JORDAN B.
PETERSON
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson is a canadian Clinical Psychologist, Professor of psychology at the
University of Toronto, and cultural critic.
Raised and toughened in the frigid wastelands of Northern Alberta, Dr. Peterson has flown a
hammer-head roll in a carbon-fiber stuntplane, piloted a mahogany racing sailboat around Alcatraz Island,
explored an Arizona meteorite crater with a group of astronauts, built a Native American Long-House on
the upper floor of his Toronto home, and been inducted into a Pacific Kwakwaka’wakw family.He’s been
a dishwasher, gas jockey, bartender, short-order cook, beekeeper, oil derrick bit re-tipper, plywood mill
laborer and railway line worker.
Peterson obtained his bachelor's degrees in political science and psychology from the University of
Alberta and a PhD in clinical psychology from McGill University. After teaching and researchinf
at Harvard University, he returned to Canada in 1998 to join the faculty of psychology at the University
of Toronto.
He’s taught mythology to physicians, lawyers, and businessmen; worked with Jim Balsillie,
former CEO of Blackberry’s Research in Motion, on Resilient People, Resilient Planet, the report of the
UN Secretary General’s High Level Panel on Global Sustainability; helped his clinical clients manage the
triumphs and catastrophes of life; served as an advisor to senior partners of major Canadian law firms;
penned the forward for the 50th anniversary edition of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago;
lectured across North America, Europe and Australia in one of the most-well attended book tours ever
mounted; and, for The Founder Institute, identified thousands of promising entrepreneurs, in 60 different
countries.
With his students and colleagues, Dr. Peterson has published more than a hundred scientific
papers, advancing the modern understanding of creativity, competence and personality, while his now-
classic book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief (released in June 2018 as a now bestselling
author-read audiobook) transformed the psychology of religion. He was nominated for five consecutive
years as one of Ontario’s Best University Lecturers, and is one of only three profs rated as “life changing”
in the U of T’s underground student handbook of course ratings.
Peterson's areas of study and research within the fields of psychology are psychopharmacology,
abnormal, neuro, clinical, personality, social, industrial and organizational, religious, ideological,
political, and creativity. Peterson has authored or co-authored more than a hundred academic papers and
was cited almost 8,000 times as of mid-2017; at end of 2020 almost 15,000 times.
In 2016, shortly before the publication of 12 Rules for Life, several of Dr. Peterson’s online
lectures, videos and interviews went viral, launching him into unprecedented international prominence as
a public intellectual and educator.
What is he known for/ His works
In 2013, Peterson registered a YouTube channel named JordanPetersonVideos, and immediately
began uploading recordings of lectures and interviews.
Uploads include recordings from two of his classes at University of Toronto ("Personality and Its
Transformations" and "Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief"),special lectures ("Potential"
for TEDx, "Death of the Oceans"), interviews, experiments in Q&A format, and video essays.
Total views reached over 200 million
In 1999, he published his first book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of
Belief, which became the basis for many of his subsequent lectures. The book
combined information from
psychology, mythology, religion, literature, philosophy, and neuroscience to
analyze systems of belief and meaning.
In January 2018, Peterson's published his second book, 12 Rules for Life: An
Antidote to Chaos, about abstract ethical principles about life
Peterson's third book, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life, was released on 2 March 2021
Controversies
In 2016, Peterson released a series of YouTube videos criticizing the Act to amend the Canadian
Human Rights Act and the Criminal Code (Bill C-16), passed by the Parliament of Canada to
introduce "gender identity and expression" as a prohibited grounds of discrimination.
He argued that the bill would make the use of certain gender pronouns into compelled speech, and
related this argument to a general critique of political correctness and identity politics. He
subsequently received significant media coverage, attracting both support and criticism.
The series of videos drew criticism from transgender activists,
faculty, and labour unions; critics accused Peterson of "helping
to foster a climate for hate to thrive" and of "fundamentally
mischaracterising" the law. Protests erupted on campus, some
including violence, and the controversy attracted international
media attention.
Peterson's lectures and debates—propagated also
through podcasts and YouTube—gradually gathered millions of
views.
12 Rules of Life: An Antidote to Chaos
The book's central idea is that "suffering is built into the structure
of being" and although it can be unbearable, people have a choice either to
withdraw, which is a "suicidal gesture," or to face and transcend it. Living
in a world of chaos and order, everyone has "darkness" that can "turn them
into the monsters they're capable of being" to satisfy their dark impulses in
the right situations. Scientific experiments like the Invisible Gorilla
Test show that perception is adjusted to aims, and it is better to
seek meaning rather than happiness. Peterson notes:
[I]t's all very well to think the meaning of life is happiness, but
what happens when you're unhappy? Happiness is a great side effect.
