EVEN A BAD MAP IS BETTER THAN NO MAP AT ALL.
Episode 664 on The School of Greatness with Lewis Howes ft. Dr Jordan Peterson.
I found myself listening to this podcast while I got ready for bed this evening, and many of the things Jordan Peterson said on here were incredibly quotable, and stuff I wanted to isolate and remember in the times to come.
Overall, he shares that life in itself is already difficult, already full of bad things and bad situations and multiple obstacles in your way. But to get through these bad things and really tackle life head-on, to find a sense of accomplishment and thus self-fulfilment and happiness (and lessen life’s inevitable suffering), one must have aims/goals. He then details how one should look at goals, and formulate them.
The goals don’t need to be sealed in stone, they can most definitely change over time, for example if one experiences something and decides that’s not what they want in life. It’s okay to have what is in the end a “bad goal”. The goals are still important, because they give you something to strive for, as well as the opportunity to learn what you want to run away from. But while they can be malleable, they must still be detailed, time-sensitive, and above all, incremental and thus achievable. Bite-sized chunks of mini-goals in order to attain a grander aim, because otherwise you’re just going to burn out and feel discouraged and revert to a bitterness that makes you succumb to life’s suffering.
I think I really needed to hear this today.
- I think people are most disappointed in life when they’re disappointed in themselves, you know? They see that they’ve made things worse than they had to be, even though the baseline can be pretty brutal.
- Meaning is actually the instinct that helps to guide you through that catastrophe, and most of that meaning is to be found in the adoption of responsibility... You feel like you’ve justified yourself, you’ve justified your existence, and so you’re not waking up at three in the morning in a cold sweat, thinking about all the terrible things that you’ve involved yourself in.
- But most of the time, you’re in guilt and shame, because not only are you not taking care of yourself (so that someone else has to), but you’re not living up to your full potential.
- [Lewis] We must have an aim in our life, no matter what stage of life we’re in. And if we don’t have some type of aim, even for a few months of an aim of going somewhere, a direction, the suffering is going to be even more suffering. Because we’re already going to face the greatest challenges in life. Adversity is coming, no matter what, but if we have big goals, or a small little goal, or whatever it may be, but it’s going to be less suffering if we have an aim.
- Because the purpose of memory isn’t to remember the past, the purpose of memory is so that you figure out what went wrong when something went wrong, so you don’t duplicate it in the future.
- Treat yourself like you’re someone responsible for helping. So, what that means is that you have to start from the presupposition that despite all your flaws and insufficiencies, that it’s worth having you around and that it would be okay if things were better for you.
- And you can have a high end goal, and more power to you if you do, but you need a pathway to it. If it’s ten storeys up above you, you need a staircase to get there and so you have to build the staircase, too... But you have to aim at it. You have to define it and aim at it.
- So, even if your aim is vague, and even if it’s off target, if you start aiming and you see you’re off target, then you can shift and you can make it more precise... That’s why you shouldn’t get perfectionistic about it. You will absolutely be wrong, but you won’t be as wrong as you would have been if you were aimless. So there’s a bit of humility in it.
- Like, let’s say you aim at something and you develop some skills along the way and then you get a third of the way there and then you think, “Well, that’s not for me,” it’s like, “Well, yeah, fair enough, but now you’ve still got the skills you developed, you know exactly why it’s not for you, now, instead of vaguely.”
- And so, as you plan, you get better at planning, which is the crucial thing. So, then we say to people, “Take your positive vision, and make it into eight state-able goals. And rank them in a hierarchy.” ... And break the goal into incremental goals so that you have a reasonable probability of succeeding... Within some time frame, that’s the other thing. You have to parameterise it with regards to time frame.
- Yeah, as you build up the basis of competence, locally, you might develop enough skill so that you can expand that outward. And it also gives your goal a certain amount of nobility and so, if someone challenges you and says, “Why are you doing that? That seems stupid,” you can say, “I’m doing that because it helps me take care of myself, but it benefits my family and here’s the reasons why, and this is the repercussions out into the broader community.”
- If you have a sufficiently noble purpose, the suffering will justify itself.
- And what that shows is that if you turn around and you confront the suffering voluntarily, you find out that you are way tougher than you think. It’s not that life is better that you think. Life is as harsh as you think. It might even be worse. But you are way tougher than you think if you turn around and confront it.
