– Stop doing the things that you know are wrong.
Make a damn schedule, and stick to it.
Sometimes, y’know I can’t sleep at night
because I’m thinking about something.
And usually what I’ll do is go write it down.
It’s important to distinguish between those,
because that’s partly,
and this is back down to the micro-routine analysis
so it’s like saying,
well you’re going to try and make yourself more industrious.
Okay, number one, specify your damn goals,
‘cuz how are you going to hit something
if you don’t know what it is.
– Hello web nation, my name is Evan Carmichael
My one word is believe,
and I believe that entrepreneurs will solve
all of the world’s major problems.
So to help you on your journey
today we’re going to learn from clinical psychologist
and professor Jordan B. Peterson,
and my take on his top ten rules for success.
Rule number four is my personal favorite,
and I’d love to know which one you guys like the best.
And as always, as you’re watching,
if you hear something that really resonates with you,
please leave it in the comments below.
Put quotes around it so other people can be inspired.
You might win a prize as well.
And also, when you write it down,
it’s much more likely to stick for yourself as well.
Enjoy.
(dramatic music)
(swish)
– Stop doing the things that you know are wrong,
that you could stop doing.
Right, so it’s a fairly limited attempt.
First of all, we’re not going to say that you know
what the good is or what the truth is,
in any ultimate sense.
But we will presume that there are things that you’re doing,
that for one reason or the other,
you know are not in your best interest.
There’s something about them,
that you just know you should stop.
They’re kind of self-evident to you.
Other things you’re going to be doubtful about.
You’re not going to know which way is up and which way is down.
But there are things that you’re doing
that you know you shouldn’t do.
Now some of those you won’t stop doing.
For whatever reason, you don’t have the discipline
or maybe there’s a secondary payoff.
Or you don’t believe it’s necessary.
Or it’s too much of a sacrifice.
Or your angry or resentful or afraid.
Who knows?
So forget about those for now.
There’s another subset that you could stop doing.
It might be a little thing.
Well that’s fine, stop doing it.
See what happens.
And what’ll happen is,
your vision’ll clear a little bit.
And then something else will pop up
in your field of apprehension
that you will also know you should stop doing,
and that you could stop doing.
‘Cuz you’ve strengthened yourself a bit
by stopping doing the particular stupid thing
that you were doing before.
It just puts you together a little bit more.
And you could do that, repeatedly,
for an indefinite period of time.
That doesn’t necessarily mean
that you’re going to ever be able to formulate a clear
and final picture of what constitutes the truth
and the good.
But it does mean that you will be able to
continually move away from what’s untruth
and what’s bad.
Y’know, that’s not a bad start.
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.
They say, well I don’t like to follow a schedule.
Well its like, what kind of schedule are you setting up?
Well, I have to do this, then I have to do this,
then I have to do this.
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 you have the day you want.
That’s the trick.
It’s like, okay, I’ve got tomorrow.
If I was going to 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 responsibility
that’s going to 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
at the beginning of the day.
‘Cuz that’s a stupid day.
If you have a bunch of those in a row,
you just dig yourself a hole
and then you bury yourself in it.
Sorry, that’s just not a good strategy.
It’s a bad strategy.
So, maybe 20 percent 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 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
who was working for you.
It’s like okay you’ve got to work tomorrow.
Okay, so I want you to work tomorrow.
And you might say, okay, well what are you going to do for me
that makes it likely that I will work for you?
Well, you could ask yourself that, y’know.
So 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 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.
That’s how you make the schedule.
And then you look at the day and you think,
well if I had that day that would be good.
Great! Y’know, and you’re useless and horrible,
so you’ll probably only hit it
with about 70 percent accuracy
but that beats the hell out of zero.
And if you hit it even with 50 percent accuracy,
another rule is, well aim for 51 percent the next week.
Or 50 and a half percent, for god’s sake.
Because, you’re going to hit that position
where things start to loop back positively
and spiral you upward.
Sometimes, y’know, I can’t sleep at night
because I’m thinking about something.
And usually what I’ll do is go write it down.
I have some writing to do.
So I get up and I go write down what I’m thinking,
and that usually does the trick.
But because I’ve been playing with YouTube,
I thought, well, I’ll try making YouTube video
and telling people what I’m thinking about.
And see if that performs the same function as writing.
To me, the function of writing, well it’s two-fold.
One is conceivably, to communicate with people.
Although the fundamental purpose for me,
is to clarify my thoughts, so that I know.
Because if something is disturbing you,
what that means is that it needs to be articulated.
It’s the emergence of unexplored territory,
something that disturbs you.
That’s the right way to think about it.
It’s unmapped territory that’s manifesting itself.
It’s like a vista of threat and possibility.
And you need to articulate a path through it.
So that’s what I was doing.
It was like, I was thinking,
well this is bothering me, and this seems to be why,
and here’s what I think is going on,
and so I made the videos.
In some sense I didn’t think anything more of it.
You don’t have to necessarily have done anything wrong
for things to get completely out of control.
It’s a terrifying doctrine,
but it’s not a hopeless doctrine
because it stills says that there’s a way forward.
There’s a pathway forward.
And the pathway forward is to adopt a mode of being
that has some nobility.
So that you can tolerate yourself,
and perhaps even have some respect for yourself,
as someone who is capable of standing up
in the face of that terrible vulnerability and suffering.
And that the pathway forward
as far as the existentialists are concerned
is by, well certainly by the avoidance of deceit,
particularly in language,
but also by the adoption of responsibility
for the conditions of existence
and some attempt on your part
to actually rectify them.
And the thing that’s so interesting about that is,
well two as far as I’m concerned.
And some of this is from clinical experience.
You know, if you take people,
and I’ve told you this,
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 that they’re afraid of,
they get stronger.
And you don’t know what the upper limits to that are.
Because you might ask yourself,
if for ten years,
if you didn’t avoid doing what you knew you needed to do,
by your own definitions, right
within the value structure that you’ve created
to the degree that you’ve done that,
what would you be like?
Well, y’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, right?
Because it means that, perhaps there’s another way
that you could look at the world
and another way 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.
My experience is with people
that were probably running at about
51 percent of our capacity.
Something, maybe 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.
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
about watching after you’re done.
That’s probably four hours right there.
You think, well that’s 20, 25 hours a week
it’s a hundred 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 dollars an hour,
which is a radical underestimate,
it’s probably more like 50,
if you think about it in terms of deferred wages.
If you’re wasting 20 hours a week,
you’re wasting 50,000 dollars a year.
And you are doing that right now.
And it’s because your young,
wasting 50,000 dollars a year is a way bigger catastrophe
than it would be for me to waste it,
because I’m not going to last nearly as long.
And so if your life isn’t everything it could be,
you could ask yourself,
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.
10 times more efficient.
20 times 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 do the 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 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 individuals to adopt the responsibility
that they know they should adopt.
It isn’t merely that your fate depends on
whether or not you get your act together,
and to what degree you decide you’re going to live
out your own genuine being.
It isn’t only your fate,
it’s the fate of everyone that you networked with.
And so, y’know, you think, well
there’s 9 billion, 7 billion people in the world.
We’re going to peak at about 9 billion, by the way,
and then it’ll decline rapidly.
But, 7 billion people in the world, and who are you?
You’re just one little dust mote among that 7 billion,
and so it really doesn’t matter what you do or don’t do.
But that’s simply not 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 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 they 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 in it,
when of course the terror of realizing that
is that it actually starts to matter what 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.
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.
Y’know when you say, well nihilists suffer dreadfully
because there’s no meaning in their life
and they still suffer.
Yeah, but the advantage is 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.
Well what Solzhenitsyn figured out,
and so many people in the twentieth 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 will 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 its a place you’d like to visit
and take all your family and friends.
Because that’s what happened in the twentieth century.
The next best predictor of lifetime success
is conscientiousness.
Of the two aspects of conscientiousness,
say orderliness 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 think the best micro-habits,
this is partly to do with
these future offering 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.
The future offering program helps people do that.
Basically, it does a situational analysis.
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, all right, you’re going to have to put some effort
into your life.
You need to be motivated to do that.
And so, what are the potential sources of motivation?
Well, you could think about them in the big five.
Manner, 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 personality.
But then there are dimensions that you want to consider
your life across.
And so we ask people about,
well, if you could have the life the way you wanted it
in three to five years,
if you were taking care of yourself properly,
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?
How are you going to use your time outside of your job?
And how are you going to regulate your mental, physical,
mental and physical health,
and maybe also your drug and alcohol use?
Because that’s a good place to auger down,
‘cuz alcohol, for example,
wipes out 5 to 10 percent of people.
So you want to keep that under control.
And then, maybe you develop a vision of what your life,
what you would like your life to be,
and that associates the
so the goal, where once the goal is established,
and then you break down the goal into
micro-processes that you can implement.
The micro-processes become rewarding, in proportion
in relation to their causal association with the goal.
And that tangles in your incentive reward system.
We talked about the dopamine urge
of consent and 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-processes 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 so 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,
‘cuz that’s also useful.
You specify your goal.
You do that, in some sense as a unique individual.
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?
‘Cuz 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 the answer to 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.
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.
So you do a structural analysis of the
subcomponents of human existence.
Hardy 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 time outside of work.
Attention to your mental and physical health, et cetera.
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,
that’s a bad deal for you.
Once you’ve set up that goal structure, let’s 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 that you’re trying to be,
and you aim at that.
And then you use everything you 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.
It’s important to distinguish between those,
because that’s partly,
and this is back down to the micro-routine analysis,
so it’s like saying
you’re going to try to make yourself more industrious,
okay number one, specify your damn goals.
‘Cuz how are you going to hit something,
if you don’t know what it is?
That isn’t going to happen.
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,
‘cuz 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.
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 by the time you’re 40.
So, I would recommend that you don’t let that happen.
So that’s willful blindness, right.
You could’ve 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,
looks like that might be worth living.
Despite the fact that it’s going to be
anxiety provoking and threatening,
and there’s going to 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.
I started to pay very careful attention to
what I was saying.
I don’t know if that happened voluntarily or involuntarily,
but I could feel a sort of split developing in my psyche.
This split, and I’ve actually had students tell me
the same thing has happened to them
after they listened to some of the material
that I’ve been describing to all of you.
