Daily Motivations - Life Advice Will Change Your Future

Episode Date: June 4, 2022

Credit to the speaker: Jordan Peterson’s Instagram - @daily_motivationsorg     Facebook- @daily_motivationsorg Interested in sponsoring this show reach out to us via [e-mail] Grab your Ultimate Female Body Fitness Guide Ebook  copy now at an exclusive 50% off discount  https://selar.co/42zb40?currency=USD Kindly Support Us Below to sustain future episodes. Support the Show.

Get ready for Las Vegas-style action at BetMGM, the king of online casinos. Enjoy casino games at your fingertips with the same Vegas-drift excitement MGM is famous for when you play classics like MGM Grand Millions. Or popular games like Blackjack, Baccarat, and Roulette. Download the BetMGM Casino app today. BetMGM and GameSense remind you to play responsibly. BetMGM.com for T's and C's. 90 plus to wager. Ontario only.

Please play responsibly. If you have questions or concerns about gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BidMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Welcome to Daily Motivation, where you get motivated and inspired. 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 a bad deal for you.

But once you set up that goal structure, let's say, and that's really, in many ways, that's what you should be doing at university. 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 aim at that. And then you use everything you learn as a means of building that person that you want to be. And I really mean want to be.

I don't mean should be. Even those things are going to overlap. And it's important to distinguish between those because that's partly, and this is back down to the micro-routine analysis. So if I say, well, you're going to try to make yourself more industrious. Okay, number one, specify your damn goals. Because how are you going to hit something if you don't know what it is? That isn't going to happen.

And often people won't specify their goals too because they don't like to specify conditions for failure. So if you keep yourself all vague and foggy, which is real easy because that's just a matter of not doing as well, then you don't know when you fail. And people might say, well, I really don't want to know when I fail

because that's painful. So I'll keep myself blind about when I fail. That's fine, except you'll fail all the time then. You just won't know it until you've failed so badly that you're done. And that can easily happen by the time you're 40. So I would recommend that you don't let that happen. So that's willful blindness, right? You could have known, but you chose not to. Okay, so once you get your goal structure set up, you think, okay, if I could have this life, it looks like that might be

worth living, despite the fact that it's going to be, you know, anxiety-provoking and threatening, and there's going to be some suffering and loss involved in all of that, obviously. The goal is to have a vision for your life such that, all things considered, that justifies your effort. Okay, so then what do you do? Well, then you turn down to the micro-routines. It's like, okay, well, this is what I'm aiming for. How does that instantiate itself day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to-month? And that's where something like a schedule can be unbelievably useful. Google Calendar.

It's like, make a damn schedule and stick to it. Okay, so what's the rule with the schedule? It's not a bloody prison. That's the first thing that people do wrong. They say, well, I don't like to follow a schedule. Well, it's like, well, what kind of schedule are you setting up? Well, I have to do this, then I have to do this, then I have to do this, you know,

and then I just go play video games because who wants to do all these things that I have to do? It's like, wrong. Set the damn schedule up so that you have the day you want. That's the trick. It's like, okay, I've got tomorrow. If I was going to set it up

so it was the best possible day I could have, practically speaking, what would it look like? Well, then you schedule that. And obviously, there's a bit of responsibility that's going to go along with that, because if you have any sense, one of the things that you're going to insist upon is that at the end of the day, you're not in worse shape than you were at the beginning of the day, right? Because that's a stupid day. If you have a bunch of those in a row, you just dig yourself a hole, and then you bury yourself in it. It's like, sorry, that's just not a good strategy. It's a bad strategy.

So maybe 20% of your day has to be responsibility and obligation, or maybe it's more than that, depending on how far behind you are. But even that, you can ask yourself, okay, well, I've got these responsibilities. I have to schedule the damn things in. What's the right ratio of responsibility to reward? And you can ask yourself that, just like you'd negotiate with someone who is working for you. It's like, okay, you got to work tomorrow. Okay, so I want you to work tomorrow. And you might say, okay, well, what are you going to do for me that makes it likely that I'll work for you? Well, you could ask yourself that, you know.

