Rapid Growth's Key Ideas from 12 Rules for Life
by Jordan B. Peterson

When you dare aspire upward, you reveal the inadequacy of the present and the promise of the future.

You are important to other people, as much as to yourself. You have a vital role to play in the unfolding destiny of the world.

People organize their brains with conversation. If they don’t have anyone to tell their story to, they lose their minds.

You cannot be protected from the things that frighten you and hurt you, but if you identify with the part of your being that is responsible for transformation, then you are always the equal, or more than the equal, of the things that frighten you.

Stop doing what you know to be wrong. Stop today. Don’t waste time questioning how you know that what you’re doing is wrong, if you are certain that it is.

Choose your friends carefully. You are affected, for better or worse, by the people you spend your time with.

Do not allow yourself to become resentful, deceitful, or arrogant. Try to make friends whose lives are not lived entirely privately. A party is an opportunity to make a new friend, and a friend is a second self. Partake in parties.

Surround yourself with people who support your upward aim, they will not tolerate your cynicism and destructiveness. They will instead encourage you when you do good for yourself and others and punish you carefully when you do not. This will help bolster your resolve to do what you should do, in the most appropriate and careful manner.

Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.

You're going to pay a price for every bloody thing you do and everything you don’t do. 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.

Discipline, properly conceived, is part of the manifestation of love. Proper discipline is a foundation for the development of a proper character.

Responsibility makes being a son, a friend, a partner, a father, and a mother much easier. Being the devil incarnate, the cause of every unnecessary and unjustifiable suffering? That’s hard.

Order is not enough. You can’t just be stable, and secure, and unchanging, because there are still vital and important new things to be learned.

Aim up, pay attention, fix what you can and don’t be arrogant in your knowledge, strive for humility, because totalitarian pride manifests itself in intolerance, oppression, torture, and death.

Meaning is the way, the path of life more abundant, the place you live when you are guided by love and speaking truth and when nothing you want or could possibly want takes any precedence over precisely that.

The meaningful life is too often sacrificed to temporal well-being. Everyone serves someone. You serve your boss, perhaps. It’s not that easy to serve God. It’s not that easy to serve the truth. It’s not that easy to do the right thing.

If your life is not what it could be, try telling the truth. If you cling desperately to an ideology, or wallow in nihilism, try telling the truth. If you feel weak and rejected, and desperate, and confused, try telling the truth. In Paradise, everyone speaks the truth. That is what makes it Paradise. Tell the truth. Or, at least, don’t lie.

Take time out of your busy day, to stop and appreciate the simple and insignificant things in life. It will brighten up your day at best.