12 Rules for Life Summary

The 12 Rules of Life is a guide for anyone who craves for order, stability and a higher sense of purpose in life.

Your posture can determine your societal status. If you appear to look weak, tired, or sloppy, you’ll be seen and treated as such. You’ll most likely be exploited, mistreated, or ripped off. Appear confident and you’ll be treated as a winner.

It’ll boost your morale make you feel less anxious about how you may appear to others.

Fact: People are better at filling and properly administering prescription medication to their pets than to themselves.

You are important to other people, as much as to yourself. Consider the people who might depend on you, this might be your friends, family, employees, and even your pet(s). Because you have people who depend on you, you are, therefore, expected to take care of, help, and be good to yourself.

You should do this the same way you would take care of, help, and be good to someone you love and value.

We are all trying to find our path throughout the chaos

That is why we need guidance on how to get our life back in order.

Here are the twelve rules that will help you live more peacefully, meaningfully and well-balanced.

A lot can be told about a person by their posture and the way that they carry themselves.

The Art of Habits Guide + 15 Actionable Self-Improvement Templates (It's free)

Standing up straight exudes dominance, confidence, and the ability to accept responsibility.

Diversely, having a lousy posture with your head hunched over, displays negative self-image and subservience.

Lobsters and humans share neurochemical systems that regulate status, reflecting evolutionarily ancient hierarchies. Just as lobsters puff themselves up to appear larger and avoid attack, standing up straight projects confidence and deters threats in humans.

Shoulders back displays the pride of accomplishment. It announces your readiness to take on challenges life will inevitably present. status matters, so mind your posture.

Imagine a loved one struggling through life's challenges. You would advise and comfort them, not harshly judge. Apply that compassion to yourself. Don't degrade your own being.

Pay attention to emotional, physical and mental health. Eat right, exercise, sleep well, reduce stress. Treat yourself as someone worthy of care, patience and support.

Raise your standards and demand excellence to aim higher, but retain humility and self-love even when you fall short. You deserve your own compassion.

• Associate with those aiming up who challenge you and themselves.
• Avoid friendships of convenience or mere proximity.
• Do not sacrifice progress for comfort.
• Help others shoulder burdens without fostering dependency.
• Share wisdom and advice reciprocally to elevate all.
• Align with colleagues pursuing purpose and meaning, not just wealth and status.
• Seek friends and romantic partners who lead by example to live nobly.
• Let the best in others inspire your own ascent.

1. You can only find out what you actually believe (rather than what you think you believe) by watching how you act. You simply don’t know what you believe, before that. You are too complex to understand yourself.

2.Ideologies are substitutes for true knowledge, and ideologues are always dangerous when they come to power, because a simple-minded I-know-it-all approach is no match for the complexity of existence.

3.You must determine where you are going in your life, because you cannot get there unless you move in that direction. Random wandering will not move you forward. It will instead disappoint and frustrate you and make you anxious and unhappy and hard to get along with (and then resentful, and then vengeful, and then worse).

The body must function like a well rehearsed orchestra. Noise and chaos ensues if each system does not play its role at precisely the right time. Erratic habits of sleeping and eating can interfere with this function.

Routine is necessary. Stable and reliable habits must be adopted.

Looking at children as an example, those with stable sleeping and eating schedules are delightful and comical and playful, on the other hand those with no stability can be horrible and whiny and nasty to say the least.

Jordan B Peterson initially asks his clinical clients about their sleep. Do they wake up in the morning everyday at approx the same time the typical person wakes up? If the answer is no, fixing that is the first recommendation. Waking up at the same hour every day consistently is a necessity.

If the sufferer of anxiety and depression has an unpredictable daily routine, they must regulate this in order to allow for successful treatment.

"Anxiety and depression cannot be easily treated if the sufferer has unpredictable daily routines."

• The body needs to functions like a well-rehearsed orchestra.
• Every system must play its role properly, and at exactly the right time.
• It is for this reason, routine is so necessary.
• The acts of life we repeat every day need to be automatized. They must be turned into stable and reliable habits, so they lose their complexity and gain predictability and simplicity.
• Waking up at a consistent hour is necessity.

I recently read 12 rules for life by Jordan Peterson. Let’s walk through all 12 rules using his commentary on them as found in his lecture series: 12 Rules for Life. All 12 rules and unedited descriptions of them can be found in this video here. You can purchase 12 Rules for Life here.

I hope you find some of these rules as useful as I have! My favorites are rules 4, 6, 7, 8, 10, and 12. What are yours?

Peterson says we ought to be combative, but surely it’s more about preparing for combat. Life is suffering, and we ought to adopt a stance of ready engagement with the world. We should reflect that in posture too, he says.

Prepare to engage in the battle for your right to live, to think, to exist uniquely in the comfort of your own terms. Prepare to add to the world, not be crushed by the weight of it. It’s heavy. And it’s coming faster than ever.

Confront things that frighten you forthrightly and with courage. Stand up straight with your shoulders back.

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.