Title: 12 Rules for Life – An antidote for Chaos

Author: Jordan Peterson

Pages: 370

Hi all,

I know it’s been quite a while since my last post, but you you know how life gets in the way. It made a nice dent this time. Nevermind, during that time I fancied re-reading one book that I enjoyed in the past and thought it time to update my memory for it again.

12 Rules for Life was reviewed under 004-2021 and made quite a good impression on me before.

You know what they say, when you read something twice, you pick things up that you previously didn’t notice. Clichê, but that is what I came across as well. Reading the rules again not only refreshed their importance, but, after a year of more experience in this world (including a job switch) I learnt more of myself again that I reflect on the rules again.

Before I end up telling you my life story I will start with the review of the 12 rules as I have come to understand their importance in the struggle to remain upright facing adversity:

• Rule 1 – Stand up straight with your shoulders back
  • Life is a daily struggle, and there are different ways you can approach it. You can let it overrun you, trample you and make it hard for you. Or, you can decide that you will stand up to it and face it head-on to make it better and more bearable.
  • Selecting the second approach will you offer you a better probability to succeed since you’re risking facing stronger punches may throw at you, but on the opposite side you stand to receive worthwhile rewards. Not only that, by standing up, you strengthen your character, mould it to be able to become stronger and therefore are able to take more punches from life.
• Rule 2 – Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping
  • Based on human history (as well as our personal history), it is understandable that someone would not consider themselves worthy of receiving help for an ailment or illness that has befallen them. Rather, they may choose that someone else should be healed.
  • Many bad things trouble our minds, and we carry those scars with us for the remainder of our lives.
  • However, we also need to understand that our past doesn’t determine our future. We can decide to fall now, or stand up and face whatever comes to challenge us, and fight/live to make good. As long as we are alive we should live towards making a better world. There will always be struggle, turmoil and other forms of suffering. But this doesn’t mean we should just accept it.
• Rule 3 – Make friends with people who want the best for you
  • You only have a certain amount of energy to utilise every day. Therefore, you should spend it wisely. As financial books will teach you, you should create a circle of people that you can connect well with, who challenge you and think like you.
  • Therefore, with friends and family it is the same, only now the objective is not financial gain, but well-being. Spend time with those people who make spending it with worthwhile and not draining.
• Rule 4 – Compare yourself to who you were yesterday and not to who someone else is today
  • You cannot truly compare yourself to anyone other than yourself. We are too unique to be compared with others. There are of course visible differences, but people from the same cultural background (i.e. from the same town, church, school, grade, etc.) are also too different from each other.
  • Therefore, to become the best you can be you need to compare who/where you were yesterday, and who/where you are today. Measure whether you have advanced since then, and if not, what steps you need to take in order to progress.
• Rule 5 – Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them
  • A parent’s job is it to socialize their child to fit in well into the world around them. If they fail in this, the child will be excluded from social events (become sad, maybe even as far as depressed) and consequently not develop their character properly.
  • Therefore, to help your child to develop into their best character the parent should help the child become properly socialized (by not letting them do something that would make them dislike them)
    • One thing to keep in mind is that the child should not be smothered or moulded into someone the parents would like them to be
    • Rather, the parent’s involvement is to help the child discover who they truly are, but also learn why some things make it unattractive for others to be friends
    • Therefore, do not force, but help them discover themselves and also learn why some things are not socially accepted.
• Rule 6 – Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world
  • Always when I read this rule I think of the Biblical story when some men wanted to stone a woman for something she had done, but then Jesus steps in and tells them that the first rock should be thrown by the one who is without any fault. They all end up leaving, no rocks end up being thrown.
  • Another thing that comes to mind is that we are able to find flaws in other people very quickly when they discuss things with us, but when we talk about our own matters, we don’t see our own flaws as easily. Maybe there is an itch in our brain that something ‘might’ not have been dealt with perfectly, but we don’t identify it right away as a fault.
