Jordan Peterson: Psychology as a Career

Professor just wanted to give you an early warning that some people may start leaving at around 6 because of class. Yeah, that's fine. I'm not going to be great till 7 anyway.

Well, we might as well get started. This room, you people have an obvious preference for the right side of the lecture hall here. I guess it's closer to the food, eh? All right, so you're here to hear about psychology as a career. So I'm going to talk to you a little bit about careers in general, and then I'll talk to you about psychology in general.

So the first thing you might want to consider is that a career and job are different. A job is something that you do from, if you're lucky, I suppose, from 9 to 5. It's a job; it's something where someone else tells you what to do, and then you do it, and you're done. Usually, it's fairly similar from day to day.

The disadvantage to that is that someone else tells you what to do, and it's the same from day to day. And those are also its advantages because if someone else is telling you what to do, then you don't have to figure it out. And if you work from 9 to 5, then at five, you're done. If you have a career, then you're never done.

So one of the things that you want to give some consideration to when you're planning a career is how do you learn to tolerate never being done. I think I went to graduate school in 1985, and I think the first time I was caught up might have been this year, but maybe it happened five years ago once or twice too. So it took me, it's 30 years to catch up. So I was behind for 30 years, and that's, um, it's hard on your nerves.

So you have to accustom yourself to the fact that no matter how much you work, it's not enough. And maybe you're starting to accustom yourself to that in University. But the thing about University that's different from the rest of your life is that although you already are faced with a problem that there's way more to learn than you're ever going to be able to manage, the only person that you're responsible to at the moment, fundamentally apart from your parents to some limited degree, is yourself.

Whereas once you start developing your career, you're going to be responsible for a larger and larger number of people, and some of them will depend on you for actions that, well, if you're a clinical psychologist, sometimes their lives depend on. So your responsibility level continues to climb. As far as I'm concerned, that's a really good thing. People tend to think that responsibility is a burden, and I suppose that's true.

But what they don't realize is that human beings are like sled dogs or pack mules. We're not happy, generally speaking, unless we're shouldering a burden or carrying a load. I guess it's part of being a social animal. So it's actually good you have the opportunity to shoulder responsibility because it helps you tolerate living with yourself. You have to be worth something in order to really tolerate the conditions of your existence.

And so you've got to pick up something heavy and carry it because then that helps you develop some respect for yourself and also for other people. And that's a big deal, but that's worth more than anything else that you'll possibly be able to find.

Now, how many of you are in your first year? Put up your hand so I can see because I need to know who I'm talking to. Okay, second, third, yeah, and fourth year? Most of you in third and fourth year? All right, so you're thinking pretty hard about what to do.

So, well, we'll start with the fourth year students. For those of you who want to apply to graduate school, which is, of course, I suppose what you're going to do, most of you, if you want to pursue psychology as a career, you better have A's because if you don't have A's, it's going to be rough. It might be rough even if you do have A's.

But it's unbelievably competitive, especially Clinical Psychology, and it's increasingly the case. And this isn't such good news for those of you in your third and fourth years that the graduate admissions committees at universities are starting to look before your last two years. They're really only supposed to look at your last two years because everyone knows it takes students, it's reasonable to allow incoming University students a year or two to screw their heads on straight before you start determining whether their performance is actually an indication of their ability.

So generally, graduate committees are only supposed to look at the last two years, but it's getting competitive enough so that they're looking farther back. Anyway, Clinical Psychology requires A's. And then, of course, as you probably know, you have to take the Graduate Record Exam. There are two of them: there's the standard Graduate Record Exam, and then there's the psychology specialty Graduate Record Exam. Most universities don't require the psychology Graduate Record Exam; I would strongly recommend that all of you take it. It's your friend.

If you're a psychology student from the University of Toronto and you've done reasonably well, the probability is high that you'll just ace it because it tests knowledge that you've acquired as a psychology student. Whereas the GRE, the general GRE, tests more general knowledge, including arithmetic and mathematical knowledge, and that's not as easy to acquire. But students at ace this psychology Graduate Record Exam fairly frequently.

So even if the universities that you're applying to don't require it, you might as well take it and send it to them because if you have a stellar 97th percentile, then, you know, why not include the information in your package? So if you score less than 80th percentile on the verbal portion of the general GRE, I would strongly recommend that you don't consider psychology as a career because it's unbelievably writing intensive.

And it'll grind you into the ground. Some people are pretty smart mathematically and analytically, so when they write the GRE, they do well on the non-verbal parts. I've had students like that who are really powerful intellectually but more nonverbally, and God, they were great at statistics, and they could be really good analytical thinkers.

But the writing just killed them. You have to write all the time as an academic psychologist, and you have to be very verbal as a clinical psychologist. And so if you're not up in the, I would say, top 15 percentile of the people who are taking the GREs, it's going to be a real grind for you.

You should think about that very seriously because the writing is the most difficult part of psychology as an academic career. And if you're not a fluent writer, you're going to have one miserable time. You're going to drag your way through graduate school, and you're not going to be productive because writing ability actually determines research productivity more than anything else.

And if you're not productive, you do well in the job market. So just do something else; there's no sense setting yourself up for, you know, a six-year grind and then a dismal outcome. So students who aren't as who are more intellectually powerful on the non-verbal sections of the GRE are often pretty good at designing experiments, and they can often learn how to analyze the data too, and that's great. But what causes graduate students to stumble is writing up the papers.

And so I often have students who maybe completed 10 or 11 studies, which is enough plenty to finish their doctor and to publish, you know, several papers, but they just can't write them up. And so then they languish because no one else is going to do it. So if you're verbally oriented, that's a good thing. Don't be thinking that you get to pick where you go to graduate school 'cause you don't.

And if you think that you get to pick where you're going to graduate school unless you're a straight 4.0 student with 99% all, you then you're setting yourself up for disappointment because it's so competitive that what you do is you apply to every bloody place you have half a chance of getting into, including places that you think you’d never go.

I think Lakehead, for example, has a clinical program now. I've got nothing against Lake, by the way, and small universities have real advantages sometimes because you're less anonymous at small universities. But you might think, "Well, I'd never go to Lake." Well, you might be also thinking then that you'll never go to clinical graduate school because that could easily be the only place that you'll get in.

So what you do, especially if you want to go to clinical graduate school, is apply to every single place that you can in Canada, whether you think you'll go there or not. You can always say no if they accept you. But if it's what you know, maybe it'll turn out that one place accepts you and that's a place you didn't think you want to go.

Well, there's a big difference between being in clinical graduate school and not being in it. It's the difference between zero and one. And so if you go off to Lakehead and come out with the clinical PhD, then you're a clinical psychologist. So who the hell cares if you have to spend five years, you know, in somewhere that isn’t a trendy urban setting? You're going to be sitting in a box most of the time anyway; it's made out of cinder blocks doing your experiments.

