📏 24 Rules for Life

1. Jordan Perterson’s first book, 12 Rules for Life focuses on the results of too much chaos, and how to handle that.
2. The second book, Beyond Order is the counterpart that focuses on the results of too much order.

🎒 Rule 1: stand up straight with your shoulders back

• Matthew Principle – to those who have everything, more will be given. From those who have nothing, everything will be taken (Matthew 25:29).
• Males who stay on top longer are those who form reciprocal coalitions with their lower status compatriots, and who pay careful attention to the females and their infants. This is why the political ploy of baby-kissing has been utilised for thousands of years.
• The dominant male with an upright and confident posture gets the prime real estate, best huting grounds, and all the girls.

Dominance hierarchy

• Humans have always lived in a dominance hierarchy and struggled for position.
• The part of our brain that keeps track of our position in the dominance hierarchy is ancient and fundamental.
• It is a control system that modulates our perceptions, values, emotions, thoughts, and actions.

The body is an orchestra

• Erratic habits of sleeping, eating, and uncertainty can interfere with our function.
• The body functions like a well-reheearsed orcheatra, with each system playing a role.
• Routine is necessary and must be turned into reliable habits, to lose complexity and gain stability.
• It does not matter if you go to bed at the same time each evening, but waking up at a consistent hour is a necessity.

Feedback loops

• Many systems of interaction between the brain, body, and social world can get caught in feedback loops.
• Depressed people can start feeling useless and burdensome, which makes them withdraw from contact with friends and family. This withdrawal makes them even more lonesome and isolated, and more liley to feel useless and burdensome. The depression spirals and amplifies.

Encourage serotonin

• People size each other up.
• If you present yourself as defeated, then people will react as if you are losing.
• If you straighten up, then people will treat you positively.
• Standing up straight accepts the responsibility of life and transforms chaos into the realities of habitable order.
• Speak your mind.
• Put your desires forward.
• Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead.
• Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural pathways desperate for its calming influence.

💝 Rule 2: treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping

Order and chaos

• The world of experience has primal constituents – order, chaos, and conscoiusness.
• The border between order and chaos – when life becomes intense, gripping, meaningful, and time passes by without notice.
• The nature of man cannot reach full potential without challenge and danger.
• People are better at administering medication to their pets than to themselves.
• Most men do not meet female human standards – women rate 85% of men as below average in attractiveness.

Self-consciousness

• Predators have no comprehension of their fundamental weakness, vulenrability, or subjugation to pain and death.
• We are aware of our own defencelessness, finitude, and mortality.
• We know how dread and pain can be inflicted upon us, and how we can inflict it upon others.

Fallen creatures

• To take care of ourselves, we would have to respect ourselves.Yet we do not.
• Consider what is truly good for you? Not what do I want or what would make me happy?.
• Consider what might my life look like if I were caring for mysef properly?
• Once having understood your own individual hell, you can decide against going there, aim elsewhere, and devote your life to individual heaven.

🤝 Rule 3: make friends with people who want the best for you

• Down is a lot easier than up.
• When delinquent teens are placed in an environment of covilised peers, the delinquency spreads, not the stability.
• Assume first that you are doing the easiest thing, not the most difficult.
• If you have a friendship you would not recommend to your sister, father, or son – why would you have such a friend for yourself?
• Associeate with people whose lives would be improved if they saw your life improve.

🪞 Rule 4: compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today

Irrelevance is a trick of the mind

• No matter how good you are, there is someone out there who makes you look incompetent.
• Anyone can choose a frame of time within which nothing matters.
• Irrelevance is a trick of the rational mind.
• There are many games at which to succeed or fail.
• You are playing multiple games at once – career, friends and family, projects, athletic pursuits, artistic endeavours etc.
• Winning at everything might mean that you are not doing anything new or difficult. Winning is not the same as growing.
• We cannot navigate without something to aim at.
• We live in a framework that defines the present as eternally lacking and the future as eternally better.
• The past is fixed, but the future could be better.
• Happiness is always to be found in the journey uphill, not in the fleeting sense of satisfaction awaiting at the next peak.

Find something new to aim at

• What could I say to someone else that would set things a bit more right between us tomorrow?
• What bit of chaos might I erradicate, so that the stage could be set for a better play?
• If we start aiming at something different, out minds will start presenting us with new information, derived from the previously hidden world.
• Focus on your surroundings – physical and psychological.
• Notice something that bothers or concerns you.
• What could I do, that I would do, to make life a little better?