  • Finding or being exposed to having flaws and faults shows that we are not perfect, don’t have everything sorted out and, most importantly, that we are vulnerable. That is one thing we don’t want to share.
  • Yet, we need to acknowledge that we are all vulnerable, we all have flaws. Therefore, knowing this, we should work towards bringing about Order amongst the Chaos we are facing. Once we have started to get more things under control, we can suggest an approach to order to those surrounding us, but not force it amongst them as being the only viable option since everyone has their own opinion what constitutes Order. You compromise.
• Rule 7 – Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)
• Rule 8 – Tell the truth – or, at least don’t lie
• Rule 9 – Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t
  • The same lesson I learnt from the first time I read the book still holds true.
  • Don’t let your ego get the better of you to lead you to believe that you know everything there is to know to resolve all kinds of problems.
  • Be humble and acknowledge that your way of doing things might be outdated, not appropriate to the circumstances, or you don’t actually have a way to resolve the matter.
  • The reason why diversity in the workplace is great is because with all our different backgrounds (i.e. educational, gender, culture, rich or poor upbringing, harsh or safe environment, etc.) has allowed the opportunity to approach a singular problem with multiple different experiences to solve a problem.
• Rule 10 – Be precise in your speech
  • Apart from the taking away the lesson that you should speak clearly and without too much beating around the bush, there is another lesson that may be even more important.
  • It links up well with Rule III (do not hide unwanted things in the fog) in the second book “Beyond Order – 12 more Rules for Life”, which was also reviewed under 007-2022
  • We are constantly confronted with Chaos and troubling matters. We can let it consume us, or we can confront it.
  • By letting it consume us, a problem we face is put into the fog, where it may accumulate to become an even bigger problem later on.
  • By confronting it, we acknowledge that there is a problem, we take active steps to understand the root cause and find a solution for it. In this process we free our minds and build our character since we now managed to overcome a problem once again. If we come across a similar problem we will have less uncertainty and less fear to confront it. Though every problem has its own unique qualities, we won’t start from scratch anymore, but with experience.
• Rule 11 – Do not bother children when they are skateboarding
  • Just as it is the responsibility of the parent to socialize the child for society, it is also responsible to let the child explore the world, do all kinds of things which lead to the child discovering their true self, so they can live their most optimal life.
  • The skateboard is the metaphor for exploration. We shouldn’t block them from doing everything, but let them explore and learn for themselves. For some things that are a little more life altering (or could result in long-term consequential side-health effects – drugs, under-age activities) the parent should become the proper teach and guide.
    • The best teacher is self-experience, but for some experience we can benefit more from other’s life experience
• Rule 12 – Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street
  • Life is a daily struggle. We are confronted and hit by so many things in our lives. It is understandable why we would be in unhappy moods in our life.
  • If you are familiar with the tale of Pandora’s clay pot (not box) you would know that amongst all the evil things that were trapped and then unleashed unto the world was something else, Hope. The possibility that something good is still there. Looking at it from afar we need to stand up and face all the evils that came out of the pot to end up also experiencing the good that was made available to us.
  • This hope comes in the form of small opportunities in our daily lives. The metaphorical cat. You walk home after a hard day at work and then you see a cat, it allows you to pet it, you forget for a moment about the hard time at work and enjoy this opportune happy event. Then you get back to going home. You may still have hard things ahead of you, but simultaneously you know there are good things that may happen.

As I have said before, you learn a few more things from reading something twice, as well as from gaining a little more life experience along the way. This has been the case in the past few months, and I believe will continue as long as we are open to learn from everything we are confronted by.

Summary:

I uphold my previous conclusion that the book is a good read since it teaches some foundational lessons that we might have overlooked or not stressed the importance to. The book receives my rating of 4.7/5

I hope you will have read it at least once, and remain on the path of being a lifelong learner, not shirking to face up to adversity and confrontation. Growth, that is what we need to focus on. Become competent and capable people!