https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=_vAat1HQU0M
Hi everyone, I’m going to talk to you today about a book that I’m publishing in January of 2018 it’s called 12 rules for life an antidote to chaos and it’s going to be published by Penguin Random House I’m going to tell you how it came about first and then I’ll Describe the books contents and then I’m going to read you a little bit of it. Okay in 2012 I did a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation program called say no to happiness and in that Program I critiqued the idea that happiness was the proper goal of life claiming instead that It’s much more useful and effective perhaps even for producing happiness to Look for meaning and responsibility in life. Anyways, I Received the following email as a consequence Dear dr. Peterson your comments on the CBC program say no to happiness were both thought-provoking and challenging They had me asking bigger questions and that is always tremendously appealing To be perfectly honest some aspects were harder for me to understand than others, but I was left wanting to know more Have you considered writing a book for a general rather than academic reader? I’m a literary agent and co-owner at the cook agency We have experience with academics interested in writing for a broad audience Working with them to remove the scaffolding that is required in academic writing and helping to make their work more accessible We specialize in selling authors to international markets and developing their writing careers. You can find out more about us at www.cookagency.ca I look forward to hearing from you Sally Harding so a literary agent Represents an author and attempts to market their books And so they’re they can be extraordinarily useful people and in return for that they get a percentage of the books Profits and that’s how they make their living. So it’s a difficult job Especially now because the market for books is well very complicated and increasingly Restricted I would say to a few extremely successful authors anyways Sally got a hold of me and I had thought about For a long time about writing a more popular version of my first book called Maps of Meaning And I actually produced almost a complete manuscript that was Let’s call it a simplified version or I wouldn’t say simplified exactly more Well, I tried to make it more accessible but I didn’t was never really happy with it I never really felt that it that it got its legs underneath it I suppose and maybe that’s because I was duplicating something that I’d already done I was thinking very hard about what to do about this and how I might approach it because Sally was interested in I thought It might be a good thing to try to write a book for a more general audience and We talked for a while and we you know discussed a few ideas this was back in 2012 and I mentioned to her that I had written something for Quora, which is an online Website obviously Where anybody can post any question and anyone can answer it and then the questions are voted on And Quora is quite interesting I would say and I had written a variety of answers because I was playing around with it and some of them as it always is attracted much more attention than others and Okay, somebody posted I think it was a young guy posted this question. What are the most valuable things everyone should know? And so I answered it. I listed as it was 4042 rules to live by and some of them were kind of amusing I thought and some of them were dead serious and Anyways, it became very popular on Quora and as of now it has 174,000 views and 2500 up votes which makes it one of Quora’s most popular answers as it was soon after I posted it and I thought well People really like those rules. There was something about them that appealed to them So what if I write a book based on the rules and so I’ll read you the rules. Okay, maybe you’ll find them interesting Tell the truth Do not do things that you hate Which I think is a variant of telling the truth because you have to act out the truth as well as Telling it act so that you can tell the truth about how you act That’s obviously related to the first two pursue what is meaningful not what is expedient If you have to choose be the one who does things instead of the one who is seen to do things Pay attention assume that the person you are listening to might know something you need to know Listen to them hard enough so that they will share it with you Plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationships Be careful who you share good news with Be careful who you share bad news with Make at least one thing better every single place you go Imagine who you could be and then aim single-mindedly at that Do not allow yourself to become arrogant or resentful Try to make one room in your house as beautiful as possible Compare yourself to who you were yesterday not to who someone else is today Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens If old memories still make you cry write them down carefully and completely Maintain your connections with people Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or artistic achievement Treat yourself as if you were someone that you are responsible for helping Ask someone to do you a small favour so that he or she can ask you to do one in the future Make friends with people who want the best for you Do not try to rescue someone who does not want to be rescued and be very careful about rescuing someone who does Nothing well done is insignificant Set your house in perfect order Before you criticize the world dress like the person you want to be Be precise in your speech Stand up straight with your shoulders back Don’t avoid something frightening if it stands in your way and don’t do unnecessarily dangerous things Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them Do not transform your wife into a maid Do not hide unwanted things in the