Daily Motivations - The Greatest Advice You Will Ever Receive

Episode Date: September 3, 2026

Jordan Peterson is a psychology professor at the University of Toronto, a widely cited scholar of personality, and the author of what’s currently the No. 1 best-selling nonfiction book on Amazon.CREDITS: Speaker Dr. Jordan B. PetersonInstagram- Daily_motivationsorgFacebook- @daily_motivationsorgSupport us PayPal

Your aim determines the manner in which the world lays itself out to you emotionally. Well, who cares about that? No one says that. The argument stops there because no one, especially no one who's been seriously hurt or seriously depressed, like in pain. No one ever says, oh, well, who cares about that? Because if you can say that about your pain, all that means is you actually haven't been in pain. Because if you're in enough pain, you will not say that. That's for sure.

So you need to know what to aim at. Now you aim at something, you got a goal, and then you see that you're making progress towards the goal. That's a good thing. That makes you happy. It actually, technically, there's a system, dopamine system, neurochemical system, and it tells you that you're moving forward in the manner that you should be according to the dictates of your plan. It doesn't necessarily tell you whether you have a good plan. That's a more complicated problem, because who knows if you have a good plan.

But one thing that you could know is that a plan is better than no plan. That's a really useful thing to know, especially if you're kind of drifting. It's like, well, I'm going to find myself. It's like, no, just pick something and move towards it. And as you move towards it, you're going to succeed and fail specifically. And then you're going to learn something about success specifically. And you're going to learn something about failure specifically. And then you can learn what you use to fix it.

your plan. So a stupid plan is way better than no plan. And you're likely to have a stupid plan, or at least to be able to make one. So that's good news for everybody. You can make a stupid plan. And so I would say, make a stupid plan. And then implement it. Not any stupider that it has to be. You know, you could think about it a little bit, but then implement it. And have your successes and failures along the way and learn from them. And then you can rejig the goal. You can move the target. That's fine. That's part of the game. It doesn't have to be fixed. It's a movable target.

And maybe what you're trying to do is to move the target to an ever better place. And you're trying to move the target towards something like an ultimate ideal. You're trying to find out what that ultimate ideal is. And part of the way you figure that out is by moving towards a target and by learning about success and failure along the way, because then you can inform yourself with regards to what might constitute a reasonable aim. And so that's the reason to go out in the world and make some mistakes, you know? and then you're going to, it's okay to make the mistakes.

It's not so okay not to learn from them, because then you make the mistakes again. That seems pointless. You could tell much about a man's character by how much truth he could tolerate, which is very interesting. You know, there's an idea in the great Western tradition that the truth is the way and the path of life,

and that no one comes to the farther except through the truth. And I believe that to be the case because I don't think that you can manifest who you are without the truth. And so I think it's literally and metaphorically truth that the pathway to who you could be if you were completely who you were is through the truth. And so the truth does set you free, but the problem is that it destroys everything that isn't worthy in you as it sets you free. and that's a process of burning. And it's painful because you cling to what you shouldn't be, partly out of pride and partly out of ignorance and partly out of laziness.

And so then you encounter something true, and you all know this, you all know this perfectly well, because when was the last time that you learned something important that wasn't a blow of some sort? You know, and it's often you look back at your life, and you think, oh, God, I really really. learned something there. I wouldn't want to do that again, but it really changed my life. I mean, sometimes it can really destroy you, you know, an encounter with the truth, and you never really

recover. But now and then something comes along and straightens you out, and a lot of you has to go, a lot of you has to burn away, you know, and I suppose in some sense the idea is that everything about you that isn't worthy is to be put into the flames. And that's another reason to be not so casual about claiming what you believe because it isn't something that you undertake without due caution. So there are deep reasons for how you perceive things and why. And perception is very, very tightly related to action, to movement forward, and to emotion. And those things are very important to know. They're very tightly associated. So for example, you live in a map, let's say, or a story. And the story is, wherever I am isn't as good as it could be, and so I'm going to go somewhere that's somewhat better.

And, you know, that can be of different timeframes. Maybe you've got a plan for the next minute. You know, you're hungry, and so you want to go somewhere to eat, or maybe it could be for the next hour, or the next week, or the next day, or the next year, whatever. But basically, what you're trying to do is take where you are, point A, and make it better, point B. And so you're always somewhere that isn't quite as good as it should be, and you're always going somewhere that's something. somewhat better. At least that's the hope. Unless things have gone wrong, you know, when you feel God, it's nothing but downhill from here on in. And that's not good. You don't want that. That's a pathological condition.

