Jordan Peterson on his advice for creative people, goals, how to manage anxiety, why specializing is important, and how to write.
A brief overview of Jordan Peterson before delving into his own words:
| Who (Identity) | Jordan Bernt Peterson, a Canadian clinical psychologist, professor, and author, known for his controversial and thought-provoking views on topics such as psychology, politics, and gender. |
| What (Contributions) | Peterson gained widespread recognition for his book “12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos,” which offers self-help advice and philosophical insights. He is also known for his critiques of political correctness, compelled speech, and advocacy for free speech and individualism. |
| When (Period of Influence) | Peterson’s influence surged in the 2010s and continues to be a prominent figure in contemporary public discourse. |
| Where (Geographic Focus) | Born in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, Peterson’s work primarily centers on Western societies, particularly Canada and the United States. However, his ideas have resonated globally. |
| Why (Artistic Philosophy) | Peterson’s philosophy is characterized by an emphasis on individual responsibility, the search for meaning, and the importance of free speech and open dialogue. He believes in the power of myth, storytelling, and religious symbolism to provide guidance and structure to human life. |
| How (Technique and Style) | Known for his articulate and passionate speaking style, Peterson employs a blend of psychology, philosophy, and cultural analysis in his work. He engages in debates and discussions, challenging prevailing ideas and advocating for open dialogue and intellectual diversity. |
This post is a collection of selected quotes and excerpts from secondary sources used for educational purposes, with citations found at the end of the article.
Advice For Creative People
If you’re a creative person, your best bet is to discipline yourself and ground yourself in something relatively practical that will enable you to eke out some sort of living, and then to practice your creative endeavor on the side. It’s very difficult for creative people to monetize their creativity and most of the time it’s an exercise in futility, so what you have to do is stabilize yourself in some sort of productive and traditional domain, and then use your extra time to work creatively and see if you can branch out that way. 1
You should organize the rest of your life except for your creative endeavors in a pretty traditional and conservative manner. What that does is buttress you against the unexpected and give you some stability along many of the potential dimensions of your life, and that frees you up to take larger risks in the creative domain. It’s hard for creative people to do that because they’re blasting out laterally in all directions simultaneously, but you exhaust yourself that way and you also risk scattering yourself. 2
How To Manage Anxiety
One of the things that you do if you’re high in anxiety is to stabilize your sleep-wake cycles – so get up at the same time, go to bed at the same time, and eat at the same time. Make sure that you eat breakfast and a big breakfast too that’s heavy on fat and protein, because if you’re hungry and then you stress yourself you destabilize your insulin production system and it wont restabilize until you go to sleep again. 3
Set Goals & Be Specific
Specify your goals, because how are you going to hit something if you don’t know what it is? Often people won’t specify their goals because they don’t like to specify conditions for failure, so if you keep yourself all vague and foggy then you don’t know when you fail. People might say “well I really don’t want to know when I fail because that’s painful so I’ll keep myself blind about when I fail”. That’s fine except you’ll fail all the time then, you just won’t know it until you’ve failed so badly that you’re done, and that can easily happen by the time you’re 40, so I would recommend that you don’t let that happen.
The goal is to have a vision for your life such that all things considered it justifies your effort. Once you have your goals set up, then you turn to the micro-routines – how do the goals instantiate themselves day to day, week to week, month to month, and that’s where something like a scheduler like Google Calendar can be unbelievably useful. 4
Advice To Young Men In Their 20s
Make a plan. Look at what you’re interested in. Get disciplined about something. Allow for the possibility that you have something important to contribute to the world and that the world would be a lesser place without that contribution.
Don’t be afraid of taking on responsibility, it’s where you find what sustains you in your life. You can take on too much responsibility, you have to be cautious in that regard but that’s a less common problem than not taking on enough.
A lot of the things that people regard as traps are actually the means to their life. Often young people are afraid of commitment, for example in the context of a romantic relationship, and because they feel that that’s going to interfere with their pursuit of something more valuable, but that’s just not the case. You’re not going to find something more valuable in your life than a committed relationship with someone that you love that sustains itself across time, and that in all likelihood produces children. That’s life.
I’ve had a very good career, a very meaningful career in multiple dimensions and it’s still been the case for me that the most important part of my life has been my intimate relationship with my wife and my family, so don’t be afraid of that, or be afraid of it but don’t let that stop you from pursuing it. 5
Determining Whether Clients Are Psychologically Stable
I assess the position of all my new clinical clients along a few dimensions largely dependent on the social world when I first start working with them. If the answer to any three or more of these questions is no, I consider that my new client is insufficiently embedded in the interpersonal world and is in danger of spiraling downward psychologically because of that.