fog Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated Read something written by someone great Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street Don’t bother children when they’re skateboarding Don’t let bullies get away with it Write a letter to the government if you see something that needs fixing and propose a solution Remember that what you do not yet know is more important than what you already know and be grateful in spite of your suffering So those were the 40 odd rules and People were pretty happy with them And then something odd happened so a friend of mine as a novelist Greg Hurwitz and Greg Wrote a book that’s become very popular Called orphan X and one of the characters in that book the female lead I would say Off and on again wrote romance interest for the main character Posted these rules on her fridge And so they were peppered throughout the book. So that was kind of an interesting development I thought and then Because they were so popular at Quora I talked to Sally about the possibility of turning them into a book and so my original vision was to write 42 short essays, I thought that would be I was going to call the book 42 which I thought was quite funny because if you remember The answer to life the universe and everything from Douglas Adams was 42 A computer calculated that so I thought it would be amusing to write a book called 42 that you know contained Answers to life the universe and everything but when I started writing the book It turned out that I had more to say about each of the rules than I had originally Envisioned and so I first cut it down to 20 And so I first cut it down to 25 and wrote some essays and then I cut it down to 16 and It was still too long And then I cut it down to 12 which turned out to be a good thing anyways Because if you write a book you should write way more than you’re going to publish and then cut Because that way you you’re only left with what’s best so anyways I Wrote for about three years. Well, no, it’s more than that now. I guess it’s almost five years Because I just finished the book in September so it took about four or five years to write and I was writing pretty regularly What i’m going to do is read to you a little bit of it. I think This is the book here That’s a galley copy And a galley copy is a pre-print of a book so that you can get some sense of what it looks like Um, it’s got some nice illustrations in it. I think by this Comic book author named ethan van scriver So that’s kind of a rough one On the chapter three treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping Ethan is a comic book artist. He’s done a he’s a great illustrator And he put my kids in each one of my kids. I have two kids one of them in each illustration sort of contemplating Well the complexities of life I guess that’s how you might describe it so that’s one illustration i’ll show you another one So that’s my son julian there looking up at the great statue of david And that’s part and david of course is an inspirational statue It’s a representation of what you could be and that’s rule three Make friends with people who want the best for you And I think i’m going to read that some of that to you right now Some of that to you right now the each chapter each rule is divided into subsections small sub chapters, let’s say and I’ll read you one of those so you’ll get some sense of the book rule three Make friends with people who want the best for you The old hometown The town I grew up in had been scraped only 50 years earlier out of the endless flat northern prairie Fairview Alberta was part of the frontier and had the cowboy bars to prove it The hudson’s bay company department store on main street Still bought beaver wolf and coyote furs directly from the local trappers 3,000 people lived there 400 miles away from the nearest city cable tv Video games and internet did not exist It was no easy matter to stay innocently amused in fairview Particularly during the five months of winter when long stretches of 40 below days and even colder nights were the norm The world’s a different place when it’s cold like that The drunks in our town ended their sad lives early They passed out in snow banks at three in the morning and froze to death You don’t go outside casually when it’s 40 below On first breath the arid desert air constricts your lungs Ice forms on your eyelashes and they stick together Long hair wet from the shower freezes solid and then stands on and wraith like of its own accord Later in a warm house when it thaws bone dry charged with electricity Children only put their tongues on steel playground equipment once Smoke from house chimneys doesn’t rise Defeated by the cold it drifts downwards and collects like fog on snow-covered rooftops and yards Cars must be plugged in at night their engines warmed by block heaters Or oil will not flow through them in the morning and they won’t start Sometimes they won’t anyways then you turn the engine over pointlessly Sometimes they won’t anyways then you turn the engine over pointlessly until the starter clatters and falls silent Then you remove the frozen battery from the car Loosening bolts with stiffening fingers in the intense cold and bring it into the house It sits there sweating for hours until it warms enough to hold a decent charge You’re not going to see out of the back window of your car either It frosts over in November and stays that way until May Scraping it off just dampens the upholstery Then that freezes too Late one night going to visit a friend I sat for two hours on the edge of the passenger seat in a 1970 dodge Challenger jammed up against the stick shift using a vodka soaked rag To keep the inside of the front windshield clear in front of the driver because the car heater had quit Stopping wasn’t an option There was nowhere to stop And it was hell on house cats Felines in fairview had short ears and tails because they had lost the