12 Rules For Life — Review Part 2
In a previous article, I shared my review of the first five rules Jordan Peterson defines in his book 12 Rules for Life. All rules have their metaphors, and in this article, I continue to explore and expand such ideas on life, including my own.
Rule 6: Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world.
Jordan Peterson should write more on this rule. It ought to be taught in schools, churches, and everywhere. In the previous article, I shared a bit about myself, the opportunities I had to chase, and the challenges I faced. As one would imagine, I complained at every challenge and obstacle, but Gabrielle Chanel once said, “I lived my life knowing that everything I don’t like has an opposite”. So when Jordan Peterson writes:
Consider your circumstances. Start Small. Have you taken full advantage of the opportunities offered to you? Have you cleaned up your life?
I shout, HEAR HEAR! How often have we heard someone complain about their relationships or jobs? Then you ask them, “What will you do about it?” and they get offended. Some answer, “How dare you to ask me that? People need to make my life easy”. If not out loud, it would be written in the eyes of those who enjoy complaining without seeking or turning every stone for a solution. Life is complicated, and people sometimes make it even more difficult. If you are lucky, you’d either be raised by parents who will move mountains for you or meet someone who would do the same. When I say “move mountains”, I don’t mean they will solve the problem, far from it. “Moving mountains” is a metaphor used when someone makes every possible effort, whether in action or support. One can find a person who makes every possible effort to hear your distress from a different perspective and goes on to help you see or understand the situation better. We don’t have to do everything by ourselves to feel accomplished. As the book says:
Life is short, and you don’t have time to figure everything out on your own.
Rule 7: Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient).
Sacrifice now, to gain later. Sacrifice will improve the future.
Admittedly, this line contradicts the conventional mode-de-Vivre of “you only live once”, which pushes us to take risks and indulge in the immediate pleasures of life. The “sacrifice” Jordan talks about aligns with all these, but we often see them standing on opposite sides of a river. Say a person wants to buy branded items or travel the world. Perhaps that person wants to be their boss or live a life ‘off the grid’. Whatever it is that one aspires it will always require some sacrifice. The magnitude of the sacrifice changes depending on a person’s aspirations. Still, no sacrifice means that, as a person, you accept whatever life throws at you without attempting to direct it your way. People have come to correlate success with delayed gratification, such as “study now and enjoy later”, “save money to be able to travel”, and “learn a new skill to sustain your life better”.
People avoid sacrifices because some accomplishments take work. Peterson says another thing that is remarkably on point:
Sometimes when things are not going well, it’s not the world that’s the cause. The cause is instead that which is currently most valued, subjectively and personally.
Imagine you have a dream, and you measure yourself against that dream. How close are you to it? How difficult is it for you to get to it? It requires less effort to blame everyone else except ourselves when things get tough. We start hating the world, and that is true. We often ask, “why can’t things be easy for me at least once in this life?” I know I said it. And it is true that I only felt that way because I was challenged against something that I valued. But pursuing it was my gratification, and having meaning in my life is essential.
After my doctorate, I spent around one year and a half existing. I achieved what I had worked hard towards for four years, yet the next step had to reveal itself. I was working a job, but my life felt like it had little meaning. There was nothing that excited me to get up in the morning. Knowing that what you are sacrificing has meaning makes all the difference. Even if it takes the form of a sacrifice for a while. Because
to have meaning in your life is better than to have what you want, because you may neither know what you want, nor truly what you need.
Rule 8: Tell the truth — or at least don’t lie.
Everybody tells lies, but not each lie carries the same weight. Saying “you’re fine” when all you want is to cry your heart out or scream at the top of your lungs carries a different weight than lying to your partner about having another family living in another state. So why do people tell heavy lies?
We try to avoid hurting someone, but lying brings more significant hurt and mental trauma. If you lie to your partner and they find out, rest assured that your conversations will be psycho analysed because the trust will begin to tear away. Jordan shares his personal experience in the following:
I soon came to realise that almost everything I said was untrue. I had motives for saying these things: I wanted to win arguments and gain status and impress people and get what I wanted. I was using language to bend and twist the world into delivering what I thought was necessary. But I was a fake.
Not telling the truth comes in different shapes and forms, still lying and faking, but the consequences can differ. We bend the truth to try and get ahead of a situation or to avoid something, and most often, we do it to someone else. But not just. We also bend the truth towards ourselves.
We are also capable of lying to ourselves in each situation. Be it an individual looking at their body or a student staring at their grades. It could also be an entrepreneur who believes in an idea, and despite all signs saying otherwise, they insist on it. Jordan says:
if you make a move and it isn’t helping you win, then by definition, it’s a bad move. You need to try something different. Insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.
He is not saying “you should give up” but on the contrary. Jordan explains a fundamental technique in science. When the results of an experiment don’t change even after ensuring that the set-up is near perfect, it means something is not correct, and maybe it would be time to look at the theory again. Great discoveries have sometimes been “stumbled” upon and not searched for. Scientists would have had a target for their research, and in that pursuit, they discovered something that may not be what they were looking for and perhaps not the result they wanted, but it was a discovery nonetheless. Setting a target doesn’t mean that nothing can take your eyes away from it, but rather that it is a meaning, and life will slowly show you whether that target is still something you should strive for, or perhaps you changed, and now there is something else that transpires meaning for you. In Jordan’s own words:
It is necessary to aim at your target, with your eyes wide open. You have a direction, but it might be wrong. You have a plan, but it might be ill-informed. You may have been led astray by your own ignorance, and worse, by your own unrevealed corruption. You must remain awake to catch yourself in the act.
