2 Hours for the NEXT 20 Years of Your LIFE | Jordan Peterson Motivation

Sit on your bed one day and ask yourself uh what's what remarkably stupid things am I doing on a regular basis to absolutely screw up my life and if you actually ask that question but you have to want to know the answer right because that's actually what asking the question means it doesn't mean just mouthing the words it means you have to decide that you want to know you'll figure that's out so fast it'll make your hair Curl there's no better Pathway to self-realization and the ennoblement of being than to posit the highest good that

you can conceive of and commit yourself to it and then you might also ask yourself and this is definitely worth asking is do you really have anything better to do and if you don't well why would you do anything else if you Orient yourself properly and then pay attention to what you do every day that works and I Actually think that that's in accordance with with what we have come to understand about human perception because what happens is that the world shifts itself around your aim because you're you're a creature that has an aim you

have to have an aim in order to do something you're an Aiming creature you look at a point and you move towards it it's built right into you and so you have an aim well let's say your aim is the highest possible aim well then so That sets up the world around you it it organizes all of your perceptions it organizes what you see and you don't see it organizes your emotions and your motivations so you organize yourself around that aim and then what happens is the day manifests itself as a set of challenges and

problems and if you solve them properly then you stay on the pathway towards that AP and you can concentrate on the on the A on the day and so that way you get to have your Cake and eat it too because you can you can point into the distance the far distance and you can live in the day and it seems to me that that's that makes every moment of the day supercharged with meaning that that's how because if everything that you're doing every day is related to the highest possible aim that you can conceptualize

well that's the very definition of the meaning that would sustain you in your life well and then The issue is well back to Noah well all hell's about to break loose and chaos is coming it's like when that's happening in your life you might want to be doing something that you regard as truly worthwhile because that's what will keep you afloat when when everything is flooded and you don't want to wait until the flood comes to start doing that because if your ark's half built and you don't know how to Captain it the probability Is

very high that that you'll drown ask and it shall be given you seek and you shall find knock and it shall be opened unto you for everyone that askthe findeth and to him that knocketh it shall be opened that's sound a pretty optimistic again but but again I think it's a description of the structure of existential reality and and by by which I mean when I'm in my clinical practice and I observe and this is also the case With my students is let's say people's lives aren't what they would like them to be and so

then you ask why well forget about tragedy and catastrophe because that's self-evident and we're not going to discuss that although the degree to which you bring about your own tragedy is always indeterminate but I would never say that every terrible thing that is visited on a person is something they deserved I think that that's a very dangerous presupposition Especially because everyone gets sick and everyone [Music] dies but one of the main reasons that people don't get what they want is because they don't actually figure out what it is and the probability that you're going to

get what would be good for you let's say which would even be better than what you want right because you know you might be what wrong about what you want Easily but maybe you could get what would really be good for you well why don't you well because you don't try you don't think okay here's what I would like if I could have it and and I don't mean I don't mean in a way that you manipulate the world to force it to deliver you goods for status or something like that that isn't what I

mean I mean something like imagine that you were taking care of yourself like you were someone you Actually cared for and then you thought okay I I'm caring for this person I would like things to go as well for them as possible what would their life have to be like in order for that to be the case well people don't do that they don't sit down and think all right you know let's let's figure it out you you've got a life it's hard obviously it's like 3 years from now you can have what you need

you got to be careful F about it You can't have everything you can have what would be good for you but you have to figure out what it is and then you have to aim at it well my experience with people has been is if they figure out what it is that would be good for them and then they aim at it then they get it and it's strange because they don't NE it's a strange thing it's not quite that simple because you know you may formulate an idea about what would be good for you

And then you take 10 steps towards that and you find out that your formulation was a bit off and so you have to reformulate your goal you know so you're kind of going like this as you move towards the goal but a huge part of the reason that people fail is because they don't ever set up the criteria for success and so since success is a very narrow line and very unlikely the probability that you're going to stumble on it randomly is zero and so there's a Proposition here and the proposition is if you actually

want something you can have it now the question then would be be well what do you mean by actually want and the answer is that you reorient your life in every possible way to make the probability that that will occur as certain as possible and that's a sacrificial idea right it's like you don't get everything obviously you obviously but Maybe you can have what you need and maybe all you have to do to get it is ask but asking isn't a WI or or today's wish it's like you have to be deadly serious about it

you have to think okay like I'm taking stock of myself and if I was going to live properly in the world and I was going to set myself up such that being would justify itself in my estimation and I don't mean as a harsh judge exactly what Is it that I would aim at and so the issue is not so much the blindness of others even though there's as much blind kindness among others as there is as there is for you but the issue here the advice here the description here is you should be concerned

about what's interfering with your own Vision first and you should leave other people the hell alone in relationship to that and so if your mode of being in the world is if you would just act better Things would improve for me or if you identify the evil and the catastrophe as something that's outside that someone else needs to fix or that someone's respon someone else is responsible for then you're not going to fix that and you're going to remain blind to the things that you're doing and not doing that make things not go well and

so it's just better to think all right I'm probably blind in many many ways and maybe there are some ways That I could rectify that because it's highly probable that you're blind in all sorts of ways I mean it's it's in fact it's virtually certain and so it's just more useful to think how is it that I'm wrong in this situation there's this old idea that you go into the abyss it's an idea that you can gaze into the abyss you gaze long and what you find in the abyss is a monster that's the dragon

at the bottom of the Abyss let's say that's Satan himself for that matter but if you go into that into that as deeply as you can what you find is you find your fragmented father in a in a comos condition in a desiccated and and separated condition and then you revivify that well what does that mean it means something it means that if you look in the darkness you find the light that's one thing it means and that the light really stands out against the darkness But that the light is to be found in the

darkness so that's a very interesting thing it's a quest narrative but it means more than that it means something fundamental so we know for example that if you take yourself out of your current state of predictability and safety you put yourself in a new situation you'll learn right you'll incorporate new information so that's a cognitive issue but that isn't all that happens what happens is that new genes turn on within You and code for the production of new proteins that happens neurologically new parts of you turn on and so the idea is that if you

can move yourself out into the world and push yourself out against a maxim array of challenges more and more of you turn on turns on and and then the question would be well what would you be if all of you that could be turned on was turned on and the answer would be you would be the resurrection of the ancestral father that's what you Would be and so that's why Christ says I am the way and the truth and the life and no one comes to the father except through me what that means is that

if you take on the unbearable burden of being voluntarily then that transforms you into the ancestral father and that's true and so that's unbelievably optimistic it's so interesting because it's it's dark beyond belief well the world is characterized by suffering and by malevolence of a depth that's Virtually beyond comprehension but if you choose to comprehend that what you discover in that is the light that destroys the darkness and that's well that's that's really something to discover it's there isn't a discovery that's more profound than that that's the search for the Holy Grail or the philosophers

Stone all of that if you actually want something you can have it now the question then would be what Do you mean by actually want and the answer is that you reorient your life in every possible way to make the probability that that will occur as certain as possible and that's a sacrificial idea right it's like you don't get everything obviously you obviously but maybe you can have what you need and maybe all you have to do to get it is ask but asking isn't a whim or or today's wish it's Like you have to

be deadly serious about it you have to think okay like I'm taking stock of myself and if I was going to live properly in the world and I was going to set myself up such that being would justify itself in my estimation and I don't mean as a hard judge exactly what is it that I would aim at you could try this this is a form of prayer knocking sit on your bed one day and ask yourself what remarkably stupid things am I doing on a regular Basis to absolutely screw up my life and if

you actually ask that question but you have to want to know the answer right because that's actually what asking the question means it doesn't mean just mouthing the words it means you have to decide that you want to know you'll figure that that's out so fast it'll make your hair curl you're perfectly capable of thinking God only knows how you're perfectly capable of of immense Feats of Imagination and and dream and fantasy it's God only knows how you do all of that what would happen if you consulted yourself about the best possible outcome for you

you might get an answer in order for us to set things right we have to understand that we we have to take on that burden of ultimate responsibility not only as if it's ours which it is but as if there isn't anything better that we could do and you have an ethical obligation to lift the Heaviest load you can possibly conceive of and that's the primary Call to Adventure in life you need a meaning in your life to forall the suffering and to make you strong enough to resist malevolence where's the meaning to be found

rights impulsive pleasure and happiness no respon responsibility oh who would have guessed that it's not part of the narrative what makes life worth living is to pick Up take its catastrophe and embrace it and carry it and to realize through that process who you are when I talk to audiences about the relationship between responsibility and meaning they inevitably go dead silent there's not a there's not a rustle there's not a cough it's like is that the secret is that the secret is that it's the voluntary adoption of responsibility it's like well that's the that's the

central message of the West It's like to pick up your cross and bear it you know and everyone's been told that but they don't know what it means because it's not been articulated enough so that it becomes something that's practical it's like yes look at the terrible responsibilities you have right in front of you your family is hurting you're in trouble there's problems in the world it's like all of that's right there and all you have to do is all you have to do is take responsibility for it And then you've got what you need

it's something so magnificent that happiness pales in comparison so it's it's it's thin gruul happiness and young people know that they're pursuing hedonistic pleasure and you know no wonder but there's nothing in it that's sustaining and all it does is make you cynical it's like is that's all there is another one night stand another another binge party you know and it's not like I have anything against in principle Against some of that exuberant youthful Hedonism look the universities have turned into places of parties why well because that's what the students find best to do there

well that's not good what you want to offer them is a reason to not party it's like no you got to understand you come to this class hung over you're not going to be able to get it you're not going to be able to write properly you're going to pay a price for That Hedonism it's like and the price will be too high for you to bear it's like oh well enough Hedonism for me then like I've got something important to do that's the way out of that before you can be a painter who can

paint what's beyond mere memory you you have to inculcate that discipline skill and a lot of that is painful repetition and hard grinding work it's the sacrifice of the presid for the future but once you manage that then things Open up that's why we have disciplines right I mean the words aren't there by accident you have to narrow yourself first and then you can broaden outward and so that's and that's part of the process of maturation that's part of the sacrifice of childhood say in childhood you're nothing but potential but it's not realized and you