tips of both to frostbite They came to resemble arctic foxes which evolved those features to deal proactively with the intense cold One day our cat got outside and no one noticed we found him later Fur frozen fast to the cold hard concrete It’s no lasting damage except to his pride Fairview cats were also at great risk in the winter from cars, but not for the reasons you think It wasn’t automobiles sliding on icy roads and running them over only loser cats died that way It was cars parked immediately after being driven that were dangerous A frigid cat might think highly of climbing up under such a vehicle and sitting on its still warm engine block But what if the driver decided to use the car again before the engine cooled down and the cat departed Let’s just say that heat seeking house pets and rapidly rotating radiator fans do not coexist happily Because we were so far north the bitterly cold winters were very dark By december the sun didn’t rise until 10 a.m We trudged to school in the pitch black It wasn’t much lighter when we walked home just before the early sunset There wasn’t much for young people to do in fairview even in the summer But the winters were worse Then your friends mattered more than anything So that’s a little section of 12 rules for life. I can tell you what the rules are Uh forward was written by norman deuge. He comments a little bit about the political Turmoil that surrounded me over the last year. Although the book itself Is very apolitical with the exception of the chapter on skateboarding where I go into The battle the ongoing polarizing battle between I would say the radical left and everyone else But other than that It’s not a political book So the table of contents include rule one Stand up straight with your shoulders back. That’s actually a bit a story that centers on lobsters to a large degree I I have a what proclivity? For talking about lobsters rule two Treat yourself like someone you were responsible for helping that’s something that people don’t do very well because they’re not very happy with themselves often rule three Make friends with people who want the best for you. That’s the chapter. I already read that I read the first part of it and it’s about trying to organize your life so that you’re surrounded by people who Support you when you’re trying to do what’s right. It’s very important Rule four compare yourself to who you were yesterday and not to who someone else is today Have because if you’re comparing yourself to someone else I mean first of all you don’t know very much about the life of the person you’re comparing yourself to you don’t know it You know it across all of its dimensions and second people are very different. And so comparing yourself to someone else It’s it’s kind of useful. I guess when you’re young, but as you get older and more singular and more particular it becomes increasingly less useful Better to compare yourself to a previous version of yourself and work for improvement in that way Rule five Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. That’s probably going to be the most controversial chapter I would say it’s a chapter about Discipline and love and respect. I guess that’s probably right Rule six set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world Yeah, well, that’s a rough chapter man. That’s uh I’m trying to explain the mindset behind people like the Columbine high school shooters and So it’s a it’s a harsh chapter Rule seven pursue what is meaningful and not what is expedient Expedient is what works in the short term expedience what’s easy Meaningful instead is what sustains you through tragedy. Let’s say Rule eight tell the truth or at least don’t lie yeah, well, it’s not that easy to tell the truth because who knows about the truth, but You can learn not to say things that you know to be false And if you stop saying things that you know to be false, then your life will improve a lot Simplifies it and it puts you in alignment with reality and you should be in alignment with reality because there’s a lot more Of it than there is of you rule nine Assume that the person you’re listening to Might know something you don’t that’s a good one because and this is even true when you’re dealing with people that don’t like you because They may offer you criticisms that are valid now many that aren’t too, of course Because maybe they’re just trying to take you down a bit But if you get a criticism that’s valid and then you can fix that Error, let’s say that’ll stop you from running nose first into walls and that’s generally a handy thing rule 10 be precise in your speech Yeah Well, you have to Be exacting in the way that you describe things and the way that you think because otherwise you live in the fog and you won’t get What you should out of life or what you need out of life And by need I mean what will sustain you so that you don’t become bitter and resentful Rule 11 do not bother children when they’re skateboarding so that chapter is about I would say our society’s hyper concern with safety and its fundamental antagonism to exploratory behavior especially among boys Rule 12 pet a cat when you encounter one on the street Yeah, well that’s about Trying to Orient yourself towards life so that even when you’re in the middle of a crisis or a tragedy you can find Bits and pieces of experience that are positive and Sustaining so that you can stay positively oriented towards your own existence and towards existence itself so anyways That’s the book And it’s coming out January 23rd Although it’s available for pre-order For pre-order at amazon.com or amazon.ca and several other places I’ll put links in the in the video description If you’re trying to figure out how to Orient yourself in the midst of the chaos that constitutes life Then you might find some of the things that I wrote in 12 rules for life helpful So I hope that that was interesting and Goodbye for now You You