So, and it's kind of unfortunate in some sense, because it means you can't be satisfied with what you've got. But how the hell can you be satisfied with what you've got? Because you've got problems coming your way. You know, I mean, even if everything's okay right now, which it probably isn't, But even if it was, that doesn't mean everything's going to be okay tomorrow or next week or next year or five years from now, right? You've got the future to take care of and your future self and you've got your family to take care of and maybe you've got your community to take care of. So you've got some problems. And so the way things are isn't good enough.

And so you're going to fix them a bit. And so then you fix them across different levels of resolution. And you do this technically in this manner. So you identify where you are. One thing you might think about is if you're mixed up, one of the problems you might have is that you don't know where you are. Lots of times people have to go to therapy or talk for a long time to someone to find out where they are, because your experience might have scattered you everywhere. And you feel that you've come apart at the seams, right?

The things have fallen apart around you, that you're in chaos. You don't know where you are. And so then you're in trouble because how the hell are you going to plot a course forward into the first? future if you don't know where you are and so maybe you have to bring yourself up to date the proper route forward for the redemption of the individual and for mankind as a whole is as a consequence of the redemption of each individual and i truly believe that and i believe that that occurs as a consequence of adherence to the truth and courage in the face of being that's rule one right to stand up straight with your shoulders back is to take on the

the onslaught and to enter the contentious ring and to do your to do and to do more than your best because your best isn't enough because your best isn't as good as you could be you have to push yourself past that and and that's as far as I can tell where you find what you need in life you find the meaning that sustains you in life and you find the patterns of action that redeem the world both at the same time you mean life is a very different business you know it's it's fatal and it's full of suffering and it's and it's full of betrayal and malevolence there's nothing about it that's trivial it's all profound and in order to find your way through all of that that that capacity for

hellish experience let's say you need to develop a relationship with something that's profound and you can. You have that capacity and what could be more profound than the truth and what would you rather have on your side? And you might say well that's obvious and of course everyone should do that and then you need to know why you don't and the answer is well the burns are still healing. It's like well you know there's no shortage of deadwood to burn off and and there's no shortage of pain when the dead wood burns off and that's what makes people afraid of the truth and so what's the decision that you make you decide to believe you know it's a risk an existential risk it's an active faith you

believe that the truth can set you free you believe that people have an intrinsic divinity about their soul you decide that you're going to live in that manner and that you're going to let everything about yourself that isn't worthy of that goal, die. And that might be almost everything that you are. Say you've got a three-year-old kid, and their room is chaos, right? Monsters are going to be coming out under the bed in no time flat, unless that thing, room gets some order in it.

And so you tell the kid, clean up the room. You know, it's a mess. And you leave and you come back, and the kid's like throwing Legos everywhere. They're not cleaning up. And then you think, that's a bad kid. That's a bad theory, eh? Because if you want to have a good fight with someone and destroy them, then that's what you do. You don't bother with the subtleties down here. You just go right for the jugular. It's like you're a bad, stupid kid. You've always been that way. You're hopeless. There's not a chance of teaching you anything. Right? And we can, that way you can nail the past, the present, and the future, all of the same insult. You've always been a terrible person. There's no teaching you, and your future's going to be exactly the same way. Then the only thing the person can do, If you do that to them, is hit you. Because that's it.

There's no coming back from that. You've boxed them completely in. So if you want to have a really unproductive argument, you go right for this. Past, present and future, you're not a good person. Demolish their entire conceptual structure and expose them completely naked to chaos. It's like, great, you won the argument.

It's a minor bit of chaos, because that's what happens when your perceptual set, the structure that you're using to organize the world, The plan through which you're viewing the complexity of the world reveals an inadequacy. Then that destabilizes your emotions. You need to be going somewhere and there needs to be a pathway in order for you to feel good. The other thing to know is that if that plan is untenable or becomes destabilized, then what happens is you become flooded with negative emotion.

