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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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:
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:
Finally, what can you do to achieve your most important desires?
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.
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.
Negotiate with yourself and honor your commitments.
Continue to pay attention.
Once you put this into practice, you’ll improve how you feel about your self-worth and comparing yourself to other people.
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.