12 Rules For Life

By Jordan Peterson

In this book, Peterson provides 12 profound and practical principles for how to live a meaningful life.

Happiness is a pointless goal…instead we must search for meaning, not for its won sake, but as a defence against the suffering that is intrinsic to our existence.

Rule 1 — Stand Up Straight With Your Shoulders Back

The Lobster

Peterson describes what happens when two lobsters are involved in a conflict over territory. He describes how the lobster which losses the battle’s brain basically dissolves. Then it grows a new, subordinate brain — one more appropriate to its new, lowly position.

A losing lobster and winning lobster’s brains differ by the level of serotonin and octopamine. Winning increase the ratio of the former to the latter.

The winning lobster’s increased serotonin levels will cause it to become a more effective and aggressive fighter. It’s a “winner-take-all in the lobster words” such as in human society where the top 1% have as much as the bottom 50%.

This is the principle of unequal distribution. The majority of scientific papers are published by a very small group of scientists.

Price’s Law

Price’s square root law or Price’s law pertains to the relationship between the literature on a subject (output) and the number of authors (players) in the subject area, stating that half of the publications (output) come from the square root of all contributors. Thus, if 100 papers are written by 25 authors, five authors will have contributed 50 papers.

In Summary, 50% of the work is done by the square root of the total number of people who participate in the work.

This law builds on the word of Vilfredo Pareto who was the father of the 80/20 principle sometimes known as the Matthew Principle after Jesus said “to those who have everything, more will be given; from those who have nothing, everything will be taken”.

Dominance Hierachies

Peterson discusses Dominance Hierarchies as fundamental within Nature both within lobster and human society.

Dominance Hierarchies are older than trees.

The part of our brain that keeps track of our place in the dominance hierarchy is therefore “exceptionally ancient and fundamental”.

It powerfully affects every aspect of our Being, conscious or unconscious alike. This is why, when we are defeated, we act very much like lobsters who have lost a fight…Much of the basic neurochemistry is the same. Consider serotonin, the chemical that governs posture and escape in the lobster, Low-ranking lobsters produce comparatively low levels of serotonin. This is also true of low-ranking human beings. Low serotonin means more response to stress and costlier physical preparedness for emergency (you are worried about surviving and can’t afford anything to go wrong)…Higher spots in the dominance hierarchy, and the higher serotonin levels typical of those who inhabit them, are characterised by less illness, misery and death.

The ancient part of your brain specialised for assessing dominance watches how you are treated by other people. On that evidence, it rends a determination of your value and assigns you a status. If you are judged by your peers as of little worth, the counter restricts serotonin availability. That makes you much more physically and psychologically reactive to any circumstance or event that might produce emotion particularly if it is negative. You need that reactivity. Emergencies are common at the bottom and you myst be ready to survive.

If you have a high status, your brain’s cold pre-reptilian mechanics assume that your niche is secure, productive and safe. You are confident and calm. Because your position is secure, the future is likely to be good for you.

To Stand Up Tall

Positive feedback loops, adding effect to effect, can spiral counterproductively in a negative direction, but can also work to get you ahead. That’s the other, far more optimistic lesson of Price’s law and the Pareto distribution: those who start to have will probably get more. If your posture is poor, then you will feel small, defeated and ineffectual. The reactions of other will amplify that. If you straighten up, then people will look at and treat you differently raising your position in the dominance hierarchy and causing the positive feedback loop to commence!

To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order. It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality. So, attend carefully to your posture. Quit drooping and hunching around.Speak your mind. Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them — at least the same right as others.Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead. Dare to be dangerous. Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural pathways desperate for its calming influence.

Rule 2 — Treat Yourself Like Someone You Are Responsible For Helping

Peterson starts with the fact that people are better at filling prescriptions for their dog then they are for themselves.

Peterson suggests the root of this is self-loathing — that we understand our faults completely, better than any outside observer, and believe we aren’t worth helping. No one has more reason to see you as pathetic, and by withholding something that does you good, to punish yourself for your failings.