It is essential to keep an open mind lifestyle. What we knew years ago is a fraction of what we know today, and knowledge keeps growing with new techniques and tools available to extract and store such information. Closing or blinding your vision to new opportunities, ideas, facts, and ways of living is dangerous.
The act of seeing is particularly important when it challenges what we know and rely on, upsetting and destabilizing us. It is the act of seeing that informs the individual and updates the state. It was for this reason that Nietzsche said that a man’s worth was determined by how much truth he could tolerate.
We all have created a version of the truth that fits our beliefs because we saw and judged what we knew and wanted to understand. When someone or something comes along and shows us something different, that can mean that our entire belief system may crumble underneath us. Such a situation may cause a lot of distress to the individual, and many choose to ignore it to keep their foundation intact. Avoiding such an event threatens the entire understanding system and prevents them from tolerating the truth. We refer to it as “tolerance” because we only tolerate something annoying that perhaps we cannot entirely avoid or defeat. Jordan explains:
Even a good example is insufficient proof, given the differences between individuals. The success of a good example can always be attributed to luck. Thus, you have to risk your particular, individual life to find out. It is this risk that the ancients described as the sacrifice of personal will to the will of God. It is not an act of submission. It is an act of courage. It is faith that the wind will blow your ship to a new and better port. It is the faith that Being can be corrected by becoming. It is the spirit of exploration itself.
Accepting new information is realising that your potential Being is more than you have expected, which may lead you to the life you dream or aspire to live.
Rule 9: Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t
I wish a lot of people would take this rule to heart. It is frustrating when someone is speaking to you, but instead of stopping to listen, you stay playing on your phone or look elsewhere, or worst, answer with a different conversation altogether.
Jordan says the following:
Advice is what you get when the person you’re talking with about something horrible and complicated wishes you would just shut up and go away.
Sometimes this is true, but it is NOT a rule. Sometimes people provide advice because they realise the other person is blocked or wants the advice but is too embarrassed to ask. I don’t believe that ‘giving advice’ means people want you to shut up, especially when they make the time from their busy schedules to dedicate themselves to you and your problems. Perhaps, it would be true when the person doesn’t try to listen and understand but instead starts shooting potential solutions. Overall, one cannot generalise the intent because a piece of advice can be given and asked for in different contexts.
In this chapter, Jordan goes on to discuss this further and makes the following statement:
Memory is a tool. Memory is the past’s guide to the future.
I smiled because I often wondered why our bodies wouldn’t forget things we don’t want to remember. However, this puts things in a different light. Remembering the good times is all good, but remembering the bad things has its purpose, too, and it’s not to hurt us. The things we insist on retaining, purposely or otherwise, are experiences we wish to learn from to guide us further.
Women are often said to be especially good at remembering some things for years and bringing them up during an argument, which their partner would think of as “random”. But it is not! Now for those out there who heavily criticise Jordan for his way of talking, here is something he said that, as a woman, I would tap him on the back:
Women are often intent on formulating the problem when they are discussing something, and they need to be listened to, even questions, to help ensure clarity in the information. Then, whatever problem is left, if any, can be helpfully solved. (It should also be noted first that too-early-problem-solving may also merely indicate a desire to escape from the effort of the problem-formulating conversation.)
Constructive criticism is an evolutionary process in which individuals come together to discuss different perspectives, however, with the same goal of moving forward. I criticise Jordan not for his arguments but for the suppositions that some opinions are made and the information left out. Nonetheless, the views are legit. At times they miss a lot of contexts but are legit.
Rule 10: Be precise in your speech
That is another excellent rule. In my honest and humble opinion, most problems would have been avoided if the people in conversation had been “precise in their speech”.
Whenever I have a scientific block because I can’t understand something or it is unclear, I try to describe it out loud. One may think that whether you say it aloud or not, the problem remains, but talking about it has always helped me. I even practice my data science presentations in front of an audience with little knowledge about the subject. I never understood why and, quite frankly, never tried to find out. It worked for me, and I was content.
Of course, Jordan was referring to different kinds of problems. One may guess from the way he explains the following:
Because to specify the problem is to admit that it exists. But you will learn something from that, and use what you learn in the future, and the alternative to that single sharp pain is the dull ache of continued hopelessness and vague failure and the sense that time, precious time, is slipping by.
Recognising the problem informed me of shortcomings and facts I took for granted. This did the trick. One question that makes me think of an answer and the solution to my problem either appears or a plan to reach a solution. Doing so helped me become a better communicator.
But practising precise speech is beneficial even for self-evaluation. It is for this reason that therapy, speaking frantically with a stranger with no fear of judgement, has shown to have helped people clear their baggage. Jordan adds:
When something goes wrong, even the perception itself must be questioned, along with evaluation, thought and action.
When we are involved in something that went wrong, we may not see a solution, and we need to distance ourselves from it. Having a safe space to tear the problem apart is essential; sometimes, finding an impartial person to help you piece together the puzzle is beneficial.
Rule 11: Do not bother children when they are skateboarding
I didn’t appreciate reading about Rule 11. Writing about it merits an article, which I will link here later.
Rule 12: Pet a cat when you encounter one in the street
Such a rule was easy to enjoy and something everyone should do from time to time. Every day is a busy day, and time has changed its unit. Going on a holiday is all well and good to have a break from the routine, but it can often become more stressful, especially if the itinerary is complex. There is a saying that we should “stop to smell the roses.” I agree. We have grown so accustomed to being busy, the oppression that if you don’t side hustle, have ambitions or pursue a career makes you lazy; we have forgotten our natural habitat.
In the end, there is a reason that most of us seek the company of trees, grass and the great outdoors for peace of mind.
