- Peterson's 12 rules
- Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement
- Understand and follow the rules, but break them when necessary to follow its spirit
- The balance between conservatism and liberalism is paramount
- Imagine who you could be and then aim single mindedly at that
- Do not hide unwanted things in the fog
- Speak up if something makes you unhappy, especially if it happens everyday. Have the fight. It’s worth it in the long run. Life is what repeats and it’s worth Etting what repeats right
- Willful blindness is very real and causes a big portion of our problems
- You must intimately know what you want and stand up for that
- The fog is your refusal either internally or externally to confront what you want or bothers you
- Notice that the opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated
- This is difficult, challenging and this makes it meaningful. It provides purpose and aim
- Seek to play generative, iterative games
- The highest good is that which is good for you and others across time. Never neglect time and the fact that you need others to want to work and play with you. Happiness should not be what you optimize for, but value, meaning, purpose across time. People feel positive emotion in the pursuit of a meaningful goal, not the attainment of it. The meaning of your life is proportional to the amount of responsibility you voluntarily take on
- When you’re in a situation that you can’t escape, the right attitude is to confront it voluntarily
- The goal is to find strategies and tactics that work across multiple times, people, and places
- Do not do what you hate
- Abandon ideology
- Work as hard as you possibly can on just one thing and see what happens
- Heat and pressure turn coal into diamond, the same can be said of people too
- Make one room in your house as beautiful as possible
- Beauty is a window into what’s possible; it is part of what makes life worth living
- If old memories still upset you, write them down carefully and completely
- Traumatic memories cannot be forgotten and integrated if they are not first understood
- We must know where we are and where we are going, and this includes an accurate recall and integration of painful memories. This gives us an accurate a map as possible to effectively navigate life
- We must recollect our experiences and derive from them our morals
- Plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationship
- Have consistent dates to build intimacy and trust and keep the spark alive
- Must know what you yourself want and then verbalize it to your partner. This can be scary but you must trust your partner if the relationship is to grow
- You do not find - as much as make and deserve - a perfect partner
- There are 3 iterations of relationship: tyrant/slave, slave/tyrant, negotiation. Negotiation is difficult but the best option all things considering. It creates for difficult arguments and awkward talks, but also contains the greatest potential
- Do not allow yourself to become resentful, deceitful or arrogant
- Be grateful in spite of your suffering
- It takes genuine courage and work to be grateful. Naïveté can bring it too but it is fragile. It takes courage to work through difficult situations and act nobly in the da e of struggle, but this hardens you and makes life less difficult than it otherwise would be
- You love people not only in spite of their imperfections but because of their imperfections. This is worth pondering deeply for a long time
- Genie - genius - is the combination of potential, possibility, and extreme constraint
- Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement
What I got out of it
- A powerful, meaningful book. To me, the idea of confronting and having the difficult conversations openly and transparently rings most true. In addition, the rule that opportunity lies where responsibility has been abdicated is a master key to learning, growing, and gaining trust in your ecosystem
