Beyond Order Summary

We have vast untapped potential within us beyond who we currently are.

Consciously deciding who you want to become in your ideal form and then aiming single-mindedly at that gives life meaning and forward momentum.

Trade complacency and routine for a voluntary transformation through rediscovering exploring your latent talents and rebirth.

• Don't hide unwanted emotions, flaws, and unsavory motivations in a fog of willful blindness.
• Have courage to look unflinchingly inside at your capacity for malevolence alongside good.
• Integrate your full self through radical truth and self-understanding.
• What you most wish to hide from yourself holds key truths.

The quintessential source of positive emotion is taking responsibility - defining goals and projects, then making progress.

Turn and confront the difficulties of the future rather than hiding; reduce suffering.

Stand up straight with your shoulders back and enjoy the journey.

Where responsibility is abdicated, there is opportunity.

1. Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement
2. Imagine who you could be, and then aim single-mindedly at that
3. Do not hide unwanted things in the fog
4. Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility is abdicated
5. Do not do what you hate
6. Abandon ideology

7. Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens

8. Try to make one room in your home as beautiful as possible

9. If old memories still upset you, write them down carefully and completely

10. Plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationship

11. Do not allow yourself to become resentful, deceitful, or arrogant

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Although Peterson describes himself politically as a British liberal, he insists liberals need to remember that social institutions exist for a reason. The reason they are maintained over long periods is that they offer many benefits. At the same time, Peterson offers advice to conservatives. Although social institutions are important, conservatives should be open to new ideas and ways of thinking. We should not marginalize those who are seeking to improve and innovate how society works. The world will change, and you have to be ready to adapt.

So, Peterson suggests the readers look at successful individuals and creative inventions as inspiration. All thriving societies feature a bottom-up hierarchy. This structure enables having an impact on the world but only on the condition that you accept the balance of society. Once you accept this balance, you must seek beneficial solutions. However, only those solutions to important problems are viable that can be repeated without decay across repetitions.

Your mind has the potential to change your future self. Peterson describes it as a key to self-improvement. The most successful individuals had visions of things nobody had seen or done before. They challenged the social order and offered their chaos. We are all part nature and part culture. From the cultural side, a fantastic story has the potential to inspire us with unrivaled motivation. This is why our imagination is a priceless asset. It allows us to voluntarily confront the unknowns of the world around us.

So, encourage your imagination and use visualization to make these ideas a reality.

Just as in the case of Peter Pan in Neverland, the immature adult hesitates to grow up, masquerading their refusal to mature, as well as their apparent lacking fear of death (basically a suicidal attitude) as cool rebelliousness.

"Aim at something. Discipline yourself. Or suffer the consequences: all the suffering of life, with none of the meaning. Is there a better description of hell?"

The antidote to the suffering and malevolence of life resides in taking responsibility for it and in trying to improve.

"But why should I shoulder all that burden? It is nothing but sacrifice, hardship and trouble."

But what makes you so sure you don't want something heavy to carry?

"Yes, I might be flawed, but at least I'm taking responsibility. I'm taking care of myself, I am of use to my family and to the other people around me. I might be stumbling, but at least I'm stumbling forward."