(1) Have they been educated to the level of their intellectual ability or ambition?
(2) Is their use of free time engaging, meaningful, and productive?
(3) Have they formulated solid and well-articulated plans for the future?
(4) Are they (and those they are close to) free of any serious physical health or economic problems?
(5) Do they have friends and a social life?
(6) A stable and satisfying intimate partnership?
(7) Close and functional familial relationships?
(8) A career—or, at least, a job—that is financially sufficient, stable and, if possible, a source of satisfaction and opportunity? 6
The Main Source Of Positive Emotion
Almost all the positive emotions that any of you are likely to experience in your life will not be a consequence of attaining things. It will be a consequence of seeing that things are working as you proceed towards a goal you value.
If someone finishes their PhD thesis for example, their presupposition is that they’re going to be elated for a month, and often instead they’re actually depressed and they think: “What the hell, I’ve been working on this for 7 years, and I handed it in, and what do I do now?” And that’s what depresses them, right? It’s the “what do I do now?”.
Well, they’re fine if they enjoy pursuing the thing as long as it was working out, because that’s how our nervous system work. Most of your positive emotion is goal pursuit emotion. 7
Why Specializing Is Important
The problem with being everything is that you’re also nothing at the same time because you never specialize. I think that being a jack-of-all-trades is pretty damn useful but I would also say that it’s really necessary to buckle down and find one primary mode of discipline. If you can’t figure out what you should do, then guess.
Just pick something that you think that you could hit hard and concentrate on. You don’t have to be perfect at it. You don’t even have to get it right, but pick something rather than nothing, or pick something rather than all things. Then set yourself to master that, because you need to have a primary discipline, it’s absolutely necessary to succeed in life.
Once you have a primary discipline then you can branch out and become a multiplicity in your disciplined approach and then you’re absolutely bloody unstoppable, but you really need that initial disciplinary routine. If you haven’t found your passion then I would say don’t wait around till you find the damn thing, because you may never find it.
Pick something and focus on it, and if you move strongly and forthrightly towards it for a number of months or even a number of years and then you find well that wasn’t the thing for you, it isn’t going to be a waste anyway because most of the time the pursuit of any disciplined knowledge pays off, even if it doesn’t pay off in the way that you initially expect. 8
Its Wrong To Say That Everyone Is Creative
You hear very frequently people say things like “everyone’s creative”. That’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.
You also have to have these divergent thinking capabilities, and that’s part of your [personality] trait structure. Creative people are really different than non-creative people. For example, they’re highly motivated to do creative things, and to experience novelty, to chase down aesthetic experiences, to attend movies, to read fiction, to go to museums, to enjoy poetry, and to enjoy music that’s not conventional music. These aren’t trivial differences.
So it’s a real misstatement to make the proposition that everyone’s creative. It’s just simply not the case, it’s a matter of wishful thinking. It’s like saying that everyone is intelligent. If everyone is intelligent, then the term loses all of its meaning, because any term that you can apply to every member of a category has absolutely no meaning. 9
How To Stop Your IQ From Decreasing
Exercise is the best preventive to stop IQ from decreasing. Why? Well your brain uses oxygen like mad and it needs to be kept clean and oxygenated, so physical exercise, both anaerobic and aerobic exercise, seem to be very effective at staving off cognitive declines across the lifespan. 4
Learn To Think Through Writing
It is important to think because action based on thinking is likely to be far less painful and more productive than action based upon ignorance. So, if you want to have a life characterized by competence, productivity, security, originality and engagement rather than one that is nasty, brutish and short, you need to think carefully about important issues. There is no better way to do so than to write. This is because writing extends your memory, facilitates editing and clarifies your thinking.
It is useful to note that your mind is organized verbally, at the highest and most abstract levels. Thus, if you learn to think through writing, then you will develop a well-organized, efficient mind – and one that is well-founded and certain. This also means that you will be healthier, mentally and physically, as lack of clarity and ignorance means unnecessary stress. Unnecessary stress makes your body react more to what could otherwise be treated as trivial affairs. This makes for excess energy expenditure, and more rapid aging (along with all the negative health-related consequences of aging).
