Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life

by Jordan B. Peterson

When ignorance destroys culture, monsters will emerge.

He must incorporate his monstrousness, so that he can supersede his naive harmlessness, before he is tough enough to face the terrors that confront him.

But it is important to remember, as we discussed in Rule I: Those who break the rules ethically are those who have mastered them first and disciplined themselves to understand the necessity of those rules, and break them in keeping with the spirit rather than the letter of the law.

Aim at something. Pick the best target you can currently conceptualize. Stumble toward it. Notice your errors and misconceptions along the way, face them, and correct them. Get your story straight. Past, present, future—they all matter. You need to map your path. You need to know where you were, so that you do not repeat the mistakes of the past. You need to know where you are, or you will not be able to draw a line from your starting point to your destination. You need to know where you are going, or you will drown in uncertainty, unpredictability, and chaos, and starve for hope and inspiration. For better or worse, you are on a journey. You are having an adventure—and your map better be accurate. Voluntarily confront what stands in your way. The way—that is the path of life, the meaningful path of life, the straight and narrow path that constitutes the very border between order and chaos, and the traversing of which brings them into balance.

Imagine who you could be, and then aim single-mindedly at that.

We want to know what happened but, more importantly, we want to know why. Why is wisdom. Why enables us to avoid making the same mistake again and again, and if we are fortunate helps us repeat our successes.

When I become angry with someone, is it because of something they have done, or my lack of control?

People will notice that and begin to appreciate your hard-earned merits.

I think that is the secret to the reason for Being itself: difficult is necessary.

There is a tradition that the ancient Indian word for suffering—dukkha (from the Pali language) or duhka (from Sanskrit)—is derived from dus (bad) and kha (hole)—particularly the hole in a horse-drawn cart wheel, through which the axle passes. The proper place for such a hole is dead center, right on target. The ride is likely to be very bumpy, otherwise—with the bumps directly proportional in magnitude to the degree of offset. This is quite reminiscent, to me, of the Greek term hamartia, which is frequently translated as “sin,” in the context of Christian thought.

People are more commonly upset by what they did not even try to do than by the errors they actively committed while engaging with the world.

At least if you misstep while doing something, you can learn from doing it wrong. But to remain passive in the face of life, even if you excuse your inaction as a means of avoiding error—that is a major mistake. As the great blues musician Tom Waits insists (in his song “A Little Rain”): “You must risk something that matters.”

I am afraid to move. Well, of course you are, but afraid compared to what? Afraid in comparison to continuing in a job where the center of your being is at stake; where you become weaker, more contemptible, more bitter, and more prone to pressure and tyranny over the years? There are few choices in life where there is no risk on either side, and it is often necessary to contemplate the risks of staying as thoroughly as the risks of moving.

that art should be pretty and easily appreciated, without work or challenge: it should be decorative; it should match the living-room furniture. But art is not decoration.

Art is exploration. Artists train people to see.

We must repent for missing the mark, meditate on our errors, acquire now what we should have acquired then, and put ourselves back together.

The humility required to clamber out of such hell exists in precise proportion to the magnitude of the unrequited errors of the past.

Dating is a pain, even if you are single. I am perfectly aware that there is adventure there, too, but a lot of that occurs in movies, and not on internet dating sites, in text exchanges, coffee shops, restaurants, and bars, where the first awkward encounters occur. You really have to work at it, and you will, if you are single, because you are lonesome, starved for attention, and desperate for physical intimacy. (Single people have far less sex, on average, than married people, although I suppose that a small percentage are making out like bandits. But I cannot see that even those successful in that manner are doing themselves any favors.)

So, as a single person, you will work at dating, because you are lonesome and deprived, but it is no simple matter. You must make space in your life for it. You have to plan. You must use your imagination, spend money, find an acceptable dating partner, and, as they say, kiss a lot of frogs to find a prince (or to find a princess, as well).

You forgo the partying and the easy hours. You immerse yourself, instead, in the difficulties of life. You do that so that fewer of those difficulties will manifest themselves—for yourself, employed gainfully as you will become, and for all the others you will help as the strength you developed through proper sacrifice makes itself manifest.

We plan for the future by attempting to bring into being what we have been taught and what we have determined, personally, to value. All of that seems good, but a too-rigid approach to understanding what is currently in front of us and what we should pursue can blind us to the value of novelty, creativity, and change.

Do not allow yourself to become resentful, deceitful, or arrogant.