Most humans crave order and meaning in existence, to deal with the terrifying uncertainty of the world. For much of history, religion served this function (eg being a servant of God). But as secularism rises, a void remains that is filled by nihilism and empty ideologies.

Peterson believes that there is real meaning and good in existence. Look at it this way - if real evil exists (human suffering, especially inflicted by other humans), then good is the opposite of this - it is preventing evil from happening.

You should therefore conduct your life to produce good. This will lead to meaning. This will make your existence matter. Your actions will matter, taking care of your health will matter, having good relationships will matter.

**Rule 1: Fix your posture. Others will treat you with more respect.**

*   There is a part of your brain that is constantly monitoring signals to figure out your position in society. How you see others, and how others treat you, affect how you view yourself. If others kowtow to you, you elevate your own impression of status. If others denigrate you, you lower your internal status.
*   If you slouch, you convey defeat and low status to others; they will then treat you poorly, which will reinforce your status. (This can be reinforced in serotonin signaling, related to depression)
*   Fix your posture to get others to treat you better, which will make you feel better and stand tall, thus kicking off a virtuous cycle.

**Rule 2: Take care of yourself, the way you would take care of someone else.**

*   Many people are better at filling prescriptions for their dogs than themselves. Similarly, you may self-sabotage yourself daily - by not taking care of your health, not keeping promises you make to yourself.
*   Peterson argues that you do this because of some self-loathing - that you believe you’re not worth helping. Instead, you have to believe that you have a vital mission in this world, and you are obliged to take care of yourself.
*   Nietzsche: “He whose life has a _why_ can bear almost any _how_.”

**Rule 3: Surround yourself with people who want you to succeed.**

*   Surround yourself with people who support you and genuinely want to see you succeed. You will push each other to greater heights; each person’s life improves as the others’ lives improve. They won’t tolerate your cynicism, and they will punish you when you mistreat yourself.
*   Don’t associate with people who want to drag you down to make them feel better about themselves.
*   Don’t accept charity cases by helping people who don’t accept personal responsibility for their actions. People who don’t want to improve can’t be helped.

**Rule 4: Judge yourself by your own goals, not by others’.**

*   With mass media, it’s easy to compare yourself to the best of every field (looks, wealth, marriage, career) and think of yourself as miserably outclassed. But modern society is so complex that everyone has different goals - which makes comparing to other people pointless.
*   Drill deeply into your discontent and understand what you want, and why. Define your goals.
*   Transform your goals into something achievable today. If it’s not within your control, look somewhere else. Let every day end a little better than it started.
*   If you do this correctly, you’ll stop being obsessed with other people’s success, because you have plenty to do yourself.

**Rule 5: As a parent, train your children to follow the rules of society.**

*   Children test boundaries of behavior to learn the rules of the world. As a parent, your purpose is to serve as a proxy for society. You must teach the child what is acceptable, and what isn’t.
*   Children who receive no/incorrect feedback will learn the incorrect boundaries of behavior. They will be poorly adjusted and rejected by society, which will severely hamper their happiness. If you don’t teach children the rules, society will punish them for you, far less mercifully.
*   Set the rules, but not too many. Use the minimum necessary force to enforce the rules.

**Rule 6: Before blaming anything else, think: have I done everything within my ability to solve the problem?**

*   It’s easy to blame the outside world, a group of people, or a specific person for your misfortunes. But before you do this, question - **have you taken full advantage of _every_ opportunity available to you?** Or are you just sitting on your ass, pointing fingers?
*   Are you doing anything you know is wrong? Stop it today.
*   Stop saying things that make you feel ashamed and cowardly. Start saying things that make you feel strong. Do only those things about which you would speak with honor.

**Rule 7: Do what is meaningful to you, and you will feel better about existing.**

*   Doing good (preventing evil from happening, alleviating unnecessary suffering) provides your life with meaning. Meaning defeats existential angst; it gratifies your short-term impulses to achieve long-term goals; it makes your life worth living.
*   Think - how can I make the world a little bit better today? Pay attention. Fix what you can fix.
*   Think more deeply - what is your true nature? **What must you become, knowing who you are?** Work toward this.

**Rule 8: Act only in ways in line with your personal truth. Stop lying.**

*   You may lie to others to get what you want; you may lie to yourself to feel better. But deep down you know it’s inconsistent with your beliefs, and you feel unsettled.
    *   Lies can be about how much you enjoy your job; whether you want to be in a relationship; whether you’re capable of something; that a bad habit isn’t that bad for you; that things will magically work out.
*   You must develop your personal truth, and then act only in ways that are consistent with your personal truth.
*   Once you develop your truth, you have a destination to travel toward. This reduces anxiety - having either everything available, or nothing available, are far worse.
*   **Act only in ways that your internal voice does not object to.** Like a drop of sewage in a lake of champagne, a lie spoils all the truth it touches.

**Rule 9: Listen to other people thoughtfully. You’ll learn something, and they’ll trust you.**

*   People talk because this is how they think. They need to verbalize their memories and emotions to clearly formulate the problem, then solve it. **As a listener, you are helping the other person think.** Sometimes you need to say nothing; other times, you serve as the voice of common reason.
*   **The most effective listening technique: summarize the person’s message.** This forces you to genuinely understand what is being said; it distills the moral of the story, perhaps clarifying more than the speaker herself; and you avoid strawman arguments while constructing steelman arguments.
*   Assume that your conversation partner has reached careful, thoughtful conclusions based on her own valid experiences.

**Rule 10: Define your problem specifically. It becomes easier to deal with.**

*   Anxiety usually comes from the unknown. You don’t know what the problem is, or something vague seems really scary. **Specificity turns chaos into a thing you can deal with.**
*   If you had a cancer in your body, wouldn’t you want to know where it is, what it is, and how exactly to treat it? **Why don’t you treat every other problem in your life with the same clarity?**
*   Be precise. What is wrong, exactly? What do you want, exactly? Why, exactly?
*   In interpersonal conflicts, specify exactly what is bothering you. Don’t let it spiral into an inescapable cobweb. If you let everyday resentment gather, eventually it may bubble up and destroy everyone.

**Rule 11: Accept that inequality exists.**

*   Peterson criticizes the postmodern assertion that gender is merely a social construct, and that there are no differences between males and females. He disagrees that there needs to be complete equality, in every behavior and preference, at all times.
*   Instead, Peterson calls for recognition that inequality does exist. Males and females have different natural instincts and different preferences, and we shouldn’t deny that they exist. If we ignore this, we can create policies that force people against their nature, which can have unintended consequences.
*   For example, Peterson feels we’re at risk of “feminizing” young boys by excessively protecting them from danger. Boys by nature are more aggressive. This is biological. They want to prove competence to each other. They want to inhabit that level of risk that pushes them to grow. Let boys be boys.

**Rule 12: Life is tough. Take time to indulge in little bits of happiness.**

*   Life is tough. Good people get hurt. Suffering is pervasive.
*   You can hate the universe for this. Or you can accept that suffering is an undeniable part of existence, and loving someone means loving their limitations. Superman without any flaws is boring and has no story.
*   Notice little bits of everyday goodness that make existence tolerable, even justifiable. Watch the girl splash into a puddle. Enjoy a good coffee. Pet a cat when you run into one.

1-Page Summary

Jordan Peterson has attracted criticism for his remarks around political correctness and free speech. He also has attracted a politically conservative following. Much of this isn’t relevant to benefiting from _12 Rules for Life_ or from this book summary. If you come in skeptical because of his background, we suggest you keep an open mind, since the book’s advice can be genuinely useful to a broad range of people.

We found the book’s chapters inconsistent in quality. Some were clear, well-structured, and had forceful logic. Others were confusing meanderings into philosophy and allegories, reading like wandering streams of consciousness. In this summary, we try to structure the advice in a straightforward way. We reorganize sections from different chapters to fit the same theme.

This means we leave out tangents you might find useful. So as always, if you like the summary, we suggest you read the actual book.

Jordan Peterson is Christian, and he refers to the Bible throughout, but this isn’t a religious book. Instead, he argues that because similar tenets underlie a broad range of religions (Christianity, Buddhism, etc.), our human struggles are universal.

However, _12 Rules for Life_ _is_ based on faith, by which I mean it doesn’t rely so much on data as it does on principles that make intuitive sense. The book doesn’t use randomized controlled trials to prove “not lying to yourself is a good way to improve your life.” But given the complexities in life, not everything can be proven, and often you just have to act according to what you intuit is best. Thus acting out the _12 Rules for Life_ requires a bit of faith.

Shortform Introduction

**Most humans crave order and meaning in their existence, to deal with the terrifying uncertainty of the world.** For much of history, this function was served by religion, with rules handed down by gods and supernatural surveillance of behavior. Despite differences in the beliefs, all major religions drew on common themes, and the _need_ for rules and order was universal. The ubiquity of this suggests something biological or evolutionary.