And most of your life there will be the social life with graduate students anyway, so it's not like you're going to be missing anything. One thing you might want to do if you're fortunate enough to get accepted and you're not sure whether you want to go is to go talk to whoever's going to be your supervisor because more than anything else you ever do in your life, I would say if you go to graduate school, you're an apprentice to a supervisor. You're not a member of a department, so your relationship with your supervisor basically determines whether graduate school works for you or not.

So you want to find out ahead of time, if possible, whether the person who wants to work with you is someone who you think you can get along with. What they're working on is less critical, I think, because none of you know what you want to do research on. You might think you do, but you don't know enough to know.

So I would also strongly suggest that when you write your applications for graduate school, you make them personal. Tell the people who you're writing to who you are, but don't specify a research interest too closely because hardly anyone is doing that research, and why give people an excuse not to take you? They're looking for an excuse not to take you anyway.

So if I'm looking for graduate students, I have a stack of 100 applications or maybe 150. I get rid of 75 of those so fast that they might as well might as well have never applied.

They're just gone. Usually, what I do is I make a spreadsheet. I put in the grades and the GRE scores, and I code the letters of reference, and I sum across and I rank them over. Then I knock off the bottom 50%, and everyone else does that too, even though they might not do it in such a quantitative way. They should because that's the most efficient and accurate way of doing it.

But everyone else who looks at that pile of resumes is going to do the same thing. So you're already 50% of the people who apply. Well, they weren't going to get in, likely anyways. That's already a tough cut. You don't want also to have a statement of interest that says, "Well, I want to look at left hemispheric language specialization for second language learners who are children." Like, there's probably one person in North America studying that, and so anyone else who might be interested in your application because of your qualifications will look at that and say, "Oh, they don't want to work with me."

And then you're out of the deal. You can say what you worked on or being interested in, but what you should do, and I'm not asking you to falsify your letter of intent because that's foolish, but what I would beg you to consider is that you don't know that much about psychology.

And what you do when you specialize as a graduate student is you start to develop, in a sense, you narrow, okay? Because you start to develop a lot of knowledge about one specific topic. But as you narrow, there comes a time when you start to broaden out again because you get into the single topic deeply enough, so you start to have to consider the contextual issues that surround that topic.

So, for example, if you're say you're interested in neuroscience but you end up studying language development, well, at some point you're going to run into the brain, right? Because language development depends on the brain.

And so psychology, in a sense, is an amorphous field, and there's entry points, and all the entry points are narrow. But once you pass through the narrow entry point, you're in the field. And so it doesn't matter that much specifically what you'll be doing your work on for your master's degree in particular because you don't know enough to specify that at all.

And you'll be, if you're fortunate, your supervisor will basically tell you what to do for your master's degree. It only takes a year, right? Well, it takes you two months just to clue in when you first start a new program, and then you're already a quarter of the way through the first semester. Somebody pretty much has to hand you a project, and you have to walk through it.

And so what it's about isn't nearly as important as the fact that it's at hand and you've done it. I'm not saying as well that what you're interested in doesn't matter; it matters an awful lot. But you don't want to prematurely and narrowly specify your domain of interest when what you're relying on is information that's not all that reliable and you're not expert enough in psychology, really, to make the determined decision about what it is that you're going to study.

I ended up studying all sorts of things I never thought I would study, things I didn't think were worth studying that turned out to be wrong. They were plenty worth studying, and they turned out to be necessary. So, learn your bloody stats. You should be a wizard with SPSS or some other computer program.

From an economic perspective, there's nothing that you'll learn as a psychology graduate student that's more valuable than statistics. If you can do statistics, all sorts of things open up to you. Not only experimental work — and you have to be a statistical expert to be a good scientist — but cross-disciplinary collaboration because most other social sciences don't have near the statistical expertise that psychologists do. Consulting for businesses, there's all sorts of value in doing statistics and understanding them.

So for those of you who are in your early years, don't shy away from statistics, especially the more practical end of it, which would be the computer, you know, the PC or Mac programs. I would say PC generally. PC programs that enable you to do statistics, you should get good at that. Find someone who will teach you how to do statistics.

Statistics is actually extremely interesting once you start looking at your own data because it's a lot like gambling. And I mean that technically. You know, if you pull a slot machine's arm, there isn't much of a chance that you're going to get a good return, but there's some chance. And so it's exciting, and the payoff is variable reinforcement, and research is like that, and statistics are exactly like that because maybe you spent six months putting together a dataset, and you arranged the variables in the SPSS statistical machine, so to speak, and you pull the handle, and now you just learned whether you wasted your time for six months or you hit the jackpot.

So it's actually pretty exciting. It's different when you're doing a class or working on someone else's dataset because what the hell do you care? But when you've got something in the game, it's an entirely different process.

I should also tell you that statistics is not arithmetic, and it's not mathematics; it's more like surgery. And it's a moral endeavor, which is funny; you wouldn't think that about statistics, but it is a moral endeavor because there aren't any real rules for doing it. A dataset is an amorphous and vague entity, and there might be information in it, and your job is to carve off the garbage and keep — and to pull out the information — that requires it doesn't require the automatic application of a set of statistical rules that just won't work at all.

Your job is to figure out where the truth is embedded in this messy thing that you just produced. That's such a study because most studies, they're complete disasters. You never learn how to do them right until you've already done it, and so they're a mess.

And whether or not you're going to be able to pull something out of that mess that constitutes genuine information depends on how skillful you are at using the statistical tools and how carefully you make your decisions ethically while you're attacking the dataset.

Because, for example, you're going to be pretty damn highly motivated to come out with something where p is less than 0.05, right? Because otherwise, it's not technically publishable, even though that's a rather foolish criteria. But that's still the point. So if you put six months into a study, and you know you have to decide where the outliers are, and where the mess is, and who to throw out, what to concentrate on, there the little career devil at the back of your mind is going to be pushing you pretty hard in the direction of playing with the data in a way that makes what you want to come out of it.

And you can bet that 40% of published studies, science studies at least, are of absolutely no utility whatsoever because the way they were produced was biased by the fact that the person who wrote them wanted to publish the study. And so that's a terrible thing because it works the whole field. But it's even worse if you happen to be the person that’s doing it because you'll fool yourself into discovering something that isn't there, then you'll convince yourself that it is there, then you'll spend the next 15 years chasing something that doesn't exist and trying to prove to yourself and others that it's real, and that accounts for a big chunk of what passes for psychology research.

It's a scandal in some ways, and the journals are changing the way they accept papers right now because this happens so frequently. So one of the things you want to do if you want to be an academic psychologist, if you want to be a scientist as a career, you better get your act together.

You have to decide what it is that you're doing, and one thing that you might be doing is building a career, which is a social enterprise. It's a primate dominance hierarchy enterprise, and it means that what you're focusing on is climbing up a primate dominance hierarchy.

That's not the same thing as trying to pursue truth in science; those are completely different things. If you pursue truth in science, you might also generate a career. If you generate a career, you might also pursue truth in science, but the probability is relatively low.