🧒 Rule 5: do not let children do anything that makes you dislike them

Discovery of permissable behaviour

• Infants are violent. They kick, hit, bite, and steal.
• They do so to explore, express outrage, and gratify their impulsive desires.
• They are also attempting ro discover the true limits of permissable behaviour by testing boundaries.
• A crying child is not always sad, they could be angry. Anger-crying and sadness-crying can be distinguished with careful attention.

Swoop like a hawk

• Figure out what you want.
• Watch the people around you like a hawk.
• Whenever you see anything like what you want – swoop in and deliver a reward.
• If you want someone to be more communicative – pay attention and listen when they talk.
• This is the technique of reinforcing positive behaviour.

Maximise learning early

• Children have a much quicker period of development prior to maturity.
• The fundamental question is not how to shelter children from misadventure and failure, so they never experience fear or pain. Insteaad, maximise their learning, so that knowledge may be gained at minimal cost.
• Principles of discipline: limit the rules and use the least force necessary to enforce those rules.
• Time outs – welcome back the misbehaving child as soon as the temper is under control.

Understand your capacity and duties

• Parents should understand their own capacity to be harsh, vengful, arrogant, resentful, angry, and deceitful.
• Revenge – after a tantrum, do not turn a cold shoulder if the child returns with excitement and accomplishments shortly after.
• Parents have a duty to act as proxies for the real world. This responsibility supersedes any responsibility to ensure happiness or self-esteem.
• The primary duty of a parent is to make their child socially desirable.

🏡 Rule 6: set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world

• Suceess makes us complacent. We forget to pay attention.
• We take what we have for granted.
• We fail to notice that things are changing or that corruption is taking root.
• A hurricane is an act of God. But failure to prepare, when the necessity for prepatation is well known – that’s sin.
• Start to stop doing what you know to be wrong.
• Do not reorganise the state until you have ordered your own experience.

🏔 Rule 7: pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient

Delay gratification

• The successful begin with the future. They sacrifice by delaying gratification.
• If the world you are seeing is not the world you want – examine your values. Get rid of your current presumptions.
• Forego expediency and pursue the path of ultimate meaning.
• No tree can grow to heaven, unless its roots reach down to hell.

Don’t allow totalitarian pride to manifest

• Aim up. Pay attention. Fix what you can fix.
• Do not be arrogant in your knowledge.
• Strive for humility.
• Totalitarian pride manifests itself in intolerance, oppression, torture, and death.
• Consider the murederousness of your own spirit before accusing others.
• Do not lie – it was the great and small lies of the Nazi and Communist states that produced the deaths of millions of people.

🙊 Rule 8: tell the truth – or at least, don’t lie

Understand your motives

• People lie to win arguments, gain status, and impress others.
• Practice only saying things that the internal voice would not object to.
• When you don’t know what to do – tell the truth.

Gene codes

• New genes in the central nervous system turn themselves on when an organism is placed in a new situation.
• These genes code for new proteins, which are the building blocks for new structures in the brain.
• This means that a lot of you is still nascent.

Aim

• An aim or an ambition provides the structure necessary for action.
• It provides a destination, a point of contrast against the present, and a framework within which all things can be evaluated.
• An aim defines progress and reduces anxiety.

Never sacrifice what you could be, for what you are

• Do not give up the better that resides within for the security you already have.
• Everyon needs a specific goal, ambition, and purpose – to limit chaos and make sense of life.
• Set meta-goals. For example, live in truth.

👂 Rule 9: assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t

• Memory is not a description of the objective past.
• Memory is the past’s guide to the future, if you can figure out why something bad happened and avoid it happening again.
• The purpose of memory is not to remember the past. It is to stop the same thing from happening over and over.
• The great majority of us cannot listen. We find ourselves compelles to evaluate, because listening is too dangerous.
• If you listen without judgement, people will generall tell you everything they are thinking with little deceit.
• If the conversation is boring – you probably are not listening.

🗣 Rule 10: be precise in your speech

• When things break down, what has been ignored rushes in.
• When things are no longer specified with precision – the walls crumble and chaos makes its presence.
• Focused intent, precision of aim, and careful attention protect us from chaos.
• Chaos emerges bit by bit.
• Mutual unhappiness and resentment piles up.
• Everything untidy is swept under the rug.
• Often, actuality pales in significance compared to ahat is terrible in imagination.

Confront the chaos of being

• Specify your destinations and chart your course.
• Admit to what you want.
• Tell those around you who you are.
• Be precise.

