Motivation Daily by Motiversity - TO GROW YOU MUST SUFFER - Best Jordan Peterson Motivational Speech

Episode Date: June 15, 2026

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Life is so difficult and challenging that unless you give it everything you have, the chances are very high that it will embitter you, and then you'll be a force for darkness and not good. You know, the fact that life is short and can be brutal, can terrify you into hiding and avoiding, you can flip that on its head and understand that since you're all in anyways, You might as well take the risks that are adventurous. It's a pain to start at the bottom, but you start at the bottom where you're weak. And if you want to rectify what's weak, you have to accept the fact that you're at the bottom

and that the first steps are going to be painful. 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, 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, 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 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. If you're going to rectify your weaknesses,

you have to admit your insufficiency to your own shame. Now, if the gap between you and your ideal is so great that it paralyzes you, you shrink that. If you hide and you don't let what's inside of you out and you don't bring into the world what you could bring and you become cynical and bitter, you will start doing very dark things. Not only will you not add to the world what you could add, but you'll start being jealous of people who are competent and doing well and work to destroy them. So that's the pathway to hell, really. People can have very, very difficult situations, can be in very, very difficult situations. And it's in those difficult situations where the search for gratitude becomes something that is by necessity deeper and more difficult.

But that doesn't mean it's not appropriate. There is a very tight association between loving your enemy and being grateful in spite of the terrible things that occur in your life. You are morally required to maintain faith, to aim up, and to treat other people the way you would want to be treated, no matter what's happened to you. You aren't necessarily the best judge of what you need. You need something extremely valuable that you can move towards. And it's easy to be diluted in what you want. And that's the sort of delusions that people chase if they chase power. if you decide instead that you're going to just say what you believe to be true, you have to let go of the consequences.

And you might think, well, I don't want to let go of the consequences because I want to control what's going on. But what you miss then is adventure, because if you don't control what's going on, you don't know what the hell's going to happen. The proper comparison group for you is you yesterday. You're the only control group that's appropriate to you because you have, a certain set of talents and possibilities and limitations and tragedies that are truly unique to you. And so you might be comparing yourself to someone else on some dimension, but it's not a reasonable comparison because you don't know what talents they were blessed with, and you also don't know what opportunities they had that you didn't, etc. It's just not a reasonable comparison. It's a lot

better to think about who you were and then to think, well, could you be somewhat better in some dimension. And the positive thing about that is the answer is almost always yes. If you're comparing yourself to someone or even to a future self and the gap is so painful that it paralyzes you, then you've created a dragon that you don't have the tools to master. And so what you have to do is you have to scale the dragon down to size. And you want to scale the dragon down to size until it's a size that you are willing to move toward, however small that is. Now, you know, if you're here and your ideal is here and that gap is

unbearable, then you reduce the gap and you reduce the gap. And you're going to have to do that anyways because you're not going to move from where you are to perfect in one fell swoop, right? There's going to be incremental steps. So you have to fill in that hierarchy of progression with a high enough resolution representation so that you can start to move forward. Because you want to discover where you're insufficient. Now it's painful. You know, it's painful to encounter an impediment in the form of someone else's opinion that might show you where you're blind and ignorant or willfully blind even. But the advantage to that is you can rectify the error and then as you move forward, you're stronger. You should always ask a stupid question. And that doesn't mean the

sort of question that someone who wasn't paying attention would ask. If you're listening to someone and you don't understand what they're saying and you reveal that, you're revealing your ignorance, you know, and maybe you're in a room full of people and you think you're the only person stupid enough to not get it, which is very rarely the case, by the way. The thing is, though, if you reveal that ignorance to yourself and to the other person, they can rectify it. And if you do that a thousand times, you're not ignorant anymore. If you ask a thousand dumb questions and you listen to the answer, then you know a thousand things, some of them deep that you didn't know before. That's the advantage to searching your soul for unrequited sins and attempting to atone.

