12 Rules for Life: London: How To Academy

Tonight's talk. This is the most popular talk we've ever done in 15 years. Tonight is the third, so it's been a weekend of Jordan Peterson, rich with... it has been a huge pleasure. For anyone who doesn't know him, last night I think it was one babe in arms, and tonight it's probably my mother. He is a former professor, associate professor at Harvard University, and is now the professor of clinical psychology at Toronto. His first book was a huge success; it revolutionized the psychology of religion and his latest book, "The Twelve Rules of Life," is set to do exactly the same.

Just a few housekeeping things: at the end of the talk, we're going to have a Q&A, which I'm going to moderate, so do prepare your questions. Please make them questions, and also, for those people in the livestream, there'll be posted notes and you can't hand questions to the ushers, and we'll be taking those as well. So, I look forward to that. At the end of it, we're going to be doing not so much as signing but here on stage, a dedication. Everyone's book is already signed, so if you don't want a dedication, just leave you on the third page; you'll find the signature.

In order to... last night, there was a huge queue, as you can imagine. In order to make the queue run smoothly, and sorry to sound bossy, but he's not going to be doing selfies just because it means he’s got to stand up the whole time and it'll slow down the flow. But he is very happy to be photographed, and you can photobomb him if you’d like. Also, because all of us, particularly me, are really keen for him to solve the problems of our lives, please resist doing that during the dedication because it’ll really slow everything down.

I think the three things that you can take away from this evening—and you'll be the judge—are, first of all, be inspired by the talk; secondly, read the book; and thirdly, marry a Canadian. I feel rather fortunate to have now done all three. Also, if you would like to tweet, its hashtag is #TheTwelveRulesOfLife.

So, without further ado, please welcome one of the world's great public intellectuals, Jordan Peterson. Thank you. [Applause] [Applause]

Well, that was nice. So, I thought I'd talk about my book tonight. I’ve given him two talks now, and I didn’t actually talk directly about it; I sort of talked around it. So, I thought I don’t like to give the same talk twice, so I thought I’d actually walk through it and outline it a little bit. I had to spend most of the day memorizing the rules. You know, you’d think if you worked on something for three years—or it's been five years, I guess—you'd actually have it memorized. But memory is a very strange thing, and it's very particular and goal-oriented. I actually didn’t have the rules memorized, and certainly not their numbers.

So, hopefully, I do by now. So, I guess we’re going to find out. I have a copy of the book here in case I forget. I think we'll go through them one by one and see how that goes...

Seven o'clock, so all right, good. The first rule, which is kind of a comical rule, is "Stand up straight with your shoulders back." It’s a meditation, among other things, on the habits of lobsters. I read some papers on lobsters, well, must be ten years ago, I guess, and they just absolutely blew me away. One of the things I’ve really loved about being a psychologist—there's many things—but I've really loved psychoanalytic theory and the great clinicians: the behaviorists as well. I mean, Freud, Jung, Adler, Carl Rogers, Abraham Maslow, the behaviorists like Skinner, and the cognitive behaviorists. I’ve learned a tremendous amount from reading the clinicians because they’ve learned so much about life. It’s crazy—by reading them, so that's been fun.

But then, on the entirely other end of the spectrum, where I've learned most about psychology is from the really low, what would you call them, the really science-oriented animal behaviors. That’s where they would... they turned into the neuroscientists, right? They were the animal behaviorists first of all, and then they turned into the neuroscientists. I’ve learned a tremendous amount from them. They're such clear thinkers, the best of the bunch. I think there are two of them. One named Jeffrey Gray, who wrote a book called "The Neural Psychology of Anxiety," which is just a deadly book. It’s impossible to read; it takes like six months to read it because I think he read like 1,800 papers to write it or something like that, and he actually read them. That’s the cool thing, and he understood them, which is really something.

Then there’s another guy named Jaak Panksepp, who wrote a book called "Affective Neuroscience," which outlines his studies, for example, of rats. He was the guy who learned that rats laugh if you tickle them with the end of a pencil eraser, but they laugh ultrasonically, like bats. So, you have to slow down the ultrasonic vocalizations before you can hear them giggle. And you think, why the hell would you spend your time tickling rats with a pencil and making them laugh? But see, what he demonstrated there was that there was a play circuit in mammals, that there's an actual... there’s a psycho-biological basis for rough-and-tumble play, for example. It’s a bloody big deal, you know, discovering a whole new circuit in the brain. That's like discovering a continent; it’s Nobel-prize winning stuff.

So, Panksepp’s "Affective Neuroscience," I would highly recommend that. There’s this other book I know about too, which is "Twelve Rules for Life," which you could also look into if you want.

Anyways, I was reading these articles on lobsters, and I came across this finding that lobsters govern their postural flexion with serotonin. I thought, "God, that's so interesting!" It’s so… deflection—it’s this is to stand up straight. Wow, that's so interesting because, you know, depressed people crouch over. I wonder if there's any link between those two things. I read a whole pile of papers on lobster. Lobster neural chemistry is actually quite well understood because they have a fairly simple nervous system, right?

If you want to understand a complex nervous system, it's a good idea to understand a simple one first and then sort of elaborate upwards. It turns out that serotonin governs status, governs status, emotional regulation, and posture in lobsters just like it does in human beings. That just blew me away!

One thing that chapter one is about is the fact that if a lobster is defeated in a dominance battle, you can give it essentially antidepressants, and it will fight again. Now, that just blew me away; you know, it’s so remarkable. One of the things that tells you is that... imagine that you could be lobster top dog or bottom dog. Imagine there are ten strata in the lobster hierarchy, and so you could be number one, right, top lobster, number ten, bottom lobster.

If you're bottom lobster, you have low serotonin levels and high octopamine levels—that's the neurochemical that human beings don’t produce. If you’re a top lobster, you have high serotonin levels and lower octopamine levels, and you can move a lobster in its dominance hierarchy by moderating its levels of serotonin. I thought that was so interesting because what it means is that the counter that keeps track of our status when we have a counter in a sense in our minds that keeps track of our status is a third of a billion years old.

What that also means is that the idea of the hierarchy, let’s call it a dominance hierarchy, because within lobsters, it’s kind of like a physical prowess hierarchy—something like that. The idea of the hierarchy is at least 350 million years old. I read that, and I think, "Well, so much for the idea that human hierarchies are a socio-cultural construct." It’s like, “No, that’s wrong." It’s not just a little bit wrong; it’s unbelievably wrong. It’s mind-bogglingly wrong, right? Hierarchies have been around for a third of a billion years, and we have a neurochemical system that modulates our understanding of those hierarchies.

This is the interesting thing too, and this is why people's reputations are so important to them, among... there are lots of reasons, but this is one of them. Where this counter that you share with lobsters rates you in terms of your hierarchical position determines the ratio of negative emotion to positive emotion that you feel. That’s also an absolutely mind-boggling idea for two reasons. One is it tells you why it’s so hard on people to be put down because it doesn’t just upset them in the moment; it changes the way their entire system responds to the world so that they now experience more positive emotion and less negative emotion, so that’s really rough.

