PDF Summary:12 Rules for Life, by Jordan Peterson

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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.

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• He concluded that people adopt shared beliefs 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 others' 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 supports the first point,...

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*   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...

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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, and 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...

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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...

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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 failures. **You’re likely overvaluing what you don’t have and...

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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 learning 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...

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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...

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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...

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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....

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• 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...

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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...

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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...

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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.