- What's up party people? Mark Manson here. And unless you've been living under a rock for the past three years, you've undoubtedly heard of Dr. Jordan Peterson. Peterson has a great YouTube channel, a very famous podcast, and wrote a bestseller called 12 Rules for Life. He then followed up with another bestseller called 12 More Rules for Life. Now, I've read Peterson's work, watched his videos, even had the opportunity to talk to him extensively about my own work on his podcasts with his daughter Mikhaila, and I'm very proud to say that I was able to get multiple F-bombs from him. - Shit. Shit. Shit. Shit. - Now, although Peterson has many interesting ideas, perhaps the greatest benefit I got from his work is not any specific answer he presents, but simply the framework of his responses. This idea that we can create rules of life for ourselves. I think this is an incredibly powerful and profound idea. The idea that we can establish our own guiding principles and codes that can not only help us navigate the world but also deeply define us as individual human beings. I love this idea. So I sat down and asked myself, what are my rules of life? Stay tuned to find out. (cheerful music) Now, before we dive into this, I have to give a little disclaimer, just because this is the Internet and people are damn stupid. These are my rules for life,

They are not, I'm not saying that this has to be the rule of life for everyone, it doesn't have to be your rule of life, these are mine. If you like them, you can have them, if not, no one cares. Okay? Let's start. Rule number one, you are responsible for everything in your own experience. Even if it's not your fault. This concept of radical responsibility comes from existentialism. Specifically from Jean-Paul Sartre. Now, Sartre had this amazing idea, which is that, at every moment we are aware, we are choosing. We constantly make decisions, not only about what to do, but also about how to see things. You know, what if someone says something that bothers me, partly because I chose to see it in a way that bothers me. I chose to have values that made me angry. I chose to listen to the guy who pissed me off. Now, Sartre said that this constant choice, this need to choose perception and action at every moment, is a huge burden for us mentally and emotionally. We are terrified to take on this constant responsibility. And so, as humans, what we tend to do is find ways to shift responsibility to other people. Say: Oh, well, it's not my fault, he made me do it. Or say, Yes, it's my, my boss messed it up. I was just following the rules. It's not

That's normal. That's human nature. But Sartre took this even further. He said that we often seek for other people to adopt our values, adopt our principles, adopt our belief systems, and what matters to us. And this is a much more subtle evasion of responsibility. You know, like saying, My dad was a doctor, and his dad was a doctor, and his dad was a doctor. So, of course, I have to be a doctor. It's like, Well, everyone else is doing it, so I should do it too. It's this very subtle way of avoiding responsibility that Sartre called living in bad faith. It's basically living for others instead of living for oneself. Now, on the other side of bad faith, Sartre called living with responsibility, doing consciously, making those choices based on your own principles and values at every moment, and also being aware that you are making those choices at every moment. Sartre called this living in authenticity. Nowadays, we generally consider it as being true to oneself or discovering who you are, figuring out what matters to you, what your values are, what you are willing to stand up for, and then being willing to make that decision when it arises, even if you are going to be socially punished for it. Now, this is an extremely profound philosophical concept. It has really changed the way I see the world and how I view my life. But you know, if

Personal responsibility is like the first step in any kind of personal growth. Because think about it, you can't improve something if you don't believe you are responsible for it, if you don't believe you are capable of choosing something different. You can't better yourself if you don't believe you are empowered to make different decisions. And so, until you have that perception of personal responsibility that I am the one making the decisions, I can choose differently next time, then there is no way to improve. Responsibility is the cornerstone of what I teach and what I write about for that reason. Now, the biggest problem people have with this whole issue of responsibility is what I call the responsibility fallacy, which is the assumption that if I am responsible for something, then it means it's my fault, but that's not true at all. Right? For example, I could be hit by a bus tomorrow, and it's not my fault that I get hit by a bus, but it is absolutely my responsibility to recover from being hit by a bus. Someone could leave a newborn baby on my doorstep. It's not my fault that someone left a newborn baby on my doorstep, but it is absolutely my damn responsibility to take care of that baby. These things happen all the time throughout our lives. We are often responsible for things we are not to blame for, and understanding that and accepting it, as annoying as it may be, is so central and fundamental to doing anything else, to improve oneself

