Chance Adrian's Key Ideas from 12 Rules for Life
by Jordan B. Peterson

Imagine someone that you treat well, that you love, and try to treat yourself that way, he says.

You’ve got to think, I'm a person among other people, and I deserve at least as much respect as a person among other people.

Help yourself across time instead of being self-contemptuous and self-destructive.

Take care of yourself as if you're potentially valuable, and lay out life in that way.

As an individual, you have a light that you have to bring into the world. And if you don't bring it into the world, the world is a dimmer place. And when the world is dim, it can be very, very dark.

Like you have an ethical responsibility to take care of yourself, you have an ethical responsibility to surround yourself with people who have the Courage,

Faith,

And Wisdom,

To wish you well when you've done something good,

And to stop you when you're doing something destructive.

And if your friends aren't like that, then they're not your friends. Make friends with people who want the best for you.

You should be better than you are.

But it's not because you're worse than other people, it's because you're not everything you should be.

And so, you got to pick the comparison right, compare yourself to you.

And then that's also ennobling. Instantly hopeful.

There is absolutely no doubt that you can be slightly better tomorrow than you are today.

Always.

Life is tragic. Brutal. And we don’t know what would happen to the world if everyone set themself right. But we can be certain that it would be less tragic and less malevolent. Like, we don’t have anything better to do.

dislike them.

If you're good to your kid in a real way, you can help maintain that tremendous attractiveness that they have as young children.

And then, wherever they go adults welcome them and teach them things.

And pat them on the head and smile at them genuinely, instead of saying “Oh my god, here comes that couple with that god damn brat again.”

There's nothing you can do to someone that's more terrible than putting them in a world where all the goodwill directed towards them is false.

There are plenty of things to criticize about being. It's tragic.

You can complain about that, but the thing is, if you complain about that, if you adopt that attitude - which is sort of an Anti-Being attitude - you go places that if you knew you were going you probably wouldn't want to go.

Should you criticize it?

Not till you put yourself together.

Approach the malevolence in yourself before you approach it in the world.

You've got to bring everything you can to bear on the problem before you have any right to. If you can help yourself you can help your family. Then community. Then the world.

Meaning is what you have to buttress yourself against the tragedy of life despite the fact that you're a fragile, damaged, and mortal creature. It is when you found something to do that announced itself as worthwhile.

Meaning tells you when you are in the right place. And the right place is between chaos and order - those are real places, and you want them carefully balanced.

Expedience is you do the thing that gets you off the hook the fastest, right now.

You play that game across time it doesn't work. It sends you down

Don't sacrifice the future for the present. 

Don't underestimate the power of your speech, the power of truth.

There's nothing more powerful.

To speak what you might regard as the truth, you have to let go of the outcome.

Nothing brings a better world into being than the stated truth. You might have to pay a price for that.

But that's fine - you're gonna pay a price for every bloody thing you do and everything you don’t do, he says. You don’t get to choose to not pay a price. You get to choose which poison you're going to take that’s it.

You want to pay the price for being who you are, not the price for being a slave.

You want to enter into a conversation so that you come out wiser than you went in.

Figure out what winning the argument really means. Winning when you're wrong is a really bad idea because then you think you’re right, and you’re not.

You might want to listen because there is the possibility that they’re trying to tell you how to not run headlong into a brick wall.

You would rather not run headlong into a brick wall if you don’t have to.

That’s the idea with the conversation.

The unnamable is far more terrifying than the nameable.

No matter how terrible the actuality is it's rarely as terrible as your imagination because your imagination has seen a lot of terrible things in the history of life.

It can put monsters everywhere.

And so, it's almost always better to name the thing that's bothering you no matter how terrible it is.

And if you can't name it, you're telling yourself that you're so terrified that you can't bring your attention to bear on it.

To bring things out of the murk is a good thing. It's the most sacred principle of Western civilization.

New skateboarders do crazy things because they're trying to become competent. They're facing danger. They don't want the damn protective gear.

It's like, "no I don’t wanna wear a helmet,"

"I want to expose myself to this dangerous thing,"

"It's not that I'm stupid,"

And the kids are often shoed away.

It’s like wait a sec, they're practicing being courageous.

They're practicing mastering something in the face of danger. 

They've taken this courageous step beyond their confidence and put everything on the line.

And when they finally land, it's awe-inspiring. Have the courage to try landing.

You have to be alert when you're suffering.

You have to be alert to the unexpected beauty in life.

You have to look for those little bits of sparkling crystal in the darkness when things are bad.

Being grateful for what we have can get us through some very dark times.

If we didn't all attempt to make terrible things even worse than they are, then maybe we could tolerate terrible things that we have to put up with in order to exist.

Maybe we can make the world a better place, knowing it's what we should be doing and what we could be doing.

Because we don't really have anything better to do.