When it comes, accept it gratefully. But it's fleeting and unpredictable. It's
not something to aim at – because it's not an aim. And if happiness is the
purpose of life, what happens when you're unhappy? Then you're a failure.
The book advances the idea that people are born with an instinct for ethics and meaning, and
should take responsibility to search for meaning above their own interests (Rule 7, "Pursue what is
meaningful, not what is expedient"). Such thinking is reflected both in contemporary stories such
as Pinocchio, The Lion King, and Harry Potter, and in ancient stories from the Bible. To "Stand up
straight with your shoulders back" (Rule 1) is to "accept the terrible responsibility of life," to make self-
sacrifice, because the individual must rise above victimization and "conduct his or her life in a manner
that requires the rejection of immediate gratification, of natural and perverse desires alike." comparison
to neurological structures and behavior of lobsters is used as a natural example to the formation of social
hierarchies.
In the last chapter, Peterson outlines the ways in which one can cope with the most tragic events,
events that are often out of one's control. In it, he describes his own personal struggle upon discovering
that his daughter had a rare bone disease. The chapter is a meditation on how to maintain a watchful eye
on, and cherish, life's small redeemable qualities (i.e., to "pet a cat when you encounter one"). It also
outlines a practical way to deal with hardship: to shorten one's temporal scope of responsibility ( e.g.,
focusing on the next minute rather than the next three months).
The book is divided into chapters with each title representing one of the following twelve specific
rules for life as explained through an essay.
1. "Stand up straight with your shoulders back."
2. "Treat yourself like you are someone you are responsible for helping."
3. "Make friends with people who want the best for you."
4. "Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today."
5. "Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them."
6. "Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world."
7. "Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)."
8. "Tell the truth — or, at least, don’t lie."
9. "Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t."
10. "Be precise in your speech."
11. "Do not bother children when they are skate-boarding."
12. "Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street."
STAND UP STRAIGHT WITH YOUR SHOULDERS BACK
“Standing up straight with your shoulders back is something that is not only physical, because you’re not
only a body, you’re a spirit so to speak, a psyche as well. Standing up physically also implies and invokes
and demands standing up metaphysically. Standing up means voluntarily accepting the burden of
being.”
Using examples from nature, like the humble lobster, Peterson explains the importance of
understanding dominance. How order and chaos work together, how paying attention to your posture,
speaking your mind, walking tall, and being daring encourages serotonin to flow and portrays an image of
competence to the world. In return you will begin to be less anxious, more confident, and increase the
probability of good things happening in your life.This newfound confidence will help you develop grit to
be bold during difficult times. It will help you face the terror of the world and still find joy. Here’s how
Peterson sums up this first rule for life:
“So, attend carefully to your posture. Quit drooping and hunching around. Speak your mind. Put your
desires forward, as if you had a right to them— at least the same right as others. Walk tall and gaze
forthrightly ahead. Dare to be dangerous. Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural
pathways desperate for its calming influence. People, including yourself, will start to assume that you are
competent and able (or at least they will not immediately conclude the reverse). Emboldened by the
positive responses you are now receiving, you will begin to be less anxious. You will then find it easier to
pay attention to the subtle social clues that people exchange when they are communicating. Your
conversations will flow better, with fewer awkward pauses. This will make you more likely to meet
people, interact with them, and impress them. Doing so will not only genuinely increase the probability
that good things will happen to you— it will also make those good things feel better when they do”
Actionable insight(s):
Often times, your feelings follow your physiology. When you don’t feel confident stand up taller with
your shoulders back. You will appear more confident to others and a chain reaction will occur that, given
time and consistency, will help you become a more confident individual.
TREAT YOURSELF LIKE SOMEONE YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR HELPING.
"Strengthen the individual. Start with yourself. Take care with yourself. Define who you are. Refine your
personality. Choose your destination and articulate your being.”
It is easier to show sympathy to others, including animals, than it is to self. Part of the reason is because
there is no greater critic than the self. The self knows all of its flaws. But you should take care of yourself
in the same way that you would take care of someone else that you love.
Give yourself grace, you have a responsibility to care of yourself. You must consider what is truly good
for you, not what you want or what would make you happy—but what is *actually* good for you.