The developed world is moving to greater secularism, as a result of: scientific explanations of the world’s uncertainty; critical thinking around religion and the logical impracticality of all religions being true at once; and moral relativism.

But take away religion, and a void remains. There is no scientific code of ethics that inherited the stabilizing role of religion. **In the absence of clear rules and a moral compass, people are prone to nihilism, existential angst, and misery.**

In _12 Rules for Life_, Peterson argues that there _is_ a right and wrong way to conduct your life. In contrast, he rejects the ambiguity of moral relativism, the idea that good and evil are merely matters of subjective opinion and that every belief has its own truth. Moral relativism tolerates all ideas to avoid being “judgmental,” and prevents adults from telling young people how to live. It also rejects thousands of years of development of virtue and how to live properly.

In this vacuum of guidance on how to live, many are drawn to group-centered belief (like political or national allegiance) or ideologies instead, because it gives them identity, purpose, and a shared code of conduct. It simplifies the world.

*   For decades Peterson was bewildered by the question of the Cold War - how could people risk world destruction for their belief systems? He questioned both the fervor of Americans and Communists.
*   He concluded that people adopt shared belief to avoid the negative emotions spurred by chaos. People are willing to fight to protect something that saves them from the existential terror of nihilism.

As a solution, Peterson focuses on **individual responsibility**. The central tenets are:

*   Take responsibility for your own life. Don’t worry about other problems - fix your own first. If everyone did this, many society-level problems would be solved.
*   Walk the line between order and chaos, where life is stable enough but also unpredictable enough to provoke personal growth. In other words, push yourself to the limit of your ability and challenge yourself.
*   Acknowledge that life is suffering. Your goal is to make progress to avoid suffering.
    *   Overprotective adults avoid discussing suffering with their children, with the hope that it will protect them from it. This just makes children unprepared to deal with suffering when they run into it.
*   If we lived properly as described above, we would be resistant to the pains of existence and to the enticing lures of empty ideologies promising safety.

That this book has hit such a chord support the first point, that most people crave order and structure. The rest of the book clarifies the _12 Rules for Life_, with themes of individual responsibility, being truthful to yourself, and defining your own meaning for life.

Introduction

This chapter discusses social status from a biological point of view, and how your body language affects how others perceive you and how you feel about yourself.

### The Biology of Social Status

(This is the most science-heavy chapter, so if you don’t enjoy reading this, don’t worry - the rest of the book isn’t like this.)

Inequality of ability occurs through natural biological variation - within a species, some animals are more capable than others. Those higher in ability command greater resources:

*   Higher position in social hierarchy
*   More advantageous home locations
*   More reproductive interest from higher-quality mates
*   More cooperation with peers and subordinates

Because social status is so important in life outcomes, **you try to figure out where on the social hierarchy you are, you signal that position to other people, and you jockey for a higher position**. Sound familiar? These are deeply evolved, biological behaviors.

*   Even crawfish do this. Two stranger lobsters, placed in the same tank, will within 30 minutes determine the dominant and the subordinate lobster. Their subsequent behaviors match their position - one strutting, claws in the air; the other sulking, dejected, prone to flight.

When a behavior is common among divergent species, the behavior **was strongly selected for in natural selection** and promoted survival in some way.

**The function of this signaling and recognition behavior is to distribute scarce resources between individuals, without the need for costly conflict**.

*   Consider the confrontation between two lobsters sizing each other up. At each stage in conflict, one lobster may yield and opt for subordination.
*   Failing this, the conflict escalates.
    *   First the lobsters examine each other’s claw and body size, and secrete chemicals indicating their health, size, and mood.
    *   Failing this, the lobsters face off, making threatening advances to one another.
    *   Failing this, the lobsters wrestle, trying to flip the other.
    *   Failing this, the lobsters engage in physical combat, using claws to damage body parts.
*   Because actual fighting is risky for both parties, being able to non-violently determine the stronger through signaling is beneficial.
*   Similar animal behaviors:
    *   Elk will wrestle with horns to prove the stronger one.
    *   Defeated wolves will roll over and expose their throats.
*   Among animals, females let the males sort themselves out into a hierarchy, then choose the best individual to mate with.
    *   (Peterson connects this to the romance trope where a large, powerful, aggressive male is subdued and charmed by the female, as in Beauty and the Beast.)

(Shortform note: How is this helpful for survival, especially in the case of the subordinate lobster?

*   Consider an average lobster that refused to defer to every lobster as a rule. In some cases, it would actually be superior, and the other lobster would back off. But sometimes it would have its bluff called by a stronger lobster, and it would be injured or killed. So “knowing your place” prevents injury from conflict, thus promoting survival.
*   Likewise, a supreme alpha lobster would rather avoid conflict, since injury could allow an inferior third lobster to take advantage of the situation. The alpha also doesn’t necessarily want to kill submissive individuals, since they could be useful partners later.
*   From a group perspective, if ability is concentrated unequally, and if a group is best served by following the unequally good people, then hierarchies are useful.)

The neurotransmitter **serotonin** is thought to be the internal mediator of social status. If you feel (or are) dominant in status, more serotonin circulates in your bloodstream. Experimental results that support this:

*   Submissive lobsters have physiologically different serotonin circuits that potentiate differently.
*   Administering SSRIs (antidepressants that increase serotonin levels ) to lobsters makes them adopt the dominant body posture and fight longer before retreating.
*   Low serotonin is associated with less happiness, more illness, and shorter lifespan (Shortform note: though it’s unclear what the causation is - those who are less fit and more prone to illness may naturally have lower status and thus lower serotonin.)
*   (Shortform note: more research results not cited in the book:
    *   If an alpha male is removed from a group and a new male given Prozac inserted, the Prozac male becomes the new alpha consistently.
    *   **Serotonin also seems to improve pro-social behavior and reduces aggression.** This makes sense, since high-status people have much to lose with violence, while low-status ones do not.
    *   In humans, frat leaders have higher serotonin levels than mere members.)

The important point is that **there is a primordial calculator in your brain (the medial prefrontal cortex) that monitors signals to figure out your position in society**. It recognizes how others behave around you, and it infers your social standing. Then, based on where you think you are in the hierarchy, you change your **perceptions, values, emotions, and actions**.

*   If others kowtow to you, you believe you’re higher on the social hierarchy.
*   If others belittle and reject you, you believe you’re lower on the social hierarchy.
*   (Shortform note: There’s an interesting experiment where an alpha male monkey is with a pack of other males, and the submissive behavior of the other males reinforces the alpha’s perception of himself. But if you put the alpha male in front of a one-way mirror, where he can’t see the submissive behavior of other males, he lowers his serotonin. The point is, seeing how others behave toward you is important for figuring out your hierarchy.)

Peterson argues that this perception of your social status affects mental illness.

*   Anxiety
    *   **Lower status people really live in greater threat,** having fewer resources available to deal with problems and emergencies.
    *   This restricts serotonin secretion, which raises stress levels, makes **you more impulsive and reactive to situations - “you must be ready to survive.”**
    *   You jump at more short-term opportunities that appear, not able to put them off for long-term rewards.
*   Depression:
    *   (Shortform note: there’s a hypothesis that depression is so common today because mass media makes you compare yourself to the best of billions of other people. **On this unprecedented world stage, you’re not particularly good at anything.** Even worse, social media makes you compare to the highlight reel of people that you know personally.
    *   In the past, being in a small tribe, you might compare to only 100 people, and you could be the best in the tribe at _something_. **Nowadays, it’s hard to be demonstrably the best at anything, and you may not receive the subordinate signals from anyone else.** Thus one might get locked in depression.)
*   Those in more vulnerable positions, chronically deprived of pleasure, may also be more susceptible to drugs and alcohol.

Finally, through feedback loops, you can become stuck in a low social position. You behave in a subordinate way, which makes others treat you as a subordinate, which makes you feel more subordinate, which makes you behave subordinately. Here’s a concrete example:

*   One infers low social status from the environment, perhaps through bullying or controlling parents.
*   This attracts negative attention from others who treat them as subordinates, which further reinforces self-perception of low status.
*   It also promotes stress, which is physiologically costly and can cause impulsive short-term decisions that lower status.
*   It also encourages behavior that entrenches the low status, like refusing to ask for promotions, which continues to reinforce low social status.

### How Body Language Affects Your Social Status

If all this is true, then to elevate your social status, first **you need to signal your confidence through external body language.** Peterson suggests, “stand up straight, with your shoulders back.” People will perceive you as higher in social status, and they’ll treat you as competent and able. This will then kick off a virtuous cycle - because you’re receiving positive signals from others, you’ll increase your own self-worth, which will make you act even more confidently.

