STOP Wasting Time And Opportunities – Jordan Peterson | Life Advice

you know if you take people and i've told you this and you expose them voluntarily to things that they are avoiding and are afraid of you know that they know they need to overcome in order to meet their goals their self-defined goals if you can teach people to stand up in the face of the things they're afraid of they get stronger and you don't know what the upper limits to that are because you might ask yourself like if for 10 years if you didn't avoid doing what you knew you needed to do by the depth by your own definitions right within the value structure that you've created to the degree that you've done that what would you be like well you know there are remarkable people who come into the world from time to time and there are people who do find out over decades-long periods what they could be like if they were who they were if they said if they spoke their being forward and they get stronger and stronger and stronger and we don't know the limits to that we do not know the limits to that and so you could say well in part perhaps the reason that you're suffering unbearably can be left at your feet because you're not everything you could be and you know it and of course that's a terrible thing to admit and it's a terrible thing to consider but there's real promise in it right because it means that perhaps there's another way that you could look at the world and the number another way that you could act in the world so what it would reflect back to you would be much better than what it reflects back to you now and then the second part of that is well imagine that many people did that because we've done a lot as human beings we've done a lot of remarkable things and i've told you already i think before that today for example about 250 000 people will be lifted out of abject poverty and about 300 000 people attached to the electrical power grid we're making people we're lifting people out of poverty collectively at a faster rate that's ever occurred in the history of humankind by a huge margin and that's been going on unbelievably quickly since the year 2000 the u.n had planned to have poverty between 2000 and 2015 and it was accomplished by 2013. so there's inequality developing in many places and you hear lots of political agitation about that but overall the the tide is lifting everyone up and that's a great thing and we have no idea how fast we could multiply that if people got their act together and really aimed at it because you know my my experience is with people that we're probably running at about 51 percent of our capacity something i mean you can think about this yourselves i often ask undergraduates how many hours a day you waste or how many hours a week you waste and the classic answer is something like four to six hours a day you know inefficient studying uh watching things on youtube that not only do you not want to watch that you don't even care about that make you feel horrible about watching after you're done that's probably four hours right there you know you think well that's 20 25 hours a week it's 100 hours a month that's two and a half full work weeks it's half a year of work weeks per year and if your time is worth 20 an hour which is a radical underestimate it's probably more like 50 if you think about it in terms of deferred wages if you're wasting 20 hours a week you're wasting 50 000 a year and you are doing that right now and it's because you're young wasting thousand dollars a year is a way bigger catastrophe than it would be for me to waste it because i'm not going to last nearly as long and so if your life isn't everything it could be you could ask yourself well what would happen if you just stopped wasting the opportunities that are in front of you you be who knows how much more efficient 10 times more efficient 20 times more efficient that's the pareto distribution you have no idea how efficient efficient people get it's completely it's off the charts well and if we all got our act together collectively and stop making things worse because that's another thing people do all the time not only do they not do what they should to make things better they actively attempt to make things worse because they're spiteful or resentful or arrogant or deceitful or or homicidal or genocidal or all of those things all bundled together in an absolutely pathological package if people stopped really really trying just to make things worse we have no idea how much better they would get just because of that so there's this weird dynamic that's part of the existential system of ideas between human vulnerability social judgment both of which are are are are major causes of suffering and the failure of individuals to adopt the responsibility that they know they should adopt and that's the thing that's interesting too is that and like one of the another thing i've always often asked my undergraduate classes is you know there's this idea that that people have that people have a conscience and you know what the conscience is it's it's this feeling or voice you have in your head just before you do something that you know is stupid telling you that probably you shouldn't do that stupid thing you don't have to listen to it strangely enough but you go ahead and do it anyways and then of course exactly what the conscience told you was going to happen inevitably happened so that you feel even stupider about it than you would if it happened by accident because you you know i knew this was going to happen i got a warning it was going to happen and i went and did it anyways and the funny thing too is that that conscience operates within people and we really don't understand what the hell that is so you might say well what would happen if you abided by your conscience for five years or for ten years what sort of position might you be in what sort of family might you have what sort of relationship might you be able to forge and you can be bloody sure that a relationship that's forged on the basis of who you actually are is going to be a lot stronger and more welcome than one that's forged on the basis of who you aren't now of course that means that the person you're with has to deal with the full force of you in all your ability and your catastrophe and that's a very very difficult thing to negotiate but if you do negotiate it well at least you you have something you have somewhere solid to stand and you have somewhere to live you have a real life and it's a great basis upon which to bring children into the world for example because you can have an actual relationship with them instead of torturing them half to death which is what happens in a tremendous a tremendously large minority of cases well it's more than that too because and this is what i'll close with and this is why i wanted to introduce social nissan's writings to you you see because it isn't merely that your fate depends on whether or not you get your act together and to what degree you decide that you're 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