There’s a corollary to that too, which is like there’s a very tight relationship between your belief system and your dominance hierarchy position. It’s complicated, but it’s worth going through. Let’s say that… so I have a certain amount of status as a professor, and I have… let’s call it the… what would you say? I’ve been granted the entitlement to a certain position in a social hierarchy.

Now, the question is, why do I have a valid claim to that position? And the answer, hypothetically, is because I know enough so that my claim to the position is valid. If you stand up in the audience and challenge my beliefs and show that I’m wrong, you might say, “Well, I get upset because I’m wrong,” but the more accurate reason that I get upset is because you’re indicating to the crowd that my position in the hierarchy of authority is invalid, and by doing that, you lower me in the hierarchy, and you mess around with the neurochemical systems that are regulating my emotions.

So, if you're interested, at least in part, in why people are so prone to defend themselves and their beliefs in the service of their position, then that’s why. That's a great example of how you can learn these unbelievable things by stumbling across a rather obscure biological fact. It just... it's just, what would you say? It's like a series of dominoes, and that’s also why biological facts are so useful.

It's like we don't have to argue about whether or not, ha-ha, social hierarchies, as I said, or hierarchies are social constructs. A given hierarchy is influenced in its structure by socio-cultural conditioning, let’s say. But the fact of the hierarchy—so, like, the part of your brain that detects and regulates your response to hierarchies is older than the part of your brain that recognizes trees. Like it's old; it’s really, really fundamental. Almost all social animals organize themselves socially in hierarchies.

Now, the other thing that chapter one is a bit of a meditation on what might constitute a hierarchy. One of my business colleagues, a former student of mine from Harvard—very, very smart guy, he’s got a graduate degree in engineering from MIT and a PhD in psychology from Harvard, so there’s like one of him in the whole world—and he’s a very smart guy. He helped me design the self-authoring suite, by the way, and he’s been working for about 20 years on that. That’s the suite of programs that helps people write about their lives and straighten them out. He told me to stop using the word “dominance hierarchy,” and he said the reason for that was that it was infested with Marxist presuppositions, and it really bothered me when he first said that because I’ve been using the word for years: “dominance hierarchy.”

He said... we had a discussion about that. He said, “Well, it’s predicated on the idea that you climb up the hierarchy of human hierarchy as a consequence of the expression of power.” It’s like, “That's wrong. You climb up valid hierarchies as a consequence of the expression of competence.”

That’s actually technically right. He was exactly the right person to tell me that because he had done his PhD on what predicts success in Western hierarchies, and the answer is quite clear: general cognitive ability, some prefrontal ability as well, which was what he specifically tested. Intelligence, roughly speaking, although it’s a little bit more elaborate than intelligence, but that’s close enough. Trait conscientiousness accounts for about 50 percent of the variance in long-term success, and you think, well, hey, how do you want your society to be structured? It seems pretty good to me that smart, hardworking people are the ones most likely to succeed. That’s not a bad empirical test of the validity of a structure, now especially given how much vagary there is in life. Lots of random things happen to people.

But it’s better to be born three standard deviations above the mean in intelligence in the West than it is to be born three standard deviations above the mean in wealth in relation to where you'll end up when you're 40. So, he said to use the word “competence hierarchy,” or we decided that, and I think that’s much better.

Chapter one is a bit of a meditation on the nature of hierarchies and the biochemistry of hierarchy, but it’s also an injunction about how to present yourself because you want to present yourself to the world in a manner that doesn’t disgrace you in some sense. That might be a good way to think about it, and you don’t want to disgrace yourself because the consequence of disgrace is its emotional dysregulation: more pain, less positive emotion.

So, the best way to present yourself is to stand up forthrightly and to stretch out, you know, and to occupy some space and to make yourself sort of vulnerable by doing that because you open up the front of your body. Right? But it’s a sign of confidence, and that way people are most likely to give you the benefit of the doubt, and that’s a good way to start regulating your mood.

Not only does it directly regulate your mood to stand up, because it’s so tightly associated—like posture reflection is associated with serotonin and emotional regulation—but also because if you straighten up and you present yourself in that manner, then other people are more likely to take you seriously, and that means they’ll start treating you as if you're a number one lobster instead of a number ten lobster. And that’s another way that you can at least give yourself the bloody benefit of the doubt, right? And confront the world in a courageous manner.

And that’s a really good way of also figuring out how to establish yourself in multiple competence hierarchies because one of the general rules of thumb about how to be successful is to confront things that frighten you forthrightly and with courage. That’s kind of a universal strategy for success, and so that’s what the first chapter is about, so that’s quite fun.

My graduate students, I told them these lobsters stories at my graduate students when we used to go out for breakfast, and they were a very competitive bunch—very fractious and witty, and they were always trying to get one over on each other, a hundred and some witty put down or something like that. It got to the point in the restaurants where they put their claws in the urns, click like this when they got one over on one of their colleagues, which was very peculiar and strange and very funny as well.

So, that’s rule number one. Rule number two is, "Treat yourself like you’re someone that you care about." That’s a deeper chapter I would say; like chapter one is kind of comical, but it's also got this serious scientific end, for example, and it's practical, like most of the rules are. Chapter 2 is a bit of a meditation on why... see, I read this piece of work by Jung a long while back, and it was a meditation on the injunction to treat your neighbor as you would like to be treated, something like that. What Jung pointed out, which I really liked, was that that wasn’t an injunction to be nice to other people; it was an invitation to reciprocity.

It was something like this: you should figure out how you would like to be treated like you were taking care of yourself, not how you would like people to respond to you. It’s more important than that. It’s like imagine you had a child that you really cared for, and someone said: "Well, people will treat this child exactly like you want them to, but you have to figure out what that is." So then you’d have to sit down for like a month and you think, “Okay, well, how do you want your child to be treated?” You don’t want everyone just to be nice to him; you know you want people to challenge them, and you want people to discipline them, and you want people to tell him when he’s wrong. It’s like you don’t just want everyone to be nice; that's pathetic.

So, well, you want to treat other people like you would like to be treated; well then you have to figure out how would you like to be treated. While you’d like people to fawn all over you and just lay everything at your feet, it’s like, no, that’s not something you’d wish for for someone that you were taking care of. Then there’s an additional problem, which is it’s often the case that people will treat other people better than they treat themselves.

That happens extremely frequently, so one of the things I pointed out in chapter 2 was that if you have a dog and you take him to a vet, and the vet gives you your prescription medicine, you’ll go buy the medicine, and you will give it to the dog and you will do it properly, but if you go yourself to a doctor and you get a prescription, there’s one... there’s a 30 percent chance you won’t even pick up the medication, and if you do there’s a 50 percent chance that you won’t administer it to yourself properly. I really thought about that when I first came across that statistic; it really, it was another one of those little facts. I thought: "What the hell's up with that?"