If we wish to take care of ourselves properly, we would have to respect ourselves-but we don’t, because we are-not least in our own eyes-fallen creatures.

The solution: believe that you are worth helping. You have a vital mission in this world, you are important in this world to others, and you are morally obliged to take care of yourself.

To treat yourself as if you were some you are responsible for helping is, instead, to consider what would be truly good for you. This is not “what you want”. It is also not “what would make you happy.” Every time you give a child something sweet, you make that child happy. That does not mean that you should do nothing for children except feed them candy. “Happy” is by no means synonymous with “good”… You must help a child become a virtuous, responsible, awake being, capable of full reciprocity… Why would you think it acceptable to do anything less for yourself?

Peterson argues that one must not underestimate the power of vision and direction asking the reader to “chose your direction and articulate your being…As Nietzsche so brilliantly noted, ‘He whose life has a why can bear almost any how’”.

Peterson offers some practical advice. He suggests you look deep into your own nature and think about what your life would like if you stopped doing the things you know you shouldn’t do. Maybe it’s something as simple as you hit snooze too many times in the morning. Maybe you drink too much. Maybe you skip the gym. Whatever it is, what would life look like if you just stopped doing those small, obviously negative things?

And then he goes further. Imagine what life would be like if you fully gave into your negative impulses. You drink too much today? Imagine if you fully gave into that and became a raving alcoholic — what would life look like? You get angry too fast? What if you gave into your angry impulses?

You now have your own personal visions of Heaven and Hell. You have a trajectory and something to aim at and something to aim away from.

Rule 3 — Make Friends With People Who Want The Best For You

The same thing happens when well-meaning counsellors place a delinquent teen among comparatively civilized peers. The delinquency spreads, not the stability.Down is a lot easier than up.

It’s much easier to fall into vice than virtue. Nihilism is easy — nothing in the world matters, there’s no point to doing anything, so why bother?

Failure is easy, too. It’s easier not to shoulder a burden. It’s easier not to think, and not to do, and not to care. It’s easier to put off until tomorrow what needs to be done today, and drown the upcoming months and years in today’s cheap pleasures.

Cambridge Somerville Youth Study — Study that illustrates that it is very difficult if not impossible to help someone who does not want to help themselves.

The Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study was the first large-scale randomised experiment in the history of criminology.

In the study, 506 boys, ages 5 to 13 years old who lived in youth facilities in eastern Massachusetts, were selected and carefully matched into either a treatment group or a control group. The boys in the treatment group were assigned a counselor and received academic tutoring, medical and psychiatric attention, and referrals to YMCA, Boy Scouts, summer camps and community programs. Boys in the control group were only told to report regularly.

The program had no impacts on juvenile arrest rates measured by official or unofficial records. The program also had no impacts on adult arrest rates. There were no differences between the two groups in the number of serious crimes committed, age at when a first crime was committed, age when first committing a serious crime, or age after no serious crime was committed. A larger proportion of criminals from the treatment group went on to commit additional crimes than their counterparts in the control group.

In 1981, McCord published a study from new data she gathered about the original participants in the Cambridge-Somerville Youth Study. Compared to the control group in the study, she found that a significantly higher proportion of the treatment group

• were alcoholic
• had serious mental health diagnoses
• had stress-related diseases, especially heart-related
• had jobs with lower prestige
• expressed lower job satisfaction in blue-collar jobs

She formulated four hypotheses about why the program had some damaging results to the treatment group: (1) that counselors imposed middle-class values on lower-class youth which did not work for the youth (2) that boys in the treatment group became dependent on counselors and, when the program ended, the boys lost a source of support (3) that youth in the treatment group suffered a labeling effect (4) that the support of the counselors raised expectations of the boys in the treatment group which could not be sustained, resulting in disillusionment after the program completed.

When you dare aspire upward, you reveal the inadequacy of the present and the promise of the future.