So maybe you do an hour of responsibility and then you play a video game for 15 minutes. I don't know, whatever turns your crank, man. But, you know, you have to negotiate with yourself and not tyrannize yourself. Like you're negotiating with someone that you care for, that you would like to be productive and have a good life. And that's how you make the schedule. It's like, and then you look at the day and you think, well, if I had that day, that'd be good. Great. You know, and you're

useless and horrible, so you'll probably only hit it with about 70% accuracy, but that beats the hell out of zero, right? And if you hit it even with 50% another rule is well aim for 51 the next week or 50 and a half percent for god's sake or because you're you're going to hit that position where things start to loop back positively and spiral you upward and so so that's one way that you can work on your conscientiousness is a plan a life you'd like to have. And you do that partly by referring to social norms. That's more or less rescuing your father from the belly of the whale. But the other way you do that is by having a little conversation with yourself about, as if you don't really know who you are, because you know what you're like. You won't do what

you're told. You won't do what you tell yourself to do. You must have noticed that. It's like you're a bad employee and a worse boss. And both of those work, you know, for you. You don't know what you want to do. And then when you tell yourself what to do, you don't do it anyways. You should fire yourself and find someone else to be. But, you know, my point is that you have to understand that you're not your own servant, so to speak. You're someone that you have to negotiate with. And you're someone that you want to present the opportunity of having a good life to.

And that's hard for people because they don't like themselves very much. So, you know, they're always like cracking the whip and then procrastinating and cracking the whip and then procrastinating. And it's like, God, it's so boring and such a pathetic way of spending your time. And you know what that's like because you probably waste like six hours a day. And I think we did an economic calculation about that a while back, right? Your time's probably worth 50 bucks an hour, something like that. I mean, you're not getting paid that now, but you're young. And so this is investment time.

And what you do now is going to multiply its effects in the future. So let's say it's 50 bucks an hour, which is perfectly reasonable. So if you waste six hours a day, and you are, then you're wasting about $2,000 a week or about $100,000 a year. So like, go ahead, but that's what it's costing you every hour. And you need to know what your damn time is worth. So let's say it's not 50 bucks, it's 30, whatever, maybe it's 100. It's somewhere in that range. One of the things you should be asking yourself is, when you spend an hour, was that, well, what if I paid someone 50 bucks to have had that hour? And if the answer is no, it's like,

well, maybe you should do something else with your time. And it depends on whether or not you think that your time's worthwhile. But the funny thing about not assuming that is if you assume your time isn't worthwhile, what happens is you don't just sit around sort of randomly in a state of responsibility-less bliss. What you do is you suffer existentially. And so that seems like a stupid solution. 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 your own definitions, right, within the value structure that you've created, to the degree that you've done that, 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's real promise in it right because it means that perhaps there's another way that you could look at the world in 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. 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 UN 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 tide is lifting everyone up, and that's a great thing. 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 experience is with people that we're probably running at about 51% of our capacity. Something, I mean, you can think about this yourselves. I often ask undergraduates how many hours a day you waste,, 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, 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. Now, 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 $50,000 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'd 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. Stay with us. We'll be right back. Hey there, fellow listeners. If you're passionate about fitness and wellness, Stay with us. We'll be right back. specifically for women aiming to conquer their fitness goals. From strength training to cardio, flexibility, nutrition, and mindset, we've got you covered. Inside, you'll find expertly crafted workout routines, personalized meal plans, motivation tips, and strategies tailored to help you reach your fitness dreams. We also tackle common challenges women encounter on

their fitness journeys, offering advice on balancing exercise with life's demands and breaking free from societal norms. Don't miss out on this incredible deal of 50% off. Get your ebook now before it's too late. 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 stop 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 our 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 another thing I've often asked my undergraduate classes is,

there's this idea that people have a conscience. And you know what the conscience is. 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 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 10 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 have something, you have somewhere solid to stand and you have somewhere to live. You have a real 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 net since readings 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 going to live out your own genuine being it isn't only your fate it's the fate of everyone that you're networked with and so you know you think well there 9 billion, 7 billion people in the world. We're going to peak at about 9 billion, by the way, and then it'll decline rapidly. But 7 billion people in the world, and who are you? You're just one little dust mote among that 7 billion. And so it really doesn't matter what you do or don't do, but that's simply not the case. It's the wrong model, because you're at the center of a network.

You're a node in a network. Of course, that's even more true now that we have social media. You'll know 1000 people at least over the course of your life, and they'll know 1000 people each, and that puts you one person away from a million and two persons away from a billion. And so that's how you're connected. And the things you do, they're like dropping a stone in a pond. The ripples move outward and they affect things in ways that you can't fully comprehend.

And it means that the things that you do and that you don't do are far more important than you think. And so if you act that way, of course, the terror of realizing that is that it actually starts to matter what you do, and you might say, well, that's better than living a meaningless existence. It's better for it to matter. But I mean, if you really asked yourself, would you be so sure if you had the choice? I can live with no responsibility whatsoever. The price I pay is that nothing matters.

