How to Plan Your Life | Lecture One (Official) | Peterson Academy

You really don't have an option about whether or not you're going to develop a vision for your life. You can either live out your vision or someone else's. There's no no vision option. You need to think through what you're up to. When this course teaches you how to think about that, you have to map out your life, past, present, and future. What I walked through was how [music] to motivate yourself so you're more likely to realize your dreams. If your [music] life is absolutely perfect and you couldn't dream of having anything better, then you can stick with what you've got. But if it isn't, [music] then there's always the possibility that a little more transformation on your part might be a good thing. If you really [music] throw yourself into the fray, like wholeheartedly, just exactly what could you accomplish? Well, what could I do if I really set my [music] mind to it? So, you really don't have an option about whether or not you're going to develop a vision for your life. You can either develop a good vision or a bad vision. That's your option. or you can live out your vision or someone else's. There's no no vision option. If you have poor vision, immature and hedonistic, that might be a good way of thinking about it, then the vision that you impose on the world is merely a consequence of your short-term whims. You're going to be governed by something, and you need to know that. And there isn't much difference between being governed by something and being possessed by something. And that's a useful thing to know, too, because if you have any sense at all, you'd want to be possessed by the right thing. Because if you're possessed by the wrong thing, you're going to be in so much trouble, you can hardly imagine it. And not only are you going to be in trouble, you're going to be trouble to everyone that you encounter. And that seems like a very bad plan. and it's not necessary. So it would be better to do the better thing. And so I entitled this relatively brief course vision and plan, theory and practice. That's a repetitive title. A vision is a broad theory and a plan is a narrow and focused vision. And so a broad vision focuses to a point that can be implemented. And so what I'm going to do with you over the next hours is describe to you how you might conceptualize a vision in the broadest possible sense so that you understand deeply why doing so is necessary. so that you understand the consequences of doing it properly and you understand the consequences of doing it improperly. And then we're going to take that general conceptual scheme and we're going to focus it down to the point where it becomes practically implementable. Right? Because one of the things you might most want to do if you become psychologically or philosophically informed is to understand how you take that broader conceptualization and make it relevant and implementable within the confines of your own life. Right? Then you have the advantages of the broader philosophical view but also something to do that's extraordinarily practical. And I would say that abstract ideas become meaningful when they're implementable. That's a good thing to know if you're ever talking to people and you want to motivate them. If you have a broadscale vision, maybe you're trying to organize people to engage in some endeavor that could be your family or your business compatriots or your friends, any sort of occasion. You want to give them the general picture, but then you also want to be able to specify for them exactly what they need to do. And what they need to do is how they need to transform the way they look at the situation and how they need to reconstruct their actions. And so we're going to go from the general to the specific over the course of this discussion. So we'll start very general. I want to present you with a way of conceptualizing the world of experience in the broadest possible sense because that'll give you the initial introduction into why developing a vision is inevitable and necessary. Uh so this is a dowist image of the world and it isn't the image that people in the west are generally familiar with because we tend to think of the world as material but the world is not merely material. uh not least because the world is at least material and information and information is not it's not material in a reductive sense. The the classic view of the world even in the west was more like the dowist view. And the dowist view is that the world of your experience and maybe even the world as such is made up of two components. One you could conceptualize as chaos and the other you could conceptualize as order. And in the yin and yang symbol, which is two serpents, by the way, head to tail, the black serpent is chaos, and the white serpent is order. And the black serpent is generally identified with the feminine, which is not the same as the female or the woman. And the white uh serpent is characterized as masculine. Um, I'll describe why that is as we progress. So, what does this mean? that the world is chaos and order in its in its what would you say initial differentiated conception. You could think of the world of experience as a transcendent unity and that would be the unity of all things and then you could think of that unity as falling into pieces. I mean each of us each of us is a piece of a overarching unity. You might ask well what are the most fundamental what is the most fundamental initial breakdown of the unity? And the answer to that is, well, it's chaos and order. And it's always that no matter where you are. And and so here's a way of understanding that. No matter where you are, there are things that are happening that you understand. And there are things that are happening that you don't understand. Okay? And the things that you understand, that's order. That's the domain of order. And the things that you don't understand that transcend your understanding, that's the domain of chaos. And chaos is also the domain of potential. Because in the things you don't understand is the possibility of new knowledge, right? New ways of conceptualizing the world and new discoveries about your own nature, right? And so you can be terrified of the things that you don't understand and you don't know and you can see why that might be because they can undermine you. But by the same token in the domain of things you don't understand is all the potential of the world. Right? So one of the things that you might think about deeply is what would be a good rule of thumb attitude to have towards the things you don't know and one answer to that is to be terrified into paralysis because of the necessity for change that an encounter with the unknown might produce and the other is to welcome it with open arms because the the you that might emerge as a consequence of confrontation with what you don't know might be much better than the you you're stuck with now and that's very much worth considering. It's it's a how you conceptualize the stance you take in relationship to the domains of chaos and order. That's about the most important decision you ever make. Like if you're a tyrant, for example, you're going to be allied 100% with what you already know. Right now, the price you'll pay for that is that you forego transformation. Another price you pay for