12 Rules for Life

The 12 Rules.

Peterson tells us that we need them to walk the line between order and chaos. We’ll talk more about that dynamic in the next Idea. First, let’s take a super-quick look at our Rules.

RULE 1 / Stand up straight with your shoulders back. ← Step 1? Get your power back. Act like a victorious lobster. Optimize your posture. (More on this in a moment! :)

RULE 2 / Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping.← Did you know that people are more likely to give their PETS prescribed medication than they are to give it to themselves? Yep. We need to treat ourselves better.

RULE 3 / Make friends with people who want the best for you. ← Remember: We’re the average of the five people with whom we spend the most time. Make sure the people you’re hanging out with want the best for you (and for themselves!).

RULE 4 / Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today. ← Are you better today than you were yesterday? AWESOME. Repeat again so it’s true tomorrow. And the day after that. Forever. Don’t waste your time and energy comparing yourself to others.

RULE 5 / Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.← I might’ve gotten into a little argument with Alexandra about this section. (Hah.) Part of a longer chat on the myriad of ways to land in the “Wise Parenting” quadrant. Short story: Don’t be permissive. Or authoritarian. (Or absent.) Let’s find the sweet spot of high standards and high warmth as Wise/Authoritative parents creating proper boundaries to “bring forth” the best within our kids.

RULE 6 /Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. ← It’s REALLY easy to criticize the world and blame something outside ourselves for all of our problems. It’s MUCH harder to get our own lives Optimized. Start there.

RULE 7 / Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient). ← What’s the right thing to do? Ignore the quick-hit gains and do that.

RULE 8 / Tell the truth—or, at least, don’t lie. ← This chapter reminded me of Don Miguel Ruiz’s first agreement to be impeccable with your word. When? Always.

RULE 9 / Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t. ← That includes yourself when you do some hard thinking.

RULE 10 / Be precise in your speech. ← Know what you want in your life. Have a clear aim. Go get it. That’s our path to meaning.

RULE 11/ Do not bother children when they are skateboarding.← Moral of this section? Life demands challenges. An overprotected human is weak. We want to be strong. Therefore, we must be willing to stretch ourselves and do “dangerous” things.

RULE 12/ Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street. ← This a tongue in cheek title. Basic idea: Appreciate how awesome life is and how blessed we are.

With that, let’s talk a little more about the dynamic interplay between order and chaos!

The essential theme of the book is that we need to do the (hard!) work to get *really* good at managing Order and Chaos.

Peterson often uses the yin and yang symbol to capture the essence of the interplay between Order and Chaos. The light part of the symbol represents Order. The dark part represents Chaos. A little bit of light (Order!) exists in the dark (Chaos) and a little bit of dark (Chaos!) exists in the light (Order). Always. And the two are flowing into one another. Always.

The trick is to gracefully evolve at the edge of that dynamic flow. One foot in Order. The other in Chaos. And the trick to THAT, Peterson says (and I agree), is to focus on what you can control so you can most powerfully deal with all the stuff you can’tcontrol. (Enter: RULES!!!)

Order. Chaos. Order. Chaos. Order. Chaos.

All of which reminds me of Dan Siegel’s insights into what he calls “the river of flexibility.” As we’ve discussed, a hallmark of a healthy human is his or her flexibility. Dan tells us that we need to flow between the banks of “structure” and “spontaneity.” Too much structure and we have rigidity. Too much spontaneity and we have chaos. Structure + Spontaneity = Flexibility.

I’m also reminded of Nassim Taleb’s antifragile barbell strategy. We need to be BOTH super-conservative AND super-aggressive. Order. Chaos. Order. Chaos. Order. Chaos.

And… I’m reminded of Barbara Fredrickson’s ideas around buoyancy and the fact that we need to have BOTH levity *and* gravity. Too much of one or the other = not so good.

Finally, as I read the book, I reflected on emotional stamina and the idea that THE WORSE you feel, THE MORE committed you need to be to your protocol. In other words, feeling a lot of chaos in your life? Create EVEN MORE order by crushing your protocol (aka your “rules” or “algorithms” or “good habits”) like never before!

So… One more time: Order. Chaos. Order. Chaos. Order. Chaos. Always in flow.

