Rule #1 - Stand up straight with your shoulders back.
The author used lobsters as an analogy for this one. Lobsters will fight each others and depending on who wins their chemistry actually changes and they stand up straighter, attract better females and have more confidence. When we 'lose' we tend to slouch and this hurts our actual body chemistry and can cause lasting effects. You need to stand up straight, with shoulders back and act with confidence. This sort of stance will, from a chemistry and biology level give you confidence and make the right hormones to feel better about yourself. This first chapter sets the table of the theory that 'life is hard", a lot of things are going to go wrong, bad things are going to happen to you and the people around you. We have to be able to absorb the losses and stand up straight with our shoulders back.
Rule #2 - Treat yourself like you would someone you are responsible for helping.
This chapter is about being much kinder to yourself and treating yourself better. We have a tendency to self-deprecate and not treat ourselves well. For example, we are more likely to give our animals a prescription before we do our own.
Rule #3 - Make friends with people who want the best for you.
This is about the power of the people you surround yourself with. We can get caught with people who don't really care what happens to us. The author uses his childhood friends who are good people and people that he has known for a long time but they have made decisions that have lead them to drug and alcohol dependence and can no longer take care of their best interests, let alone anything to do with you.
Rule #4 - Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.
This rule is all about thinking about what you are comparing yourself to, how you think about your own progress. Peterson cautions that if you compare yourself to other people you will always have difficulty. There will always be someone who is better at something that you, and there will always be someone who is worst as well. You need better or worse in order to have something going for you.
When we are young, comparison and standards are important to give us a perception of where we are at, but as we grow older and our lives become more uniquely our own based on all the experiences, we become so vastly different then other people and the details start to matter. We must stop comparing ourselves to others because of this fact, we don't know all the details of someone else's life to accurate judge if theirs is better or worse than ours.
Taking stock is important. Just like you have an inspector come to a look at a house before you purchase it, it is to give you a picture of the current day, not what it should/ought be or what it will be in the future, but what it is now. You have to do the same thing with yourself.
You have to be your own boss and employee, but you have to be nice to each other, not a tyrant and not treating yourself like a slave. You have to have a reward system for when you doing something, negotiate with yourself.
It is important to consider what you take aim at, because we only go in the direction of the things we aim at. We have to understand that there is a lot of 'inattentional blindness', we miss a lot of what is happening in the world because from a biological standpoint, vision is expensive and we only see the things that we focus on (e.g. famous study of the gorilla walking through a group of people passing a ball."
We can aim low and try to achieve that, with the goal of trying to become a better person, make our life better and trying to improve the life of the people around us. What do you want your life to look like and start to aim at that.
Rule #5 - Don't let your kids do things that will make you hate them
This rule is about making sure that your kids are acting appropriately and become good citizens so that people will like them and they will have friends. That is the job of parents, make sure their kids are not doing things that will make others hate them.
Statistically 2-year olds are the most violent people, they bite, they hit, scratch, etc. Humans are inherently 'violent' and primal, it is just a show of emotion and anger and trying to find their space. These are important 'fights' to get in. Crying by youngsters is often a sign of anger more than anything and you have to be prepared to stand up to this anger and get desired behaviour (dinner time, bedtime are common fights you must get in). It is important to remember that you do provide a reward if they do display the given behaviour, they have to know what you want them to do.
Kids who misbehave will often times turn into adults who misbehave and will end up with no friends.
Parents have to be careful of trying to be friends with their kids, kids will have lots of friends (hopefully) but they only have 2 parents, and parents need to be more than friends to their kids.
An interesting note in this chapter by the author was talking about what is a mystery vs. which is not. He talked about poor behaviours are defaults, i.e. violence is the default, it's not the mystery. Peace is the mystery. Why do people take drugs? that is not the mystery, it's why they don't take them, why do people have anxiety? that is not the mystery. A million things can go wrong in a million ways. We should be terrified out of our skulls at every second. But we're not.
Principles of discipline: #1 Don't make too many rules. #2 Use the minimum amount of required force. This was an interesting concept around discipline and punishment and the use of 'no' and force depending on the situation. It is the main job of parents to make sure their child can function in society and be liked by other people. Better the parents teaching them that lessons than someone potentially more harsh.