Or I can reverse it and everything matters. But I have to take the responsibility that's associated with that. It's not so obvious to me that people would take the meaningful path. Now when you say, well, nihilists suffer dreadfully because there's no meaning in their life and they still suffer. Yeah, but the advantage is they have no responsibility. So that's the payoff and I actually think that's the motivation. Say, well, I can't help being nihilistic. All my belief systems have collapsed. It's like, yeah, maybe.

Maybe you've just allowed them to collapse because it's a hell of a lot easier than acting them out. And the price you pay is some meaningless suffering. But you can always whine about that and people will feel sorry for you. And you have the option of taking the pathway of the martyr. So that's a pretty good deal, all things considered. Especially when the alternative is to bear your burden properly and to live forthrightly in the world. Well, what Solzhenitsyn figured out, and so many people in the 20th century, it's not just him, even though he's the best example,

is that if you live a pathological life, you pathologize your society. And if enough people do that, then it's hell. Really. Really. Really. And you can read the Gulag Archipelago if you have the fortitude to do that. And you'll see exactly what hell is like. And then you can decide if that's a place you'd like to visit. Or even more importantly, if it's a place you'd like to visit and take all your family and friends.

Because that's what happened in the 20th century. How to think about motivation? We'll think about it from the hypothalamic perspective. So we could say one thing that motivation does is set goals. We could say that emotions track progress towards goals. And I'm going to use that schema, even though it's not exactly right. So you say, well, motivation determines where you're going to aim. So if you're hungry, you're going to aim at something to eat. And then that will organize your perceptions

so that you zero out everything that isn't relevant to that task, which is almost everything. You concentrate on those few things that are going to facilitate your movement forward. When you encounter those things, that produces positive emotion. As you move through the world towards your goal, and you see that things are laying themselves out that facilitate your movement forward, those things cause positive emotion and if you encounter anything that gets in the way, then that produces negative emotion

and it can be like threat, because you're not supposed to encounter something that gets in the way it can be anger, so that you move it away, it can be frustration, disappointment, grief those would, if you had a response that serious to an obstacle, it would probably punish the little motivated frame right out of existence. You know, so you walk downstairs and, I don't know, the contracting company has set a wrecking ball through your kitchen. It's like, that's going to be disappointing. You're not going to keep eating the peanut butter sandwich in the rubble. That little frame is going to get punished out of existence and some new goal is going to pop up and instead and you know one of the things we're going to try to sort out is how

do you decide when you've encountered an obstacle that's so big that you should just quit and go do something else because that's not obvious you know and you can you can get into counterproductive persistence pretty easily so we don't know how people solve that problem. It's a really complicated one. So anyways, we're going to work on that scenario. Your hypothalamus pops up micro goals that are directly relevant to biological survival. That produces a frame of reference. So it's not a goal. It's not a drive. And it's not a collection of behaviors. It's a little personality. And the personality has a viewpoint. It has thoughts that go along with it. It has perceptions.

It has action tendencies. All of that. You can see this in addiction. Most particularly. So one of the things that you find often with people who are alcoholic is they lie all the time. And that's because when they're... They built a little alcohol dependent personality inside of themselves, or a big one, it might, maybe it's 90% of their personality. And one of that, one of the

things that consists of is all the rationalizations that they've used over the years to justify their addiction to themselves and to other people. And so the addiction has a personality, personality you know and so when the person is off or maybe they're addicted to meth or something like that where we know the addiction is more it's it's more short-term powerful that i would say than an alcohol addiction they'll say anything and the the the words are just tools used to get towards the goal and if they happen to be deceptive whatever it doesn't matter they're just practical tools to get towards the goal and if they happen to be deceptive, whatever it doesn't matter they're just practical tools to get towards the goal and Then when you get towards the goal and you take a nice shot of meth or something like that You reinforce all those rationales that you use to get the drug and then the next time you're even a better deceiver and liar

So, okay, so we're gonna say motivations one way of thinking about is they set goals But it's not the right way of thinking about it They produce a whole framework of interpretation And so we're going to think about that framework of interpretation and then emotions emerge inside of that So that's it. So the world is framed motivation set goals. You could say the world has to be framed So motivation sets that frame cruise goals emotions perceptions and actions and then actions track progress. So positive emotion says you're moving forward properly towards your goal. And if you encounter something you don't expect, you stop. That's anxiety. It's like, oh, we're not where we thought we were. And so we don't know what to do.

So we should stop because we don't know where we are, what we're doing. Stop frozen. And then the more powerful negative emotions like pain, they might make you get out of there. So emotions forward, stop, reverse. That's your emotions within that motivated frame. So, and that's another example of how your mind is embedded in your body. You know, emotions are like they're, they're offshoots of action tendencies. That's, that's the right way to think about it. Because action is everything fundamentally.

