10 of the Best Jordan Peterson Lectures and Major Highlights
Jordan Peterson love him or hate him he certainly makes a point, here are my 10 favourite all-time lectures. I have added the major themes and takeaways from each lecture however have refrained from comments of personal opinion. I will soon undertake a series of articles on the same subjects with opinion and interpretation, however, the videos speak for themselves and Peterson has an ability to articulate words with such intent that it’s hard to express an opinion as he is so succinct yet covers vast areas in ways that are understandable.
Entire Series: 2017 Personality and Its Transformations Parts 1-22
1: Find meaning in your life
You should be afraid of taking risks and pursuing something meaningful but you should be more afraid of staying where you are if its making you miserable. You are paying a price by setting there being miserable. The clock is ticking and if you are miserable in your job now and you change nothing, in 5 years you will be much more miserable and you will be a lot of older.
It’s a luxury to pursue what makes you happy but it’s a moral obligation to pursue what you find meaningful. It doesn’t mean it’s easy, it might require sacrifice.
If you need to change your job and you have family, children and mortgage, then you have responsibilities, you have already picked up those responsibilities. You don’t just get to walk away scot-free and say well I don’t like my job I quit that’s not a strategy but what you might have to do is you think well this job is killing my soul all right so what do I have to do about that well I have to look for another job well no one wants to hire me it’s like okay maybe you need to educate yourself more maybe you need to overcome your fear of being interviewed, maybe you need to sharpen your social skills like you have to think about these things strategically. if you’re going to switch careers you have to do it like an intelligent responsible person that might take you a couple of years of effort to do properly.
- It’s a moral responsibility to pursue what is meaningful.
- The more radical the change the bigger the pain.
- A lot of things we learn, we learn painfully, we learn in pain and anxiety.
- The better idea is to eat a little poison every day so that you don’t have to overdose in a month.
- “He who has a why can bear any how”
Why would you look in the darkest places? Because in the darkest places you can find what still shines. If it can shine in the darkest places then you know it’s a real light.
Life is suffering and malevolence. You need to be armed with virtue in order to, for that not to turn into hell.
And most importantly meaning is not optional. It’s a deep instinct. You need a reason to get out of bed on a terrible day. Do some difficult things. Do them well. Pick up your goddamn burden and walk up the hill. Accept the burdensome condition of suffering.
2: Strive to become 1%:
Aim high and then concentrate on it. We experience the most positive emotion in relation to a goal. If you don’t have any goal then you don’t have any motivation.
You better have your goals well delineated because that way you will be maximally motivated. It also makes you less anxious and uncertain because your pathway forward into the future is mapped. It makes it more certain. And uncertainty causes stress and physiological load.
Every single person who sets out to put themselves together ethically is a net positive to everyone around them.
If you don’t get your act together and you let yourself slide then what moves into taking the place of what you could have been is something that’s not good at all.
If you don’t get your act together then you leave a little space for hill.
If you ask older people what they regret, they generally report things not done. They don’t regret so many mistakes they have made but they miss and torment themselves for the opportunities that had presented themselves that they did not exploit or engage in.
Our consciousness is for to encounter things that we have not yet encountered are things that have not been brought into being.
The strength that you develop in your monstrousness is actually the best guarantee of peace.
3: Strengthen the individual:
Being is made out of things that you understand and the things you don’t understand. Your brain is adapted in two hemispheres for the world you understand and the world you don’t understand.
The world you understand is handled by the left and the world you don’t understand is being handled by the right. The line between the middle is Tao, that is meaning.
People need so little encouragement.
From a revolutionary perspective, reality is the case and order. Its that to which you are adapted.
The enemy makes you think, the enemy tells you things that no one else will tell you.
Archetypal themes are archetypal because they actually speak of the structure of the human experience that’s why they last. Human nature has a pattern. You don’t have the capacity to articulate that pattern as an individual because your life is too short. But the ancient representations of those patterns are everywhere around you. Your soul already knows but it doesn’t have the words.
