THE STOIC MINDSET Jordan Peterson Best Motivational Speech

So to navigate there's two things you need to know. The first is where the hell are you exactly precisely right razor sharp what's good about you and what's bad about you by your own by your own reckoning. You don't have to you can ask other people but this is game you play yourself. It's like as far as I'm concerned I'm taking stock. What is it that's okay about me and what needs some work? And you got to watch to not be too self-critical when you're doing that too because that can just be another kind of flaw. And then the next is okay well where are you going? What's your destination? Well, and that's what the frame is. Now, you know, you you could do that in very sophisticated way. And you do that by thinking consciously about who it is that you are in an articulated manner and where you want to go and why and how you're going to get there. And people hardly ever do that. That is that's come as such an absolute shock to me as an educator. just because one of the other programs use this in my classes, one of the other programs in this suite of programs is called the future authoring program and started developing it my maps of meaning class which is where some of this materials from and got students to write about their past. It's like okay we're we're talking about stories so let's tell your story. Who are you? How did you get here? And what are you now? That usually helps people put things to rest. Although it's quite stressful while you're doing it. Stress goes up when you're doing it and maybe you feel miserable for couple of weeks and then stress goes down and it stays down. So that's and that's also why people don't do it because who the hell wants to have their stress go up. But if it's temporary it's sacrifice. So then the next issue is well where are you going? And one of the things that and this just still cannot understand these students that had been in education system for 15 years 14 years high-end students most of them not once in their whole bloody life did anyone ever get them to sit down for like day and say all right justify your existence like well seriously it's like here you are in university you're taking bunch of courses you've got some sort of vague career plan it's like defend the damn thing bit since you're going to go live it and everything. You're staking everything on it. It's like what's your damn plan and why are you so convinced that it's not the plan of babbling fool? Because if you haven't thought about it, then it is. And if you really want to go out there and live that out, you know, one of the things Carl Jung said was that you you're in story whether you know it or not. And and then he made two nice comments about that. If it's someone else's story, you're probably going to get bit part and it might not be the one you want. And if it's story that you don't know, it might be one with really bad ending. Or maybe it's just bad period with worse ending. And if you don't know what the story that you're living out is, maybe that's the one. You know, maybe you got that from your mother, you got it from your grandmother, you got it from your aunt, or God only knows where you picked it up because you pick up things like mad because that's what human beings are like. So maybe you're living malevolent tragedy unconsciously. And then one thing you might ask yourself is, well, how wretched and miserable is your life? Let's add futile to that. How wretched, miserable, and futile is your life? And you might say, well, yeah, 70% on each count. It's like then you're probably unconsciously living out malevolent tragedy. And maybe that's not for the best. Well, it's either that or the whole universe hates you, right? or 70% hates you, you know. So, so anyways, you know, we got students to start writing in detail about not what they wanted. It's not career thing because that's the closest people usually get is they have career plan. It's like, no, no, it's not career plan. That's that's peripheral. Important, but peripheral. It's like, all right, you got three years, man. You're going to live them anyways. Devote those three years to setting the world up around you. so that it's the best it can possibly be for you as if you were taking care of yourself as if you cared for yourself. Well, what would that look like? You know, let's say just for the sake of argument if you figured out where you were that you could have what would be best for you. Well, what is that? bet you you never asked. People don't ask. And so life comes at them like random snakes and they sort of fend them off and life goes by and things don't work out the way people expected them to. But huge part of that is they didn't know where they were because they wouldn't look or didn't know that they should look. Ignorance and willful blindness, right? Two great catastrophes. And they never figured out where they wanted to go or why. Now there's problem with figuring out where you want to go. And the problem is is that you make your conditions for failure clear to yourself and people don't like that. So if you keep yourself in the fog, then you can't tell when you screwed up. Now that isn't so good because you're still screwing up. You're just too blind, self-blind to notice. Although in in in the short term, that's less painful. If you make your criteria for success razor sharp, then you know every time you screw up. But that's great because then you could fix it. You could either repair the the the behavioral inadequacy or the conceptual inadequacy