*   Some experiments suggest that **alterations in body language can change mental perception** \- smiling makes you happier, adopting power poses can make you feel more confident.

This begins with your body language, but **you also need to improve self-beliefs. Speak your mind, put your desires forward, and dare to be dangerous.**

*   This is the beginning of developing self-respect, accepting the demands of life, marking your space, and standing up to tyranny.

(Shortform note: This is a variant of “fake it ‘til you make it.” Even if you don’t feel confident, act confidently - others will treat you better, and you will develop real confidence.)

You might worry that all this posturing will make you a target for attack by stronger people. Peterson argues that the _ability_ to respond with aggression decreases the probability that _actual_ aggression will become necessary. In other words, acting confidently is a deterrent to attack.

But fake it ‘til you make it might only go so far. Doesn’t this ignore the problem that there is such a thing as real ability, and that a person’s low social status might be warranted?

*   Peterson acknowledges this, but suggests that there are people who specifically prey on those who behave submissively. This could cause an artificially low perception of status and make it hard to crawl out of your vicious cycle.
*   Instead, if you kick off the change by appearing confident, people will treat you as though you have value. You get positive responses, and this makes you less anxious, which makes you better at conversation and social interaction. As you enjoy things more, you will seek it out more, and so forth.

Rule 1: Fix Your Posture - Others Will Treat You with More Respect

People are better at filling prescriptions for their dogs than for themselves, even though taking drugs is literally life-saving. Why?

_12 Rules for Life_ argues **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 else has more reason to see you as pathetic. **By withholding something that does you good, you punish yourself for your failings**.

Why do we hate ourselves?

*   He uses the Biblical story of Adam and Eve as the origination of seeing good and evil, and how this original sin carries into us today. After their fall from heaven, they are naked, ugly, ashamed, resentful - why would anyone care for a descendant of Adam and Eve?
*   Also, we know that humans have great capacity for evil, as evidenced by historical atrocities. This increases loathing for mankind and self.

In contrast, our pets and our children are faultless - they don’t know any better, they’re innocent, so they deserve all the help we can give.

The solution is to **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 obligated to take care of yourself.**

*   You are not your own possession to torture and mistreat, because your being is tied up with that of others. Therefore, mistreating yourself will harm others.
    *   Look at all the wonders and comforts of the modern world (electricity, running water, plentiful food), put together by people like you for the benefit of others.
*   You deserve sympathy for merely being alive and shouldering the burden of existence.
*   Reject virtuous self-sacrifice - don’t suffer silently when someone demands more from you than is offered in return. Then you are supporting tyranny.

In other words, see yourself like you see your pet or someone else. You don’t see their faults, and you want to care for them. Treat yourself like the same.

This means taking care of yourself, getting healthier (physically and mentally), expanding your knowledge, pursuing goals you want, articulating your principles.

*   **You must keep the promises you make to yourself**.
*   Think - “**what might my life look like if I were caring for myself properly**?”
*   Having a vision for your life forces you through obstacles toward your goals. Nietzsche: “**He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.**”
*   You know what your personal Hell is like. Decide against going there or creating that.

Minor points from this chapter:

*   In the past our cultural leaders were more concerned with survival than with objective truth, which is why they captured wisdom and subjective experience in stories.
*   Why are people ashamed of nakedness?
    *   This might be a cultural custom to protect our bodies from harm. Yet we get injured rarely these days - why does it persist?
    *   It might also be to [desist straying from your relationship](http://mentalfloss.com/article/21098/why-are-people-ashamed-being-naked). There is more temptation when a person’s body is exposed, and covering it up invites more stability.

Rule 2: Take Care of Yourself, the Way You Would Take Care of Someone Else

Believe that you are worth helping. You have a vital mission in this world, and you are obligated to take care of yourself for the sake of others.

Exercise: Take Care of Yourself

This rule is similar to the adage “you’re the average of your 5 best friends,” with more focus on why you might be hanging around people you know are bad for you.

**Do you have a person you spend a lot of time with, who you feel is dragging you down**, doesn’t support your personal growth, and whose goals don’t align well with yours? Consider why you still spend time with this person, knowing their presence isn’t good for you.

Peterson gives three reasons you might still be with these people.

1) Sometimes, if you feel the person is “beneath you” in status, you may feel like you can rescue this person. But consider the other insidious, malevolent factors that could be at play:

*   Why you stay with this person
    *   **You have a savior complex** \- the idea of rescuing another person boosts your ego and makes you feel virtuous.
    *   **The person’s lower status makes you feel better about your own.** Someone whose marriage is falling apart makes you feel better about your own rocky one. Conversely, it’s intimidating for you to be around people who make you feel less accomplished.
    *   You want to exercise power over someone lower. Possibly because you feel that you are yourself exploited.
    *   The superficial motions of ineffective mentoring distract you from your own unwillingness to pursue a real, meaningful goal.
    *   You’re too weak-willed and indecisive to leave.
*   Why the other person sticks around
    *   They benefit from/exploit your generosity, and when that runs out, they move on to another willing patron.
    *   They want to drag you down to their level.
    *   They may not realize they’re doing this, and want to believe their actions are genuine. This may be to put off the realization that they’ve given up and don’t care about improving.

While some people may really be capable of improving, some aren’t. **People who don’t want to improve can’t be helped.** It’s very difficult to overturn this foundational layer and convince someone to change for the better.

*   Maybe they don’t believe they deserve to be helped, or they don’t go looking for it.
*   They may want to repeat the horrors of their past, sometimes to feel as though they have agency over their suffering, sometimes because there is no alternative.
*   They may want to continue feeling like a victim of life’s horrors, rather than taking personal responsibility for what’s under their control.

All of this is dramatized to the extreme, and Peterson recognizes that if the relationship is genuine and there is sincere desire to improve, then it’s still worth maintaining. But this is hard to accurately assess, so reflect and see if any of the above elements apply to your relationship. **See if the person you’re helping accepts any personal responsibility** - it’s a red flag if they merely see themselves as the victim of endless external causes.

2) This idea of a savior complex might not apply at all. Instead, **you might all be bound by an implicit contract aimed at nihilism and failure**. You’ve all decided to sacrifice the future for the present. Everyone deliberately wastes time, sets no goals, and sabotages themselves. No one mentions it, but everyone knows what the game is. If you feel that you’re ready to adopt a new attitude, then you need to move on from this group.

*   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?” It’s easier not to shoulder a burden, not to think, not to care. Pick one or two bad habits and indulge, and you can fall into a deep chasm, a personal hell.

3) Finally, even if everyone’s intentions are good, a negative person’s presence still drags you down. Studies show that **pulling a problematic person into a team lowers the team’s overall efficacy** \- in essence, the team falls to the lowest common denominator.

*   This might be because the high performers may feel resentment at others not carrying their weight, so they lower their performance to match.

Even if the friendship isn’t a charity case, be wary of people who insidiously drag you down. They belittle your personal ambition because they’re embarrassed about lack of their own. They override your accomplishments with their own, real or imaginary.

### Choose Friendships that Are Good for You

**Surround yourself with people who support you and want to see you succeed.** You will push each other to greater heights. Your goals will reinforce the others’ goals, and each person’s life improves as the others’ lives improve. They won’t tolerate your cynicism and destructiveness, and they will punish you when you mistreat yourself.

“Friends” who are destructive will do the opposite. They’ll put down your goals. They’ll be jealous when you succeed, and try to knock down your achievements or one-up with their own. They worry that you’ll outshine them, so they pull you back down the abyss.

Avoid these friendships at all costs.

As you learned in Rule 2, have the friendships that you would advise other people to have. **If you wouldn’t recommend your friendship with someone to your brother, or your parent - why would you have such a friend for yourself?**

Rule 3: Surround Yourself with People Who Want You to Succeed

Surround yourself with people who support you and want to see you succeed.

Exercise: Have Friends Who Want You to Succeed

**With today’s mass media, there is always someone out there better than you in everything you do.** Your career seems boring, you wish your friends were more exciting and more attractive, you’re fatter than your co-workers, and you’re bad at sports. How good can you feel as prime minister of Canada, when someone else is the President of the United States?

As explained in Rule 1, this wasn’t the natural case for hundreds of thousands of years. We used to live in small tribes of hundreds. Chances were you were good at something, and you got serotonin signals from people acknowledging you were good. **Now you might _never_ get positive feedback, while you get tons of negative feedback about people who seem better than you.**

If you compare yourself to other people, you’re using an unfairly harsh standard.

### Bad Solutions

People react to high standards in a variety of ways.

The solution isn’t to simply reject all standards. Standards _are_ useful to guarantee a level of quality (like building bridges) and to keep pushing us up to better things. Being unsatisfied with your present world is a useful push to improve your situation. But setting unrealistically high standards can also lead to crushing, chronic self-criticism, where you feel you aren’t capable of doing anything.

