12 Rules for Life by Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
Good discussion with my former Jackrabbit teammate. We went deep and wide. Sorry you could’t see my face at all. Good times.
Pg 4 The poor and stressed always die first, and in greater numbers. They are also much more susceptible to non-infectious diseases, such as cancer, diabetes and heart disease. When the aristocracy catches a cols, as it is said, the working class dies of pneumonia.
Pg 16 The ancient part of your brain specialized for assessing dominance watches how you are treated by other people. On that evidence, it renders a determination of your value and assigns you a status.
Pg 21 Our anxiety systems are very practical. They assume that anything you run away from is dangerous. The proof of that is, of course, the fact you ran away.
Pg 71 Teenage parties(clubs): The lights are kept low. That keeps self-consciousness to a minimum.
Pg 75 Repetition Compulsion: an unconscious drive to repeat the horrors of the past, sometimes perhaps, to formulate those horrors more precisely, sometimes to attempt more active mastery and sometimes because no alternatives beckon.
Pg 94 The past is fixed, but the future could be better. The present is eternally flawed but where you start might not be as important as the direction you are heading. Perhaps happiness is always to be found in the journey uphill, and not in the fleeting sense of satisfaction awaiting at the next peak. Much of happiness is hope, no matter how deep the underworld in which that hope was conceived.
Pg 115 Sigmund Freud: A man who has been the indisputable favorite of his mother keeps for life the feeling of a conqueror, that confidence of success that often induces real success.
Pg 131 We feel more negative about a loss of a given size than we feel good about the same-sized gain. Pain is more potent that pleasure, and anxiety more than hope.
Pg 135 If a child has not been taught to behave properly by 4, it will forever be difficult for him or her to make friends. This matters because peers are the primary source of socialization after the age of four. Rejected children cease to develop, because they are alienated from their peers.
Pg 180 Soldiers who develop PTSD frequently develop it not because of something they saw, but because of something they did.
Pg 212 If you say no to your boss, or your spouse, or your mother, when it needs to be said, then you transform yourself into someone who can say no when it needs to be said. If you say yes when no needs to be said, you transform yourself into someone who can only say yes, even when it is clearly time to say no.
Pg 221 An aim reduces anxiety, because if you have no aim everything can mean anything or nothing, and neither of those two options makes for a tranquil spirit.
Pg 241 True thinking is rare-just like true listening. Thinking is listening to yourself. To think, you have to be at least two people at the same time. Then you have to let those people disagree. Thinking is an internal dialogue between two or more different views of the world.
Pg 246 Exercise during a argument: Install the rule that each person can speak up for himself only after he has first restated the ideas and feeling of the previous speaker accurately, and to the speakers satisfaction.
Pg 282 Why couples cease communicating: Every argument degenerates into every problem that ever emerged in the past, every problem that exists now and every terrible thing that is likely to happen in the future. No one can have a discussion about “everything”. Instead, you can say, “this exact precise thing-that is what is making me unhappy, this exact precise thing is what I want as an alternative.
Pg 320 Assume ignorance before malevolence
Let’s get 1% better everyday