don't know how to realize it and so then the question is well how do you get to a point where you Realize the potential and the answer is you sacrifice almost all of it to a single Direction and so that's the thing about growing up is that when you're a teenager and a young adult you have to sacrifice everything you could have been as a child to be the one thing that you're aiming at but then that opens up aimless is not nothing aimless is bad said if you had a a why you could bear

anyhow most people find the meaning in their life through respon Responsibility I believe the the fundamental religious truth of the idea that life is suffering it's suffering because we're mortal and fragile and because we're also subject to malevolence at our own hands and to the at at the hands of others it's a it's a constant existential problem and that can make you bitter and can make you hopeless and nihilistic and depressed and anxious and pro and likely to abuse uh substances of various sorts as as a Medication or an escape it it can augur you

in in in a very large number of ways and I'm suggesting to people that there is a way out of that and the way out is to confront that forthrightly and to adopt responsibility in your own life and to try to make the world a better place and that it's necessary to do that and that if you don't do that that things go badly I think the deck is stacked against everyone to some degree because life is very difficult and we All die so but people some people do have it harder than others and and

all of us have it very hard at sometimes in our lives it's like well what's the what's the alternative you take responsibility for that and try to struggle uphill because the alternative makes everything worse find something in your life that's so worthwhile doing that the fact that you're going to suffer is justifiable yeah life's rough no doubt About it and if good luck comes your way then you should be grateful for it and if happiness manages to manifest itself you should be grateful for that too so then you might ask yourself well what's the best

antidote to the discomfort of life and you might say well it's comfort and I suppose that's what you act out when you swaddle a baby but a better antidote is something like Adventure to Excellence and that's far better antidote to suffering than the mere Absence of suffering so not to say that the mere absence of suffering that's not nothing I've been a psychotherapist for 20 years I've seen things you can't imagine horror shows that you can't fathom and people who have been hurt in so many ways so many dimensions it's like should they be bitter

should they be resentful should they become violent these things don't help they have to struggle uphill despite their excess burden and it's Responsibility not guilt it's the female crucifixion so and that's exemplified best in well the best portrayal of that I've seen is Michelangelo's Pi you know it's it's a statue of Mary uh and she has Christ's body on her as an adult on her lap and he's broken and destroyed and you know she's displaying that that's that's The Bravery of a mother to allow that to happen but not only that to to facilitate it

facilitate it where You go kid where you go where you go well why it's dangerous out there it's like yeah no kidding it's more dangerous here if you stay with me by a lot so you might lose your body out there in the world but if you stay here you lose your soul you know I mean it's a pretty competitive world there's lots of competition for young men in particular there's competition for status and limited resources and for the attention of women and just because you're nice Doesn't necessarily mean that you come out particularly well

in those competitions I would like to say that you should all be smarter but I don't know how you could be smarter we don't know anything about how to improve intelligence and I suppose we don't really know anything about how to improve industriousness either but I can tell you that people who are industrious come up with a strategy for solving the problem that's ahead of them and then They do whatever they can to stick to the strategy and so for example if you sat down today or tomorrow for a couple of hours 3 hours and

you filled in a Google Calendar whatever you happen to use with a a strategy for studying and a list of when all your assignments are due and all of that and when you're going to sit down and study then you won't be in a position where you have to cram for 10 hours a day hopelessly right before you know an important Exam is beautifully put that uh love is the the highest ideal to reach for and Truth is it's handmaiden I TR I thought about that for a long time right this hierarchy of Ideal and

the thing about truth that bitter truth let's say that that cynical truth is it can break the shackles of naivity and actually a burnt cynicism is a moral improvement over a blind naivity even though one is in some ways positive but only because it's protected and the Other is bitter and dark but still better but you're not done at that point you're just barely started I think optimally we exist to have something like a playful Adventure right we're built for an optimal challenge it's partly why we like to play cuz in play you find an

optimal challenge it's almost like the definition of the play and so if you can organize yourself and the world Optimally then you have adventure and maybe you have the adventure of your life and if you can do that brilliantly then you can do it in a spirit of play that's what you need and want I saw an endless repetition in my clinical practice and in my own private life when my eyes were open the consequences of not saying what was true it's like whatever hell you might fall into by opening your mouth when you have

something to say that isn't popular it's Nothing like the hell that you're going to envelop yourself in if you lose control of your own tongue and mind and I like I said in my clinical practice I never saw anyone get away with anything even once and so all you have in a situation like that is what is the truth now you know of course you only have your approximations to the truth but that's better than nothing and so you need to be afraid of the right thing and you Should be afraid of contaminating your soul

with deceit that's what you should be afraid of what happens is you know garbage in garbage out the old programmer saying goes and so you'll fill your head with nonsense and no one will call you on it except you but you can steal that voice if you try hard enough you just wait until you get in real trouble you know one day there'll come a point where you have to make a decision and the decision is the Difference between life and death or Worse between someone else's life and death or Worse between health and the

suffering that's worse than death and because you've compromised yourself to such a degree you will not be able to rely on your judgment and you will make the mistake you should shouldn't make and then you're done and that will absolutely happen yeah well I mean you you set what's great against what's tragic yeah I mean what else could you possibly do and so then you say well how do you find what's great in your own life and part of that is you watch it's like when is it that I'm doing something that alleviates my suffering

right it's a real you have to ask that question to yourself honestly one of the things you have them do is say well why don't you just watch for a week like watch yourself like you don't know who you are and just see when you're not quite as Miserable and then let's see if we can figure out what it is about what you're doing in that situation that's lifting the Gloom it's like okay okay there's something in that that's Curative right and that's something in that that's Curative is related to well you might say your

purpose it's like maybe part of the reason you're depressed is because you're too isolated and now we can work on that so let's see if we can increase the amount of time you're spending with Your friends by like 20% or maybe you need a couple of new friends or maybe you need to work on your comic material you know because you can set that against the tragedy of life you said that a harmless man is not a good man A Good Man is a very dangerous man who has that under voluntary control how should people

become more dangerous becoming more articulate is definitely I would say that's the primary array of weapons so Mean physical prowess is something and and it's not nothing that physical confidence that comes along with that as well but the same thing replicated at the level of the ability to communicate and think that's way broader field of battle and opportunity you want to take your rightful place in the Kingdom it's like get your tongue straight man get it under control in the highest possible sense there's nothing that makes you more formidable than verbal competence And being able

to articulate be able to think to Marshall your arguments right it's a battlefield metaphor to get everything in order all your information straight know to Marshall your forces is it possible to have too much responsibility to take too much responsibility for yourself you can for sure yeah definitely you know dovi said that every man was responsible for everything he did and and for everything that everyone else does which is kind of An insane statement but but also somewhat it's true in in in a certain sense you do have an indefinite responsibility and you do have

an indefinite capacity to bear that responsibility but that doesn't mean it can't be crushing and then I would say the antidote to that is that you're not in this alone as your responsibilities Mount and your opportunities increase you have to delegate more and more it's important That you do everything you can but there's enough for everyone to do and so you might say well the heroic path is one that leads to Universal Redemption and that's true and you might say well that's all on you it's like it is in a sense but then the problem

that you just described it it can be unsustainable right you can torture yourself for not doing it well enough and it is up to you but it's not up to you alone it's not up to you alone so you delegate you and you You help build people around you so that they're all working in the same direction it's an effort it's an effort multiplier in any case and you make sure that they get credit credit isn't exact credit's good enough it's it's not exactly right the rewards are are in accordance with their efforts and you

can distribute that if you can routinize someone something and parse it off to someone else say here's a little kingdom for you and it doesn't have to be little And it's something that can grow but here's a kingdom for you well then you can go off and do the next thing you need to do which is extremely important you know and you might think there's there's a kingdom and then it's broken into little kingdoms and so so the farther you are down the hierarchy the smaller the kingdom you get but that's only true if you

think the world's a zero sum game because you could also think of it as a place of indefinite Number of the largest kingdoms possible and I think what why do we think this is exhaustible in some sense what we're doing doesn't look exhaust you know that's the limits to growth mentality it's like economists don't believe in that CU they think well no we can just get more efficient which we certainly are we're way more efficient than we once were and those grains in efficiency when they're not being interfered with are increasing at More than an

arithmetic rate why do you think people have a tendency toward that zeros some mentality yeah well I mean there there are elements of life that have a zero sum element I mean if you're competing with another man for example to marry a particular woman that's a zero sum game if you only think of the game as including you too and that woman so you can set up circumstances that are zero sum but to take take that metaphor of Zero Sum game where there has to be winners and losers because there's a finite number of resources

is to assume that the rules of that game are the rules that govern all game the set of all games and that's just not true there's games are infinitely multipliable I mean you can invent a new game people do that all the time the man who invented Katan which is a game I really like to play it's very popular board game and that didn't exist until He invented it now you know thousands and thousands of people play it and he made a fortune from it it's like that game never existed so there doesn't seem to

be any limit to the number of games we can in invent and it's a complicated problem because we are on a single planet and some resources are more zero some than others but we haven't really run into any actual Zero Sum limits in terms of our you know the probability of us living an abundant life on the planet We've we've stewarded some resources very stupidly we've we've done a very bad job of of managing Oceanic production for example we have to be smart about our resources but that doesn't mean there's zero sum and certainly doesn't

mean the world is a zero sum game and that's a malthusian idea you know that population will grow till it consumes all available resources and precipitously collapse and then why do we think Apocalyptically it's well because things do come to sudden ends people die people get fatal illnesses like the world you so carefully constructed can be blown apart at any moment by a random occurrence genetic mutation that causes the cancer that kills you like life has a fundamentally apocalyptic aspect and we do understand that because we're self-conscious and then it's very difficult not to apply

that kind of apocalyptic reasoning to things as such The world's going to burn up the climate's too hot what about runaway positive feedback loops cuz that's what the climate types are afraid of it's like hey they happen how do we bind our apocalyptic thinking that's a good question man that's a good question we do that with the truth that's how we do it through dialogue through investigation through exploration through discipline all of that the logos is the antidote to the Apocalypse and so what does that mean love and truth is the antidote to the apocalypse