Now, I would suggest that you pursue truth in science, and the reason for that is, well, first of all, you won't get corrupt, and second, you won't corrupt other people. But perhaps more importantly, from an existential perspective, 20 years down the road, you won't look back at your life and be disgusted by the whole thing and cynical and unable to teach or talk to students or to be a good graduate adviser because you're sick and tired of the whole business.

And that's exactly what happens to people who do things in a corrupt manner. They get cynical, and why the hell wouldn't they? They should be cynical because they're the sorts of people that you should be cynical about.

So the other thing you should decide too is if you want to pursue experimental psychology as a career; do you actually care about scientific truth? Does that matter to you? If the answer is no, I would say go into business. No, no, it's not a joke; there's nothing wrong with going into business.

I've got nothing against business; it's important. It's not easy. But if you want, if what you're after is the sort of status that comes along with a business career, don't be an idiot and go into academia. You might as well just go into business and do that. You're not going to make much money as an experimental psychologist.

So if you're after status and the sort of status that comes along with business and the sort of productivity and social relations that come along with business, just go into business. Don't sidetrack yourself off into something that's, in a sense, a more arcane pursuit. So, okay, so do your stats and get good at it.

And, you know, you might be resentful about having to do it because a lot of people who are sort of oriented towards the humanistic end of psychology are pretty irritated about statistics. And I was certainly one of those people because it didn't come naturally to me.

But if you can't hack it, get a tutor and take more stats courses than you think you need because you'll need them. And if you go into graduate school and you're sort of crippled in terms of your ability to approach statistics, you'll pay a big price for it. You won't be able to understand the papers; you won't be able to do your own analysis. It's bad news.

Okay, so apply everywhere. Now, you might say, "Well, I can't afford to apply everywhere because each application is $15, or I don't know what it is. What is it now? $100? $150?" That's silly; that's not a cost; it's an investment.

And you need to distinguish between costs and investments. And if you get in, what do you think a doctoral degree in psychology is worth? Let's say you get an academic job. When you think that's worth economically, come on. Is it $100,000? Is it $50 million? What do you think it's worth?

Anybody ballpark? $70,000 a year? Okay, that's good. For how many years? Forty years, maybe? Yeah, okay. So that's $3 million, right? What's your pension worth? Another two? And you're underestimating the salary in the latter part of the career. So it's probably $7 million, something like that.

Okay, so now you know what you're aiming at. You get that acceptance letter in the mail; it's worth $7 million. If you play it right, and if you're a clinical psychologist, it's probably worth twice that.

So you're after a $14 million prize. You ask, "Well, why is it so competitive?" Well, now you know; that's why it's so competitive. Lots of people would like to have $14 million, so it's hard to get it. So then if you're applying, and it's $100, $150 — let's say you got a one in 10 chance or one in 20 chance of getting in at any given school — so let's see. What would you pay for a one in 20 chance of $14 million?

How would you calculate that? $14 million divided by 20? So you'd pay about $700,000, something like that. So you pay $700,000, not one. So let's half that because you're skeptical about your chances of winning. Fine, so then you pay $350,000. Well, don't be at $200; it's a bargain.

And don't get too irritated about the application process. It's annoying; they're trying to annoy you because if you get annoyed and quit, then they won't have to look at your damn application, and that's the end of you.

So take a big amount of time to do your applications because they're really important, and do lots of them, as many as you can. If you can afford to, think about going to the U.S.; throw some applications down there. That's especially true if you're a hot student, and you're a hot student if you've got basically an A average and a GRE of 90 percentile or above. People will be interested in you, and that means you might get a scholarship to an American school, and you won't have to pay tuition.

So, and that might especially be the case, you know, maybe that won't happen to you at Harvard, although it might, but there's lots of state schools down there that are excellent. The big research schools? Maybe they'll pay you to come down and study.

So not only do you get your crack at $7 million or $14 million, but someone will give you some money to help you get it, so that's a pretty good deal. So don't lay out on the bloody applications; it's really important.

All right, now we'll go back to more general things for a minute. So now we might want to talk about what makes people successful, okay? And you want to also think about what success means, right? And what success means, I can give you a couple of rules of thumb about that.

I mean, the first thing is, if you want to be successful, let's put that — let's use a different phrase. We could say, well, let's say you want to have a good life. And I don't mean good in that it's happy and easy or any of those things; I mean sort of good classically. If you want to have a platonically good life, okay?

So how would one go about doing that? Well, the first thing I would say is do what other people do unless you have a really good reason not to. So what do people do to have a good life? They have friends. They have a circle of friends, some of whom they can talk to carefully about important things. So you need that.

People have an intimate relationship with someone that's stable across time. Why? Well, without that, you're kind of chaotic and lost. Plus, you only have half your brain because people are pair-bonding animals, and we're highly communicative. If you have a partner that you can trust, who's got your back, that you can talk to and plan with, then you're twice as wise as the person that you're competing with.

Because it's just like, you know, why is there sexual reproduction instead of clonal reproduction? Why is that? You could have taken biology courses; it's a pretty fundamental question. What's the answer to that? Variation? Mhmm, that's part of it.

All right, yeah, I mean, as a unit, if you cloned yourself, first of all, the parasites would do you in in no time flat. But apart from that, you have a bunch of strengths and a bunch of weaknesses, and they're kind of random, and then you'll pair up with someone who has a bunch of strengths and a bunch of weaknesses, and they're kind of random. And hopefully, when you pair up, most of the places you're weak, that person will be strong and vice versa.

So that makes you a much more solidified unit. Sometimes your weaknesses match, and that's where you'll fight non-stop, and so you know that can be a problem. But still, you're a lot better off with somebody. And that's especially true if you also want to have children.

And you're foolish not to have children. I don't know, you guys are under — most women in here, most of you be under 25, so there's probably a fair number of people who think you're not going to have children. Might want to bloody well dispense with that foolish idea right now because all that means is that you just haven’t — you’ve been warned.

That's one thing it means, and second, it means you don't know who the hell you are because my experience has been that virtually, I think this is virtually without exception, every woman I've ever met, whether they thought they wanted children at the age of 21 or 22 or 23 or 24, if they were basically mentally healthy, they were desperate for children by the time they were 30.

And that kicks in, too, at 28. So expect it ‘cause it's going to happen. And you might think, "No, it's not going to happen to me." Well, you can think that if you want, but I'm basing what I'm telling you on my work. I've done a lot of work with really high-achieving — most of these were female partners of senior partners of big law firms.

And being a senior partner of a big law firm, that's as hard as being a successful clinical psychologist. Like, you have to be at the top of your class as an undergraduate. Then you have to get into a really good law school. Then you have to be really good at that law school. Then you have to go off and article, and you have to be kept as an articling student. And generally you're not because the big law firms will pull in articling students, work with them to death, and throw away all the ones that don’t make it.