I split into two, let’s say,
and one part was the, let’s say the old me
that was talking a lot,
and that liked to argue,
and that liked ideas.
And there was another part that was watching that part
just with its eyes open,
and neutrally judging.
And the part that was neutrally judging
was watching the part that was talking
and going, that’s isn’t your idea.
You don’t really believe that.
You don’t really know what you’re talking about.
That isn’t true.
I thought, hmm, that’s really interesting.
That was happening to like 95 percent of what I was saying.
So then I didn’t really know what to do.
I thought, okay this is strange.
So maybe, I’ve fragmented,
and that’s just not a good thing at all.
I mean it wasn’t like I was hearing voices or anything
like that, it wasn’t like that.
It was well people have multiple parts.
So then I had this weird conundrum,
it was like, well which of these two things are me?
Is it the part that’s listening and saying,
no that’s rubbish, that’s a lie, that’s
you’re doing that to impress people,
you’re just trying to win the argument, y’know.
Was that me? Or was the part that was going about
my normal verbal business me?
And I didn’t know, but I decided I would go with the critic.
And then what I tried to do, what I learned to do,
I think, was to stop saying things that made me weak.
I mean I’m still trying to do that,
because I’m always feeling when I talk
whether or not the words that I’m saying
are either making me align
or making me come apart.
I think the alignment, I really do think the alignment,
I think alignment is the right way of conceptualizing it,
because I think if you say things that are
as true as you can say them, let’s say,
then they come up,
they come out of the depths inside of you.
We don’t know where thoughts come from.
We don’t know how far down into your substructure
the thoughts emerge.
We don’t know what processes of physiological alignment
are necessary for you to speak from the core of your being.
We don’t understand any of that.
We don’t even conceptualize that.
But I believe that you can feel that.
I learned some of that from reading Carl Rogers,
by the way, who’s a great clinician.
Because he talked about mental health, in part,
as a coherence between the spiritual or the abstract
and the physical.
That the two things were aligned.
There’s a lot of idea of alignment
in psychoanalytic and clinical thinking.
But, anyways, I decided that I would start practicing
not saying things that would make me weak.
What happened was that I had to stop saying
almost everything that I was saying.
I would say 95 percent of it.
That’s a hell of a shock to wake up,
I mean, this was over a few months,
but it’s a hell of a shock to wake up and realize that
you’re mostly dead wood.
It’s a shock.
And you might think,
well do you really want all of that to burn off?
There’s nothing left but a little husk
five percent of you.
It’s like, well, if that five percent is solid,
then maybe that’s exactly what you want to have happen.
Adopt the mode of authentic being.
And that is something like,
refusing to participate in the lie,
in deception and the lie.
To orient your speech as much as you can
towards the truth.
And to take responsibility for your own life,
and perhaps for the lives of other people.
And there’s something about that that’s
meaningful, and responsible, and noble,
but also serves to mitigate the very suffering that produces
say the nihilism, or the fleeing into the arms
or the escape into the arms of totalitarians to begin with.
You need something to shelter you against
your own vulnerability.
You can think about the world this way.
You can think about it as your orderly little plan.
That’s a place.
And you can think about it as the place
that things that disrupt your plan comes from.
That’s another place.
This is a bigger place than this.
Because there’s an endless number of things
that can disrupt your plan,
and only a tiny number of them
that will help you work it out.
So, part of the question then too,
is like, are you the friend of your plan,
or are you the friend of the thing that disrupts your plan?
I would say, you should work to become the friend
of the the thing that disrupts your plan,
because there’s a lot of that.
And then if you become the friend of the thing
that disrupts your plan,
then you start to develop strength
in proportion to the disruptive force,
and that’s really what you want.
You want to be able to implement your plan, obviously.
But you want to be able to take on
the consequences of error and learn from it,
and then you win constantly.
Because even if something goes sideways,
you think there’s something to be derived from this.
That’s wisdom, fundamentally.
Plan a life you’d like to have,
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 other way you do that is by
having a little conversation with yourself,
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.
Both of those work 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 be.
But, my point is that you have to understand
that you’re not your own servant, so to speak.
You’re someone that you have to negotiate with.
You’re someone that you want to present
the opportunity of having a good life to.
That’s hard for people,
‘cuz they don’t like themselves very much.
So, they’re always like cracking the whip
and then procrastinating,
and cracking the whip
and then procrastinating.
And it’s like god, it’s so boring,
and it’s such a pathetic way of spending your time.
If you can figure your life,
so that what you are generally doing
is aiming at the highest possible good,
then the things that you need to survive
and to thrive on a day to day basis
will deliver themselves to you.
That’s a hypothesis,
and it’s not some simple hypothesis, right?
Because what it basically says is,
if you dare to do the most difficult thing
that you can conceptualize
your life will work out better
than it will if you do anything else.
Well how are you going to find out if that’s true?
It’s a Kierkegaardian leap of faith.
There’s no way you’re going to find out
whether or not that’s true unless you do it.
No one can tell you either,
because just because it works for someone else,
I mean that’s interesting and all that.
But it’s no proof that it’ll work for you.
You have to be all in, in this game.
There is no more effective way of operating in the world,
then to conceptualize the highest good that you can,
and then strive to to attain it.