4: Why you waste your time:
You can debate about the good we can do but you cannot debate about the harm that we can do. The probability that you are wrong is extraordinarily high.
There’s something with your presupposition and your habitual actions. And the way the word is responding to you. What can you do about that? The answer is to examine yourself for presuppositions and action patterns that are not serving you well.
The best way to face fear and glueing yourself back together and expanding your personality to live properly in the world is to go back to those terrible events and untie them and straighten them out and understand them and drop them.
To navigate you should ask yourself where the hell are you. What’s good about you and what’s bad about you by your own reckoning? Think consciously about who is it that you are in an articulated manner and where you want to go and why and how you are going to get there?
What would happen if you just stopped wasting the opportunity that are right in front of you? You would be a million times more efficient.
If we all got our act together collectively and stop making things worse because that’s another thing people do all the time. They actively attempt to making things worse because they are spiteful, resentful and arrogant. If people stopped really trying to make things worse, we have no idea how much better they would get just because of that.
There’s weird dynamic between human vulnerability and social judgment. Both of which major causes of suffering an the failure of individuals to adopt the responsibility that they know they should adopt.
If you take people and you expose them voluntarily to things that they are afraid of , if you can teach people to stand up in the face of the things they are afraid of, they get stronger.
5: The secret to become mentally strong:
If you are sufficiently courageous and forthright and honest in your approach and you don’t shy away, what you will find is there is something within you that will respond to the challenge suffering with the development of ability that will transcend the suffering.
The pessimism is life is rife with problems at every level but the upside is if you turn and confront them that you will find something in yourself that can develop and master that. So the optimism is nested in pessimism.
You are more than you think you are.
If you are very sensitive to an in group’s claims that makes you very hostile to perceived out-group members. Empathy is not a virtue. Empathy drives that in group identification.
Never do anything for one of your clients they can do themselves. Why? Because they are already struggling with the loss of their independence and you want to help them maintain that independence as long as possible. That might mean sitting by while someone struggles to do up their buttons.
For example: when you are helping your 3-year-old dress themselves, like” yeah you can put on the buttons a lot faster but let me help with you that”. It is like You struggle with that, you master it and I will keep my empathy to myself so that I can help you maintain your independence.
If you put people in wildly uncertain circumstances, they discount the future. It only makes sense to store up goods for future consumption, if the future is very likely to very similar to the past and the present, you need a stable society for that. Consciousness only works in a stable society. If you are piling up goods which is what conscious people do is leaving them there for the criminals to take or waiting for the next chaotic upheaval to wipe up everything that you have stored.
Conscientiousness is a kind of a guess. Hardworking people say “sacrifice the present for the future” That is great as long as the future is going to be there and you can predict it. But if it’s not going to be there and it’s unpredictable then the right response is to take what you can take right now while the getting is good. There are troubles with that. Sometimes in a dangerous social environment, it’s not obvious that being an extroverted person is a good idea because extroverted people they stand out. Especially if they are extroverted and creative. Because not only they are noisy, dominant and assertive, they are also colourful, flamboyant and provocative.
Direction determines destination. The destination is not determined by hope or wish. the destination is determined by direction.
Every time you lose something, you are one step closer, winning next time.
6: How to deal with depression:
Every small event produces a cascade through the entire value system. If you are really depressed each of the terrible expectations hits you with the certainty of the truth.
Depression, frustration, anxiety, pain, disillusion, it’s just a natural part of the process of becoming a stronger version of yourself.
The one that keeps one living is the sense of the future. That there will be a tomorrow and the tomorrow I have got to do this and then the day I have to do that. Get started now. It won’t be easy. It will be hard because life is hard.
With depression one of the most important things you can realize is that you are not alone.
Depression is not only normal, it’s essential and be grateful for it because it allows you to reorder yourself at a higher level. Stand in, let in those challenges raise you up, let them elevate you. Let their demands and trails make you stronger. The adversity you face today turning you into a better person tomorrow.
