12 Rules for Life by Jordan B. Peterson (2018)

TL;DR: 12 Rules to improve life based on mythologies, philosophy, psychology, science and religion.

Jordan Peterson is a controversial figure. Maybe because of the rhetoric different groups are interpreting as attacks. And maybe that's simply the purpose of a discussion. It seems he's become a voice, where none used to be around. Like a forest with burnt wood, and the first spark creates a ripple that lights up the area.

This book is a good read. Stripped of all the arguments, it's basically like a self-help/personal development book. What makes it different from what one can usually read is it pulls from different sources, The Bible, Fairy Tales, Greek Mythology, Lessons from World War II, essentially from Myths, History, Psychology, Religion etc.

The 12 Rules

Stand up straight with your shoulders back
Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping
Make friends with people who want the best for you
Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today
Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them
Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world
Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)
Tell the truth - or, at least, don't lie
Assume the person you are listening to might know something you don't
Be precise in your speech
Do not bother children when they are skateboarding
Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street

In the foreword:

Ideologies are simple ideas, disguised as science or philosophy, that purport to explain the complexity of the world and offer remedies that will perfect it.

In all these triumph stories, the hero has to go into the unknown, into an unexplored territory, and deal with a new great challenge and take great risks. In the process, something of himself has to die, or be given up, so he can be reborn and meet the challenge. This requires courage.

Rule 1: Stand up straight with your shoulders back

Hierarchies are a part of nature, an example given in this are of "lobsters". To thrive in nature you have to be both competitive and cooperative.

If you can bite, you generally don't have to

It is in this manner that the willingness of the individual to stand up for him or herself protects everyone from the corruption of society.

To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open.

Dare to be dangerous

Rule 2: Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping

People tend to be more supportive of their dogs than when taking care of their own selves.If you have a tendency to be very critical and demeaning to yourself, one way manage this to develop a self-talk where you may ask, "What advice would you give to friend that was having this kind of problem?"

People have the capacity for both good and evil. We have a "spark of the divine" within us. And we also have this monster lurking within. Whichever we provide nourishment to, flourishes.

Elements of experience: Chaos, Order and Consciousness, which mediates between the two. [...] Chaos is the domain of ignorance itself. It is unexplored territory. [...] It is all those things and situations we neither know or understand. [...] Order is where everything is certain. It is explored territory.

An idea is more credible when it emerges as a consequence of investigations in different realms

The snake in the Garden of Eden was also Satan, the Spirit of Evil itself. [...] The worst of all possible snakes is the eternal human proclivity for evil. The worst of all possible snakes is psychological, spiritual, personal and internal.

It is far better to render Beings in your care competent than to protect them.

It is much better for any relationship when both partners are strong.

You are not simple your own possession to torture and mistreat. [...] Your Being is inexorably tied up with that of others, and your mistreatment of yourself can have catastrophic consequences for others.

You have a spark of the divine in you, which belongs not to you, but to God.

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.

Heaven, after all, will not arrive on its own accord.

Rule 3: Make friends with people who want the best for you

Choose good people to surround you because they have an effect on you, and the people you love.

Before you help someone, you should find out why that person is in trouble. [...] If you buy the story that everything terrible just happened on its own, with no personal responsibility on the part of the victim, you deny a person all agency in the past (and, by implication, in the present and future, as well). In this manner, you strip him or her of all power.

Here's something to consider: 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?

Rule 4: Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today

Aim to do better for yourself. Do not anchor your self-worth from other people. Like the proverbial story of Cain and Abel, Cain's envy leads to a fratricide towards Abel.

It's part of an evil triad: arrogance, deceit, and resentment.

The past is fixed, but the future - it could be better.

Perhaps happiness is always to be found in the journey uphill, and not in the fleeting sense of satisfaction awaiting at the next peak.

What could I do, that I would do, that would accomplish that, and what small thing would I like as a reward? Then you do what you have decided to do, even if you do it badly. Then you give yourself that damn coffee, in triumph. Maybe you feel a bit stupid about it, but you do it anyway. And you do the same thing tomorrow, and the next day, and the next. And, with each day, your baseline of comparison gets a little higher, and that's magic. [...] What you aim at determines what you see.

Life doesn't have the problem. You do.

Faith is not the childish belief in magic. [...] It is the realization that the tragic irrationalities of life must be counterbalanced by an equally irrational commitment to the essential goodness of Being.

3 questions: What is it that is bothering me? Is that something I could fix? and Would I actually be willing to fix it? If you find that the answer is "no", to any or all of the questions, the look elsewhere. Aim lower. Search until you find something that bothers you, that you could fix, that you would fix, and then fix it.

Rule 5: Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them

Discipline your children.

It is an act of responsibility to discipline a child.

Two general principles of discipline: The first: limit the rules. The second: use the least force necessary to enforce those rules.

Another rule: Come be with us as soon as you can behave properly.

Rule 6: Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world

Fix yourself, clean your room before you criticize the world. Stop those bad habits. The change you wish to bring forth externally must be aligned with you internally.

Start to stop doing what you know to be wrong. Start stopping today. Don't waste time questioning how you know that what you're doing is wrong, if you are certain that it is. [...] You can know that something is wrong or right without knowing why.

Have some humility. If you cannot bring peace to your household, how dare you try to rule a city

Rule 7: Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)

What is pressing now seems urgent and easy. The typical view of an epicurean is when pleasure precedes and is the purpose of life. And as with our impulses, we constantly seek what it want now. What we should do is take a pause, be patient, be the kid in the Marshmallow Tests. Think Viktor Frankl with meaning. And in Christianity, think Jesus with the Ultimate Sacrifice

The future is a judgmental father.

