12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

by Jordan B. Peterson

But I have learned that these old stories contain nothing superfluous. Anything accidental—anything that does not serve the plot—has long been forgotten in the telling. As the Russian playwright Anton Chekhov advised, “If there is a rifle hanging on the wall in act one, it must be fired in the next act.

Women have been making men self-conscious since the beginning of time. They do this primarily by rejecting them—but they also do it by shaming them, if men do not take responsibility. Since women bear the primary burden of reproduction, it’s no wonder. It is very hard to see how it could be otherwise.

the capacity of women to shame men and render them self-conscious is still a primal force of nature.

half a gift is worse than none.

Naked means vulnerable and easily damaged. Naked means subject to judgment for beauty and health. Naked means unprotected and unarmed in the jungle of nature and man.

Beauty shames the ugly. Strength shames the weak. Death shames the living—and the Ideal shames us all.

Perhaps Heaven is something you must build, and immortality something you must earn.

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

“Happy” is by no means synonymous with “good.”

“He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.”

It had the perfect bumper sticker: Be Alert—The World Needs More Lerts.

Godot?

In a small town, everyone knows who you are. You drag your years behind you like a running dog with tin cans tied to its tail. You can’t escape who you have been.

I liked the anonymity that the city provided. I liked the new beginnings. I liked the escape from the dismal, cramped adolescent culture of my home town.

grapevine

“My particles are scattered all over the ceiling,”

People differ in intelligence, which is in large part the ability to learn and transform. People have very different personalities, as well. Some are active, and some passive. Others are anxious or calm. For every individual driven to achieve, there is another who is indolent. The degree to which these differences are immutably part and parcel of someone is greater than an optimist might presume or desire. And then there is illness, mental and physical, diagnosed or invisible, further limiting or shaping our lives.

Sometimes, when people have a low opinion of their own worth—or, perhaps, when they refuse responsibility for their lives—they choose a new acquaintance, of precisely the type who proved troublesome in the past. Such people don’t believe that they deserve any better—so they don’t go looking for it.

People create their worlds with the tools they have directly at hand. Faulty tools produce faulty results. Repeated use of the same faulty tools produces the same faulty results. It is in this manner that those who fail to learn from the past doom themselves to repeat it. It’s partly fate. It’s partly inability. It’s partly … unwillingness to learn? Refusal to learn? Motivated refusal to learn?

“It is only right to see the best in people. The highest virtue is the desire to help.” But not everyone who is failing is a victim, and not everyone at the bottom wishes to rise,

a villain who despairs of his villainy has not become a hero. A hero is something positive, not just the absence of evil.

Maybe you are saving someone because you’re a strong, generous, well-put-together person who wants to do the right thing. But it’s also possible—and, perhaps, more likely—that you just want to draw attention to your inexhaustible reserves of compassion and good-will. Or maybe you’re saving someone because you want to convince yourself that the strength of your character is more than just a side effect of your luck and birthplace. Or maybe it’s because it’s easier to look virtuous when standing alongside someone utterly irresponsible.

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 that person all agency in the past (and, by implication, in the present and future, as well).

failure is easy to understand. No explanation for its existence is required.

But it is much harder to extract someone from a chasm than to lift him from a ditch.

Rogers believed it was impossible to convince someone to change for the better. The desire to improve was, instead, the precondition for progress.

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? You might say: out of loyalty. Well, loyalty is not identical to stupidity. Loyalty must be negotiated, fairly and honestly. Friendship is a reciprocal arrangement.

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. This will help bolster your resolve to do what you should do, in the most appropriate and careful manner. People who are not aiming up will do the opposite. They will offer a former smoker a cigarette and a former alcoholic a beer. They will become jealous when you succeed, or do something pristine. They will withdraw their presence or support, or actively punish you for it. They will over-ride your accomplishment with a past action, real or imaginary, of their own. Maybe they are trying to test you, to see if your resolve is real, to see if you are genuine. But mostly they are dragging you down because your new improvements cast their faults in an even dimmer light.

Don’t think that it is easier to surround yourself with good healthy people than with bad unhealthy people. It’s not. A good, healthy person is an ideal. It requires strength and daring to stand up near such a person. Have some humility. Have some courage. Use your judgment, and protect yourself from too-uncritical compassion and pity. Make friends with people who want the best for you.

Failure is the price we pay for standards and, because mediocrity has consequences both real and harsh, standards are necessary.

There will always be people better than you—that’s a cliché of nihilism, like the phrase, In a million years, who’s going to know the difference?

You have a career and friends and family members and personal projects and artistic endeavors and athletic pursuits. 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. You might object: I should be winning at everything! 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 present always take precedence over trajectory across time?

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

once burnt and twice shy.

Your eyes are tools. They are there to help you get what you want. The price you pay for that utility, that specific, focused direction, is blindness to everything else.

You cannot aim yourself at anything if you are completely undisciplined and untutored.

But something that seems incomprehensible to someone unseeing might be perfectly evident to someone who had opened his eyes.

You are, on the one hand, the most complex thing in the entire universe, and on the other, someone who can’t even set the clock on your microwave. Don’t over-estimate your self-knowledge.

More thoughtful parents would not have let someone they truly cared for become the object of a crowd’s contempt.

The desire of his parents to let their child act without correction on every impulse perversely produced precisely the opposite effect: they deprived him instead of every opportunity to engage in independent action.

But that appearance of triviality is deceptive: it is the things that occur every single day that truly make up our lives,

If society is corrupt, but not the individuals within it, then where did the corruption originate?

It has been said that every individual is the conscious or unconscious follower of some influential philosopher.

In general, people improve with age, rather than worsening, becoming kinder, more conscientious, and more emotionally stable as they mature.83 Bullying at the sheer and often terrible intensity of the schoolyard84 rarely manifests itself in grown-up society.

Kato, an indigeneous people of California, 1450 of whom per 100,000 met a violent death circa 1840.95

it is not just wrong to attribute all the violent tendencies of human beings to the pathologies of social structure.

A child will have many friends, but only two parents—if that—and parents are more, not less, than friends. Friends have very limited authority to correct. Every parent therefore needs to learn to tolerate the momentary anger or even hatred directed towards them by their children, after necessary corrective action has been taken, as the capacity of children to perceive or care about long-term consequences is very limited. Parents are the arbiters of society. They teach children how to behave so that other people will be able to interact meaningfully and productively with them.

Violence, after all, is no mystery. It’s peace that’s the mystery. Violence is the default. It’s easy. It’s peace that is difficult: learned, inculcated, earned.

Children hit first because aggression is innate, although more dominant in some individuals and less in others, and, second, because aggression facilitates desire.

A patient adult can defeat a two-year-old, hard as that is to believe.