🛹 Rule 11: do not bother children when they are skateboarding

Danger breeds competence

• Skateboarding is dangerous – that is the point.
• Children want to triumph over danger.
• They are not trying to be safe, they are trying to be competent.
• Competence makes people as safe as they can truly be.

Live on the edge

• When untrammeled and encouraged, we prefer to live on the edge.
• On the edge we can be confident and confront the chaos that helps us develop.
• We are hard-wired to enjoy risk – we feel invigorated and excited when we work to optimise our future performance, whilst playing in the present.
• If you cannot understand why someone did something – look at the consequences and infer the motivation.

Power is a fundamental motivator

• Any hierarchy creates winners and losers.
• The winners are likely to justify the hierarchy, whilst the losers criticise it.
• The collective pursuit of any valued goal produces a hierarchy.
• It is the pursuit of goals that lends life its sustaining meaning.
• People compete to rise to thetop and care about their position in the dominance hierarchy.
• Although power is a major motivator – it is not the only one. We cannot justify using single cause interpretations.

Competence is a prime determiner of status

• In well-functioning societies, competence rather than power is the key determiner of status.
• The most valid personality trait predictors of long-term success in Western counries are intelligence and conscientiousness.

Assume ignorance before malevolence

• No one has a direct pipeline to your wants and needs. Not even you.
• Tell the person exactly what you would like them to do.
• The voice of resentment – if they loved me, they would know what to do.

Women want men

• Women want someone to contend with – someone who brings to the table something they can’t already provide.
• Desirable male offerings – income, education, self-confidence, intelligence, dominance, social position.

🐈 Rule 12: pet a cat when you encounter one on the street

• When you love someone, it is not despite their limitations. It is because of their limitations.
• Set aside some time to talk and to think about the illness or crisis, and how it should be managed every day.
• If you do not limit its effect, you will become exhausted and everything will spiral into the ground.
• Conserve your strength.
• When worries associated with the crisis arise – remind yourself that you will think them through during the next scheduled period.
• If a cat shows up and you pay attention to it, then you may just remember that the wonder of being makes up for the ineradicable suffering that accompanies it.

🎭 Rule 13: do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement

Outsource the problem of sanity

• People need to communicate to keep their own minds organised.
• We talk about the past to sort our stories and avoid stressing over the trivial.
• We talk about the present and future to understand where we are, where we are going, and why.
• People remain mentally healthy in part because they are constantly being reminded how to think, act, and speak.

Social worlds

• Are they educated?
• Do they use their free time productively?
• Do they have a plan for the future?
• Do they have economic problems or health issues?
• Do they have friends, family, a relationship, a career?
• If many of these questions are negative – you are not properly embedded in the world.

Iterable solutions

• A good solution to a problem must be repeatable, without deterioration across repetision, people, and time.
• Diverse traits complement each other and maintain balance.
• All thriving societies feature a bottom-up hierarchy.
• This structure enables impact – only if you accept the balance of society.
• As a beginner – accept your place in the social hierarchy and walk before you attempt to run.
• \Social institutions prevent chaos from taking over.

🎯 Rule 14: imagine who you could be, and aim single-mindedly at that

• People are complex beyond belief.
• Our ignorance is further complicated by the intermingling of who you are with who you could be.
• You are something that is, yet also something that is becoming.
• Our potential is obscured by poor health, misfortune, and tragedies.
• Our potential can also be hidden by an unwillingness to take advantage of opportunities, regrettable errors, and failures of: discipline, faith, imagination, and commitment.

Story framework

• Everyone needs a story in which we can structure our actions and perceptions.
• Every story requires a starting point and a better ending.
• Storie give us direction – draw a map from where we are to where we need to go.
• Change paths – if the new path appears more challenging.

🌁 Rule 15: do not hide unwanted things in the fog

• Life is what repeats, and it’s worth getting what repeats right.
• Confront the repetitive.
• Do not avoid discussion over minor things that repeat again and again. At some point, it will not be just a minor problem anymore.

Refusal to notice

• The fog that hides is the refusal to notice emotions and motivations as they arise.
• Every emotion or anxiety is a signal that points out a deeper problem.
• If you leave all dangers and obstacles hidden in the fog, they will eventually bury you.
• Small issues will grow in the darkness until they begin to overwhelm you.

