Table of contents
“You’re going to pay a price for every bloody thing you do and everything you don’t do.”
If you don't know who JBP is, watch this. I promise you'll repect his intellect and tact when handling uncomfortable stuations.
12 Rules of Life contains Jordan's life advice, based on the principles of biology, psychology, and religion. I was pleasantly surprised when I found him, because this type of thinking was exactly what I was trying to develop for myself in 2021 (I guess the omnipotent instagram algorithm picked up on that).
This book is massive (loads of mind blowing stuff). It's not a light read at all. It's confusing at times because his conclusions are derived from a combination of both science and religion/ideologies (which often seem contradictory).
I've tried to dissect this massive book for myself, and I quite like it. I hope that you'll like it too.
🌈 3 Sentence Summary
- Suffering is built into life, and people can choose to give up and withdraw, or face it and transcend it.
- Pursue meaning, not short-term pleasure. Happiness will come as a by-product (or not, but that's not the main point)
- Life is terribly tragic, and the way we can cope is to cherish life's small redeemable qualities, and shorten our temporal scope of responsibility (focus on the next minute rather than the next few months).
💡 Thoughts
I quite liked this book, because it speaks to the fundamental problem of life we all have (I do hope everyone reading this is alive).
Since then, I've learned to accept the terrible responsibility of life. A lot of us have darkness inside us that may potentially turn us into monsters. But we must accept it, and make sacrifices to act properly.
I'm pursuing a meaningful life of personal growth, recognition, and service to others. Of course, I hope that I'll gain happiness from it, but it's more of a by-product rather than the main goal.
👤 Should You Read It?
Millions of people read the book, with thousands saying it changed their lives. Although it's not particularly life-changing for me, I still enjoyed it. You'll probably enjoy it more if:
- If you want to lead an intentionally ordered and meaningful life.
- If you're struggling to find purpose in your life.
- If you want to understand how you think and behave.
🚀 Actionable takeaways
All 12 rules are actionable takeaways, but here are some that I like best.
- Stand up straight to gain confidence (Rule 1).
- Measure the gain, not the gap (Rule 4)
- Meaningful life = Doing something you're good at, that can also help others, that can also earn you some money. (Rule 7)
- Practice using words precisely (Rule 10)
✍️ Summary + Notes
🦞 1. Stand up straight with your shoulders back
"To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order … It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality."
Lobsters have a surprising fact about them. Their dominance hierarchies and posture both depend on seretonin levels. The higher the seretonin levels, the more dominant the lobster, and the more open their posture. The ones at the bottom of the hierarchy are slumped over in defeat.
Peterson takes this one step further. He says that depressed people have a slumped posture, while people with good character have good posture. Having good posture can trick us into being confident, and is the first step in undertaking any responsibility in life.
Standing up has a psychological significance too. Instead of being flimsy and floating wherever the tides of life bring us, we stand up and accept the terrible responsibility of life. We sacrifice the present to build a better future (building order out of chaos).
⌛ 2. Treat yourself like you are someone you are responsible for helping
"We deserve some respect. You deserve some respect. You are important to other people as much to yourself. You have some vital role to play in the unfolding destiny of the world. You are, therefore, morally obliged to take care of yourself.”
Treat others the way you would want them to treat you. This golden rule is somewhat problematic, but good as a general guideline. Peterson tells us to flip this rule around: treat yourself the way you would treat others.
Don't get it wrong. Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping, doesn't mean be nice to yourself. It means make your life more difficult. It means to do the hard thing when it is the right thing to do.
Care for yourself the same way we would care for our family, children, or our romantic partners. Of course, be reasonably harsh on yourself (I wrote a piece about it here), don't go overboard.
Read. Write. Get enough sleep. Exercise 3 times a week. Get annual health checkups (don't forget dental :D). Take your prescribed medications on time.
“You must help a child become a virtuous, responsible, awake being, capable of full reciprocity – able to take care of himself and others, and to thrive while doing so. Why would you think it acceptable to do anything less for yourself?”
👧 3. Make friends with people who want the best for you
“It’s a good thing, not a selfish thing, to choose people who are good for you.”
Find for ourselves a merry band of hobbits who will sing each other's merits. We have fun with friends. They keep us accountable to our goals. They encourage, challenge, and criticise us.
If we take the average income of our 5 closest friends, it's scarily close to our own income. The same goes for personality traits, ideologies, and habits.
Friends are the tools that sharpens our iron. Again, they are here to make our lives more difficult when it is the right thing to do. You'll be amazed how many people are willing to cheer you on. Choose your friends wisely.
“Sometimes, when people have a low opinion of their own worth — or, perhaps, when they refuse responsibility for their lives — they choose a new acquaintance, of precisely the type who proved troublesome in the past.”
📅 4. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today
“There will always be people better than you.”
Peterson can be dramatic at times, but it's quite true. We need something above us to give us something to aim at, but the trade-off is that we can become envious of our heroes, and bitter to those who got there underservedly.