The use of rewards is important during the process, you have to catch your kids being good with the appropriate reward, not to much and not too little.
Rule #6 - Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.
"Don't blame capitalism, the radical left, or the iniquity of your enemies. Don't reorganize the state until you have ordered your own experience. Have some humility. Ff you cannot bring peace to your household, how dare you try to rule a city? Let your own soul guide you. Watch that happens over the days and weeks. When you are at work you will begin to day what you really think. You will start to tell your wife, or husband, or your children, or your parents, what you really want and need. When you know that you have left something undone, you will act to correct the omission. Your head will start to clear up, as you stop filling it with lies. Your experience will improve, as you stop distorting it with inauthentic actions. You will then begin to discover new, more subtle things that you are doing wrong. Stop doing these, too. After some months and years of diligent effort, your life will become simpler and less complicated. Your judgement will improve. You will untangle your past. You will become stronger and less bitter. You will move more confidently into the future. You will stop making your life unnecessarily difficult. You will then be left the inevitable bare tragedies of life, but they will no longer be compounded with bitterness and deceit."
Rule #7 - Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)
In this chapter the author meditates on the idea of delaying gratification. This is, in sense, something that has allowed human beings have been able to advance using 'sacrifice'. Sacrificing the now for the later, most animals are unable to do this or have the means to do it. We are able to save food for later or for loved ones, etc. We have the ability to share or get into these 'social contracts' and help each other out, or help out our future selves if we delay the gratifications. There are a lot of examples of people sacrificing or delaying gratification that we can lean on, Jesus, Socrates. If we can live our life in the service of the Good, that requires sacrifice and patience.
The challenge with the sacrificing now for the later is if that doesn't pay off, if you do sacrifice but then it doesn't turn out, then you have lost the future and the present.
The author uses Adam and Eve as an example as well, when they eat the forbidden fruit and their eyes are opened to the truth and of human evil then we find out what all that means and you understand the nature of human vulnerability and how it is produced inside of you, you then understand how to produce them in others. Humans are strong enough to withstand earthquakes, floods, poverty, cancer BUT human evil adds a whole new dimension of misery to the world. Life is already nasty, brutish and short but man's capacity for evil makes it worst.
Meaning is much more valuable than what is expedient. Expediency is selfish and wrong and self serving. Meaning is how we pay tribute to being on earth and having the opportunity to live and serve the rest of human kind. It is just about doing the right thing in the service of being good.
To have meaning in your life is better than having what you want, because you may not know what you want or even what you truly need.
Rule #8 - Tell the Truth - Or, At Least, Don't lie.
This chapter is about obviously telling the truth to yourself and to others. We have tendency to tell a lot of even white lies that in the moment are seemingly more convenient and better but this type of behaviour will only lead to problems in the short or long term. It is important to build up the ability to tell the truth so that when you really need to tell it, it is easier and you can do it.
When dealing with people it is important
We can easily manipulate the world into delivering what we want and we "spin" it in a way that makes it good for us. This is a bad habit. Pride will fall in love with it's own creations and try to make them absolute.
Errors of commission or ommission.
The author talks about taking AIM, we must take aim at a better life and that is about telling the truth and allows us to progress and reduces our anxiety. We can use the past to help us with our aim but we also not to think about it on our own. But with this aim, you need to keep your eyes open and be aware of the progress you are taking and not do so blindly in your path that could be created by others.
Set your ambitions, even if you are not sure of where you want to go, have a plan and take ownership, the better ambitions have to do with character and ability, rather than status and power. Status can be lost, but your CHARACTER will carry you through, it allows you to prevail against adversity.
If you tell the truth, your values transform as you progress. The reason is that things fall apart. What worked yesterday will not necessarily work today.
If your life is not what it could be, try telling the truth.
Rule #9 - Assume that the person you are listening to knows something that you don't.
Advice is not listening to people. Giving people advice is saying that you know more than them and that they need to hear the truth. This is not nearly as good as listening. The thought is that you can hear people talk or ask you a question and then come up with an answer that will in fact be true but it is not necessarily going to be helpful.
Memory is an interesting because it should be used to help you not make the same mistakes in the future, it should be used to learn from the past not to recollect the facts, because it is really hard to remember everything and/or be aware of everything. So that is why we have to be careful to debate the facts of the past because we don't necessarily know what they are exactly are.