not the planet has too many people on it truth in the service of love MH what do you mean by that well it's a hierarchy of virtue I would say you know there's an old idea that God is the sum of all that's good I don't think some is exactly the right metaphor it's more like imagine there are Eternal varities truth beauty Justice love courage fortitude compassion think of All those things as virtues so virtue is what all virtues have in common that's the relationship of God to the good or you might think how would

that manifest itself in your life well that might be pursuit of the good and that's the pursuit of the good that unites all proximal Goods well what is that exactly well it's something like belief that it would be for the best that all things flourish to the degree that that's possible when when I was a clinician I Thought of that as the good in me serving the best in my clients and I think the desire for that to happen that's love so that's the desire for you say well you take a human bent broken miserable

malevolent hurt corrupt weak frustrating disappointing all of those things that we can lay on ourselves because of our inadequacies it's like it's easy to dismiss that and part of that dismissal is what drives the notion that the planet has too many People on it and that we're cancer on the face of the Earth it's like it's not easy to love that but what do you want you want the broken people to rise up out of their Brokenness rather than despise them for it and then you Orient yourself towards that and try to pull that out

of people and yourself keep facing challenges voluntarily pay attention at a rate that works for you develop your confidence that actually stabilizes the environment Around you so it's it actually is less predictable and less threatening plus you acrew that evidence and you get the social support for doing so that's your best pathway [Music] forward if you do what it is that you're called upon to do which is to lift your eyes up above the mundane daily selfish impulsive issues that might beset you and attempt to enter into a contractual Relationship with that which you might

hold in the highest regard whatever that might be to aim high and to make that important above all else in your life that that fortifies you against the vicissitudes of existence like nothing else can and I truly believe that that's the most practical advice that you could possibly receive the way that you fortify your faith in life is to assume the best something like that and then to act Courageously in relationship to that and and that's that's tantamount to expressing your faith in the highest possible good it's tantamount to expressing your faith in God and

it's not a matter of stating well I believe in the existence of a Transcendent deity because in some sense who cares who cares what you believe I mean you might and all that but but that's not the issue it's not the issue the issue it seems to me is how you Act the issue is not what you believe as if it's a set of facts but how you conduct yourself in the world the purpose of thinking is to let your thoughts die instead of you it's a brilliant notion and so the idea is something like

you can conjure up a representation of yourself you can conjure a variety of potential representations of yourself into in the future you can lay out how those future representations of yourself Are likely to Prevail or fail you can call the potential use in the future that will fail and then you can embody the ones that will succeed you do that well simultaneously Conjuring up a representation of your current state and determining for yourself because of your undue suffering which elements of your your pathetic being need to be given up so that you can move forward

into that future and the goal what is it that You're aiming at with that work and that sacrifice that's the ultimate question what is it that you're trying to do you're trying to improve the future we believe that the future can be improved we believe that it can be improved as a consequence of our sacrificial work and so once again what are the limitations what are the limits to that what are the necessary limits to that I would say we don't know we conjured up this remarkable idea the Future exists we can see it even

though it's only potential we can adjust our behavior in the present in order to maximize our probability of success in the future how best to do that well the idea is something like don't hesitate to offer the ultimate sacrifice if you want the future to turn out ultimately well what is it that you could contract for let's Say if you were willing to give up everything about you that's weak and [Music] unworthy the proper sacrificial attitude produces a psychological State and then a social State that's a manifestation of that attitude that decreases the probability that

the world will C into hell and increases the probability that people will live high quality meaningful private lives in a society that's Balanced and capable of supporting that and none of that seems to me to be questionable really I also don't think it's anything that people don't actually know you know people have told me many times that when they listen to me talk they're hearing things that they already knew but didn't know how to say it's something like that and this is one of those things that I think is exactly like that I mean I

think it's at the Very core of our moral knowledge which is our behavioral knowledge and our perceptual knowledge I mean let's get this straight moral knowledge is no trivial matter it's knowledge about how it is that you Orient yourself in the world there's no more profoundly necessary form of knowledge well it's predicated on on something that's exactly like this we know that we have to make sacrifices we know that we have to aim at what's good so then why isn't That we don't aim at what's best and make the sacrifices that are necessary in order

to bring that into play I think it seems to me that in some sense that's self-evident the question is why we don't do it but there's answers to that too life is hard and it hurts people it's Rife with limitation and some of it's arbitrary and some of it's unjust and some of it's worse some of it's malevolent which is even worse it's not Surprising that that combination of vicity ude can turn people against being but I think even when that happens and even when people have the kind of history that if they revealed to

you you would say well it's no wonder you turned out that way the people who turn out that way still know that it's wrong they still know that however deep their own suffering however arbitrary their own suffering however much that's caused by The malevolence of others as well as the tragedy of existence that that does not in any way justify they're turning away from the good and I believe everyone knows that I believe that they know it implicitly even if they don't allow themselves to know it explicitly and I believe that if they violate that

idea then they violate themselves and that they end up in Cain's position which is the position of the man who's been given A punishment that is too great to Bear now we're capable of making sacrifices in abstraction right to conceptualize a future that we want to let go of the things that are stopping us from moving forward and to free ourselves from the chains of our original preconceptions pursue pleasure follow your impulses live for the moment do what's expedient a mountain is something you Have to climb and you have to climb to the Pinnacle of

a mountain and the mountain is up right and the mountain stretches up to heaven and it's a long journey to specify the right place on the highest Pinnacle and and that's symbolic because of course it's a pinnacle that you're always trying to reach just like you're always trying to aim you're always trying to climb Upward at least that's the theory depends to some degree of course on your definition Of upward you're supposed to again to act out the highest good of which you're capable now that'll transform your life to some degree into an archetypal Adventure

there's no way around that because as you attempt to climb a higher Mountain let's say or to aim at a higher Target or something like that then the things around you will become increasingly dramatic and of import that H happens by necessity Obviously because if you're aiming at something difficult and profound and you're really working at it then your life is going to become perhaps increasingly difficult and profound but that might be okay you might that might be exactly what you need as an antidote to the implicit limitations that face you as a human being

the good father is precisely someone who is willing to sacrifice his child to the Ultimate good you have a moral obligation as a parent to encourage your child to go out into the world right and to be whoever they can be to be the best they can possibly be and in doing that you're encouraging them to pursue the good you're sacrificing them to the good good you're not keeping them for yourself selfishly you're telling them that they can go out and live their life and live it properly you don't want for your son What it

is that you want for him you want for your son what would be best for him and for the world and you let go in precise proportion to your desire to have that happen when you have an infant you do everything for the infant because the infant can do nothing for him or herself but as the infant matures and is increasingly capable of doing things for him or herself then you pull back right You pull back and every time the child develops the ability to do something you allow them or encourage them to do it

and you don't interfere you know so if your child is struggling getting dressed well obviously there's sometimes that you help them but mostly you let them learn so that they can know how to do it in the future that's better for you and it's certainly better for them there's a rule if you're working with the elderly in an old age home and the rule is Something like don't do anything for any of the guests let's say that they can do for themselves because you compromise their independence and so as a mother you pull back and

you pull back and you let your child hit him or herself against the world and you fail to protect them but by failing to protect them you encourage and en Noble them to the point where you're no longer necessary now they may still want to see you and it would be wonderful if that Was the case but the point is is that you're supposed to remove yourself from the equation by encouraging your child to be the best possible person that person can be and you sacrifice your desires all of your desires to that your personal

desires even your desires for your child in relationship to you because you want them to move forward into the world as a light right as a light on a hill that's what you want if you have any sense and so you don't get To keep your children at home because you need them if you don't know what you're doing you don't know where you are and you don't know where you're going and if you're in a place where you don't know where you are or where you're going you're in danger because that's unmapped territory and

God only knows what lurks in unmapped territory if you're so confused and disoriented That you don't know where you are or where you're going there are predators of the spirit who are much worse than snakes that are waiting for you and the probability that you'll move from aimless hopeless joyless anxiety to nihilism corrosive bitterness and genocidal fantasy in the fundamental extreme is very high it's like well I just want to be happy it's a slogan it's the most common Slogan of our time I would say and it's such a Preposterous slogan it's like what do

you mean just you just want to be happy that's all that's all you want that absolute impossibility you want Bliss unending no matter what you do and that's that's all you want it's it's it's not exactly a small ask let's say because it's the same thing as asking to dwell permanently in Paradise it's something like that and then it is also isn't true That isn't what you want if you do careful analysis of what people mean when they say they just want to be happy what they mean is they don't want to suffer stupidly they're

much more concerned we're much more concerned with not experiencing an excess of negative emotion than we are with experiencing a surfite of positive pleasure so first of all we don't don't mean we just want to be happy we mean please don't make us too Miserable and and fair enough that's reasonable but then even on the happiness front even on the absence of misery front that's not true it's like it isn't obvious at all that we want happiness it isn't even obvious that we want absence of misery what's really obvious is that we want an adventure

right we want an adventure that's so compelling that it makes the misery of life not just justifiable but but Worthwhile you want to look back in your life and and you know this to be true you you want to be able to say to yourself even considering a month or a week or a series of days you want to be able to say that was really difficult but you know what it was worth it and I think that's what you want from your life it's something like you know what that was difficult but it was

worth it and that meant that the adventure was so great that it Justified the Difficulties and so then the question is and here's the question where do you find the Great Adventure of your life well how about in truth well why CU you don't know what's going to happen if you tell the truth it's a mystery it's going to lay itself out for you and and so that's an adventure cuz you don't you literally do not know what's going to happen you have to let go of knowing what's going to happen and So then you

have that adventure and then what is also the case is that it's you that's having the adventure right because if if what you're doing is living in truth that's your that's you that truth is you and so that means that whatever happens when you tell the truth is your adventure and and then you think well I'm using deception it's like well maybe you are but maybe deception is using you and then maybe it's the spirit of Deception that's having the adventure of your life and then you might ask yourself well why are you so miserable

and unhappy and the answer would be well the spirit of deception is having the adventure of your life life you're not even there cuz if you're not living in truth you're not there obviously what's there is the spirit of deception and you might think that's your deception but I would be very careful about thinking that because there has been there have Been centuries of meditation on the nature of the spirit of deception and the answer isn't that the spirit of deception is you the answer is that the spirit of deception is something that possesses you

convinces you that it's you and that's not something you want to fall into the clutches of the world is founded on a sacrifice right and that's that's what the crucifix represents and European towns were built around a church and the Church was built around an altar and the altar was built around the idea of s sacrifice so the sacrifice the proper sacrifice is at the center of the community that's what that idea means now you might ask ask well what's the proper sacrifice and the answer is something like the voluntary willingness to bury your cross

and then you might say well what is your cross and the answer to that is well that's the catastrophe of your life right that's The fact you'll be betrayed the fact that you're going to die the fact that you're going to be in pain the fact that your loved ones will see you suffer the fact that the mob will come after you the fact that criminals might be preferred to you Etc it's all the potential catastrophes of your life and then the the sacrifice is the idea that you you have to you have to let

your what would you say you have to let your narrow ego go enough so that you Pick all that up voluntarily all of that and then that transforms it and I think I think that's literally true I think that's what all this that's what all the psychological evidence points to is that if you adopt a stance of voluntary challenge even in relationship to tragedy and malevolence that that's the pathway to Transcendence do you have something to say that you're not saying if if you do then it's your fault This is your fault it's your problem

and you might say well I'm too afraid to talk it's like fair enough how afraid are you not to talk you know people say to me frequently they compliment me on my bravery and I think you don't understand I'm not brave I don't I don't like conflict I'm way more afraid of losing control of my tongue than I am of the consequences of saying what I have to say cuz I know what happens when we Allow other people to control our tongues it's not good it's not good it's hell itself and so of course it's