To be an ethical and reasonable person, to have good relationships, as if the responsibility were there, front and center at all times. So, for me, that's rule number one, radical responsibility. Rule number two, there is no such thing as a bad emotion. There are only bad reactions to emotions. For some reason, every time I say this, it reminds me of when I was in music school, studying jazz. And I remember I had a jazz teacher who said, There is no such thing as a wrong note, there are only bad musicians. (Mark laughs) Which is pretty brutal. But the analogy kind of works. Like, there are no bad emotions, only bad people. Everyone gets angry, everyone gets upset, everyone gets sad, everyone gets depressed, everyone gets anxious. All of these are basic and normal human functions. What determines if it's good, bad, or not is how the person responds to those emotions. So, there are people who handle anxiety extremely well and there are people who handle anxiety extremely poorly. There are people who handle their anger extremely well and there are people who handle their anger extremely poorly. The term emotional intelligence has been around for a long time. In fact, I consider it more in terms of emotional skill. Just like some people are naturally very talented in basketball but are terrible at, I don't know, water polo, some people are naturally very talented at handling guilt and terrible at handling, you know,

Sadness or whatever it may be. So we all have our strengths and weaknesses, but we all need to train ourselves to better handle emotions and train ourselves to be better at managing our emotions. We have to be willing to experience those emotions. We cannot label or judge those emotions as bad or incorrect or shameful or assume that we are screwed losers because we are very sad at the end of that Pixar movie, no, that's life. You feel things and move on. The truth is that emotions are actually just biological feedback mechanisms. They are ways our nervous system evolved over thousands or millions of years to help us survive better. When we get scared it's because our body detects some sense of danger, some threat to our ability to preserve our own lives. If we get angry it's to motivate us to overcome some kind of obstacle or fight back, you know, to an enemy or something like that, as if these were inherently useful tools in our biology. I think the first step to emotional health is simply learning not to block any of them. Let it out, be willing to experience them. The second step is then to experience or express these emotions in a way that is healthy, or at least not harmful to yourself and others. Now, I want to digress a bit here because it has become very popular in recent years to publicly celebrate people who are vulnerable with their emotions.

Athletes who are very open about their mental health issues, or business or political leaders who talk about mental health problems or different feelings they had, the royal family doing damn interviews about their depression and that shit, in general, this is a good development. I believe it is more emotionally healthy for people and prominent leaders in the world to be very open about their emotions. But, you know, here comes a but, a danger I see is that there is starting to be a glorification of these people. You know, it's like if an athlete comes out and says they are battling depression. And not only is it okay, but now there is a certain segment of people applauding that person saying, You are a hero. This person is the best because they came out and admitted they feel depressed. Well, that's also a problem, right? Remember, you don't want to judge your negative emotions. You don't want to say, I'm a loser for being sad, but you also don't want to judge your emotions positively. Like, you don't want to be like, I'm damn best for being sad, because what that does is unconsciously encourage people to start feeling sad all the time or to investigate and find their own, like finding that damn thing in their own life that makes them so sad, and then make that their identity. The goal of not judging emotions is not to judge emotions. That means you are not a loser for being

But you are not a damn saint either. You are not a disaster because you are anxious, but you are not brave either. As if you were just a human, you are just a damn person. I think we are starting to lose sight of that. You know, 10 years ago, I started writing about vulnerability, and I believe the culture was very unvulnerable. Sometimes I wonder if maybe we are becoming a little more vulnerable than celebrating vulnerability is like denying any benefit that comes from vulnerability. It's okay. Rule number three, every action and decision you make should be motivated to improve life, both yours and others'. Now, obviously, this is a very difficult rule to maintain. Not only because, you know, damn, sometimes we just want to sit on the couch and drink beer all day, but also because it's very hard to know, what is improvement? What makes a life better? Are you spoiling that child or just giving them an opportunity? Are you actively loving someone or suffocating them and making them feel trapped? It's very hard to know where the line is, practically in everything we do, but that's why the rule here is intention. You know, the intention is always towards growth and improvement. It is always towards greater health and greater functionality. You know, I just think of this as having a value for radical growth. You know, if the first rule is radical responsibility, the second rule is radical acceptance, the third rule

Maintaining that intention, in everything I do in life, whether it benefits a living being, be it myself, another person, or the furry squirrel from the street. So those are my three rules, simple, straight to the point, practically impossible to fulfill, I think probably all rules of life should be like that. You know, it's like, you don't want a life rule that you can easily like, and then, a year later, you say, Well, that was easy, to hell with that crap. And then you go back to drinking beer on the couch. I think one of the reasons why virtues are virtues is that in ancient Greece they realized that some of these things require constant effort. Like honesty, as if you could never stop trying to be honest, you know, always, no matter how honest you were yesterday, you have to try to be honest today. And I think any good rule for life is like that. So those are mine, radical responsibility, radical acceptance, radical growth. What are yours? Leave them in the comments below, and if you agree with these rules, make sure to subscribe to the channel, maybe like this video, share it with a friend or two, because that will improve their life. It will also improve mine. So until next time, peace. (upbeat music)

3 Rules That Will Immediately Change Your Life

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