What's the different between the successful and the unsuccessful? The successful sacrifice.

A fact is something that is dead, in and of itself. [...] But an idea that grips a person is alive.

Pay Attention. Fix what you can fix. Don't be arrogant in your knowledge. Strive for humility, because totalitarian pride manifests itself in intolerance, oppression, torture and death. Become aware of your own insufficiency - your cowardice, malevolence, resentment and hatred.

To the best of my ability I will act in a manner that leads to the alleviation of unnecessary pain and suffering.

Expedience is the following of blind impulse.

How could I use my time to make things better, instead of worse?

To have meaning in your life is better than to have what you want, because you may neither know what you want, nor what you truly need.

Rule 8: Tell the truth - or, at least, don't lie

Telling the truth guarantees you the best possible outcome. There is a story about honesty. If for example in WW2, soldiers are looking for a relative who is a Jew and they are hiding in your house. The soldiers ask if your relative is in the house, to take into concentration camps. The moral dilemma then is, what do you do? If you tell the truth, your relative gets taken to concentration camps. If you don't tell the truth, then you've broken this rule. This was not discussed.

What should you do, when you don't know that to do? Tell the truth.

Willful blindness is the refusal to know something that could be known.

Lies warp the structure of Being. Untruth corrupts the soul and the state alike, and one form of corruption feeds the other

With love, encouragement and character intact, a human being can be resilient beyond imagining. What cannot be borne, however, is the absolute ruin produced by tragedy and deception.

It is the greatest temptation of the rational faculty to glorify its own capacity and its own productions and to claim that in the face of its theories nothing transcendent or outside its domain need exist.

The Word that produces order from Chaos sacrifices everything, even itself, to God. That single sentence, wise beyond comprehension, sums up Christianity.

You carry character with you wherever you go, and it allows you to prevail against adversity.

Your truth is something only you can tell, based as it is on the unique circumstances of your life.

Rule 9: Assume the person you are listening to might know something you don't

Some times part of learning is for old ideas to die. It simply isn't possible that one person knows everything. To truly have an open mind, part of this conquest is to be able to listen effectively and correctly. And with different conversations; Mutual Exploration is the best

Memory is not a description of the objective past. Memory is a tool. Memory is the past's guide to the future.

Thinking is listening to yourself.

Rogerian Method: Stop the discussion for a moment, and institute this rule: 'Each person can speak up for himself only after he has restated the ideas and feelings of the previous speaker accurately, and to that speaker's satisfaction.

People organize their brains with conversation. If they don't have anyone to tell their story to, they lose their minds. [...] It takes a village to organize a mind.

A well-practised and competent public speaker addresses a single, identifiable person, watches that individual nod, shake his head, frown, or look confused, and responds appropriately and directly to those gestures and expressions.

Rule 10: Be precise in your speech

Clarity lessens the chances of chaos ensuing; Specify and clarify your aims/needs. As with Rule 8, if you don't know, then say that. No point going around it.

The world reveals itself to us as something to utilize and something to navigate through-not as something that merely is.

In truth, what you need - what you deserve, after all - is someone exactly as imperfect as you.

When things fall apart, and chaos re-emerges, we can give structure to it, and re-establish order, through our speech. If we speak carefully, and precisely, we can sort things out, and put them in their proper place, and set a new goal, and navigate to it - often communally, if we negotiate; if we reach consensus.

Be careful with what you tell yourself and other about what you have done, what you are doing, and where you are going. Search for the correct words. Organize those words into the correct sentences, and those sentences into the correct paragraphs.

Don't hide baby monsters under the carpet. They will flourish. The will grow large in the dark. Then, when you least expect it, they will jump out and devour you.

Rule 11: Do not bother children when they are skateboarding

Allow for some risk in kid's lives. Let them find their way; otherwise it could manifest in harmful ways. When kids/people are too sheltered, they grow weak and this comes out in unhelpful ways.

Kids need playgrounds dangerous enough to remain challenging. People, including children (who are people too, after all) don't seek to minimize risk. They seek to optimize it. [...] Thus if things are made too safe, people (including children) start to figure out ways to make them dangerous again.

If you cannot understand why someone did something, look at the consequences - and infer the motivation.

Any hierarchy creates winners and losers. [...] The collective pursuit of any valued goal produces a hierarchy [...] the pursuit of goals [...] lends life its sustaining meaning. [...]. We experience almost all the emotions that make life deep and engaging as a consequence of moving successfully towards something deeply desired and valued.

You might think, "if they loved me, they would know what to do." That's the voice of resentment. Assume ignorance before malevolence. No one has a direct pipeline to your wants and needs - not even you.

When softness and harmlessness become the only consciously acceptable virtues, then hardness and dominance will start to exert an unconscious fascination. Partly what this means for the future is that if men are pushed too hard to feminize, they will become more and more interested in harsh, fascist political ideology.

Rule 12: Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street

A call for Savoring; notice the small things in spite of pain

Cooperation is for safety, security and companionship. Competition is for personal growth and status.

That what can truly be loved about a person is inseparable from their limitations.

If you are already everything, everywhere, always, there is nowhere to go and nothing to be. Everything that could be already is, and everything that could happen already has.

The desire to produce suffering, for the sake of suffering. That is the very essence of evil.

If you pay careful attention, even on a bad day, you may be fortunate enough to be confronted with small opportunities

In the closing chapter, JBP includes this

Aim to be the person at your father's funeral that everyone, in their grief and misery, can rely on. There's a worthy and noble ambition: strength in adversity.

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