it's from the uphill climb that we derive our value and I mean this technically so almost all the positive emotion we feel especially the emotion that fills us with enthusiasm and that's experienced in relationship to a goal and so in some sense you want a goal that you can never attain so you can always move closer to the goal that recedes as you move towards it you think well that's frustrating it's like cifas pushing the rock uphill but it's not because as you pursue that goal you put yourself together your life does get better and richer and more abundant that's why the highest levels of virtue and goal are in some sense Transcendent you want them to be above everything you're doing so you can continually move towards something that's more Sublime and better that's what you are you're you're here to live not to not to sleep and the problem with the vision of my Ties on the beach is that well first of all that's a vision of of drug induced unconsciousness second it's only going to work work for about a week third you're going to be a laughing stalk in a month and depressed and aimless and and goalless it's no that's not it's it's you want a horizon of ever expanding possibility and so it does happen to people is they because they've Stak their soul on the attainment of an instrumental goal and it it can be a pretty high order goal but then you think now I'm there now what well the answer can't be well I'm going to live in the lap of luxury and never have to leave what do you want to be a giant infant with a gold with a gold bottle you never have to do anything but lay in your back and suck it's like you see the problem with that as a conceptualization it's no you want to be like an active Warrior moving uphill with your sword in hand and that's that's Dynamic that's [Music] [Applause] exciting these people that you're comparing yourself to you don't really know very well what that means means is that you see their shiny outside but you don't see the reality of their life there's always people out there who are doing far better than you on pretty much anything you want to imagine and if all you're doing is seeing yourself in their reflected light let's say then it's going to be pretty damn dismal but it's not a good comparison because well first of all there's danger in just comparing yourself to others period because they're not you and God only knows what struggles they had to undertake to get to where they were or what burdens they're currently carrying that you're not aware of but you can certainly contrast your with yourself and that's a lot better it is the only way well it's also the only way of really of really measuring anything approximating proper Improvement you can actually tell when you're a little better than you were yesterday right and and you can actually do that that's another thing that's so interesting about it is that you can actually make yourself a little better in some way pretty much well I don't know if it's at every moment but you can certainly do it every day be careful who you share good news with cuz you want to share good news with people who are are going to be genuinely happy for you and be careful who you share bad news with because that's equally tricky you want someone who will listen to you when you're having trouble and allow you your grief Beauty calls people to their higher being I would say and to make friends with beauty is to introduce yourself very carefully to one of the mysteries of life that make it worth living there's never been a better time for the majority of people to be alive and the future although we're vulnerable and terrible things can always happen to us it's hard to make a case that the future doesn't look comparatively positive we're becoming extremely technologically sophisticated and the world is changing at an incredibly rapid rate and the only way we're going to be able to manage that in a positive way is if each of us or as many of us as possible are capable of making wise and careful and truthful decisions and if we do that then maybe things can continue to improve you don't get people to stand up on their own two feet and to adopt responsibility if everything is given to them and that that's that's a real conundrum you know maybe you're in California see someone speeding down the road in a in a convertible Porsche and you think oh man what a lucky bastard and the truth of the matter is that he's thinking about wrapping his expensive sports car around the next cement pillar that he comes close to you know you you can't tell and people have hard lives and and even people who are comparatively fortunate have hard lives and the ideal that you're observing that makes you jealous and resentful is in large part an illusion that's created by your own mind you have to be careful of what you're jealous of because you don't really know what it is and and then the other thing that's kind of useful is to well understand you're quite different from other people and you shouldn't be comparing yourself to them because they're not like you they they don't have your family they don't have your temperament they don't have your troubles they don't have your abilities the only person that has those is you one of the rules I think it's rule four is compare yourself to who you were yesterday and not to who someone else is today and see that's a game you can win the possibility that you can make your slightly better on a continual basis is I think that's something that's accessible to everyone I I think that's equivalent to Leading a virtuous life and there is something to be said for virtue and truth you know and that is one thing another thing that I've noticed about people who've been phenomenally successful is that they really do everything they can to live a truthful life and you can get a bloody long ways by being honest you got to know that there are differences in intelligence it's really important if you go into a job and you're not smart enough for that job you're going to have one bloody miserable time and you're going to make life wretched for the people around you because you won't be able to handle the position but what you really want to do as far as I can tell if you want to maximize your chances for both success and and let's say well-being is you want to find a strata of occupation in which you would have an intelligence that would put you in the upper cortile that's perfect then you're a big fish in a small pond and you don't want to be you don't want to be the stupidest guy in the room it's a bloody rough place to be so and you probably don't want to be the smartest guy in the room either because what that probably means is you should be in a different room if you want to be the best at what you're doing Bar None than having an IQ of above 145 is a necessity and maybe you're pushing 160 in some situations and maybe that's make making you one person in 10,000 or even one person in 100,000 and then also to really be good at it you probably have to be reasonably stress tolerant and also somewhat conscientious why is it that smart people are at the top of dominance hierarchies and the answer to that in part is because they get there first right I mean