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.

Rule 4-Compare Yourself To Who You Were Yesterday, Not To Who Someone Else Is Today

Peterson argues that as globalism has taken affect it is very hard to be good at something. It was easier for someone to be good at something when we lived in small villages, however, now the comparison is so much wider.

Who cares if you are prime minister of Canada when someone else is the president of the United States.

He writes that our internal voice is a critical one and is predisposed to make its noisy case. One typical example of our inner voice’s response to this globalised reality is nihilism and hopelessness — “there will always be people better than you — so what’s the point? The world’s going to end in a million years if not a billion — why does what I do matter?” Peterson argues that this is a cheap trick — “any idiot can choose a frame of time within which nothing matters.” This is an unreliable, worthlessly easy way to look at life.Worthlessness is the default condition is live which is why psychologists recommend “positive illusions” as the only reliable route to mental health as the reality is to nihilistic.

Peterson argues that we must not listen to this internal voice. As we grow older we become more unique and therefore cannot compare ourselves to others. You cannot compare yourself against others based on a single factor, so don’t.

“Your colleague outperforms you at work. His wife, however, is having an affair, while your marriage is stable and happy. Who has it better?”

Instead of focusing on others, Peterson asks that we start small and ask “What could I do, that I would do, to make Life a little better?”. Fix them things and give yourself a reward and build up from there. “You are less concerned with the actions of other people, because you have plenty to do yourself”.

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. Then you ask yourself, “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. That’s compound interest. Do that for three years, and your life will be entirely different.

Rule 5-Do Not Let Your Children Do Anything That Makes You Dislike Them

If a child has not been taught to behave properly by the age of four, it will forever be difficult for him or her to make friends. The research literature is quite clear on this.

“the fundamental moral question is not how to shelter children completely from misadventure and failure, so they never experience any fear or pain, but how to maximise their learning so that useful knowledge may be gained with minimum cost.”

Peterson’s Principles Of Parenting:

1. Limit the rules. “Rules should not be multiplied beyond necessity. Alternatively stated, bad laws drive out respect for good laws”
2. Use minimum necessary force. Start with a glare, then verbal admonishment, then a time out, upward until they get the point.
3. Parents should come In pairs. “It’s easy for parents to make a mistake…It is necessary to have someone else around, to observe, and step in, and discuss”.
4. Parents should understand their own capacity to be harsh, vengeful, arrogant, angry and deceitful. If you don’t discipline your child, resentment will build. A vicious cycle can result where you tolerate your child, but punish them later in different ways. “Very few people set out, consciously, to do a terrible job as father or mother, but bad parenting happens all the time. This is because people have a great capacity for evil as well as good…No adult human being can truly tolerate being dominated by an upstart child. Revenge will come..Resentment breeds the desire fore vengeance…And this is only the beginning of the road to total familial warfare.”
5. Parents have a duty to act as proxies for the real world. The problem is that society doesn’t care about your child nearly as much as you do. If you dislike your child at times, imagine how other people will react. Other people will swiftly judge and punish your child mercilessly, with nowhere near the tolerance and patience that you show your child. In school, other children will reject a temperamental, unsociable child. Teachers will run out of patience and focus attention on more pleasant children, causing learning differences. Parents will refuse her presence at their playtimes. If these habits persist into adulthood, employers will fire them; relationship partners will reject them.

This obligation supersedes any responsibly to ensure happiness, foster creativity, or boost esteem. It is the primary duty of parents to make their child socially desirable. That will provide the child with opportunity, self-regard, and security.

Rule 6-Set Your House In Perfect Order Before You Criticise The World

If you are suffering-well, that’s the norm. People are limited and life is tragic.If your suffering is unbearable…here’s something to think about. Consider your circumstances. Start small. Have you taken full advantage of the opportunities offered to you? Have you made peace with your brother? Do you have habits that are destroying your health and well-being?…If the answer is no. Start to stop doing what you know to be wrong. Start stopping today.

