12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

by Jordan B. Peterson

To begin with, there is not just one game at which to succeed or fail. There are many games and, more specifically, many good games—games that match your talents, involve you productively with other people, and sustain and even improve themselves across time.

The world allows for many ways of Being. If you don’t succeed at one, you can try another.

You can pick something better matched to your unique mix of strengths, we...

You might consider judging your success across all the games you play.

Imagine that you are very good at some, middling at others, and terrible at the remainder. Perhaps that’s how it should be.

But winning at everything might only mean that you’re not doing anything new or difficult. You might be winning but you’re not growing, and growing might be the most important form of winning. Should victory in the p...

Finally, you might come to realize that the specifics of the many games you are playing are so unique to you, so individual, that compari...

Perhaps you are overvaluing what you don’t have and underv...

There’s some real utility in gratitude. It’s also good protection against the dangers of ...

First, it selects a single, arbitrary domain of comparison (fame, maybe, or power). Then it acts as if that domain is the only one that is relevant. Then it contrasts you unfavourably with someone truly stellar, within that domain. It can take that final step even further, using the unbridgeable gap between you and its target of comparison as evidence for the fundamental injustice of life.

That way your motivation to do anything at all can be most effectively undermined.

The conditions of our lives become more and more personal and less and less comparable with those of others.

We must take note of our disarray, without completely abandoning that father in the process. We must then rediscover the values of our culture—veiled from us by our ignorance, hidden in the dusty treasure-trove of the past—rescue them, and integrate them into our own lives. This is what gives existence its full and necessary meaning.

Before you can articulate your own standards of value, you must see yourself as a stranger—and then you must get to know yourself.

What do you find valuable or pleasurable? How much leisure, enjoyment, and reward do you require, so that you feel like more than a beast of burden? How must you treat yourself, so you won’t kick over the traces and smash up your corral? You could force yourself through your daily grind and kick your dog in frustration when you come home. You could watch the precious days tick by. Or you could learn how to entice yourself into sustainable, productive activity. Do you ask yourself what you want? Do you negotiate fairly with yourself? Or are you a tyrant, with yourself as slave?

I’m talking about determining the nature of your moral obligation, to yourself.

Should might enter into it, because you are nested within a network of social obligations. Should is your responsibility, and you should live up to it. But this does not mean you must take the role of lap-dog, obedient and harmless. That’s how a dictator wants his slaves.

Dare, instead, to be dangerous. Dare to be truthful. Dare to articulate yourself, and express (or at least become aware of) w...

How do you need to be spoken to? What do you need to take from people? What are you putting up with, or pretending to like, from duty or obligation?

Consult your resentment. It’s a revelatory emotion, for all its pathology.

It’s part of an evil triad: arrogance, deceit, and resentment. Nothing causes more harm th...

Either the resentful person is immature, in which case he or she should shut up, quit whining, and get on with it, or there is tyranny afoot—in which case the person ...

When you have something to say, silence is a lie—and tyranny feeds on lies.

When you start nursing secret fantasies of revenge; when your life is being poisoned and your imagination fills with the wish to devour and destroy.

What do you fake?

You have your own particular, specific problems—financial, intimate, psychological, and otherwise. Those are embedded in the unique broader context of your existence.

You must decide what to let go, and what to pursue.

We cannot navigate, without something to aim at and, while we are in this world, we must always navigate.

We live within a framework that defines the present as eternally lacking and the future as eternally better.

The disadvantage to all this foresight and creativity is chronic unease and discomfort.

You need to know because you can’t fix something if you don’t know it’s broken—and you’re broken. You need an inspector.

The internal critic—it could play that role, if you could get it on track; if you and it could cooperate. It could help you take stock.

The future is like the past. But there’s a crucial difference. The past is fixed, but the future—it could be better.

The present is eternally flawed. But where you start might not be as important as the direction you are heading.

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

Much of happiness is hope, no matter how deep the underworld in which th...

is there one thing that exists in disarray in your life or your situation that you could, and would, set straight? Could you, and would you, fix that one thing that announces itself humbly in need of repair? Could you do it now?

Maybe you need to say to yourself, “OK. I know we haven’t gotten along very well in the past. I’m sorry about that. I’m trying to improve. I’ll probably make some more mistakes along the way, but I’ll try to listen if you object. I’ll try to learn. I noticed, just now, today, that you weren’t really jumping at the opportunity to help when I asked. Is there something I could offer in return for your cooperation? Maybe if you did the dishes, we could go for coffee. You like espresso. How about an espresso—maybe a double shot? Or is there something else you want?” Then you could listen. Maybe you’ll hear a voice inside (maybe it’s even the voice of a long-lost child). Maybe it will reply, “Really? You really want to do something nice for me? You’ll really do it? It’s not a trick?”

“Really. I might not do it very well, and I might not be great company, but I will do something nice for you. I promise.”

“What could I say to someone else—my friend, my brother, my boss, my assistant—that would set things a bit more right between us tomorrow? What bit of chaos might I eradicate at home, on my desk, in my kitchen, tonight, so that the stage could be set for a better play? What snakes might I banish from my closet—and my mind?”

Five hundred small decisions, five hundred tiny actions, compose your day, today, and every day. Could you aim one or two of these at a better result?

Could you compare your specific personal tomorrow with your specific personal yesterday? Could you use your own judgment, and ask yourse...

Thus, you set the following goal: by the end of the day, I want things in my life to be a tiny bit better than they were this morning.

“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...

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...

Now the beam is disappearing from your eye, and you’re learning to see. And what you aim at determines what you see. That’s worth repeating. What you aim at determines what you see.

That’s how you deal with the overwhelming complexity of the world: you ignore it, while you concentrate minutely on your private concerns.

You’re blind to everything else (and there’s a lot of everything else—so you’re very blind).

Seeing is very difficult, so you must choose what to see, and let the rest go.