Jordan Peterson | You Have No More Time

You need a family. You need friends. You don't need to have all these things, but you better have most of them: family, friends, career, educational goals, plans for, you know, time outside of work, attention to your mental and physical health, etc. You know, those are—that's what life is about. If you don't have any of those things, well then, all you've got left is misery and suffering. So, that's a bad deal for you.

So number one: specify your damn goals. Because how are you going to hit something if you don't know what it is? That isn't going to happen. Often, people won't specify their goals, too, because they don't like to specify conditions for failure. If you keep yourself all vague and foggy—which is real easy, 'cause that's just a matter of not doing—then you don't know when you fail.

People might say, "Well, I really don't want to know when I fail because that's painful." So, I'll keep myself blind about when I fail. That's fine, except you'll fail all the time. Then you just won't know it until you've failed so badly that you're done. That can easily happen by the time you're 40.

You would like to be productive and have a good life, and that's how you make the schedule. It's like, and then you look at the day and you think, "Well, if I had that day, that'd be good, great." You know, and you're useless and horrible, so you'll probably only hit it with about 70% accuracy, but that beats the hell out of zero, right?

If you hit it even with 50% accuracy, another rule is, well, aim for 51% the next week or 50.5%, for God's sake. Because you're going to hit that position where things start to loop back positively and spiral you upward. So, that's one way that you can work on your conscientiousness: plan a life you'd like to have. You do that partly by referring to social norms. That's more or less rescuing your father from the belly of the whale.

But the way you do that is by having a little conversation with yourself, as if you don't really know who you are. Because you know what you're like: you won't do what you're told. You won't do what you tell yourself to do. You must have noticed that. It's like you're a bad employee and a worse boss, and both of those work for you.

You don't know what you want to do, and then when you tell yourself what to do, you don't do it anyways. But my point is that you have to understand that you're not your own servant, so to speak. You're someone that you have to negotiate with, and you're someone that you want to present the opportunity of having a good life to.

That's hard for people, see? They don't like themselves very much. They're always cracking the whip and then procrastinating, cracking the whip and then procrastinating. It's like, God, it's so boring and such a pathetic way of spending your time. You know what that's like, 'cause you probably waste like six hours a day.

What you do now is going to multiply its effects in the future. You need to know what your damn time is worth. One of the things you should be asking yourself is, when you spend an hour, was that well? Would I have paid someone 50 bucks to have had that hour? If the answer is no, it's like, well, maybe you should do something else with your time.

It depends on whether or not you think that your time's worthwhile. But the funny thing about not assuming that is, if you assume your time isn't worthwhile, what happens is you don't just sit around sort of randomly in a state of responsibility-laden bliss; what you do is you suffer existentially.