So if you make it, well then you get to be an associate, and then they'll get rid of most of those too. And then, if you're really good at it, you'll be a senior partner, and so that's tough. If you're a female and you're bloody well committed to your career, it doesn't matter, by the time you hit 28 to 30 and you're working 70 hours a week, you’re going to be thinking, "What the hell am I working 70 hours a week for?"

Which is really, by the way, a good question. And your attention is going to turn to having children, as it should. And the way you solve that if you're a female and you want a career is A) you have a partner who's got a clue and can provide some support, and B) you outsource most of your domestic responsibilities that go along with the household.

You have to have a nanny. Maybe you have to have a cook. You don't do any housework. You pay attention to your kids with the little bit of time that you have, and that will work. Daycare doesn't work; your bloody law firm isn't going to take care of your children. They're not going to set up a daycare in the firm. That doesn't work anyway, but a nanny will work.

And so you might as well be thinking about things along that line because if you want to have a career, and you're smart, and you're hardworking, and you should have a career, and you want to have children, then you have to set up your life so that you can do those two difficult things without driving yourself stark raving mad or exhausting yourself or destroying your relationship. And that's about the only way that I've seen so far that it's possible to do that.

Okay, so anyways, back to career. Okay, so now we've already established that what you're after is worth a lot, and it's hard to get. And it's hard to get because it's worth a lot, and there's lots of people chasing it. Now the question is what can you do to give yourself an edge?

Okay, well what makes you good for something from a career perspective? Well, one is IQ. Well, you're pretty much stuck with what you've got. You can maintain it by exercising. It turns out physical exercise is the best way to maintain your intelligence across time. It starts to plummet pretty precipitously after you're about the age of 24, and it's downhill to 70.

And then, well, after that, things get worse. So exercise helps. If you keep yourself in good physical condition, that's going to make a big difference. I would also say if you want to play a sharp game, so if you're going to be on the edge of things competing with people who are, say, in the top one percent, you better get your drug and alcohol use under control because that will compromise you.

You better make sure that your sleeping is well regulated, and you better make sure that you eat properly. And those are, they're not small things; they're big things because you do them every day. And so I would say you can start to look at yourself now. Get up at the same time every day; start learning how to do that.

I would say get up at eight or 7:30, ‘cause that's when civilized people get up, and the people you're competing with, who you're really going to be competing with, they're already up at six, and they're working by seven, and they'll work you right into the ground because the people who are at the top of their discipline, and that's basically what you're talking about if you're talking about doing something that requires PhD level education, as a career, they're not walking around.

Okay, so here's a question: think about this for a minute. So think about your typical day. Now think about this: how much time do you waste? And so you can define waste any way you want it to be defined, but I would say time is wasted when what you're doing isn't what you planned to do. Right? You know what it feels like to waste time; you feel like a jerk.

Right? I don't know; there's a feeling. For me, it's like a feeling like I need to take a shower. It's, I've deviated from the appropriate path. I'm in, you know, YouTube hell, some — and that's not good.

So, okay, so now you've thought about that typical day; how much time do you waste? All right, so let's find out.

How many people waste more than half an hour? Is there anybody here who thinks they don't waste half an hour? Okay? And if you do think that, please do tell me because, you know, maybe you're efficient; some people learn to be efficient.

Okay, how many waste two hours? All right, how about three? Okay? How many think they waste less than three hours? Okay, one person. Okay, I'll come back to you.

Okay, four hours? Five hours? Jesus, you better wake up, people. Okay, so we're, let's say five hours because I won't embarrass you further. So let's do a little mathematics. What's your time worth? No, no, M, come on. Let's make it in money; that's what we use to evaluate value, right?

$10.25? What's your time worth? $10.25? No, wrong. Why is that wrong? That's minimum wage. No, no, no, no. We're going to play capitalist here.

It's not invaluable; I'm not going to pay you an infinite amount of money to do anything, okay? So we're just talking about economic value here; that's all, so it has to be quantifiable. We're going to quantify. Okay? It's not $10 and a quarter. Why? Because you have a future.

$10.25 is what you're worth — if your time isn't — if what you do now isn't contributing to who you're going to be in the future. So it's more than that. How much is it?

Okay, well, let's look at it this way: let's say you manage your career goals, and it's 10 years down the road, and you're making the amount of money you should be making. So we got a rule of thumb here a while back: it's $75,000. $75,000 a year? So that's about $6,000 a month or about $1,500 a week.

And so we'll assume 40 hours, so that's about $45 an hour, okay? Let's assume that you're worth 35 because you're still a baby; you're not worth that. But the time that you spend now is an investment, right? So even though you might not be being paid for at this second, you're banking what it's worth. So you'll be paid for it later.

So you can't be thinking it's 10 bucks. So we'll say, we'll say 40 because it makes the math easier. So how much time do you waste in a day? Five hours? What's that? 5 times 40? $200? Times 50? Right? Let's multiply it by seven because, after all, you're wasting time on the weekends too. So that's $1,400 a week.

How many weeks in the month? Four? What's 4 times 1,400? $5,600? So we'll save five for the sake of argument: $5,000 a month. How many months in a year? You're wasting $60,000 a year, right?

So maybe you should stop doing that. I don't know; $60,000 a year is a lot, and there are people — the people that you'll be competing with — they're not going to be wasting that time or maybe they're going to be wasting 30,000 of it or 15,000 of it, but if you're wasting five hours a day, you better get your act together because you're going to pay for that in a big way. It's a foolish waste of time.

Now, IQ, there isn't much you can do about. We already said that. You can exercise, and maybe you can read. And you can read as broadly as you possibly can. So you should read every day. That would be helpful.

And maybe you should read non-fiction, especially if you want to be a scientist. But maybe you can learn to work harder, and one rule of thumb for that is how much time are you wasting?

Now, we could do a little more in-depth analysis of ways to do better because I could also ask you. I have students who come and see me, and they say, "Well, I don't seem to be doing very well in this course." And I said, "Well, how much are you working on it?"

They said, "Well, I'm in the library 6 hours a day." And I think, "What?" I ask, "How much time are you spending working on it?" Because first of all, you shouldn't be in your library 6 hours a day; that's just completely insane. Because I don't know anyone at all, except for a very small fraction of people who are extremely disciplined and well put together who can concentrate on difficult material for 6 hours in a row.

You're lucky if you can manage three like real work. So the first thing you do is half your time in the library and may — and then double your discipline. So let's say we can look at a typical hour that you're working. I might say, "Well, how hard are you working during that hour to how hard you'd be working if someone pulled out a gun and said, 'Look, if you don’t work as hard as you can for the next hour, I'm going to shoot you.'"

And then you might think, "Well, I'm working about one out of 10 as hard as I can." Right? I bet you that's about right. I bet you that's about right. The reason I use that figure is because I figured out a long time ago that if you have a given task to do, and you sit for 5 or 10 minutes and you think, "How can I do this 10 times faster?" you can almost always figure out how to do it 10 times faster, sometimes better and 10 times faster.