Troublesome to suffer the slings and arrows of Outrageous Fortune when you say what you have to say it's like that's fine try not saying what you have to say well that'll be okay in the moment it's like yeah in the moment but unfortunately your whole life isn't in the moment practice in developing the Capacity for skilled movement forward in a manner that simultaneously encourages the others that you're cooperating with to do precisely the same thing and that's not some arbitrary ethos it's it's not arbitrary because if that doesn't happen then nothing flourishes and if it

does happen then everything flourishes it's also not relativistic in some sense because you have to do that no matter what you're doing no matter what it is That you're doing if you do that well you're doing whatever it is you're doing well in fact that's really in some sense how you would Define well if you give up enough psychologically you'll you'll cut your losses in actuality and of course that's sort of what thought's for is right so that you can you can get yourself straight you can give it up in abstraction so you don't act

out the pathology and then and then nothing dies In actuality but that still means you have something to give up you want to initiate a process of active engagement with the dragon that burned you fundamentally the psychophysiological pattern of active engagement is the opposite to the psychophysiological pattern of involuntary stress and so if you can practice embodying that voluntary conf ration then that stance can come to dominate and that's the stance you want to dominate because that Moves you forward voluntarily into the world and so and that in all probability that that will work I

want to be free to do what I want okay well hang on a sec which eye are you talking about there are you talking about the mature eye that sees next week and next month and next year and 10 years out and that takes the the community into account or are you talking about the impulsive hedonistic self-serving narrow eye that just wants Exactly what it wants right now and what makes you think that when you make a case for that Hedonism that you're not just falling under the sway of an impulsive short-sighted demon so to

speak if you look at music for example music operates by very sophisticated rules and so it's ordered and constrained but out of that rule rul system of rules comes an in almost infinite array of possibility and so you know we have this sense I think it deres From rouso that any constraint of order is a limit on freedom when what we should be hypothesizing is that with the optimal set of principles you get the maximally desirable freedom and it it's not freedom from everything and it's not freedom to do anything it's certainly not a narrow

hedonistic freedom because that backfires on you like the next day this is I think why people are so obsessed in some sense with the search for fundamental meaning this is a good Story so you can imagine two people laying bricks they're building a gigantic wall and the one person thinks oh my God you know this wall is going to take 100,000 bricks I'm laying one at a time and I'm wasting my life away trivially adding to this gigantic brick wall and what am I doing this is absolutely miserable Brick by Brick and the other person

thinks in 300 years this is going to be a cathedral and so the person in the Second state is doing exactly the same thing at a local level laying bricks but each brick is related to a very high goal and that means the reward that's attendant upon the laying of the brick is proportional to the goal of the entire behavioral process so if you're aess and and goalless then you can't elicit any positive emotion and if your goals are fragmented which is also what happens if you're aimless or your goals lack Unity If your goals

are fragmented then no given behavioral manifestation can elicit any dopam energic reward because it's not a step forward to anything desirable one of the things well I did write about this in my first book particularly about putting your life putting your house in perfect order it's like well if you if you're lost one of the things you can do is look around and see what direction you could take locally fix something find something That you could do that would make things better that you would do and there's a humility in that too because especially if

you're in a low energy State it's like oh my God you know I don't have enough energy to make dinner it's like do you have enough energy to put a fork on the table and sometimes people are so depressed that that's really all they can do can you take a small step forward no matter how small that is Implement a micro routine even something like Washing a cup and putting it back in the shelf and you know that's a good thing because you have a shelf and there's cups on it you've already decided that's an

appropriate way to live is to have your coffee cups on a shelf if you go ahead with cleaning out the cup and putting it on the Shelf then you've taken steps towards a a valuable micro goal you get a dopamine kick from that that transforms itself into adrenaline and energizes you in part what the Dopamine system is doing so imagine that the purpose of the dopamine system is to elicit a satiating reward fundamentally but then the satiating reward is something that has to be approached in in steps and so in order to maintain the motivation

necessary to approach the satiating reward you have to mark each of the steps with a with a marker of [Music] pleasure small things are not small you might have the cognitive appraisal that Doing something local like cleaning up your room is small but it's not obvious at all that that's the case it's not it's not that trivial to put your immediate surroundings in order and it can easily be the stepping stone to putting things in order on a broader scale in fact it's probably the necessary stepping stone to do that you can pat yourself on

the back especially if you're depressed a little harder than you might otherwise by say you know you Say well this is Trivial but I did it it's like no if you're moving ahead that's not small you just keep doing that you're going to get out of this paralyzed or Retreat mode if you're in the zone of proximal development you're pushing your skill development one increment forward and it's one that you can actually manage imagine that you have someone who's habitually avoidant and maybe they're avoidant because when they Become possessed by negative emotion they become hyper

aware of their internal State and they feel the panic and so then they freeze or Retreat and they do that constantly and then they're in this terrible negative emotional State all the time because every time they see a stimulus that's associated with retreat they get gripped by these interceptive Sensations and so you say to them well we're going to reverse that Instead of you being gripped by that you're going to expose yourself to that voluntarily see if you do that repeatedly with people not only do they stop being afraid of the things that you're that

you're showing them that you're exposing them to but they become more likely to approach other things they're afraid far more likely in fact it doesn't exactly look like people get more less afraid at all it looks like What happens is they learn to get [Music] braver one of the phenomenon cognitive phenomena that loads very heavily on neuroticism is self-consciousness and so when you fall into anxiety Then There is this internal obsessiveness which has to do with the panoply of sins in some sense which parts of me are malfunctioning and need to be eradicated and what

are the things I used to do with my socially anxious Clients so they would go into a social situation often with eyes downcast by the way and they would be so intensely concentrating on their own internal Sensations that they would fail to make eye contact with anybody they were talking to and then they would be awkward because they weren't reading the cues they could have read if they would have only looked and then the conversation would become disjointed and then they would get Anxious and fall into themselves and so one of the things that I

taught them to do wasn't to try to calm themselves down but to try to calm the other person down so when you go into a social situation pay more attention to the other person like just focus your attention outward and if the person had any social skill sometimes I had clients who had no social skills and so they were anxious socially because they actually didn't know how to behave socially so then you Had to teach them the social skills but some of them had the skills but wouldn't activate them because they were so neurotically obsessed

with their own inadequacy that they failed to attend to the cues that would elicit the proper responses and all they had to learn to do was watch and then they would automatically respond because they knew how to have a conversation see the reason that socially anxious people are so Interoceptive is it's involuntary right they get gripped by the negative emotion and then that produces this intense obsessive interoception that might not happen if they did it voluntarily this is why exposure therapy works so well in in Psychotherapy is like well I'm afraid of something and if

I go near it then I'm possessed by negative emotion well that's if you go near it accidentally I'm going to have you go near it Purposefully and what you're going to find is that to the degree that you do it purposefully that response will be quelled and that happens it's extraordinarily reliable imagine you anticipate something and then you make a mistake now the question then becomes how significant is the mistake the depressive takes that punishment response let's say that's a consequence of failed Anticipation and can't bind it it just it just takes out all of

their potential future selves and so then they're in a depressive pit that's too much learning from failure that binding problem is really tricky one of the rules of thumb for that that's extremely use useful that's socially instantiated is innocent until proven guilty so you might say when those thoughts come up because they're Adversarial and accusatory thoughts you might say well that is part of the realm of possibility but when your child does something wrong that's minor you don't say you're a rotten kid you bind it you say look kid here's a bunch of things you're

doing right but in this particular example specific situation here's the minimal thing you did incorrectly and how to alter it and it's a really good habit of mind to address towards yourself as well as to Other people which is to say well what's the minimum crime that I'm responsible for In This Moment and that's part of this miracle of the presumption of innocence and especially without proof a lot of what I did in my clinical practice to people who had a depressive temperament was help them make a case for themselves it's like well maybe you're

as bad as you think you might be but maybe not let's take the contrary [Music] Argument and only narrow the repair to the absolute minimum that needs to be manifested sometimes when you make one little mistake it is actually an indicator of a flaw in your character but most of the time it isn't and it certainly can't be responded to that all the time because then you'd never be able to make a mistake without wiping yourself completely out you want to make it as local and precise as you possibly can and that's Also one of

the advantages to removing yourself from a rage or an anxiety state because a rage or an anxiety state is low resolution and global and so it'll be globally accusatory so you want to specify and you think okay well what's the what's the minimum necessary behavioral transformation to ensure that similar mistakes are not replicated in the future it's like if you're roof leaks you don't have to dig a New Foundation You can just fix a few shingles and you might think well the rain's coming through so you have to tear down the whole house it's like