There’s no more practical pathway to the kind of success
that you could have if you actually knew what success was.
The world shifts itself around your aim.
You’re a creature that has an aim.
You have to have an aim in order to do something.
You’re an aiming creature.
You look at a point and you move towards it.
It’s built right into you.
And so you have an aim.
Well, let’s say your aim is the highest possible aim.
Well, then, that sets up the world around you.
It organizes all of your perceptions.
It organizes what you see and you don’t see.
It organizes your emotions and your motivations.
So you organize yourself around that aim.
And then what happens is the day manifests itself
as a set of challenges and problems.
If you solve them properly,
then you stay on the pathway towards that aim.
And you can concentrate on the day,
and so that way you get to have your cake and eat it too,
because you can point into the distance,
the far distance,
and you can live in the day.
It seems to me, that makes every moment of the day
supercharged with meaning,
If everything that you’re doing every day,
is related to the highest possible aim
that you can conceptualize,
well that’s the very definition of the meaning
that would sustain you in you life.
(swish)
– Thank you guys so much for watching.
I made this video because dudewat two one two
asked me to.
So if there is a famous entrepreneur
that you want me to profile next
check out the link that’s in the description
and you can go and cast your vote.
I’d also love to know which clip
resonated the most with you?
What lesson are you going to take from this video
and immediately apply to your life
or to your business somehow.
Leave it down in the comments below.
I’m really curious to find out what you have to say.
I also want to give a quick shout out to Nathan
from the Productivity Game Channel.
Nathan, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book,
Your One Word, and making that awesome YouTube video
on your channel about it.
I really appreciate the support man.
And I’m so glad you enjoyed my book.
– [Nathan] Carmichael states that there is one word
that defines who you are,
connects all the things in your life,
that make you come alive,
and will help you escape the chains of mediocrity.
– Thank you guys so much for watching.
I believe in you.
I hope you continue to believe in yourself,
and whatever your one word is,
much love.
I’ll see you soon.
(swish)
– No one can live without a routine.
Just forget that.
If you guys don’t have a routine,
I would recommend 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, ‘cuz otherwise
you dis-regulate your circadian rhythms,
and they regulate your mood.
Well you want to take everything that’s
negative and emotional,
and transform that into a fully articulated
vision for your future.
That frees you of your past.
You shouldn’t be thinking about your past.
I mean, maybe if you’re 80,
and you’re going over a well-spent life,
that’s a whole different thing.
But if you’re 30, 35, or 20,
and most of the time your thinking about your past
it’s like your soul is trapped back there.
You need to free it through investigation.
The metaphysical language is appropriate,
because that is in the sense what you’re doing.
You’re trapped in the past.
It’s like you’ve got to break free of that,
so you can use all your resources to move ahead
into the future.
Have a routine, that’s disciplined, that’s predictable,
and bloody well stick to it.
You’re going to be way healthier, happier, and saner,
if you do that.
The other thing that you need.
This is one of the things the psychoanalysts got wrong,
I think, is that
they overestimated the degree to which
sanity was a consequence of internal,
of being properly structured internally.
‘Cuz from the psychoanalytic point of view,
you’re sort of an ego, and that ego is inside you.
Of course it rests on an unconscious structure,
but the purpose of psychoanalysis is to
sort out that unconscious structure
and the ego on top of it,
and to make you a fully functioning,
and autonomous individual.
But there’s a problem with that,
because the reason that you’re sane as a
fully functional and autonomous human being
isn’t because you’ve organized your psyche,
even thought that’s important.
The reason that you’re sane,
if you have a well-organized unconscious and ego,
is because other people can tolerate having you around
for reasonably extensive periods of time,
and will cuff you across the head every time
you do something so stupid
that people will dislike you permanently if you continue.
So what people are doing to each other all the time,
just non stop,
is broadcasting sanity signals back and forth, right.
It’s like you smile at people if they’re,
well not only behaving properly,
but behaving in a way that you would like
to see them continue to behave.
You frown at them if they’re not.
You ignore them if they’re not.
You shun them.
You roll your eyes at them.
You manifest a disgust face.
You don’t listen to them, you interrupt them.
You won’t cooperate with them.
You won’t compete with them.
It’s like you’re blasting signals at other people
about how to regulate their behavior, so frequently,
it just makes up all of your social interaction.
That’s why we face each other.
We have emotional displays on our face,
and we’re looking at each others eyes.
And we know exactly,
we know as much as we can
about what’s going on with each other,
given that we don’t have immediate access
to the contents of their consciousness.
Partly what you’re doing with your routine
is establishing yourself as a credible, reliable,
trustworthy, potentially interesting human being,
who isn’t going to do anything too erratic at any moment.
And everyone else is around there
tapping you into shape,
making sure that that’s exactly what you are.
And that’s how you stay sane.
What happens to people too, if they don’t have routine,
and they get isolated, is they start to drift.
They drift badly, because the world is too complicated
for you to keep it organized all by yourself.
You just cannot do it.
So a lot of our, so we outsource the problem of sanity,
and it’s very intelligent that we outsource
the problem of sanity because
sanity is an impossibly complex problem.
And so the way that we manage
the incredibly complex problem,
is we have a very large number of brains working
simultaneously on the problem all the time.
