Ian Nathaniel Puang's Key Ideas from 12 Rules for Life
by Jordan B. Peterson

• No one standing still can triumph, no matter how well constituted
• Eat a fat and protein heavy breakfast as soon as possible after awaken (no carbohydrates, no sugars, as they are digested too rapidly, and produce a blood-sugar spike and rapid dip
• Anxious and depressed people are already stressed, their body therefore primed to hypersecrete insulin if they engage in any demanding activity
• Excess insulin will mop up all their blood sugar
• They become hypoglycemic and psycho-physiologically unstable

If you're number 1, highest level of status

• If you're male, you have preferential access to the best places to live and the highest quality food. People compete to do you favours. You have limitless opportunity for romantic and sexual contact. You are a successful lobster, and the most desirable females line up and vie for your attention
• If you're female, you have access to many high quality suitors: tall, strong, and symmetrical; creative, reliable, honest and generous. And like your dominant male counterparts, you will complete ferociously to maintain your position.

• Ancient part of your brain watches how you are treated by other people
• It renders determination of your value and assign you a status
• If you judge as little value, your brain restrict serotonin availability
• Makes you reactive to any circumstances that might produce emotion
• You need that reactivity, emergencies are common at the bottom, and you must ready to survive.

• Doing unto others as you would have them do unto you
• He whose life has a why can bear almost anyhow

• When people have a low opinion of their own worth—or, perhaps, when they refuse responsibility for their lives—they choose a new acquaintance, of precisely the type who proved troublesome in the past. Such people don’t believe that they deserve any better—so they don’t go looking for it
• People create their worlds with the tools they have directly at hand. Faulty tools produce faulty results. Repeated use of the same faulty tools produces the same faulty results. It is in this manner that those who fail to learn from the past doom themselves to repeat it

• “It is only right to see the best in people. The highest virtue is the desire to help.” But not everyone who is failing is a victim, and not everyone at the bottom wishes to rise, although many do, and many manage it
• 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
• If you have a friend whose friendship you wouldn’t recommend to your sister, or your father, or your son, why would you have such a friend for yourself?

• It’s appropriate and praiseworthy to associate with people whose lives would be improved if they saw your life improve.
• If you surround yourself with people who support your upward aim, they will not tolerate your cynicism and destructiveness
• But mostly they are dragging you down because your new improvements cast their faults in an even dimmer light.