everything's a race roughly speaking and the faster you are the more likely you are to be at the Forefront of the pack and intelligence in large part is speed that's not all of it is so if you're moving towards something difficult rapidly the faster people are going to get there first you're going to have to put some effort into your life and 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 you know 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 Enga engage in Creative activity if you're high eroticism you want security okay so those are all sources of potential motivation that you could draw on that you could tailor to your own you know your own personality but then there are dimensions that you want to consider your life across and so we ask people about well you know if you could have your life the way you wanted it in 3 to 5 years if you were taking care of yourself properly you know 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 that's a good place to Auger down and that tangles in your your incentive reward system you know we talked about the dopaminergic incentive 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 most creative people fail at producing their creative product and monetizing it right so your default position if you're a creative person is you're going to fail and so and that's because it's hard to come up with something new and it's and it's hard to present it to the market at the right time and it's hard to Market it like those things are really really difficult and so what successful entrepreneurs do is they just keep doing it over and over and over and over and over and over and over and eventually if they're fortunate one of their ideas happens to hit the right place at the right time even if your idea is good that doesn't mean it will be successful there's so many things that have to be taken into account so this is partly why persistence and that's part of conscientiousness is so useful it's like persistence is helpful because it enables you to run many many experiments and and you need to know that the Baseline is failure you know it's important because otherwise you'll blame that on yourself you know and some of that's useful because there's probably some things that you could improve about yourself but it's very difficult to go from zero to one you know you know what should happen when you go to University is you should learn how to think and formulate arguments you should learn to think speak and write that's what the humanities are for they're to make you dangerous right because if you can think and speak and write you're deadly in a complex job you're exactly what's necessary there's nothing you can possibly do to become more deadly than to improve your facility with language and the way you do that is by reading especially great things and by writing and by thinking and by speaking for that matter but how how could that not be viewed as absolutely Central to what education is about you want to be inarticulate and stumble over everything that you try to think and communicate how are you going to get anywhere you don't even know who you are under those circumstances this massive feeling that's expressing itself you know maybe in violence because you can't find the words yeah you you stumble around and bump into things and you're clunky and dull and you're not witty don't Sparkle so let's say you take the example example of a seal who's got at all but this literacy what happens to him compared to someone who has all those skills if he can't write well and he's in charge of six guys and one of those guys works hard or does something that deserves to be recognized this is the responsibility of that leader to write that person an award okay so he can't reward his he can't reward his his good workers his good soldiers he can give him a pat on the back but a pat on the back isn't going to get him promoted an award is actually worth some points towards your promotion and the people that are on that board that are giving that reward they're never going to meet that leader and they're definitely not going to meet that guy there's no there's no bias it's based on this piece of paper that you hand in you hand in this piece of paper they read the piece of paper and they say award approved or award not approved or you want to do a mission and you send that up the chain of command and it's the same thing it gets to a certain point where they're just looking at it and reading and trying to decipher this pile of junk that you put together and by the way if I'm in charge and Jordan sends me a concept of operations that doesn't make any sense why would I possibly let you go out and execute an operation that I can't even understand what it is you're trying to do because what I observed in my own career and it's so interest the parallelism is so interesting but not surprising is that nothing can stop you if you can write and it's for the reasons you just laid out it's like when you write you make a case for something whatever it happens to be and if you make the best case well then you win and you get whatever it is that you're aiming at and so you're adventurous you want to make a mark is you bloody well better learn how to write cuz if you learn how to write well then you can think and you can communicate your thoughts so not only are you deadly strategically you become extremely convincing and then you can go and do anything you want and no one will stop you and that's never told to people and I I I I don't really understand why you know you hear the pen is mightier than the sword which is just a cliche unless it's fleshed out there there's a book it's there's a book called about face it's it's about a guy that was in the Korean War and the news in the Vietnam War and his name is Colonel David hackworth it when I was on deployment I would read open up that book anywhere and I would read two pages or three pages before I'd go to bed if I was in my bed that night and and there was so many lessons that correlated to what I was actually going through and a real obvious example was when you read you can learn and you don't have to you don't have to go through the School of Hard Knocks you don't have to get punched in the face repeatedly with things that turn out to be situations that other people have absolutely gone through the the the the the level of capability increases so much by seeing something one single time well if I see something one time I I'm I'm infinitely better than if I'd never seen it before it's like those you those little puzzles they give you a little puzzle some kind of a mind Bender right the mindbenders only work on you one time the riddle only works on you one time then you go I know the answer to that that's the answer you you never get fooled by that again so just knowing just seeing it one time you're infinitely better so when you read enough you're capturing all these lessons of course you want to put the book on you want to become that person that can rattle you up man especially if the person is thinking all sorts of things that you've never thought I mean I love reading for that reason I could pick my peers too which I really loved it's like well you know