Motivation Daily by Motiversity - BECOME COMPETENT AND DANGEROUS - Best Motivational Speech (Jordan Peterson Motivation)

Episode Date: July 17, 2023

Jordan Peterson, a renowned professor of psychology, clinical psychologist, author, and popular figure on YouTube, reveals the importance of self-discipline, prioritizing meaning over happiness, and avoiding a life wasted."Do you want to be competent and dangerous, or do you want to be vague and useless?"― Jordan PetersonSpeakers:Jordan PetersonMusic:AudiojungleSoundstripe▶Subscribe for New Motivational Videos Every Week:http://bit.ly/MotivationVids▶DOWNLOAD our Top 100 Quotes of All Time:https://bit.ly/topquotesfreepdf▶JOIN our Newsletter for Exclusive Updates, Discounts, and Deals: https://bit.ly/Motiversitynewsletter▶READ our Weekly Blog -https://bit.ly/motiversityblog▶SHOP Official Motivational Canvases and Apparel -https://bit.ly/motiversityshop▶BECOME A MEMBER of our loyal community!https://bit.ly/motiversitymembers Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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The link is in the description. Your ambition, if you have any sense, is actually to become competent. Do you want to be competent and dangerous, or do you want to be vague and useless? It is definitely the case that there is no more exceptional form of the capacity to be dangerous than to be articulate. And so it's a moral endeavor in some real sense. to become articulate is to become the master of your own tongue. Every advantage comes with a disadvantage. So if you're extroverted, you're social and you're positive,

but you're impulsive, and you can tilt towards hedonism, and you can't stand being alone. No matter where you land in the temperamental landscape, you're going to have your associated faults and temptations. You've got a goal, and you'll see that as you progress towards the goal, there'll be obstacles that emerge, and some of them you don't want to confront. That's why it's useful to order your room. Chaotic room makes you anxious. Why? Too many pathways, man. People don't really repress the things they don't want to face. They just fail to unpack them. You want a horizon of ever-expanding possibility. 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. Beware of unintended consequences. It's like, oh, no, this thing will just do what I wanted to do and nothing else. It's like, no. Turns out that not only is what we want from each other,

the real thing, but that's also the adventure of your life. And so if you aren't truthful, and that means, unfortunately, especially at the beginning, when you start to be truthful, it means deeply coming to terms with your inadequacies in humility. So it's very painful. Without that, you don't have the adventure of your life. You have the role that you've acquiesced to. And that'll take all the meaning out of your life. It's good for you to go take your place in the world. Have some ambition. Have a vision. Have a goal. Have a strategy. Try to be a good person. Not because, it's your duty precisely because that's the proper way to live. You sit on the bed and say, okay, man, I'm ready to learn something.

What's one thing I'm doing wrong, that I know I'm doing wrong, that I could fix? You meditate on that? You'll get an answer. You grow in proportion to the weight you take on voluntarily, and it's also true that we have no idea what the upper limit to that is. It's from the uphill climb that we derive our value, and I mean this technically. So almost all the positive emotion we feel, especially the emotion that fills us with enthusiasm. And that's experienced in relationship to a goal. And so in some sense, you want a goal that you can never attain.

So you can always move closer to the goal that recedes as you move towards it. You think, well, that's frustrating. It's like Sisyphus pushing the rock uphill. But it's not because as you pursue that goal, you put yourself together and your life does get better and richer and more abundant. And that's why the highest levels of virtue and goal are in some sense transcendent. You want them to be above everything you're doing. So you can continually move towards something that's more sublime and better. That's what you are.

You're here to live, not to sleep. And the problem with the vision of Mai Tai's on the beach is that, well, first of all, that's a vision of drug-induced unconsciousness. Second, it's only going to work for about a week. Third, you're going to be a laughing stalk in a mottis on. and depressed and aimless and goalless. No, that's not, it's, you want a horizon of ever-expanding possibility. And so it does happen to people as they,

because they've staked their soul on the attainment of an instrumental goal. And it can be a pretty high order goal, but then you think, 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, you see the problem with that 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. People are afraid of the truth because often if you reveal it, it causes conflict in the moment. Telling the truth is definitely an adventure. Seeking for sure, but also telling. Another way of going about it is to just say what you think and see what happens. That's an adventure, because you don't know what the outcome is going to be.

So, look, there's this old idea that it's necessary to have faith in the truth. And so here's a way of thinking about that. Someone asks you a question, and you might think, well, here's the outcome I want, and so here's how I'm going to answer that question. So that's one way of approaching it. But another way of approaching it is, you ask me a question, I'm going to think about the answer, and I'm just going to tell you what I think. And it doesn't matter what the outcome is,

because I'm willing to see what the outcome will be, predicated on the idea that there isn't a better outcome than the one that truth produces. Even if it's harsh and terrible in the short term, and sometimes it is, it's like there isn't a better way of doing it. Now, you might say, well, how do you know that? And answer is, well, I don't know that. That's why it's an article of faith. Because I believe, and I believe this deeply, the being that you produce as a consequence of telling the truth is good by definition, even though it's harsh and often uncomfortable. Because you get in trouble. One of the things that I've really learned recently or learned to articulate better is that there's a very tight relationship between aspiration and responsibility.

The first question might be, do you need to aspire to something? And the answer is, well, yes, because you have to do something. If you just sit there, you'll die. You can't just sit there. You have to go act out in the world. Okay, so act towards what? Well, that's whatever your aspiration is. You have to have an aim.

Okay, well, what should the aim be? Well, it should be something worth doing, let's say. Why do something that you don't feel is worth doing? What do you think is worth doing? Well, if you watch other people and you judge when they're doing something worthwhile, usually judge them positively if you see that they're taking responsibility, at least for themselves. What do you want to be completely useless so other people have to take care of you?

That's pretty pathetic. And maybe you could get your act together so you're taking care of yourself and your family. And maybe you could even do better than that and take care of yourself and your family and your community. Well, good for you. That's responsibility and that's an aim. Well, here's one of the things that's cool about that is that your life doesn't have meaning without aspiration or an aim. Okay, so you need a hierarchy of values. There's got to be something at the top.

It's got to be something important. If you don't have that, your life doesn't have any meaning. So if you criticize the hierarchy or even the idea of hierarchy, you destroy the idea of aspiration. And then people have nothing. Well, that's not helpful. People are built for a struggle and they're built for a weight. And you want to take on a heavy burden voluntarily. See if you can put yourself together.

See what you can do out in the world while you're waiting to die. It's an all-in-game. It better be worthwhile. It took me a long time to understand that belief-regulated emotion. So what happens is that if you act out your identity, if you act out your beliefs in the world, and what you want doesn't happen, what happens is that your body defaults into emergency preparation for action.

And the reason for that is you've wandered too far away from the campfire, and now you're in the forest and maybe you're naked and so what do you do then and the answer is well you don't know what to do so what do you do when you don't want know what to do and the answer is you prepare to do everything and the problem with that is that it's unbelievably draining psychophysiologically like it hurts you and there's there's an immense physiological literature detailing the the cost of of exactly that kind of response people stay where what they do has the results they want. That's partly why you want to be around people who share your cultural presuppositions.

It's very hard on us not to be where we know that what we want is going to happen. We hate that. And no wonder there are varying degrees of that, obviously. You can really be where you don't know what's going to happen or you can only be there to some degree. But by and large, we're conservative creatures, even if we're liberal in temperament. We can't tolerate that much uncertainty. You might ask, well, why? And the answer is, well, because you can be hurt.

Pain, you can be damaged, you can become intolerably anxious, and you can die. So it's no wonder you're sensitive or very sensitive to negative emotion.