🚪 Rule 16: notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated

• The meaning that most effectively sustains life is to be found in the adoption of responsibility.
• The most valued accomplishments are usually the difficult ones.
• Sacrifice something of your manifold potential in exchange for something real in life.
• Discipline yourself, or suffer the consequence of life without meaning.
• Positive emotions are a result of the pursuit of valuable goals.
• There is no happiness in the absence of responsibility.
• Life becomes meaningful in proportion to the depths of responsibility you are willing to shoulder.
• Disenchantment and disappointment can be an indicator of abdicated responsibility.

💢 Rule 17: do not do what you hate

• We do things, because we feel they are important, valuable, and worth the sacrifice.
• Pointless action is contrary to our beliefs and violates ourselves.
• People often act in spite of their conscience.
• Hell tends to arrive step by step.
• If you do not object when the transgressions against your conscience are minor – you will wilfully participate when the transgressions get out of hand.

✊🏼 Rule 18: abandon ideology

• An ideology begins by selecting a few abstractions in whose low-resolution representations hide large, undifferentiated chunks of the world.
• THey oversimplify very complex phenomena – economy, the rich, the oppressors.
• The abstractions are then described as problems and villains are assigned.
• A small number of causal powers are assigned that explain these problems.
• A theory is developed that can describe real life phenomena in the context of this new school of thought.
• Finally, the propoganda phase begins.
• Everyone who refuses to acknowledge the new system of thought is demonised and excluded.

Illusion of mastery

• Beware of single variable causes for diverse and complex problems.
• Hidden motivations can be vented behind simplification.
• Never blindly follow ideas – respect and challenge ideas.

🔨 Rule 19: work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens

• If there is no goal or direction – you will have nowhere to go and nothing to do.
• Commitment propels people in the right direction.
• Place yourself under pressure and see the outcome – like coal can turn into diamonds

💐 Rule 20: try to make one room in your home as beautiful as possible

• As soon as you have one beautiful thing in your life, you can expand it.
• Reconnect with the immortality of childhood.
• It is difficult to open up to the beauty of the world as an adult.
• Our simplification of the world disguises its grandeur and beauty.
• Creative endeavours are risky, but necessary for change and transformation.

Beauty

• Beauty leads you back to what you have lost.
• Beauty beckons in a manner that straightens your aim.
• Many things make life worth living: love, play, courage, gratitude, work, friendship, truth, grace, hope, virtie, responsibility.

📝 Rule 21: if old memories still upset you, write them down carefully and completely

• To have a good orientation in the world – we need to know where we are coming from and where we are going.
• If you do not know where you came from, you cannot know where you are.
• We are the sailors and explorers that recall our stories.
• We remember the past, so that we can avoid pitfalls and repeat successes.
• If our past is not properly ordered and we still have unresolved issues – it will continue to have a negative impact on the current journey.
• Refusing to acknowledge past errors will result in the unknown surrounding us and becoming predatory.

💑 Rule 22: plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationship

• Maintaining romance requires a relationship-wide strategy.
• Most people rely on intuition and passion – this lacks consistency and will ultimately lead to an unhappy relationship.
• Know what you want, and the willingness to discuss.
• Avoid being naive about the beauty of live carrting your relationship.
• Talk to your partner for at least 90 minutes per week to develop romance and intimacy.

Fundamental states of social being

1. Tyranny – you do what I want
2. Slavery – I do what you want
3. Negotiation – the good, but difficult option

🤥 Rule 23: do not allow yourself to become resentful, deceitful, or arrogant

• Explore the things that you are trying to avoid.
• Protecting ourselves from all negative and evil in life can leave us unprepared for the harshness of life and unable to deal with responsibilities.
• People become resentful, because of the absolute unkown and its terrors, because nature conspires against you, because of the tyrannical element of culturem, and because of the melevolence of yourself.

Fundamental instinct

• Self-deception corrupts and distorts the fundamental instinct that guies you through the difficulties of life.
• A truthful person can rely on their own judgement and senses.
• Live in a manner whose nobility, grandeur, and intrinsic meaning are sufficient to tolerate the negative elements of existence without becoming bitter.
• Find purpose and reject resentment, deceit, and arrogance.

🙏🏼 Rule 24: be grateful in spite of your suffering

• Suffering is inevitable.
• People have the ability to transcend suffering – both psychologically and practically.
• See the best in yourself and the world.
• Be grateful not because you are suffering, but because you are thankful for existence and the opportunity it brings.
• We often love others not for their perfections. We love others for their limitations.

📹 Video Summary

12 Rules for Life video summary

Beyond Order animated summary