Actionable insight(s):
Reward yourself for doing unpleasant tasks that you do not want to. Make sure you follow through with
the promised reward. Example, take yourself out for a coffee after doing paperwork you don’t want to do.
Get to know yourself in the same way you would get to know a new friend. Articulate your own
principles, discipline yourself, and keep the promises you make to yourself.
Balancing chaos and order
“Order is not enough. You can’t just be stable, and secure, and unchanging, because there are still vital
and important new things to be learned. Nonetheless, chaos can be too much. You can’t long tolerate
being swamped and overwhelmed beyond your capacity to cope while you are learning what you still
need to know. Thus, you need to place one foot in what you have mastered and understood and the other
in what you are currently exploring and mastering. Then you have positioned yourself where the terror of
existence is under control and you are secure, but where you are also alert and engaged. That is where
there is something new to master and some way that you can be improved. That is where meaning is to be
found.”
Define A Vision And Direction
“Don’t underestimate the power of vision and direction. These are irresistible forces, able to transform
what might appear to be unconquerable obstacles into traversable pathways and expanding
opportunities. Strengthen the individual. Start with yourself. Take care with yourself. Define who you are.
Refine your personality. Choose you destination and articulate your Being. As the great nineteenth-
century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so brilliantly noted, ‘He whose life has a why can bear
almost any how’.”
Regardless of where you’re at right now, you can find a way to improve your circumstances. It starts with
you, not others. You need to figure out who you are, what you’re about, and what you’re working
towards. Defining this will strengthen your being and ability to endure obstacles you face. It will also help
set you in motion for succeeding on the path you’re consciously chosen to pursue.
SET YOUR HOUSE IN PERFECT ORDER BEFORE YOU CRITICIZE THE WORLD.
“My sense is that if you want to change the world, you start from yourself
and work outward, because you build your competence that way.”
This echoes the wisdom of Confucius, who said:
“To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the
nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in
order; we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts
right.”
“The world presents itself as a series of puzzles some of which you’re capable of solving and
some of which you’re not. You have many puzzles in front of you that you could solve but you choose not
to. Those are the things that weigh on your conscience. It’s like “I should really do this,” but you don’t.
Cause the question is, how much are we contributing to the fact that life is an existential
catastrophe and a tragedy? How much is our own corruption contributing to that? That’s a really a
worthwhile question.
The things you leave undone. Because you’re angry, you’re resentful, or you’re lazy. You have
inertia. Well, you consult your conscience and it says, ‘Well, you know, that place over there could use a
little work.’ It’s the same as working on yourself. And so you clean that up, because you can. And then
things are a little clearer around you. And you’re a little better off, because you’ve practiced a bit. And
so you’re a little stronger. And then something else manifest itself and says, ‘Well maybe you can take a
crack at fixing me too.’ So you decide to do that and that gets a little more pristine. “
“…and then maybe you’ll learn enough by doing that so that you can fix up your family a little
bit, and then having done that, you’ll have enough character so that when you try to operate in the world,
at your job, or maybe in the broader social spheres, that you’ll be a force for good instead of harm…”
Self-Authoring Program
Responsibility and Meaning
A Discussion with Lewis Howes
JP: So then the question is, "what should your aim be?" Now, we have a program. It’s one of the things I
wanted to talk to you about today. I have this website called SelfAuthoring.com, and that program helps
people write about their life. There’s a Past Authoring Program. To establish your aim, you have to know
where you are. It’s like you’re trying to orient yourself on a map. You can’t orient yourself on a map unless
you know where you are. You also have to know where you’re going, so those are the two relevant things.
The Past Authoring Program helps people write about their lives, so it’s a guided autobiography. We ask
people to break their life up into six epochs, six sections, and then to write about the emotionally
important events in those epochs, and to detail out the positive things and why more of that could
conceivably happen in the future, and to detail out why the negative things happened, and to try to
understand why, with an aim to not replicate them in the future. The purpose of memory isn’t to remember
the past. The purpose of memory is so that you figure out what went wrong when something went wrong,
so you don’t duplicate it in the future. That’s the purpose of memory. The Past Authoring Program can
help people catch up, and you know you have to catch up if you have memories that are older than about
a year and a half that still cause you emotional pain when you think about them. Or if you dwell on them,
they come spontaneously back to mind, it means that there’s part of your life that you haven’t mapped out
properly, and it still has emotional valence that’s gripping you.
LH: You’re still holding on to that story.
