12 Rules for Life

Author: Jordan B Peterson

🎯 RULE 1 STAND UP STRAIGHT WITH YOUR SHOULDERS BACK

Lobsters and Territory

To help understand this, there is an example of lobsters. Lobsters live on the ocean floor. The ocean base is home for them, where they can hunt for prey and scavenge around to eat edible bits and pieces that rain down from the continual chaos of carnage and death above. They want somewhere secure, where the hunting and gathering are good.

What if there are many lobsters in the same territory? Now, all of them want to feed their family. Other creatures have the same problem. Take an example of a wren, an insect-eating songbird that builds nests away from wind and rain, close to food, and attractive to potential mates.

Birds and Territory

Now, as per the example in the book, the same thing happens with birds. They will not let any other bird sit on their branch. The author tried to play a recorded voice of the same birds, and they started attacking the recorder.

As per the psychologist Thorleif Schjelderup-Ebbe, even common barnyard chickens establish a "pecking order." The determination of who's who in the chicken world is also important for each individual bird's survival, particularly in times of scarcity. The birds that always have priority to whatever food is sprinkled out in the yard in the morning are the celebrity chickens. After them come the second-stringers, the hangers-on and wannabes. Then come the third-rate chickens, and so on, down to the bedraggled, partially-feathered, and badly-pecked wretches who occupy the lowest, untouchable stratum of the chicken hierarchy.

Territory matters, and there is little difference between territorial rights and social status. It is often a matter of life and death.

If two birds engage in a squabble over a desirable nesting area, the interaction can easily degenerate into outright physical combat. Under such circumstances, the largest usually wins. The victor may have won but may be hurt by the fight. A third bird takes the opportunity and defeats the crippled victor. That is not a good deal for the first two birds.

Dolphins produce specialized sound pulses while hunting and during other times of high excitement to reduce potential conflict among dominant and subordinate group members. Such behavior is endemic in the community of living things.

Researchers have demonstrated that even a lobster raised in isolation knows what to do when such a thing happens.

It has complex defensive and aggressive behaviors built right into its nervous system. It begins to dance around, like a boxer, opening and raising its claws, moving backward, forward, and side to side, mirroring its opponent, waving its opened claws back and forth. At the same time, it employs special jets under its eyes to direct streams of liquid at its opponent. The liquid spray contains a mix of chemicals that tell the other lobster about its size, sex, health, and mood. Sometimes one lobster can tell immediately from the display of claw size that it is much smaller than its opponent and will back down without a fight. The chemical information exchanged in the spray can have the same effect, convincing a less healthy or less aggressive lobster to retreat. That’s dispute resolution Level 1. If the two lobsters are very close in size and apparent ability, however, or if the exchange of liquid has been insufficiently informative, they will proceed to dispute resolution Level 2. With antennae whipping madly and claws folded downward, one will advance, and the other retreat. Then the defender will advance, and the aggressor will retreat. After a couple of rounds of this behavior, the more nervous of the lobsters may feel that continuing is not in his best interest. He will flick his tail reflexively, dart backward, and vanish to try his luck elsewhere. If neither blinks, however, the lobsters move to Level 3, which involves genuine combat. This time, the now enraged lobsters come at each other viciously, with their claws extended, to grapple. Each tries to flip the other on its back. A successfully flipped lobster will conclude that its opponent is capable of inflicting serious damage. It generally gives up and leaves (although it harbors intense resentment and gossips endlessly about the victor behind its back). If neither can overturn the other—or if one will not quit despite being flipped—the lobsters move to Level 4. Doing so involves extreme risk and is not something to be engaged in without forethought: one or both lobsters will emerge damaged from the ensuing fray, perhaps fatally.

The animals advance on each other, with increasing speed. Their claws are open, so they can grab a leg, or antenna, or an eye-stalk, or anything else exposed and vulnerable. Once a body part has been successfully grabbed, the grabber will tail-flick backward, sharply, with the claw clamped firmly shut, and try to tear it off. Disputes that have escalated to this point typically create a clear winner and loser. The loser is unlikely to survive, particularly if he or she remains in the territory occupied by the winner, now a mortal enemy. In the aftermath of a losing battle, regardless of how aggressively a lobster has behaved, it becomes unwilling to fight further, even against another, previously defeated opponent. A vanquished competitor loses confidence, sometimes for days. Sometimes the defeat can have even more severe consequences. If a dominant lobster is badly defeated, its brain basically dissolves. Then it grows a new, subordinate’s brain—one more appropriate to its new, lowly position.

The Neurochemistry of Defeat and Victory

A lobster loser’s brain chemistry differs importantly from that of a lobster winner. This is reflected in their relative postures. Whether a lobster is confident or cringing depends on the ratio of two chemicals that modulate communication between lobster neurons: serotonin and octopamine. Winning increases the ratio of the former to the latter.

