Jordan Peterson | Take Care of Yourself First

And while you’d like people to fawn all over you and just lay everything at your feet, it’s like—no. That’s not something you’d wish for someone that you were taking care of.

And then there’s an additional problem, which is it’s often the case that people will treat other people better than they treat themselves. That happens extremely frequently.

So one of the things I pointed out in Chapter 2 was that if you have a dog and you take him to a vet, and the vet gives you the prescription medicine, you’ll go buy the medicine and you will give it to the dog—and you will do it properly. But if you go yourself to a doctor and you get a prescription, there’s a 30% chance you won’t even pick up the medication. And if you do, there’s a 50% chance that you won’t administer it to yourself properly.

And so I really thought about that when I first came across that statistic. Really, it was another one of those little facts I thought—what the hell’s up with that? It’s like, you’ll do it for your dog. So obviously, you’ll do it for something you care about, and you’re conscientious enough, so you’ll actually do it. So, like, why wouldn’t you do it for you?

Your dog likes you, you know. Even your dog would rather that you did. But… but you don’t. You don’t. And it’s actually one of the reasons that modern medicine doesn’t work nearly as well as it could—because people just don’t take their medication.

You make the world a much worse place if you don’t take care of yourself. So you should bloody well take care of yourself, you know?

Because—well—that’s what the chapter is about. It’s partly because you have something valuable to bring into the world. That’s the thing about being an individual. It’s the thing that Western civilization has always recognized: that as an individual, you have a light that you have to bring into the world. And that if you don’t bring it into the world, the world is a dimmer place. And that’s a bad thing, because when the world is a dim place, it can get very, very, very dark.

And so it’s necessary—not just so that you feel better, not just so that you’re a number one lobster, none of those things—you need to take care of yourself because you’re in the best position to do that. And it’s necessary for you to take care of yourself despite the fact that we’re mortal and vulnerable and self-conscious and capable—not only capable of doing terrible things but actually do them.

Despite all that, you still have that responsibility.

Look, every ideal is a judge, right? So you posit an ideal, and instantly you’re in an inferior position in relationship to that ideal. And that can be crushing.

Okay, so what do you do about that?

Well, one answer is: no ideals. Well, that’s not a good answer because then you don’t have anything to do, right? And that deprives you of a main source of pleasure, which is observed-generated as a consequence of observed movement towards a valued goal.

So if you have a high goal and you see any movement towards it, there’s a potential—there’s a really powerful potential kick there. So you don’t want to dispense with that.

But then if you set up an ideal, it can judge you very harshly. So then you have to rearrange your reward philosophy. And instead of punishing yourself as a consequence of perceived distance, you reward yourself for incremental movement forward.

And that’s not just theoretical. Look—I was stopped by three guys on the street this week. Three separate occasions. And they all told me the same thing. They said that they had read something I wrote, or listened to something, or watched something, and that it had been helpful.

And whenever anybody says that to me, I always ask them, “Okay, exactly what was helpful and what changed?” Because I want to know what’s helping so that I can understand the target and hit it better. And generally, people are pleased to tell me, although sometimes it takes them a while to formulate exactly the description.

But they—all three of them—said: “I stopped comparing myself to other people. So I stopped comparing what I didn’t have to what other people had. I left that off the table. And then I started to reward myself for improving over what I was yesterday.”

And that’s profound change, because it means that you actually get your reward structure transformed. And that’s a big deal, because that’s your source of positive emotion and enthusiasm, encouragement—all of that. So now you can start to encourage yourself for genuine improvement.

And it’s also pragmatically extremely intelligent, because incremental improvement repeated is virtually unstoppable.

And that’s, like, the hallmark of behavioral therapy—that idea. Because what a behavior therapist does is: you come and you say to me, “I’m not—things aren’t the way I want them to be.”

And then I say, “Well, how would you like them to be, and how are they not that?” So we lay out the problem—the territory. And then the next thing we do is lay out a trajectory, which is, “Okay, well here’s something—you’re lonesome, you don’t have a partner. Okay, so what are incremental movements you can make towards that goal that you would do that would be helpful?”

And so maybe you negotiate with the person—because that’s what you do if you’re a reasonable therapist—and you say, “Well, look. Why don’t you decide as a consequence of the conversation—why don’t you write out a description of yourself for a dating site? Don’t post it or anything. Just write it out. And then let’s see if you actually do that.”

And so then the person comes back next week and they say, “I did that. And not only that—I posted it.”

And you say, “Great. What’s the next step?”

Or they say, “Jeez, you know, I just kept avoiding that.”

And then you say, “Okay. Well, we need to break that down. You avoided it. Well, could you write one sentence about who you are right now while you’re sitting here?”

And sometimes they can do that right away. Or sometimes they can’t. And then you make a microanalysis of that.

And what you do is—you reduce the magnitude of the move forward until you hit the point where you actually will do it. And that’s, like, the secret to good negotiation as well.

If you’re negotiating with your wife—maybe you want one of her behaviors to change. Then obviously she has to be on board with that. And hypothetically, that’s going to be a reciprocal process. But what you want to do is find a small improvement that is measurable, that’s implementable, that will be implemented, that you can then reward.

And that’s—that’s how you can have your ideal. You can have whatever ideal you want, as long as you’re willing to reduce your movement forward to achievable increments.

But that’s okay. Because they compound.

And I really learned this as a therapist. It was one of the things that was so fun about being a therapist. You can take someone through this process and start them on just the tiniest goal, you know—and it just seems trivial. But they’ll do it. And then they start moving faster and faster after that point. Once the direction has been established.

And people make incredible improvement over—not unreasonable spans of time. A few months. Maybe a year. Which is not nothing, but it’s not decades. I saw that time and time again.

So aim high. But reward yourself for small, incremental improvements—especially ones that repeat every day.

Right?

Because malevolence clearly exists. And we all suffer from the weight of malevolent history, right? Because even the grounds we walk on here—which, this is a remarkable and wonderful place—I mean, English soil is soaked with blood, just like the soil of every place in the world. That’s part of the human heritage. And all of us bear the marks of that conflict in some sense in our souls. Partly because of the possibility for us to engage in that. But also partly because part of the reason we’re here in all this privilege is because of all that catastrophe.

Well, the best way to localize that malevolence is inside you.

Right? And to remember that the enemy that you’re fighting—the greatest enemy that you ever fight—is in your own heart…