I have these people around me but then there's these people who who've lived before me and in different different places and I can set them up on my shelf I can enter into their world and I can benefit from everything they've thought and saturate myself with that person it's and it's very disruptive especially if the person that you're reading has a mind that's more powerful and more well developed than your own it was very disruptive but unbelievably useful unbelievably useful to try on other people like that and you get the benefit of their entire life distilled into their into their book you know it it it's 30 years of work I I read this one book called The neuros pychology of anxiety which is a it's a great scientific work it's very hard book I think it has 1,800 references something like that and this guy Jeffrey gray he actually read all those references and he understood them and so it took me 6 months to read the book but I got an entire education out of it I got to experien in six months what it took him 30 years to learn like what a gift that is it's it's it's unbelievable what were you reading when you were in University was it was it fiction novels was it non-fiction what what were you what were you focusing on as trit as this may sound it was actually the the most impact was from Shakespeare the most impact on on multiple levels and I'll tell you the primary level and when I've covered Shakespeare on my podcast I explain this to people people think well you know I didn't really understand but I read it I understand it if you think you're going to just pick up Shakespeare open it up and read it and understand it you're not going to because it's barely written in English it's barely written in English it's almost another language so what you have to do is you have to start to interpret it and so what I realized with with Shakespeare is number one the weight of the words that these words were so pregnant with meaning that you had to pull those words and parse those words and pull those words apart to to see all the depth that each individual word had and then the way that they're put together and what was great about this was by the time I was back because then I went right back into the SEAL Teams and somebody would hand me a Rules of Engagement document that was written by some lawyer in Washington DC and I'd pull it out and say wait a second this word I don't know what this word means let's pull this word out let's see what this let's see what this actual definition of this particular word is and how that changes my viewpoint of these rules of engagement and how can I translate that for my troops so that they actually know what to do so that part uh for me was from a reading perspective starting to read Shakespeare and and saying oh okay you're not going to understand this and if you don't understand something that's okay you pull out the Oxford English Dictionary and you look it up and then you not just find out what the meaning of the word is but what's the root word and where does it come from and what kind of depth and what kind of yeah and that's really that's that's unbelievably useful too virtually every word is like that cuz a word is an ancient artifact it's like it's it's it's like an it's like an animal in some sense it has an evolutionary history and it transforms across time and each word kind of it carries The Echoes of its past with it too because each word um attracts other words in a particular unique way so it kind of lives in a word ecosystem as well and the ecosystem contain information about the history of that word and you think well why is that important it's like well hey guess what you think in words you talk in words you have all these archaic entities these words these living entities that you use it's like the more you know about them the more you know about you the more you know about other people and the better you are at formulating and communicating your ideas there's nothing there's nothing lost in that kind of Investigation nothing there's nothing but gain there how did I balance marriage fatherhood and a demanding career well I stopped wasting time that helped a lot I stopped drinking I stopped going to bars I really didn't spend a lot of time with my friends when I had young kids in particular I had friends and I I I saw them you know with some degree of regularity but where I cut Corners was more with social life outside my family so I spent a lot of time with my wife and I spent a lot of time with my kids and I spent a lot of time on my career and so you have to make choices and I think those were reasonable choices I'm not displeased with them don't abandon your friendships but you can certainly look at where you're wasting time and just stop doing things that you know to be a waste of time so and I did the funny thing is if you're trying to stop drinking you need something better than alcohol and alcohol is pretty good so you better find something a lot better man yeah and and it is then esteemable people do esteemable things it's like yeah well you want to figure out you want to figure out something that you're doing with your life that's worth not getting drunk and screwing up because that's fun I concentrated on my marriage and making time for it I concentrated on spending time with my kids consciously and I concentrated on developing my career those were the three elements of my life and I had some time left over for Creative Pursuits and and and for friends but most of it was a matter of getting rid of time wastes of any sort you know and I just pushed that out of my life you know day after day until I wasn't wasting any time or virtually no time and you know I've asked my undergraduates frequently how much time they waste per day and general estimates are like 6 to8 hours of time they regard themselves as wasting like that's a whole career right there right so if you just stop wasting time you can do a tremendous amount especially if you also try to maximize efficiency and I always found that incredibly motivating you know a motivating game how much can I do in the least amount of time possible that was that's fun to try to do that as far as I'm concerned because if you're starting to put your life together and you have friends that object those are not friends those are just people you know they're not friends because a friend is someone this is one of the Hallmarks of a friend here's two Hallmarks M A friend is someone you can tell bad news to and they won't tell you why you're an idiot and they won't interfere with your suffering they they'll just listen and maybe they'll suffer along with you okay so you can tell bad new news to them and they won't tell you some worse thing that happened to them they'll listen and they'll suffer along with you but a friend is also someone you can tell good news to and the friend will say wow in this veil of Tears something good happened to you great man I'm wonderful it's rare it's unlikely good for you I hope 10 more things like that Happ and they're not envious and they're not jealous and they're not wanting up in you and if you're trying to get your life together it's actually if you're trying to get your life together