Simplifying 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson

This is a simplification of the book “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos” by Jordan Peterson. Jordan Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist and college professor. He came into wide attention for his views and ideas on political and cultural issues. He is most famous for lectures and videos on YouTube about self-development and all things on how to live life, which made him very influential

among a lot of young people. He is easily one of the most influential public intellects in the western world.

These are the 12 rules that are described in the book:

1. Stand up straight with your shoulders back.

How you present yourself is directly related to emotion stimulation in your brain. When you see a person standing, crunched over, not making eye contact, is he a confident person or is he weak and depressed? You should always try not to discourage and disgrace yourself. So, the best way to do that is to stand straight, open, and with your shoulders back. Which might make yourself vulnerable and open to everything but is also a sign of confidence. Your posture directly affects your psyche, how you are feeling about yourself. If you are confident and love yourself, then you got nothing to hide. Other people will also take you seriously, and they won’t tend to pick on you. So, stretch it as far as you can.

2. Treat yourself like your someone that you care about.

Have you ever wondered that you treat other people better than you treat yourself? Suppose, you have pets, you feed it on time, you bathe it every week and you take to a doctor whenever it is sick. But whenever you get sick and need attention, you would rather stay depressed and postpone it than actually confronting the problem. Because you know everything about yourself, remember every terrible thing you ever have done, so you don’t want to care for a worthless case like you. Even it might be true, you might be terrible, so is everyone else. You are the one that needs to live with yourself until you die. You are the person that needs to be most cared for. So, it is your responsibility to take care of yourself.

3. Make friends with people who want the best for you.

You need to be friends with people that you can share your good news with and they should have the wisdom to be genuinely happy for you. You have friends that are aiming high and low. Generally, when you are doing better and succeeding, your friends who are not productive and going nowhere will try to bring you down, sometimes unconsciously. These are kind of friends that make you smoke when you are trying to quit. So, it is your responsibility to break off from these friends and make friends with someone who will wish you well, when you’ve done something good and stop you when you are doing something terrible.

4. Compare yourself to who you are yesterday, not who is someone else today.

You know everything about yourself, at least consciously. You know and remember everything that you have done in your life. All the mistakes, deeds, sins, and some good things. When you are comparing yourself with other people you don’t know anything about them. You don’t where those qualities come from, that you are so obsessed about. But humans are aiming creatures, you aim at something and you move towards it, that system is built right into you. So, you should aim at something that you know all the minute details about, that is YOU. You compare yourself to who you are yesterday and see if you are better than you. Your goal is to make today a little better than yesterday. You do this process every day and incrementally make yourself better.

5. Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.

No family is perfect. Every family has this clouded conflict, neurotic tension, hatred, and a silent war going on between them. Most of this starts with parenting and childhood. Your child has done something, it makes you angry. If you don’t make them stop right away, you will slowly start to hate them. As he grows, there is this invisible conflict building between you two. So, when you are in a bad mood, then he did that again who knows what terrible things you might do. When your child does something and you don’t like it, there is a high probability that other people will also like it. So, your fundamental job as a parent to teach and make your child socially desirable, that doesn’t mean most popular. Of course, there are exceptions to this. They need to be mentored this way so that they will be most included and tend to learn a lot more things.

6. Set your house in order before you criticize the world.

If your life is not going very well, then ask yourself this, did you do everything that you could to set it straight? No? then go clean your room. The mind works at it best when everything is in order. But you could never make everything in order, there is always going to be chaos, but you should try to do it in your power to make the house and yourself in order. This is about truth and being true to yourself. And remember one thing “Never do something that you know you shouldn’t do”.

7. Do what is meaningful, not what is expedient.

The world is chaos, life is suffering, everything is worse and nothing ever works out, so what do you do? whatever you want to, whatever that feels good at the time. Doing things for short term pleasures is being expedient. If you fall into doing expedient things, it might lead to stealing, cheating, masturbation, addictions, and more. You should be doing hard things that will make your life better in long term, without finding rational false make-sense excuses. Suppress immediate thoughts and work for your long-term goals.

8. Tell the truth or at least don’t lie.

Remember when awkward people try to make up some story and say something grandiose but it falls flat which makes it embarrassing for them and everyone else around. It’s because it is not true and somewhat of a lie, and that’s why it doesn’t work. Lies will make you weak as they do not represent reality from you. You might get away for some time, but not for long. If you lie, then you are lying about something true, which leads to an improper way of life and incomplete relationships because people will never know who you truly are. So, either tell the truth or don’t say anything.

9. Assume the person you’re listening to knows something that you don’t.

You know everything about that you already know. What you don’t know is more important than what you know. Because it brings change and growth. If you don’t know enough, then your life is not what it should be. Are you completely happy and perfect with zero problems? That is impossible. The person you’re listening to might has the solution to your problems. Most of the time you are wrong, so listening will make you find the things that might change you. There is a whole world of people with wisdom and experiences and you are just a little dot among them. If you carefully listen to people, you will learn a lot of things about them — like too many things.

10. Be precise in your speech.

There is an integral relationship between communication and the structure of being. Clear language puts everything in order and fixes things. You are having a rough patch in your relationship with parents but you don’t know what is making things worse. So, it forms this big cloud of blurry neurons of conflict and confusion in your mind. But when you put a name to that poison, everything clears and now it makes total sense why it is happening that way. Now you know what the problem is so that you can do something about it. The unnamable thing is chaos and it brings all kinds of monsters and awfulness.

11. Don’t bother children when they’re skateboarding.

Do not disturb children when they exploring the world. When children are in the playground and they are doing all kinds of stuff that might seem challenging and dangerous, they are learning how to do courageous things. Children in playgrounds push themselves to their highest limits and perfection. Sometimes they get injured, but it is fine because that’s how they learn things about themselves. In these actions, they learn to be competent and also expose themselves to facing danger.

12. Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.

Life is hard in itself. So, you have to be alerted to unexpected beauty when you’re suffering in life. You have to look for that sparkling little crystal when things are bad, so it can get you through dark times. You, in a hurry, running to your busy job, encounter a cat on the way, STOP, and pet the cat. It will give you that little time capsule of happiness and even make that day better. Let the tragedy life be a tragedy, don’t make it an absolute hell. The world is worse as it is, so try to find the beauty whenever you can and embrace it.