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Do you really need rules in life? Surely life is for living, for experiencing, for learning from. According to Jordan Peterson, this one book will give you rules for life. According to Peterson’s book the 12 rules are going to be the antidote to chaos.
Jordan Peterson is a clinical psychologist from Canada.. In 1993 he lived in Massachusetts teaching and doing research at Harvard University. He was an associate professor in the psychology department. Here he looked at aggression from alcohol and drug abuse. After that, he took up professorship at the University of Toronto in psychology, and he also looked at the improvement of personality and performance. It was there that he wrote this book as a comprehensive theory for how we construct meaning.
His goal was to essentially look at people individually and not just as groups, but to look at the social conflict of individuals or the paths they took, and look at the results. He was interested in things like the Rwandan genocide and the Auschwitz concentration camps He considered himself a pragmatist and used science and neuropsychology to look at the belief systems of the past. It was said in 2017 that his project was of great psychological significance
The rules:
1. Stand up straight, with your shoulders back. According to Peterson our subconscious brain is constantly looking around the environment to figure out the hierarchy of society, so we need to look at people and see how they respond in a positive manner.
2. Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping. Many people are kinder to their pets, it said in this book, than themselves.
3. Make friends with people who want the best for you.
4. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.
5. Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.
6. Put your house in order before you criticize the world. People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
7. Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient.
8. Tell the truth. There’s huge wisdom behind this and realistically, this wisdon doesn’t need to come from huge wisdom of one author. These can come from many many millions of years of wisdom from human beings.
9. Assume the person you are listening to might know something you don’t.
10. Be precise with your speech.
11. Leave children alone when they are skateboarding. If you leave your kids alone when they do things with some element of a danger, they need to grow up.
12. Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.