It’s like you’ll do it for your dog, so obviously you’ll do it for something you care about, and you’re conscientious enough so you’ll actually do it. So, like why wouldn’t you do it for you? Your dog likes you, you know, even your dog would rather that you did! But you don’t, you don’t. And it’s—it’s actually one of the reasons that modern medicine doesn’t work nearly as well as it could, because people just don’t take their medication.

And it’s not only because they don’t take care of themselves. There’s some skepticism about doctors, but you could be just as skeptical about the vet. So, it’s a deep meditation, I would say, and it’s what I’ve done with these rules is they’re very simple rules, and they’re kind of comical and tongue-in-cheek in some ways, but what I’ve tried to do is like pull them apart and show what’s underneath them.

To go down as deep as I possibly can, and in rule two, it’s a bit of a meditation on why people don’t like themselves very much. I think there are two reasons really, and one is that we’re fragile and damageable and imperfect in multiple dimensions all the time, and that often just gets worse. A lot of things get worse as you get old, for example.

So, it’s not necessarily that easy for a self-conscious being who’s extraordinarily aware of his or her own fragility. And—but not just fragility—foolishness and errors. You know yourself better than anyone else knows you, and you know you might have a certain amount of dislike for someone you know because of something they did, but you know everything you did.

Jesus, that’s a drag, man. You have to carry that along behind, like really? I did that? You know, and then, so there’s that—it’s like you’re weak and kind of useless and prone to temptation, and you know all those things. You know that just shouldn’t be that way, and then you’re also capable of pretty vicious acts of malevolence, and so you also know that about yourself.

And so, it’s a real existential question for people: why the hell should you take care of something as sorry and wretched as you are? And that’s really what the chapter is about: it’s because the answer in the chapter is yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, first of all, yes, you’re pretty useless and terrible, but so is everyone else, and that’s actually an existential problem, right? What I mean by that, it’s a problem that every human being has always had and always will.

So, it’s not just you; it’s a universal problem, and there’s an answer to that. One of them is to... what is it? To say love the sinner but hate the sin. It’s something like that, is that despite the fact that you’re not all that you could be, the proper attitude to have towards yourself is the attitude that you would have towards someone that you genuinely cared for.

And that it’s incumbent on you to act as if you genuinely care for yourself just like you would act towards someone that you actually cared about, some other person. And so it’s a reversal in some sense of the golden rule, right? And it’s a discussion of why that’s necessary, and also more than that, it's a discussion of why you have a moral obligation to do that.

It's not just that you should because it would be better for you; you actually have a moral obligation to do that, I think, because you make the world a much better place, a much worse place if you don't take care of yourself. So you should bloody well take care of yourself, you know? Because, well, that’s what the chapter is about.

It’s partly because you have something valuable to bring into the world. That’s the thing about being an individual; it’s the thing that Western civilization has always recognized. That as an individual, you have a light that you have to bring into the world, and that if you don’t bring it into the world, the world is a dimmer place. And that’s a bad thing because when the world is a dim place, it can get very, very, very dark.

So, it’s necessary... number one lobster! Now, none of those things you need to take care of yourself because you’re in the best position to do that, and it’s necessary for you to take care of yourself despite the fact that we’re mortal and vulnerable and self-conscious and capable—not only capable of doing terrible things, but actually do them. Despite all that, you still have that responsibility.

I wanted to hit the question as hard as I can to try to figure out, well, why people have our contempt towards themselves? And there’s plenty of reason, that’s for sure. But the reasons do not justify the mistreatment of yourself. It’s as simple as that; it’s not a good strategy.

And the next rule is: "Make friends with people who want the best for you." That’s a meditation on my own childhood and adolescence, to some degree. I had friends who wanted the best for me and friends who didn’t. They were friends who... some of them were aiming up and some of them were aiming down. If you have a friend that’s aiming down and you do something that’s aiming up, then they're generally not that happy about it. You know, try to talk your accomplishment with one of their own hypothetical or real or put down what you're doing or offer you a cigarette if you’re trying to quit.

And you've kind of done that successfully or a drink if you’ve been drinking too much and are trying to stop being an alcoholic, you know? Or... yeah, they’re cynical and bitter and devoted towards no good. Sometimes, that’s family members too, and sometimes it’s even part of you, you know?

But this chapter is an injunction to people: you have an ethical responsibility to take care of yourself. You have an ethical responsibility to surround yourself with people who have the courage and the faith and wisdom to wish you well when you’ve done something good and to stop you when you’re doing something destructive.

And if your friends aren’t like that, then they’re not your friends. Maintaining your friendships with them might not even be in their interest. And so, it’s a tricky argument to make because I’m not saying whenever anyone’s in trouble you should push them into a ditch and then give them a couple of kicks. That’s not the idea.

But I had a couple of rules I didn’t write about. One was: be careful about whom you share good news with, and another was: be careful about whom you share bad news with. Everyone, those rules ring in people’s minds quite quickly. A friend is someone you can share good news with. You know, you go to them, and you say, "Hey, look, this good thing happened to me," and they say, "Look, I’m so happy that that happened to you! Like, way to be!" And they don’t think, “God damn it, why didn’t that happen to me?” and like, “You didn’t deserve it. Here’s a bunch of reasons you’re stupid and why it won’t work.” It’s like, that’s not helpful.

And so, I would say like if people are... you know what the other thing people are doing if they’re trying to drag you down, let's say, is they’re trying to see if you’ll put up with it because they have this idea that maybe life isn’t worth living and things aren’t good. And if they can besmirch, let’s say, to use an archaic term, something that’s pristine and good, then they demonstrate to themselves that there is no true ideal and that there’s no necessary reason to be responsible and to strive forward.

They usually... what’s a test case? You know, I’ll just push you down into the low lobster bin and see how you respond. If you put up with it, then yeah, my cynicism is fully justified. And so, well, that’s chapter three. It’s a painful chapter because it also details the suicide of one of my friends, which occurred over a very long period of time—not the actual suicide, but all the prodrome to it.

So, it’s a contentious chapter. Number four is comparing yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today. The reason I wrote that was because I had this client, ten young clinical psychologists, and I spent 20 hours a week for 25 years listening to people—listening to people tell me about their lives, you know? And those people were people who were just barely hanging on to the bottom of the world up to people who were so successful you can hardly believe it—like the entire gamut of people.

That’s been absolutely fascinating; it’s like being a clinical psychologist if you really listen is like being immersed in a Dostoyevsky novel all the time, you know, because it's amazing what people will tell you if you listen to them. People are so interesting if you actually listen to them because they’re so peculiar—like they’re like penguins are writing on sources and ostriches; they’re unlikely creatures.

Anyways, with regards to comparing yourself to who you were yesterday and not to who someone else is today, this old client of mine, he was about 85 when he came to see me, and he was a financier, kind of a mathematical genius. He made these little pendants out of a mathematical symbol for the most beautiful mathematical equation that was ever written—he made them out of gold and he would hand those out.

He’d studied psychology as a young man and he introduced me to this concept that I didn’t know about called the Pareto distribution, which see, I’d been taught as a psychologist that most human characteristics were normally distributed, right? So most people were average and some people were extreme—that’s a priori our normal distribution.