Frustration, disappointment, anger, primarily anxiety. But all of those things sort of things sort of, sort of, of intermingled. Anger maybe because you have to fight your way through the obstacle. Frustration because maybe you have to make a new plan. Disappointment because you put a bunch of work into the damn plan and it didn't work out. Anxiety because now there's too many choices in front of you. And so people don't like to have their plans disrupted. And the reason for that is that their plans are directly associated with their emotional perception of the world. Well why? Because it's annoying to have your plans change. It

disrupts the structure that you use to destabilize your perceptions of the world and it throws you momentarily into a state of chaos I think what happens when you go deep and understanding so that you could stop it because if you if you understand a problem maybe you can solve it you know and at least in part I came to believe that the problem was as Solzhenitsyn said that the problem is is that the line between good and evil runs down every human heart. And I was reading Jung at the same time, you know, and he believed that the human soul was a tree

whose roots grew all the way to hell, and believed also that in the full investigation of the shadow, which was the dark side of the human psyche, was that it was bottomless, essentially, that it was like an experience of hell. And that also struck me as true. and that the way to stop those sorts of things from happening was to stop yourself from being the sort of person who would do it,

who would even start to do it. Because the other thing you learn, when you learn about atrocities of that sort, for me it was a matter of understanding that the way to stop such things from happening, the way to remember properly, is to understand that you could do, do it, that you could do those terrible things because the people who did them were like you.

And that the way out of that is to stop being like that. And the way you stop being like that is by stopping to tell yourself lies that you don't believe in and that you know you shouldn't act out. If you're obsessed by memories of the past, more than 18 months old, and most of those are negative, so anxiety-provoking most often, then there's a lot of you that's stuck in the past. And what that means is you didn't map the territory well enough, and the parts of your brain that are alarm systems, anxiety systems, are saying, no, no, there's holes in the way you're looking at the world.

There's holes in the way that you're looking in the world. And you fell in them once, and you don't know where they are, and you don't know how to fill them, and you don't know how to walk around them. And so you can't forget them. You can't forget them. You can't forget them. So you have recurring nightmares, for example, or a good example of that sort of thing happening.

But in any case, if you have memories like that, you remember them, they make you feel anxious and negative. You're stuck back there. Your body is still reacting as if there's an emergency that could happen again that you haven't fixed. It doesn't matter if it was your fault. That's irrelevant because the alarm system doesn't care. Like, when your smoke detector goes off,

It isn't relevant whether it was your fault. The smoke detector just says, house is on fire. And that's a bad thing. And your anxiety systems are like that. If they're tagging old memories with anxiety, then you have to do something about it. Or you will be tortured by those memories forever, because that's how the alarm system works.

And so maybe you need to go back there and clean things up. You've got to figure out, okay, well, how did this happen? What sort of role did I play? Even if it's a minor role, that doesn't matter, Because the point is that you don't want to be put in the same vulnerable position again. So anything you can do to strengthen yourself is good. You know, and often if it's a really old memory, like maybe you were a child, you're not a child now.

So you probably have a variety of techniques at hand that you could use to deal with a situation like that if it came up now. And so you have to update that part of your brain that still thinks you're for. And lots of people have parts of them that are still stuck in some traumatic childhood experience. Here's a real powerful technique that you might want to think about, man, because this is worth knowing. Often when you have a family member or someone that you're interacting with, and they make a mistake, then you call them out on their mistake. And it's pretty obvious when they make a mistake, eh, because you're going along on a pathway together, and then there's a divergence from the pathway, and you notice that, that's negative emotion,

and you say, you know, what the hell, what's going on? What you don't notice is all of the way, this is all the time you're spending walking forward when it's going real well. And the reason for that is what's going real well. So you mostly ignore it. But that's not so good. You got to wise up. So like if you're dealing with people in your own life or yourself, for that matter,

and you notice that the person that you're with or are has done something that you would like to see repeated. Perhaps many times. You might want to point it out. Say look, you know, I just saw you do this thing and I'm really happy about that. You did a great job. I'm really happy about that A little more of that would be wonderful and just leave it be and people are very thrilled about that because they're And this is especially true of kids is there they are looking for positive attention. They're looking for attention Period. That's their currency. They'll take negative attention if they can't get positive attention They really want positive attention and what they really want is for someone to watch them

and notice when they do something that makes them a good person, and then have that pointed out. It's like, good work, kid, way to be. I saw what you did. Here's what it was. Good job. I'm sure you could do a bunch more of that. Then they're just like, they're just thrilled that their action,

their small child action was important enough to draw your focused attention toward. That makes them glow. And the probability that that will help them come. continue to act in those ways is extremely, extremely powerful. The other thing you can also notice is, well, when are you doing things that make you feel really awful? By your own standards. It's like, oh, look, I just did something.

