The Greatest Advice You Will Ever Receive | Jordan Peterson Motivation

so i figured something out that i thought i'd tell you about this took me like 30 years to figure out and i figured it out on this tour so there's this old idea you know that you have to rescue your father from the belly of the whale right from some monster that's deep in the abyss you see that pinocchio for example but it's a very common idea and i figured out why that is i think so imagine that we already know from a clinical perspective that you know if you set out a path towards a goal which you want to do because you need a goal and you need a path because that provides you with positive emotion right so you set up something as valuable so that implies a hierarchy you set up something as valuable you decide that you're going to do that instead of other things so that's kind of a sacrifice because you're sacrificing everything else to pursue that and then you experience a fair bit of positive emotion and meaning as you watch yourself move towards the goal and so the implication of that is the the better the goal the the more full and rich your experience is going to be when you pursue it so that's one of the reasons of of that's one of the reasons for developing a vision and for fleshing yourself out philosophically because you want to aim at the highest goal that you can manage okay so you do that and then what you'll find is that as you move towards the goal there are certain things that that that you have to accomplish that frighten you you know maybe you have to learn to be a better speaker a better writer a better thinker you have to be better to people around you or you have to learn some new skills and you're afraid of that whatever because it's going to stretch you if you if you pursue a goal and it's and so that'll put you up against challenges okay so all the clinical data indicates well the opposite of safe spaces as jonathan height has been pointing out that what you want to do when you identify something that someone is avoiding that they need to do because they're afraid you have them voluntary voluntarily confront it and so you break it down what you try to do if you're a behavior therapist is you break down the thing they're avoiding into smaller and smaller pieces until you find a piece that's small enough so they'll do it and it doesn't really matter as long as they start it you know then they can put the next piece on in the next piece and what happens is they don't get less afraid exactly they get braver they get they get it's like there's more of them you can and here's why so imagine you do something new and that's informative right there's information in the action and then you can incorporate that information and turn it into a skill and turn it into a transformation of your perceptions so there's more to you because you've tried something new so that's one thing the second thing is and there's good biological evidence for this now that if you put yourself in a new situation then new genes code for new proteins and build new neural structures and new nervous system structures same thing happens to some degree when you work out right because your your muscles are responding to the load but your nervous system does that too so you imagine that there's a lot of potential you locked in your genetic code and then if you put yourself in a new situation then then the stress that's the situational stress that's produced by that particular situation unlocks those genes and then builds new parts of you so that's very cool because who knows how much there is locked inside of you okay so now here's the idea so let's assume that that scales as you take on heavier and heavier loads that more and more of you you get more and more informed because you're doing more and more difficult things but more and more of you gets unlocked and so then what that would imply is that if you got to the point where you could look at the darkest things so that would be the abyss right that would be the deepest abyss if you could look at the harshest things like the most brutal parts of the suffering of the world and the malevolence of people and society if you could look that look at that straight and and directly that that would turn you on maximally and so that's the idea of rescuing your father because imagine that you're like the potential composite of of all your all the ancestral wisdom that's locked inside of you biologically but that's not going to come out at all unless you stress yourself unless you unless you challenge yourself and the bigger the challenge you take on the more that's going to turn on and so that as you take on a broader and broader range of challenges and you push yourself harder then more and more of what you could be turns on and that's equivalent to transforming yourself into the ancestral father into all because you're you're like the what would you call it you're the consequence of all these living beings that have come before you and that's all part of your biological potentiality and then if you can push yourself then all that clicks on and that turns you into who you could be that's and that's the re-representation of that positive ancestral father the point is your best strategic position is how am i insufficient and how can i rectify that that's what you've got and the thing is you are insufficient and you could rectify it both of those are within your grasp if you aim low enough one of the things why do you see that that's another thing you keep saying aim low enough have a low enough bar why do you why do you mean that well let's say you've got a kid and you want the kid to improve you don't set them a bar that's so high that it's impossible for them to attain it you take a look at the kid and you think okay this kid's got this range of skill here's a challenge we can throw at him or her that exceeds their current level of skill but gives them a reasonable probability of success and so like i'm saying it tongue-in-cheek to some degree you know it's like but if you're but i'm doing it as an aid to humility it's like well i don't know how to start improving my life someone might say that and i would say well you're not aiming low enough there's something you could do that you are regarding as trivial that that that you could do that you would do that would result in an actual improvement but it's not a big enough improvement for you so you won't lower yourself enough to take the opportunity incremental steps yes and so this is also what is achieved through exercise it's one of the most important well what do you do when you go and lift weights yeah you don't go in like if you haven't bench pressed before you don't put 400 pounds on the damn bar and drop the and drop the bar through your skull right you know you think look when i started working out when i was a kid i was i was weighed about 130 pounds and i was six foot one it's a thin kid and i smoked a lot i wasn't in good shape i wasn't in good physical shape and i went to the gym a