Make a damn schedule, and stick to it.
Sometimes, y’know I can’t sleep at night
because I’m thinking about something.
And usually what I’ll do is go write it down.
It’s important to distinguish between those,
because that’s partly,
and this is back down to the micro-routine analysis
so it’s like saying,
well you’re going to try and make yourself more industrious.
Okay, number one, specify your damn goals,
‘cuz how are you going to hit something
if you don’t know what it is.
– Hello web nation, my name is Evan Carmichael
My one word is believe,
and I believe that entrepreneurs will solve
all of the world’s major problems.
So to help you on your journey
today we’re going to learn from clinical psychologist
and professor Jordan B. Peterson,
and my take on his top ten rules for success.
Rule number four is my personal favorite,
and I’d love to know which one you guys like the best.
And as always, as you’re watching,
if you hear something that really resonates with you,
please leave it in the comments below.
Put quotes around it so other people can be inspired.
You might win a prize as well.
And also, when you write it down,
it’s much more likely to stick for yourself as well.
Enjoy.
(dramatic music)
(swish)
– Stop doing the things that you know are wrong,
that you could stop doing.
Right, so it’s a fairly limited attempt.
First of all, we’re not going to say that you know
what the good is or what the truth is,
in any ultimate sense.
But we will presume that there are things that you’re doing,
that for one reason or the other,
you know are not in your best interest.
There’s something about them,
that you just know you should stop.
They’re kind of self-evident to you.
Other things you’re going to be doubtful about.
You’re not going to know which way is up and which way is down.
But there are things that you’re doing
that you know you shouldn’t do.
Now some of those you won’t stop doing.
For whatever reason, you don’t have the discipline
or maybe there’s a secondary payoff.
Or you don’t believe it’s necessary.
Or it’s too much of a sacrifice.
Or your angry or resentful or afraid.
Who knows?
So forget about those for now.
There’s another subset that you could stop doing.
It might be a little thing.
Well that’s fine, stop doing it.
See what happens.
And what’ll happen is,
your vision’ll clear a little bit.
And then something else will pop up
in your field of apprehension
that you will also know you should stop doing,
and that you could stop doing.
‘Cuz you’ve strengthened yourself a bit
by stopping doing the particular stupid thing
that you were doing before.
It just puts you together a little bit more.
And you could do that, repeatedly,
for an indefinite period of time.
That doesn’t necessarily mean
that you’re going to ever be able to formulate a clear
and final picture of what constitutes the truth
and the good.
But it does mean that you will be able to
continually move away from what’s untruth
and what’s bad.
Y’know, that’s not a bad start.
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.
They say, well I don’t like to follow a schedule.
Well its like, what kind of schedule are you setting up?
Well, I have to do this, then I have to do this,
then I have to do this.
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 you have the day you want.
That’s the trick.
It’s like, okay, I’ve got tomorrow.
If I was going to 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 responsibility
that’s going to 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
at the beginning of the day.
‘Cuz that’s a stupid day.
If you have a bunch of those in a row,
you just dig yourself a hole
and then you bury yourself in it.
Sorry, that’s just not a good strategy.
It’s a bad strategy.
So, maybe 20 percent 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 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
who was working for you.
It’s like okay you’ve got to work tomorrow.
Okay, so I want you to work tomorrow.
And you might say, okay, well what are you going to do for me
that makes it likely that I will work for you?
Well, you could ask yourself that, y’know.
So 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 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.
That’s how you make the schedule.
And then you look at the day and you think,
well if I had that day that would be good.
Great! Y’know, and you’re useless and horrible,
so you’ll probably only hit it
with about 70 percent accuracy
but that beats the hell out of zero.
And if you hit it even with 50 percent accuracy,
another rule is, well aim for 51 percent the next week.
Or 50 and a half percent, for god’s sake.
Because, you’re going to hit that position
where things start to loop back positively
and spiral you upward.
Sometimes, y’know, I can’t sleep at night
because I’m thinking about something.
And usually what I’ll do is go write it down.
I have some writing to do.
So I get up and I go write down what I’m thinking,
and that usually does the trick.
But because I’ve been playing with YouTube,
I thought, well, I’ll try making YouTube video
and telling people what I’m thinking about.
And see if that performs the same function as writing.
To me, the function of writing, well it’s two-fold.
One is conceivably, to communicate with people.
Although the fundamental purpose for me,
is to clarify my thoughts, so that I know.
Because if something is disturbing you,
what that means is that it needs to be articulated.
It’s the emergence of unexplored territory,
something that disturbs you.
That’s the right way to think about it.
It’s unmapped territory that’s manifesting itself.
It’s like a vista of threat and possibility.
And you need to articulate a path through it.
So that’s what I was doing.
It was like, I was thinking,
well this is bothering me, and this seems to be why,
and here’s what I think is going on,
and so I made the videos.
In some sense I didn’t think anything more of it.
You don’t have to necessarily have done anything wrong
for things to get completely out of control.
It’s a terrifying doctrine,
but it’s not a hopeless doctrine
because it stills says that there’s a way forward.
There’s a pathway forward.
And the pathway forward is to adopt a mode of being
that has some nobility.
