Daily Motivations - The Art of Suffering

Episode Date: August 6, 2026

To  grow, you must suffer. To become who you are meant to be, you must understand the art of suffering. In this powerful motivational video, Jordan Peterson speaks on the importance of suffering and how it will ultimately lead you to the person you were destined to be. Special Thanks to: Diary of a CEO: Instagram- Daily_motivationsorgFacebook- @daily_motivationsorgSupport us PayPal

Life isn't fair, is it? Doesn't appear to be very fair? Because, I mean, this is how your story ended in that regard. I don't know if an adventure is fair. I don't even know if that's what we want. What are we built for? We're built for maximal challenge. And that isn't the way we view ourselves in the modern world.

We view ourselves as built for pleasure. We view ourselves as built for consumption or for safety or for maybe for egotistical self-aggrandizement and fame. Those are, look, many, all of those things are better than their absence, let's say. What are we built for? I think we're built for maximal challenge. Well, humility is starting where you are. That's what humility is.

And it's annoying because, you know, like if your life is a mess, then you have to see that you're the person in that mess. And then you have to understand that your first attempt to redress the mess might not be something you're particularly proud of, you know? I mean, I saw this lots in my clinical practice where people would, the first steps they had to take to put things in order were pretty embarrassing. It's like, really, that's all I can do? Hey, man.

uphill is better than downhill. And, okay, so it lays out a view of the world. Progress, regression. So even if you have to start small, you accrue success exponentially. You accrue defeat exponentially too. That's the abyss that is hell. You start going downhill.

You go downhill faster and faster. Start going uphill. You go uphill faster and faster. So even if you have to start small or even painfully small, which is highly probable, especially if you're trying to tackle something that's really plagued you, doesn't really matter. What is self-belief in this context? Because people, so many people are in search of two words, I guess three words, but self-belief and confidence. Yeah.

And in this context of that small task, how is that building my self-belief or confidence? Yeah. Well, because you watch yourself do it. And that does what to me? Well, look, if you see someone, a friend, who is continually incrementally improving, you're going to, oh, that's admirable. Well, you see the same thing in yourself. You have to develop an opinion of yourself the same way you would develop an opinion of someone else. So now, and I'm not hypothesizing about this, by the way.

We know this clinically. If I want to truly help you build your confidence, rather than merely readjusting the words you say about yourself, which would be something like self-esteem, which is something that doesn't even exist, by the way. It's just a pathological concept altogether. You want confidence, okay? More to the point. You want the confidence that's based in competence. Otherwise, it's narcissistic. Okay, so how do you develop that?

Well, you watch yourself exceed your limits. And then you think, oh, look at that. There's something in me that can exceed my limits. That's your true self. That's a good way of thinking about it. And in doing so, you actually realize that limits exist and you've imposed one on yourself in the first place. Well, that's one of the things you can realize, certainly.

That also you don't exactly know where the limits are. It's like, oh, I exceeded that. It's like, okay, well, now what? What's the upward arc of exceeding limits? that's Jacob's ladder. I would say, this is the promise of the kingdom of God. That's one way of thinking about it. There's no upward limit.

We're built to walk uphill. And when you reach the pinnacle of the hill, you want to stop and appreciate the vision, but the next thing you want is a higher hill in the distance, because it's the uphill climb that it's from the uphill climb that we derive our value. And I mean this technically. So almost all the positive emotion we feel, feel, especially the emotion that fills us with enthusiasm, and that's to be filled with the spirit

of God, by the way, because that's what enthusiasm means. That's experienced in relationship to a goal. You want a goal that you can never attain. You want a horizon of ever expanding possibility. And so it does happen to people, because they've staked their soul on the attainment of an instrumental goal. And it can be a pretty high order goal. It was in your case. But then you think, well, now I'm there. Now what? Well, the answer can't be, well, I'm going to live in the lap of luxury and never have to leave the fate. What do you want to be? A giant infant with a gold, with a gold bottle? You never have to do anything but lay in your back and suck.

It's like, well, you see the problem with that as a, as a conceptualization. It's no, you want to be like an active warrior moving uphill with your sword in hand. And that's dynamic, that's exciting. That's why so many young men disappear into video games. That's all acted out in the video game. So I have to act that out in their own life. Not that I despise video games because I don't, but they're not a substitute for life.

We kind of experienced life as if we're tossed into it, thrown into it. You know, you're male and not female. You're Hindu and not Christian. You're tall and not short. You have an arbitrary range of talents and an arbitrary range of limitations, none of which in some sense you chose. It's the cards you're dealt. Now, some of those are cards of privilege.

Now, maybe you're born intelligent. Maybe you're born symmetrical. Maybe you're born healthy. Maybe you're born into a culture where it's much easier not to be absolutely deprived. Maybe your parents are rich. And so all of that in some sense is unearned. The way you pay for your privilege is with your virtue. I mean that most particularly.

You have these opportunities and this existential guilt. And the way you expiate that and atone is by doing your best to live the best possible life you can manage, to speak the truth, to treat people with respect, to abide by the principles of the dignity of the individual, and to put your house in order. And that's how you pay for your unearned privilege. All of us. And we all have our privileges and our, and our curses, you know. All of us have that.

That's why it's not useful to be envious of people. You know, you see some, you're a young man, you see someone drive by in a Ferrari with a blonde. And you think, my God, he's got everything. And, you know, the woman in the car is a prostitute who's got a cocaine addiction. And her life is just one catastrophe after another. And he's had to lie and cheat his way into this position. and he's afraid that everything's going to come crashing down on him, and that's what you're jealous of.

