Letters from Dr. Peterson #1: Anything Worth Doing is Worth Doing Badly
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson is a Professor, Clinical Psychologist, best selling author, and the dad of the internet. I believe that his ideas are worth spreading, so I’m starting a series here which are transcriptions of his viral videos. You can check the source on top of the writing, as some paragraphs are paraphrased or/and taken out. Speedy recovery for Dr. Peterson!
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Source: Anything Worth Doing Is Worth Doing Badly | Jordan Peterson | Best Life Advice
Carl Jung had this idea that you had a potential future self which manifest itself moment to moment in your present life by making you interested in things and the things that you are interested in are the things that would guide you along the path that would lead you to maximal development. The idea is something like:
- “well, you’re set up so that you are automatically interested in those things that would fully expand you as a well-adapted creature”. Or,
- “your interest is captured by those things that would lead you down the path of development”
And so, there is some utility in pursuing those things that you are interested in, that is the call to adventure, and the call to adventure takes you all sorts of places.
Now the problem with the call to adventure is: what the hell do you know? Often is the case when we become interested in something, we do it very badly and shoddily. You stumbled around like an idiot when you try to do something new. That is why the fool is the precursor to the savior, from the symbolic perspective. You have to be a fool before you can be a master and if you are not willing to be a fool then you cannot be a master.
It is an error ridden process that is also laid out in the old testament stories. The first thing that happens to all these patriarchal figures when God kicks them out of their father’s house when they are like eighty-four is that they run into all sorts of trouble. Some of it social and some of it natural and some of it is consequences of their own moral inadequacy. So, they are fools but the thing that is so interesting is that despite the fact that they are fools they are still supposed to go on the adventure and that they are capable of learning enough as a consequences of moving forward on the adventure so that they straighten themselves out across time.
Imagine that something glimmers before you. It is an interest that is dawning and you decide first of all you are paralyzed, you think “well, how do I know if I should pursue that? It is probably a stupid idea”. And the prosper responds to that is, “you are right, it probably is a stupid idea. Because almost all ideas are stupid” and so the probability that as you move forward on your adventure that you are going to get it right the first time is zero. It is just not going to happen, and so you might think “I’ll just wait around until I get the right idea” and which people do right, they are like 40-year-old thirteen-year-old which is not a good idea. So, they wait around until they finally get it right. But the problem is you are too stupid to know when you got it right, so waiting around is not going to help. Because even if the perfect opportunity manifested itself to you in your incomplete form, the probability that you would recognize it as the perfect opportunity is zero. You might even think that it is the worst possible idea that you have ever heard of anywhere.
Nietzsche called that “a will to stupidity”. He thought of stupidity as “something you need to take into account when doing something” fundamentally and work with it. You can take these tentative steps on your pathway to destiny and you can assume that you are going to do it badly and that is really useful. Because you do not have to beat yourself up, it is pretty easy to do it badly. And that is a hell a lot better than just rotting away at home.
So, you start your path. When you start your adventure at point A the world looks a particular way, but when you move to point B here the world looks different! And you are also different, as a consequence of having made that voyage. And what that means is, the thing that you are interested in is slightly different from when you first imagine it to be. Because you are not very good at specifying it to begin with, and now that you are a little sharper and more focus than you were it is going to reveal itself with more accuracy to you. So then, you think you have to take an almost 180-degree reversal, but you actually don’t! You have gone this far and that is a long way to get that far but that is a lot farther than you would be if you just stayed where you were waiting.
And so, it does not matter that you overshoot continually because as you overshoot, even if you do not learn what you should have done you are going to continually learn what should not keep doing. And if you learn enough what you should not keep doing, then that is tantamount at some point to learning at the same time what you should be doing. What is cool about it though, I think, is that as you progress the degree of overshooting start to decline. As you learn a new skill, such as to play a new song on the piano for example, you overshoot madly making all sorts of mistake to begin with and then the mistakes disappear.
It is okay to wander around stupidly before you fix destination. You see this echoed in Exodus. Because what happens is that the Hebrews escape a tyranny (which is kind of whatever you do personally and psychologically when you escape from your previous set of stupidly held and ignorant and stubborn axioms). You might think ‘great! I have freed myself from that!’ Well, then what? You might think ‘well, now I am on the way!’ No, you are not. Now you are in the dessert. Where you wander around stupidly and worship the wrong things until you finally organize yourselves morally again and head in the proper direction. You got rid of a whole set of scaffolds that were keeping you in place, even though they were pathological. Now you have nothing. And nothing turns out to actually be better than something pathological but you’re still with the problem of nothing.
That is why Exodus is structured the way that it is. You escaped from a tyranny “hooray we are no longer slaves!,” well now you are nihilistic and lost. It is not necessarily an improvement. You think, that is just a linear pathway uphill. It is just from one success to another; no, it is not. Here you are, you are not doing too badly and the first step is a complete bloody catastrophe, it is worst. And then, maybe, you could pull yourself together and you hit a new plateau and then that crumbles and shakes and bang it is worst again. And so, part of the reason people does not become enlighten is because it is punctuated by intermittent desserts by intermittent catastrophe. And if you do not know that, well then you are basically screwed.
You go ahead on your movement forward and you collapse and you think “well, that did not work, I collapsed”. No, that is par for the course. It is not an indication that you have failed. It is just an indication that it is really hard. And that when you unlearn something, you also learn something. And the thing you unlearned is probably useful and unlearning it is actually painful. Let’s say you have to get out of a bad relationship, there is no relationships that is 100% bad and so when you jumped out of it maybe you are in a better shape; but you are still lonesome and disoriented and you do not know what your past was and you do not know what your present is and you do not know what your future is. That is why people stay with the devil they know instead of looking for the devil they do not know.
So, anyways, the fact that you are full of faults does not mean you have to stop. And thank God for that, that is a really useful thing. And the fact that you are full of faults does not mean that you cannot learn. And so, you can posit an ideal, and you are going to be wrong about it, but it does not matter because what you are right about is positing the ideal moving towards it. If the actual ideal is not conceptualized perfectly, it does not matter that it is imperfect. It just matters that you do it and that you move forward. So that is really positive news as far as I am concern, because you can actually do that right. You can do it badly; anyone can do that and that is useful.