You are part of a larger cosmos whether you know it or not and communicating with nature allows you to not to see the bars of the prison cell but the stars of the universe and if you can connect with those every day, you will use your pain as an instrument for your greatest growth.
7: Carl Jung and the lion king part1 and 2:
Sun is compared with consciousness is because we are awake during the day and we are very visual. Half of our brain is devoted to the visual processes.
To be enlightened is to move toward a high status of consciousness.
We’re only wiling to hear what we want to hear. We cut ourselves off from feedback. We become stagnant, lose competence and confidence. You must dialogue with people you disagree with… they’re the only ones who are going to tell you what you need to hear.
Unless you are willing to be a fool you can’t learn anything new. Because you cannot do the right thing unless you are willing to be a fool first. To know that you have to be fallible in order to progress is unbelievably it can free you up. Failure in trying to learn new things, a perfectionist won’t try new things, a bad first draft is necessary.
8: how to stop being a people pleaser:
One of the things you see when you are talking to people and they are trying to solve the problems is that they are afraid to face the problem. Their anxiety is working against them. Think for a while. What your life will be like if you didn’t face this problem, because if you think that through and you have a problem, what the consequences are going to be in three to five years of not facing it then you are going to get more afraid of not facing it than facing it.
Anger is toxic, it’s like you are driving the car, you are stepping on the gas and pushing on the brake at the same time because anger tells you to run away and to attack at the same time.
The first thing you have to understand with regards to trying to come to the terms with the concept of the shadow to understand the idea of the persona. The persona is the you that you present when you want to accept and like you.
Internal validation:
Most people pleasers are desperate for validation and appreciation. They want to feel needed so they become over the top helpful and say yes to everyone. This makes their confidence purely based on external forces the approval of others and not internal forces.
9: How to become the best version of yourself:
Learn to write: writing is formalized thinking. First of all you need a problem. Pick up a bloody problem you want to write about. Find something that grips you that you desire to investigate. Next thing you need to have something to say about the problem, therefore reading is really good for that. Read as much as you can. It addresses the problem. Basically you integrate your own personality with at the highest and most abstract level of organization. You are sharpening the tool because you are learning to think. The best thing you can do is to read and write every day. Write about things you see important and see if you can discover what you believe to be true. That will build you a foundation. That makes you unstoppable. Make yourself an articulate creature and then you are deadly in the best possible way.
10: You are strong:
You have to look for those little bit sparkling crystals in the darkness when things are bad. You have to look and see where things are still beautiful. When you narrow your time frame you would be grateful for what you have and it can get you through some very dark times.
If we didn’t all attempt to make terrible things even worse than they are then maybe we could tolerate the terrible things that we have to put up with in order to coexist. We could make the world into a better place.
Every time you learn something, you learn something because something you did, didn’t work and that exposes you to the part of the world that you don’t understand.
Every time you are exposed to the part of the world that you don’t understand you have the possibility of rebuilding the structures to interpret the world. Its very important to notice that you are wrong than it is to prove that you are right.
Talking to people who agree with what you say is like walking around in a desert.
People have an unbelievable capacity to face and overcome things they don’t understand, that is essentially what gives life meaning.
You are the thing that isn’t, you are the thing that becomes. And you should put the thing that becomes at a higher place then the thing it is.
Everything that makes you anxious or upset is the same that’s ever made you upset
Top 10 Lectures by Jordan Peterson
That’s if folks, enjoy the videos, the takeaways were notes I made while watching, watch this space as more to come in this review of Jordan Peterson and his best works.
Comment your favourites below for others to enjoy.
Also Enjoy: Top 10 Podcasts by Jordan Peterson
Fun Fact
What are Jordan B 12 rules for life summary??
12 Rules For Life is a stern, story-based, and entertaining self-help manual for young people that lays out a set of simple principles that can help us become more disciplined, behave better, act with integrity, and balance our lives while enjoying them as much as we can.