We need to embrace both to Optimize and Actualize.

That’s Rule #1: “Stand up straight, with your shoulders back.”

Guess what living creature Professor (of Evolutionary Psychology) Peterson uses as our model for proper posture? A lobster. More specifically, a victorious lobster.

Very short story: Lobsters have been on the planet for a staggering 350 million years. (To put that number in perspective, dinosaurs arrived only 65 million years ago.)

And, guess what? For nearly half a billion years, lobsters have lived within “dominance hierarchies.” The most powerful lobsters had the best “posture”—which was correlated with the amount of (feel good) serotonin they had going through their little brains and bodies.

Fast-forward to today. To create powerful order in our lives, Jordan tells us that the FIRST step is to “Look for your inspiration to the victorious lobster, with its 350 million years of practical wisdom. Stand up straight, with your shoulders back.”

P.S. After that recent talk I gave a woman told me that the first thing she noticed was my posture. She was a ballerina and was trained to always hold herself in such a manner that she was going UP *and* DOWN at the same time. She told me that I did that well and looked like I could be a ballet dancer. I said thank you! :)

As I reflected on that, three tips came to mind: Head Threads + Power Poses + Thor’s Hammer. (Thor? Yah. Chris Helmsworth wrote the foreword to Eric Goodman’s book True to Form. His #1 tip for proper, powerful posture? Chest up, chin down.)

Even simpler: “Stand up straight, with your shoulders back.”<- Try it now. And remember it all day every day. Cultivate your power via your posture so you can give us all you’ve got. (Please!)

P.P.S. This is powerful: “The body, with its various parts, needs to function like a well-rehearsed orchestra. Every system must play its role properly, at exactly the right time, or noise and chaos will ensue. It is for this reason that routine is so necessary. The acts of life we repeat every day need to be automatized. They must be turned into stable and reliable habits, so they lose their complexity and gain predictability and simplicity.

It is for such reasons that I always ask my clinical clients first about sleep. Do they wake up in the morning at approximately the time the typical person wakes up, and at the same time every day? If the answer is no, fixing that is the first thing I recommend. It doesn’t matter so much if they go to bed at the same time each evening, but waking up at a consistent hour is a necessity. Anxiety and depression cannot be easily treated if the sufferer has unpredictable routines. The systems that mediate negative emotion are tightly tied to the properly cyclical circadian rhythms.”

Welcome to Rule #2: Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping.

Did you know that people are more likely to give their PETS prescribed medication than they are to give it to themselves? Yep. Enter: Rule #2: We need to treat ourselves better.

We need to have enough self-respect to take care of ourselves and do the little things that we KNOW can help us Optimize.

“Treat yourself like someone you’re responsible for helping.” ← Imagine that for a moment. And act like that all day today. (And tomorrow. And…)

It’s really easy to criticize the world. It’s a LOT harder to get our lives in perfect order.

New Rule: Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. <- Think about THAT the next time you find yourself complaining about the world or pointing out someone’s flaws.

And, remember: The fastest way to Optimize? STOP doing stupid stuff.

What will it be for you today?

That’s from the final chapter called “Coda” in which Peterson walks us through some big questions and recaps the Rules.

The ultimate dance between chaos and order? Right there at the edge of your Being and your Becoming. In fact, your ultimate Being IS your Becoming. Or, as Jordan puts it, our “Proper Being is a process, not a state; a journey, not a destination.”

As we discuss often, there are no enlightened beings. Only more or less enlightened moments. And, there is no static “done!” version of you (or me). We’re ALWAYS in a dynamic state.

Which brings us back to Rule #4: Don’t compare yourself to other people. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday. And, be willing to let go of who you are TODAY so you can be proud of who you are TOMORROW. Repeat that enough times and what happens?

All that magic we talk about all the time when we truly embrace the idea of incremental optimization. In fact, Jordan talks about the magic of compounding. It’s real.

But, it requires a never-ending string of micro-deaths and rebirths. Constantly dying to the lesser-version of ourselves so we can be born again into the next-best version of ourselves—shouldering as much responsibility as we can and giving life all we’ve got.

As we said in the intro: “If we each live properly, we will collectively flourish.” ← Let’s!!!