So that you can tolerate yourself,
and perhaps even have some respect for yourself,
as someone who is capable of standing up
in the face of that terrible vulnerability and suffering.
And that the pathway forward
as far as the existentialists are concerned
is by, well certainly by the avoidance of deceit,
particularly in language,
but also by the adoption of responsibility
for the conditions of existence
and some attempt on your part
to actually rectify them.
And the thing that’s so interesting about that is,
well two as far as I’m concerned.
And some of this is from clinical experience.
You know, if you take people,
and I’ve told you this,
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 that they’re afraid of,
they get stronger.
And you don’t know what the upper limits to that are.
Because you might ask yourself,
if for ten years,
if you didn’t avoid doing what you knew you needed to do,
by your own definitions, right
within the value structure that you’ve created
to the degree that you’ve done that,
what would you be like?
Well, y’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, right?
Because it means that, perhaps there’s another way
that you could look at the world
and another way 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.
My experience is with people
that were probably running at about
51 percent of our capacity.
Something, maybe 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.
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
about watching after you’re done.
That’s probably four hours right there.
You think, well that’s 20, 25 hours a week
it’s a hundred 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 dollars an hour,
which is a radical underestimate,
it’s probably more like 50,
if you think about it in terms of deferred wages.
If you’re wasting 20 hours a week,
you’re wasting 50,000 dollars a year.
And you are doing that right now.
And it’s because your young,
wasting 50,000 dollars a year is a way bigger catastrophe
than it would be for me to waste it,
because I’m not going to last nearly as long.
And so if your life isn’t everything it could be,
you could ask yourself,
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.
10 times more efficient.
20 times 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 do the 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 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 individuals to adopt the responsibility
that they know they should adopt.
It isn’t merely that your fate depends on
whether or not you get your act together,
and to what degree you decide you’re going to live
out your own genuine being.
It isn’t only your fate,
it’s the fate of everyone that you networked with.
And so, y’know, you think, well
there’s 9 billion, 7 billion people in the world.
We’re going to peak at about 9 billion, by the way,
and then it’ll decline rapidly.
But, 7 billion people in the world, and who are you?
You’re just one little dust mote among that 7 billion,
and so it really doesn’t matter what you do or don’t do.
But that’s simply not 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 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 they 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 in it,
when of course the terror of realizing that
is that it actually starts to matter what 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.
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.
Y’know when you say, well nihilists suffer dreadfully
because there’s no meaning in their life
and they still suffer.
Yeah, but the advantage is 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.
Well what Solzhenitsyn figured out,
and so many people in the twentieth 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 will 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 its a place you’d like to visit
and take all your family and friends.
Because that’s what happened in the twentieth century.
The next best predictor of lifetime success
is conscientiousness.
Of the two aspects of conscientiousness,
say orderliness 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 think the best micro-habits,
this is partly to do with
these future offering 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.
The future offering program helps people do that.
Basically, it does a situational analysis.
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, all right, you’re going to have to put some effort
into your life.
You need to be motivated to do that.
And so, what are the potential sources of motivation?
Well, you could think about them in the big five.
Manner, 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 personality.
But then there are dimensions that you want to consider
your life across.
And so we ask people about,
well, if you could have the life the way you wanted it
in three to five years,
if you were taking care of yourself properly,
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?
How are you going to use your time outside of your job?
And how are you going to regulate your mental, physical,
mental and physical health,
and maybe also your drug and alcohol use?
Because that’s a good place to auger down,
‘cuz alcohol, for example,
wipes out 5 to 10 percent of people.
So you want to keep that under control.
And then, maybe you develop a vision of what your life,
what you would like your life to be,
and that associates the
so the goal, where once the goal is established,
and then you break down the goal into
micro-processes that you can implement.
The micro-processes become rewarding, in proportion
in relation to their causal association with the goal.
And that tangles in your incentive reward system.
We talked about the dopamine urge
of consent and 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-processes 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 so 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,
‘cuz that’s also useful.
You specify your goal.
You do that, in some sense as a unique individual.
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?
‘Cuz 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 the answer to 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.
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.
So you do a structural analysis of the
subcomponents of human existence.
Hardy 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 time outside of work.
Attention to your mental and physical health, et cetera.
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,
that’s a bad deal for you.
Once you’ve set up that goal structure, let’s 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 that you’re trying to be,
and you aim at that.
And then you use everything you 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.
It’s important to distinguish between those,
because that’s partly,
and this is back down to the micro-routine analysis,
so it’s like saying
you’re going to try to make yourself more industrious,
okay number one, specify your damn goals.
‘Cuz how are you going to hit something,
if you don’t know what it is?
That isn’t going to happen.
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,
‘cuz 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.
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 by the time you’re 40.
So, I would recommend that you don’t let that happen.
So that’s willful blindness, right.
You could’ve 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,
looks like that might be worth living.
Despite the fact that it’s going to be
anxiety provoking and threatening,
and there’s going to 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.
I started to pay very careful attention to
what I was saying.
I don’t know if that happened voluntarily or involuntarily,
but I could feel a sort of split developing in my psyche.
This split, and I’ve actually had students tell me
the same thing has happened to them
after they listened to some of the material
that I’ve been describing to all of you.
I split into two, let’s say,
and one part was the, let’s say the old me
that was talking a lot,
and that liked to argue,
and that liked ideas.
