Follow These Steps To Improve Your Life | Jordan Peterson EP 228

0:00Thank you.

0:53What do you think of the skills that people should start to develop in their 20s in general? role? Well, it certainly doesn't hurt to be in good physical condition. So we can walk through it. Stop drinking too much. How do you know if you're drinking too much? You regret what you do when you're drinking. It's interfering with other important goals. It's causing you financial distress. It's getting you in trouble with your friends or your family. It's getting you in trouble with the police. So stop abusing substances if you can. Physical health. Are you in decent in shape? Are you strong and coordinated?

1:26And if you're not, you'd be better if you were. You'd feel better. You'd be more effective. You'd live longer. You'd be less sick. And you really see that mount up. Like if someone's been in shape once in their life, they age way better. And it's also a really good way of maintaining your cognitive ability. You know, you hear about those exercises that you can do online to make you smarter and keep your cognitive ability intact. Those don't work. Exercise works. Cardiovascular and weightlifting, you start to decline in your fluid intelligence at about the age of 25. And it's a linear trend downhill and it can accelerate as you get older.

2:00If you exercise, you stave that off. Maintain your relationships and foster them. So when I look at successful people, they're really good at something. They're reliable. You can count on their word. They're generous and they have a wide, wide connection network, which becomes more and more valuable as you get older. So it's one advantage that older people really have over younger people. They have a connection network and a connection network is huge. You could be connected to a thousand well-connected people. Okay. That means you are connected to the entire world. It's unbelievably valuable.

2:36And that's one of the things that's so absolutely remarkable about the situation that I'm in right now, as far as one of the great benefits is I can contact pretty much anybody and they'll talk to me. Having a connection network is of an inestimable value. Reliability, generosity, you can work on both of those. Philosophical sophistication, it's very useful because it orients you properly. You have a sophisticated sense of the world. You find, for example, that doing things for other people is actually more rewarding than virtually anything else you can do. You know, when you hear you should be of service to other people.

3:12Well, if you actually watch yourself, you pay attention to yourself and you do something that helps someone else and it genuinely helps them, I defy you to find another experience that is that satisfying. It's actually quite stunning how satisfying that is. Why is helping another person the most satisfying thing for probably most people when they're out of their ego of like, I want to buy more things to make me happy in this moment. Why is that such a satisfying thing for human beings? There's no better life strategy. So imagine I take two people and I say, okay, I'm going to give you a hundred dollars and you have to give some of it to the person right beside you.

3:48And they can either agree or disagree with the split, but if they disagree, you don't get anything. Okay. So a classical economist would say that the person should take the hundred, offer the person next to them a dollar and the person should accept it because why not? They get a dollar instead of nothing. And that's the solution. But what happens is that if you don't offer that other person something close to 50-50, they're likely to tell you to go to hell. Yes. And then you get nothing. You get nothing too. You think, well, why would people do that? Because they just reject$50 and who cares?

4:22And the answer is, well, we don't just play one game with other people. We play a repeating game. And so imagine we did this. So imagine it's a crowd and they're all watching you and I offer you a hundred dollars and you have to share it with the person next to you and you say would you like to take seventy dollars and the person says well I'm not sure that's fair to you but if it's okay yes but then everyone else sees that and now they all have an opportunity to pick who they're going to play with next well you're not going to get picked last are you remember what you told me you didn't want to get picked last right not okay so what you did was you turned yourself into an athlete.

4:57So, but imagine we expand that game and we say, you want to be the person that everyone wants to play with. Well, then all you have in your whole life is invitations to play. And how are you going to be that person? Be productive, straightforward, generous. Make everyone else better around you and they're going to want to play with you. So there you go. And then you get to play. If the ethical argument is put properly, it is by far the most compelling argument. It's like, if you want to have everything you could possibly want and more than be a good person. The better a person you are, the more likely that is to happen.

5:31That doesn't mean that you're completely protected against getting cut off at the knees, but there's no better strategy.

5:54Thank you.

6:24Thank you.

6:54Thank you.