12 Little Rules For A Fabulous Life
Tips on how to live a good life from “12 Rules For Life” by Jordan Peterson.
Rido | Canva Without rules we quickly become slaves to our passions — and there’s nothing freeing about that. The best rules do not ultimately restrict us but instead, facilitate our goals and make for fuller, freer lives. These rules are demanding. They require you to undertake an incremental process that over time will stretch you to a new limit. That requires venturing into the unknown and stretching yourself beyond the boundaries of your current self. That requires carefully choosing and then pursuing ideals: ideals that are up there, above you, superior to you — and that you can’t always be sure you will reach. If we each live properly, we will collectively flourish. Here are my reflections on Canadian clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life.
Here are 12 little rules for a fabulous life, according to Jordan Peterson:
1. Stand up straight with your shoulders back
The ancient part of your brain specialized for assessing dominance watches how you are treated by other people. If you are judged by your peers as of little worth, the counter restricts serotonin availability. Serotonin is the chemical that governs posture and escape. Low serotonin means decreased confidence. Low serotonin means more response to stress and costlier physical preparedness for emergencies. Low serotonin means less happiness, more pain and anxiety, more illness, and a shorter lifespan.
Attend carefully to your posture. Speak your mind. Put your desires forward. Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead. Dare to be dangerous. Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural pathways desperate for its calming influence.
People size each other up, partly as a consequence of their stance. If you start to straighten up, then people will look at and treat you differently. People, including yourself, will start to assume that you are competent and able. Emboldened by the positive responses you are now receiving, you will begin to be less anxious.
You will then find it easier to pay attention to the subtle social clues that people exchange when they are communicating. Your conversations will flow better, with fewer awkward pauses. This will make you more likely to meet people, interact with them, and impress them. Doing so will not only genuinely increase the probability that good things will happen to you — but it will also make those good things feel better when they do happen.
2. Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping
People are better at filling and properly administering prescription medication to their pets than to themselves. That’s not good. Even from your pet's perspective, that’s not good. Your pet (probably) loves you and would be happier if you took your medication.
Those who see into the future can also eternally see trouble coming, and must then prepare for all contingencies and possibilities. To do that, you will have to eternally sacrifice the present for the future. You must put aside pleasure for security. In short: you will have to work — and it’s going to be difficult.
You need to consider the future and think, “What might my life look like if I were caring for myself properly? What career would challenge me and render me productive and helpful, so that I could shoulder my share of the load, and enjoy the consequences? What should I be doing, when I have some freedom, to improve my health, expand my knowledge, and strengthen my body?”
You need to know where you are, so you can start to chart your course. You need to know who you are so that you understand your armament and bolster yourself concerning your limitations. You need to know where you are going so that you can limit the extent of chaos in your life, restructure order, and bring the divine force of Hope to bear on the world.
You deserve some respect. You have some vital role to play in the unfolding destiny of the world. You are, therefore, morally obliged to take care of yourself. You should take care of, help, and be good to yourself the same way you would take care of, help, and be good to someone you loved and valued. You may therefore have to conduct yourself habitually in a manner that allows you some respect for your Being.
You must discipline yourself carefully. You must keep the promises you make to yourself, and reward yourself so that you can trust and motivate yourself. You need to determine how to act toward yourself so that you are most likely to become and stay a good person. It would be good to make the world a better place.
3. Make friends with people who want the best for you
You’re associating with people who are bad for you not because it’s better for anyone, but because it’s easier. Vice is easy. Failure is easy, too. It’s easier not to shoulder a burden. It’s easier not to think, and not to do, and not to care. It’s easier to put off until tomorrow what needs to be done today and drown the upcoming months and years in today’s cheap pleasures.
“That’s a problem for Future Homer. Man, I don’t envy that guy!” — Homer Simpson
Things fall apart, of their own accord, but the sins of men speed their degeneration. If you have a friend whose friendship you wouldn’t recommend to your sister, or your father, or your son, why would you have such a friend for yourself? You are not morally obliged to support someone who is making the world a worse place. You should choose people who want things to be better, not worse. It’s a good thing, not a selfish thing, to choose people who are good for you. It’s appropriate and praiseworthy to associate with people whose lives would be improved if they saw your life improve.
If you surround yourself with people who support your upward aim, they will not tolerate your cynicism and destructiveness. They will instead encourage you when you do good for yourself and others and punish you carefully when you do not.
4. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today
No matter how good you are at something, there is someone out there who makes you look incompetent. We are not equal in ability or outcome and never will be. If the internal voice makes you doubt the value of your endeavors, perhaps you should stop listening. We live within a framework that defines the present as eternally lacking and the future as eternally better. If we did not see things this way, we would not act at all.
The future is like the past. But there’s a crucial difference. The past is fixed, but the future — it could be better. It could be better, some precise amount — the amount that can be achieved, perhaps, in a day, with some minimal engagement. Could you compare your specific personal tomorrow with your specific personal yesterday? Could you use your judgment, and ask yourself what that better tomorrow might be?
Aim small. You don’t want to shoulder too much, to begin with, given your limited talents, the tendency to deceive, the burden of resentment, and the ability to shrink responsibly. Making your life better means adopting a lot of responsibility, and that takes more effort and care than living stupidly in pain and remaining arrogant, deceitful, and resentful. Attend to the day, but aim at the highest good.
5. Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them
Children must be shaped and informed, or they cannot thrive. Children are much more likely to go complexly astray if they are not trained, disciplined, and properly encouraged.
6. Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world
Consider your circumstances. Start small. Have you taken full advantage of the opportunities offered to you? Are you working hard on your career, or even your job, or are you letting bitterness and resentment hold you back and drag you down? Have you made peace with your brother? Are you treating your spouse and your children with dignity and respect? Do you have habits that are destroying your health and well-being? Are you truly shouldering your responsibilities? Have you said what you need to say to your friends and family members? Are there things that you could do, that you know you could do, that would make things around you better?
Stop acting in that manner. Stop saying those things that make you weak and ashamed. Say only those things that make you strong. Do only those things that you could speak of with honor.
7. Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)
It takes a long time to learn to keep anything later for yourself or to share it with someone else (and those are very much the same thing as, in the former case, you are sharing with your future self). It is much easier and far more likely to selfishly and immediately wolf down everything in sight.
Such sacrifice — work — is a delay of gratification. The discovery that gratification could be delayed was simultaneously the discovery of time and, with it, causality. We began to realize that reality was structured as if it could be bargained with. Behaving properly now, in the present — regulating our impulses, considering the plight of others — could bring rewards in the future, in a time and place that did not yet exist. We began to inhibit, control, and organize our immediate impulses so that we could stop interfering with other people and our future selves.
Sacrifices are necessary, to improve the future, and larger sacrifices can be better. To share does not mean to give away something you value, and get nothing back. That is instead only what every child who refuses to share fears it means. To share means, properly, initiate the process of trade. A child who can’t share — who can’t trade — can’t have any friends, because having friends is a form of trade.
Nicoleta Ionescu / Shutterstock
Expedience is the following of blind impulse. It’s a short-term gain. It’s narrow and selfish. It lies to get its way. It takes nothing into account. It’s immature and irresponsible. Meaning is its mature replacement. Meaning emerges when impulses are regulated, organized, and unified. Meaning emerges from the interplay between the possibilities of the world and the value structure operating within that world. If the value structure is aimed at the betterment of being, the meaning revealed will be life-sustaining. It will provide the antidote for chaos and suffering. It will make everything matter. It will make everything better.
If you act properly, your actions allow you to be psychologically integrated now, and tomorrow, and into the future, while you benefit yourself, your family, and the broader world around you. Everything will stack up and align along a single axis. Everything will come together. This produces maximal meaning. Meaning signifies that you are in the right place, at the right time, properly balanced between order and chaos, where everything lines up as best it can at that moment.
8. Tell the truth or, at least, don’t lie
What should you do, when you don’t know what to do? Tell the truth. If you betray yourself, if you say untrue things, if you act out a lie, you weaken your character. If you have a weak character, then adversity will mow you down when it appears, as it will, inevitably. You will hide, but there will be no place left to hide. And then you will find yourself doing terrible things.
If you pay attention to what you do and say, you can learn to feel a state of internal division and weakness when you are misbehaving and misspeaking. It’s an embodied sensation, not a thought. When the lies get big enough, the whole world spoils. If you look closely enough, the biggest lie is composed of smaller lies, and those are composed of still smaller lies — and the smallest of lies is where the big lie starts. It is not a mere misstatement of fact. It is instead an act that has the aspect of the most serious conspiracy ever to possess the race of man.
If your life is not what it could be, try telling the truth. If you cling desperately to an ideology, or wallow in nihilism, try telling the truth. If you feel weak or rejected, desperate, and confused, try telling the truth. In Paradise, everyone speaks the truth. That is what makes it Paradise.
9. Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t
Listening is paying attention. It’s amazing what people will tell you if you listen. Sometimes if you listen to people they will even tell you what’s wrong with them. Sometimes they will even tell you how they plan to fix it. Sometimes that helps you fix something wrong with yourself.
“The great majority of us cannot listen; we find ourselves compelled to evaluate because listening is too dangerous. The first requirement is courage, and we do not always have it.” — Carl Rogers
You already know what you know and, unless your life is perfect, what you know is not enough. If you just knew enough, you could be healthier and more honest. You would suffer less. You could recognize, resist and even triumph over malevolence and evil. You would neither betray a friend nor deal falsely and deceitfully in business, politics, or love. However, your current knowledge has neither made you perfect nor kept you safe. So, it is insufficient, by definition — radically, fatally insufficient.
Socrates always sought the truth. Wisest living man, because he knew that what he knew was nothing. 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.
10. Be precise in your speech
Maybe the fault is with you, and you should grow up, get yourself together, and keep quiet. Say what you mean, so that you can find out what you mean. Act out what you say, so you can find out what happens. Then pay attention. Note your errors. Articulate them. Strive to correct them. That is how you discover the meaning of your life. That will protect you from the tragedy of your life.
11. Do not bother children when they are skateboarding
It’s competence that makes people as safe as they can truly be. When untrammeled — and encouraged — we prefer to live on the edge. We can still be both confident in our experience and confront the chaos that helps us develop. We feel invigorated and excited when we work to optimize our future performance while playing in the present. They drive and walk and love and play so that they achieve what they desire, but they push themselves a bit at the same time, too, so they continue to develop.
12. Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street
Perhaps you might start by noticing this: when you love someone, it’s not despite their limitations. It’s because of their limitations. You shouldn’t stop trying to make life better or let suffering just be. Being requires Becoming, as well as mere static existence — and to become is to become something more, or at least something different. That is only possible for something limited.
Maybe when you are going for a walk and your head is spinning a cat will show up and if you pay attention to it then you will get a reminder for just fifteen seconds that the wonder of Being might make up for the ineradicable suffering that accompanies it.
Parker Klein is the founder and CEO of Twos. He previously worked as an engineer at Google but is now focused on helping people stay organized, be productive, and live memorable lives.