And that's also something to really know because what you'll find as you mature into your career is that you'll be asked to do way more than is humanly possible. And the way that you learn how to do that is you get way faster than you think you could be. And just using the 10 times marker as a rule of thumb is an excellent one.

It's remarkable how much you can do in a very short period of time if you set yourself up with that expectation. And then when you remember what your time’s worth, well then, you might think about $40, by the way. It's an underestimate; your time is actually worth more than that because you're young.

And so every hour that you have now to shape yourself pays off through the whole course of your life. You know, like what I do now doesn't affect what I did when I was 20, but what you do now that you're 23 is going to affect you when you're my age. So your time is actually worth more, even though you can't get anybody to actually pay for it at the moment.

So the other thing you might really think about learning to do is to figure out how to get efficient, and you've got to be ruthless with yourself to be efficient. And you better be efficient because if you were going to pursue a career, efficient people win, and they'll just win a little bit.

I don't know, you guys have probably learned that most things in life are normally distributed, right? Heights? Well, you should have learned that if you're a psychology student, and you haven't learned that, then there's really something wrong because that's like the basic premise of statistics, so of most statistics anyway.

So, all right, so, you know, maybe the average man is 5'10", and then there's a standard deviation around that of maybe, I don't know, it's probably something like 6 inches, and then 85% of men — no, it's not 6, it's 68%, 65% of men fall in that range. Okay?

So, and heights like that, weights like that, and intelligence is like that. Most things are distributed according to a normal distribution, but life outcomes aren't; they're distributed according to a Pareto distribution. And that's a Pareto distribution, so anybody know how much money Bill Gates has? About $40 billion, yeah? So how much money do the top 10 richest men in the U.S. have? $300 billion? Something like that?

So that's $1,000 for every single person in the United States, which is more than the average family has in savings. So the top 40 men in the United States have more money than all the rest of the Americans have put together in savings. Okay? So the top 100 richest men in the world have more money than the bottom two billion, right?

So this is a Pareto distribution. You see the same thing with creative production. So let's say you're looking at PhD students, and you want to know how many publications they have. Well, the median number is one. The median is the number that most people have; it's not the mean.

It's if you popped out the typical PhD student, held him by the collar, and said, "How many publications do you have?" you'd say one. I'd say, "Well, you’re not at one because one doesn’t count; it’s more than zero, but it’s only one more than zero." Okay?

Okay, so then there are going to be the top 1% of PhD students way the hell out here, and they're going to have 20 papers by the time they graduate, which is about as many as the typical associate professor has at 10 years. And those are the people you'll be competing with on the job market.

So they've published — they'll be in the PhD for 5 years; they'll publish four papers a year. And they'll come out, and they'll be hired. And so just for the sake of comparison, the typical professor at a top-rate research institution — there are about 40 in North America — publishes between three and four papers a year.

So the graduate students that are hot prospects on the job market, and that makes it likely that they'll get an academic job — although not certain — are out-producing typical associate and assistant professors at high universities, and there's hardly any of these people, and all of the science is done by these people.

So the rest of them, they're just going the game. So all the people who aren't way out at that tail end, they're just keeping the institutions running. So what's the typical profit margin for a typical corporation year after year? Approximately, well, guess.

How much money do you get? How much kind of interest do you get when you put your money in the bank? Max 2%? Okay. So obviously, a company would have to make more than 2% or no one would ever invest in one. So it's got to be more than 2%.

Okay, well, it's around five — 5%. So a really efficient company runs on a 5% margin. That means it spends 95% of its time just existing. Okay? Everything is like that; most things spend almost all of their time just existing. All of the power comes at the top end.

How do you put yourself in the top end? Well, it helps to be smart. Let you guys who ever — don’t go here.

Okay, so if you want to put yourself up at this end of the distribution, how do you do it? Well, I can give you an example of the differences in people's productivity. So Picasso produced 65,000 pieces of art, 3 a day for 65 years.

Okay? And the median number of pieces of art that people produce is zero, right? So that's a huge difference. But almost all fields of creative production are like that. Almost everyone does nothing, and a few people do everything.

Okay? So Bach — J.S. Bach — he wrote so much music that if you took all his manuscripts and copied them for 8 hours a day, it would take you 40 years. And he was actually writing the music, not just copying it out. So people can get unbelievably productive, and they're the ones who have careers.

Okay? So what do you do to do that? Well, you can't do much about your intelligence, but you can learn to work, and work matters. Conscientiousness, which is a trait, is a big predictor of long-term life success. Conscientious people are orderly, which isn't quite as relevant, and industrious.

Industrious people, when they put their mind to something, they do it. There's no wasting time, and the people I know who are really successful — and so they're often top 1% — which is only one in a thousand. Right?

So you guys are already probably one in 100 if you look at your IQs in your work ethic. So one in 10 of you is one in a thousand. So people like that, they don't waste any time. And I really mean that; they'll make 5 minutes be productive. They'll do more than 5 minutes than most people do in a week, and that's not an exaggeration because they learn to be bloody efficient.

They do not waste time. So they think, "How can I do this 10 times faster?" They think, "How can I do this one thing so it does five things simultaneously? You know, so I can kill five birds with one stone instead of two." And that way, they make maximal use of their time, and they discipline themselves enough so that they're not in a constant battle with themselves about doing what they should be doing; they just bloody well do it.

And that's why they can produce at these levels that are really almost beyond imagination. So discipline really matters. So if you're wasting time and you want to pursue a difficult career, you better learn how to get that under control.

The best way to do that, as far as I can tell, is to pick something that's difficult, you know, that you like to do that's difficult, something that's kind of beyond you, and do it. Bang your head against it. It'll probably take you a couple of years of, like, really hard work to mold yourself into something that isn't utterly useless, and a there's a big payoff associated with that.

And I think that's something you can do merely by wanting it and attending to it. And if you do that, well, first of all, you get disciplined, and that's where it’s useful.

It's why it doesn't matter so much when what you study when you first go to graduate school — what really matters is that you study something and you really study it hard. Now when I went to graduate school, I went to graduate school; we had a great time. I had a great social life with Miguel. We spent a lot of time going to restaurants and going to bars and playing softball—had a blast.

But all the people I went to graduate school with, they worked like 10 hours a day, and they worked like mad dogs. And so that was fine. When they were done their 10-hour day, then they could go off and have fun. But there was no mucking about during the work period, and whether they were hung over or not, they got up and they did their work. And so that's what you have to learn to do.

And it makes your life more enjoyable and entertaining, not less. I mean, do you really want to waste five hours a day? That's, what, 1/3 of your waking time? If you live 90 years, you wasted 30 years, and if you waste 30 years, you'll be wondering why you weren't anywhere. It's like, come on, that's pretty easy to figure out.

If you waste 30 years, you're not going to get it. And why should you? Because you're just wasting your time. So it's best to really learn how to stop doing that. It'd be a terrible battle, especially for those of you who procrastinate. You know, lots of people are like that. You really have to rewire yourself to get that under control, so if you want to be successful at a high-competition career, then that's what you have to do.