that is if it if you're tyrannical in your alliance with what you already understand, you're going to attempt to force that on other people, right? And part of the reason you do that is because you don't have enough faith in your own ability to confront what you don't understand and change. Right? It's not wise unless, well, I suppose you could envision a situation where you should only abide by what you know. And I would say if your life is absolutely perfect in all of its manifestations and you couldn't dream of having anything better, then you can stick with what you've got, right? But if it isn't, then there's always the possibility that a little more transformation on your part might be a good thing. At the typical state [music] university, 10% of the courses are of high quality. >> What in your mind constitutes low quality? >> Dull. Ideologically adult, taught by people who don't know how to teach. >> Peterson Academy. If you want an [music] actual education, join them. >> They're the best courses that have ever been offered publicly in terms of their quality of [music] content and also the production values are unparalleled. >> Yeah, we certainly didn't have that when I was a kid. >> There's a deep level of conceptualization that goes along with that too, which is how should you construe the domain of possibility or potential? And I suppose you might say that this is an this is a question of faith, right? Because the future is unknown and indeterminate. It's very difficult to make any any final decisions about its nature. But you can make a meta decision. You might say that the domain of potential if confronted properly is positive and that you could establish a relationship with it that would bring benefit to you. Right? And that's that's really the attitude that children have towards the world, right? Is that they're open to exploration and discovery within certain bounds. That's often shattered. That that naivity, that naive openness of children is often shattered by trauma, right? And that tends to turn us into cynics. But that doesn't mean that the attitude was fundamentally inappropriate. There's a gospel statement that makes the claim that you can't enter the kingdom of heaven unless you become like little children, which is not the same as staying like a little child, by the way. And the idea there is that you should strive to regain the attitude of open acceptance of what's confronting you as an adult, even if you've been hurt. Right? Because if you've been hurt, well, then you could imagine that you're more afraid of what you don't know because you've discovered that it can undermine and destroy you, devour you. And it's very easy to become cynical and bitter and and and rigid as a consequence of that. But as I said before, the price you pay for that is that you forgo any further transformation and you tend to become a tyrant. And that's well, unless you want to become a tyrant. Tyrants tend to live in hell. So, I wouldn't recommend it unless that's what you want. And you can be a tyrant to yourself just like you're a tyrant to other people. And in fact, that's usually a precondition for being a tyrant to other people, which is also a good reason not to be a tyrant to other people because you will bring that attitude towards yourself. Okay. So, what have we established? Well, we've established that you can think about your world of experience as bifurcated into two fundamental realms, right? There's a real the realm of things you don't understand. You think about that as unexplored territory. If you want to make it more biological. Animals have to deal with a territory that they have mastered and understand. That's their home territory. And they have to deal with territories that where the predators lurk, let's say, and animals tend to stick to their home territory because that's explored. And they tend to be afraid of their unexplored territory because that's where they can be destroyed. And so this notion, this metaphysical notion that experience is characterized by chaos and order is also a notion that's that can align with a materialistic view of the world and the psyche as a biological phenomenon. Your nervous system is set up really to respond with security when you're in the territory that you understand and to respond with first fear and then curiosity when you're encountered when you encounter the territory you don't understand. Now for animals that territory tends to be more specifically geographical right because like a wolfpack will have its territory or any given animal will have its physical territory. Now, we inhabit a physical territory, which is why hopefully you're comfortable at home and less comfortable when you make a foray out into the world to places that you don't know. But our environment is also conceptual, right? And so our conceptual environments are also divided up into the things we understand and the things that we don't understand. And even though we can be at home in our physical territory and quite secure in our metaphysical territories, there are still domains that we don't understand, edges and frontiers, right? And so if you maybe you have you know some some primitive understanding of physics but you could certainly appreciate very rapidly that there are physical theories theories developed by sophisticated physicists that transcend your understanding. And you can imagine that there's also a place between your understanding and those more sophisticated theories where you can almost understand. And you could imagine standing on that edge of almost understanding and being curious and intrigued and enticed by the possibility that you might expand your knowledge. Well, you're surrounded by a metaphysical territory, a multi-dimensional metaphysical territory made of all these different domains of knowledge. And you have some mastery over each of them. There are elements of them that transcend you. And there are frontiers and borders that you could stand on where you would learn. Right? Here's the thing to know. You get interested in something when you're put on the edge of what you know. Right? And that that that that that grip of interest is actually a manifestation of the instinct that drives you to learn. Now, and you you can see now and then that you'll encounter a book or a talk or a discussion that maximizes your engagement. And the maximization of that engagement is generally a signal that you're in the place where ma where optimized learning is taking place. Now people make the claim especially in the modern world that life is intrinsically meaningless and that's usually a rationalist claim. I can talk about that later, but I'm making a phenomenological claim, which is that there's an instinct of meaning that signals that you're in a place that's the border between what you know and what you don't know that grips you and that that phenomenological meaning is a signal of transformation and and of expansion of adaptation. And in consequence, it's not something that should be eradicable by a kind of brainless nihilism. It's actually the deepest signal you have that you're in the place that you should be if you're transforming into the next best version of yourself. So, you don't want to forgo a relationship with that because if you do that because you're nihilistic, let's say, and maybe because you've been