JP: Or it’s still holding on to you.
LH: Interesting. You have to let it go.
JP: Yeah, well, you haven’t been able to navigate your way through it. There’s a pitfall, there, that you fell
in, and you don’t know how to avoid similar pitfalls in the future, and that’s why your brain won’t let it go.
That’s what the anxiety systems do. It’s like, "this happened to you, it wasn’t good. This happened to you,
it wasn’t good. This happened to you, it wasn’t good. Fix it, fix it, fix it, fix it." That will never go away,
unless you fix it.
LH: How do you fix it?
JP: Well, you have to figure out why it happened. That’s the first thing. It’s like, "how was it that that
situation arose to pull you down?" And that’s not simple. That’s why we have the writing program,
because it’s complicated to think it through. But if you face it, and you meditate on it, let’s say, and you do
this voluntarily, there’s a pretty high probability that you’ll be able to decrease the probability that it will be
repeated in the future. The second part of the program helps people do an analysis of their virtues and
their faults—same sort of idea: "what’s good about you that you could capitalize on? What’s weak about
you that you need to fix, so it doesn’t bring you down?" That’s the Present Authoring Program.
The Future Authoring Program is probably most relevant to you and your listeners, because you’re
interested in helping people establish aims. So we already talked about the fact that you need an aim in
life, or that’s where you derive your meaning; and, without that, things go to hell, as literally as that can be
taken. But it’s not easy to ask people to say—well, it’s easy to ask them, "what do you want in your life?"
It’s a very hard question to answer, because it’s too vague and grand. In the Future Authoring Program,
we help people break that down. Put yourself in the right frame of mind. "Whats the right frame of mind?"
Rule 2 in this book: "treat yourself like you’re someone who you’re responsible for helping." What that
means is you have to start from the presupposition that, despite all your flaws and insufficiencies, it’s
worth having you around, and it would be ok if things were better for you. So you need to take care of
yourself, like you’re taking care of someone you care for. There’s a bit of detachment, in that. The next
thing is, "OK, look three to five years down the road. You get to have what you need and want, assuming
you’re being reasonable and you actually want it, which means you’re willing to make the sacrifices that
would make it possible."
Notes
Mahogany: Reddish-brown timber
Compelled speech: Transmission of expression required by law
Identity politics: A tendency for people of a particular race, religion or social background to form exclusive
political alliance s, moving away from traditional broad based party politics
Expedient: a means of attaining an end, especially one that is convenient but possibly improper or
immoral.
Gratification: pleasure, especially when gained from the satisfaction of a desire
“Stand up straight with your shoulders back.”: Be confident in your posture and speech
"Treat yourself like you are someone you are responsible for helping."
Take care of yourself like how you would take care of someone you love
Sometimes we feel like someone else deserves more help and compassion compared to ourselves, as we
feel like we do not deserve it.
We do not know other people's flaws and mistake, so we perceived them as all kind and good, and that they
deserved all the help they need.
E.g donating to charities (strangers we have never met), taking care of stray animals
On the other hand, we know our own flaws, mistakes and regrets, this we feel that we do not deserved that
kind of compassion.
Be more responsible to yourself
"Make friends with people who want the best for you."
Do not be friends with someone you would not introduce or recommend to your brother, sister or parents.
If you have a friend that you would not recommend to someone else, then maybe he/she is not a good
friend to begin with
You are not responsible to help someone who does not want your help.
How can you be sure you are qualified enough to help that person?
"Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today."
As we get older, our lives become increasingly different from one another
When you see a person that you think is successful, you do not know what that person is going through or
what life problem he/she is facing
Everyone's life and upbringing is too different to be compared
Everyone has their own set of problems or flaws
It's better to compare yourself to the person that is the most similar to yourself, which is you
Try to be better than who you were the day before
Improve yourself day by day
"Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world."
Clean your room
If you can't even keep your house in order, who are you to criticize the world
Importance of personal responsibility
Start with yourself, the move to something bigger
What is it that I can change right now that would make my life better or more organized?
Start small by cleaning your desk. If you can do that, then maybe u can clean the whole room as well, and
then progress to your entire house.
"Tell the truth — or, at least, don’t lie."
Don't say something you know that is false, based on your own standards
Don’t say things that make you weak.
"Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t."
Have some humility
Be modest
Be willing to accept criticism
What you don't know is more important than what you know
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jordan_Peterson
https://www.meaningfulhq.com/12-rules-for-life.html
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