that you're using as tool in that situation. Or maybe you could adjust your damn plan. Either way, you can fix it. And so, okay, so you're living in one of these bloody things and you might as well, it seems to me, you might as well make it the best one you could live in because you don't have anything better to do. Now if you don't do that, if you don't do it consciously and and this is what the psychoanalyst pointed out is that you have innumerable quasi autonomous subsystems that make you up that will generate stories impulsively and you'll just act them out. And you know that because you watch yourself over two weeks and you think Jesus did lot of stupid things in the last two weeks and you think why? And it's because you're random you're collection of somewhat random quasi autonomous personality units and lacking leader. They're just going to fire off whenever they want. You know, first you're hungry, then you're thirsty, then you want to go to bed with your wife, you know, then you want to sleep in, then you want to tell your boss off, then you want to curse at the guy that cuts you off in traffic. It's like you're kind of like two-year-old, you know, just it's one emotional frame after another vying for dominance. There's no overarching hierarchy and there's no king at the top. It's too public. You know, there's this there's this old there's this old saying from the from the New Testament about not praying in public, right? And the idea is that if you're going to commune for the higher good, you should do it in private because otherwise you're warping your ethic in some sense by demonstrating how virtuous you virtuous you are to the world. It's like, you know, I'm You go out there with stick and sign on it that says I'm against poverty. It's like, yeah, no kidding, man. Really? Like, who's for poverty? No one's for poverty. So, it's it's it's it's an abdication of responsibility with the mask of social virtue. You want to solve difficult problem is you figure out how to get along with your brother, the one you've been fighting with for 5 years, or see if you can staple your family back together. see if you can stop fighting with your girlfriend and have relationship that lasts for more than two weeks. You know, it's like there are things that you should be doing in the confines of your own life that are private and humble that would that would constitute genuine accomplishments and those are the things that you should attend to and no one's going to come along and say, "Hey, you know, good job. You're you're changing the world because it's it's private, but it's real and and people don't do that." And so, no, don't don't trust the activist don't trust the activist ethos at all. think it think everything about it is is superficial and and trendy and and too easy and and it externalizes the blame. The evil is always elsewhere, which is dreadful mistake to make because the evil isn't elsewhere. That's that's the thing that you understand when you're wise is the evil is not elsewhere. It's you because you're not everything you could be. And so, you know, you should work on that before going and telling someone else that maybe they're not who they should be. So, think it's, you know, so don't buy it. It's too easy. It's far too easy and it's too public and it's too self- congratulatory. And then there's the murderous like Marxist element which, you know, I'm always often inclined to mention. So certainly think you've identified certain causes where the public element trying to do good or the self- congratulatory version trying to do good could be harmful but do you think there are cases for instance I'm thinking of policy influencing policy being policy maker it seems like something like that public policy could be used to eliminate some unnecessary suffering but would involve more public domain something where you are trying to attract followers is trying to attract praise from other people. Look, look, if you if you've established yourself in the world as credible human being and people are asking you to enter public service because of your accomplishments, then it's time to do it, right? But before that, it's little on the premature side. And if you're just setting your for self forward as an avatar of an ide of an ideology, then there's nothing to you except think of it as the chattering of various forms of demons. It's like you're not helpful. And if you if you look, you want to think, okay, are you fit to lead? Let's let's put it that way. Okay, first of all, do you know where you're going? Because that's actually one of the hallmarks of leader. Leader knows where he's going. And maybe other people are also interested in going that way. But the leaders I've met have carved themselves out personal vision, right? It's not some it's not some cookie cutter ideological solution to the ills of the planet. They've done detailed analysis, right? They know what they're talking about. And they're usually people, well, they've had successful relationship, they've had successful family, they have couple of degrees, they've established business, like they've made themselves credible in five or six dimensions. Well, then maybe you know enough about the world to dare to mess with its internal mechanisms. And if you if you don't have that kind of in-depth knowledge, then you should just you shouldn't you should no more work on the economic systems of Western civilization than you should try to adjust the electronic systems of your automobile because the latter is far less complex than the former.