12 Rules for Life - Code Snippet

Rule 1: Stand Up Straight With Your Shoulders Back

“Attend carefully to your posture. Quit drooping and hunching around. Speak your mind. Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them—at least the same right as others.”

To be human means you will have to suffer and deal with setbacks and pain. But how we respond to suffering makes all the difference. Peterson says, “The world is a hard place and a bitter place in many ways. And it’s touched with betrayal and malevolence. But there’s something in you that’s capable of taking that full on and transcending it.”

Whether we like it or not, there’s a dominance hierarchy embedded in nature—and we can tell a lot about someone’s status and confidence based on their physical appearance. When you don’t take care of yourself physically, your body and brain respond. When you’re defeated or feeling insecure, your posture drops, creating a vicious cycle in which you feel bad yourself, make poor decisions, act emotionally unstable, and fail to perform at your peak.

Key Takeaways:

Accept the burden of being, which allows your nervous system to respond entirely differently than when you feel helpless.
Undertake the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality.
Start by taking care of your body, including getting enough sleep and eating a healthy diet (such as a high-protein, high-fat, and nutrient-dense one), which will make you feel psycho-physiologically stable.
Stand up straight, look people in the eye, and don’t be scared to state your opinions.
Remember that circumstances can always change, and so can you. Create a positive feedback loop that gets you moving in the right direction.

Rule 2: Treat Yourself Like Someone You Are Responsible for Helping

“You should take care of, help, and be good to yourself the same way you would take care of, help, and be good to someone you loved and valued. You may therefore have to conduct yourself habitually in a manner that allows you some respect for your own Being.”

We all deserve respect. Therefore, start by extending some to yourself. Recognize that you’re important to other people and God and have vital roles to play in the world.

Key Takeaways:

Operate as if you’re obliged to take care of yourself, knowing that no one else will do this for you.
Keep the promises you make to yourself.
Rather than blaming others for your misfortunes, take accountability and try to do better.

Rule 3: Make Friends With People Who Want the Best for You

“Sometimes, when people have a low opinion of their own worth—or, perhaps, when they refuse responsibility for their lives—they choose a new acquaintance, of precisely the type who proved troublesome in the past. Such people don’t believe that they deserve any better—so they don’t go looking for it. Or, perhaps, they don’t want the trouble of better.”

Christ said, “Don’t throw pearls to pigs.” It’s different if someone truly wants to get better and you are helping them to help themselves. However, the desire to change must come from within. Otherwise, you’re wasting your time. As Peterson explains in this video, “Telling someone they aren’t living up to their full potential is actually a compliment.”

Key Takeaways:

To reach your greatest potential, surround yourself with people who support your upward aim and those who want to grow.
Be careful about “saving” others who have a victim mentality. Some people don’t actually want your help and need time to accept on their own that they need to change.

Rule 4: Compare Yourself to Who You Were Yesterday, Not to Who Someone Else Is Today

“The better ambitions have to do with the development of character and ability, rather than status and power. Status you can lose. You carry character with you wherever you go, and it allows you to prevail against adversity.”

Envy doesn’t serve us and can contribute to stress and lack of confidence. On the other hand, tracking your progress and celebrating your accomplishments can boost your motivation to keep improving.

“Memory is the past’s guide to the future. If you remember that something bad happened, and you can figure out why, then you can try to avoid that bad thing happening again. That’s the purpose of memory. It’s not ‘to remember the past.’ It’s to stop the same damn thing from happening over and over,” says Peterson.

Key Takeaways:

Focus on what’s in your control and fixable instead of worrying about others’ success.
When something bothers you or makes you feel jealous or insecure, question why.
Observe characteristics in others that rub you the wrong way, then use that information to fuel yourself to become better.
Always seek to learn from your mistakes.

Rule 5: Do Not Let Your Children Do Anything That Makes You Dislike Them

“More often than not, modern parents are simply paralyzed by the fear that they will no longer be liked or even loved by their children if they chastise them for any reason. They want their children’s friendship above all, and are willing to sacrifice respect to get it. This is not good. A child will have many friends, but only two parents (if that). Parents are more, not less than friends.”

Children require discipline and solid examples from their parents to grow into their best selves. “Friends have very limited authority to correct,” says Peterson, so it’s parents’ job to do the disciplining.

Key Takeaways:

Because it’s important for children to get along with their peers and respect their elders, train them to socialize well, cooperate, and follow the rules. Otherwise, children risk being ostracized and missing out on opportunities.
Establish clear rules for your children, then reinforce them.
While being unnecessarily tough on your kids isn’t encouraged, be willing to withstand their temporary anger when they break your rules and are punished.

Rule 6: Set Your House in Perfect Order Before You Criticize the World

“Intolerance of others’ views (no matter how ignorant or incoherent they may be) is not simply wrong; in a world where there is no right or wrong, it is worse: it is a sign you are embarrassingly unsophisticated or, possibly, dangerous.”

We are all human and every one of us is a work in progress. Focus your energy on doing what you can to improve your life. In Peterson’s words, “Don’t reorganize the state until you have ordered your own experience. Have some humility. If you cannot bring peace to your household, how dare you try to rule a city?”