The solution also isn’t nihilism and hopelessness. Don’t think, “there will always be people better than me, so what’s the point? The world’s going to end in a billion years if not a million - why does what I do matter?” Peterson argues that this is a cheap trick - pick a time frame long enough, and nothing matters. This is an unreliable, worthlessly simplistic way to look at life.

The solution also isn’t to protect people from the idea that they have ways to improve, and that standards do exist. Throughout the 20th century, American culture took on the delusionally positive thinking of constant praise for kids. Trophies for everyone, you’re all special and capable of everything you want to do. This merely blinds people to the truth, and when reality hits, people are unprepared to deal with it.

### Set Your Own Goals

Instead of judging yourself by other people’s yardsticks, you need to set your own. You need **a total reworking of your goals**, starting with understanding yourself as though you were a stranger. There are 3 steps:

#### Step 1: Take a broader view of your existence and of other people.

You’ve likely identified a single, arbitrary dimension as THE single most important thing to achieve - like money, fame, or status - and you feel miserable that you don’t have it.

But your existence is **multidimensional**. You have a lot of components to your existence - family, friends, personal projects, hobbies. **Judge your success across all the games you play.** Your existence is so unique and customized to you, that you can’t easily compare yourself to any other individual.

Furthermore, there isn’t a binary condition of “success” vs “failure.” There are many gradations in between. **What matters is whether you can get better, not whether you can achieve binary success.**

Finally, you’re likely only seeing the highlight reel from other people. They don’t expose their deep problems and failing. **You’re likely overvaluing what you don’t have and undervaluing what you do.** Even the very people you envy might secretly envy you, in ways you’re not aware.

#### Step 2: Drill deeply into your discontent and understand yourself.

The first absolute requirement: **you need to genuinely want your life to improve.** You can’t fool yourself. If you don’t want this, you won’t be able to improve.

*   (Shortform suggestion: If you’re stuck here, then think more about why you don’t want to improve. Recall from Rule 2 that you might have self-loathing and believe you don’t deserve to improve. If so, treat yourself like you would another person, and be lighter in your judgment of yourself.)

Next, you’re likely discontent about not having something (like money, a particular job, an achievement). Drill into your discontent and transform it. **What do you want? _Why_ do you feel this way?** (Shortform suggestion: Keep asking why until you can’t answer it anymore. Then you’ll hit the foundation of why you feel this way.)

As you question yourself, you may realize that there are multiple conflicting desires at play. List them all out, realize the conflict between them, then prioritize them into a list.

**Is the subject of your discontent within your control? If not, look somewhere else. Find something you can fix.**

You may find some of your desires to be rooted in bitterness and resentment. How do you transform your goal so that you remove bitterness and resentment? What if you didn’t have to improve yourself at other people’s expense? What if you could achieve your goal, while also making your friends, even your enemies happier?

Finally, realize you may have to give up old goals to find a new direction.

(Shortform note: These are abstract pointers, so let’s work through an example in more detail than the book does. Say you really want your boss’s job. You’re miserable day-to-day because you can’t stand to see your incompetent boss doing a job that should be yours. You believe that if only you got your boss’s job, you’d be happy forever.

Then keep asking why you want your boss’s job. You may find a surprising variety of desires at play:

*   You want better status. Why?
    *   Because you enjoy when other people see you with higher social status.
*   You want to make more money. Why?
    *   Because it allows you to better take care of your family.
    *   Because money is the yardstick by which you measure people’s value.
*   You want fairness. More capable people should be rewarded accordingly, and it’s unfair for less deserving people to get more.
*   You want to do good work with higher responsibility. Why?
    *   Because you want to serve the world, and having a higher title lets you accomplish more.
*   You dislike your boss as a person. You want to see him fail in return for all that he’s taken from you.

That’s a lot of desires, and it’s much more complicated than “I want my boss’s job.” You can only produce a list like this by thinking deeply.

Now that you’ve listed them, you can then prioritize which ones are most important to you.

Then you can notice the conflicts between them:

*   You want to serve the world, and you see yourself as a good person. But at the same time, you want to see your boss fail. Could you define a new goal, that allows you to avoid this bitterness?

Finally, what can you do to achieve your most important desires?

*   If getting your boss’s job is within your control and you still desire it, how could you do so?
*   If not, how could you achieve all your other goals another way? Maybe by applying to a new role within the company, or a new job?

While Peterson doesn’t go into his example anywhere near this length, we believe it correctly applies his thinking.)

While you do this exercise, realize that you’re blind and can’t see yourself honestly. **You’re blind to what goals you really want because you’re focusing on something very narrow.** You’ve obsessed over a narrow goal for a long time, so it’ll take an adjustment period to see the bigger picture.

*   In general, you can’t even understand fully how your brain works, since it’s been shaped by millions of years of development that you’re not aware of.
*   Analogy to vision: our retinas have a narrow central section with high acuity (the fovea) - everything else is blurred. Similarly in life, you’re focusing on something very narrow and ignoring everything else of value.

#### **Step 3: Transform your goal into something achievable.**

You might have big goals, and that’s good. But break it down to something tractable you can do today. Then you’ll start building ever upwards.

Aim small, then grow your ambition.

*   **What one thing in your life can you fix right now?**
*   Let things in your life at the end of the day be a little better than they were this morning.
*   Do that for a month, then three months, then three years, and now you’re aiming for the stars.

Negotiate with yourself and honor your commitments.

*   Pretend you’re working for your own internal boss. After you finish, the boss complains it’s not good enough and asks for 10x the work. Would you work for a tyrant like this?
*   No - make yourself a deal (eg reward for doing something), and feel good about it after you finish.

Continue to pay attention.

*   Once you start looking at your new goal, you’ll start seeing new things you were blind to before - new information, opportunities.

---

Once you put this into practice, you’ll improve how you feel about your self-worth and comparing yourself to other people.

*   You don’t get jealous of someone else’s success, because you know life has a lot of factors, everyone’s playing their own game, and that person might not have it better than you.
*   You don’t get frustrated with your lack of immediate success, since you know you need to make small steps and be patient.
*   You’re less obsessed with other people’s success, because you have more than enough to do yourself.

Ultimately, Peterson believes the answer to nihilism is the “essential goodness of Being.” This comes from aiming for a meaningful goal that improves the lives of people and for a long time. There is beauty to create and order to make in the world. There’s evil to defeat and misery to soothe.

Rule 4: Judge Yourself by Your Own Goals, Not by Others’

Instead of judging yourself by other people’s standards, redefine your goals to find a new way to measure yourself.

Exercise: Judge Yourself in a New Way, Part 1

Finish redefining your goals to find a new way to measure yourself.

Exercise: Judge Yourself in a New Way, Part 2

Children aren’t born ready for life. This is partly a biological compromise with head size - too big of a head wouldn’t fit through a woman’s birth canal. This is also partly because much of human culture isn’t written in our genes - culture has developed faster than biological evolutionary cycles. Instead, as children age, they develop physically, and they also learn a lot about how the human world works.

**This means children need training and feedback to understand how to navigate human society.** If you’re a typical parent, you want your children to succeed, and helping your children become well-liked, functioning members of society is a key part of success.

Children, curious and exploratory as they are, **constantly test limits to figure out where the boundaries are**. When they get corrective feedback, they understand where the boundary is. “I now know it’s not OK to throw food on the floor on a restaurant, because my mom yelled at me for it.”

Furthermore, while it’s tempting to think of them as cherubic angels, they have capacity for evil inside them. They will not bloom into perfection if left to their own devices. So if they hit you or yell in supermarkets, and you don’t provide corrective feedback, they’ll think it’s ok. They’ll learn the wrong boundaries of society. Then when they become adults, they’ll be poorly adjusted to function in broader society.

### Parents Who Fail to Teach their Kids

**Many parents, in a misguided effort to avoid damaging their child or wanting to be their child’s friend, avoid giving corrective feedback to their kids.** These are the parents who let their kids curse at them in public or scream disruptively in movie theaters. These parents are teaching their kids the wrong boundaries of society, and in effect they’re outsourcing the training to society. “Here’s my kid - society, please teach him the right rules.”

The problem is that **society doesn’t care about your child nearly as much as you do.** If _you_ dislike your own 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 have for your child. Here are examples of how a poorly socialized child will be rejected by society:

*   In school, other children will refuse to spend time around a temperamental, unsociable child.
*   Teachers will run out of patience and focus attention on more pleasant children, causing your child to fall behind.
*   Parents will refuse your child’s presence at their playtimes.
*   If these habits persist into adulthood, employers will fire them; relationship partners will reject them.

