What To Do To Be Successful | Jordan B Peterson

and I would you know I think about this because I'll tell you what it is that you need to do to be successful some of these things aren't so malleable but others are things that you can work on well IQ well that's a rough one because there's no evidence as far as I can tell that you can do a damn thing about your IQ I was just reading a paper by Dan Simon today it's a relatively recent review dan Simon did the invisible gorilla stuff and he was looking because there's all these companies that claim

that these online brain training exercises can produce cognitive improvements and he reviewed the literature again and I've reviewed that literature like six times in the last 15 years because I keep hoping that someone will crack the problem but it's always the same answer it's like you do brain training games to get better at the game a lot better at that game you get slightly better at similar games but distil games that are still heavily cognitively loaded doesn't affect your performance at all zero none so the the the issue of how to raise IQ man that's

a killer no one knows well how to do it I can tell you how to stop your IQ from decreasing as you get older that's not so bad because it does that fluid IQ decreases from the time you're 20 and and pretty rapidly it's physical health is the best preventive so exercise physical exercise weirdly enough you know you think well why well your brain uses oxygen like mad right and it and it needs to be kept clean and well oxygenated and physical exercise both both like weightlifting so anaerobic anaerobic anaerobic and aerobic exercise both seem

to be very very effective at staving off cognitive declines across the lifespan so that's a really useful thing to know because that's the only thing we know that does that so then the next best predictor of lifetime success is conscientiousness well so and although of the two aspects of conscientiousness say orderliness and and industriousness the better predictor is industriousness so the question is well what can you do about your industriousness and the answer to that is well that's kind of rough too because there's a strong genetic component but you can work on micro habits with

regards to your conscientiousness and I the best micro habits this is partly to do with this future authoring program processes I think the best thing you can do with regards to your conscientiousness is to set up some aims for yourself goals that you actually value and the future authoring program helps people do that and basically it does a situational analysis of it helps you do a situational analysis of your life more than a psychological analysis I would say and so the questions are something like well alright you're gonna 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 well you could think about them in in the Big Five manner you know if you're extroverted you want friends if you're agreeable you want an intimate relationship if you're disagreeable you want to win competitions if you're open you want to engage in creative activity if you're high in neuroticism you want security okay so those are all sources of potential motivation that you could draw on that you could tailor to your own you know your own personality but

then there are dimensions that you want to consider your life across and so we asked people about well you know if you could have your life the way you wanted it in three to five years if you were taking care of yourself properly you know 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 well how are you going to use your time outside of your job and how are you gonna regulate your mental physical mental

and physical health and maybe also your drug and alcohol use because that's that's a good place to auger down you know cuz alcoholism for example wipes out you know five to ten percent of people so you want to keep that under control and then and then so maybe you know you you you develop a vision of what your life what you would like your life to be and that associates the so the goal well once the goal is established and then you break down the goal into micro processes that you can implement the micro process

has become rewarding in proportion in relation to their causal association with the goal and that tangles in your 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 working out and so the more valuable the goal in principle the more

the micro process is associated with that goal start to take on a positive charge and so what that means is well you get up in the morning and you're excited about the day you're ready to go and so as far as I can tell what you do is you specify your long-term ideal maybe you also specify a place you want to stay the hell away from so that you're terrified to fail as well as excited about succeeding because that's also useful you specify your goal you do that you do that in some sense as a

unique individual you want to you want to specify goals that make you say oh if that could happen as a consequence of my efforts it would clearly be worthwhile because the question always is why do something because doing nothing is easy you just sit there and you don't do anything that's real easy the question is why would you ever do anything and that's how that has to be because you've determined by some means that it's worthwhile and then the next question might be well where should you look for worthwhile things and one would be well

you could consult your own temperament and the other would be well you kind of look at how look at what it is that people accrue that's valuable across the lifespan look look what so you do a structural analysis of the sub components of human existence and already did that you need a family you need friends like you don't need to have all these things but you better have most of them family friends career educational goals plans for you know time outside of work attention to your mental and physical health etc you know those are 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 that's a bad that's a bad deal for you so so once you but once you set up that that goal structure let's say and that's really in many many ways that's what you should be doing at universities is that's exactly what you should be doing is trying to figure out who it is that you're trying to be right and you aim at that and then use everything you learned as a means

of building that person that you want to be and and I really mean want to be I don't mean should be even those things 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 I started saying well you're gonna try to make yourself more industrious okay number one specify your damn goals because how are you gonna hit something if you don't know what it is that isn't going to happen and often people won't 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 really don't want to know when I fail because that's painful it's so I'll keep myself blind about when I fail that's fine except you'll fail all the time then you just won't know it until you've 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 right you could have known but you chose not to okay so once you get your goal structure set up you think okay if I could have this life it looks like that might be worth living despite the fact that it's gonna be you know anxiety provoking and threatening and there's gonna be some suffering and loss involved in 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 well then then you turn down to the micro routines it's like okay well this is what I'm aiming for how does that instantiate itself day to day week to week month to month and that's where something like a schedule can be unbelievably useful Google Calendar it's like make a damn schedule and stick to it okay so what's the rule with the schedule it's not a bloody prison that's the first thing that people do wrong is say well I don't like to have to follow a schedule looks like well what kind of schedule are you

setting up well I should I have to do this then I have to do this then I have to do this you know and then I just go play 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 it's like okay I've got tomorrow if I was gonna set it up so it was the best possible day I could have practically speaking what would it look like well then you schedule that and

obviously there's a bit of responsible that's gonna go along with that because if you have any sense one of the things that you're going to insist upon is that at the end of the day you're not in worse shape than you were that then at the beginning of the day right that's a stupid day if you have a bunch of those in a row you just dig you know you dig yourself a hole and then you bury yourself in it's like 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 or maybe it's more than that depending on how far behind you are but even that you can you can ask yourself ok 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 who is working for you it's like okay you got work tomorrow ok so I want you to work tomorrow and you might say ok well 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 you do an hour of responsibility and then you play a video game for 15 minutes I don't know whatever turns your crank man but you know you have to negotiate with yourself and not tyrannize yourself like you're negotiating with someone that you care for that you would like to be productive and have a good life and and that's how you make the schedule it's like and then you look at the day and you think well if I had that day that'd

be good great you know and you you're useless and horrible so you'll probably only hit it with about 70% accuracy but that beats the hell out of zero right and if you hit it even with 50% accuracy another rule is well aim for 51% the next week or 50 and a half percent for God's sake or because you're gonna hit that position where things start to loop back positively and spiral you upward and so so that's one way that you can work on your conscientiousness it's a plan of life you'd like to have and and

you do that partly by referring to social norms that's more or less rescuing your father from the belly of the whale but the way other way you do that is by having a little conversation with yourself about as if you don't really know who you are because you know what you're like you won't do what you're told you won't do what you tell yourself to do you must have noticed that it's like you're a bad employee and a worse boss and both of those work you know for you you don't know what you want to

do and then when you tell yourself what to do you don't do it anyway so you should fire yourself and find someone else to beat but