Okay, I'm going to stop for a minute and ask and take questions, and then I'll tell you a little bit about what options you have if you choose psychology as a career, what sort of things lay themselves open to you. So, if you have any questions, now's the time to ask them.

Um, what kind of, um, I guess like extracurricular activities, per se, something outside of the career, will help you get into grad schools?

None. Grades and GREs; that's what matters. The rest of it's fluff. I mean, see, the thing is, it's a multiple-threshold cutoff system. So, first of all, you have to have A's. If you don't, you're out. Then if you have A's, you have to have certain GRE levels, and if you don't, you're out.

If you have certain grades and certain GRE levels, then you're in. Then it's random factors that determine whether or not you're going to get chosen, which is partly why you want to maximize your probability of success by applying to many, many places. Because let's say that you're a threshold student.

Okay, I'm going to look over your application. Well, what's going to determine whether I take you? Do I need a student? That'd be number one. Do I have the funding? Do you have funding? If you can get SSHRC or NSERC or MRC funding as a graduate student, that helps a lot. I mean, if you're above threshold or even sort of at that threshold and you have funding, it's really easy for a professor to say, "Yeah, yeah, I'll take you."

You're not going to, you know, eat up grant resources, so that's really helpful. So you can apply for graduate school fellowships. You have to still have the same level of attainment. Some extracurricular activities can help with that. If you have lab experience and you can write a decent research proposal, that'll increase the probability that you can get a fellowship. So lab experience helps there.

Lab experience also helps when you get to graduate school because you know what the hell you're doing, and you can get a jump on it. But it's not going to help you get in much now. If I'm looking at two students who basically cross threshold the same way, and one of them has extra lab experience and maybe knows some computer programming and has some useful skills or is good statistically, well then, I'll certainly prefer that one.

But I won't even see the applications unless those first two things are met. And I probably am not even deciding that because usually what happens when you apply is that there's a committee of administrators that does the first pass, and they don't even let your application through the door to see the professors unless you meet the minimal criteria.

So you know, students are desperate to get the experience that would get them into graduate school like a publication would help, but they're hard to get. So if you do a, like an honors research project, for example, and it works, well, you can write it up.

But almost no one does that because by the time you’re done your damn project and you've written up your thesis, you're only one-third of the way to having it published, and that's something else to think about too. If you want to be an academic psychologist, like everything you ever do will be rejected, and not just a little bit either.

You'll work for something on for six months; like you'll write your first research paper, and you'll send it out maybe not to even a very good journal, and you'll get three reviews back, and they'll say, "This is the stupidest thing I've ever seen, and you might as well quit." You know, and that's — and you'll get those letters throughout your whole career.

Now and then they'll say, "Well, this doesn't suck as much as it could, so if you really work hard on it and you do this part again and you address these 30 concerns, then we'll be willing to look at it again, but don't get your hopes up." And that's when you go have a pint at the local bar because that's the best news you're going to get this month.

So that's another thing to think about too when you're thinking about whether this kind of career is for you, because if you're rather high in negative emotion, you're going to get punched in the stomach a lot, and you've got to ask yourself whether or not you can learn to tolerate that.

It's just, it's just a function of the business because it's hard to get published. You know the rejection rate in a good journal is 95 to 99%, which is worse than your application, you know, your chances of getting accepted to a given graduate school. So just looking for reasons not to publish your damn paper.

And it can be because there's a mistake in it; it might be because it's too good and it scares people, or there are political reasons or whatever. But there's a lot of rejection, and that's true for most careers. So you have to get used to that.

But in academia, I think in some ways, it's worse because you're always trying to publish. And the answer is always, "We don't want your stupid paper; we've got 100 other ones." So, Prof Peterson, I know that you do some clinical work as well as your research and teaching activity. Can I ask why you or why one might want to work as a professor, why clinical psychologists might choose to work as a professor rather than full-time?

Well, okay, so one of the answers to that is why you would ever want to be a professor. Okay? So here is why you might want to be a professor. One of the things you might watch about yourself, you want to see when you're talking with other people. Does your is your tendency to turn the conversation to ideas? That means you're open; that’s a trait of openness.

If you tend to turn the conversation to ideas, then you're an intellectual fundamentally. You're open. That's a good reason to be a professor; you like ideas. If you're not like that, like if you talk to your friends and what you do most of the time is talk about people or maybe what you did last night, or those are fine things that probably means more that you're extroverted, or maybe you talk about relationships, and that means more that you're agreeable.

That's not really the kind of temperament that is suited for an intellectual pursuit because it's about ideas fundamentally. And then you also have to ask yourself, would you like to teach? Teaching is brutal for people who don't like it.

I mean, you know you have professors like this. They stand in front of the board, they look down, they mumble; they're so bloody terrified of the students they won't even look at them, and everyone there is like checking Facebook. It's awful.

So you know if you don't like to engage an audience, you're going to spend the most exhausting part of your career teaching because teaching is — teaching is writing is very exhausting. So is doing clinical work, but writing is more exhausting.

But there was teaching because a lecture is a performance; it takes a tremendous amount of energy. You know, unless you do it by rote, and it's boring, but otherwise, it's like spontaneous jazz for 90 minutes. It's very tiring. And when I teach three courses in the spring, I'm just wiped out by March, and I've got a lot of energy.

So you also have to decide if you want that. And then you have to decide, do you like mentoring students? Graduate students? I really like that. I really like ideas, and I really like mentoring graduate students. So being a university professor is perfect for me.

And I got used to being rejected, the papers being rejected. I learned how to deal with that in about three or four years. It used to just piss me off. I'd be mad for like three months after I got a rejection letter. You know, I'd get the envelope, and I wouldn't even want to open it because you know what it says: it says, "Up yours." You don't want to see that, you know.

But you learn not to take that personally because it's not personal; they don't hate you; I just hate everybody. So if you can learn to tolerate it, that's good. Now, you ask me why you would be a clinical psychologist as well as a professor? Well, that depends to some degree on what kind of breadth of experience you're inclined towards.

So for me, life is better if I'm doing a lot of different things. And so being a clinician, I do — I'm a clinician; I do consulting with businesses; I'm a professor, and I run a little testing company that evaluates employees and I have other — I have other jobs. I think I have seven jobs; that's what I figured at one point.

It fluctuates between five and seven. And the reason I do that is because I learned how to do things flat out all the time; it turns out I'm kind of wired for that. So it's better for me; that's better.

I love doing clinical work. People wonder too how you can do it because you say, "Well, people bring their problems to you all the time," right? But it isn't like that, because social work is like that. I think you're insane to be a social worker; if any of you were thinking about that, I think of all the jobs that will just hammer you to death over a five-year period, that and teaching junior high school kids.

Because see, the thing about being a clinical psychologist is the people who come to you have problems, but they don’t want to have them. That's why they're coming to see you. And so what you're doing isn't dealing with people who have problems; you're dealing with people who want to get rid of their problems.