Intelligence is like that, and height; there are more people of average height than very tall or very short, and weight is like that. Lots of things are normally distributed and psychologists tend to assume that everything is. But they didn’t... creative products are distributed in a Pareto distribution, and that's a whole different thing and it's really important to know this. It’s another fundamental fact, the knowledge of which can sort of transform the way you conceptualize, let's say, the political landscape.

So here’s an example of the Pareto distribution: you know there’s a rule of thumb that if you run a company, that 20 percent of your employees do 80 percent of the work, or 20 percent of your customers are responsible for 80 percent of your sales, or the 20 percent of them are responsible for 80 percent of the customer service calls—the same thing. But that’s not exactly the rule. The rule is worse than that. The rule is, in a given domain, the square root of the number of people operating in that domain do half the productive work.

So you think, "Well, you have ten employees, three of them do half the work." It’s like, "Yeah, okay! What if you have a hundred employees?" Then ten of them do half the work. "What if you have a thousand employees?" Well, then it's thirty, and if it’s 10,000 employees, then it’s a hundred. This actually turns out to be a rather ironclad rule. It applies across very, very many situations.

It applies, for example, to the mass of stars and the size of cities, so you can see how universal it is as a law. It’s something like those that have more get more, and those that have less get less. That’s the Matthew principle, right? To those who have everything, more will be given; from those who have nothing, everything will be taken away, and the economists sometimes call that the Matthew principle.

What that lays out is a world that’s rife with inequality. So, you know, you hear this idea that I think it’s the 85 richest people in the world have more money than the bottom 2 billion; that's a Pareto distribution phenomenon. You might say, “To hell with capitalism for producing that!” It’s like “Sorry! You got your diagnosis wrong! It’s a natural law.” No matter what society you study, you get a Pareto distribution of wealth. You get a Pareto distribution of the number of records recorded; you get a Pareto distribution of the number of songs written or goals scored. Any creative product has that characteristic.

It’s partly because as you start to become successful, let's say, people offer you more and more opportunities, and as you start to fail, people move away from you, and you plummet. So, okay, so that’s rough. So what it means is that there is always a landscape of inequality. I’m not saying that we shouldn't do anything about it, although I am saying that we don’t know what to do about it.

That's the thing you know because you can modify the Pareto distribution of wealth, let's say, but if you... but we don’t know how to do it without maybe disrupting the system so completely that it collapses, which is what happened in the Soviet Union, for example. In Mao’s China, they were trying at least in principle to adjust inequality, but the cure was far worse than the disease.

The truth of the matter is we actually don’t know technically how much inequality there has to be to generate wealth. We can guess, and you could say, “Well, there should be less,” and you might say, “Well, there should be more.” If you're left-wing, you'd say less, and if you're right-wing, you’d say, “Well, we’ll just let the inequality flourish.” But we do know that it’s inevitable and we also know that we don’t know how to regulate it. So there is inequality!

What that means is there’s always gonna be people around that are better at something than you are, and that’s a problem because you can get jealous, and you can get bitter, and you can get resentful, and worse, you can get hopeless. You know, because you look... like I have this friend of mine. He told me something so funny. He was decrying his lack of success in the world, and he compared himself to his roommate, and he said, “You know, his roommate—his cozy roommate—was doing much better than he was, and his bloody roommate was Elon Musk.”

It’s like, “Oh! You’re not doing as well as Elon Musk?” Well, I mean, you could see me—that would take it rather personally because they were roommates and everything. It wasn’t like he was doing badly; he wasn’t doing pretty damn well. It’s like, “I’m not as good as Elon Musk.” It's like, “Yeah, well, you and like seven billion other people, you know?"

But I thought it was instructive because, well, yes, you have to be careful who you compare yourself to. Now, you can’t just not compare yourself to others, to successful people, right, because then you don’t have anything to aim at. One of the things I learned from you, this was a cool thing, I’m going to make a real lateral move here—Jung thought the Book of Revelation was appended to the Bible because the Christ in the Gospels was too merciful; he was too nice a guy.

Now, he's an ideal, right? And Jung said, “Wait a second! An ideal is always a judge.” That’s the thing about an ideal because you’re not as good as your ideal. So your ideal is a judge, and you always fall short of the ideal. So how the hell can you have the benefits of having an ideal without having the crushing blow that goes along with having the judge that always regards you as insufficient?

So I was trying to work that out in the chapter, and this is something I’ve had to work out a lot as a clinical psychologist. It’s like, well, let’s say you need a goal, but we don’t want to let your distance from the goal crush you. So you’ve got to set up a goal, and then you go to make the goal, break the goal down into parts so that you can move towards it. You have a fairly high likelihood of doing it. Set a high aim but differentiate it down so you know what the next step is, and then make the next step difficult enough so you have to push yourself past where you are but also provide yourself with a reasonable probability of success.

That’s also what you do with children, right? You want to push them because they need to grow up and be more than they are, right? But you don’t want to crush them with constant failure, so what you do is aim high and make the goal proximate, difficult but proximal. So anyway, that’s one way of looking at it, but then the next thing is...

I've had clients—many clients in their 30s who are trying to... this is more true with women, I would say: a lot of women who were very high achieving and who established their career goals at 30, and then they want to differentiate and differentiate out their life. They want to have a husband; they want to have a family, and they’re trying to figure out how to do that.

One of the things I’ve noticed that around 30 you really have to stop comparing yourself in some ways to other people, and the reason for that is that the particularities of your life are so unique—synchronic! There isn’t anyone really all that much like you, you know, because the details of your life happened to matter.

So maybe you compare yourself to some rock star or something like that, and you know the person’s rich and famous and glamorous and all that, but you know they’re alcoholic and they use too much cocaine and they’ve had three divorces. And it’s like, how the hell do you make sense out of that? Is that someone that you should judge yourself harshly against or not?

The answer is you don’t know because you don’t know all the details of their lives, and who do you know that you can compare yourself to that’s easy? You yesterday! So, here’s a good goal. It’s something like: aim high, and I really mean that! It’s like about that a little bit too—aim high! But use yourself as your control.

So your goal is to make today some tiny increment better than yesterday, and you can define “better” yourself. This doesn’t have to be some imposition of external morality, you know? You know where you’re weak and insufficient, where you could improve. Think, okay, well, this is what I was like yesterday; if I did this little thing, things would be just an increment better.

Well, that’s a great thing because you get the ball rolling, and incremental improvement is unstoppable. You can actually implement it, and it starts to generate Pareto distribution-like consequences; it starts to compound, and I’ve seen that happen in people's lives over time. People writing all the time and tell me that they’re doing that.

I’ve seen that happen in people's lives continually. They make a goal—a goal that... the goal should be how could I conceive of my life so that if I had that life, it would clearly be worth living? So I wouldn’t have to be bitter, resentful, deceitful, arrogant, and vengeful—like that’s sort of the bottom line, right?

