[Music] make friends with people who want the best for you i had friends who wanted the best for me and friends who didn't and you know they were friends who some of them were aiming up and some of them were aiming down and if you have a friend that's aiming down and you do something that's aiming up then they're generally not that happy about it you know they try to top your accomplishment with one of their own hypothetical or real or put down what you're doing or offer you a cigarette if you're trying to quit
and you've kind of done that successfully or a drink if you've been drinking too much and are trying to stop being an alcoholic you know or yeah they're cynical and bitter and and devoted towards no good and sometimes that's family members too and sometimes it's even part of you you know but like you have an ethical responsibility to take care of yourself you have an ethical responsibility to surround yourself with people who have the courage and faith and wisdom to wish you well when you've done something good and to stop you when you're doing something
destructive and if your friends aren't like that then they're not your friends and maintaining your friendships with them might not even be in their interest be careful about whom you share good news with and another was be careful about whom you share bad news with a friend is someone you can share good news with you know you go to them and you say hey look this good thing happened to me and they say look i'm so happy that that happened to you like way to be and they don't think god damn it why didn't that
happen to me and like you know you didn't deserve it here's a bunch of reasons you're stupid and why it won't work it's like that's not helpful stand up straight with your shoulders back because you want to present yourself to the world in a manner that that doesn't disgrace you in some sense that that might be a good way to think about it and you don't want to disgrace yourself because the consequence of disgrace is emotional dysregulation more pain less positive emotion and so the best way to present yourself is to stand up forthrightly and
to stretch out you know and to occupy some space and to make yourself sort of vulnerable by doing that because you open up the front of your body right but it's a sign of confidence and that way people are most likely to give you the benefit of the doubt and that's a good way to start regulating your mood but not only does it directly regulate your mood to stand up but also because if you straighten up and you present yourself in that manner then other people are more likely to take you seriously and that's another
way that you can at least give yourself the bloody benefit of the doubt right and confront the world in a courageous manner and that's a really good way of also of figuring out how to establish yourself in multiple competence hierarchies because one of the general rules of thumb about how to be successful is to confront things that frighten you forthrightly and with courage and that's kind of a universal strategy for success there's always going to be people around that are better at something than you are and that's a problem because you can get jealous and
you can get bitter and you can get resentful and worse you can get hopeless you know i have this this friend of mine he told me something so funny he was decrying his his lack of success in the world and he compared himself to his roommate and uh he said you know his roommate his college roommate was doing much better than he was and his bloody roommate was elon musk it's like it wasn't like he was doing badly like he was doing pretty damn well it's like i'm not as good as elon musk it's like
yeah well you and like seven billion other people you know but but i thought it was instructive because you have to be careful who you compare yourself to now you can't just not compare yourself to others to successful people right because then you don't have anything to aim at you need an ideal because you have nothing to aim at but an ideal is a judge and you always fall short of the ideal so how the hell can you have the benefits of having an ideal without having the crushing blow that goes along with having the
judge that always regards you as insufficient and this is something i've had to work out a lot as a clinical psychologist it's like well let's say you need a goal but we don't want to let your distance from the goal crush you so you got to set up a goal and then you got to make the goal break the goal down into parts so that you can move towards it you have a fairly high likelihood of doing it so that's a bit of practical i wouldn't say advice because it's better than advice it's it's some
practical knowledge about how to go about achieving a name set a high aim but differentiate it down so you know what the next step is and then make the next step difficult enough so you have to push yourself past where you are but but also provide yourself with a reasonable probability of success it's also what you do with children right you want to push them because they need to grow up and be more than they are right but you don't want to crush them with constant failures so what you do is aim high and make
the goal difficult but proximal so your goal is to make today some tiny increment better than yesterday and you can use better you can define better yourself this doesn't have to be some imposition of external morality you know you know where you're weak and insufficient where you could improve think okay well this is what i'm like yesterday if i did this little thing things would be just an increment better well that's a great thing because you get the ball rolling and incremental improvement is unstoppable you can actually implement it and it starts to generate paredo
distribution like consequences it starts to compound and i've seen that happen in people's lives over and over people write me all the time and tell me that they're doing that but i've seen that happen in people's lives continually they make a goal the goal should be how could i conceive of my life so that if i had that life it would clearly be worth living so i wouldn't have to be bitter resentful deceitful arrogant and vengeful like that's sort of the bottom line right because that's what endless failure does to you it's not good and
that's what life without purpose and the goal does to you as well because life is very hard so you think okay well i need to adopt a motive being that would justify my suffering and you can ask yourself that question what would make this worthwhile he who has a why can bear almost any how that's a lovely line man i mean it's a lovely line and it's really worth thinking about so you think well how do i manage all this misery and suffering and futility it's like well i need to figure out what i would
have to do in order to make that clearly worthwhile and so then you have your goal and then you think well i need to move towards that incrementally because i'm kind of useless and can only do so much and maybe not even that and but all i have to do is be a little bit better than my my miserable self yesterday and that'll propel you forward very rapidly and and you can succeed at it which is also really lovely because why not set yourself up for success you know [Music] why people don't like themselves very
much and i think there's two reasons really and one is that we're fragile and damageable and imperfect in multiple dimensions all the time and that often just gets worse lots of things get worse as you get old for example so it's not necessarily that easy for a self-conscious being who's extraordinarily aware of his or her own fragility but not just fragility um foolishness and errors like you know yourself better than anyone else knows you and you know you you might have a certain amount of uh dislike for someone you know because of something they did
but you know everything you did and then so there's that it's like you're weak and kind of useless and prone to temptation and you know all those things you know that just shouldn't be that way and then you're also capable of pretty vicious acts of malevolence and so you also know that about yourself and so it's a real existential question for people it's like why the hell should you take care of something as sorry and wretched as you are the answer is yeah yeah yeah you know you're first of all yes you're pretty useless and
terrible but so is everyone else and that's actually an existential problem right and what i mean by that it's a problem that every human being has always had and always will so it's not just you it's a universal problem and there's an answer to that and one of them is to love the sinner but hate the sin it's something like that is that despite the fact that you're not all that you could be the proper attitude to have towards yourself is the attitude that you would have towards someone that you genuinely cared for and that
it's incumbent on you to act as if you genuinely care for yourself just like you would act towards someone that you actually cared about some other person and so it's a reversal in some sense of the golden rule right and it's a discussion of why that's necessary and also more than that it's a discussion of why why you have a moral obligation to do that it's not just that you should because it would be better for you it's you actually have a moral obligation to do that i think because you make the world a much
worse place if you don't take care of yourself so you should bloody well take care of yourself you know because it's partly because you have something valuable to bring into the world that's the thing about being an individual it's the thing that western civilization has always recognized that as an individual you have a light that you have to bring into the world and that if you don't bring it into the world the world is a dimmer place and that's a bad thing because when the world is a dim place it can get very very very
dark not just so that you feel better none of those things you need to take care of yourself because you're in the best position to do that and it's necessary for you to take care of yourself despite the fact that we're mortal and vulnerable and self-conscious and capable not only capable of doing terrible things but actually do them despite all that you still have that responsibility one of the things that jung said about the shadow which is the dark side of humanity the dark side of each individual was that its roots reached all the way
to hell and so what he meant was that if you were able to understand your dark side then you would see in yourself a reflection of the behavior that was that was present at auschwitz for example and that the reason that people don't take the dark side of themselves seriously at all even confront the fact that it exists is because no one wants to see that reflected within them and no wonder [Music] you