hurt, then you're going to destroy your relationship with the process that could transform you and allow you to adapt to the world. That seems like a bad idea. And so it's it's it's it's use people say, you know, that they can't live without meaning. And that's that's a very strange thing to say if you think about meaning as something that's only abstracted or metaphysical. But if you understand that meaning is actually a manifestation of the instinct that signals optimal learning or optimal transformation, then you can understand why you might die without meaning. Because in some sense if you're static you're not living. So and if you also understand that meaning is the signal of optimized transformation. If you really understand that then you're immune in some ways to a corrosive into to the corrosive nihilism that says you know at its core life has no meaning. It's like I probably figured this out years ago when I was thinking about music, you know, because music has the aspect of intrinsic meaning, right? If you're listening to a piece of music that compels you or that you love and someone taps you on the shoulder and tells you that, you know, um, in the final analysis that nothing you do has any significance, if you have any sense, you're going to just push them away and say, "Yeah, but I'm listening to the music." And music is a balance between chaos and order, right? It has an element of predictability. Otherwise, you can't follow the piece of music, but it has an element of unpredictability because if it just repeats over and over, you get bored with it very quickly. So, what a musician does is present you with a structure of order and then vary that in an interesting way within a certain set of parameters and captures your interest as a consequence. And the reason that you feel that as meaningful is because what music is doing is modeling the way the world actually works, right? And so, and that's also extremely useful to know. You know, you you hear that music is a non-representational art, but that's actually not true. It's the most representational art because it it specifies most precisely that the world is made out of order and chaos and that meaning is the appropriate balance between the two. And so I would say if you're conducting your life properly so to speak, it'll have a musical element. It'll have that same kind of meaning and that things will fall into place in a relatively musical manner. You'll see in your life that there are times when you're in the right place at the right time doing the right thing and things fall into alignment right all around you temporally. They're timed well and things seem to exist in a harmonious relationship to one another. And those are the times of your life that well that you would like to have more of if you could only figure out how to do it. And well partly what we're going to do in the next four hours or so is see if we can step through understanding how you might manage that. All right. So you could say to begin with the world is made out of order. And what does it mean for things to be ordered? There's a very specific meaning that's useful to know about that. You're in the domain of order when your actions produce the outcomes you intended. Okay? So that's really what it means to understand something. If what you're doing produces the results that you desire, then you're somewhere you understand. You know, if you're out with your friends, hypothetically, you're there to have a good time. If you're in a conversation with them and the conversation is flowing smoothly, everyone's happy and laughing, then you your emotions signal to you that the territory defined by you and your friends and your interaction is familiar and comfortable and promising. It's the same thing if you have a meal with your family and it's going well. Now you know maybe you have a meal with your family at a vacation and someone throws something you know untoward on the table which often happens in family gatherings some unresolved issue right comes up for one reason or another like it might habitually that's the emergence of unexplored territory into the domain of what's predictable and positive right and that produces all sorts of emotional reactions often negative especially if it happens involuntarily Right? So that's another way of starting to understand what it means to see the world in this way. So you have what you understand which is the domain that you inhabit when your patterns of attention and action are producing the desired outcome and you have the domain of the unexpected and then you have the border between them as well. Okay. So that's a good way of conceptualizing the world as such. And and my proposition was that you experience the positive meaning that lightens up your life when you're standing on the border between order and chaos. That's the border of optimized transformation. Because you might say you're best situated when you're firmly in the domain of what you understand. That's what people think when they pursue security. But the problem with security is that it has no element of transformation. And so you don't only want to be where things are going the way you want them to go. You want to be where things are going the way you want them to go, but where you're changing and things are changing so that they can get better. Right? So it's an edge. It's not you're not in the domain of the predictable. You're you have one foot in the domain of the predictable and another foot in the domain of the unknown so that you can make more of yourself while you're sufficiently safe. You know, and that's why that's what you do when you play. By the way, when you play, you manifest a set of skills that you've already mastered. Otherwise, you don't know how to play the game. But you want to play the game on the edge. It's why you pick a partner that in a play bout that you can that's a challenge to you, right? Because you might think, well, if you're playing with someone, why not just pick someone that you can beat hands down 100% of the time? And your answer would be, well, that's no fun. And the question about that is, well, why is it no fun if the aim of the game is to win? Why not pick a partner that you can beat 100% of the time? Because then you win. And the answer is in the pursuit of that narrow certain victory, you forgo the possibility of becoming a better player. Right? Okay. So there's a meaning in security which is that you can predict everything that's going to happen. And there's a meaning in the unknown which is that you're put off your what would you say? You're thrown off your feet and you're surprised and threatened and anxious. And then there's a meaning on the border between those where you're secure enough so that you're stable but you're transforming enough so that you're moving towards an optimized version of yourself in the world. Okay. So what we're going to do is to detail out the processes by which you develop the vision that enables you to stand on that edge. So that's the plan. All right. Now we live in time, right? We live in space obviously. We inhabit our different territories, but we also live in time. And the entire expanse of time is also characterized by this relationship between the known and the unknown. Here's an example. You may have memories that come to visit you of past troubles. And