well no and you might panic and run around because the water's coming in but it's still a bad idea to to dig up the foundations every time something trivial maintenance problem needs to emerge and so one of the things you that's very useful to learn is like well is this only a trivial maintenance problem and One of the advantages to that too is that if it's not the collapse of your entire self let's say and it's a trivial maintenance problem you're much more able to activate that that courageous response to anomaly that's part and parcel

of exploratory behavior and eventual success so part of the trick of of of many sorts of why I would say religious training Enterprises certainly the meditative Enterprises is something like How do you tell yourself a story like a real story though a story that actually works where you can confidently approach the thing that's blocking your path how do we come to know ourselves in terms of our personalities and more importantly potential one of the first ways to come to know yourself is to understand that you don't you know you can learn to kind of watch

yourself like you're watching a Stranger so you have to understand that you don't know who you are and that's not easy to understand because you think you know but then you know you remember you can't control yourself very well you're not very disciplined you're full of flaws maybe you don't know yourself as well as you think but it's hard to get low enough to understand how deeply it is the case that you are ignorant about who you are now there's an upside to that too which also is that you're Also ignorant about who you could

be and so the discovery of that you know is some reward for the horror of determining who you actually are then you watch yourself you watch yourself like you're watching a stranger you watch what you say and you listen you think well what what sort of person would say that and how am I reacting emotionally when I'm communicating in that manner you know is that making me feel stronger weaker is it is it is Filling me with shame is it helping my confidence am I laying out a lie am I deceiving myself and other people

am I adopting this personality at parties that is designed to impress and to amuse and it comes across as nothing but like self-centered narcissism um what are my dark fantasies what are my aggressive fantasies what is it that I'm willing to do what am I interested in so that I'll spontaneously pursue it what do I Procrastinate about and why what am I unwilling to do what do I think is good what do I congratulate myself for accomplishing and what do I berate myself for failing to confront and to implement those are all incredibly complicated questions

and you don't know the answers to them so that's a start and then in terms of potential well you'll discover a little bit more about your potential as you discover who you are especially the darker parts of Yourself because then you discover your potential for Mayhem there's some real utility in that you know discovery that you're dangerous it's such a useful Discovery it's actually something that strengthens you because the first thing that a realization like that can in fact produce is the ambition to incorporate that danger into a higher order personality and that can make

you implacable that can make you someone who can say no when you need to say know you Know that can make you someone who won't avoid necessary conflict and so that's unbelievably useful and so that's one of the potentials that you might discover the other thing you do to discover your potential is to well you challenge yourself you know it's like take a bit of a look at yourself and think about what's not so good that you could improve that you should improve by your own standards and that you would improve you know and set

yourself a little Goal um you know maybe you're not studying at all at at and you're at University or maybe you're maybe you're at work and you've got this stack of paper there you know and you haven't looked at that damn stack for like a month and you know that you should be and you're bothering yourself at night because you're avoiding that it's like maybe think I've avoided that stack of paper completely for one month I'm quite a coward when it comes to whatever Snakes might be hidden in that stack of paper how about tomorrow

I just like put that stack of paper in front of me on my desk and I like I glan through it for 15 seconds see if I can do that it's like well you set yourself a goal of improvement you know it's a humble goal there's things you could do to improve and you know what they are and there's small steps that you could take that you might take that would put you in that direction and then the question Is are you big enough to take those small steps you know are you capable of grappling

with the fact that you're fundamentally flawed to the point where you have to break things down into almost childlike steps in order to manage them and the answer to that is yeah you are most people have things they avoid you know and they're afraid of so I would say to some degree it's the lot of everyone people vary in the degree to which they've conquered that And you do meet people from time to time who are extraordinarily disciplined but most of the time they've got disciplined in exactly this manner it's through slow incremental Improvement and

then you challenge yourself it's like well could I do this that would be better then you find out and then you think well is there something slightly larger and more challenging that I could do that would be better and and you try it and you find out and as you try it And you find out generally you get better at it and you can take on larger and larger challenges you know you take responsibility for yourself that's part of standing up straight with your shoulders back it's like Take On The World man but only at

the level that you can manage when you're ignorant and biased and deeply flawed and immature it's where everyone starts you don't want to take you don't want to bite off more than you can chew But it doesn't mean that you can't wrestle with with part of reality you know some part that's small enough so that you have a good shot at Victory and then you attain victory over or some small part of the chaos and then you're the person who's Victorious over chaos you're just a beginner but that's who you are and then maybe you

can get unbelievably good at that and you do that by challenging yourself humbly at the level that you're able to function It's easier to understand if you think about a child that you're trying to rear properly and you want to make that child help that child reveal their their Highest Potential whatever that is whatever that means and what you do is you don't set them a series of impossible tasks in the hope of undermining their self-confidence you form a relationship with them that is predicated on your interest in their highest mode of being And then

you offer them challenges that are precisely optimized to their ability right so they can do them but they have to strength the two elements of their ability would be what they can do and what and how much they're capable of transforming what they can do and an optimal challenge is stretches you to the end of what you can do and then into the domain of of how you can transform you have to be humble and wise Enough to understand that you might have to aim pretty damn low especially in those places where you're not functioning

well and it might be so embarrassing that you can't that you can't bring yourself to Fathom that that's actually who you are you need the loss of that arrogant ego because it's precisely what's interfering with your movement forward you know it's part of the adversarial process mythologically speaking that stops moral progress You're too proud of who you think you are to notice what you're like so that you could change properly you don't want to sacrifice that part of yourself it's probably associated with some delusion that helps you maintain a positive although very fragile self-image you

know in the absence of genuine effort it's not to be recommended so you know yourself by watching and paying attention it's not thinking exactly it's not imagination It's just it's watching like you're a like you're a snake because a a snake watches like cold-bloodedly with no no emotional reaction just to see what's there doesn't allow what is wanted or desired to interfere with what is observed so you watch yourself like that as if you don't know who you are well that's the beginning and then you challenge yourself continually to see how far past Yesterday you

could push today and tomorrow and to continually experiment with expanding the domains not only of your competence but of your ability to increase that competence the the upper limit to that is proportional to the moral effort that you put into it the more that's Guided by the highest of all possible Visions right the alliance with the highest of all possible conceivable good the more it's accompanied by truth in speech and action the more you will Develop your potential and I believe that potential to be as Unlimited in the upward Direction More Unlimited in the upward

Direction then it is Unlimited in the direction that brings people to to the political and social hells that so often characterize the world that we inhabit and so you also I suppose have to be willing to undertake that as an adventure because it's a hell of a thing to bear That kind of response responsibility it takes a person out of the ordinary it takes them out of themselves but there's deep meaning to be had in it and it's and there isn't anything better that you can do everyone in their right mind knows that there's a

million ways of doing things wrong and one way if you're lucky to do things right and so the notion that it's a a very very narrow pathway that you tread upon if you're doing Things right that's wisdom that's the line between Chaos and Order that you're supposed to be on constantly right it's a very very thin line because if you're a little bit too far in One Direction then it's too much chaos and if you're a little too far in the other direction then it's too much order and both of those aren't good it has

to the balance has to be exactly right and you can feel that and I truly believe you can feel that and I think it's your deepest Instinct it's your deepest Instinct and I mean that I mean that biologically I don't mean that metaphorically I think that your psyche is arranged to exist in a cosmos that's composed of Chaos order I think that's why you have the hemispheric structure that you have and then when you feel as if you're meaningfully engaged in the world when the terror of your mortality strips away and you're engaged and it's

Timeless that's the deepest Instinct you have Telling you that you're in the right place at the right time and then what you do is practice being there practice being there and that's that that narrow spot that's so difficult to find you wander around it maybe if you're lucky you can watch you can watch this is an experiment watch yourself for two weeks like you don't know who you are because you don't so watch yourself for two weeks and notice there's going to be times when things are proper they're Raid properly for you you it's not

easy to notice because when they're AR raid like that you're so engaged you you don't exactly notice you know but you'll see oh I'm in the right place it's like okay how' I get here what am I doing right you know how is it that this could happen more often I'd like this to happen more often how would I have to conduct myself in order for that to happen more often and then you practice that and then maybe instead of 10 Minutes a month or 10 minutes a week it's like 15 minutes a day and

then it's half an hour a day and then it's an hour a day and then it's 4 hours a day and maybe if you're if you're extraordinarily careful then you get to a point where you're like that a good proportion of the [Music] time you are not the master of your own house there are spirits that dwell within you meaning You have a will and you can exercise a certain amount of conscious control over your being but there are all sorts of things that occur within you that seem to be Beyond Your Capacity to control

your dreams for example that's a really good example or your impulses for example you might you might think of those as so foreign from you that they're not even you don't even want them to be part of you but but more subtly even how about what you're Interested in what compels you like where does that come from exactly because you can't conjure it up of your own accord you know so if you're a student and you're taking difficult course you might say to yourself well I need to sit down and study for 3 hours but

then you sit down and that isn't what happens your attention goes everywhere and you might say well whose attention is it then if it goes everywhere because you say it's your Attention it's like well if it's your attention maybe you would be able to control it but you can't and so then you might think well Jen just exactly what the hell is controlling it and you might say well it's random it's well it better not be random I can tell you that that's that happens to some degree in schizophrenia there's an element of Randomness in

that it's not random it's driven by the action of phenomena that I think are best considered as something Like subpersonalities you can't make yourself interested in something interest manifests itself and grips you that's a whole different thing and so what is it that's gripping you and and how do you conceptualize that is that a divine power well it's divine as far as you're concerned because it grips you and you can't do anything about it and so there's a calling in you towards what you're compelled by and what you're interested In and sometimes that might be

very dark and sometimes not but you're compelled forward by your interest and so the idea that what moves you away from your country and your father's house and the Comforts of your childhood home is is something that's beyond you and that you listen to and hearken to that's exactly right and you can say well I don't want to call that God it's like doesn't matter what you call it exactly it doesn't matter to what it is what it's Called it's still is and if you don't listen to it that's the other thing if you don't

listen to it and I've been a clinician and talked to enough people now as old as I am to know this absolutely if you do not listen to that thing that beckons you forward you will pay for it like you cannot possibly imagine you'll have everything that's terrible about life in your life and nothing about it that's good and first you'll know that it was your fault and That you squandered what you could have had so this is not only a calling forth but a warning one of the things that I've noticed in my life