I had some interaction with someone. Now I feel awful. It's like, well, maybe you could not do that, whatever it was. You might have to think it through. What were the routines that constituted that ill-advised set of actions? And maybe you're going to have to think really deeply about it, you know, because God only knows how much of your personality structure is involved in that error. But if it made you wretched, it made you feel like life wasn't worth living, then that might be a hint that that that wasn't a good thing to do.

And so then maybe you could start doing more of the things that make you engaged and less of the things that make you hate life. And that's worthy of practice, let's say. You might think about that as a fundamental ethical requirement. or I would say it's a fundamental form of religious meditation. That's a better way of thinking about it. And so then you're on the path. That's the straight and narrow path. It's like, I'm moving forward.

I've got name. I'm moving forward. As I move forward, I'm engaged. It's bloody well worth walking down this pathway. And, you know, on the left of me is terror and horror and hell and pain, and I'm avoiding that. And to the right of me, perhaps, is ego and arrogance and the things that can get out of control with regards to positive emotion. but I've got that balance right. I'm on the right pathway.

Teach them to stand up and speak for themselves. That would be good. You can teach a child to stand up pretty convincingly and say something intelligent in about 15 minutes if you do it carefully. And it almost never happens in school. It's really quite appalling. So that's another thing you can do for your kids is get them to stand up and say something. And, you know, not like this.

We're talking to the floor and bear it. able to hear, you know, so that people have to strain and strive to hear them, but to stand up and to say something. And you can tell them, well, stand up a little more, you know? Put your shoulders back a little more. A little more volume so I can hear you. It can be a little game. God, they learn that so fast, you can hardly believe it. And I don't know why they're not taught that. I think because people are afraid of competence. And so they're afraid to teach kids to be competent and so we don't and they kind of have to learn it on their own and that's unfortunate let's say we have our set points for negative emotion so so there's neuroticism trait some people will be a lot

more nervous about a small level anomaly than others and maybe they'll go to the hospital first and they won't die and then or maybe they'll be freaking out all the time and there'll be a hypochondriac right so there's pros and cons about being nervous like that other person's very emotionally stable they don't worry about much, they think adds nothing, and then, you know, by the time they get to the hospital, it's too late. Another part is, your position in the hierarchy. You know, so the issue is, how safe are you in life? And the answer is, who knows? But one of the way you guess is, well, are you good at things?

You know, because if you're good at things, and a problem comes up, you can probably solve it. And then you might think, well, how do you know if you're good at things? And one answer might be, well, other people think you're good at things. Because you're really kind of comparing yourself to other people when you're thinking about whether or not you're good at things And so if it turns out that you're in a hierarchy and you're fairly high in the hierarchy Indicating a certain degree of competence then your nervous system under the control of the serotonin system dampens down your negative emotion It says look, you know all things considered you're probably pretty safe and that's nice

But it also means you don't like having your position in the dominance hierarchy challenged at all Because if you get tossed down the hierarchy, let's say you get fired. It makes you defeated. And then all of a sudden you're way more susceptible to negative emotion. And who wants that? Put your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. Well, so what's the idea? It's like, well, if the world isn't up to your standards, let's say.

First of all, you might ask yourself about that to begin with. It's like, the world isn't up to your standards. Really? And that's the world's problem somehow. It's not more likely that it's given that you're talking about the world here. It's not more likely that there's some chance that it's your problem. And that if you put yourself right, then the world wouldn't appear to be a problem. You know, knowing that your emotional reactions are dependent on your aim.

And that that's actually technically true. Does immediately open up the question. Hey, man, if things aren't laying themselves in front of you, out in front of you, the way that is necessary for you to live a full and engaged life and not be cynical and bitter and twisted and cruel and vengeful and disappointed in all of that, it's just possible that you're not aiming at the right thing. And man, that is a question. That is a question worth asking.