those will come on you involuntarily. And when they do, they make you anxious. They they take the foundation out from underneath your feet. And the degree to which they do that is proportionate to how serious the chasm that you encountered. It's proportionate to the depth of the chasm that you encountered in the past. If you have experiences that hurt you that you don't understand and didn't master and could still disturb you in the future, then those visions, those visions of the past will come to haunt you. They'll haunt your nightmares. They'll haunt your daydreams. They'll destabilize you. You'll be tempted to push them away. And what that is, the reason that that happens is because your psyche is set up so that if you fell into a hole once and you don't know why, you you're the more instinctual parts of you are going to presume that that danger still lurks in the future and will represent those experiences to you in the hope of motivating you to develop the adaptive competence necessary. So you won't fall into that hole again. One of the things you do in therapy, one of the things you do with your friends and your family members or even if yourself with yourself if you have some wisdom is if someone has a problem, you try to walk through with them why the problem emerged which might have something to do with the vagaries of the world. Because things happen to us that are accidental and random, that are difficult and dangerous, but also that our misadventures may have something to do with the improper calibration of our of the way that we're looking at and interacting with the world, right? And so when you're thinking about things that befell you in the past, let's say, you may have to develop a relatively sophisticated theory of the randomness of the world and come to terms with that. But you may also have to determine as precisely as you can what insufficiencies you might have brought to the situation that made you more vulnerable than you needed to be. So, for example, if you were bullied as a child, maybe you still are concerned when you go to your workplace, for example, especially if it's new, that the same pattern might recur and you might remember with some apprehension the misadventures you had when you were young. And what that indicates is that possibly that you haven't redressed the insufficiencies in your personality that led you to be the victim of repeated bullying. I'll use bullying as an example because one thing we do know is that there is some stability in the probability that a given child will be a bully or be a victim of bullies. And so I'm not trying to blame the victim of a bully for the fact that that happens. I'm just saying that if negative things have befallen you in the past, it's wisdom to determine what it is that you might be doing wrong that's opening yourself up to the possibility that that those sorts of things will happen to you. And I would say if you're characterized by patterns of negative events, then it's reasonably probable that you're bringing something to the situation. Right? If it happens to you once, well, it's random. And maybe if it happens to you twice, it's random. But if it happens, if you have the same sort of relationship with an intimate partner three times, it's you, right? And that's, you know, that's an uncomfortable thing to realize and you can understand why a stance like that might be criticized in relationship to blaming the victim. But look at it this way. Even if it's 5% you, maybe you should do something about it. That's a useful thing to know, by the way, if you're having difficult discussions with an intimate partner that you have now or family member or a friend. You know, if if you're in a situation where your interactions aren't proceeding in the manner that you would find optimal, one thing that's very much worth doing is trying to figure out what it is that you're doing wrong. It's often very difficult, right? Because if you're in a disagreement with someone, the part of you that's seeking security is going to want to insist that look, we're having a fight here, but it's it's at least 95% you. And that that's an easy well and anger will make you think that. And anger will also make you want to win. And you know, the thing is it might be 90% the other person, although on average it's probably not. But even if it's 10% you, that's something that is under your control and you could rectify and if you did might stop the 90% from making itself manifest in the other person cuz you never know to what degree your imperfections are bringing about the conflicts in your life. Now you have to be careful to meditate on that because you don't want to take yourself apart. But you can learn techniques and we'll talk about them too so that you don't force upon yourself the necessity of a transformation that's so rapid that it undermines you. Right? If it starts to become too threatening, if the magnitude of change that you're apprehending that's necessary for yourself is too daunting, then you're biting off more than you can chew and you should try to change slightly slower, right? Maybe you should try to change at the rate that you find optimal, right? And that's a good thing to learn about yourself. You know, if you if you know that there's something that you have to do and you're not doing it, one tactic that you can employ that's extremely useful is to shrink the task right. So maybe, I don't know, maybe your garage is a mess and it's been that way for 10 years, you know, and you can't get yourself in there to clean. It's like, well, maybe you should clean up one corner in a week, something like that, right? You can shrink the task until you'll find a step forward that you will take. Right? And maybe if you're sophisticated, you could find a step forward that you would take that you would take happily. And this is a good thing to know too when you're negotiating, say, with your wife or your husband. It's like you want you want them or you or the two of you to make a change. you can negotiate the change until you find a change that's small enough and interesting enough so you might both be willing to experiment with it happily. And there's a there's a certain humility in that, right? Because one of the things I noticed as a clinician often was that if my clients were starting to make a positive change in a new direction, especially in a domain where they had had some habitual weakness, they often had to start that change at a level that was so trivial that it was embarrassing or shameful. Right? And so that's where the humility comes in. There's going to be parts of your personality that are pretty immature and the probability that you have to do something shamefully small to start improving that is extremely high. But one thing to know about that is change accelerates. And so even if you have to start slow, that doesn't mean that that isn't going to start a process that will accelerate. And so even if your first steps have to be embarrassingly tiny, that doesn't mean that you're destined to only take embarrassingly tiny steps during the entire process of necessary transformation. Jung, Carl Jung said, the fool is the precursor to the savior. And what he meant, it's why comedians are so necessary, by the way. But what he meant by that was that if you want to make a change in a positive direction, you