is that nothing I've ever done was wasted and by done I mean put my heart and soul into you know like like attempted with with all of my effort that that always worked now it didn't always work the way I expected it to work work that's a whole different Issue but the payoff from it was always positive something of value always accured to me when I made the sacrifice is necessary to do something worthwhile go somewhere you don't understand you have to go into the unknown and that's that's God's First Command go into the unknown

because you already know what you know and so and that's not enough unless you think you're enough and if you're not enough and you don't think you're enough then You have to go where you haven't been get away from your family enough so that you can establish your Independence and that isn't because there's something wrong with your family but it means get away you know I talk to people very frequently whose families have provided them with too much protection and they know it themselves and that means they're deprived of necessity and you have to get

yourself away from your dependency in order to allow necessity To drive you forward and that's to become independent and to become mature you know we've been fed this unending diet of Rights and Freedoms and there's something about that there's something about that that's so pathologically wrong and people are starving for the antidote and the antidote is truth and responsibility right and it it isn't it isn't because that's what you should do and some some I know better or someone knows better For you what you should do sense it's that that's the secret to a meaningful

life and without a meaningful life then all you have is suffering and and nihilism and despair and all of that and self-contempt and and that's not good and it's necessary for men to stand up and take responsibility if you were able to reveal the best of yourself to you in the world that you would be an overwhelming Force for good and that whatever errors might be made along the Way would wash out in the works if you forthrightly pursue that which God directs you to pursue let's say that all things are possible and so we

don't know know the limits of human endeavor we truly don't and it it's it's premature to put a cap on what it is that we are what it is that we're capable of and so you you know you're already something and maybe you're not so bad in your current configuration but you might wonder if you did nothing for the next 30 Years except put yourself together just exactly what would you be able to do and you might think well that's worth finding out but of course that's that's the adoption of responsibility there there's lots in

the world to fix everything that bothers you about the world and about yourself should be fixed and you can do that I have a friend he lives in Montreal his name is James Simon he's a great painter and he's taught me a lot Of things help he's helped me design my house and beautify it and I bought some paintings from him a couple of years ago and he did this series of paintings where he went around North America and and stood in different places and then he painted the view from here down and so it's

his feet planted in different places on roads in the desert on the ocean yeah well you know he was trying to make a point and the point was that wherever you are it's worth paying Attention and that's cuz you know so all these places that he visited he looked exactly where he was standing by the side of the road in the desert sort of mundane in some sense but then maybe he put 40 hours into that painting you know and it's it's very very realistic painting with really good light and what he's telling you as

a painter is everything is worth paying attention to an infinite amount but you don't have enough time and so the artist does that For you right the artist looks and looks and looks and looks and looks and then gives you that vision and so then you can look at the painting and it reminds you that everything that there is is right where you are and that's a hard thing to realize but it's actually true and so I've I've been telling people online in various ways and in lectures that they should start fixing up the World

by cleaning up their room how you would like your life to to Be what you would like your character to be 3 to 5 years down the road if you were taking care of yourself like you were taking care of someone that you actually cared about so you kind of have to split yourself into two people and treat yourself like you like someone you have respect for and that you want the best for that's not easy because people don't necessarily have respect for themselves and they don't necessarily want what's the best for themselves Because they

they have a lot of self-contempt and a lot of self-hatred a lot of guilt I think you have an obligation it's one of the highest moral obligations to treat yourself as if you're a creature of value how you would like your friendships to be conducted cuz it's useful to surround yourself with people who are trying to move forward and and more importantly who are happy when you move forward and not happy when you move backwards not when You fall that isn't what I mean but when you're doing self-destructive things your friends shouldn't be there to

cheer you on you look at the world through a story you can't you can't help it and this the story is what gives value to the world or or the story is what you extract from the value of the world world you can look at it either way you're somewhere and it's not good enough right that's the Eternal human predicament wherever You are isn't good enough and to some degree that's actually a good thing because if it was good enough well there's nothing for you to do so it's actually maybe a good thing that it's

insufficient and that might be why sometimes having less is is better than having more and and I don't want to be a paana about that I mean I know that there's deprivation that can reach to the point where it's where it's completely counterproductive but it Isn't always the case that starting with little is you if you start with little you start with more possibility it's something like that so you move from always from what's unbearable about the present to some better future right and if you don't have that then you have nothing but threat and

a negative emotion you have no positive emotion because the positive emotion is generated in the conception of the better future and then the evidence that You generate yourself that you're moving towards it that's where the positive and fulfilling meaning of life comes so you want to set up this structure properly it's very very important and so what it means is that you want to be going somewhere that's good enough so that the going is worth the while and you can ask yourself that and well we know what's wrong with life it's Rife with suffering and

insufficiency and deception and evil it's all of that obviously okay what Would make the journey worthwhile or you can ask yourself that it's like all right in order to Bear up under this load what is it that I would need to be striving to attain and if you ask yourself that that's to knock and and the door will open that's what that means if you ask yourself that then you will find an answer and you'll think you'll shrink away from it you'll think well there's no way I could do that it's like well you don't

know what you could Do you don't know what's possible and you're not as much as you could be and so God only knows what you could what you could do and have and give if you sacrificed everything to it you have to sacrifice that which is most valuable to you currently that's stopping you and God only knows what that is it's certainly the worst of you it's certainly that and God Only Knows to what degree you're in love with the worst of [Music] you the idea that what you should do if you're feeling resentful about

the nature of being or suffering too much for your own life let's say is straighten the damn thing out like seriously try it for a year even try it for week try not doing the things you know you shouldn't do try not saying the things you know to be false and just watch what happens you might as well give it a shot right because you say Well I'm all in for a year you know I'm going to do things right and then I'll just stand back and I kind of watch how things unfold and maybe

I'll reconsider at the end of that year it's like try it try it I mean I would say I've had thousands of letters now from people who are saying heyy I tried that you know and hey you know worked I read this great line in a TS Elliot play called the cocktail party and in it this woman comes up to a Psychiatrist and she says you know I'm having a really rough time of it I'm suffering badly my life is not going well and and then she says uh I hope that there's something wrong with

me and the psychiatrist says what the hell do you mean by that and she says well here's how I look at it there's either something wrong with world and I'm just in it and that's how it is and then like what am I going to do about that because it's the whole world or maybe I could be Fortunate and there's something wrong with me that's causing all this unnecessary suffering and if I would I could just set it right I could learn and I could set it right and so well I've been thinking about that

for a very long time and I think well if your life isn't going the way it is you know you can find someone else to blame which is pretty convenient for you and also relatively easy or you could think okay I don't like life I don't like the Way my life is unfolding um maybe I don't like life in general because it's tragic and and tainted with evil how do I know if my judgment is accurate and the question is well have I really done everything I possibly could to set my life straight because maybe

I shouldn't be judging it its quality or the quality of life itself or being itself for that matter if I haven't done everything I POS possibly could to set my life Straight well so there's a there's a task the humility element is it took me a long time to understand why there's religious injunctions supporting humility to even understand what the word really meant in that sort of technical sense and it means something like this it means what you don't know is more important than what you know then then what you don't know can start to

be your friend you see people are very defensive about what they know but The thing is you don't know enough enough and the re you can tell you don't know enough cuz your life is not what it could be and neither is the life of the people around you you just don't know enough and so what that means is that every time you encounter some evidence that you're ignorant someone points it out you should be happy about that because you think oh you just told me how I'm wrong it's like great like maybe I had

to sift through a lot of nonsense To get through the real message that you're telling me but if you can actually tell me some way that I'm wrong and then maybe give me a hint about how to not be wrong like that well then I wouldn't have to be wrong like that anymore that that would be a good thing and you can embark on that Adventure by listening to people and if you listen to people they will tell you they'll tell you amazing things if you listen to them and many of those things are little

Tools that you can put in your toolkit like Batman and then you can go out into the world and use those tools and you don't have to fall blindly into a pit quite as often and so the humility element is well do you want to be right or do you want to be learning and and it's deeper than that it's do you want to be the the tyrannical King who's already got everything figured out or do you want to be the continually transforming hero or fool for that Matter who's getting better all the time and

that's actually a choice you know um it's a deep choice and it's better to be the self-transforming fool who's humble enough to make friends with what he or she doesn't know and to listen when people talk and listening is a transformative exercise like if if you listen to the people in your life for example if you actually listen to them they'll tell you what's wrong with them and how to fix it and what they want They can't even help it if you start listening because people are so shocked if you actually listen to them that

they they tell you all sorts of things that they might not have even intended to things they don't even know and then you can you can work with that and the other thing that's so interesting you know now and then you have a meaningful conversation right you you have a good conversation with someone you walk away and you think geez you know we really Connect and I know more than I did when I came away from that conversation and during the conversation you're really engrossed in it and that feeling of being engrossed is a feeling

of meaning and the feeling of meaning is engendered because you're having a transformative conversation so your brain produces that feeling of meaning for you says oh yeah this exactly where you should be right here and now it's it's the right place And time for you and that's a great place to occupy and so a good conversation where people are listening has exactly that nature and the reason it has that nature is because it is in fact transformative it's one of the truisms of of Clinical Psychology like if you're a clinical psychologist a huge part of

what you do is just listen to people it's like you know they come in they're unhappy and they'd rather not be something like that you say well why do You think you might be unhappy and they don't know they have some ideas they may have to ramble around for like a year before they figure out why they're unhappy they get rid of a bunch of reasons why they thought they were unhappy that are untr true and then you kind of get to the heart of the problem and then you might ask them well if you

could have what you wanted so that your life would be okay what would that look like then they have to ramble around a Bunch about that because they don't really know but the listening will straighten them out because people think by talking and in order to think you have to have someone to listen because it's very hard to think hardly anyone can think and even the people who can think can only think about a limited number of things but almost everybody can talk and you can listen to your yourself talk and if someone listens to

you then well then you also have a foil For your thoughts right because you can watch the person when you're talking and see if you're boring or see if you're amusing or if you're engrossing all of those things so like if you're arguing with your wife let's say or your husband big party is going to want to win that's stupid because CU you don't want that you want to you want to defeat your wife in an argument oh well great like if she was going to disappear tomorrow no Problem but like you're going to like

live with defeated miserable her for the next week that's no good so you listen and you think okay well here's here's what you what I think you said and maybe even make it a little stronger and more elaborated than was the case with the original utterance so that you get the damn argument right because you don't want to win you want to fix the problem that's the winning how do I decide if my inner Voice is healthy or not and how do I maintain it healthily how can one tell if one's inner voice judgment or

conscience is a healthy one and not a voice that is the result of an unhealthy mind due to past experiences now that's a really interesting question it's a question of conscience I continually ask my frequently let's say or yearly asked my personality class attendees if they heard the voice of conscience if they had a feeling an Emotion emotional state let's say or a voice that informed them when they had done something ethically wrong and that perhaps made them guilty as a consequence and it was essentially a universal experience and that's the voice of society within