And it's just not that profound. You don't want someone else's fate. Man, your fate's enough, and your adventure's enough. It's plenty. It's more than you can ever fully realize. And so that's also part of the reason that we all believe that the individual has some intrinsic dignity. Don't be so sure that your position and your room is so damn trivial.

It might be your attitude towards. it's trivial. And if you're in dire straits and dire circumstances, just look at how much opportunity you have to make things better. So not that it's easy. You don't even want it to be easy. Well, you need to contemplate your own malevolence because that helps you understand who you are and who you could be. And you could be something absolutely brutal and terrible. So you need to contemplate your own malevolence so that you understand who you are. And that means you have to contemplate malevolence as such because you're not only who you are, you're who you could be for better or worse. And I actually think it's, I think it's a lot easier to start to understand

who you could be if you were better, if you deeply understand who you could be if you were worse and who you might be to the degree that you're blind to that worse presently. So you think, oh my God, I could be that malevolent, a force for ill. That's horrible, but highly compelling and given my understanding of my own character. I'm way deeper on the negative end than I thought, much more closely aligned with the forces of hell than I presumed. That's easy to swallow factually, right? You think, yeah, there's evidence for that.

It's not so easy to swallow emotionally. It's a bitter pill, to say the least. And so I don't think that you can contemplate the good without contemplating the evil first. I don't think it has the depth. You know, they say that fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. It's something like that necessary fear. It's like, well, I don't want to be a monster.

Okay, well, how much of a monster are you? I'm as monstrous as I have been, so that's on me, conscience-wise. But I'm also the same being that's been as monstrous as any being throughout history. Nothing human is foreign to me. Lots of my clients, my clinical clients, are too agreeable. And they're generally women because women are more agreeable than men, But not always, because I've had agreeable men as clients as well. And what happens is they're resentful and they don't know how to stand up for themselves.

And it's because they're very compassionate by nature. And so if you're entering into a negotiation with them, they'll let you win. Well, that's not so good because, you know, you need to win too. Especially if you're in an organization of adults where there's a struggle, right? When you have kids, you can let them win, especially infants. You're like, you have to let them win. And that's partly why compassion is so necessary. But as a basis for negotiation between adults, it's like, sorry, it's insufficient.

You have to be a bit of a monster so that you can say, no, well, let's toughen you up. You know, let's put you in a position where you can bargain. Let's teach you how to assert yourself and stand up for yourself. And that's assertiveness training. And it's a huge chunk of psychotherapy. And you need to learn it. It's like because part of how you regulate your interactions, with other people is to negotiate and you cannot negotiate unless you can say no you can't do it and it

causes conflict to say no and if you don't like conflict which is basically the definition of being agreeable then you can't tolerate the conflict and so then you can't negotiate on your own behalf and so then you keep losing and you're bullied and you know it's it's not good then you get resentful and it's really not good so you have to develop your inner monster a little bit and and and and And then that makes you a better person, not a worse person. It's weird. It's weird. But that's just how it is.

If you've been victimized, you're naive and you've been victimized. The way out of that is to no longer be naive and to no longer be victimized. And that means that you see this reflected in the Harry Potter idea, for example, that the reason that Harry Potter can withstand Voldemort is because he's got a piece of him. He's been touched by it. The way that you keep the psychopaths at bay is to develop the inner psychopaths so that you know one when you see one. Right. And then, but that's a voluntary thing. So it's like a set of tools that you have at your disposal, which is full knowledge of evil.

There's this old idea that if you look into the darkness enough, you'll find something that compensates for it, right? And that emerges out of the darkness that's greater and more powerful than the darkness. and that part of looking into the dark side of you yourself is you find the power that enables you to deal with mortality. If they've been coddled and their ambition has been squelched and everything about them that's aggressive has been shamed out of existence, that's part of that attraction of that dark fantasy, right? And then they see that aggression manifesting itself and in a creative form. It's not surprising that they're going to try to imitate that. It's part of that desire to bring that shadow out of the shadows and into the light.

There's two pathways to the development of the shadow, and they're tightly allied with one another. The fundamental pathway is truth, and that's to face the bitter truth about yourself. But to break that down more particularly, you might think about that as the capacity to observe your own resentment. You're going to be resentful and bitter in many situations because you don't get what you want. And if you watch that resentment and bitterness, you'll see that it produces fantasies that can be unbelievably dark. And that can be very frightening. And you might not want to admit to yourself that you're actually capable of having fantasies like that or impulses like that or aggressive feelings like that. But the thing is, is that if those aggressive feelings and impulses and fantasies are integrated into your character,

it's like you're opening up a dialogue with a part of yourself that can be very forceful and strong and dangerous. And it's really useful to be dangerous because if you can be dangerous, you often don't have. have to be. You know, or you're oppressing yourself, then you got to notice that you're feeling oppressed. Then you have to notice that you're feeling resentful and angry and bitter. And then you have to decide what it is that you need to do in order to remove from yourself that bitterness. And that's usually means that there's something that you have to say. And then you have to say it because your soul depends on it. And not only does your soul depend on it, I would say the fate of the world depends on it. Because, you know, you might be wrong. And then you should be

straightened out, maybe you're just being whiny and you have to talk to somebody about that, but it may be that you're actually detecting something wrong, some tyranny that's directed towards you and other people, and it's like your moral obligation to speak up about it. And so many workplaces become toxic to use a terrible cliche because the people in them won't speak up for what they actually want, or they speak up too late and then they're all twisted up about it and, you know, they're torturing other people because they're so unhappy and so forth and so on. So practical approach for developing your shadow fundamentally is radical honesty.