How to Have a Life Worth Living

By Prof. Jordan Peterson

Gently edited by Monica Perez Nevarez from the lecture, for narrative ease

Source https://youtu.be/E49l2KnyVUA as of 10/17/2020

You’re going to have to put some effort into your life, and you need to be motivated to do that. So, what are your potential sources of motivation?

Well, think of them as the “Big Five.”

You want friends.

You want an intimate relationship.

You want to win competitions.

You want to engage in creative activity.

You want security.

Those are all sources of potential motivation that you can tailor to your own personality.

Then there are other dimensions that you want to consider. Ask yourself, if you could have your life exactly the way you wanted it in three to five years, if you were taking care of yourself properly and seeing your surroundings correctly, what would you want from your friendships? What would you want from your intimate relationship? How would you like to structure your family or your career? How are you going to use your time outside of your job? How are you going to regulate your mental and physical self? And for that matter, how much alcohol and drugs do you use? That’s an important question given that 5% - 10% of people need to keep that under control.

Develop a vision of what you would like your life to be, and once the goals are established, you break down each goal into micro-processes that you can carry out daily, weekly, monthly. The micro-processes become rewarding in relation to their causal association with the goals. And that entangles you with an incentive/reward system and keeps you moving forward. Everything works better when you can see yourself moving towards a valued goal.

What does this imply? That you better have a valued goal for your life. Because otherwise, you cannot get any positive motivation. So, the more valuable the goal, the more the micro-processes associated with that goal start to take on a positive charge. You get up in the morning and you are excited about the day ahead. You are ready to go. You have specified your long-term ideal, maybe you also specify a place you want to stay the hell away from as well, or something that you’re terrified to fail at, but are excited about succeeding at, those are also useful tactics. 

Specify your goal as a unique individual. You want to be able to say, “If this can happen as a consequence of my efforts, that would clearly be worthwhile.” Because the question always is, “Why am I doing this?” Because doing nothing is easy. You sit there and you do not do anything. So, in order to do something, the question is “Why do this?” And the answer is that you’ve determined, by some means, that it’s worthwhile doing, that it’s important to you, that it means something to you.

And the next question is, where would you look for worthwhile things to do? You can consult your own temperament and also, look at what it is that people accrue that is valuable across their lifespan. You do a structural analysis of the subcomponents of human existence. What are they? You need family, friends, community, career, educational goals, time outside of work, hobbies, attention to your mental and physical health, etc. That is what life is about. And if you don’t have any of those things, all you have left is misery and suffering. You’re wasting your life. And that is a bad deal.

The best thing you can do with regards to your conscientiousness is to set up some aims for yourself. Goals that you actually value. Because how are you going to hit a goal if you do not know what it is? Often, people will not specify their goals because they do not like to specify conditions for failure. So, if you keep yourself all vague and foggy, which is easy because it is a matter of not doing anything, well, then you do not know when you are failing, or where you have failed. People say that they do not want to know when they fail because that is painful, so they keep themselves blind about when they fail. But then you’ll fail all the time, and you won’t know it until you fail so badly that you can’t fix it. And that can easily happen by the time you’re 40. So, I recommend you don’t let that happen, because it is willful blindness. You could have known, but you chose not to.

Once you set up a goal structure, you have a say in the outcome. In many ways, that’s what you should be doing at university. That’s when you should be trying to figure out who you are trying to be, and aiming for that. And you use everything you learn as a means of building that person that you really want to be. I really mean “want” to be, I don’t mean “should” be. Those things are going to overlap anyway.

Once you get your goal structure up, you think, “If I could have this, it looks like that life will be worth living, despite that fact that it is anxiety provoking and threatening, and there’s going to be some suffering and loss involved in living it. Obviously, the goal is to have a vision for your life such that, all things considered, what you become justifies your efforts.

After you set your goals, what do you do?

You turn to the micro routines. Make them substantiate your goals day to day, week to week, month to month. This is where a schedule can be unbelievably useful. Figure out the role of the schedule. It’s not a bloody prison. The first thing people do wrong is that they think they don’t want to follow a schedule. What kind of schedule are you setting up? Well, I have to do this, then this, then this, and then I go play video games, because who wants to do all these things I have to do?

That is wrong. Set the schedule up so that you have the day you want to have! That’s the trick. It’s like OK, if I set it up as the best possible day I could have (while doing the things I need to do), what would that look like? Schedule that. Of course, there’s a bit of responsibility that is going to go on with that, because if you have any sense, one of the things you are going to insist upon is that at the end of the day you’re not in worse shape than you were at the beginning of the day. 

So you must negotiate with yourself and not tyrannize yourself. Negotiate with yourself like you are a person you care for, in a way that is productive and that gives you a good life. And that’s how you make a schedule work for you. And it’s done when you look at the day and you say to yourself “that will be a good day.” And if you hit it with even 50% accuracy, that’s great. Another rule is to increase your aim the next week, because if you keep doing that, increasing what you get done and getting better at realistic scheduling, you’re going to hit that sweet spot where things are going to start to loop back positively and spiral you upward.

So that is one way you can work on your conscientiousness, by planning a life you’d like to have, one day at a time. And you do that partly by referring to social norms. That is more or less rescuing your father from the belly of the whale, but the other way you do that is by having a conversation with yourself as if you don’t really know who you are. Because you know you won’t do what you’re told. You won’t do what you tell yourself you have to do. Understand that you are not your own servant. You are someone you have to negotiate with to get things done. You are someone you want to present the opportunity to have a good life to, and that is hard for people, because they don’t like themselves very much. There’s cracking the whip and that leads to procrastinating, so one of the things you should be asking yourself is “Would you spend an hour doing that?" Or "What if I paid someone $50 bucks to give me that hour?” and depending on the answer, plan accordingly. Doing this depends on whether you think your time is valuable. But the funny thing about assuming your time isn’t worthwhile is that you don’t just sit around in a state of random responsibility and less bliss, what happens is that you suffer existentially. And that is when you lose the life you want, and maybe get depressed, or just give up.

Those who seek true happiness find it within themselves.

What are you currently doing to make yourself a better person?