Because that’s what endless failure does to you—it’s not good. And that’s what life without purpose and the goal does to you as well, because life is very hard. So you think, okay, well, I need to adopt a mode of being that would justify my suffering. And you can ask yourself that question: what would make this worthwhile?

You need to quote Nietzsche, I think, in that chapter: he said, “He who has a why can bear almost any how.” That’s a lovely line, man! I mean, it’s a lovely line and it’s really worth thinking about.

So you think, well, how do I manage this misery and suffering and futility? It’s like, well, I need to figure out what I would have to do in order to make that clearly worthwhile, and so then you have your goal. Then you think, well, I need to move towards that incrementally because I’m kind of useless and can only do so much, and maybe not even that. But all I have to do is be a little bit better than my miserable self yesterday, and that’ll propel you forward very rapidly.

You can succeed at it, which is also really lovely, because why not set yourself up for success, you know? Because otherwise you droop around like a number-10 lobster, and you know, that’s just not good. You get all pinchy when that happens, and it’s not a good thing. So that was chapter four.

Chapter five, geez, we’re cruising along here. Chapter five is the one that I thought I would get in the most trouble for writing. You know, I figured people would be all over me for this and so far they haven’t been, but they still might be. It’s called “Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.”

And I thought that would be contentious, first of all, because people would think, “Well, I’d never dislike my children.” It’s like, really? Really? You’re going to really tell me that? God, you know, and there’s a more... there’s a more horrifying element to that too because as a clinical psychologist, I’ve seen the full Freudian nightmare, I can tell you that.

I’ve seen families where it’s like the family members are standing in a circle, let's say, and each of them has their hands around each other’s neck and they’re squeezing hard enough to strangle the other person in 20 years. And that’s the family. It’s like... and you know if you haven’t met a family like that or well then you’re not paying attention, and there’s some reasonable possibility that you’re actually in the family like that.

So the idea that parents can’t dislike their children is like, God, how naïve can you get? It’s just... that’s just... if you think that, man, I don’t even know where you’d start to straighten yourself out.

I could never dislike my children. It’s like, yeah, well those are the people who produce the most monstrous children, I can tell you that. So, mmm. So, and then there’s this idea Jung had which I really love, which is the idea of the shadow. You know it’s... it kind of got pop psychology and trendy among the new-age types too, but one thing I can tell you about Carl Jung is, no matter what else someone might say about him, he is absolutely not new agey.

If you read Carl Jung and you understand him and you’re not terrified right to the depths of your soul, you haven’t understood a damn thing you’ve read. One of the things he said about the shadow, which is the dark side of humanity, the dark side of each individual, was that its roots reached all the way to hell. And he meant something—he meant something very specific, both metaphysical and practical by that.

The metaphysical element was he meant hell—literally and metaphysically—but he also meant the more proximal kinds of hell. What he meant was that if you were able to understand your dark side, then you would see in yourself a reflection of the behavior that was present at Auschwitz, for example. And the reason that people don’t take the dark side of themselves seriously at all, and even confront the fact that it exists, is because no one wants to see that reflected within them.

And no wonder; it's absolutely no wonder. You also believe that that confrontation with the shadow was an inevitable barrier to enlightenment—that there was no... you know, Joseph Campbell, who is a popularizer of you to some degree, has become well-known for saying "Follow your bliss." And, you know, Campbell learned virtually everything he knew from Jung, but Jung—that isn’t what Jung said at all. He said, “Pursue what’s meaningful and you'll encounter that which you least want to encounter.”

And that’s, well, that’s the dragon, right? That’s the dragon that hoards gold, for example, and the dragon is also something that lives inside you, and it’s not something that you take the encounter with lightly. There are very old stories about this Egyptian story about the god Horus who was that Egyptian savior in some sense, and when he encountered evil, even though he was a god, he lost an eye in the battle.

That’s the famous Egyptian eye that everyone still knows about; that’s the eye of Horus that was torn out by Seth, who’s the precursor to Satan. And so it’s no joke; it’s no joke! Back to children: see, I kind of knew this when I had my kids. I’d already undergone that to some degree and understood what it meant to be a bad person, a terrible person.

One of the things I knew that manifested itself in families all the time is a tyrannical father, overprotective mother—more rarely, overprotective mother, tyrannical overprotective father—tyrannical mother; it’s usually the other way around. The terrible pathological familial drama that Freud made much of in the early 20th century, I had seen that in many, many situations. Dismal, brutal, awful; I’ve seen parents punish their children.

You can also take a page from Nietzsche if you really want to punish your children or anyone else. If you have someone you’re interested in punishing, including yourself, you don’t—I mean, to ever punish someone you really want to punish for doing something wrong because that’s actually a bit of a relief to them. You know, that’s the theme of Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment”; the murderer gets away with it and it’s a relief to him when he gets caught.

It’s like, no! If you really want to punish someone, you wait until they do something good. Then you punish them because that’ll teach them! You maximize the hurt that way; you decrease the probability that they’ll ever do anything good again. And I’ll tell you, man, if you want to have a good relationship with someone, that’s one thing you don’t do.

You open your bloody eyes, and if they do something that you would like them to do again, then you tell them how much you appreciated the fact that that happened, and you hope that it replicates. You know? You see, that’s if there’s one thing you can take away from tonight’s lecture—that’s an extraordinarily useful thing to know.

Watch, and when people do something that they should do more of, say, “Look, I saw that you did this specific thing. I saw that it took some effort. Here’s what it meant. Here’s how I observed; it’s like: keep that up.”

And man, if you love someone, you do that to them. That’s encouragement; that’s such a great thing. So anyway, back to children. So I already knew that I was a pretty decent monster by the time I had kids, and I thought, “Well, my kids, little, you know, like a baby or two-year-olds, like I’m a horrible monster.”

And so there’s an uneven power problem here; I better not let that child do that which really makes me angry. You know, now you hear... now and then you hear about something horrible that happens. I... when I was in Boston years ago, I read about a woman who plunged her two-year-old daughter’s arms into boiling water. You think, well, how in the world can that happen? It’s like, well, she’s probably hungover; she probably just lost her job; she was probably desperate in six different ways. She probably didn’t have any good disciplinary strategies for children, she probably didn’t have anyone helping her, she was bitter and resentful and angry and the child misbehaved at exactly the wrong moment.

And like, you’re going to be around your children a lot, and so you might want to have it so that they don’t misbehave at exactly the wrong moment because all hell can break loose if they can. I didn’t want that to happen. And I knew that it was easy for people to hate their children even though they mouth the words that they loved them all the time. I saw very little evidence of that in many situations.

One of the things... you know, you have a natural affinity for children and even more, maybe a more powerful natural affinity for your own children, so that’s a good start. But you don’t want to set them up as an enemy against you. You don’t want to allow them to engage in the kind of hierarchical challenge that makes you irritable and resentful. That’s not a good idea.

And if the things they do make you dislike them, the probability that they will make other people dislike them is extraordinarily high. And so you can consult your own irritability, and you can say, “Look, kid, I used to tell my kids this; you know when they were three or four, I’d say, ‘Look, I’m not in a very good mood, and I’m likely to be unreasonable, so it’d be best if you’d go in your room and play for a while.’ It’s like, I like you, man! You’re a great kid! But like, get the hell out of here for a while."