A lobster with high levels of serotonin and low levels of octopamine is a cocky, strutting sort of shellfish, much less likely to back down when challenged. This is because serotonin helps regulate postural flexion. A flexed lobster extends its appendages so that it can look tall and dangerous, like Clint Eastwood in a spaghetti Western. When a lobster that has just lost a battle is exposed to serotonin, it will stretch itself out, advance even on former victors, and fight longer and harder. The drugs prescribed to depressed human beings, which are selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, have much the same chemical and behavioral effect. In one of the more staggering demonstrations of the evolutionary continuity of life on Earth, Prozac even cheers up lobsters.

High serotonin/low octopamine characterizes the victor. The opposite neurochemical configuration, a high ratio of octopamine to serotonin, produces a defeated-looking, scrunched-up, inhibited, drooping, skulking sort of lobster, very likely to hang around street corners and to vanish at the first hint of trouble. Serotonin and octopamine also regulate the tail-flick reflex, which serves to propel a lobster rapidly backward when it needs to escape. Less provocation is necessary to trigger that reflex in a defeated lobster. You can see an echo of that in the heightened startle reflex characteristic of the soldier or battered child with post-traumatic stress disorder.

Price's square root law refers to an empirical rule which states that the majority of scientific publications in any field of study would likely come from a comparatively small number of authors.

All the Girls

Here it is explained that females will select the best dominant mating partner for survival.

Nature of Nature

• Natural selection
• Adaptation

Mark Twain once said, “It’s not what we don’t know that gets us in trouble. It’s what we know for sure that just ain’t so.”

The part of our brain that keeps track of our position in the dominance hierarchy is therefore exceptionally ancient and fundamental. It is a master control system, modulating our perceptions, values, emotions, thoughts, and actions. It powerfully affects every aspect of our being, conscious and unconscious alike. This is why, when we are defeated, we act very much like lobsters who have lost a fight. Our posture droops. We face the ground. We feel threatened, hurt, anxious, and weak. If things do not improve, we become chronically depressed. Under such conditions, we can’t easily put up the kind of fight that life demands, and we become easy targets for harder-shelled bullies. And it is not only the behavioral and experiential similarities that are striking. Much of the basic neurochemistry is the same.

In short, if you are a low-status victim, the rough-and-tumble of life will beat you badly. Unfortunate, isolated, low-status humans are much more likely to die and much more likely to suffer from heart disease, cancer, and diabetes, among many other illnesses.

The importance of this can hardly be overstated.

Posture and Brain

If your posture is poor, for example—if you slump, shoulders hunched forward, and head down—you will feel small, defeated, and useless. In that pose, you will shrink metaphorically and literally. Your body language will broadcast your lowly status. The message your body sends to other people and to itself will be “I am not in control. I am not someone who should be admired.” This is not only a psychological effect. Your mood will reflect your posture. If you stand up straight, your brain will send a signal that reflects a higher status. Confidence will show in your body language.

If you start to straighten up, then people will begin to treat you differently. You will start to feel better and grow more confident. The positive feedback loop will help you thrive.

12 Rules for Life Summary

To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open.

• To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order.
• It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order.
• It means adopting the burden of self-conscious vulnerability and accepting the end of the unconscious paradise of childhood, where finitude and mortality are only dimly comprehended.
• It means willingly undertaking the sacrifices necessary to generate a productive and meaningful reality (it means acting to please God, in the ancient language).

So, 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. Walk tall and gaze forthrightly ahead. Dare to be dangerous. Encourage the serotonin to flow plentifully through the neural pathways desperate for its calming influence.

People, including yourself, will start to assume that you are competent and able (or at least they will not immediately conclude the reverse). Emboldened by the positive responses you are now receiving, you will begin to be less anxious. You will then find it easier to pay attention to subtle social cues, indicating that the others around you are not as hostile and rejecting as you might have assumed. Be attentive to your posture, and remember to keep your shoulders back.

🎯 RULE 2 TREAT YOURSELF LIKE SOMEONE YOU ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR HELPING

WHY WON’T YOU JUST TAKE YOUR DAMN PILLS?

Some patients will not take the pill correctly, and physicians and pharmacists will blame them. As a psychologist, he believes it's the prescriber's responsibility to offer advice that will be followed.

Questions:

• What is wrong with them?
• Don’t they want to get better?

Example of Organ transplant: Complications occur when the body rejects the organ. To stop this from happening, you must take anti-rejection drugs, which weaken immunity, increasing your susceptibility to infectious disease. Most people are happy to accept the trade-off. This is beggars' belief. It's not because the drug fails. To lose all that because you don’t take your medication? How could people do that to themselves? How could this possibly be?