and your friends get in the way that's actually real useful for you because you've now identified who your friends aren't and you might think well I can't give them up it's like oh yes you can and not only can you you should and it would be better for them because if they're aiming down and they want you going down with them there's nothing good about what's happening to them and there's certainly nothing good about that for you you might say well why do people drink too much it's like if you like alcohol that's a stupid question yeah right it's like why do people drink too much well cuz it's great you know it's like okay so why stop well you do stupid things when you're drunk you hurt yourself you you compromise your health it's really hard in the people around you you tend to turn into a liar and it screws up your life yeah it's like yeah but it's pretty fun yeah well it is but you need something better than that and what's better isn't being straight and and and and not making mistakes it's like that's all Prohibition in some sense what's better is no you need an adventure man you need to get out there and have something to do yeah and and something worth waking up for and you need that's the substitute for the addiction actually the addiction is the substitute for that if if truth be known you need to be afraid of the right thing and you should be afraid of contaminating your soul with deceit that's what you should be afraid of that will definitely do you in and I know exactly how what happens is you know garbage in garbage out the old programmer saying goes and so you'll fill your head with nonsense and no one will call you on it except you but you can steal that voice if you try hard enough you just wait until you get in real trouble you know one day there'll come a point where you have to make a decision and the decision is the difference between life and death or Worse between someone else's life and death or Worse between health and the suffering that's worse than death and because you've compromised yourself to such a degree you will not be able to rely on your judgment and you will make the mistake you shouldn't make and then you're done and that will absolutely happen approach it voluntarily carefully but voluntarily don't freeze and run away explore instead you expose yourself to risk but you gain knowledge and you wouldn't have a cortex that you know is ridiculously disproportionate if as a species we hadn't decided that exploration trumps Escape or freezing it's like we explore that can make you the master of the situation so you can be the master of something like fire instead of just being terrified about it so and one of the things that's absolutely phenomenally fascinating I think is that one of the things that the Hindus do in relationship to Kelly is offer sacrifices say well why would you offer sacrifice to what you're afraid of well it's because that is what you do that's always what you do is you offer up sacrifices to the unknown in the hope that good things will happen to you so in a sense you know you're faced with something terrible the uncertain future that faces all of you right something you're afraid of no doubt I mean how many of you are worried about your future yeah why you're all young you're smart you're relatively good-look it's like what the hell are you worried for what are you worried about you have innumerable quasi autonomous subsystems that make you up that will generate stories impulsively and you'll just act them out and you know that because you watch yourself over two weeks and you think Jesus I did a lot of stupid things in the last 2 weeks and you think why and it's because you're a random you're a collection of somewhat random quasy autonomous personality units and lacking a leader they're just going to fire off whenever they want you know first you're hungry then you're thirsty then you want to go to bed with your wife you know then you want to sleep in then you want to tell your boss off then you want to curse at the guy that cuts you off in traffic it's like you're kind of like a 2-year-old you know just it's one emotional frame after another dying for dominance there's no overarching hierarchy and there's no King at the top and so you know we already talked about pyramids of competence and what's supposed to be at the top is you want to bring all those things together we understand this neurologically I'll show you some of that in a little bit we understand this neurologically how how how how this maps in some sense right onto the neural structure of your being you want to put something in control and the thing that you should put in control is the bloody thing that pays attention and learns right everything else in the hierarchy should be subordinate to the thing that pays attention and learns what advice do you have for a young man in his 20s make a plan look at what you're interested in get disciplined about something allow for the possibility that you have something important to contribute to the world and that the world would be a lesser place without that contribution don't be afraid of of taking on responsibility you're so it's where you find what sustains you in your life you can take on too much responsibility you you have to be cautious in that regard but that's a less common problem than not taking on enough a lot of the things that people regard as traps are actually the means to their life you know often young people are afraid of commitment for example in the context of a romantic relationship and because they feel that that's going to interfere with their pursuit of something more valuable but that's just not the case is you're not going to find something more valuable in your life than a committed relationship with someone that you love that sustains itself across time and that in all likelihood produces children that's life and there may be people for whom avoiding that is the better route but those people are very rare and you need a real reason to assume that you're one of those people and hopefully for you you're not um you know I've had a very good career a very meaningful career in multiple dimensions and it's still been the case for me that the most important part of my life has been my intimate relationship with my wife and my and my family so don't be afraid of that or be afraid of it but don't let that stop you from from pursuing it your ambition if you have any sense is actually to become competent do you want to be competent and dangerous or do you want to be vag and useless it is definitely the case that there is no more exceptional form of the capacity to be dangerous than to be articulate and so it's a moral Endeavor in some real sense right to become articulate is to become the master of your own tongue every Advantage comes with a disadvantage so if you're extroverted you're social and you're positive but you're impulsive and you can tilt towards Hedonism and you can't stand being alone no matter where you land in the temperamental landscape you're going to have your Associated faults and temptations you got a goal and you'll see that as you progress towards the goal there'll be obstacles that emerge and some of them you don't