You are your child’s best shot at teaching society’s rules. Society doesn’t have the patience to teach your child - there are many other well-adjusted, functioning people to spend time on. A bad kid will simply be rejected and left behind.

And this problem can get worse throughout a child’s life. An early poor social experience can set up a **vicious cycle of chronic maladjustment** \- a maladjusted child will act poorly; she will receive negative feedback from the world, often without understanding why; she will withdraw and feel rejected, causing anxiety, depression, and resentment. This further receives negative feedback from the world. This can last for a lifetime.

Shielding your child from corrective feedback is in effect crippling them in the long run. And early exposure matters - a child not taught to behave properly by age 4 will have lasting social difficulties.

### Teach Your Child What’s Acceptable and What Isn’t

**As a parent, your purpose is to serve as a proxy for society.** You teach the child what is acceptable, and what isn’t.

**Think not about having your child avoid all pain, but rather to maximize their learning at minimal cost.** In other words, some amount of pain early on will save a lot of pain throughout the child’s life. Don’t protect your kids - make them as competent as you can.

Teaching children the rules should be done with **both rewards and punishment** - leaving one out removes a tool from your toolkit (most parents omit punishment). Punishments and negative emotions are natural, evolved reactions to events - sadness and shame train people to avoid the situation that led to those painful emotions.

Also, a good reward program requires **continuous vigilance**, since the behavior needs to be reinforced quickly with the reward. The right reward structure doesn’t work if it’s not correctly applied continuously with the child.

In _12 Rules for Life_, Peterson has 4 principles for raising kids:

1.  **Set the rules, but not too many.**
    *   Some suggestions - don’t bite, kick, or hit. Don’t torture and bully other children. Eat in a civilized way, so other people are pleased to have you. Learn to share, so other kids will play with you. Pay attention when spoken to by adults, so they will feel eager to teach you. Be good company so that you’re invited to fun.
2.  **Use the minimum necessary force. Escalate only if necessary.**
    *   Start with a glare, then verbal admonishment, then a time out, then taking away belongings - escalating until they get the point.
    *   Physical punishment may be necessary, depending on the child.
    *   A patient adult can defeat a two-year-old, because time lasts forever when you’re two.
    *   When they comply, give them a reward, like a pat on the head or a compliment.
3.  **Parenting is best done with a partner.**
    *   Raising young children is demanding, and it’s easy for one parent to make a mistake. Another parent helps cover for the other and limit overreactions.
    *   Peterson acknowledges that single parents have an admirably difficult life, but we shouldn’t pretend that all family forms are equally good. Two good parents are better than one.
4.  **Understand your own capacity for anger and revenge.**
    *   You might think that you have infinite patience and love for your child, but you don’t - not if your child dominates you.
    *   If you don’t discipline your child, you’ll start resenting your child. A vicious cycle can result where you punish them subtly (eg don’t show them attention), which then breeds resentment in the child, which causes them to seek vengeance more aggressively, which causes you to resent them more, and so forth. Before you know it, your family has a schism that’s hard to repair.

Rule 5: As a Parent, Train Your Children to Follow the Rules of Society

**There is inevitable suffering in life.** People are born unequal in ability and attributes. Disaster strikes unpredictably - cancer, a car accident, a mass layoff. You never get quite exactly what you want. Life seems like an unfair joke.

**One response to this is anger at the universe** or, if you’re religious, at your god. More extremely, this becomes misanthropic thinking, or hating humankind. Then some convert this into the action of vengeance, to express their outrage and spite the universe/god. Peterson argues this underlay the beliefs of the Columbine killers, who sought to punish those who had wronged them.

But **there is still potential for redemption, to learn from misfortune and do good despite it**. Many people who suffered child abuse by their parents perpetuate the evil and abuse their own children; but most choose not to. Despite the suffering you bear, you have the potential to overturn it and make the world better.

**Before blaming the universe for your misfortunes, first consider - what personal responsibility did you have in your misfortune? Did you do everything within your power to improve your situation, or did you passively sabotage yourself by letting bad things happen to you?**

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn served as a Russian soldier in WWII. He was then arrested and imprisoned by his own people. He got cancer. His misfortunes seemed out of his control. Then he wrote _The Gulag Archipelago_, at great risk to himself, to expose Soviet prison camps and the flaws of Lenin’s thinking. He realized his unquestioning support of the Communist Party contributed directly to his misery, and he decided to correct his mistake.

Look at it this way - **if your suffering is your own fault, then you can actually _do something_ about it.** If, in contrast, it’s entirely the universe’s fault, then reality itself is flawed, and you are perpetually doomed, and you have absolutely no ability to change that. Which worldview would you rather have?

Often, disasters could have been prevented with the right mindset. Peterson argues lack of preparation is a sin. When times are good, we get complacent and forget our commitments and responsibilities. Then when disaster strikes, we omit our personal responsibility in causing it. We may learn our lesson temporarily and make empty promises to improve, but inevitably we forget, and so the cycle repeats.

*   The New Orleans flood, Peterson argues, could have been prevented with legislation passed in 1965. By Katrina in 2005, only 60% of the work had been done. In contrast, the Netherlands protects its borders with dams built to withstand a once-in-10,000-year storm.

Before blaming the universe, or a political faction, or an enemy, put your own house in order. **Have you taken full advantage of every opportunity available to you?** Are you working hard at your career? Your relationships? Outside of work to improve yourself?

**Are you doing anything you know is wrong? Stop it today.** Stop when you feel when an inkling that you should stop. **Stop saying things that make you feel ashamed and cowardly; start saying things that make you feel strong.** Do only those things about which you would speak with honor.

A nice quote from the book: “If you cannot bring peace to your household, how dare you try to rule a city?”

As you continue doing this, you will continue discovering further wrongs that you can right. Your life will become simpler and more honorable. You’ll stop filling your head with lies and resentment. Then you might see existence as naturally good and worth maintaining. You’ll become resistant to the trials and misfortunes that do appear. And imagine if all people did this - how magnificent would the world be then?

Rule 6: Think: Have I Done Everything Within My Ability?

Before blaming the universe for your misfortunes, first consider what you can do about it.

Exercise: Do Everything Within Your Ability

So suffering in life is inevitable. The universe can be unfair. In a hundred million years, nothing we do will likely matter. What does one do in the face of this knowledge?

One response is to take the expedient path. Indulge short-term pleasures and put off long-term commitments. Do what feels the best today - indulge your basest desires all the time. Even lie, cheat, and steal to get what you want. Do these things even if you know it makes your future self worse off than better.

Of course, **we _know_ this is what we _shouldn’t_ be doing.** We know we should be doing the hard things today to make our lives better in the future. **We should suppress our immediate impulses to bring future rewards**, like studying today and putting off partying to build the career we really want.

One obstacle is our powerful biological instincts - they kept us alive in the Stone Age, but they’re counterproductive today (overeating 100,000 years ago helped us survive a period of famine; today it leads to obesity). But on a **higher conscious level**, it’s hard to answer: why? How do we define what’s good and worth doing, and what isn’t?

In 12 Rules for Life, Peterson tackles it this way: it seems intuitively true that certain things can be defined as Evil - most abhorrently, conscious human malevolence. Auschwitz, mass shootings, enslavement, knowing torment of others - these are all things most people believe are bad, even without having to read a philosophy book. You likely believe the world is better off without these things happening.

If there is such a thing as Evil, then **Good must be the antithesis of Evil - Good is whatever stops Evil from happening.** Good alleviates unnecessary pain and suffering.

In the most extreme of cases, literally fighting evil is good - as typified in the Union’s antislavery stance in the Civil War, and the Allies’ anti-Holocaust stance in World War II. But all actions exist on a spectrum, and resolving even little bits of bad are good. This could mean counseling a friend to get out of a bad situation. This could mean improving your own health, so that you have more ability and time to do good. This could mean empowering others to do good - even by helping people understand what good and evil are, like Peterson is doing.

**Doing good has Meaning.** When you act with Meaning, you will attain more security and strength than would be granted by a short-sighted concern for your own security. **What you do will matter to you. In turn, you’ll feel better about your existence**, and the evils and injustices of the world are more tolerable, because you know they can be overcome. Remember Socrates who, believing his principles to be right, retained the strength to speak truth at his trial and accepted his death with resolve.

If you’re the type to bemoan your existence, Peterson argues doing good is the salve - by doing good, you are compensating for the sins of your existence and those of humankind.

Meaning is the mature substitute for expedience. Expedience rejects responsibility; it doesn’t have the wisdom or sophistication to look ahead and plan carefully; it has no courage or sacrifice; it’s the easy way out. Meaning regulates impulses and recognizes the value of making the world better. **By providing deeper meaning, Meaning gratifies all impulses.**

Ask yourself - **how can I make the world a little bit better today?** Aim upwards. Pay attention. Fix what you can fix.