That's not a delusion, right? It's an attempt to set yourself right. One of the things that I think I see people respond to this degree of pressure when they think about what is going to happen a long term, I have discomfort that is in front of me now, that I need to face that I need to go through if I'm going to get to something in the future that I think that I'm supposed to do. And one of the solutions that they come up with, which isn't a solution, but it kind of is to them, is I'm not going to do anything. Yeah. You know, that no decision is kind of the same as a neutral choice. One of my friends Alex has got this quote, which I love, and he says, the heaviest things in life aren't iron and gold, but unmade decisions. The reason you are stressed is that you have decisions to make

and you're not making them. There's no indecision because you age. Like you pay for your indecision. It's a decision. It's a decision to avoid fundamentally. The people who are using fear to garner power point to the various apocalypses that might befall us. And it's difficult to counter them

because the future is always an apocalyptic horizon. and everything can fall apart and has before and might well again and will in fact in your life as you age and die. And so it's very easy to conjure up an apocalypse. Then the question becomes not, is that apocalypse potentially real? Because the answer to that is yes, but what attitude should you have towards that? Naive, that's not good. Cynical, that's better, but it's still not good. It's another form of hell.

and it also tends to make the potential apocalypse is more likely. Well, so what do you have when you move beyond cynicism? And what you have when you move beyond cynicism is wisdom. And that's not naive. It's courageous. Well, one of the really difficult things to learn when you're down and out is how far you're down. Because it's humiliating. You know, I was ill recently, and when I started to recover, I couldn't really button my shirts. I had to learn to do that again.

I'd forgotten how to put my hands on keyboard. I didn't know where to put my hands. I had to learn to type again. Now, I hadn't lost all the knowledge and it came back quite quickly. And the reason I'm saying that is because one of the impediments to people who've really taken a blow in their life

is that things have fallen apart around them so badly that where they have to start is humiliating even to consider the rule. It's a pretty straightforward rule. when you want to get back on your feet, and the rule is you have to make the task small enough so that you'll do it, no matter how small that is. You know, and that can, I've worked with people.

I mean, one of the things I've become well known for is my advice to start by cleaning up your room, but I had plenty of clients who couldn't, they couldn't go home and clean up their room. They hadn't cleaned up their room for like 20 years, for all sorts of reasons, Maybe because every time they did try to do anything positive in their family, no matter what it was, they were immediately punished and undermined. And so in a situation like that, you cut it down so that maybe the first thing they do is clean up like maybe they look inside one drawer and see the mess that's there and just look at it for a minute and think about how they might reorganize it if they were going to.

when people are very down and out and they decide to make a move forward, in some ways they're facing the whole panoply of problems that confront them in the guise of that single problem. Right? It's all lurking behind it, right? It's like, you know, they see the tip of a reptile's tail outside a gigantic closet, let's say, and they look and they think, well, that's just the tip of a tail. what harm can it do me, but it's connected to the whole damn beast.

And the advantage to that is that if you make that first step forward, you're actually advancing in the face of all that opposition. The disadvantage is that the first task seems so small that you literally have to be on your knees to be humble enough to lower yourself to take that first step. You know, God, is that all I can do? I'm so useless. Well, what's humility? What's the opposite of pride? 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, put things in order were pretty embarrassing.

It's like, really, that's all I can do? Hey man, uphill is better than downhill. 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, It doesn't really matter. How small? I would say take the step that you can take that you will take that actually feels like some accomplishment. Imagine you're dealing with the three-year-old kid

and you want to encourage him. Okay, you want to set him a task that you don't want him to say, Dad, I could do that when I was two, right? But you don't want to set him a task that there's not a chance he'll manage. You want to set him a task that will stretch him beyond where he is that has a reasonable probability of success, right? Why? Why stretch him from where he is? Well, because you want to grow.

I mean, look, if you love a child, you love the child for who he is and who he could be, and you want to indicate your love for both of those, I think if you're a father, you tilt even more towards love for who the child could be. 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 imposed one on yourself in the first place. Well, that's one of the things you can realize, certainly. That also you don't exact. 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 there's no upward limit. There's no limit how bad things can get. No one would deny that who has any sense. I don't know if an adventure is fair. I don't even know if that's what we want. Like, this is something I really came to understand more deeply when writing this book.

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, you know, pornography. We view ourselves as built for consumption or for safety or for maybe for egotistical self-aggrandizement and fame. Look, all of those things are better than they're absent. let's say, what are we built for? I think we're built for maximal challenge.