want to confront it's why it's useful to order your room chaotic room makes you anxious why too many Pathways man people don't really repress the things they don't want to face they just fail to unpack them you want a horizon of ever expanding possibility we're built to walk uphill and when you reach the Pinnacle of the Hill you want to stop and appreciate the vision but the next thing you want is a higher Hill in the distance beware of unintended consequences it's like oh no this thing will just do what I want it to do and nothing else it's like no turns out that not only is what we want from each other the real thing but that's also the adventure of your life and so if you aren't truthful and that means unfortunately especially at the beginning when you start to be truthful it means deeply coming to terms with your inadequacies in humility so it's very painful without that you don't have the adventure of your life you have the role that you've acquiesced to and that'll take all the meaning out of your life it's good for you to go take your place in the world have some ambition have a vision have a goal have a strategy try to be a good person not because it's your duty precisely because that's the proper way to live you sit on the bed and say okay man I'm ready to learn something what's one thing I'm doing wrong that I know I'm doing wrong that I could fix you meditate on that you'll get an answer you grow in proportion to the weight you take on voluntarily it's also true that we have no idea what the upper limit to that is people are afraid of the truth because often if you reveal it it causes conflict in the moment telling the truth is definitely an adventure seeking for sure but also telling another way of going about it is to just say what you think and see what happens that's an adventure CU you don't know what the outcome is going to be so look there's this old idea that it's necessary to have faith in the truth and so here's here's a way of thinking about that someone asks you a question and you might think well here's the outcome I want and so here's how I'm going to answer that question so that's one way of approaching it but another way of approaching it is you ask me a question I'm going to think about the answer and I'm just going to tell you what I think and it doesn't matter what the outcome is because I'm willing to see what the outcome will be predicated on the idea that there isn't a better outcome than the one that truth produces even if it's harsh and terrible in the in the short term and sometimes it is it's like there isn't a better way of doing it now you might say well how do you know that answer is well I don't know that that's why it's an Article of Faith CU I believe and and I believe this deeply the being that you produce as a consequence of telling the truth is good by definition even though it's harsh and and often uncomfortable because you get in trouble one of the things that I've really learned recently or learned to articulate better is that there's a very tight relationship between aspiration and responsibility the first question might be do you need to Aspire to something and the answer is well yes because you have to do something you can't if you just sit there you'll die you can't just sit there you have to go act out in the world okay so act towards what well that's whatever your aspiration is you have to have an aim okay well what should the aim be well it should be something worth doing let's say what why do something that you don't feel is worth doing what do you think's worth doing well if you watch other people and you judge when they're doing something worthwhile you usually judge them positively if you see that they're taking responsibility at least for themselves but do you want to be completely useless so other people have to take care of you that's pretty pathetic and maybe you could get your act together so you're taking care of yourself and your family and maybe you could even do better than that and take care of yourself and your family and your community well good for you that's that's responsibility and that's an aim well here's one of the things that's cool about that is that your life doesn't have meaning without aspiration or an aim okay so you need a hierarchy of values there's got to be something at the top it's got to be something important if you don't have that your life doesn't have any meaning so if you criticize the hierarchy or even the ideas of idea of hierarchy you destroy the idea of aspiration and then people have nothing well that's not helpful people are built for a struggle and they're built for a weight and you want to take on a heavy burden voluntarily see if you can put yourself together see what you can do out in the world while you're waiting to die it's an all-in game it better be worthwhile it took me a long time to understand that belief regulated emotion so what happens is that if you act out your identity if you act out your beliefs in the world and what you want doesn't happen what happens is that your body defaults into emergency preparation for action and the reason for that is you've wandered too far away from the campfire and now you're in the forest and maybe you're naked and so what do you do then and the answer is well you don't know what to do so what do you do when you don't want know what to do and the answer is you prepare to do everything and the problem problem with that is that it's unbelievably draining psychophysiologically like it hurts you and there there's there's an immense physiological literature detailing the the cost of of of exactly that kind of response people stay where what they do has the results they want that's partly why you want to be around people who share your cultural presuppositions it's very hard on us not to be where we know that what we want is going to happen we hate that and no wonder there are varying degrees of that obviously you can really be where you don't know what's going to happen or you can only be there to some degree but by and large we're conservative creatures even if we're liberal in temperament we can't tolerate that much uncertainty you might ask well why and the answer is well because you can be hurt pain you can be damaged you can become intolerably anxious and you can die so it's no wonder you're sensitive or very sensitive to negative emotion what do you want in your life it's a very hard question to answer you're going to have to put some effort into your life set up some aims for yourself goals that you actually value you need to be motivated to do that 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 so now you've got your thing to aim at think well I'm motivated cuz I got my thing thing to aim at it's like you're not as motivated as you could be cuz you don't yet have your thing to run away from cuz if you really want to be motivated you want to be going somewhere and you want to be not going somewhere else you got to aim at something otherwise your life is meaningless well what should you aim at well pick something aim at it as you move toward it you'll get wiser then maybe your aim will change that's okay but at least it'll change in an informed way discipline