Even more deeply - what is your true nature? **What must you become, knowing who you truly are?** How can you make the world a LOT better, if only you made certain changes in your life? Something valuable, given up, ensures future prosperity.

**The greater the change you want to make, the greater the sacrifice might be.** Inverting the question - what is the greatest sacrifice you can make, that of what you love most - and what good will come of it? In so doing, you change the structure of reality in your favor.

---

The above is his main point in the chapter, but Peterson also discusses two other topics:

### The Historical Rise and Fall of Meaning

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. 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.

(Shortform note: In one interpretation, these temptations are different paths for Jesus to become a Messiah by demonstrating supernatural powers. He can easily alleviate physical hardships; he can relieve Roman oppression by seizing the kingdoms. Jesus rejects these options - he wants to undergo his trials without powers that ordinary humans don’t have, in effect becoming a practical role model for humans. Instead of making bread for everyone, **he sets an example of a practice that can _forever_ solve the problem of hunger for everyone - rejection of immediate gratification and the temptations of evil**.)

Despite its tremendous influence, Christianity had a few problems that limited its reach in the modern day:

*   It failed to sufficiently address the problem of suffering in the present day (“why would God allow this atrocity to happen?”), which helped give rise to science and alchemy.
*   People felt Jesus had already died to relieve all of mankind’s sins, thus freeing people from personal moral obligation.
*   Protestant belief switched from salvation by works to salvation by faith.
    *   In Catholic belief (and that of other denominations), both faith and works are necessary for salvation. However, this raised an issue of how to assess “worthiness,” and allowed kings to see themselves as morally superior to their subjects.
    *   The Protestant switch was meant partially as an expression of equality between all people - salvation comes from faith alone. However, this move devalued effort in this life, since one couldn’t earn salvation anyway.

Nietzsche argues that humans killed God, and they would have to invent their own values in the aftermath. However, ideologies like fascism and communism filled the void instead.

In _12 Rules for Life_, Peterson argues that the individual must be constrained and molded by a disciplinary structure before she can act freely and competently. As secularism rose, a void in disciplinary structure grew; filling it was nihilism and susceptibility to new utopian ideas, like fascism. Hence he wrote this book to provide a reworked structure for people to follow.

### Order and Chaos

Chaos is unexplored territory. It’s the things and situations we don’t understand. It’s where you go when you get fired; it’s the threatening stranger on the street; it’s the scary audacious goal you’ve wanted. It’s also the realm of possibility and where new ideas form.

Order is explored territory. It’s stability and structure. It’s your plan for the next day, the comfort of tradition, the customs we use to treat each other. Yet it also can mean concentration camps, fascism, and, less extremely, personal stasis and lack of growth.

We like being in Order. We don’t like when we are forced to leave Order for Chaos, like when tragedy strikes, when you’re cheated on by your partner, or when you’re fired.

But Order isn’t enough - there are still vital things to be learned. **The ideal place is to be right in the middle. To have enough Order to feel tethered, but enough Chaos to be challenged and learn new things.** This is where meaning is to be found.

Rule 7: Do What is Meaningful, and You Will Feel Better About Existing

This rule discusses not only lying to others, but also lying to yourself and obscuring your personal truth. Instead, you need to develop your personal truth, then act consistently with it. This chapter is fairly abstract, but try to see if its principles resonate with a specific problem you have in life.

### Why You Lie

Day to day, **you may lie to the outside world to get what you want and to avoid pain**. You tell lies to appear more competent, to gain status, to be well-liked, to prevent conflict. This is you manipulating the world.

**On a deeper level, you may lie to yourself about what you want**. You might have a dream life envisioned by your younger self, without probing carefully into whether you really want it (career and retirement goals are common examples here). You may entertain ideas about what you really want, but deceive yourself into thinking they’re impossible to reach or undesirable after all. You then act in ways that you paper over with more lies, but deep down you know it’s inconsistent with your beliefs, and you feel unsettled.

Beware of the big lie (in Hitler’s terms) something so large and audacious that you cannot accept someone would intentionally fabricate it. This could be about who to blame for your faults, or what you should do with your life.

You may not be actively misleading other people, but **merely lying by omission. This isn’t any better.** If your boss does something you dislike, not confronting her about it is still lying - you’re acting inauthentically, not in accordance with your beliefs. If you habitually avoid conflict, don’t complain when mistreated, and suppress your own ideas, you’re still lying to yourself. This makes you feel weak, because your existence has little real meaning. **You’ve become a tool to be used, obliterating your independence.**

Even worse, on a meta level, **you may be in _denial_ about lying to yourself**. You may believe that your truth is the only truth, and that no amount of new knowledge can change what you believe. That all important facts have been discovered, and that everything will work out perfectly.

Your lie may begin with protecting yourself from reality. You may believe reality is intolerable and must be distorted. You want to avoid that short-term pain. But after a certain point, **the lies take on a life of their own**.

*   First you start with a little lie, then support it with further little lies.
*   Then you distort your thinking to avoid shame of those lies.
*   Then those lies become necessary and become ritualized into unconscious action.
*   **The longer you lie, the more you believe it, and the harder it is to undo.**

All the lying may work in the short term, but ultimately you will run into failure. **If you betray yourself, if you act out a lie, you weaken your character. If you have a weak character, adversity will bulldoze you.** By failing to react the first time, you’ve already trained yourself to tolerate things you disagree with.

This leads to bitterness. Because you are avoiding pain and fabricating your world, you are likely to avoid personal responsibility for your failures. You will blame the world as unfair, and other people as getting in your way. It’s not hard to take this one step further to believing “they must be stopped,” and another step further into revenge.

**All this applies to many levels of existence.** You may be lying to yourself:

*   About what you want to do with the rest of your life.
*   That you enjoy a job that actually bites against your being.
*   That you continue relationships you know are toxic, under the guise of convenience or comfort.
*   That you’re not capable of something, that it’s not worth trying, even though deep down you know you really want it.
*   That a bad habit really isn’t that bad, or actually good for you.
*   That things will get better on their own and things will magically work out without your involvement.
*   That you know what you’re doing in life, when really you’re too scared to confront uncertainty.

Clearly telling lies to yourself leads to bad outcomes and misery. What do you do?

### How to Tell the Truth

#### Step 1) Develop your personal truth.

Figure out what you really want and why. If you don’t know what you want, you can start with tradition and work from there. **Your truth is truly personal to you, based on you and your circumstances.**

**Ambitions based around developing character and ability are better than status and power.** You can lose status, sometimes in ways out of your control; but no matter what happens, you carry character whereever you go.

(Shortform note: because people have different truths, naturally people should have different goals. And as we learned in Rule 4, this means comparing yourself to other people is pointless.)

Confronting the idea that you’ve been lying to yourself will likely be painful. Error requires sacrifice to correct it. The larger the error, the larger the sacrifice you need. This may mean accepting weaknesses you didn’t want to confront earlier. It may mean having conflicts with people you were lying to before. This is the cost of getting on the right track, but it’s worth it.

**Once you develop a personal truth, it gives you a destination to travel toward.** It gives you a personal code of conduct to act by. Having a personal truth reduces anxiety, because having either everything or nothing available are far worse options.

#### **Step 2) Act only consistently with your personal truth**.

Speak in a way that makes you feel strong, not weak. **Act only in ways that your internal voice does not object to.** A lie spoils all the truth it touches, like a tiny drop of sewage in a bottle of wine.

**Are you doing anything you know is wrong? Stop it today.** Stop when you feel an inkling that you should stop. **Stop saying things that make you feel ashamed and cowardly; start saying things that make you feel strong.** Do only those things about which you would speak with honor.

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.”

#### Step 3) Keep an open mind to new information and keep adjusting your truth.

**Be willing to learn from what you don’t know.** While tradition is a good start, it may no longer apply if the circumstances have truly changed. Putting yourself in new situations will literally grow your brain. Transform your values as you progress.

\====

Again, all of this applies to many levels of existence.

*   From the deepest level, it means defining what you want to do with your life, and shifting your time and energy to achieving progress in that direction.
*   It means defining what kinds of relationships you want with people, and reconstructing ones that don’t meet your wants.
*   It means doing something about things you disagree with in the world - how a country is moving, a policy your employer enacts, how you see a stranger treat another stranger.
*   It means telling your friend or partner what you really think, at the expense of a conflict for a longer-term gain.

**What do you do when you don’t know what to do? Tell the truth. At the very least, you will be trusted for being honest, and you’ll feel the strength that comes with authenticity.**

Rule 8: Act Only in Line With Your Personal Truth - Stop Lying

Learn to stop lying to yourself and others. Develop a personal truth to live by.

Exercise: Tell Your Truth

We’ve all been in situations where someone seems to be talking endlessly, and we’re tempted to disengage.