And there was another part that was watching that part
just with its eyes open,
and neutrally judging.
And the part that was neutrally judging
was watching the part that was talking
and going, that’s isn’t your idea.
You don’t really believe that.
You don’t really know what you’re talking about.
That isn’t true.
I thought, hmm, that’s really interesting.
That was happening to like 95 percent of what I was saying.
So then I didn’t really know what to do.
I thought, okay this is strange.
So maybe, I’ve fragmented,
and that’s just not a good thing at all.
I mean it wasn’t like I was hearing voices or anything
like that, it wasn’t like that.
It was well people have multiple parts.
So then I had this weird conundrum,
it was like, well which of these two things are me?
Is it the part that’s listening and saying,
no that’s rubbish, that’s a lie, that’s
you’re doing that to impress people,
you’re just trying to win the argument, y’know.
Was that me? Or was the part that was going about
my normal verbal business me?
And I didn’t know, but I decided I would go with the critic.
And then what I tried to do, what I learned to do,
I think, was to stop saying things that made me weak.
I mean I’m still trying to do that,
because I’m always feeling when I talk
whether or not the words that I’m saying
are either making me align
or making me come apart.
I think the alignment, I really do think the alignment,
I think alignment is the right way of conceptualizing it,
because I think if you say things that are
as true as you can say them, let’s say,
then they come up,
they come out of the depths inside of you.
We don’t know where thoughts come from.
We don’t know how far down into your substructure
the thoughts emerge.
We don’t know what processes of physiological alignment
are necessary for you to speak from the core of your being.
We don’t understand any of that.
We don’t even conceptualize that.
But I believe that you can feel that.
I learned some of that from reading Carl Rogers,
by the way, who’s a great clinician.
Because he talked about mental health, in part,
as a coherence between the spiritual or the abstract
and the physical.
That the two things were aligned.
There’s a lot of idea of alignment
in psychoanalytic and clinical thinking.
But, anyways, I decided that I would start practicing
not saying things that would make me weak.
What happened was that I had to stop saying
almost everything that I was saying.
I would say 95 percent of it.
That’s a hell of a shock to wake up,
I mean, this was over a few months,
but it’s a hell of a shock to wake up and realize that
you’re mostly dead wood.
It’s a shock.
And you might think,
well do you really want all of that to burn off?
There’s nothing left but a little husk
five percent of you.
It’s like, well, if that five percent is solid,
then maybe that’s exactly what you want to have happen.
Adopt the mode of authentic being.
And that is something like,
refusing to participate in the lie,
in deception and the lie.
To orient your speech as much as you can
towards the truth.
And to take responsibility for your own life,
and perhaps for the lives of other people.
And there’s something about that that’s
meaningful, and responsible, and noble,
but also serves to mitigate the very suffering that produces
say the nihilism, or the fleeing into the arms
or the escape into the arms of totalitarians to begin with.
You need something to shelter you against
your own vulnerability.
You can think about the world this way.
You can think about it as your orderly little plan.
That’s a place.
And you can think about it as the place
that things that disrupt your plan comes from.
That’s another place.
This is a bigger place than this.
Because there’s an endless number of things
that can disrupt your plan,
and only a tiny number of them
that will help you work it out.
So, part of the question then too,
is like, are you the friend of your plan,
or are you the friend of the thing that disrupts your plan?
I would say, you should work to become the friend
of the the thing that disrupts your plan,
because there’s a lot of that.
And then if you become the friend of the thing
that disrupts your plan,
then you start to develop strength
in proportion to the disruptive force,
and that’s really what you want.
You want to be able to implement your plan, obviously.
But you want to be able to take on
the consequences of error and learn from it,
and then you win constantly.
Because even if something goes sideways,
you think there’s something to be derived from this.
That’s wisdom, fundamentally.
Plan a life you’d like to have,
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 other way you do that is by
having a little conversation with yourself,
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.
Both of those work 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 be.
But, my point is that you have to understand
that you’re not your own servant, so to speak.
You’re someone that you have to negotiate with.
You’re someone that you want to present
the opportunity of having a good life to.
That’s hard for people,
‘cuz they don’t like themselves very much.
So, they’re always like cracking the whip
and then procrastinating,
and cracking the whip
and then procrastinating.
And it’s like god, it’s so boring,
and it’s such a pathetic way of spending your time.
If you can figure your life,
so that what you are generally doing
is aiming at the highest possible good,
then the things that you need to survive
and to thrive on a day to day basis
will deliver themselves to you.
That’s a hypothesis,
and it’s not some simple hypothesis, right?
Because what it basically says is,
if you dare to do the most difficult thing
that you can conceptualize
your life will work out better
than it will if you do anything else.
Well how are you going to find out if that’s true?
It’s a Kierkegaardian leap of faith.
There’s no way you’re going to find out
whether or not that’s true unless you do it.
No one can tell you either,
because just because it works for someone else,
I mean that’s interesting and all that.
But it’s no proof that it’ll work for you.
You have to be all in, in this game.
There is no more effective way of operating in the world,
then to conceptualize the highest good that you can,
and then strive to to attain it.
There’s no more practical pathway to the kind of success
that you could have if you actually knew what success was.