yourself in one dimension see what happens in some sense life is a game the analogy is that in in life like in sports you're setting forth an aim and then arranging your perceptions and your actions in pursuit of that and that you also generally do it while cooperating and competing with other people that's also the game likee element as well 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 the goal is to to have a vision for your life such that all things considered that justifies your effort put yourself in the right frame of mind treat yourself like you're someone responsible for helping you're someone that you are responsible for helping so what that means is you have to start from the presupposition that despite all your flaws and insufficiencies that it's worth having you around and that it would be okay if things were better for you it's like if you want to have everything you could possibly want and more then be a good person the better a person you are the more likely that is to happen that doesn't mean you that you're completely protected against getting cut off at the knees but there's no better strategy then what do you do well then then you turn down to the micro routines it's like okay well this is what I'm aiming for how does that instantiate itself dayto day week to week month to month and that's where something like a schedule can be unbelievably useful Google Calendar it's like 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 have follow a schedule it's like well what kind of schedule are you setting up well I I have to do this then I have to do this then I have to do this you know 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 that 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 that than at the beginning of the day right cuz that's a stupid day if you have a bunch of those in a row you just dig you know you dig yourself a hole and then you bury yourself in it it's like sorry that's just not a good strategy now it's okay now you got your vision you're trying to get through a territory you don't understand and here's your option no map a map that's not so good but has some things about it or a great map well obviously the great map is the thing you want but the the map that's something is way better than the map that's nothing plus as you explore because of your map you could start to fill in the details let's say you you aim at something and you and you develop some skills along the way and then you get like a third of the way there and you think oh that's not for me it's like well yeah fair enough but now you've still got the skills you developed you know exactly why it's not for you now and then you can bring that wisdom back even though it's not perfect you can bring it back to your next plan and so as you plan you get better at planning which is the crucial thing so then we say to people take your positive vision and make it into eight statable goals right so and then rank them in a hierarch break the goals into incremental goals so that you have a reasonable probability of succeeding within some time frame that's the other thing you have to parameterize it with regards to time frame that's right and when you're in the zone you're expanding your skills at in a manner that's intrinsically rewarding because you're succeeding and so you want to set if you're good to yourself you think okay I need to set a goal but I need to set a goal that someone as stupid and useless as me could probably attain if they put some effort into it then you got then you've got it perfectly because it's not so high that it's grandiose or impossible that you fail necessarily and then justify your bitterness well I set a goal and I didn't attain it so I'm not going to set any more goals it's like no you set a goal goal that was inappropriate and you're playing a trick on yourself because you wanted to fail so that you could justify not having to try which is inh helpful you're still going to be a victim like there's no way out of that man so you know because life is this life is a challenge that in some sense can't be surmounted so there's no way out of your problem but there is certainly proper ways of dealing with it and then the next thing is okay you need a rationale for them because you're going to have doubts and other going to people are going to put up obstacles why would it be good for you okay why would it be good for your family if you attained that goal why would it be good for the broader Community because if it's a good goal it should be good for you that's fine but if it's a really good goal it should be good for you in a way that's good for other people when when yes exactly and you and if you're going to decide what your goals are why not set up the ones that benefit the largest number of people simultaneously yes if you can do that you should start with your own concerns cuz you have to take care of yourself basic needs first yes put your own oxygen mask on then put your child's oxygen mask yeah right and then you can as you as you build up the basis of competence locally you might develop enough skill so that you can expand that outward and it also gives your goal a certain amount of nobility and so if someone challenges you and says well why are you doing that that seems stupid you can say I'm doing that because it helps me take care of myself but it benefits my family and here's the reasons why and this is the repercussions out into the broader Community people who are putting up objections and doubts aren't aren't armed to deal with that kind response and then when you have those doubts in your mind that plague you say why why am I doing this oh yeah it's because well I have to take care of myself because otherwise I'm pathetic and useless and bitter and cruel and then then I'm going somewhere terrible so that's a bad idea and here's how it would help my family and here's how it would help the community and that's good enough set of reasons for it unless I can think of better ones right right if without better ones that's good enough when the unknown emerges you tend to experience anxiety and then there's the the known and I Define the known known very specifically and and very carefully the known is the place you are when what you're doing produces the results you want and I say want because that brings motivation and emotion into the game so you're motivated to pursue something you pursue it and what you want happens not only do you get what you want but you get validation for the structure that governs your perceptions and your actions if you gaze into the abyss long enough you see the light not the darkness I'm betting my life on it bring it on the adventure along the Route man and I would say Where's that adventure to be found you don't want someone else's fate man your Fate's enough and your adventure is enough it's plenty it's more than you can ever fully realize and so that's also part of the reason that we all believe that the individual has some intrinsic dignity it's don't be so sure that your position and your room is so damn trivial might be your attitude towards it that's trivial and if you're in Dire Straits and dire circumstances just look at how much opportunity