And they were fine with that! We’d trained them already at that point to be able to go play by themselves in the room, you know—which is something a kid should be able to do anyways. But you need to know what sort of monster you are if you’re gonna be a good parent. If you think, “Oh, I’m not a monster,” it’s like: “Oh, yes you are! You’re just an unbelievably unconscious monster, and that’s actually the worst kind.”

So, and then the other thing about that chapter is there’s an idea in it—and it’s an idea that I think is well supported by the relevant literature—which is that your fundamental job as a parent, especially of a child from zero to four, is to make that child eminently socially desirable.

So what you're... you’re a successful parent if when your child is four, all sorts of other children want to play with him or her. That’s really the... that’s like, if you want one marker of whether or not you’ve been successful—that’s it! Now, some children are a lot harder to get along with than others, and some children have a harder time playing, and so I’m not saying that every parent who has a child that isn’t popular at four is at fault for that.

I’m not saying that. I’m saying the reverse, which is: you can be sure that you’ve been successful, if your child is not popular exactly but desirable as a playmate. And so then you think, well, what have you done for your child? Well, you’ve opened up the entire world of children to them.

Because they know how to play, which is a very deep knowledge and it starts to become inculcated probably at the breast, and certainly in the course of rough-and-tumble play at about two years of age. It’s a deep embodied knowledge—they know how to play. Like a good well-trained dog knows how to play. You know, you meet a new dog, and you go like this, and the dog goes like this, and you think, “Oh, that dog! I can go like this and it won’t bite me,” right? It knows how to play.

A kid who’s awake and alert is just like that. Like a well-socialized kid, if you know anything about kids, says you can take a four-year-old, make a little play gesture at them, and they’ll smile right away and start playing just right now. That’s what you want for your kids!

Then everywhere they go, other kids like them and will include them in their play. Play is the way that children develop, and so if other children include them in their play, then the children develop. And the poor kids that don’t get befriended at the age of four with the literature on this is crystal clear. If your child is an outcast at the age of four, the probability that anything can be done about that is almost zero, no matter what you do.

I hate to be so blunt about that, but I know the literature, and that’s what the literature suggests. And then the other thing is if you don’t allow your children to engage in dislikable behavior, then adults will like them because adults actually like kids, you know? One of the things I loved about having little kids in Montreal, I lived in a poor area; there were a lot of rough guys around there, and we used to roll our daughter around in the stroller, and these rough guys, you know, like God only knows what they were up to.

They're rough-looking guys, you know? We rolled our daughter by them and they’d smile and they’d crouch down and make little goo-goo faces. You know, they were... I tell you, one of the great things about having little kids is they bring out the best in other people.

You see a whole side of humanity, even among the darker parts of humanity, you see a whole side of them that you wouldn’t normally see, and it’s lovely. And the thing is, if you’re good to your kid in a real way, you can help them maintain that tremendous attractiveness that they have as young children and to respond to adults properly, like a puppy that wags its tail instead of growls and, you know, goes for your ankle, and then wherever they go, adults welcome them and teach them things and pat them on the head and smile at them genuinely instead of saying, “Oh my God, here comes that couple with that goddamn brat again!”

You know, which is the horrible... that’s a horrible thing to do to a child because then everywhere they go, all the good will is false! You know? There’s nothing that you can do to someone that’s more terrible than to put them in a world where all the good will directed towards them is false.

That’s a terrible thing! So, anyway, that’s chapter... let’s see, chapter five. Chapter six is about... it’s a rough chapter. It’s about... I spend a lot of time reading about totalitarianism and about atrocity—like, many, many brutal things, brutal beyond the capacity of imagination, even. I read a lot about individual criminals.

You know, serial killers and those sorts of people trying to get to the bottom of... one book I would really recommend is a book by Carl Panzram, which is an autobiography—a Panzram is the name of the book. He was a... here’s a rough guy, man! His... whatever his dying words to his executioner, to his hangman, he said, “Hurry up, you bastard! I could kill ten men in the time that it takes you to hang me!”

That was his dying words! You know, he said, “I wish the human race had one neck so that I could put my hands around it and squeeze!” That was Carl Panzram, and not many people like that write autobiographies, but he did, and he told you why he was like that and why he thought that way, in case you want to find out. I would recommend, by the way, because it’s very useful to know such things.

But now I have to remember why I told you that Panzram story. Oh, yeah! Chapter six is about that—it's a boat, Panzram, and it’s about the Columbine kids—the kids who showed up at the high school because I read their diaries. And I understood them too, which is even better than just reading them.

You know you can see these mass shootings all the time and everyone does the same thing: “Oh, how did that happen? Why did that happen? How can it be this way?” It’s like, well, why don’t you read what they said about why they did it? Just assume that that’s the reason!

If you go, “Oh, the Columbine kids?” “Oh, yeah! It was like, oh, they must have been bullied.” “Oh yes, because you know the natural response of anyone who’s being bullied is to go arm themselves to the teeth and to plot the destruction of the entire city, I think it was, of Detroit—to line your entire high school avenue with bombs and then to go and shoot your classmates.”

That’s what happens when you’re bullied! It’s like, “No!” That’s not what happens when you're bullied. That’s a stupid explanation; it’s shallow beyond belief, and it really emerges only because people don’t want to contend with the real issue.

The Columbine kids, while they were contending with the real issue, you know, they basically said quite forthrightly that in their own arrogant estimation, being itself was corrupt and unnecessary and it would be best if it was eradicated in the most brutal possible way, as fast as possible.

You get to places like that if you dwell on revenge for three or four years in your mom’s basement, you know you can go to very dark places, and so that’s what chapter six is about.

Panzram, who was very brutally treated when he was a kid, and the Columbine kids, who you know had their ups and downs, but nothing compared to Carl Panzram, were judges of being and decided that it was flawed, and that they were the ones to set it right.

So it’s a rough chapter! But it’s more than that. It’s a meditation on resentment because resentment is a key human motivation, and I would say it's a great teacher too. To listen to your resentment is one of the best things you can possibly do— you have to admit that it exists first, and then you have to admit to the fantasies that it’s generating, and you have to admit to what you would regard as the way out of it.

That’s all very difficult because it means learning things about yourself that you probably don’t want to learn, but resentment only means one of two things: it means either like shut the hell up, grow up, quit whining, and get on with it; that’s one thing it means. Or someone is playing the tyrant to you—might even be you.

And you have something to say and do that you should say and do to put it to a stop, and so maybe... and resentment can show you the pathway to doing that—it’s a meditation on resentment. One of the principles that I extracted from that is a choral person wants other people to change.

If you’re resentful, then your motivations aren’t trustworthy; in fact, they’re very very dark. That’s why I went to the extreme with people like Panzram and the Columbine killers: resentful people who want to change the world are not to be trusted.