Key Takeaways:

Hold back the urge to judge others harshly and act with arrogance. Identify your own destructive habits and behaviors that need to be corrected before you nitpick others’ actions.
When unsure of what’s right versus wrong, seek wisdom from your ancestors, your culture, and those you admire.
Follow Peterson’s advice: “Put the things you can control in order. Repair what is in disorder, and make what is already good better.”

Rule 7: Pursue What Is Meaningful (Not What Is Expedient)

“The successful among us delay gratification. The successful among us bargain with the future.”

It’s easy to pursue instant gratification, but this is not a good long-term strategy for achieving happiness and contentment. According to Peterson, “You must discipline yourself carefully. You must keep the promises you make to yourself, and reward yourself, so that you can trust and motivate yourself. You need to determine how to act toward yourself so that you are most likely to become and to stay a good person.”

Key Takeaways:

Embrace hard work and sacrifice, knowing they are inevitable and necessary to become a well-rounded, wise person.
Be willing to give up pleasurable but superficial things that would make you feel good now in order to live a life of deeper meaning in the future.
Strive for meaning, which you can think of as the balance between order and chaos.

Rule 8: Tell the Truth—Or, at Least, Don’t Lie

“Every bit of learning is a little death. Every bit of new information challenges a previous conception, forcing it to dissolve into chaos before it can be reborn as something better.”

Even when you’re dealing with hardships and feeling confused or desperate, still tell the truth. This is a display of vulnerability and authenticity that builds trust. While telling the truth can sometimes be uncomfortable, remember that it is a way to best serve others and yourself.

Key Takeaways:

Identify your core values and life purpose and then keep asking yourself if your character and behaviors are moving you toward them.
Never lie to yourself and ideally not to others. Be willing to face the truth and admit when you’re not acting according to your own standards.

Rule 9: Assume That the Person You Are Listening to Might Know Something You Don’t

“Ideologies are substitutes for true knowledge, and ideologues are always dangerous when they come to power, because a simple-minded I-know-it-all approach is no match for the complexity of existence.”

Every encounter has the potential to teach you something valuable. Therefore, it’s imperative to give people your full attention, stay curious, and ask insightful questions that make you wiser.

Key Takeaways:

Display humility and keep an open mind in order to keep learning.
Practice engaged, active listening, which is a sign of respect and great communication skills.
Listen to yourself, as well, without judgment. Let yourself think out loud, which is how you make sense of the world and your experiences.

Rule 10: Be Precise in Your Speech

“Random wandering will not move you forward. It will instead disappoint and frustrate you and make you anxious and unhappy and hard to get along with.”

You’ll only know that something isn’t working for you if you’ve established precisely what you want. Being precise helps you pinpoint when you’re missing the mark and when there’s a problem. This way, you can start to fix it.

Peterson says, “What you aim at determines what you see” and that we must “act diligently towards some well-articulated, defined and temporary end. Make your criteria for failure and success timely and clear, at least for yourself (and even better if others can understand what you are doing and evaluate it with you).”

Key Takeaways:

Be very specific when visualizing your ideal life and setting standards that you want to uphold.
When you’re too vague with your goals or path, this allows your boundaries to be crossed easily and for you to lose sight of what matters most.
On the other hand, when you’re specific, you hold yourself and others accountable.
While it can hurt to admit that things aren’t going to plan, embracing failure and learning from it is the best way to move forward and avoid feeling hopeless or continuously disappointed.

Rule 11: Do Not Bother Children When They Are Skateboarding

“Even if it were possible to permanently banish everything threatening—everything dangerous (and, therefore, everything challenging and interesting)—that would mean only that another danger would emerge: that of permanent human infantilism and absolute uselessness. How could the nature of man ever reach its full potential without challenge and danger?”

Some people are bigger risk-takers than others, but to some extent, we all want to experiment and learn lessons “the hard way” for ourselves. To optimize our lives, we need to be willing to do hard things and fail instead of remaining within our comfort zone forever.

If we remain risk-averse—and insist that our children do the same—our lives can feel boring and stifled, often leading to resentment. This is especially true among very agreeable people who fear speaking up for themselves or being bold.

Key Takeaways:

Encourage your kids instead of sheltering them. Teach them to be brave, try hard things, say what they mean, and find the lessons in everything.
“To interfere with a child’s willingness to take necessary risks is not love or empathy, but cowardice on the part of the parents,” says Peterson.

Rule 12: Pet a Cat When You Encounter One on the Street

“Perhaps you are overvaluing what you don’t have and undervaluing what you do.”

Rest assured that most people are resilient and can bounce back from pain and losses as long as they still have hope for the future and appreciation for their time on this planet. As Peterson states, “Perhaps happiness is always to be found in the journey uphill, and not in the fleeting sense of satisfaction awaiting at the next peak. Much of happiness is hope, no matter how deep the underworld in which that hope was conceived.”

Key Takeaways:

Concentrate on the day in front of you and the opportunities you have right now.
Look for the good around you every day, let go of what’s out of your control, and become comfortable with uncertainty.
Practice gratitude, even in hard times, by focusing on all that you’re fortunate to have, as well as big and small opportunities that come your way.