But take a more generous view of the situation. **People talk because this is how they think.** They explore past events, discover how they feel about it, simulate the world, and plan how to act in it. They can figure out what stupid things they shouldn’t do, then not do them. They formulate the problem they are struggling with, before designing a solution. You’re doing them a favor by listening.

Some people are capable of thinking alone and have internal conversations with themselves. This is more difficult than talking out loud with another person - it requires you to model other points of view (in effect being multiple people at the same time), have the models disagree, and resolve the disagreement. This is demanding, requiring you to tolerate conflict and adjust your perceptions of the world internally.

Thus, **many people prefer to talk to a listener. They organize their brains with conversation.**

Thus rises the classic stereotype in how men and women treat conversation differently. Women want to converse as a mode of thinking, going over their day and struggles they’ve faced. In response, men want to design efficient solutions and move on. **Rushing this process robs the speaker of their ability to think**, and it signals that you dismiss the importance of what the speaker has to say. Instead, the speaker feels a need to formulate the problem in conversation. **They need to be listened to and questioned to ensure clarity in the formulation. Only then is there a problem that is solvable.**

**As a listener, you are helping the other person think.** True listening is paying attention and accepting what the person has to say.

*   Sometimes, you don’t really have to say anything - the person solves her own problem merely by speaking aloud. Just by giving sympathetic responses, you signal that you value the speaker, that her experiences are important and deserving of consideration.
*   Other times, you serve as the voice of common reason, helping ground the person and revealing what the other person is ignoring.

In effect, we stay sane by talking to other people. People who listen and engage in conversation help us figure out our problems.

*   (In connection with Rule 5 about parenting, Peterson argues this is why parents have an ethical obligation to raise their children to be socially acceptable - a child who is rejected by society reduces willing conversation partners, which can lead to madness.)

**If you listen without premature judgment, people will tend to trust you and tell you everything they’re thinking.**

### Listening Can Teach You Valuable Things

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.** After all, if your life isn’t perfect right now, this must be true - you must not have all the answers.

Therefore, go into every conversation with the idea that you have something to learn from this, that the other person’s experiences are valuable. Without genuinely believing this, you will find it difficult to carry a fulfilling conversation.

(Shortform note: this is why conversations with certain people can always feel frustrating - neither party believes they can learn anything from the other, so it’s just two people trying to talk over each other.)

### How to Listen Well

The best conversations occur when all parties are listening to each other, trying to solve a problem together, and build to a synthesis greater than what each person started out with. All act with the premise that they have something to learn. This constitutes active philosophy. Everyone leaves with an improved worldview and better knowledge of their conversation partners.

As a comparison, these are **common examples of poor listening** that lead to lack of connection and synthesis:

*   Trying to jockey for status in the social hierarchy - a game of one-upsmanship in telling a better story or appearing to have a better life.
*   Monologues enforcing one’s viewpoint without opening paths for replies. These are often meant to _shut off_ thinking in the listener.
*   Absentmindedly thinking about what to say next, rather than addressing what is being said
*   Stubbornly disregarding what is being said, out of fear of changing your opinion

Sound familiar? We all do this at one point or another, often to great discontent.

**Here is the most effective listening technique: summarize the person’s message.** Say something like, “let me make sure I have this right - what I’m hearing is **\_\_**.” This has very helpful effects:

*   You take the time to genuinely understand what is being said, rather than skirting over it on the surface.
*   You give the person a chance to correct what you said, or emphasize something you didn’t. This improves your understanding of the other person.
*   You extract the moral of the story, discarding the meandering paths that are a natural consequence of thinking aloud. This forms a successful, lightweight memory for the listener.
*   You avoid strawman arguments. Normally you might pick up a single element and distort it to absurdity. This is obviously counterproductive. If you understand the core of what is being said, you will more likely find the value in it.
*   You strengthen your arguments further against challenge. By stating your opponent’s viewpoint better than she can, you build a steelman (as opposed to a strongman). If you can successfully defeat the steelman, you can develop even stronger, more well-reasoned beliefs.

Assume that your conversational partner has reached careful, thoughtful conclusions based on her own valid experiences. Assume that they want to engage with you as a voice of reason, not oppress you. Reflect their viewpoints back to them, and only then share your own viewpoint.

### Other Tips for Conversations

A tip for resolving arguments: When you argue with someone and reach a dead end, take time to separate and sit alone. Each person should think, “What have I done to contribute to what we’re arguing about? I made a mistake somewhere, even if it’s small or far away.” Then when you get back together, admit your mistakes.

Good lectures are actually conversations that happen to be given to many _individuals_ at once. As a public speaker, you should talk _with individuals_. Make eye contact with a specific person, note her confusion or acceptance, and modify your conversation accordingly. Then switch to another audience member.

Rule 9: Listen to Other People Thoughtfully - You’ll Learn Something

When you have a problem, there is often the temptation to paper it over, to think the problem will go away by itself. It’s easier to keep the peace and avoid the anxiety, despair, sadness that will come with confronting your problems. **It’s easier to pretend the problem doesn’t exist than to admit it does and the pain that accompanies it.**

Maybe you hate going into work everyday. Maybe you can’t stand the way your partner chews. Maybe you stare blankly at the ceiling each morning, unable to drag yourself out of bed. Maybe you feel a simmering level of rage throughout the day. You don’t know exactly what it is, but it’s more pleasant not to think too hard about it and try to get through another day.

Left unaddressed, this will gradually build until it leads to a catastrophic failure. You will regret not having acted sooner.

**Specificity turns chaos into a thing that you can deal with.** If you have a vague unease, you will struggle with it until **you define it explicitly and give it a concrete form**. Once you precisely identify the issue, you will likely realize that you were far more afraid than you should have been, and you now have a specific target to confront.

If you have a cancer somewhere in your body, wouldn’t you want to know where and what it is as soon as possible, so you can do something about it? **Why don’t you treat every other problem in your life with the same urgency and clarity?**

**Give structure to the chaos through specific speech**. If you speak carefully and precisely, you can make order from the chaos, develop a new goal, and navigate to it.

Precision sorts out the uniquely terrible thing from all the other, equally terrible things that did _not_ happen. If you have a pain in your abdomen, you start with a vague set of terrifying possibilities. Then you go to the doctor, who collapses the possibilities into a single, clear diagnosis. You feel less anxiety, certain now that it’s addressable, and you laugh at your previous anxiety. **Why are your other concerns and problems any different?**

You cannot move in life without aiming at a direction. Random wandering will not move you forward. It will make you disappointed and frustrated and resentful.

Be precise. **What is the problem, exactly? What do you want, exactly? Why, exactly?**

Endure the sharp pain of specificity and confrontation instead of the chronic vague dull ache of negligence. Once you identify it, things will get better.

### Interpersonal Conflicts

Many issues of this sort have to do with interpersonal relations, particularly with your romantic partner. Communicating what you really think risks immediate negative emotion - resentment, jealousy, frustration, hatred. So it’s easy just to pretend you’re a saint, try to move on, that “it’s not worth fighting about.”

**In a marriage, there is little that is not worth fighting about.** Do you really want an annoyance tormenting you every day of your marriage, for the decades? All it takes to invite disaster is to do nothing.

The longer you wait, the more the little problems form a thick interrelated cobweb. Each small unresolved resentment piles onto the next one, aggregating into a ball of hate. Sometimes the person you resent is totally unaware that you’re resentful. You behave poorly, which makes the other person react poorly, thus perpetuating a vicious cycle. Each argument becomes difficult to extricate from all the other problems - hence the stereotypical couple’s argument digging up grievances from years past.

Instead, **specify exactly what is bothering you**. Share this with the person. It’s far better to do this earlier than later. If you let everyday resentment gather, it may eventually bubble up and destroy everyone.

**Focus the argument only on the specific thing that is bothering.** Both people should promise just to solve _just that one issue_ - the other problems will have their due time, so don’t unearth them or get distracted.

One by one, you reveal and solve each issue. You clear the cobweb that was once impenetrable.

(Shortform suggestion: As you discuss, **keep asking why**. You can’t clean out a dental cavity without digging out all the rot from the very bottom. Maybe she finds his laugh annoying (why?), because she doesn’t want him to be happy when she isn’t (why?), because she thinks he held her back from her ambition when they agreed to focus on _his_ career, but she now regrets it (why?), because she saw how it ate at her mother and ruined her parents’ marriage, and now she feels guilty about not being stronger as a person.

Now she sees it’s not really about his laugh, but about far deeper issues. These issues are hard to fix and take time - but it’s far better to know what the issue is, than to ignore it and try to pretend it doesn’t exist.)

