolute panic. so you just don't go there and a huge a huge part of how we regulate our emotions is just by never going anywhere where we have to experience them and so that has very little to do with internal inhibitory control and everything to do with staying where you belong the myth of mental illness by Thomas szasz, it's a classic. you should read it.

if you're interested in psychology. . READ IT and he basically said most people have problems in living.

they don't have psychological problems and so I've experienced despite my love for the psychoanalysts very frequently what I'm doing as a therapist is helping people have a life that would work and you can parameterize that it's like. . what do you need how about some friends?

people kind of like that. how about an intimate relationship with someone that you can trust that maybe has a future. that'd be good.

how about a career that puts you in a dominant hierarchy somewhere so at least you've go some possibility of rising and some possibility of stabilizing yourself and a schedule in a routing because no one can live without a routine. just forget that, if you guys don't have a routine I would recommend like you get one going because you cannot be mentally healthy without a routine you need to pick a time to get up, whatever time you want but pick one and stick to it, because otherwise you dis regulate your circadian rhythms and they regulate your mood. and eat something in the morning.

. I had lots of clients who've had anxiety disorders. .

I had one client who was literally starving. . very smart girl she- there's very little that she liked she kind of tried to subsist on like half a cup of rice a day she came to me and said: I have no energy I come home all I want to do is watch the same movie over and over is that weird and I thought well it depends on how hard you work you know.

it's a little weird but. . whatever it's familiar you're looking for comfort.

. so I did an analysis of her diet, it's like. .

3/4 of a cup of rice it's like you're starving. eat something. .

. you know. .

you'll feel better! so she modified her diet and all her anxiety went away and she had some energy! like yeah.

. you've got to eat! so.

. . schedule, that's a good thing man your brain will thank you for it.

it will stabilize your nervous system. . with a bit of a plan that's a good thing you need a career, you need something productive to do with your time you need to regulate your use of drugs and alcohol.

. most particularly alcohol you need a family. .

. like the family you have your parents and all that. would be nice if you all got along you can work on that that's a good thing to work on and then you know you probably need children at some point that's life.

. . that's what life is and if you're missing- you know you may have a good reason to not be operating on one of those dimensions.

. it's not mandatory but I can tell you that if you're not operating reasonably well on four- I think I mentioned six if you're not operating reasonably well on at least three of them there's no way you're going to be psychologically thriving and that's more pragmatic in some sense than psychological right. .

human beings have a nature there's things we need and if we have them well that's good! and if we don't have them well then we feel the lack and so behaviorists, behavioral psychologists concentrate a lot more on that sort of thing. you know it's practical strategizing make a career plan figure out how to negotiate cuz that's bloody important figure out how to say what you need.

. . figure out how to tell the truth to people figure out how to listen.

. to your partner in particular because if you listen to them they will actually tell you what they want and sometimes you can give it to them and maybe they'll return the favor and if you practice that for like 15 years. .

well then maybe you're constantly giving each other what you want, well hooray! that would be good.