you have to make things better well maybe the same thing is true of life right you bind yourself to it and that tighter you bind yourself to it the more you find out what it is and that's like a radical Embrace we're built to walk uphill and when you reach the Pinnacle of the Hill you want to stop and appreciate the vision but the next thing you want is a higher Hill in the distance because it's from the uphill climb that we derive our value almost all the positive emotion we feel especially the emotion that fills us with enthusiasm that's experienced in relationship to a goal and so in some sense you want a goal that you can never attain there's nothing that makes you more formidable than verbal competence than being able to articulate be able to think to Marshal your arguments right aim yourself in One Direction and you might say well I've gone halfway down this path and I found out it's wrong well how do you distinguish that from just giving up well that's a really hard question right it's it's a moral hazard but then the absolute is yeah but you have to play one of them you have to learn to play one of them you have to become an expert at at least one of them and then that's not a relative proposition and I I believe that's true so you want to commit to something and then when you commit to something you require yourself to bring all of your desperate components moving in a single Direction United in a single Direction so it's a unifying it's a unifying act you said that a harmless man is not a good man A Good Man is a very dangerous man who has that under voluntary control how should people become more dangerous oh becoming more articulate is definitely I would say that's the primary array of weapons I mean physical PR is something and and it's not nothing that physical confidence that comes along with that as well but the same thing replicated at the level of the ability to communicate and to think that's way broader field of of battle and opportunity in a world with seemingly infinite options it can be challenging to decide on the best course of action for one's life Peterson suggests that a useful approach is to focus on what bothers you or what you find most challenging these discomforts or challenges can be an indication of where one should focus their time and energy by leaning into what is difficult or uncomfortable individuals can discover their strengths and find direction in their lives be honest with yourself about your interests abilities and limitations and pursue the path that aligns most closely with your values and passions there's a lot of things you could be bothered by like a million things man but some things grip you they bug you and they might make you resentful and bitter cuz they bug you so much like they're your things man they've got you so then I look for a question that I would like the answer to I would really like the answer to it so I don't assume I already have the answer cuz I would actually really like to have the answer so if I could get a better answer great and so that's the first thing and that's like a prayer it's like okay here's a mystery I would like to delve into it further well so that's humility it's like here's a mystery which means I don't know I would like to delve into it further which means I don't know enough already and then then comes the Revelation it's like well what's a revelation well if you ask yourself a question it's a real question do you get an answer or not the answer is well yeah thoughts start to appear in your head so from somewhere that's right from somewhere where do they come from do you have a sense depends on what you're aiming at it depends it depends on your intent so imagine that your intent is to make things better then maybe they come from the place that's designed to make things better maybe your intent is to make things worse then they come from Hell Jordan Peterson is adamant about the importance of setting goals in life and the need to embrace the difficulty that comes with pursuing them Peterson emphasizes that while it's acceptable to change your direction in life it's essential not to make it easier for yourself instead He suggests that it's crucial to challenge yourself continually and strive for greater accomplishments he highlights the importance of goal setting as a powerful tool for personal growth and development and encourages people to embrace the challenges that come with pursuing their dreams cuz it's inappropriate to continue in a direction you now realize to be wrong but it's also inappropriate to give up and use that rationalization as an excuse and how do you distinguish it especially seeing as we're not transparent to ourselves well right exactly so that is genuinely a moral hazard so one of the principles that I tried to abide by in my therapeutic discussions was you can change course as long as the next thing you do is equally or more difficult cuz that's a check against just giving up so you want to discipline yourself so you can get yourself organized so that you can go in a particular direction so that when you find the right direction you can go in that direction and that does require an apprenticeship of sorts and it it might not matter in some sense exactly what the apprenticeship is as long as it is rigorous you want a goal that you can never attain so you can always move closer to the goal that recedes as you move towards it you think well that's frustrating it's like sopus pushing the rock uphill but it's not because as you pursue that goal you put yourself together and your life does get better and richer and more abundant that's why the highest levels of virtue and goal are in some sense Transcendent you want them to be above everything you're doing so you can continually move towards something that's more Sublime and better that's what you are you're you're here to live not to not to sleep and the problem with the vision of my Ties on the beach is that well first of all that's a vision of of drug induced unconsciousness second it's only going to work for about a week third you're going to be a laugh stock in a month and depressed and aimless and and goalless it's no that's not it's it's you want a horizon of ever expanding possibility and so it does happen to people is they because they've staked their soul on the attainment of an instrumental goal what's your time worth you're a university student well it's certainly worth minimum wage cuz obviously but it's worth way more than that because if you spend a productive hour when you're 20 then you gain the benefits of that hour for the rest of your life so there's the compounding effect of time spent when we young so I say well let's assume your time's worth 50 bucks an hour which I think is an underestimate but whatever let's call it 50 we can call it 25 but we'll call it 50 if that's $2,000 a week you're wasting it's $100,000 a year it's like how much better would your life be if you weren't wasting $100,000 a year the devention code everyone liked that it sold a lot and you know it was full of little Mysteries and was full of hints that there was more to the world than you think and which is definitely true and that you know there was a way of getting