So, unless you want to stay an ignorant, unhealthy lightweight, learn to write (and to think and communicate). Otherwise those who can will ride roughshod over you and push you out of the way. Your life will be harder, at the bottom of the dominance hierarchies that you will inevitably inhabit, and you will get old fast. 10
Practical Advice On Writing
People’s brains function better in the morning. Get up. Eat something. You are much smarter and more resilient after you have slept properly and ate. There is plenty of solid research demonstrating this. Coffee alone is counter-productive. Have some protein and some fat. Make a smoothie with fruit and real yogurt. Go out and buy a cheap breakfast, if necessary. Eat by whatever means necessary. Prepare to spend between 90 minutes and three hours writing. However, even 15 minutes can be useful, particularly if you do it every day.
Do not wait for a big chunk of free time to start. You will never get big chunks of free time ever in your life, so don’t make your success dependent on their non-existent. The most effective writers write every day, at least a bit.
Realize that when you first sit down to write, your mind will rebel. It is full of other ideas, all of which will fight to dominate. If you refuse to be tempted for fifteen minutes (25 on a really bad day) you will find that the clamor in your mind will settle down and you will be able to concentrate on writing. If you do this day after day, you will find that the power of such temptations do not reduce, but the duration of their attempts to distract you will decrease. You will also find that even on a day where concentration is very difficult, you will still be able to do some productive writing if you stick it out.
Don’t kid yourself into thinking you will write for six hours, either. Three is a maximum, especially if you want to sustain it day after day. Don’t wait too late to start your writing, so you don’t have to cram insanely, but give yourself a break after a good period of sustained concentration. Three productive hours are way better than ten hours of self-deceptive non-productivity. 10
Rules
Rules are there for a reason. You are only allowed to break them if you are a master. If you’re not a master, don’t confuse your ignorance with creativity or style. Writing that follows the rules is easier for readers, because they know roughly what to expect. So rules are conventions. Like all conventions, they are sometimes sub-optimal. But not very often. So, to begin with, use the conventions. 10
How To Take Notes When Reading
When you are taking notes, don’t bother doing stupid things like highlighting or underlining sentences in the textbook. There is no evidence that it works. It just looks like work. What you need to do is to read for understanding. Read a bit, then write down what you have learned or any questions that have arisen in your mind.
Don’t ever copy the source word for word. The most important part of learning and remembering is the recreation of what you have written in your own language. This is not some simplistic “use your own words.” This is the dialog you are having with the writer of your sources. This is your attempt to say back to the author “this is what I understand you are saying.” This is where you extract the gist of the writing.
If someone asks you about your day, you don’t say, “Well, first I opened my eyes. Then I blinked and rubbed them. Then I placed my left leg on the floor, and then my right.” You would bore them to death. Instead, you eliminate the extra detail, and concentrate on communicating what is important. That is exactly what you are supposed to be doing when you take some notes during or after reading something. 10
How To Write Better Sentences
Make your sentences shorter and simpler (as all unnecessary words should be eliminated). There is almost nothing a novice writer can do that will improve his or her writing more rapidly than writing very short sentences. See if you can cut the length of each sentence by 15-25%.
Make sure each word is precisely and exactly the right word. Don’t be tempted to use any word that you would be uncomfortable using in spoken conversation. Often, new writers try to impress their readers with their vocabulary. This often backfires when words are used that are technically correct but whose connotation is not, or that are unsuitable within the context of the sentence, paragraph or full essay. An expert writer will spot such flaws immediately, and see them for what they are: forms of camouflage and deception. Write clearly at a vocabulary level you have mastered. 10
Recreating From Memory
If you force yourself to reconstruct your writing from memory, you will likely improve it. Generally, when you remember something, you simplify it, while retaining most of what is important. Thus, your memory can serve as a filter, removing what is useless and preserving and organizing what is vital. What you are doing is distilling what you have written to its essence. 10
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References and Related Resources
- Jordan Peterson – Creative People in Hierarchies of Authority, YouTube
- Jordan Peterson’s advice for Creative people who are also high in Neuroticism, YouTube
- How to Regulate Emotions with High Neuroticism/Low Agreeableness | Jordan B Peterson, YouTube
- Jordan Peterson: What To Do To Be Successful, YouTube
- Advice to Young Men in Their 20s | Jordan and Mikhaila Peterson, YouTube
- Beyond Order, Jordan Peterson
- Jordan Peterson – Advice For People With Depression, YouTube
- Very Creative but high in Neuroticism?, YouTube
- Jordan Peterson – The Curse of Creativity, YouTube
- Essay Writing Guide, Jordan B. Peterson