And so the trajectory is uphill, and it doesn't really matter how bad the current situation is if there's hope in the future, right? Because you're oriented towards the future, and so if you're working with your clients and they want to have better lives, and you're helping them do that, that's a fine thing to do; it's a great thing to be able to do.

Do you think that perhaps a lot of clinical psychologists pursue the professors' ships instead of full-time clinical work because grad programs hear them that way? Well, it depends on the grad program.

So there's two kinds of — there's actually three kinds of clinical graduate programs. There's the graduate programs that are characteristic of large research institutions, so say like McGill. And McGill is mostly a scientific institution with a sidebar of clinical training.

And most research institutions are like that, and so most APA-approved — that's how it used to be anyways — APA-approved American Psychological Association-approved programs tend to be research-oriented, and they provide clinical training. So what they expect of you if you're a student there is to be a scientist and to be trained as a clinician.

Now there are also side programs — they're more common in the U.S. They'll charge you about $40,000 a year, and they'll train you basically just as a clinician. And then there are clinical programs that aren't in major research institutions but are still in public universities where most of the emphasis is on clinical training, and less is on experimental work.

And they're usually not designed to — they're not geared at producing academics who could train clinical psychologists, which is what the big research universities are for. And yeah, often when you go there, like at McGill, if you were a successful clinical student, you became a professor. It was the unsuccessful clinical students who became clinical psychologists.

And you know, you could say, "Well, that's because that was all they could do." Well, that's a cynical way of looking at it, but in some ways, it's true because to be a professor at a research institute like this, and a clinical psychologist, you have to be able to be a scientist and to do everything that's associated with that.

So it's a good option if you can pull it off because you have all the stability that goes along with being in a university. Plus, you have all the undergraduates. And you know, if you like undergraduates, if you don't like undergraduates, you really don't like people, you know?

Because, I mean, undergraduates, they're all shiny and clean, and you know, they're all happy about their futures, and they're all probably going to be reasonably successful. Man, if you can't deal with undergraduates, you might as well go dig a hole and climb into it because that's about as good as it gets among human beings, you know?

So anyway, so if you're a professor, you get to stay in that milieu. And then, you know, I do my clinical work and my consulting work as well. So it's sort of like the best of both worlds, but there’s a lot of preparation that goes into doing all those things.

So, for example, you have to do, I think, I have to do 2,000 hours of supervised practice when I came back to Ontario after I was in Massachusetts, even though I was licensed in Massachusetts. So there's — it takes quite a bit of work to keep your... because just after you get your clinical PhD, you're not a psychologist yet; you have to do another 2,000 hours of supervised practice. And to do that as well as to do what you need to do in order to pursue an academic career means, you know, you better be efficient.

So, other questions? Yeah, you said earlier, basically from a lot of people, that you should look for supervisors who are working on areas that you're interested in. Yeah. If you have straight A's and 98% GREs, do whatever you want. If you don't, apply everywhere.

And I would say, even if you do, apply everywhere. You can always say no. You know, what a delightful deal. You apply to 40 places, let's say, or 30 places — more realistically — and four people give you an offer, and you fly out there, and they try to tell you how wonderful you are, and you get to say no to three of them and pick the best one, and that's a deal.

So that's what you want to set yourself up for. So, and you know, if you really know what you want, which is doubtful, but maybe you do because sometimes people do, and you can specify who you'd like to work with, and they're interested, and you can target that carefully, hey! More power to you, but that's very rare, and for most people, it’s not a good strategy.

Look, I've had lots of students ask me about how to get into, well, let's say specifically clinical graduate school, and I say apply to lots of places. Then they don't; they apply to like four places, and they're threshold students, and they don't get in.

Well, that's pretty rough. You know, they languish for a year, sometimes two years as they try again. Usually, by the second year of not getting in, then they listen, and then they apply to 30 places, and then they get in. Then they think, "Geez, you know, if I would have done that the first year, I would have been, you know, waiting at the local bar for two years while I was trying to get into graduate school."

So if you're 100% credible, and you've got an inside track, you know, the normal rules don't apply to you, and that's fine. But it's a numbers game, and with most things that are low profitability, the way you maximize your chance of success is to do it a lot.

That's, you know, if you have a one in ten chance of getting in somewhere, and you apply to 20 places, you know, you're probably going to get into two. But if you apply to eight places, you might get unlucky and get into none.

So do you think we'll have — not here at St. George Scarborough. Possibly; they're working on it, but it's hard to set up a clinical program. You need a lot of clinical faculty, and you need to be tied in with hospitals; it's a multi-year process.

So not in the foreseeable future. But York has a good clinical program, Ryerson has a clinical program; is there a clinical program? No. Is it clinical child? Oh yeah. Other questions?

Yeah, does any of what you said change when advising students for applying to social psychology in school? Not at all; it's easier. Like, if you're — it's easier to get into graduate school if it's not clinical.

That doesn't mean it's easy; it's still hard, but it's not impossible like it is with clinical. The problem with that is that although it's, you know, it's moderately difficult, we'll say. Or even extremely difficult to get into an experimental program, period.

The problem is that with the difficulty comes a little later. The difficulty then becomes getting a job because it's just as hard to get a job as a social psychologist as it is to get a job as any other — I mean, an academic job as any other kind of psychologist.

So the entry barrier to graduate school is less, but the entry barrier into the job market might even be higher. So what you have to do is all you're doing in — you got — this is something to remember; you are not going to graduate school for the classes.

What you want to do is barely pass because otherwise, you’re working too much on the classes because the classes are useless. They're — you're not going to learn a damn thing, and all they do is take you away from what you should be doing. And what you should be doing is publishing papers because that's all that matters.

If you publish enough papers, you'll get a job, assuming that, you know, you're not flawed in some remarkably obvious other way. So that you've got to remember that when you go to graduate school.

So if you pass a graduate course, you get an A. That's how graduate courses work. Anything other than an A is a failure. So there's a bunch of complicated reasons for that; to pass a graduate class, you have to do a decent job.

They're easier than undergraduate classes, but they don't matter. You have to pass them because if you don't, they'll kick you out of the program. But if you pass them, it's irrelevant; no one cares. No one's ever going to look at your blooded graduate transcript for grades.

Except for maybe the GRE, you know, the fellowship granting agency, so that's the one exception. But if you pass the course, you get an A anyway.

The reason you get an A is if you pass the course is because if you don't get an A, let's say I give 30% of my graduate students B’s, then they don't get graduate fellowships because the graduate fellowship programs will only give graduate fellowships to students who have A's.

So the way the university adjusts to that is you get A's if you pass, otherwise, you fail. So you have to work hard enough for the graduate course to pass. Having done that, then you have to work really hard to get your damn publications out, 'cause that's what will determine how hot a prospect you are when you graduate.

And you want to be in social psychology; each year, there's going to be five or six graduates in North America who everyone wants. So they're the guys on the pilot here, and then there's everyone else. And everyone else has a hell of a time.