access to that knowledge and that it would really be worthwhile and people like that they like that idea and the reason for that is cu it's actually it's true some people have traced fairy tales back you know more than 10,000 years so they're part of an oral tradition and oral Traditions can last for tens of thousands of years and you know it's a story that's been told for 10,000 years is a funny kind of story it's like people have remembered it and and obviously modified it it's like the game of telephone you know where I tell you something and you whisper it to the person next to you and so on it's like a game of telephone that's gone on for you know thousand generations and all that's left is what people remember maybe they remember what's important because you tend to remember what's important it isn't necessarily the case that you know what the hell it means you you don't know what music means but you doesn't stop you from listening to it you don't know generally speaking what a movie that you see or a book that you read means not if it's profound it means more than you can understand cuz otherwise why read it learn to write I'm I'm dead serious like I'm dead serious about that um because writing is formalized thinking and so the way you write is first of all you need a problem cuz why write if you don't have a problem so this is good advice if you're just writing an essay by the way for your classes it's like pick a bloody problem that you want to write about because otherwise it's false right from the start it's up to you to engage with the material until you find something that grips you that you desire to investigate okay so you need a problem well the next thing you need to do is well you need to have something say about the problem so reading reading is really good for that read as much as you can get your hands on that addresses the problem okay so now now you now you know a bunch of things or at least provisionally know you at least have access to them well now you start you start sorting through it it's like okay well maybe I need to summarize what I've learned and then I need to iron out the contradictions between what I've learned and I need to elegantly formulate that and and I need to get my word choice right and my phrase choice right and my sentence choice right and I need to organize the sentences into proper paragraphs and the paragraphs into proper sequence so that I have a coherent argument and at the same time what you're doing is is you're you're you're you're um you're integrating your own personality at the highest and most abstract level of organization and you're sharpening your tools and you're putting yourself straight because you're learning to think you learn to do that by writing many many years you hone your words they're they're the most powerful thing about you bar none if you are an effective writer and speaker and Communicator you you have all the authority and competence that there is and so you're at University maybe you're taking Humanities degree well that what's the humanities degree for it's to teach you how to think you learn to think by writing now there's more to read to speak and all of that but the best thing you can do is read and write every day couple of hours every day write about things you find important and see if you can see if you can discover what you believe to be true and that'll build you a foundation and it's unbelievably practical like if you look at people who are phenomenally successful across life there's various reasons but one of them is is that they're unbelievably good at articulating what they what they're aiming at and strategizing and negotiating and and and and enticing people with a vision forward it's like get your words together man that's that makes you Unstoppable and that that's really that's the core of the humanity is that idea get your words together make yourself an articulate creature and then you're you're deadly in the best possible way so and take that serious serously the best thing you can do is teach people to write cuz there's no difference between that and thinking and one of the things that just blows me away about universities is that no one ever tells students why they should write something it's like well you have to do this assignment well why are you writing well you need the grade it's like no you need to learn to think because thinking makes you act effectively in the world thinking makes you win the battles you Undertake and those could be battles for good things if you can think and speak right you are absolutely deadly nothing can get in your way so that's why you learn to write it's like and I can't believe that people aren't just told that it's it's it's like it's the most powerful weapon you could possibly provide someone with and I I mean I know lots of people who've been staggeringly successful and watched them throughout my life and those people you don't want to have an argument with them they'll just slash you into pieces and not in vent way it's like if you're going to make your point and they're going to make their point you better have your points organized because otherwise you are going to look like and be an absolute idiot you are not going to get anywhere and if you can formulate your arguments coherently and make a presentation if you can speak to people if you can lay out a proposal God people give you money they give you opportunities you have influence that's what you're at University for and so that's what you do is you that's you're in you're in English right you're yeah in languages anyways it's like yeah te teach people to be articulate because that's the most dangerous thing you can possibly be so and that's motivating if people know that it's like well why are you learning to write cuz you're here's your sword here's your M16 right here's your bulletproof vest like you learn how to use them you students you might think in your more cynical moments that you have to offer your professors what they want and gerrymander the content of your language to suit their predilections or what you consider to be their pred elections first of all it's a very small minority of professors who are corrupt enough to punish you for producing a highquality essay that they don't agree with and and though that's reprehensible but it's it doesn't happen very often but more importantly it's it's uh it's the highest academic sin to do that because what you're here to do is to learn to find your true voice and every time you deviate from that for expedient reasons you corrupt yourself and not in a trivial way because when you formulate your arguments that that becomes a permanent part of your character you carry that with you it becomes part of the structure through which you view the world and it guides your actions and so you hold your words pre and you work in a dedicated way to become as articulate and clear as you can possibly become and there's nothing that's more practical and Noble than that at the same time if you come out of here able to speak and think and right no matter where you go like you're you're headed for for the Pinnacle and hopefully in a in a in a way that's positive for [Music] everyone