12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson (Quotes and Excerpts)
If you've spent time on the internet lately, especially on YouTube, chances are that you know who Jordan Peterson is.
He is one of today's most influential and famous lecturers on sociological topics like free speech, biology, psychology and gender politics to name a few.
In 2018 he released his highly acclaimed non-fiction book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote for Chaos and here below is the general outline of the book followed by a selection of insightful quotes and excerpts.
Outline of the book:
- Stand up straight with your shoulders back
- Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping
- Make friends with people who want the best for you
- Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today
- Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them
- Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world
- Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)
- Tell the truth – or, at least, don't lie
- Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don't
- Be precise in your speech
- Do not bother children when they are skateboarding
- Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street
If you wish to read the entire book, here is a link to amazon
RULE 4: COMPARE YOURSELF TO WHO YOU WERE YESTERDAY, NOT TO WHO SOMEONE ELSE IS TODAY
You must determine where you are going in your life, because you cannot get there unless you move in that direction. Random wandering will not move you forward. It will instead disappoint and frustrate you and make you anxious and unhappy and hard to get along with (and then resentful, and then vengeful, and then worse).
Dreams shed light on the dim places where reason itself has yet to voyage.
If we lived in Truth; if we spoke the Truth - then we could walk with God once again, and respect ourselves, and others, and the world. Then we might treat ourselves like people we cared for. We might strive to set the world straight. We might orient it toward Heaven, where we would want people we cared for to dwell, instead of Hell, where our resentment and hatred would eternally sentence everyone.
It took untold generations to get you where you are. A little gratitude might be in order. If you're going to insist on bending the world to your way, you better have your reasons.
When you decide to learn about your faults, so that they can be rectified, you open a line of communication with the source of all revelatory thought. Maybe that’s the same thing as consulting your conscience. Maybe that’s the same thing, in some manner, as a discussion with God.
It is far better to render Beings in your care competent than to protect them.
There’s some real utility in gratitude. It’s also good protection against the dangers of victimhood and resentment.
Ideologies are substitutes for true knowledge, and ideologues are always dangerous when they come to power, because a simple-minded I-know-it-all approach is no match for the complexity of existence.
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 adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability, and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended. It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality (it means acting to please God, in the ancient language)