I suppose that's one way of thinking about it the freudians would think about that as the voice of the super eagle Yung Carl Yung would take that conceptualization Somewhat farther he would have considered it the voice of the self which is in part the voice of the ethic that's derived from the broader community in so far as that ethic is valid let's say but also in part the voice of the more thoroughly developed self that's still striving to be born one thing you could say is that you you experience violations of your conscience when you're

not acting Like the better person that you could possibly become and so to some degree that's your higher self upgrading you for failure to develop in the appropriate Direction and that seems to me to be a reasonable way of conceptualizing it now the one question might be how error prone is your conscience given that you're not omniscient you have to tend to your guilt and your self-disgust and Your self-contempt and your self-consciousness you have to understand that the manifestation of those emotions might well indicate a moral failing on your part or a a lack that

needs to be addressed well at the same time considering that it is not a straightforward matter to deal fairly with yourself and you can be too tormented by your conscience too rigid too responsible take on too much weight onto Yourself deny yourself in a manner that isn't sustainable and so forth that that a moral code a moral way of being can become too rigid and and inflexible and despite its putative aim upward be something counterproductive I think most of the way out of that if there is one is well careful thinking you have to see

what your conscience says you have to see how you Respond you have to capture that voice and your responses and you have to think it through but most of that is done in dialogue with other people rather than as the consequence of internal thought you know if you have a dispute with your wife or your husband your intimate partner sibling your parents anybody close to you and it's useful to for each of you in the dispute to ask yourself and the other person very Seriously if you're at fault or if they're at fault and and

for both of you to be able to contemplate that you might be at fault and so might the other person and that it's in your best interest to sort out exactly who's made the error and where and maybe it's both of you and maybe at different levels of analysis um I think the same might be said about your reaction to your conscience it's not uncommon for me to Talk to my wife my kids my parents my friends for that matter about something I might be feeling maybe I'm guilty about something I'm self-conscious about something I'm

angry about something um I feel impelled by my conscience to do something as a consequence to change something it's very helpful to discuss such things with other people to say look here's what I think I did wrong and here's how I'm punishing myself but I'm Not sure that I'm not doing it in an exaggerated way and you gather other people's opinions and listen to them carefully and friends are extraordinarily useful in that regard and that can help you calibrate it so I think most of what we do to decide if our inner voice is healthy

is discuss it with other people and I believe as I pointed out in my last book uh explicitly that tremendous amount of our sanity is maintained as a consequence of Social interaction so you can't find your authentic self merely as a consequence of a journey within I would say you you're not there's just not enough of you you you have to be informed by the broader social world what is the best way to avoid falling back into nihilistic behaviors and thinking well a large part of that I would say is is habit the the Maintenance

the development maintenance of good practices habits if you find yourself dis uh neurotic if your tendance if your thought tends in the nihilistic direction and you tend to fall apart organizing your life across multiple Dimensions is a good antidote it's not exactly thinking do you have an intimate relationship if not well probably you could use One do you have contact with close family members siblings or children or parents or or or people who are even more distantly related if not you probably need that do you see your friends a couple of times a week and

do something social with them uh do you have a way of productively using your time outside of employment are you employed do you have a good job or at least a job that is practically sufficient and that enables you to work With people who you like working with even if the job itself is you know mundane or repetitive or difficult sometimes the relationships that you establish with a in in a employment situation like that can make the job worthwhile um have you regulated your response to Temptations pornography alcohol abuse drug abuse is that under control

um I would say differentiate the problem there's multiple dimensions of Attainment ambition pleasure responsibility all of that that make up a life and to the degree that it's possible you want to optimize your functioning on as many of those Dimensions as possible those are all the questions that I would decompose the problem into the best way to avoid falling back into nihilistic behaviors and thinking how can responsibility be differentiated from imposed guilt well I think you adopt genuine responsibility Let's say healthy responsibility I think you adopt that more or less voluntarily I mean there's an

element of necessity and compulsion in our lives as well because there are things we have to do to survive but if you've explicitly formulated a set of goals and you're pursuing them then you've adopted the responsibility to act in a certain manner to make those goals realize themselves that's that's responsibility that you've adopted Rather than responsibility that's being imposed on you assuming that you've thought through the goals and you find your spirit in harmony with those goals um you can consult your resentment I think that's a very useful step if you find yourself angry and

bitter about the things that you are responsible for doing then that's an indication that you might be operating under some unhealthy compulsion that you're rebelling and that's the reason for the resentment Against the insistence that you act in a certain way although it's also possible that you're just immature and that you're rebelling against the discipline that's necessary to attain the goals that you genuinely do want to attain and that are valid and that you are actively engaged in constructing so you have to get that straight and some of that's a consequence of thought and again

some of that's a consequence of of discussion with other People with whom you're intimate enough to have a conversation like that and perhaps they have conversations about similar things with you if you're [Music] fortunate human beings have built a mechanism let's say that's like a game engine you know how there are game engines now that people have devised their computational devices and you can take a game engine and you can generate Games with it like computer games so the game engine is a mechanism for producing games well that's what our brains are like our brains

are game engines for producing games and so what happens is that that when you think you produce an avatar of yourself you produce a fictional world that that Avatar inhabits and maybe you produce multiple fictional worlds in multiple avatars that's the you that could be tomorrow which is what you're doing when you're Planning and you walk the Avatar through its potential roots and those that look good you keep and those that don't look good you kill and so then you can embody the ideas that you keep and act those out and hopefully the idea is

that when you embody them you're successful and you don't get killed don't have one plan right if you're going to stake yourself on something you should throw a couple of alternative scaffolds up beside you so That you have somewhere to go you want to be a doctor okay well you could be a nurse it's like it's not a doctor but it beats cutting your throat you're still doing 80% of what you wanted to do so you want to and you want to think about this during your whole life man if you're going to take a

high risk you want to scaffold yourself in other areas so that if it fails bottom doesn't drop out and you die and it's also very much worth thinking about with regards to Setting up your life life in general it's like if you concentrate solely on your career you can get a long way in your career and I would say that that's a strategy that a minority of men preferentially do that that's all they do they work like 70 80 hours a week they go flat out on their career they're staking everything on the small probability

of exceptional status in a narrow domain but it's it's hard on them they don't have a life it's very Difficult for them to have a family they don't know how to take any leisure activity like they get very onedimensional now it may be that that unid dimensionality is the price you have to pay to be exceptional at one thing right because if you're going to be something like a genius level mathematician or a scientist say it's like you're in your lab you're in your lab all the time you're working 70 hours a week or 80

hours a week you're smart You're dedicated you're unidimensional and that's how you get to beat all the other people who are doing that it's the only way but the problem is you don't get a life now if you love being a scientist and you have that kind of focus of Mind well first of all you're a rare person and second you're going to pay for it but fine more power to you but but it's a it's a risky business to do that you sacrifice a lot for it you know and I would say most often

if You're speaking about having a healthy life that isn't what you do you spread yourself out more so you know you have a family you have some things that you do outside of work that are meaning ful to you and useful you you have a network of friends of that that those three things alone are four things alone are plenty to keep you well oriented and then if one of those things collapses you know everything doesn't go now the the price you pay for that is the more you strive To optimize that balance the less

likely you are to be fantastically successful at any single one of them but you might have a very you know if you consider your life as a whole that might be a winning strategy one of the things Carl Jung said I really lik this he thought that men went after Perfection and women went after wholeness so Perfection would be stake it all on one thing and and look for radical success not all not that all men Do that because they don't but we're talking about extremes at least with the regards to the men that do

that the wholeness idea is more like well I want it's like I want one thing in my life to be 150 % or I want five things in my life to be 80% well there there's a lot more richness in a life where you have five things operating at 80% but you're not operating at any of them at 150% and I really believe this because I've watched men and women go through their careers now for a long period of time and but one of the things that I've noticed is that mostly women in their 30s

bail out of unidimensional careers they won't do them they won't put put in the 80 hours a week that they would have to put in in order to dominate that particular area and it isn't the reason that they won't do it is because they decide it's not worth it and no wonder because why would that be worth it you You have to ask yourself that it's like well you want to be an outstanding scientist it's like okay really really that's what you want because that means that's what you do cuz you're competing with other people

you know they're smart they're hardworking and if you want to be at the top you have to be smarter and work harder than any of them and working hard means working long hours I mean it also means working diligently but in in the Final analysis it's all also an additive issue if I'm smart and hardworking and I can crank out for 70 hours a week and you do it for 30 it's like in 2 years I'm so far ahead of you you will never ever catch up and I think partly maybe part of the reason

too that women are oriented that way more than men I think there's two reasons is one is socioeconomic status does not make women more attractive on the The Mating Market but it does make men more attractive and The second is women's time frame is compressed right cuz guys can always say well I'll have kids later and they can say that till they're like 80 whereas women it's like no way man you got to get it you got to get it together by the time you're let's say 40 but really probably by 35 but definitely by