Peterson argues that we should simply stop doing what we know to be wrong by our own standards of judgement. “Don’t blame capitalism..Don’t reorganise the state until you have ordered your own experience. Have some humility. If you cannot bring peace to your own household, how dare you try to rule a city?”. Once you start to clear up your own life, your head will start to clar up, as you stop filling it with lies. Your life becomes simpler and less complicated. “Perhaps you will discover that your now corrupted soul , is now able to bear those remaining, necessary, minimal, inescapable challenges.

This chapter mirrors Peterson’s argument “to make your bed”. In the Joe Rogan Podcast Peterson states

The things you leave undone. Because you’re angry, you’re resentful, or you’re lazy. You have inertia. Well, you consult your conscience and it says, ‘Well, you know, that place over there could use a little work.’ It’s the same as working on yourself. And so you clean that up, because you can. And then things are a little clearer around you. And you’re a little better off, because you’ve practiced a bit. And so you’re a little stronger. And then something else manifest itself and says, ‘Well maybe you can take a crack at fixing me too.’ So you decide to do that and that gets a little more pristine.and then maybe you’ll learn enough by doing that so that you can fix up your family a little bit, and then having done that, you’ll have enough character so that when you try to operate in the world, at your job, or maybe in the broader social spheres, that you’ll be a force for good instead of harm.

Rule 7-Pursue What Is Meaningful (Not What Is Expedient)

People watched the successful succeed and the unsuccessful fail for thousands and thousands of years. We thought it over, and drew a conclusion: The successful among us delay gratification. The successful among us bargain with the future….What’s the difference between the successful and the unsuccessful. The successful sacrifice.

Peterson describes how this is embodied and taught in the sacrifices that were inherent in all the practises of the western religions.

Self-sacrifice and delayed gratification have been part of human teachings for a long time, and the discovery of its utility goes back even further. Picture in the Stone Age that a tribe brings down a mammoth, and they engorge themselves until they can’t possibly eat any more. (This after all promotes storing fat to help ride through rougher times of less plenty.) But then they have leftover food. They learn that they can go through the labor of preserving the food today for the benefit of having food tomorrow. Even better, they can give this food to a neighboring tribe and expect a return of favor in the future.

These sacrificial behaviors promoted survival, and they gradually became ritualized and dramatized, customs inherited through generations. They became enshrined in moral narratives and religious texts, like the Temptation of Christ. Wandering through the desert for 40 days and nights, Satan tempts Jesus with hedonism (relieving hunger by creating his own bread), egoism (jumping off a peak and relying on God to save him), and materialism (ruling the kingdoms of Earth). Jesus rejects all these temptations of evil and immediate gratification. Instead he reaches for a higher goal, of transcending desires to do good.

Rule 8-Tell The Truth-Or, At Least, Don’t Lie

Set your ambitions, even if you are uncertain about what they should be. The better ambitions have to do with the development of character and ability, rather than status and power…Knowing this, tie a rope to a boulder. Pick up the great stone, heave it in front of you, and pull yourself towards it…And while you are doing this, do not lie. Especially to yourself.

Act only consistently with your personal truth. Speak in a way that makes you feel strong, not weak and sick. Act only in ways that your internal voice does not object to. A lie spoils all the truth it touches. It’s like a tiny drop of sewage in a bottle of champagne.
Stand up for your beliefs. If you say yes when you want to say no, you weaken your resolve and become habituated to violating your beliefs. You will lack the strength when you really need it. Instead, when you say no, you transform yourself into someone who can say no when it needs to be said. Nietzsche said that “the strength of a person’s spirit” is “measured by how much truth he could tolerate…to what extent he needs to have it diluted, disguised, sweetened.”

Rule 9-Assume That The Person You Are Listening To Might Know Something You Don’t

Peterson discusses how many conversations simply revolve around the “dominance — hierarchy” with each side not listening to the other but simply trying to justify their social position by “winning” the argument.