### The World in Abstraction

We have a tendency not to dig into things because it makes our lives easier. Day to day we perceive the world with vast simplifications, happily unaware of the complexities underlying the surface. We perceive only what is enough for our plans to work and for us to get by.

When everything works according to plan, we don’t need to peer under the surface. We drive a car, indifferent to how an engine transmits power to the wheels, the labor that produced the car, the electricity that powers the street lamps. We just care that the car functions to get us from point A to point B. We abstract away the world to simplify our lives, because there is too much complexity to understand in ways that aren’t immediately useful.

**When the world doesn’t work properly, you _have to_ peer into this complexity.** This is chaos. Chaos provokes anxiety. When your car breaks, you have to figure out what’s wrong, find a mechanic who can fix it, think about how to just a mechanic, figure out how much the unexpected cost will eat into your financial plans. You may plunge further into chaos: are drivers more dangerous now? Am I incompetent as a driver? When the simplified world breaks down, the complex world that was hidden away becomes obvious.

This happens with relationships too. In a stable romantic relationship, both people have their roles and identities, their history, their conception of the future. If one partner cheats on the other, all is shattered. How could this possibly have happened? Who is this person I’m living with? How could she have done this? What part of the happy past needs to be rewritten?

Precision of aim and careful attention protect us when things break down.

Rule 10: Define Your Problem Specifically - It Becomes Easier to Deal With

Give your problem specific form, and it becomes easier to deal with.

Exercise: Define Your Problem Specifically

(Shortform note: Depending on your viewpoint, this can be a controversial chapter as Peterson bemoans the “postmodernist” interpretation of gender as a social construct. He criticizes the assertion that biological differences between men and women do not exist.)

This chapter is meandering and confusing, but the main point is this: modern society desires gender equality. When gender equality means equal opportunity, rights, and treatment, this is good.

However, it can be taken too far - like denying _any_ biological difference between males and females, and insisting that behavior and outcomes be equal in _every_ way. This idea of literal, complete quality is not supported by biology, and it could be counterproductive because it forces people against their nature. For example, we might raise boys to “feminize” them, erasing their biological tendencies and making them less independent and more agreeable. This is counter to their nature and can cause unintended consequences.

### The Flaws of Complete Equality

Some postmodernist thinking claims that all of gender is entirely a social construct, that it was popularized by men to oppress women. This began with roots in communist ideals that all people should be equal, that the rich exploited the labor of the poor, and that social structures were put in place by the rich to oppress the poor. When implementing this idea largely failed in the Soviet Union and China, the Marxist ideals were rewritten, from the idea of oppression of the poor by the rich, to **oppression of _everyone_ by the powerful**.

When extended to its logical conclusion, this promoted skepticism that **every cultural construct and hierarchy was merely constructed by the powerful to continue their oppression** - science benefits only the scientists, gender classification benefits only the males, management benefits only the managers, measurement of skill benefit only the skilled. As the thinking goes, every hierarchy is an artificial construct made up to selfishly benefit the powerful and to exclude others. This means everything in the world is largely up to interpretation.

Peterson decries the nihilism in this approach, the rejection of all categorizations as done _only_ for power reasons. Surely power and corruption play some role in hierarchies, but they aren’t necessarily the only role or even the primary role. And believing this idea may be counter-productive, if it limits cooperation and contravenes biological roots evolved over millions of years.

The idea of complete equality itself is flawed. In general, **pursuit of any valued goal produces a hierarchy - some people will be better and some will be worse**. In modern well-functioning societies, the hierarchy is based on competence and ability, not power. (Peterson argues the best predictors of long-term success in Western countries are IQ and conscientiousness.)

Take the most diehard egalitarian, and when she gets sick, see if she wants to find a more reputable, more skilled doctor. See then if she believes in a hierarchy of skill that is not merely an artificial construct.

To demand absolute equality between all people in all situations would require sacrificing value itself.

There is a perverse logic to the argument that all hierarchy is socially constructed. Its believers desire for _all inequalities_ to be eliminated, on the basis of fairness. But - IF some inequalities are hard-wired into our genes, or have functional purposes (like identifying the spectrum of skill), or result from free will (females may, given completely equal environmental treatment, just enjoy nursing more than males do), THEN proposing obliterating these would sound unreasonable. It would mean opposing free will, or overwriting biology.

In other words, **find someone who insists that _all_ hierarchies are artificial constructs, and you’ll see someone who cannot stomach the idea of inequality in any sense**.

### Accepting Inequality

Instead of bemoaning a narrow hierarchy, instead celebrate the complexity of culture that allows for a large number of games and successful players. Different people can have very different levels of success in different dimensions, and so one’s outcomes can’t be compared to anyone else's outcomes. Trying to compress everyone into completely equal outcomes - regardless of biology, behavior, and personal preferences - may be destructive.

Within gender, Peterson maintains **there are clear biological differences between men and women** - men tend to be more interested in things while women are more interested in people; men are more disobedient and women are more agreeable. The variation among individuals is very high - the most \[adjective\] of one gender is more \[adjective\] than the average person of the other gender (for instance, the most aggressive female is more aggressive than the average male), but by and large, the general trend is true.

And in societies with more social freedom (like Sweden) the gender imbalance in certain professions is magnified. For instance, the imbalance of males and females in engineering is greater than it is in the Middle East, where there is less social freedom. The implication is that when given freedom, people do what they naturally want to do.

When it gets down to it, even with equal opportunity, **what if women _really_ just want to nurse and teach more than men, and men _really_ want to design bridges more than women?** Should we force equality in ways that wouldn’t naturally arise, like forcing a 50-50 gender split in every single profession? What are the costs and benefits of this type of policy?

The idea that gender is a construct used to exert power has led to continuous (Peterson calls unfair) attacks on men. Men’s accomplishments are considered unearned due to their privilege by being born males; their ambitions make them plunderers. Men are attacked as oppressors, when there is little historical evidence that the patriarchy was deliberately designed by men to subjugate women and assert dominance.

Instead, Peterson considers another biological possibility - that women, by nature of sexual specialization, have to bear children; and that when they get pregnant, they need more protection than usual. In a time when humanity faced many more existential threats, with a higher probability of death and higher risk inherent in unwanted pregnancies, different legal treatments of men and women may have arisen.

*   This also explains why women tend to prefer mates who are at equal or higher social status levels, while males are more indifferent (this is true across cultures).
*   This leads to the depletion of possible mates for high-status women. Women who have to care for infants don’t want an adult male baby to look after as well.

### How to Treat Boys as They’re Growing

Peterson wants society to be amenable to the idea that **boys and men want to prove their competence, to friends and to romantic partners.** Boys want to skirt at the edge of danger, where life is challenging enough to grow. This is why friends tease each other and have hazing rituals, subjecting newcomers to social stress - they are evaluating character and determining who can be trusted, who has a strong spine, who is entertaining.

Peterson decries the neutering of male independence for the sake of gender equality. Instead of being independent, boys raised this way become socially weak and dependent on parents. Still, their natural urges remain, and they’ll lash out in other ways, like adhering to violent, fascist ideologies. “Men have to toughen up. Men demand it, and women want it.”

Modern parental overprotection robs men of this opportunity. Don’t remove risk from life - let children optimize for it and improve their competence. Let boys push against authority and toughen up and do some seemingly dangerous things. Hence his rule: “Leave children alone when they’re skateboarding.”

(Shortform note: while he discusses men and independence, Peterson doesn’t complete the argument to discuss how society should raise girls to suit female natural instincts.)

Rule 11: Accept that Inequality Exists

Suffering in life is guaranteed. This idea is present 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. Peterson’s daughter suffered from unexplained juvenile rheumatoid arthritis for decades, enduring years of chronic pain and risking amputation. There is little more to question the sanity and justice of the world than having an ill child. What kind of god would allow this to happen?

One response to this, as stated above, is to hate your god or the universe for these outcomes. Stretched to its extreme, this becomes hatred of existence, and the desire to destroy existence itself. When practiced, this leads to genocide and mass murders. Clearly this is evil, causing suffering in the name of suffering, and not the right response.

Another response, which only partially mitigates the suffering, is to acknowledge that **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. In response, the writers had to make him weak to kryptonite to make his stories interesting.

Peterson could have wished for her daughter to have an indestructible metal skeleton, or an inhumanly high threshold to pain. But then her daughter would be changed to a different person, even a monster. What can be loved about a person can’t be separated from their limitations.

There are also coping mechanisms for dealing with suffering. Promise yourself that you’ll only worry about a problem at a specific time of day (not at night, or else you can’t sleep) then promise not to think about the problem outside these scheduled times. This conserves your strength and allows you to deal with the rest of life, which doesn’t care what problems you’re facing.

**Finally, 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.

Rule 12: Take Time to Indulge in Little Bits of Goodness

Reflect on what you learned from 12 Rules for Life.