It's not fair to take another person's single acomplishment and compare it with ourselves. We don't know what went on behind the scenes, or how many consecutive lucky breaks that guy had. We don't have the full context.
Successful people share their lives on social media (which is awesome), and failures don't share anything. So we only see cherry-picked success stories from a handful of successful people, but ignore the unseen stories of the vast majority of mediocre ones.
So you should measure your gain from yesteday, rather than the gap between you and another person. Aim higher. Pay better attention. Search for your own possibilities for success.
🎲 5. Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them
“If you dislike your child, then other people will too.”
Don't be your children's friend. Be a proxy for the real world, and teach your child the appropriate rules of the world. Let the social world open up to them at every level: other children, adults, teachers. Otherwise, society will reject them.
If you are your child's best friend, it becomes difficult to enforce the required rules for your child to become a better person.
“Friends have very limited authority to correct.”
Set up a few proper rules (something like a simpler version of 12 rules of life), not a bunch of superficial ones like be in bed by 10pm.
🏠 6. Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world
“If one wants to live a full life, one first sets one’s own house in order; and only then can one sensibly aim to take on bigger responsibilities.”
This is not "Don't help others until you have your act together". It means restrict your ambitions with humility. Work on what's right in front of you, before engaging in large-scale transformation of other people.
🌎 7. Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)
“To straddle that fundamental duality is to be balanced: to have one foot firmly planted in order and security, and the other in chaos, possibility, growth and adventure. When life suddenly reveals itself as intense, gripping and meaningful; when time passes and you’re so engrossed in what you’re doing you don’t notice—it is there and then that you are located precisely on the border between order and chaos.”
By now you should understand why I say this is a massive book. That's a whole lot of big words packed into a long sentence. But it's important because this is the whole principle of the book.
I wrote a section about this idea in What is the meaning of life? The basic idea is that we have to do the hard thing, when it is the right thing to do, and this gives our lives meaning. Happiness may come as a by-product, or it may not.
If we pursue happiness as the main goal in our lives, then it would be reasonable to pursue after short-term pleasure (through drugs and computer games).
😄 8. Tell the truth – or, at least, don’t lie
Quite a straightforward idea. The only way to pursue meaning is don't lie to ourselves. The more we lie, the more we corrupt our intuitions that will guide us to what we really want in life.
The more you lie, the more you corrupt your perceptions/intuitions, the more you can't rely on yourself. And if you can't rely on youself, then, well, good luck to you.
💡 9. Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t
“So, listen, to yourself and to those with whom you are speaking. Your wisdom then consists not of the knowledge you already have, but the continual search for knowledge, which is the highest form of wisdom.”
It's less of giving others respect (although it is that), but it's more of acknowledging our own ignorance.
Decide on whether or not what you know or what you don't know is more important. If life is perfect, then what you know is probably sufficient. If life can be better, then pay attention to things you don't know. Talk to people, walk away from each conversation having learned something new. But beware:
“Not all talking is thinking. Nor does all listening foster transformation. There are other motives for both, some of which produce much less valuable, counterproductive, and even dangerous outcomes.”
💬 10. Be precise in your speech
“Be precise in your speech. Speech can give structure and re-establish order.”
If you specify the thing that you want to get, you increase the probability that it will occur. You don't get the thing you don't aim at. You might get the thing that you aim at.
If we aim at something, we will subconsciously walk in that direction. The world will seem to open itself up to you, and your path to that goal will be clearer and clearer.
🛹 11. Do not bother children when they are skate-boarding
“The fundamental moral question is not how to shelter children completely from misadventure and failure, so they never experience any fear or pain, but how to maximize their learning so that useful knowledge may be gained with minimal cost.”
Children have child-sized problems, which are still psychologically significant, but the actual objective risks are still lower than adult-sized problems.
To interfere with a child who is skateboarding, is to discourage them from willingly expose themselves to risks that they need to expose themselves to, in order to develop the competence that they need to thrive in a world that they cannot be sheltered from.
Interfering is not love or empathy, it's cowardice. Of course, try to set things up so that the risks are not potentially life-threatening. But let your children take the necessary risks wherever possible. Do not do anything for them that they can do for themselves.
🐈 12. Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street
“If you pay careful attention, even on a bad day, you may be fortunate enough to be confronted with small opportunities of just that sort. Maybe you will see a little girl dancing on the street because she is all dressed up in a ballet costume. Maybe you will have a particularly good cup of coffee in a cafe that cares about their customers. Maybe you can steal ten or twenty minutes to do some ridiculous thing that distracts you or reminds you that you can laugh at the absurdity of existence.”
This rule is a meditation on fragility. It's a rule for you to do, when you don't know what to do.
When the world flips upside down, the way to cope is to shorten the time frame to the longest unit of time that you can tolerate (it may be months, days, or even hours when things are really bad). And also appreciate the little things that appears in our lives that allows itself to be appreciated.
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