So what are some basic motivations? Most of these are regulated by the hypothalamus, by the way. And that tells you just how important a control system it is. The other thing that's useful to know about the hypothalamus is that it has projections going up from it that are like tree trunks and inhibitory projections coming down that are like grape vines so you can kind of control your hypothalamus as long as it's not on too much but if it's on in any serious way it's like it it wins so partly what you do to stop yourself from falling under the dominion of your hypothalamus is to never, ever be anywhere where its action is necessary. Right?

You don't want to go into a biker bar because you might find yourself in a situation where panicked defensive aggression is immediately necessary. You probably don't want that. You don't want the panic. You don't want the terror. You don't want the frenzied fight. You don't want any of that. You don't want to have to run away in absolute panic. So you just don't want the frenzied fight. You don't want any of that. You don't want to have to run away in absolute panic. So you just don't go there.

And then a huge, a huge part of how we regulate our emotions is just by never going anywhere where we have to experience them. And so that has very little to do with internal inhibitory control and everything to do with staying where you belong. The myth of mental illness by Thomas Saz. S-Z-A-S-Z. It's a classic. You should read it. If you're interested in psychology, read it. It's a classic. And he basically said, most people have problems in living. They don't have psychological problems. And so I've experienced, despite my love for the psychoanalysts, very frequently what I'm doing as a therapist is helping people have a life that would work.

You know, and you can parameterize that. It's like, what do you need? How about some friends? That people kind of like that. How about an intimate relationship with someone that you can trust that maybe has a future? That'd be good. How about a career that puts you in a dominance hierarchy somewhere? So at least you've got some possibility

of rising, some possibility of stabilizing yourself and a schedule and a routine. Because no one can live without a routine. You just forget that if you guys don't have a routine, I would recommend you get one going because you cannot be mentally healthy have a routine, I would recommend you get one going because you cannot be mentally healthy without a routine. You need to pick a time to get up whatever time you want, but pick one and stick to it because otherwise you dysregulate your circadian rhythms and they regulate your mood and eat something in the morning.

I had lots of clients who've had anxiety disorders. I had one client who was literally starving. Very smart girl. There's very little that she liked. She kind of tried to subsist on like half a cup of rice a day. She came to me and said, I have no energy. I come home. All I want to do is watch the same movie over and over. Is that weird?

And I thought, well, it depends on how hard you work. It's a little weird, but whatever. It's familiar. You're looking for comfort. So I did an analysis of her diet. It's like three quarters of a cup of rice. It's like you're starving. Eat something. You'll feel better.

So she modified her diet and all her anxiety went away and she had some energy. It's like, yeah, you got to eat. So a schedule, that's a good thing, man. Your brain will thank you for it. It will stabilize your nervous system with a bit of a plan. That's a good thing. You need a career. You need something productive to do with your time.

You need to regulate your use of drugs and alcohol, most particularly alcohol, because that does in a lot of people. You need a family like the family you have, your parents and all that. Be nice. You all got along. You can work on that. That's a good thing to work on. And then you probably need children at some point. And that's life.

That's what life is. And if you're missing, you may have a good reason to not be operating on one of those dimensions. It's not mandatory. But I can tell you that if you're not operating reasonably well on four, I think I mentioned six, if you're not operating reasonably well on four, I think I mentioned six, if you're not operating reasonably well on at least three of them, there's no way you're going to be psychologically thriving.

And that's more pragmatic in some sense than psychological, right? Human beings have a nature. There's things we need. And if we have them, well, that's good. And if we don't have them, well, then we feel the lack. And so behaviorists, behavioral psychologists concentrate a lot more on that sort of thing. It's practical. Strategizing, make a career plan, figure out how to negotiate because that's bloody important.

Figure out how to say what you need. Figure out how to tell the truth to people. Figure out how to listen to your partner in particular, because if you listen to them, they will actually tell you what they want. And sometimes you can give it to them and maybe they'll return the favor. And if you practice that for like 15 years, well, then maybe you're constantly giving each other what you want. Well, hooray, that would be good. And then there's two of you under both circumstances.

And it's better to have two brains than one because people think differently because of their temperament mostly. And so the negotiation is where the wisdom arises. And it's part of the transformation, the psychological transformation, that's attendant on an intimate relationship. And one of the fundamental purposes of a long-term intimate relationship. Thanks for listening. Kindly support the movement of this podcast by supporting us or subscribing to our premium content for more exclusive stuff.

When you do so, you also get a shout out in our next episode. Thank you.