Listening to someone else can often be helpful in improving your own life. It’s far better to learn from another person’s experiences and mistakes than to suffer them yourself. Therefore, approach each conversation with the belief that your current knowledge is imperfect (if your life isn’t perfect right now, this must be true), that you have something to learn from this, that the other person’s experiences are valuable.

Rule 10 — Be Precise In Your Speech

Precision specifies. When something terrible happens, it is precision that separates the unique terrible thing that has actually happened from all the other, equally terrible things that might have happened — but did not. If you wake up in pain, you might be dying. You might be dying slowly and terribly from one of a diverse number of painful, horrible diseases. If you refuse to tell your doctor about your pain, then what you have is unspecified: it could be any of those diseases — and it certainly (since you have avoided the diagnostic conversation — the act of articulation) is something unspeakable. But if you talk to your doctor, all those terrible possible diseases will collapse, with luck, into just one terrible (or not so terrible) disease, or even into nothing. Then you can laugh at your previous fears, and if something really is wrong, well, you’re prepared. Precision may leave the tragedy intact, but it chases away the ghouls and the demons.

Put simply, precision collapses the massive array of possibilities into one reality. Confront chaos through precision.

Rule 11-Do Not Bother Children When They Are Skateboarding

On The Patriarchy

Peterson writes that any hierarchy creates winners and losers. Any any value structure produces a hierarchy with these structures not being formed due to any exploitation or capitalist injustice.

• “The collective pursuit of any valued goal produces a hierachy.
• “It is the pursuit of goals that in large part lends life its sustaining meaning. We experience all the emotions that make life deep and engaging as a consequence of moving successfully towards something deeply desired and valued.”.
• “The price we pay for that involvement is the inevitable creation of hierarchies of success, while the inevitable consequence is different in outcome. Absolute equality would therefore require the sacrifice of value itself-and then there would be nothing worth living for.”

In societies that are well-functioning — not in comparison to a hypothetical utopia, but contrasted with other existing or historical cultures — competence, not power, is a prime determiner of status. Competence. Ability. Skill. Not power. This is obvious both anecdotally and factually. No one with brain cancer is equity-minded enough to refuse the service of the surgeon with the best education, the best reputation and, perhaps, the highest earnings. Furthermore, the most valid personality trait predictors of long-term success in Western countries are intelligence (as measured with cognitive ability or IQ tests) and conscientiousness (a trait characterized by industriousness and orderliness).

Men enforce a code of behavior on each other, when working together. Do you work. Pull your weight. Stay awake and pay attention. Don’t whine or be touchy. Stand up for your friends. Don’t suck up and don’t snitch. Don’t be a slave to stupid rules. Don’t, in the immortal words of Arnold Schwarzenegger, be a girlie man. Don’t be dependent. At all. Ever. Period. The harassment that is part of acceptance on a working crew is a test: are you tough, entertaining, competent, and reliable? If not, go away. Simple as that. We don’t need to feel sorry for you. We don’t want to put up with your narcissism, and we don’t want to do your work.

The only way for children to develop into adults who can meet this code is to be exposed to danger. Which they do naturally if allowed to. And sometimes even if they aren’t allowed to.

Rule 12-Pet a Cat When You Encounter One on the Street

Suffering in life is guaranteed. It’s a tenet in every major religion, and it’s obvious from everyday life. Outcomes are unequal. People are born with different abilities. Some people get worse treatment than others.

limitation is critical to making existence meaningful. When Superman was created as a comic book character, he had infinite powers and could overcome any situation. This became boring. There was nothing for him to struggle against, so he couldn’t be admirable; no lesson for him to learn, so he couldn’t grow. They had to make him weak to kryptonite to make his stories anywhere near interesting.

Notice little bits of goodness that make existence tolerable, even justifiable. See the girl splash happily into a puddle with her rain boots. Enjoy a particularly good coffee or book or conversation. Pet a cat when you run into one.