40 cuz otherwise it ain't happening and that's bloody [Music] Dreadful there's a sacrificial element In maturation right you have to sacrifice the plur potentiality of childhood for the actuality of a frame and the question is well why would you do that well one reason is it happens to you whether you do it or not you can either choose your damn limitation or you can let it take you unaware when you're 30 or even worse when you're 40 and then that is not a happy day you see I see people like this and I think it's

more and more common in Our culture because people can put off M maturity without without suffering an immediate penalty but all that happens is the penalty acrs and then when it finally hits it just Wallops you because when you're 25 you can be an idiot it's no problem even when you're out in a job search it's like well you don't have any experience and you're kind of Clueless it's yeah yeah you're young you know it's no problem we can that's what young people are like but they're full of Potential okay well now you're the same

person at 30 it's like people aren't so thrilled about you at that point it's like what the hell have you been doing for the last 10 years well I'm just as clue as I was when I was 22 yeah but you're not 22 you're an old infant right and that's an ugly thing an old infant so the the re part of the reason you choose your damn Sacrifice because the sacrifice is inevitable but at least you get to choose it and then there's something that's that's even more complex than that in some sense is that

the problem with being a child is that all you are is potential and it's really low resolution you you could be anything but you're not anything so then you go and you adopt an apprenticeship roughly speaking and then you become at least you become something and when you're Something that makes the world open up to you again you know like if you're a really good plumber then you end up being far more than a plumber you know if you're a really good plumber well then you have some employees you run a business you train some

other people you enlarge their lives you're kind of a pillar of the community you you have your family it's once you pass through that that narrow training period which Narrows you and constricts you and Develops you at the same time then you can come out the other end with a bunch of new possibility at hand part of the proper path of development in the last half of life was to ReDiscover the child that you left behind as you were apprenticing and so then you get to be something and regain that potential at the same time

you're in the situation that you're in right now and that's not good enough and so that's another thing that's kind Of interesting about people is they're chronically dissatisfied with the way things are well that's okay because you wouldn't be motivated to move forward if you weren't chronically dissatisfied with the way that things are but it's kind of annoying you know because you might think well why aren't you just happy with what you have and the answer to that is generally CU I don't know if it's going to last and so that's part of it and

the other is well if the Situation shifted a bit maybe I'd have more options and some of that would be it would last longer it'd be more stable it'd be more promising and so you can say well you should be satisfied with what you have but it's kind of really a stupid thing in some sense to tell human beings because no matter what you have it isn't going to solve your fundamental problem so the problem isn't going away and you can't just fool yourself into saying well what I have is great you Could say I

could have a hell of a lot less and that would be bad and most people have a lot less than me and I should be grateful for what I have that's fine that's perfectly reasonable but you're stuck with this chronic sense of Unfinished Business and the reason for that is well you're permanently vulnerable so H how could it be otherwise and even if you've got your problem solved then there's three or four people in your family that by no Means have got their problems solved so the problem of problems never goes away that's a good

thing to know existentially too because it helps you calibrate your life properly because you might be thinking well if I just got everything together you know I'd hit some plateau of satiation and stability and and then I would just be there it's like no that's never going to happen it's never going to happen so you might as well just forget about that well Maybe you want to push your damn Rock up a hill you know it's going to roll down again it's like what are you going to do just sit there by the rock it's

okay to be active even even if the problem you're trying to solve is not fundamentally solvable that doesn't mean it isn't worth trying to [Music] solve and you guys should listen to this because I know what I'm talking about if you happen to be creative if you're a Songwriter or another kind of musician or an artist or or or any of the other number of things that you might be find a way to make money and then practice your craft on the side because you will starve to death otherwise now some for some of you

that won't be true but it's a tiny minority your best bet is to find a job that will keep Body and Soul together and parse off some time that you can pursue your creative thing because then well as a long-term Strategy medium to long-term strategy it's a better one you know you hear very frequently people say things like everyone's creative it's like that's wrong okay it's wrong it's just as wrong as saying that everyone's extroverted first of all you have to be pretty damn smart to be creative because otherwise you're just going to get to

where other people have already got and that's not creative by definition so so being fast and being Out there at the front of things really makes a difference and then you also have to have these Divergent thinking capabilities and that's part of your trait structured and creative people are really different than non-creative people you know partly because for example they're highly motivated to do creative things and to experience novelty and and to chase down aesthetic experiences and to attend movies and to read fiction and to go to museums and to Enjoy poetry and and and

to enjoy music that's not conventional music for example these aren't trivial differences and so it's a real it's a real misstatement to make the proposition that everyone's creative it's just simply not the case it's matter of wishful thinking it's like saying that everyone's intelligent it's like well if everyone's intelligent then the the term loses all of its meaning because any term that you can apply to every member Of a category AB has absolutely no meaning you know the other thing you want to be thinking about here is that don't be thinking that creativity is such

a good thing it's a high-risk High return strategy there's creative people in this room man you guys are going to have a hell of a time monetizing your creativity it's virtually impossible it's really really difficult because first of all let's say you make an original product you think the world Will beat a pathway to your door if you build a better mouse trap it's like that's complete rubbish it isn't it isn't true in the least if you make a good creative product you've probably solved about 5% of your problem because then you have marketing which

is insanely difficult and then you have sales and then you have customer support and then you have to build an organization and you have to if it's really novel you have to tell people What the hell the thing is you know we built this future authoring program right it's available for people online how do you Market that no one knows what that is and that's a real problem if you write a book well then you have the problem that another million people have also written a book but if you produce something that's completely new and

doesn't have a category people can't search for it online how are they going to find it and then you have pricing Problems and it's really unbelievably difficult to produce something creative and then monetize it and even worse if you're the creative person let's say you have a spectacular invention you've got no money right you've got no customers those are big problems problems and so maybe you go and you find a venture capitalist we start with family and friends cuz that's how it works you raise money for your product you raise money from your family and

friends That's assuming you have family and friends that have some money and that they're going to give it to you and most people aren't in that situation so it's a terrible barrier right off the bat and then of course you're putting your family and friends at substantial Financial Risk because the probability that your stupid idea is going to make money is virtually zero even if it's a really brilliant idea and so then let's say well you get past family and friends You get Venture Capital capitalists involved cuz that's often the next step or an angel

investor that's there's there's steps in building a business family and friends angel investor that's some rich guy that you've happened to meet some manner some way who's who's into this sort of thing and is willing to provide you with some money to get your product off the ground well how much of your product is that person going to take well most of it most of it And no wonder because you know you don't have any money how are you going to Bar for control over your product he'll just say well do you want the money

or not and if your answer is no then he'll go and do something else with his money it's not like there's no shortage of things that you can do with your money there's a million things you can do with it so you're not in a great bargaining position and then if you get Venture capitalists involved they'll take Another big chunk and maybe if they're not very straight with you they'll just throw you out because maybe by that point in the company's development you're nothing but a pain in the neck because what do you know about

marketing and sales and customer service and building an organization and running a business like you don't have a clue so why do they need you so even if you're successful at generating a new idea and you put it into a business the Probability that you as the originator of the of the idea are going to make some money from it is very very low so don't be thinking that creativity is such a is something you would want to curse yourself with now you know it's not all bad because it it opens up Avenues of experience

for Creative people that aren't available to people who aren't cre creative but it definitely is a highrisk high return strategy you know so the overwhelming Probability is that you will fail but a small proportion of creative people succeed spectacularly and so it's like a lottery in some sense you're probably going to lose but if you don't lose you could win big and that keeps a lot of creative people going but also they don't really have much choice in it because if you're a creative person you're like a a a fruit tree that's that's bearing fruit

so you don't really have you can Suppress it but it's very bad for you you know the creative people I've worked with is if they're not creative they're miserable so they have to do it but and and you know there's real joy and pleasure in it and and psychological utility but that doesn't necessarily mean that it's an intelligent it's certainly not a conservative strategy for moving forward through life what does it mean to think creatively it's something like this Imagine that I toss you out an idea and there's some probability that when I toss you

that idea that that will trigger off other ideas in your imagination so you could think about it as a threshold issue if you're not very creative I'll throw you an idea and hardly any other ideal will be triggered and the ones that will be triggered are going to be very closely associated with that initial idea so let's say I tossed each of you an idea and I asked you to Think tell me the first thing that comes to mind okay so what we would see first is that the first thing that comes to mind in

like in all likelihood would be shared by many of you okay so then you could think about that as a common response right and so that's a less creative response and then there'll be some things that come to mind for you that are that are so idiosyncratic that you're the only person that thinks it and no one can understand it well that That's also not exactly creative because the thing that you for something to be creative it has to be novel and useful at the same time that's sort of a rough definition creative something creative

is novel and useful so you anyway so you can think of you you get thrown an idea and there's some probability that that will co-activate other ideas and if it coactivates many other ideas that's like fluency and if it co-activates ideas that are quite distant from the original Idea something like that and you could you could track Distance by comparing it to to probability that other people have generated it then that's also another indication of creativity so they have to be unlikely resp many unlikely responses that are useful that's what creativity is roughly speaking and

then you can fractionate it into different dimensions so that's creative thinking but then creative achievement would be the ability to take those original ideas and Then actually to implement them in the world and that's obviously much more different than merely being creative imagine what happens when you play Monopoly what happens everybody has the same amount of money to begin with right so then you start playing it's basically a random game well some people start to win a bit and some people start to lose a bit and then if you win the probability that you'll keep

winning Starts to increase and if you lose your vulnerability increases as you lose and then maybe you've got say six people playing Monopoly soon one person has zero what happens when they have zero they're out of the game so zero is a weird number cuz when you hit zero you're out of the game so so then if you keep playing people start to stack up at zero right what happens at the end of the game one person has all the property and all the money and everyone else has None right that that's what happens if

you play an iterated trading game to its final conclusion it's not a consquence necessarily of structural inequality it's built into the system at a deeper level than that so you know people talk about all the time about how unfair it is that the 1% of the population has the vast amount of the money and 1% of the 1% has most of that money and 1% of the 1% of the 1% has most of that money it's a it's an inevitable Conclusion of iterated trading games and we don't know how to fight it we don't know

how to take from the people who have and move it to the bottom without an instantly moving back up to the top different people maybe but still back up to the top cuz even the 1% churns a lot like I think you have a 10% chance if I remember correctly you have a 10% chance of being in the top 1% for at least one year of your life and a 40% chance of being in the top 10% for at least one Year in your life that's in Canada and the US it's less so in Europe

so there's a fair bit of churning at the top end it's not the same people all the time who have the money but it is a tiny fraction of the people all the time who have all the [Music] money