What should you do instead? How do you treat your own resentment? I would say, well, there’s a great... I read this great line in a T.S. Eliot play called "The Cocktail Party." In it, this woman comes up to a psychiatrist—I think this is in this chapter—and she says, “You know, I’m having a really rough time of it. I’m suffering badly; my life is not going well.”

Then she says, “I hope that there's something wrong with me.” The psychiatrist says, she says, “Well, here’s how I look at it: there’s either something wrong with the world and I’m just in it, and that’s how it is—what am I going to do about that? Because it’s the whole world, or maybe I could be fortunate and there’s something wrong with me that’s causing all this unnecessary suffering, and if I could just set it right, I could learn and I could set it right.”

I’ve been thinking about that for a very long time, and I think, well, if your life isn't going the way it is, you know, you can find someone else to blame, which is pretty convenient for you and also relatively easy.

Or you could think, “Okay, I don’t like life; I don’t like the way my life is unfolding; I don’t like life in general because it’s tragic and untainted with evil.”

How do I know if my judgment is accurate? And the question is, well, have I really done everything I possibly could to set my life straight? Because maybe I shouldn’t be judging its quality or the quality of life itself, or being itself for that matter, if I haven’t done everything I possibly could to set my life straight.

Well, so there’s a task! Solzhenitsyn, who I’m a great admirer of, in his book "The Gulag Archipelago," was one of the things that brought down the Soviet Union. He said that one man who stopped lying could bring down a tyranny.

You know, he said that with some authority! I think you could easily make the case that "The Gulag Archipelago" is the greatest book of the 20th century. I mean, there’s another contender, so obviously. But he said, when he was in the gulag camps, you know, meditating on how the hell he got there—and he had a rough life, man!

I mean, first of all, he was on the Russian front at the beginning of World War II, and then he was thrown in the gulag camps, and that was just the beginning of his adventures! Man, he had a rough life. He was in the camps; he was thinking, “What the hell? Like, huh? How did I get here? What’s going on?”

He had Hitler and Stalin to blame, right? So if you need someone to blame, man, Hitler and Stalin—that’s great! But he—he didn’t do that. He said he meditated for a while. Once he realized that he might have something to do with, in some strange way, the way things turned out for him, he said he went over his life with a fine-tooth comb in his memory and thought, “Okay, where did I go wrong by my own judgment?”

When there was a path in front of me, when did I take the path that I knew I shouldn’t take? Because you all know that, right? You know, sometimes you don’t know if what you’re doing is good or bad; it’s just ignorance. You just don’t know. But sometimes you bloody well know, and you do the thing you know you shouldn’t do anyways.

That happens a lot! And why do you do that? Part of it is stupidity; there are all sorts of reasons, but you certainly know you do it. Solzhenitsyn thought, “Okay, well, what would happen if I took responsibility for where I am in this concentration camp, and then I went over my whole life and tried to figure out all the things I did that were wrong by my own estimation that increased the probability that I would get here?

And then what would happen if I tried to set them all right, now in the present?” That’s why he wrote "The Gulag Archipelago." And one of the consequences of that, as I said, was it sped the dissolution of the Soviet empire.

So hey, that’s not a bad day! Like you make a real confession; you really repent; you do your penance, which is writing this book, and you completely change the geopolitical landscape of the world. That’s worth thinking about because it’s not only Solzhenitsyn who did that; Nelson Mandela did something quite similar.

It’s not so impossible! So the idea that what you should do if you’re feeling resentful about the nature of being or suffering too much for your own life, let’s say, is straighten the damn thing out! Like, seriously try it for a year!

Even try it for a week! Try not doing the things you know you shouldn’t do. Try not saying the things you know to be false, and just watch what happens! You might as well give it a shot, right? Because you say, “Well, I’m all in for a year! You know what? I’m gonna do things right, and then I’ll just stand back and kind of watch how things unfold, and maybe I’ll reconsider at the end of that year.”

It’s like, try it! I mean, I would say I’ve had thousands of letters now from people who are saying, “Hey, I tried that! You know what? It worked! You know, I quit lying and everything!”

Do you ever see that Simpsons episode where Sideshow Bob keeps stepping on the rake over and over? That’s like the whole yard is littered with rakes and all he does is walk around and step on them, and then curse, steps on a rake and hits them in the face, and he curses again and steps on another rake!

You know what I mean? Stop doing that! I don’t know if we’ll get through all 12 rules. Guess you’ll have to read the damn book!

Anyways, rule seven—rule seven just about killed me! Like I’ve had a lot of bad health in the last year. Having to rewrite rule seven coincided with one of those periods that lasted about a month, and it was the hardest chapter by far. It went down the deepest by far, and it was really hard to get right.

It’s called, "Do what is meaningful, not what is expedient." I’ll just tell you a little bit about the chapter because I figured something out in it and then explained it. Something that took me decades to figure out, so there’s this idea—it’s a very deep Christian idea that the Messiah is the person who takes the world’s sins upon himself, right? That’s a characteristic of Christ, right?

It’s something... the idea is something like Christ died for your sins. Like, what the hell does that mean exactly? You know? Partly what it means—and I would say a slightly corrupted form of Christianity—is that you just have to believe that that happened and you’re redeemed.

It’s like, well, that’s... we’ll leave that aside for a second, but there’s an idea there, a psychological idea. You know that because the idea doesn’t go away; it’s lasted for thousands of years. It’s like, whoa, so the idea signifies something; it has a psychological reality independent of its metaphysical reality, whatever that might be.

I’ve thought about that for a long time. It’s like, what in the world does that possibly mean? And then I realized— and you knew this! Carl Jung knew this—that it was associated with this idea of the shadow.

I had this client once who had... her parents, man, they were pieces of work. Her parents taught her, I swear to you that this is the truth, her parents taught her that adults were angels—literally! And when I saw her, she was about 30 and she had a lot of strange symptoms, symptoms of sorts I’d never seen—psychosomatic symptoms.

She had kind of like quasi-epileptic seizures at night, and no—she stayed conscious during them; it was very difficult to understand at night. I won’t walk through it. But her parents told her that adults were angels, and she was like 28; she had a university degree.

I said, “Well, didn’t you ever wonder about that?” I said, “Didn’t you read any history?” And she said, “Yeah, what? I’d read something about the terrible things that people did to each other, and I would just compartmentalize it.”

And that was actually the key that I used to unlock what was wrong with her, which was eventually fixed, and I won’t go into that. But I said, “I gave her this book.” I gave her two books: I gave her a book called "The Terror That Comes in the Night," which is a book about sleep paralysis and nightmares because I thought that was what might have been bothering her; turned out that wasn’t it.

Then I gave her this other book called "Ordinary Men," and it’s a great book. It’s a terrible book—terrible dark book about this police battalion that was moved into Poland during World War II after the Nazis had marched through.

It was all made of middle-aged guys who weren’t like victims of Nazi totalitarian propaganda when they were kids; they were just, you know, bourgeois middle-class guys, kind of like all of us, let’s say. They went to police Poland, and they were going to have to do some terrible things essentially, but their commander told them quite forthrightly that if being involved in wartime policing was too hard on them, if they felt that it violated their moral beliefs, they could just go back to policing in Germany.