The world shifts itself around your aim.
You’re a creature that has an aim.
You have to have an aim in order to do something.
You’re an aiming creature.
You look at a point and you move towards it.
It’s built right into you.
And so you have an aim.
Well, let’s say your aim is the highest possible aim.
Well, then, that sets up the world around you.
It organizes all of your perceptions.
It organizes what you see and you don’t see.
It organizes your emotions and your motivations.
So you organize yourself around that aim.
And then what happens is the day manifests itself
as a set of challenges and problems.
If you solve them properly,
then you stay on the pathway towards that aim.
And you can concentrate on the day,
and so that way you get to have your cake and eat it too,
because you can point into the distance,
the far distance,
and you can live in the day.
It seems to me, that makes every moment of the day
supercharged with meaning,
If everything that you’re doing every day,
is related to the highest possible aim
that you can conceptualize,
well that’s the very definition of the meaning
that would sustain you in you life.
(swish)
– Thank you guys so much for watching.
I made this video because dudewat two one two
asked me to.
So if there is a famous entrepreneur
that you want me to profile next
check out the link that’s in the description
and you can go and cast your vote.
I’d also love to know which clip
resonated the most with you?
What lesson are you going to take from this video
and immediately apply to your life
or to your business somehow.
Leave it down in the comments below.
I’m really curious to find out what you have to say.
I also want to give a quick shout out to Nathan
from the Productivity Game Channel.
Nathan, thank you so much for picking up a copy of my book,
Your One Word, and making that awesome YouTube video
on your channel about it.
I really appreciate the support man.
And I’m so glad you enjoyed my book.
– [Nathan] Carmichael states that there is one word
that defines who you are,
connects all the things in your life,
that make you come alive,
and will help you escape the chains of mediocrity.
– Thank you guys so much for watching.
I believe in you.
I hope you continue to believe in yourself,
and whatever your one word is,
much love.
I’ll see you soon.
(swish)
– No one can live without a routine.
Just forget that.
If you guys don’t have a routine,
I would recommend 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, ‘cuz otherwise
you dis-regulate your circadian rhythms,
and they regulate your mood.
Well you want to take everything that’s
negative and emotional,
and transform that into a fully articulated
vision for your future.
That frees you of your past.
You shouldn’t be thinking about your past.
I mean, maybe if you’re 80,
and you’re going over a well-spent life,
that’s a whole different thing.
But if you’re 30, 35, or 20,
and most of the time your thinking about your past
it’s like your soul is trapped back there.
You need to free it through investigation.
The metaphysical language is appropriate,
because that is in the sense what you’re doing.
You’re trapped in the past.
It’s like you’ve got to break free of that,
so you can use all your resources to move ahead
into the future.
Have a routine, that’s disciplined, that’s predictable,
and bloody well stick to it.
You’re going to be way healthier, happier, and saner,
if you do that.
The other thing that you need.
This is one of the things the psychoanalysts got wrong,
I think, is that
they overestimated the degree to which
sanity was a consequence of internal,
of being properly structured internally.
‘Cuz from the psychoanalytic point of view,
you’re sort of an ego, and that ego is inside you.
Of course it rests on an unconscious structure,
but the purpose of psychoanalysis is to
sort out that unconscious structure
and the ego on top of it,
and to make you a fully functioning,
and autonomous individual.
But there’s a problem with that,
because the reason that you’re sane as a
fully functional and autonomous human being
isn’t because you’ve organized your psyche,
even thought that’s important.
The reason that you’re sane,
if you have a well-organized unconscious and ego,
is because other people can tolerate having you around
for reasonably extensive periods of time,
and will cuff you across the head every time
you do something so stupid
that people will dislike you permanently if you continue.
So what people are doing to each other all the time,
just non stop,
is broadcasting sanity signals back and forth, right.
It’s like you smile at people if they’re,
well not only behaving properly,
but behaving in a way that you would like
to see them continue to behave.
You frown at them if they’re not.
You ignore them if they’re not.
You shun them.
You roll your eyes at them.
You manifest a disgust face.
You don’t listen to them, you interrupt them.
You won’t cooperate with them.
You won’t compete with them.
It’s like you’re blasting signals at other people
about how to regulate their behavior, so frequently,
it just makes up all of your social interaction.
That’s why we face each other.
We have emotional displays on our face,
and we’re looking at each others eyes.
And we know exactly,
we know as much as we can
about what’s going on with each other,
given that we don’t have immediate access
to the contents of their consciousness.
Partly what you’re doing with your routine
is establishing yourself as a credible, reliable,
trustworthy, potentially interesting human being,
who isn’t going to do anything too erratic at any moment.
And everyone else is around there
tapping you into shape,
making sure that that’s exactly what you are.
And that’s how you stay sane.
What happens to people too, if they don’t have routine,
and they get isolated, is they start to drift.
They drift badly, because the world is too complicated
for you to keep it organized all by yourself.
You just cannot do it.
So a lot of our, so we outsource the problem of sanity,
and it’s very intelligent that we outsource
the problem of sanity because
sanity is an impossibly complex problem.
And so the way that we manage
the incredibly complex problem,
is we have a very large number of brains working
simultaneously on the problem all the time.
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