Jordan Peterson’s Life Advice Will Change Your Future (MUST WATCH)

[Music] i'll tell you what it is that you need to do to be successful some of these things aren't so malleable but others are things that you can work on well iq well that's a rough one because there's no evidence as far as i can tell that you can do a damn thing about your iq i was just reading a paper by dan simon today uh it's a relatively recent review dan simon did the invisible gorilla stuff and he was looking because there's all these companies that claim that these online brain training exercises can produce cognitive improvements and he reviewed the literature again and i've reviewed that literature like six times in the last 15 years because i keep hoping that someone will crack the problem but it's always the same answer it's like you do brain training games you get better at the game a lot better at that game you get slightly better at similar games but distal games that are still heavily cognitively loaded doesn't affect your performance at all zero none so the the the issue of how to raise iq man that's a killer no one knows how to do it i can tell you how to stop your iq from decreasing as you get older that's not so bad because it does that the fluid iq decreases from the time you're 20 and and pretty rapidly it's uh physical health is the best preventative so exercise physical exercise weirdly enough you know you think well why well your brain uses oxygen like mad right and it and it needs to be kept clean and well oxygenated and physical exercise both both like weightlifting so anaerobic anaerobic anaerobic and aerobic exercise both seem to be very very effective at staving off cognitive declines across the lifespan so that's a really useful thing to know because that's the only thing we know that does that so then the next best predictor of lifetime success is conscientiousness well so and of tho of the two aspects of conscientiousness say orderliness and and industriousness the better predictor is industriousness so the question is well what can you do about your industriousness and the answer to that is well that's kind of rough too because there's a strong genetic component but you can work on micro habits with regards to your conscientiousness and i think the best micro habits this is partly to do with this future authoring program processes i think the best thing you can do with regards to your conscientiousness is to set up some aims for yourself goals that you actually value and the future authoring program helps people do that and basically it does a situational analysis of it helps you do a situational analysis of your life more than a psychological analysis i would say and so the questions are something like well all right you're going to have to put some effort into your life and you need to be motivated to do that and so what are the potential sources of motivation well you could think about them in the big five manner you know if you're extroverted you want friends if you're agreeable you want an intimate relationship if you're disagreeable you want to win competitions if you're open you want to engage in creative activity if you're high neuroticism you want security okay so those are all sources of potential motivation that you could draw on that you could tailor to your own you know your own personality but then there are dimensions that you want to consider your life across and so we ask people about well you know if you could have your life the way you wanted it in three to five years if you were taking care of yourself properly you know what would you want from your friendships what would you want from your intimate relationship how would you like to structure your family what do you want for your career how are you going to use your time outside of your job and how are you going to regulate your mental physical mental and physical health and maybe also your drug and alcohol use because that's that's a good place to auger down you know because alcoholism for example wipes out you know five to ten percent of people so you want to keep that under control and then and then so maybe you know you you you develop a vision of what your life what you would like your life to be and that associates the so the goal once the goal is established and then you break down the goal into micro processes that you can implement the microprocessors become rewarding in proportion in relation to their uh causal association with the goal and that tangles in your your incentive reward system you know we talked about the dopaminergic incentive reward system and that's the thing that keeps you moving forward and the way it works is that it works better if it produces positive emotion when it can see you moving towards a valued goal okay well what's the implication of that better have a valued goal because otherwise you can't get any positive motivation working out and so the more valuable the goal in principle the more the micro processes associated with that goal start to take on a positive charge and so what that means is while you get up in the morning and you're excited about the day you're ready to go and so as far as i can tell what you do is you specify your long-term ideal maybe you also specify a place you want to stay the hell away from so that you're terrified to fail as well as excited about succeeding because that's also useful you specify your goal you do that you do that in some sense as a unique individual you want you want to specify goals that make you say oh if that could happen as a consequence of my efforts it would clearly be worthwhile because the question always is why do something because doing nothing is easy you just sit there and you don't do anything that's real easy the question is why would you ever do anything and the answer that has to be because you've determined by some means that it's worthwhile and then the next question might be well where should you look for worthwhile things and one would be well you could consult your own temperament and the other would be well you kind of look at how look at what it is that people accrue that's valuable across the lifespan look look what so you do a structural analysis of the subcomponents of human existence and already did that you need a family you need friends like you don't need to have all these things but you better have most of them family friends career educational goals plans for you know time outside of work attention to your mental and physical health etc you know those are that's what life is about and if you don't have any of those things well then all you've got left is misery and suffering so that's that's a bad that's a bad deal for you so so once but once you set up that that goal structure let's say and that's really in many in many ways that's what you should be doing at universities is that's exactly what you should be doing is trying to figure out who it is that you're trying to be right and you you aim at that and then use everything you learned as a means of bu