I am loving Jordan Peterson's "
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos," which my lovely husband bought for me. The summary below is cropped and summarized further from an Amazon reader review The last three are so short because I got them out of the table of contents, not having gotten that far yet.
Rule 1: Stand up straight with your shoulders back. It’s a deep instinct to size others up when looking at them to see where they fit in the social hierarchy. If you crouch forward you’re inviting more oppression from predator personalities and can get stuck in a loop that's not helping anyone.
Rule 2: Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping. People often have self-contempt whether they realize it or not. Imagine someone you love and treat well, then treat yourself with the same respect.
Rule 3: Choose your friends carefully. Eliminate those who are hurting you. It’s not cruel, it’s sending a message that some behaviors are not to be tolerated.
Rule 4: Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today. You only see a slice of their life, a public facet, and are blind to the problems they conceal.
Rule 5: Don't let children do things that make you dislike them. You aren't as nice as you think, and you will unconsciously take revenge on them. Brats are like misbehaving dogs: they never get taken off the leash to enjoy a little freedom, because they can't be trusted.
Rule 6: Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. Start by ceasing to do one thing, anything, that you know to be wrong.
Rule 7: Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient. Meaning is how you protect yourself against the suffering that life entails. Meaning lets you know when you’re in the right place, midway between chaos and order. If you stay firmly ensconced within order, things you understand, then you can’t grow. If you stay within chaos, then you’re lost. Expediency is what you do to get yourself out of trouble here and now, but you're sacrificing the future for the present.
Rule 8: Tell the truth—or, at least, don't lie. Telling the truth can be hard in the sense that it’s often difficult to know the truth. However, we can know when we’re lying. Telling lies makes you weak. You can feel it, and others can sense it too. Meaning is associated with truth, and lying is the antithesis of meaning.
Rule 9: Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don't. A good conversation consists of you coming out wiser than you went into it. Listen even to your enemies. They will lie about you, but they will also say true things about yourself that your friends won’t.
Rule 10: Be precise in your speech. Don't cover things in a fog. Face up to the real horrors of the world.
Rule 11: Do not bother children when they are skateboarding. You're not supposed to remove all dangers from your kids' lives, you're supposed to be helping them become stronger.
Rule 12: Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street. It can't hurt, and it might make you feel better.
For another perspective on the same rules, try
this. I don't think he liked the book.
9 comments:
Just remember that cat bites are surprisingly dangerous, so be sure the cat wants to be petted before you proceed.
I've never met a cat who didn't appreciate the stroke. Even a bobcat who frequents the green belt a few hundred from our house. My wife and I were walking along it, and our path took us near where one was lazing. When we got too close for his comfort zone, he just eased up and moseyed away. He's not tame, nor even friendly, but he does know his environment. Don't make sudden moves, though, even with a house cat. They are still largely feral, and their startle reaction is aggressive as often as it is to dart away.
Regarding Rule 3: Choose your enemies carefully, too, and keep them close.
Rule 5: Don't be dogmatic about it, though. Nor children nor dogs will learn to be trustworthy if they're not given the chance to. Even after they've initially shown untrustworthiness.
Rule 6: Requiring perfection goes too far. We'd never correct ills because we'd never even approach them under that standard. Especially those ills that require group action to correct. It's sufficient to recognize our own disorder and be working actively to improve that before we go after those other ills. Indeed, going after those other ills can beneficially inform our efforts to correct our own.
Eric Hines
Rule 5 is actually: Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. I think the possessive is important. Or, as the mother of a friend of mine used to say, if I take care of mine (my family, my home, my job, my church, my block, my neighborhood, etc.) and you take care of yours, the world will take care of itself.
I've seen Rule 4 expressed as: Don't compare your insides to someone else's outsides. And I once read someone who said that whenever she would talk to a friend about how wonderfully perfect Anne or Bob or Cathy or David was, the friend would ask, "What does s/he struggle with?" Even if we don't know what someone else struggles with, it's a good reminder he or she almost certainly struggles with something. As Eric says, no one ever even approaches perfection.
You are quite right about the importance of the possessive, Elise. Or so I think.
On Rule 4 and Elise's comment. One of the big problems we have today is the number of people trying to fix what's wrong on the inside by changing everybody else's outside.
I don't think he liked the book.
Based upon how he directly contradicts what is said in the book, I don't think he actually read it.
"So what you're saying is..."
He openly admits his editor is making him write the review, and that he can't bear to read the book, so he's making it up.
"Meaning is how you protect yourself against the suffering that life entails." I marveled at that.
He is much preoccupied with the dangers of nihilism, the way it leaves people unequipped to weather pain and misfortune. He's not a transcendentalist, exactly; he seems to treat Christianity as a valuable metaphor rather than a literal truth. But he believes people can't thrive without acknowledge the clash between good and evil and without making truthfullness and meaning central. He's a big Jungian.
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