Those top five students or six students, they have their pick of jobs. That's where you want to be. And to do that, you need to publish. The bar keeps going up because it gets — even though it's hard to publish because people tell you no, computers have made the process more straightforward.

Right? It's the journals are right at your fingertips; you don’t have to spend a day looking for each journal like you did when I was a graduate student. And then the journal wouldn't be there anyway because you can get them instantly now, and you can do your stats on your laptop. Whereas I, you had to use a mainframe in 1985, and I tell you, the manual for that mainframe, and I didn't have used a computer. I didn't know anything about statistics; the manual was as long as this table was, one book on metal rods that long.

It's like doing ANOVA was a nightmare. Now you just get it done. So, some of the barriers to publication have fallen, but the consequence of that is the top students publish more, so it hasn't gotten any easier.

You just — you have to spend exactly the same amount of time as you would have before, except now, the output's better. You're going to need 10 to 12 publications and a couple of book chapters; most of those should be first author. You should be the first author on five or six of those papers, and two of them should be in good journals, and then you're set.

But I'll tell you to hit that, you better be running because it’s not hit by very many students. And the problem with graduate school — and this is something else to understand — is people will leave you alone in graduate school.

And what that means is you can float around vaguely for five years, graduate with one publication, and disappear. So it’s dangerous; graduate school is dangerous. That way, because no one will be on your case to make sure that you're one of the top students.

So you have lots of freedom, but you've got to also ask yourself, do you want freedom, and can you tolerate it? So do you want it? Well, people float and drift if they have too much freedom, and then can you tolerate it?

The question there is can you discipline yourself enough to be successful without someone basically, you know, watching you every day and hitting you in the back of the head? And that's a tough question because it's not easy to become that future-oriented and that disciplined.

So, social psychology. The other thing I would also mention about social psychology is learn your psychometrics because most of social psychology is nonsense. And there’s a reason for that.

The reason is that social psychologists don't know measurement very well, and they're starting to clamp down. Like all the journals have adopted a new code of ethics for publications. And the reason they've done it is because so much of what particularly was published in social psychology is simply not true, so learn your psychometrics and learn your statistics, and that'll really do you well in social psychology.

There are lots of things to be discovered in social psychology, but you have to be hard-headed and not be after your career. So I don't necessarily see how it makes sense for students to be more focused on publishing when they're in graduate school than their classes because their classes should be training them for their job.

Basically, how many good — what percentage of classes have you taken in the last year that were good? Um, maybe 50%? Okay, so there you go; it's worse than graduate school.

So 90% of the time in classes will be a waste if you want to learn to be a clinician? You could start now. Read Carl Rogers, read Abraham Maslow, read Carl Jung, read Sigmund Freud — like there's lots of great clinicians. Read them; read them; that'll help a lot.

Doesn't that mean that the system is flawed? Yes, so it's all — systems are flawed; most of them are really flawed. Systems that are flawed are murderous. If you're in a system, and it's not stomping you to death, it's actually working not too bad.

These people are supposed to be smart; that's not the people who made the system, the professors. Every — they are. So why is it? Well, I remember earlier in the lecture I talked to you about businesses, right? I said businesses run on a 5% profit margin.

That means they spent — that's an efficient business because most businesses fail. So really well-run businesses produce 5% profit year after year. That means they spend 95% of their time just existing. And that's how systems work. Systems spend — good systems spend only 95% of their time existing. Bad systems spend about 125% of their time existing, which means that not only do they not produce anything of any value, they suck resources from other things that are producing things of value.

And so it's really—look, it's really important. I know you're skeptical about this, but that's because you don't know what you're talking about, and you should listen to me. Most systems don't work, and a lot of them are murderous.

And so if you go off to graduate school, it's not — no point talking because you're not listening. No, you're not.

Yeah, well, that's what you think.

Okay, another question. When would you recommend you take the GRE? Most people usually take it, say, in the summer before they start.

That's probably about right because I wouldn't push it too close to when you apply because the application process is stressful, and you probably don't want to clutter those things up too much. I would also say people do a lot of studying for the GRE.

It's not that helpful; if you want — like the one thing you can study for is the psychology GRE, and the best way to do that is probably read an introductory textbook or two. But I wouldn't kill yourself studying for the GRE because it's not going to help that much. So partly because like the vocabulary, let's say you build up your vocabulary over maybe 25,000 hours of study; add another 100 hours to that — let’s draw the bucket.

So do it the summer before, and then you probably have to apply from November to January. So anyways, back to your question. If you want to — what you have to do in University, and this is what you have to do in graduate school as well, is what the institution does is it opens up a space of identity for you.

And the identity is you're a graduate student. Okay? What does that mean? Well, it means any number of things. It means you can languish for five years if you want, but what it does mean is now you have a stamp of approval on your forehead.

And so you can sit around and read and learn things, and you don't have to worry about whether or not you're useful because everyone has said, by all possible measurement, you appear to be useful. So that means you get to have the luxury of educating yourself.

Now, you'll go off to an institution, and 90% of the courses won't be worthwhile, just like they are in every institution, but some of them will be really worthwhile. And so your job is to discriminate between the things that are worthwhile and the things that aren't, and to really focus on where you can get educated because there's lots of places to get educated.

So, for example, you'll have your placements, and you'll have clients, and you'll learn — like that's an opportunity right there to learn because that'll be the real thing, and you'll meet people who know what they're talking about, and you want to stick to them like glue because they'll teach you things.

But it's okay that systems don't work very well because they have to spend most of their time just existing because they're complicated things. You know, and the reason I used a business example is because businesses pay a big price for inefficiency; they just nosedive into the ground and disappear.

And so if even a business can only manage 5% genuine productivity, that gives you a rule of thumb against which you should judge institutions in general. It's hard to make something work. And mean, you look around the world; most countries don't work. Most governmental systems don't work. And a lot of them get so out of control that they kill people.

So what you hope for is you hope you can get in somewhere that has possibility, opens up a space for you to do what you can do, if you're disciplined and ready to go. And that's good enough.

And so the classes, a lot of classes, they're not going to be worthwhile. That's okay; you put in as much effort as you need to to pass them, and you pay attention to the things outside of that where you're actually learning.

Why is there so much focus on — well, it depends on the institution that you go to. Like if you go to a side program, which is just professional training, they won't care if you publish. They're not trying to produce people who are scientists.

The idea with the Adler programs is that you can't be a good clinician unless you're a scientist, and there’s some real truth in that. And bad clinicians really hurt people, like you can mess up someone's memory no trouble if you're a foolish clinician. You can cause a lot of misery, grief, ‘cause especially confused and vague people, they'll open themselves up to you, and whatever boneheaded biases and lack of clarity you bring to the situation has every possibility of making things worse for them.

So the big research institutions, they want to train you to think critically. And a critical thinker is someone who's good at getting rid of what isn't necessary and keeping what is. I mean, often when you think of critical thinking, you think of criticizing things, you know, like, "