A big part of the author's clinical practice is about listening and he refers to conversations as 'listening' conversations. If we are truly listening and seeking to understand where the other person is coming from then we will have a much better result for everyone. It can't be about jockeying for position or waiting for the other person to talk.
Rule #10 - Be precise in your speech.
The author begins this chapter talking about the impermanence of things. How things, the example used is a computer and how quickly it becomes obsolete. The reason that things are so impermanent is because they rely on the external world to function, and as that world is continually changing it, so to do our things. Even us, ourselves change all the time and that causes us to think differently about the world and how we perceive it.
Sometimes we don't notice these little changes that are happening, example used here is the a house getting dirtier and messier as we live in it and maybe we "brush things under the rug" and don't notice them. But as soon as things start to break down, the ignored comes rushing in.
The author used a marriage as an example throughout the chapter as one where things will breakdown if we don't address what we want. If we let too much slide, or we are not 'precise' in our speech or in what we want, then things will break down beyond repair at times. We need to really get clear on where we want to go, what we want, etc. etc. We have to look underneath the rug, face the 'monster' in the dark and found out if it is as bad as we are imagining. Sometimes it will be bad for sure, but usually not as a bad as what we are imagining.
We have to try and get from point A to point B, but we have to clearly determine where Point A actually is. Because if we aren't even starting at point A, then it will be hard to get where we are going. We have to be precise in our speech and determine what we want or don't want, what we feel or don't feel. Determine it.
Rule #11 - Do not bother children when they are skateboarding.
This chapter is one of the more extensive ones and it is getting into the fact that we need to let people do what they are going to do and allow them the freedoms to express themselves. It starts out with talking about kids skateboarding but cities making it harder for them to use the structures to skateboard. The thing with kids is, they want to be challenged and want to stretch and try to grow, so if we make everything too safe then they will seek out other opportunities.
The author uses his friend Chris from a previous chapter as a guy who ends up ending his life because he didn't quite fit in the constructs of the world. He saw it as a place that is bleak and humans are part of an inadequate existence and it isn't really worth it. The point being is that sometimes it is hard for people to fit into what the world generally is trying to do, and there is enough misery and judgement that can make it hard if you don't feel like you fit in.
The author gets into now thinking about gender hierarchies and roles and brings up an interesting point about girls vs. boys. Boys are having an increasingly harder time "fitting in" and the stats around academic success is the example he uses. Whereas girls have more success academically and that trend is going further down that path as it gets into high school and university. The struggle with boys is that they can only play "boys games" and can't play at "girls games", because if you are a male and win a female game it is not kindly regarded. But girls can play boys games and it is ok for them to win or lose them.
The last part of the chapter the author went through discussing some traditional female and male roles and how important they are to support each of the genders. He used the example of a mother who becomes over protective of their children as a bad way to parent because it causes the children, especially boys to under develop independence (which is a required skill in life).
Boys need to learn how to make decisions, take risks and "toughen up" to an extent so they can function in society. Women need this independence as well but not to the degree at which men need it. Women are smart, considerate, compassionate and have a lot of life skills that inherently will allow them to succeed in a lot of ways. And these women will want male partners that are up to the task, have independence and can lead in some areas of their own lives. A women can't take care of children and men at the same time.
The major theme of this chapter was that children need to develop independence while they are growing up, to learn things on their own, not be over protected by their parents so that they are ready to face the world, which as we have found out from this book, is a harsh place.
Rule #12 - When you see a cat on the side of street, pet it.
This chapter is all about BEING, it is about living in the moment, all the while understanding the limits that are in front of us, the possibilities that things can go wrong. He uses a story of his daughter who had Juvenile Arthritis and it still persists to this day, and how hard it is to have something like that how unfair it seems for that to happen to a child, who was otherwise happy and easy going. This is the idea that we have limits and that being is not easy. That is life and we have to appreciate the moments and know that when things are good, we have to appreciate them and recognize that they are happening, because they may not last long. So when he relates it to a cat, sometimes a cat will come by on the street and sometimes it will ignore you but sometimes if you go to pet it, the cat will come over and enjoy that moment and so should you.
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