It’s complicated, to be fair. Many people who receive a transplanted organ are isolated or beset by multiple physical health problems (to say nothing of problems associated with unemployment or family crisis). They may be cognitively impaired or depressed. They may not entirely trust their doctor or understand the necessity of the medication. Maybe they can barely afford the drugs and ration them, desperately and unproductively.

People are far more diligent in filling and properly administering pets' prescriptions than they do for themselves.

It is the drama of lived experience—the unique, tragic, personal death of your father, compared to the objective death listed in the hospital records; the pain of your first love; the despair of dashed hopes; the joy attendant upon a child’s success.

Chaos is the domain of ignorance itself. It’s unexplored territory. Chaos is what extends, eternally and without limit, beyond the boundaries of all states, all ideas, and all disciplines. It’s the foreigner, the stranger, the member of another gang, the rustle in the bushes in the night-time, the monster under the bed, the hidden anger of your mother, and the sickness of your child. Chaos is the despair and horror you feel when you have been profoundly betrayed. It’s the place you end up when things fall apart; when your dreams die, your career collapses, or your marriage ends. It’s the underworld of fairytale and myth, where the dragon and the gold it guards eternally co-exist. Chaos is where we are when we don’t know where we are, and what we are doing when we don’t know what we are doing. It is, in short, all those things and situations we neither know nor understand.

Where everything is certain, we’re in order. We’re there when things are going according to plan and nothing is new and disturbing. In the domain of order, things behave as God intended. We like to be there. Familiar environments are congenial. In order, we’re able to think about things in the long term. There, things work, and we’re stable, calm, and competent. We seldom leave places we understand—geographical or conceptual—for that reason, and we certainly do not like it when we are compelled to or when it happens accidentally.

You’re in order when you have a loyal friend, a trustworthy ally. When the same person betrays you, sells you out, you move from the daytime world of clarity and light to the dark underworld of chaos, confusion, and despair.

When the ice you’re skating on is solid, that’s order. When the bottom drops out, and things fall apart, and you plunge through the ice, that’s chaos.

Chaos is the underground kingdom of the dwarves, usurped by Smaug, the treasure-hoarding serpent. Chaos is the deep ocean bottom to which Pinocchio voyaged to rescue his father from Monstro, whale, and fire-breathing dragon. That journey into darkness and rescue is the most difficult thing a puppet must do, if he wants to be real; if he wants to extract himself from the temptations of deceit and acting and victimization and impulsive pleasure and totalitarian subjugation; if he wants to take his place as a genuine Being in the world.

Order is the stability of your marriage. It’s buttressed by the traditions of the past and by your expectations—grounded, often invisibly, in those traditions. Chaos is that stability crumbling under your feet when you discover your partner’s infidelity. Chaos is the experience of reeling unbound and unsupported through space when your guiding routines and traditions collapse.

CHAOS AND ORDER: PERSONALITY FEMALE AND MALE

Over the millennia, as our brain capacity increased and we developed curiosity to spare, we became increasingly aware of and curious about the nature of the world—what we eventually conceptualized as the objective world—outside the personalities of family and troupe. And “outside” is not merely unexplored physical territory. Outside is outside of what we currently understand—and understanding is dealing with and coping with and not merely representing objectively. But our brains had been long concentrating on other people. Thus, it appears that we first began to perceive the unknown, chaotic, non-human world with the innate categories of our social brain. And even this is a misstatement: when we first began to perceive the unknown, chaotic, non-animal world, we used categories that had originally evolved to represent the pre-human animal social world. Our minds are far older than mere humanity. Our categories are far older than our species. Our most basic category—as old, in some sense, as the sexual act itself—appears to be that of sex, male and female. We appear to have taken that primordial knowledge of structured, creative opposition and begun to interpret everything through its lens.

Chaos, the eternal feminine, is also the crushing force of sexual selection. Women are choosy maters (unlike female chimps, their closest animal counterparts). Most men do not meet female human standards. It is for this reason that women on dating sites rate 85 percent of men as below average in attractiveness. It is for this reason that we all have twice as many female ancestors as male (imagine that all the women who have ever lived have averaged one child. Now imagine that half the men who have ever lived have fathered two children, if they had any, while the other half fathered none). It is Woman as Nature who looks at half of all men and says, “No!” For the men, that’s a direct encounter with chaos, and it occurs with devastating force every time they are turned down for a date. Human female choosiness is also why we are very different from the common ancestor we shared with our chimpanzee cousins, while the latter are very much the same. Women’s proclivity to say no, more than any other force, has shaped our evolution into the creative, industrious, upright, large-brained (competitive, aggressive, domineering) creatures that we are. It is Nature as Woman who says, “Well, bucko, you’re good enough for a friend, but my experience of you so far has not indicated the suitability of your genetic material for

🎯 RULE 3 MAKE FRIENDS WITH PEOPLE WHO WANT THE BEST FOR YOU