How to Improve Yourself Right NOW (and Why) - Prof. Jordan Peterson

What could you do to improve yourself?

Well, let's step one step backwards.

The first question might be: Why should you even bother improving yourself?

And I think the answer to that is something like

so you don't suffer anymore stupidly than you have to.

And maybe so others don't have to either. It's something like that.

You know, like, there is a real adjunction at the bottom of it.

It's not some casual self-help doctrine,

it's that if you don't organize yourself properly: you'll pay for it!

And in a big way. And so will the people around you.

And you can say: 'Well, I don't care about that!'

but that's actually not true, you actually DO care about that.

Because if you're in pain you will care about it.

And so you DO care about it even if it's just that negative way, you know.

It's very rare that you can find someone who is in excruciating pain who would ever say

'Well, it would be no better if I was out of this!'

This sort of pain is one of those things that brings the idea that it would be better

if it didn't exist along with it.

It's incontrovertible.

So you get your act together so that there isn't any more stupid pain around you that necessary.

So then the question might be: how would you go about getting your act together?

And the answer to that -

- and this is a phenomenological idea, too -

it's something like: Look around for something that bothers you

and see if you can fix it.

So now you think, well...

Let's say you go into...

You can do this in a room, it's quite fun to do it.

Just when you're sitting in a room - maybe your bedroom -

you can sit there and just sort of meditate on it and think:

'Okay, if I wanted to spend ten minutes making this room better,

what would I have to do?'

And you have to ask yourself that. It's not a command, it's like a genuine question.

And things will pop out in the room like

there's a stack of papers over there that's kind of bugging you

and you know that maybe a little order there would be a good thing.

There's some rubbish behind your computer monitor that you haven't attended to for like six months.

The room would be slightly better if it was a little less dusty and the cables weren't all tangled up the same way.

If you allow yourself just to consider the expanse in which you exist at that moment