Very few of them did. Big part of it is because they didn’t want to abandon their comrades, let’s say. They didn’t want them to have to do the dirty work. They ended up—they were normal policemen—they ended up the sorts of people who could take naked pregnant women out into the middle of the field and shoot them in the back of the head!

That’s how the book—that’s the culmination of their training! It’s very interesting to read about their training because they were absolutely sickened by what they learned to do, like physically sick and vomiting, shaking, traumatized, but they didn’t stop!

And if you want to know why, then you can read the book, and I said, “Look, read this book, but don’t bloody well compartmentalize it! Enough of that! It’s like read it like you’re one of the damn policemen.”

Which is how you should read history, right? You read about Nazi Germany, and you think, “Well, I’m Oscar Schindler. I’d saved the Jews.” It’s like “No, you wouldn’t!” Right?

You wouldn’t because people didn’t! The probability is very high that you wouldn’t! And it’s not surprising; it’s not surprising that it’s unlikely. But you don’t want to be inflating yourself with self— you know, with fictional heroism without actually knowing the facts on the ground.

So I told her to read it and understand that the policemen were her, and that’s the thing to understand. Well, the idea that the savior is the person who takes the world’s sins upon himself is exactly that; it’s exactly the same idea. It’s like the way that there stops being Nazis is for you to know that the Nazis were you and for you to decide not to do that again!

But you have to know, you see, this is the thing that people won’t do. You have to understand that you could not only do what the Nazi camp guards did, but that you could actually enjoy it! And then you have to decide that you’re not going to do that anymore.

And that’S not an easy thing to figure out. Well, then that’s what that chapter’s about.

So that’s a rough chapter, man! That’s a rough chapter and that’s only a bit of what it’s about, you know—it’s a lot in there!

And anyways, so that’s what that’s about. Chapter ten.

Oh yes, chapter nine is "Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t." This is a chapter about conversation and about the different forms conversation takes. It’s a chapter about humility, and the humility element is— it took me a long time to understand why there are religious injunctions supporting humility to even understand what the word really meant.

And that sort of technical sense, it means something like this: it means what you don’t know is more important than what you know, and that’s a lovely thing too. Then, what you don’t know can start to be your friend. You see, people are very defensive about what they know for the reasons we’ve already discussed, but the thing is, you don’t know enough!

And the rate—you can tell you don’t know enough because your life isn't what it could be, and neither is the life of the people around you. You just don’t know enough! So, what that means is that every time you encounter some evidence that you’re ignorant, someone points it out; you should be happy about that!

Because you think, "Oh, you just told me how I'm wrong!" It’s like, great! Maybe I had to sift through a lot of nonsense to get through the real message that you’re telling me, but if you could actually tell me some way that I’m wrong and then maybe give me a hint about how to not be wrong like that, well then I wouldn’t have to be wrong like that anymore! That would be a good thing, and you can embark on that adventure by listening to people.

If you listen to people, they will tell you amazing things if you listen to them. Many of those things are little tools that you can put in your toolkit like Batman, and then you can go out into the world and use those tools and you don’t have to fall blindly into a pit quite as often.

So the humility element is, well, do you want to be right or do you want to be learning? It’s deeper than that. It’s do you want to be the tyrannical king who’s already got everything figured out or do you want to be the continually transforming hero or fool for that matter, who’s getting better all the time? And that’s actually a choice, you know? It’s a deep choice, and it’s better to be the self-transforming fool who’s humble enough to make friends with what he or she doesn’t know and to listen when people talk.

Listening is a transformative exercise. If you listen to the people in your life, for example, if you actually listen to them, they’ll tell you what’s wrong with them and how to fix it and what they want. They can’t help it! If you start listening, because people are so shocked if you actually listen to them, they tell you all sorts of things that they might not have even intended to—things they don’t even know.

Then you can work with that! The other thing that’s so interesting—you know, now and then you have a meaningful conversation, right? You don’t have a good conversation with someone; you walk away and think, “Geez! You know what? We really connected!”

I know more than I did when I came away from that conversation, and during the conversation you’re really engrossed in it, and that feeling of being engrossed is a feeling of meaning. The feeling of meaning is engendered because you’re having a transformative conversation. Your brain produces that feeling of meaning for it says, “Oh yeah! This is exactly where you should be! Right here, now—it’s the right place and time for you!”

And that’s a great place to occupy! So a good conversation where people are listening has exactly that nature, and the reason it has that nature is because it is, in fact, transformative.

It’s one of the truisms of clinical psychology. If you’re a clinical psychologist, a huge part of what you do is just listen to people. It’s like you know old—they come in; they’re unhappy, and they’d rather not be, something like that. You say, “Well, why do you think you might be unhappy?” and they don’t know. They have some ideas; they may have to ramble around for like a year before they figure out why they’re unhappy.

They get rid of a bunch of reasons why they thought they were unhappy that are untrue, and then you kind of get to the heart of the problem! Then you might ask them all, “If you could have what you wanted so that your life would be okay, what would that look like?”

Then they have to ramble around a bunch about that because they don't really know, but the listening will straighten them out because people think by talking. In order to think, you have to have someone to listen because it’s very hard to think; hardly anyone can think and even the people who can think can only think about a limited number of things, but almost everybody can talk and you can listen to yourself talk.

If someone listens to you, then, well, then you also have a foil for your thoughts, right? Because you can watch the person when you’re talking and see if you’re boring or see if you’re amusing or if you’re engrossing—all of those things. So listening, that's a very good thing!

I’ll outline Carl Rogers’ dictum. He was a famous clinical psychologist. This is another great little tip. Rogers said, here’s a trick to tell if you’re listening. So let’s say someone lays out their perspective for you, and then what you do is say, “Look, here’s what I think you said. I think you said this and this and this and this and then this—Is that right? Have I got what you’re saying right?”

Maybe the person says, “God, you don’t be listening at all.” And you know, then they have to straighten you out! Or maybe they say, “Yeah, yeah, you got it.” The nice thing about that is that you summarize their argument for them, which can be very helpful for you but also allows you to not create the person into a straw man.

So, like if you’re arguing with your wife, let’s say, or your husband: big part of you is gonna want to win—not stupid, because if you win, you get to be top lobster, but they get to be bottom lobster. If you want to live with bottom lobster, then more power to you, but I wouldn’t recommend it, right?

Because you don’t want that! You want to... you want to defeat your wife in an argument—oh, well great! If she was gonna disappear tomorrow, no problem! But like you’re gonna live with defeated miserable her for the next week? That’s no good!

So you listen and you think, “Okay, well, here’s what I think you said.” Maybe even make it a little stronger and more elaborated than was the case with the original utterance so that you get the damn argument right.

Because you don’t want to win; you want to fix the problem! That’s the winning! And so the summary with listening is so useful for that because the person can say, “Well, yeah! That’s what I meant.” It’s like, “Then, well then you have to grapple with that!”

Roger said