Well, it's the question people do ask. It's like, well, what's the purpose of life? Well, it's the same question. What should I aim at? Those are the same questions. And, you know, if what you're aiming at is producing nothing but unrequited misery for you and everyone else, and it's a downhill bloody spiral into something approximating hell, then there is some possibility that you should think that perhaps your aim is off. So, and I don't want to overplay my hand on that either, too, because I know perfectly well that, you know, if you're suffering, if you're depressed, if you're miserable,

It might be a consequence of really bad luck. You know, like people get sick and good people get sick, right? Everyone knows that. You know, good people, they get sick and they die. And so you can't say, well, if you're miserable and sick, it's because there's something, you know, bad about you. Because then that would be the case for everyone. Always, whenever they get ill, and you could just blame ill people.

It's like, well, it serves you right that you're sick because you're a bad person. It happens a lot, actually, with ill people, you know, and it's an unfortunate thing. So I know there's an element of chance to all this. And I don't want to downplay that. You know, we are, we're blowing hither and thither by events that are somewhat beyond our control. But that's still not the point. The point is that to a large degree, you can determine the manner in which the world manifests itself to you by changing your aim. You know, I learned when I was a kid, about 25 or so, a little older than a kid, that almost everything that I said was,

one form of lie or another. And I wasn't any worse, I would say, than the people that I was associating with, or any better. And the lies were manifold. They were attempts to win arguments for the sake of winning the argument. That might be one. Attempts to indicate my intellectual prowess when there were competitions of that sort. Maybe just the sheer pleasure of engaging. in an intellectual argument and winning.

My inability to distinguish between ideas that I had read and incorporated because I had read but hadn't realized that I hadn't yet earned the right to use all of that. And, you know, I had this experience that lasted a long time. Well, I would say it's really never gone away. That, and I think this was the awakening of my conscience, essentially. This voice, for lack of a bit of a bit of,

word made itself manifest inside me and it said every time I said something that wasn't true and that's usually what it said that's not true you don't believe that or or there was a sensation that was associated with it you have might wonder about whether or not you should be engaged in life and then if all of a sudden you're doing something and because you're doing it you get engaged in life, then it seems like that might be the very definition of a good thing. It's evidence. The engagement is evidence that you're actually doing a good thing, a worthwhile thing in life with all its suffering and misery and brutality. It's like you've got a pathway, you've got an aim, you're moving forward, you're engaged.

Excellent. Your nervous system, very deep down. This dopaminergic system. It's associated with a part of the brain called the hypothalamus. It's a really, really old part of the brain. It's not some new thing that popped up like 15,000 years ago. It's ancient. It's there to orient you in the world. And so if it's saying, hey, man, you're on the right track, it's like, that's worth noticing. Now, you can criticize it out of existence.

You can question your aim continually. It's one of the, what would you call it, dangers of our capacity to abstract. But, you know, if you're a smart person who doubts, you also might be smart enough now and then to doubt your doubt. And just to notice and to pay attention. And it's something I explained to my clinical clients and my students often. It's like if you're trying to put your life together, watch yourself for a couple of weeks. Like you don't know who you are.

Because if your life isn't together, you don't know who you are. So just watch yourself like you don't know who you are. And notice now and then if you're engaged in something. You know, and you kind of have to wake up because if you're engaged in it, you don't quite notice. right because you're engaged in it but afterwards you might think oh i just spent an hour and i didn't notice that it was an hour i was in it that's good you're in the right place at the right time doing the right thing there's something about that that's right and maybe like you're not in good shape and that happened to you like 15 minutes once in two weeks it's like that's pretty dismal and the rest of the

time it was wretched it's like okay fine well maybe in the next two weeks you see if you can do it for half an hour, and then maybe for 45 minutes, and then maybe for an hour, right? You can start practicing being in that place. That's a very useful thing to learn. It's like, oh, look, I'm interested in what I'm doing. I'm engaged in it. Now, how did I get here? Where am I exactly? And how did I get here? And how could I stay here? How could I be here more often? Those are all questions you have to ask yourself. Well, that's the beginning of philosophy as well. And you think, well, why bother? And the answer is, well, you want to be engaged in your life? Well, why would you? Well, it's positive.

It's analgesic. It fights off pain. Quels anxiety. It gives you purpose. It's good for you. Practically speaking, generally speaking, if you have an aim and you're moving forward, you're moving forward to something that's psychologically valuable, but also practically valuable.