have to allow yourself to be a fool to begin with. You're going to do things stupidly and badly when you first do them. Although maybe slightly better than you had done them before. And maybe even stupidly and badly is better than pure avoidance. Right? And this is a good thing to know too when you're negotiating again with your husband or your wife. If there's something that you would want from them that you think would help you strengthen your commitment to the relationship, you can negotiate with them until you find a small change that they're willing to do voluntarily and you can allow them to do that badly. This is a very good thing to know, especially if you're with someone you're going to be with for a long time. One of the things I used to do in in my clinical practice was some relationship counseling. And one of the things I would recommend to my clients who were in a long-term relationship or married was to have to go on dates with their partner. And people were often very resistant to that for all probably because they'd tried it a number of times and been burned in some way or they'd say things like, "Well, you know, I don't have to date because now I'm married. It's like okay, you know, you don't want any romance in your life." And then they'd go out and have a date and they'd come back and tell me about how wretched and miserable it went. And then we do a little arithmetic. And so you which is also always a useful thing to do in a situation like this. Let's say maybe you want to have three intimate interactions with your marital partner a week for 50 years. Let's say that or two. Let's go with three. That's 12 a month or about 150 a year. in over 50 years. That's 7,500 interactions. 7,500. Okay, maybe you have to do the first 200 of them badly, right? And 200's a lot, but it's nothing compared to 7500. And so, if you're willing to let yourself stumble forward when you're improving things that repeat, right? You allow yourself that space for play and for error. then you can learn to incrementally master in a manner that enables you to become a master over the long run. Another thing to think about that too that that isn't so obvious when you first apprehend it is that your life in the main is made up of things you repeat. And we tend to downplay the significance of things that we repeat because they're everyday, right? They're normal. They're drab. Coming home from work is a good example. You're going to come home from work five days a week. There's going to be a transition period from work that's 20 minutes. And that transition period is going to happen every day. And it's going to set the tone for the rest of the day. And so it's often the case that those transition periods are awkward for people and they don't do anything about it. And that's a huge mistake. So because 20 minutes a day, we can do the arithmetic. That's 20 minutes a day times three. So that's 2 hours a week. Let's say it's 8 hours a month. It's so it's 12 work days a year essentially. And so that's 5% of your life. That's 5% of your life. If you get 20 things like that right, you have your whole life right. And so you look at the things that repeat right. You master them. You make incremental progress to making them as perfect as they can possibly be. You negotiate with your partner so that that occurs and you allow that negotiation to make itself manifest imperfectly and in a manner that's ridden with errors so that you can continually correct it. And hopefully after you repeat it a hundred times, you get it right. And you do that 20 times and everything in your life is set not only in order but in the order that's on the edge of play. Right? And you can do that. You have to think about though. You have to think about I see this with parents and their children. You know, you'll have someone with a 2-year-old and every bedtime's a fight. Well, you got to think that through because parents actually only spend about 20 minutes a day in one-on-one interaction with their kids. It's a much smaller fraction of your time than you think. And if that interaction is bedtime and every night it's a misery, then what you've done is you've made that whole relationship into misery. And you think, well, it's only, you know, when I put my kid to bed. It's like, no, it's not only that because it happens every day. And if that sets the pattern of your relationship that it's it's nothing but strife and foolish conflict, then well, how are you going to establish a good relationship with your child? and vice versa. All they are is a problem to you and that's not a good thing. And so pay attention to the things that repeat. They're very, very important. That's your life. That people get obsessed about the exceptions, you know, vacations, the special occasions in their life. And those are often a disappointment, by the way. And that's fair enough, you know, because well, it's because people overvalue them and then they go have the experience and it doesn't meet their expectations. And so then they're miserable while they have it and they have nothing but regret. And part of the problem with that, the part of what's causing that is that they're paying way more way too much attention to what's hypothetically exceptional and not nearly enough attention to what is normal and repeats, right? And that's a form of pride, too, because you might want to identify with only the things in your life that are exceptional and not the boring and drab day-to-day things that you do all the time. But you know, you could elevate those to the point of some optimized perfection. You could tell you're doing that, by the way, because you can do it in a state of play. And that's also a very good thing to know. It took me a long time to figure this out. I spent decades trying to understand what the opposite of tyrannical power was. It's not an easy thing to conceptualize, but I believe that it's play. And I think that you know if you have a situation mastered if you can do it playfully. So imagine the situation where you're trying to put your your little kid to bed and that turns into a bout of play. Well then you've got it and then you do nothing but look forward to that. And that would be a good deal if you were in a situation where you could do but do nothing but look forward to the things you repeat every day. That'd be a good bargain to strike with yourself. And it's also it's also something to consider too if if you have things you're doing every day that you dread. Well, one question you might ask is is there something wrong with your attitude? Because maybe there is and you should dig into that and find out. But another conclusion you might draw is maybe you're not doing the right thing, you know, and then you have to strategize carefully and that has to do with the development of a vision about maybe you hate your job, you know, and you think, well, I have to have this job because I have to take care of my family. That's a tyrannical attitude all the way through. And you're blaming your family. So that's a real good deal for them, eh? Isn't there now the shackles that keep you in slavery to a tyrannical job that you hate? That's a lovely gift to lay at the feet of your family. There's a fair bit of pleasure of martyrdom in that too. And you might say instead, and this is what you can do, too, if you're trying to understand the obstacles that are getting in your way as you progress, is well, why are you stuck with this damn job? And you got to think about that in detail. Like I had clients, for example, who were stuck in miserable jobs. I'd say to them, "Well, let's take a look at your resume, your CV. Bring it in next week." And then they wouldn't. Then I'd have to find out why. It's like, "Well, why do you not want to show your CV to someone?" Well, here's some reasons. You haven't updated it for 10 years. Okay. So, then that's kind of daunting, right? Because it's actually like just because it's difficult. You have to sit down and go through your life and you have to structure that in a way that's comprehensible. But then too, the problem with the CV is you have to reveal everything about you that's embarrassing. Maybe you have to paper over various aspects of your stupidity with lies and that undermines your cons your confidence about the CV and about the job uh say the job interview process because you have holes in your past that you don't know what to do with. Well, you face that, you think, okay, well, you know, I had clients, for example, they had 95% of their undergraduate degree and then they stopped. And there's a reason for that. I I don't know, maybe they didn't want the responsibility that would be attendant upon completing the degree. Maybe it was a good way of getting back at their father who forced them to go into engineering when they wanted to be an artist. Like there's some reason you stop with it 95% done. And then you have to fix that cuz otherwise you're embarrassed about it. And if you're embarrassed about it, then you're not going to be confident when you go to your job interview. And if you're afraid of not being confident, you won't look for a job. And then if you won't look for a job, you'll blame your wife because you have to be tyrannized at work. That's a stupid game. And so instead of that, you might figure out, well, why the hell did you quit when you were within, you know, grasping definition, grasping distance of the goal. And God only knows why that is. But maybe it's something that isn't even true of you anymore. You know, maybe you outgrew whatever stupidity had made you do that 10 years ago. To put your CV together, you have to put your past together. And maybe that takes two years. You know, if you want to find a job you actually like, two years isn't too much of an investment to make. And maybe you're terrified because you're going to throw your CV out in the wind and 49 out of 50 times it's going to be rejected. But then you could look at it actuarily and presume, well, of course that's the case because lots of companies advertise positions that don't even exist because they want to keep a continual flow of CVs going through the system. Or they advertise because they're required to legally have a candidate. Or it could be that, you know, at this particular moment you're not the best candidate for that particular like there are a lot of reasons why you're not going to get the job, but they're true for virtually everyone. Then when you know that the base rate for CV submission failure is 95% then you don't have to take it personally and you can think well I need a new job okay I have to send out well you ask yourself how many bloody resumes can you stand to send out a week and that's a serious question right how how much disappointment can you take I don't know maybe you can handle 20 and maybe you can handle five there's going to be some individual difference in that but you could consult yourself and find out. And maybe you're so afraid to begin with that you can only send out one. It's like one's a lot more than zero. And once you've done one, well, maybe you could do three. And once you did three, maybe you could do 10. And you could settle on, I'll send out, you make a routine out of it. I'll send out 10 rums a week for like a year, you know. And if you do that, if you've updated your CV and you're aiming at jobs that are hypothetically within your purview and you have a good story to tell about why you would be the right candidate and you can figure that out, too. If you have a good story to tell, you're not going to be nervous about telling it. You know, you got to ask yourself, well, why should someone hire you? And then you got to discuss that with someone, your wife or friends, and have them hammer away at you until you kind of know what you have to offer, right? And then you can go in there with a bit of confidence and you can say, "Well, I don't know much. I don't have any experience in this realm, but here's a bunch of things that I've done, and here's the investigations that I've made about your company, and this is why I think I'd be a good fit, and this is what I can offer to you, and I won't be a catastrophe, which is the one thing everyone hiring really wants to know." It's like, "What do you think? Did we do this together?" And if you have an attitude like that and you do get an interview, which you will eventually, then the probability that you'll get the job has gone up substantively. And so you don't have to stay in your damn rut, but you do have to figure out what elements of what you don't understand that chaos and potential are terrifying you into paralysis, right? And then you think, well, I'm terrified into paralysis by the magnitude of the job search. It's like, fair enough. You know, you you may have lots of things that you have to put right. Make a list of all the things that frighten you, right? Maybe it's 15 things. Then you can rank order the list. This frightens me the least. Maybe I could try it. And if all of the things frighten you too much, so you're paralyzed, break them down. You know, I when when I was counseling my clients to go on the job search, one of their first assignments was often just open up your CV and look at it. And and like this was an actual contract because when you're playing this game with yourself, let's say, you can't cheat. If you're terrified to go on the job search and you've motivated yourself enough so that you're willing to open your damn computer and look through your CV, don't sit down right then and start rewriting it. It's a violation of the contract, right? You're pushing yourself too hard. What you should do instead is give yourself a little pat in the back and say, you know, sad as it is, I was terrified to do this, but I did it right. So, it's time to like, you know, if if you have a child and the child does something new, you're not going to say to them, if you have any sense, why didn't you do twice as much? That's a great way to demoralize someone. You also shouldn't do that to yourself if if you've taken a step forward, you know, like have a little recognition and maybe you've got someone around you if you're lucky that you could tell what you did to and they would be happy about it. And that's how you distinguish, by the way, between the people you should have around you and the people you shouldn't. Because if you have people around you and you tell them that you made a small step forward and they make light of it or are cynical about it or punish you for it, they might think very hard about just who it is that you're hanging around because you want to be with people who note your progress forward and at least don't get in the way. So, and that includes yourself, that's for sure. All right. So there may be some cleaning up of the chaos in your past you have to do right and you can note that imagine you have a goal getting a new job and you see that there are obstacles in your path that are preventing you from moving forward and then you see that some of those obstacles have to do with the past. Well, so then you have to clean up the past to the point where those obstacles disappear and then you may find some obstacles in the present, right? Maybe you're you don't think you're good at interviews. Well, lots of people feel that way. Well, then yeah, practice that. That's a present problem, let's say. And although it may have its roots in the past, maybe you're not sophisticated enough to conduct yourself well in a job interview, but that's something you can learn. Write down 40 questions that you think you might be asked. Come up with an answer. Not a lie, but an answer. Here, here's the problem with lying. Let's say you lie your way into a job. Well, then you didn't get the job. The lie got the job. And if you had to lie to get the job, probably it's not the job for you. So then your reward is that you get a job that isn't for you and that you don't deserve. Well, that's a hell of a way to start a job. You know, why don't you start a job that is for you, that you do deserve, that you could do? That'd be a lot better plan. And you might say, well, I have to get a pretty dismal job given my qualifications. It's like you start where you are or you start on a falsehood. And one of the things there's this phenomena in economics called the Matthew principle, by the way. And the Matthew principle is to those who have everything more will be given. And from those who have nothing, everything will be taken. And this is a reflection of a phenomenon called the prito distribution. And the prito distribution works like this. Progress is not linear. It's geometric or exponential. Once you start acrewing money, the probability that you'll acrew more starts to increase. This is why a very small percentage of the people have all the money. If you have a million, it's hard to make. If you have no money, it's hard to make a dollar. If you have a million, it's a lot easier to make the next million than it is to make the first million. And that continues. If you have 400 million, it's a lot easier to make a billion, etc. This is true, by the way, for every domain of accomplishment. Once you've recorded one album, it's much easier to record the next it was to record the first. And the third is even easier than the second. Success builds upon itself. And so what that means, and this is a good thing to know, as I said before, even if you have to start slow, that doesn't mean you're doomed to slow. And even if you have to take a job that's beneath you, which is not a good way of conceptualizing it out, by the way, if it's actually matched to your talents, you should be grateful for it. If you do a stellar job at that job, the probability that someone will notice and push you along is extremely high. You know this is something also that people who are bitter and hold back don't understand. I used to get undergraduates come to work with me in my lab and I had a lot fewer positions than there were inquiring undergraduates, right? So they were high demand positions and generally what I would do was give the undergraduate who's asking a task, a real one, you know, because I'd have some maybe I needed them to go investigate some psychological phenomena, make me a little report about it, little research review, and I'd give them that obligation or opportunity. Well, if you are talking with someone who has resources that you might want access to, if they ask you to do something, that's not an obligation. That's an opportunity. And if you have the two things confused, you're doomed, right? Bec. If you regard the things that will move you forward as an obligation, how in the world are you going to move forward? So what would happen inevitably is that some of the undergraduates would go and do just like a stellar job and it would be done in like two days and then others would come back to me a week later and say well you know all these things came up and I couldn't do it and often the story was very plausible you know because they had family trouble I don't know what the hell the problem was it was some real problem or maybe not but at least it sounded like a real problem but you know then I'd go ask the people who did it who actually did the job and they had just as many problems. They just didn't let the problems stop them from doing the job, right? And so then I would hire the undergraduates who actually did the job and not hire the undergraduates who didn't do the job. And you might say, well, that's pretty mean because those poor people had problems. It's like, well, maybe they had problems and maybe they were a problem. And one of the things I noticed was that if I pulled people into my lab who were a problem, that was a problem. And it wasn't just a problem that I had to deal with. It was a problem that often infected the entire lab and especially demoralized the people who were doing a good job, right? And so, well, if you have to start where you are and you're grateful for the opportunity and you make the proper sacrifices and you work, then anyone with any sense will notice that. and anyone you want to work for has enough sense to notice when you're doing a good job. Now, if you're in a job where you're doing a good job and no one is noticing, you should ask yourself two questions. Do the people that you're working for know that you're doing a good job? Because it's possible that you're doing things so efficiently that you're invisible and you're not very good at self-promotion, which is actually just communication. If you're doing a good job for people, they need to know it. And one of the times that you can inform them about that is when you go ask for a raise or a promotion. You need a little list. Here's a bunch of things I did that made your life a hell of a lot easier than it might have otherwise been and perhaps more profitable that you may not have even known about. And if you produce an increment of salary of this magnitude or give me a bit more flexibility or a promotion or some other opportunity, here's a bunch of things I could do for you that would make your life even better. It's like if you have that story and it's real and you present that to your employer and they don't go, you know, that sounds like a pretty damn good deal. Are you sure that that raise is enough? Then maybe you should decide whether or not that's not the right place for you to be working. Right? And before you do that too, you might have already wanted to get your CV in order and to have started sending it out to see what sort of market demand there is for your skills. So you can tell your employer as well that you have other offers that are pending. And then you put yourself in a pretty damn good bargaining position. Part of the reason, by the way, that women do not make as much money as men's is one of many reasons is that they're not as good at men at promoting their own accomplishments, right? It's part of being agreeable and higher in negative emotion. I saw this when I worked in civil service in Alberta years ago when I was a kid 20 years old. I saw that the bureaucracy was basically run by 50year-old women who did all the work and all of that credit was taken by narcissists who pretended that it was them and took all the credit from the conscientious older women who were working. Right? An ugly situation. And you could lay that at the feet of the narcissists for being manipulative and psychopathic. But those women should have learned that doing a great job invisibly is not a very good strategy, right? People need to know. And that means you shouldn't be tooting your own horn constantly because that's just annoying. But it does mean that you know the people for whom you're doing a good job should know you're doing it. And you should also note how much reward you need for doing a good job, right? Because if you're doing a great job and no one ever notices, maybe you're conscientious enough so that that'll be sufficiently motivating for you. But most of us would like to be rewarded for a job well done on some schedule. And that's something else you can negotiate with your wife, your husband, your your kids. It's like one of you in a marriage is going to cook. Well, a little appreciation for that now and then tends to improve the quality of the meals, right? And the atmosphere around the table. And so, one of the things you have to discover about yourself, and this is also part of developing a vision is, well, what's the reward schedule that's necessary for you? And none, that's that's not a good reward schedule. And it's it's something to discover, right? Maybe someone only has something has to say something positive to you like once every month. Who knows? Or maybe it's twice a day. There's going to be some temperamental variability that characterizes you in that regard. You're probably going to need to be rewarded more for things that you're just trying as well, right? But this is this is a good thing to meditate on. You know, how much notice do you need when you're doing something good? And this is something to negotiate with your partner when you do something for them. You can teach them to notice it. And you can also let them know what they need to say. This is another this is something else that's useful to know. Say you're having a dispute with your wife and she wanted you to say something other than what you said. Now, that's what she's going to let you know. First of all, I would like you to say something other than what you just said. What do you want me to say? Well, then she's going to say, "Well, if you loved me, you'd know, right?" Everyone laughs when I make that joke. Yeah. Well, it's it's it's too vague. It's like, "No, I want to know exactly what you would want me to say." Like, if I could say to you what would make you happiest, what would that be? Now, you're in trouble because you have to figure that out, right? Right? And then you have to reveal that and then you're going to be annoyed because you're going to say, "Well, that's not genuine." It's like, "Yeah, maybe it won't be the first 20 times, right? But maybe the person can get good at it." And by the 50th compliment, not only will have the words right, but they'll also have the sentiment, right? You have to let people be stupid about how they're treating you well to begin with. The other thing you can notice too is that if if if your partner does do something that you really appreciated, something small and subtle, let's say they sort of sneak something good in just to see what might happen. If you're smart enough to jump on that, and you have to not be too resentful about their existence to do this. If you're smart enough to jump on that and say, "Ha, I saw what you did." You know, this is how you greeted me when I came home. I got a hug, for example, instead of an immediate litany of never-ending complaints. Like that was a very lovely way to re-enter the house. If you're very very This is something that's very useful with employees too and co-workers. If you see someone doing a good job and you say, "Hey, here's what you did." And you say it in detail. I saw that and it was good. Man, you do that a hundred times if you're running a restaurant. You do that to your employees. any of the employees worth keeping, they'll be working themselves to the bone to get another reward like that. So, people really like that. The Skinner, the Skinner behavioral psychologist, trained animals to do anything. He trained pigeons to guide guided missiles over enemy territory by pecking on photographs. That's hard. Skinner noticed that reward was the most effective form of behavioral transformation. But it was subtle because to reward an animal for doing something you want it to do, you have to wait around until it does the thing and then you have to reward them, right? And so this is the same in your household. If you're watching your kids, maybe your kid by accident cleans something up one day. You know, you can notice that. You say, "Look, you know, maybe they're five. That was the sort of thing an eight-year-old would do. You know, good work, kid. Here's what you did. They'll smile like mad. And the probability that they'll do something like that again ra radically magnifies. And kids are very good at generalizing too, you know? So, not only will they do that thing again, but they'll do things in that category again, right? And that's a fun way of interacting with people in your family because targeted reward is a pleasure to give. and also to receive. And so it's a great way of establishing harmony in your household without without the scraps, the fights that might otherwise be necessary. You know, sometimes you have to settle something and that requires dredging up all sorts of things that everyone perhaps would rather leave buried and attempting to sort through them. That's quite demanding. that targeted reward. It requires attention, but it's extremely effective and it's very pleasant thing to engage in. All right. So, there may be things in your present that you have to sort out. Maybe you have to find your damn CV on your computer. Even that can be a nightmare. You know, one of the things I saw with my particularly disorganized clients was that I'd asked them to get their CV off their computer and then maybe they'd bring their laptop in and the whole bloody thing was just a catastrophic mess, right? There were files everywhere. There was the computer hard drive was a reflection of their psyche, right? Everything was everywhere and all that was valuable was lost. And so maybe one of the things that the first thing you have to encounter when you try to open your CV is the fact that your computer's such a bloody mess that you can't find anything. And you know these are the can imagine that you just imagine that. So someone's in a job they hate and in order to fix that they have to sort out their CV and to do that they have to find it and to do that they have to confront their computer which isn't that big a dragon. It's not nothing but it, you know, it's not cancer. It's it's trouble. But then that's annoying and embarrassing. And so instead of doing that, they don't do it. And then they have the job they hate for 30 years. Right. Right. Yeah. Not smart. Right. And and you could also see that there's a certain humility involved in noticing that your failure to confront the mess on your computer might end your life. Right. Right. [music]