Overview
Book Title: 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
Author: Jordan B. Peterson
Year: 2018
Cameron’s Rating: 9/10
My Thoughts
There were a lot of great nuggets of wisdom in this book. Similar to The Defining Decade, 12 Rules for Life is one of those books that every young person should read at least once.
If you know someone that’s just drifting through life, this may be be the perfect book to gift them to help them “wake up” and begin proactively taking control of their lives.
Even if you’re an avid reader who has your life in decent order, however, you’ll still emerge from reading this book a more mature and dare I say “whole” person than before you started reading it.
Take the idea of self-compassion for example. Dr. Peterson suggests that we rebel against totalitarianism even if we are the ones being tyrannical with ourselves. The takeaway?
It’s not effective nor virtuous to try to bully yourself into doing things. Instead, treat yourself like someone you are trying to help and reward yourself when appropriate.
Another great takeaway was about discipline’s role in raising children that prosper. It’s easy enough to understand why clearly defining rules for your children is important.
If your children don’t know the rules, they’re going to find following the rules to be impossible and they are going to feel resentful when they don’t understand why they are being punished.
What’s less obvious, however, is the idea of disciplining your children with a “minimum effective dose”. The concept of minimum effective doses was popularized in the 4 Hour Body.
The idea is to do the least necessary to produce some result. For fitness, that may mean putting your muscles under tension for a certain amount of seconds or minutes in a given workout.
Punishing your children is never fun, but it is necessary from time to time to help mold them into mature likable adults.
If you fail to mold your children in this manner, there’s a good chance they’ll become social outcasts or have to face harsher feedback from people in the outside world that can’t or aren’t willing to deliver this feedback in the loving manner parents can.
A certain level of discipline is required for your children to understand that they did something that’s “not ok”. A punishment that exceeds this level inflicts additional pain, but does not offer additional opportunities to learn more productive behaviors.
As such, punishing your children with minimum effective doses of discipline helps them develop without having to suffer unnecessary pain from draconian punishments or large quantities of harsh feedback from the outside world.
And… These were just a few nice insights I picked up from 12 Rules for Life. Be sure to pick up your own copy of the book or read the rest of my quotes and notes below! 😀
Best Quotes
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“I couldn’t understand how belief systems could be so important to people that they were willing to risk the destruction of the world to protect them. I came to realize that shared belief systems made people intelligible to one other and that the systems weren’t just about belief. People who live by the same code are rendered mutually predictable to one another.”
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“Circumstances change and so can you.”
- “Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping.”
- “Women’s proclivity to say, “no” more than any other force has shaped our evolution into the creative, industrious, upright, large-brained, competitive, aggressive, domineering creatures that we are.”
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“It is far better to render beings in your care competent than to protect them… Question for parents: Do you want to make your children safe or strong?”
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“No one is more familiar than you with all the ways your mind and body are flawed. No one has more reason to hold you in contempt, to see you as pathetic and by withholding something that might do you good; you can punish yourself for all your failings.”
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“It is not virtuous to be victimized by a bully — even if that bully is oneself.
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“Before you help someone, you should find out why that person is in trouble. You shouldn’t merely assume that he or she is a noble victim of unjust circumstances and exploitation. It’s the most unlikely explanation, not the most probable.
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“We cannot navigate without something to aim at.”
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“What you aim at determines what you see.”
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“…There are catastrophes lurking at the extremes of every moral continuum.”
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“Too much protection devastates the developing soul.”
My Notes
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While we are all too familiar with the negative aspects of anger and aggression, it’s important to note that they also have a useful purpose — to defend oneself from threats and oppression.
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Meaningfulness and flow states are to be found in situations which balance chaos and order.
- Feelings of resentment usually indicate that you are somehow being immature about a situation or that the person you feel resentment towards is somehow treating you in a tyrannical manner.
- Fair rules that are presented clearly to children and proper minimum effective doses of discipline are the foundations that lead to happy families that are able to maintain order in their own lives despite the chaos of the world that surrounds them.
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If you are unwilling to give your child a fair amounts of discipline and help mold them into likable social beings, they will most likely either become social outcasts or have to face harsher consequences from people that don’t love them in the outside world.
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The world that reveals itself to you is largely determined by the values you hold.
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We rebel against our own totalitarianism just as much as the totalitarianism of others.
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One of the reasons listening in conversations and debates is so difficult is that authentic listening forces you to risk adopting the other person’s viewpoint.
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A great rule for conversations is that the next speaker can only begin speaking after summarizing the previous speaker’s points to a level the previous speaker is satisfied with.
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Men often feel angered or annoyed by women’s failure to listen and implement men’s solutions to their problems. While there are certainly women (and men) who just want to vent and indulge in negativity, perhaps a more significant reason men and women struggle to communicate effectively is that women prioritize fleshing out and processing the meaning of their problems to a greater degree before entering the action stage (at least on average compared to men).
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Specifying exactly what you want has the potential to lead to sharp pain if you don’t get it. Being vague, however, leads to the dull pain of discontentment.
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You can’t start moving from “point A” to “point B” until you admit where you currently stand (point A) and precisely where you want to go (point B).
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In most cases it makes more sense to optimize risk rather than minimize it.
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Your insufficiencies can only be rectified once you’ve admitted to having them.