Your calendar knows what you believe better than you do.
Suppose you are sure you want your boss’s job. You also skip the hard projects, say nothing in the meetings where it would count, and spend evenings rehearsing how unfairly you have been passed over. Which of these is your belief? Jordan Peterson’s answer in 12 Rules for Life is uncomfortable: you can only find out what you believe, rather than what you think you believe, by watching how you act. You are too complex to understand yourself any other way.
That sounds like despair, but Peterson treats it as a starting condition. The mind that still has something to learn is authentic. When what it wants does not happen, it says “I still have something to learn.” The voice of inauthenticity says “that is someone else’s fault; the world is unfair.”
Negotiating with someone difficult
If you can’t simply read your beliefs off your thoughts, you can’t simply command yourself either. Imagine negotiating with someone lazy, touchy, resentful and hard to get along with. That someone is you. You have to charm, listen and occasionally bribe. Tyrannize yourself and you will rebel, and the rebel wins because it knows every secret the tyrant has.
Peterson’s reason for patience runs deeper. Imagine a Being who is omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent, and ask what it lacks: limitation. Without limitation there is no story. When you love someone, it is not despite their limitations but because of them. The limited, sulking creature you are negotiating with is the only one who can actually grow.
Resentment points somewhere
So what should the person passed over do with the evenings of rehearsed grievance? Consult your resentment. When you have something to say, silence is a lie. Peterson finds two main sources of resentment: being taken advantage of, or allowing it, and the whiny refusal to adopt responsibility and grow up. The thought “if they loved me, they would know what to do” belongs to the second. No one has a direct pipeline to your needs — not even you. Resentment is useful because it points at something that needs to move, but it often points at the world for not being what you wanted rather than at yourself for not growing into what the world requires.
Telling the truth is how you find out which. Lies are rarely large at first; big ones are built from seemingly innocuous evasions, feeble arrogance and trivial circumventing of responsibility, until you curse reality for producing a wall. A lie is connected to everything else, a drop of sewage in a bottle of champagne. Speaking plainly reverses this, because truth reduces the terrible complexity of man to the simplicity of his words, so that he can become a partner rather than an enemy. That includes becoming a partner to yourself. If you cannot reveal yourself to others, you cannot reveal yourself to yourself. The truth gets postponed because “errors require sacrifice to be corrected,” and for the would-be manager the sacrifice might be the comfortable story of unfairness.
Competence, not safety
Peterson’s most concrete image comes from watching kids skateboard on dangerous rails. They were not trying to be safe. They were trying to become competent, and it is competence that makes people truly safe. The skate stoppers bolted to the ledges suppress the risk and the skill together, leaving a dismal impression of poor design and resentment.
Competence requires standards, and standards mean some people fail. Failure is the price we pay for standards, and because mediocrity has consequences, standards are necessary. Skipping the hard projects buys you safety from failure at the price of never becoming good enough for the job you want.
The common objection is that Peterson wraps conservative common sense in Jungian mysticism. The packaging sometimes invites that reading. But the core move holds without the mythology: if what you do is the evidence of what you believe, then you stop arguing with your own narration and start watching your behavior.
If you’re winning, you’re not growing — and growing is the most important form of winning. Maybe you are not unhappy because you do not have your boss’s job, but because you cannot stop wanting it. Aim to be the person at your father’s funeral everyone can rely on. That is very different from a wish for a life free of trouble. What would your last month of actions say you are aiming at?
References:
- Jordan Peterson, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos