Jordan B. Peterson
Author of 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
About the Author
Jordan B. Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist, Professor of Psychology at the University of Toronto and author. He has published numerous scientific papers with colleagues and students regarding creativity and personality. His YouTube channel features his university and public lectures. He show more is the author of Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, published in March 1999. His latest book is 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, published January 2018. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: Dr. Jordan Peterson delivering a lecture at the University of Toronto in 2017.
Series
Works by Jordan B. Peterson
Essay Writing Guide 4 copies
Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don’t Have To / 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2020) — Author — 2 copies
The War Against Free Speech 1 copy
We were five 1 copy
Associated Works
Don't Burn this Book: Thinking for Yourself in an Age of Unreason (2020) — Foreword, some editions — 197 copies, 4 reviews
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1962-06-12
- Gender
- male
- Education
- University of Alberta
McGill University, Montreal, Canada
Fairview High School
Grande Prairie Regional College - Occupations
- clinical psychologist
cultural critic
professor of psychology - Organizations
- University of Toronto
McGill University - Nationality
- Canada
- Birthplace
- Edmonton, Alberta, Canada
- Places of residence
- Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Fairview, Alberta, Canada
Montréal, Québec, Canada
Arlington, Massachusetts, USA - Map Location
- Canada
Members
Discussions
Jordan Peterson's Advice for practicing and developing better critical-thinking habits in Pro and Con (May 2018)
Reviews
I really wanted this book to be good. I've seen interviews with the author and he seemed to be intelligent, rational, open to listen and explore new ideas with the scientific method (regardless of his personal views, which might be controversial to some)... and 12 Rules for Life is everything but :(
Contrary to its subtitle "an antidote to chaos", it is pure chaos, much too long, convoluted, with many digressions and loose ends, full of stories that bring little or none value to the argument show more for the choice of those 12 rules. Analogies used by the author are far-fetched and often fail to take into account the nuances and complexity of human life. There is little research done to validate those rules, and when data is presented it is cherry-picked and often misinterpreted in favor of the author's thesis. For many rules the only justification is "because I say so. Period" or "I had this one situation and it worked for me, so it's universal" or "because the Bible says so. Period" (and I have nothing against the Bible itself, just missing a bit more contemporary source of knowledge to argument applicability of those rules to modern life... or, in fact, any other source).
And the worst part is that this book is not totally bad. As in any chaos, as the author repetitively claims, there is some order - there are bits and themes that are interesting and make you question rules of life as you know them. They lure you deeper into the book wishing there will be more, that it will get better later on... but it doesn't. Some rules are written more coherently, some are painful to go through without a facepalm, some provide some insight, some are banal, all of them seem to miss the editor work.
I expected much more of this book and I wish I had stopped at watching videos with Peterson. My recommendation is rather to explore YouTube than start reading this book as for me it was a waste of time. show less
Contrary to its subtitle "an antidote to chaos", it is pure chaos, much too long, convoluted, with many digressions and loose ends, full of stories that bring little or none value to the argument show more for the choice of those 12 rules. Analogies used by the author are far-fetched and often fail to take into account the nuances and complexity of human life. There is little research done to validate those rules, and when data is presented it is cherry-picked and often misinterpreted in favor of the author's thesis. For many rules the only justification is "because I say so. Period" or "I had this one situation and it worked for me, so it's universal" or "because the Bible says so. Period" (and I have nothing against the Bible itself, just missing a bit more contemporary source of knowledge to argument applicability of those rules to modern life... or, in fact, any other source).
And the worst part is that this book is not totally bad. As in any chaos, as the author repetitively claims, there is some order - there are bits and themes that are interesting and make you question rules of life as you know them. They lure you deeper into the book wishing there will be more, that it will get better later on... but it doesn't. Some rules are written more coherently, some are painful to go through without a facepalm, some provide some insight, some are banal, all of them seem to miss the editor work.
I expected much more of this book and I wish I had stopped at watching videos with Peterson. My recommendation is rather to explore YouTube than start reading this book as for me it was a waste of time. show less
"… the insistence throughout Exodus that redemption is found through continual voluntary exposure to that which is threatening." (pg. 338)
I must admit to being a bit blindsided by this book. Moving on from his 12 Rules – or 24 Rules, if you count Beyond Order – Jordan Peterson's next step has been a retrenchment of his ideas rather than a new chapter. Hewing much closer to the tone and depth of his 1999 academic masterpiece Maps of Meaning than the more consciously user-friendly, show more quasi-polemical bestsellers 12 Rules for Life and Beyond Order, I was slightly unprepared for this shift and struggled to engage with parts. Even when I managed to lock myself in, I found We Who Wrestle with God to be a more intensive analysis of ideas already addressed in previous books – and in the lectures and podcasts where Dr Peterson's message truly thrives.
In the last few years, Jordan Peterson has been delving much deeper into the stories of the Bible, with lecture series on Genesis and Exodus and with the religious allusions that had always been there in his work becoming more overt and less apologetic. We Who Wrestle with God is a summary of these last few years of thought, providing exhaustive commentary on the main stories of those first few books of the Bible – Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, the Tower of Babel, Abraham, Moses and Jonah – through the lens of Peterson's Logocentric philosophy, underpinned by his astute psychological observations. Fans of Peterson's work will already be familiar with how he utilises the story of Cain and Abel (for example), and this book is in effect the definitive written record of Peterson's perspective on such things.
There are drawbacks to this. There is a lack of freshness here, at least for those of us who already have a longstanding interest in Peterson's work. I personally feel that the Biblical stuff Peterson talks about works better in small doses, in the digressions in his lectures and podcast appearances, or as the profound examples that illustrate wider, more freewheeling points in 12 Rules for Life. We Who Wrestle with God, however, is – at 570 pages – certainly not a small dose. At its best, it feels like Maps of Meaning, that astonishing but heavy-going tome that requires academic grit and endurance. At its worst, when it's exhaustively querying what a feature of a particular story tells us about what God requires of us, or presenting different translations of Bible verses, it can feel like an extended hardback version of one of those leaflets that get pushed through your door.
Once I accepted it would require the same application as Maps of Meaning, I could accommodate my fatigue better, but I think the book would have been better if it had been less exhaustive and closer to the ready engagement an everyman reader could have in 12 Rules for Life. Its methodical approach, combined with the familiarity of its core ideas to regular Peterson readers, makes it less compelling. In previous books, a Peterson argument could sometimes end up in a place that stopped me in my tracks, but on most occasions in We Who Wrestle with God, I knew where Peterson was going and, regrettably, was impatient for him to get there. The message might not be lost along the way, but some of the interest in it is. More a commentary than an argument, the book would've been more charming if it had engaged the reader more on an adventure, rather than presenting them with a schematic of one.
This is not to say, however, that We Who Wrestle with God fails, or is underwhelming. Quite the contrary. The Logocentric interpretations of the stories of Genesis and Exodus are fascinating – if sometimes a little overcooked in some chapters, losing their flavour – and the serious, unashamed advocacy of the value of the Bible to our civilisation and its morals is intriguing in a modern secular society that has longed since decided such things are uncool. We need to "reestablish our covenant with the God" who has oriented us on this path of consciousness, Peterson argues at the end of his book (pg. 505), and he has provided plenty of evidence on why we should do so.
Peterson's contention is that we as a species discover our moral and societal values by acting them out, not only in personal behaviour but through our stories. The Biblical stories are those that have endured – and consequently, might well have the most fundamental things to say about our behaviours. The Biblical stories are "not an argument for the existence of God, rendered against the doubt of believer and unbeliever alike", as the atheists and the dogmatic theists would like them to be, "but a description of what is to be held properly in the very highest of places, so that the continuation of man, society, and world may be ensured" (pg. 173). There are "a million paths of deviation, detour, and defection, and very few (perhaps one) that enable effective, efficient, productive, generous, and unified movement forward" (pg. 457); a common theme Peterson identifies in the stories is that "when terrible things happen… faith, humility and courage… nonetheless constitute the best strategy, the best pathway forward" (pg. 139).
For Peterson, then, the stories are 'true', and God is 'real', in the sense that being oriented by this concept of a God, and following the examples of the stories in your behaviour, lead to positive outcomes that are, in your life, true and real. And this is not a sleight-of-hand argument, but one coming from the proposition that humans are "not the submissive receivers of simply self-evident truths. Every perception is an effort" (pg. xxvi) and has been learned over countless generations of humans observing what behaviour works and what doesn't, and then abstracting those lessons into stories which are then passed down through the generations. This is why we can experience a "sense of revelation… when reading, say, a particularly profound book"; there is a connection between our personal perspective and this "collective unconscious" (pg. 18). It glows because it communicates an underlying shared truth, even if we did not know it.
It is a magnificent and inspiring concept of human development, even if We Who Wrestle with God feels at times like an extensive Appendix to Peterson's three previous books rather than a player in its own right. When I read the Bible myself some years ago, I began it as a scofflaw atheist but more importantly as a lover of literature; I quickly came to appreciate that the stories were meant to be taken in that profound, revelatory way that great literature is meant to, rather than the gotcha-style literalism some of my atheist influences had taken it. Since then, Peterson's recognition – and subsequent curation of – a more "psychological and relational definition" of God (pg. xxv), rather than a literal one, has seemed to me entirely right, and one that I had reached, appropriately enough, through exploration in my own story, Void Station One.
We Who Wrestle with God is the most overt and in-depth curation of this idea, which has been underpinning Peterson's worldview for decades, and the book's sometimes excessive weight serves as a sturdy anchor for it. Readers should nevertheless be advised that they will need to undergo much wrestling of their own should they choose to open it, and consequently navigate some considerable fatigue.
"Those who attend assiduously to their focal 'narrow' concerns will first journey deeper and deeper into the narrowly defined unknown at hand, learning first the details directly relevant to those concerns, but soon after coming to understand the broader webs of associations and causal pathways that are inevitably part of the phenomenon in question. Nothing exists in isolation. Anything studied with sufficient depth thus eventually comes to speak of everything." (pp326-7). show less
I must admit to being a bit blindsided by this book. Moving on from his 12 Rules – or 24 Rules, if you count Beyond Order – Jordan Peterson's next step has been a retrenchment of his ideas rather than a new chapter. Hewing much closer to the tone and depth of his 1999 academic masterpiece Maps of Meaning than the more consciously user-friendly, show more quasi-polemical bestsellers 12 Rules for Life and Beyond Order, I was slightly unprepared for this shift and struggled to engage with parts. Even when I managed to lock myself in, I found We Who Wrestle with God to be a more intensive analysis of ideas already addressed in previous books – and in the lectures and podcasts where Dr Peterson's message truly thrives.
In the last few years, Jordan Peterson has been delving much deeper into the stories of the Bible, with lecture series on Genesis and Exodus and with the religious allusions that had always been there in his work becoming more overt and less apologetic. We Who Wrestle with God is a summary of these last few years of thought, providing exhaustive commentary on the main stories of those first few books of the Bible – Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah, the Tower of Babel, Abraham, Moses and Jonah – through the lens of Peterson's Logocentric philosophy, underpinned by his astute psychological observations. Fans of Peterson's work will already be familiar with how he utilises the story of Cain and Abel (for example), and this book is in effect the definitive written record of Peterson's perspective on such things.
There are drawbacks to this. There is a lack of freshness here, at least for those of us who already have a longstanding interest in Peterson's work. I personally feel that the Biblical stuff Peterson talks about works better in small doses, in the digressions in his lectures and podcast appearances, or as the profound examples that illustrate wider, more freewheeling points in 12 Rules for Life. We Who Wrestle with God, however, is – at 570 pages – certainly not a small dose. At its best, it feels like Maps of Meaning, that astonishing but heavy-going tome that requires academic grit and endurance. At its worst, when it's exhaustively querying what a feature of a particular story tells us about what God requires of us, or presenting different translations of Bible verses, it can feel like an extended hardback version of one of those leaflets that get pushed through your door.
Once I accepted it would require the same application as Maps of Meaning, I could accommodate my fatigue better, but I think the book would have been better if it had been less exhaustive and closer to the ready engagement an everyman reader could have in 12 Rules for Life. Its methodical approach, combined with the familiarity of its core ideas to regular Peterson readers, makes it less compelling. In previous books, a Peterson argument could sometimes end up in a place that stopped me in my tracks, but on most occasions in We Who Wrestle with God, I knew where Peterson was going and, regrettably, was impatient for him to get there. The message might not be lost along the way, but some of the interest in it is. More a commentary than an argument, the book would've been more charming if it had engaged the reader more on an adventure, rather than presenting them with a schematic of one.
This is not to say, however, that We Who Wrestle with God fails, or is underwhelming. Quite the contrary. The Logocentric interpretations of the stories of Genesis and Exodus are fascinating – if sometimes a little overcooked in some chapters, losing their flavour – and the serious, unashamed advocacy of the value of the Bible to our civilisation and its morals is intriguing in a modern secular society that has longed since decided such things are uncool. We need to "reestablish our covenant with the God" who has oriented us on this path of consciousness, Peterson argues at the end of his book (pg. 505), and he has provided plenty of evidence on why we should do so.
Peterson's contention is that we as a species discover our moral and societal values by acting them out, not only in personal behaviour but through our stories. The Biblical stories are those that have endured – and consequently, might well have the most fundamental things to say about our behaviours. The Biblical stories are "not an argument for the existence of God, rendered against the doubt of believer and unbeliever alike", as the atheists and the dogmatic theists would like them to be, "but a description of what is to be held properly in the very highest of places, so that the continuation of man, society, and world may be ensured" (pg. 173). There are "a million paths of deviation, detour, and defection, and very few (perhaps one) that enable effective, efficient, productive, generous, and unified movement forward" (pg. 457); a common theme Peterson identifies in the stories is that "when terrible things happen… faith, humility and courage… nonetheless constitute the best strategy, the best pathway forward" (pg. 139).
For Peterson, then, the stories are 'true', and God is 'real', in the sense that being oriented by this concept of a God, and following the examples of the stories in your behaviour, lead to positive outcomes that are, in your life, true and real. And this is not a sleight-of-hand argument, but one coming from the proposition that humans are "not the submissive receivers of simply self-evident truths. Every perception is an effort" (pg. xxvi) and has been learned over countless generations of humans observing what behaviour works and what doesn't, and then abstracting those lessons into stories which are then passed down through the generations. This is why we can experience a "sense of revelation… when reading, say, a particularly profound book"; there is a connection between our personal perspective and this "collective unconscious" (pg. 18). It glows because it communicates an underlying shared truth, even if we did not know it.
It is a magnificent and inspiring concept of human development, even if We Who Wrestle with God feels at times like an extensive Appendix to Peterson's three previous books rather than a player in its own right. When I read the Bible myself some years ago, I began it as a scofflaw atheist but more importantly as a lover of literature; I quickly came to appreciate that the stories were meant to be taken in that profound, revelatory way that great literature is meant to, rather than the gotcha-style literalism some of my atheist influences had taken it. Since then, Peterson's recognition – and subsequent curation of – a more "psychological and relational definition" of God (pg. xxv), rather than a literal one, has seemed to me entirely right, and one that I had reached, appropriately enough, through exploration in my own story, Void Station One.
We Who Wrestle with God is the most overt and in-depth curation of this idea, which has been underpinning Peterson's worldview for decades, and the book's sometimes excessive weight serves as a sturdy anchor for it. Readers should nevertheless be advised that they will need to undergo much wrestling of their own should they choose to open it, and consequently navigate some considerable fatigue.
"Those who attend assiduously to their focal 'narrow' concerns will first journey deeper and deeper into the narrowly defined unknown at hand, learning first the details directly relevant to those concerns, but soon after coming to understand the broader webs of associations and causal pathways that are inevitably part of the phenomenon in question. Nothing exists in isolation. Anything studied with sufficient depth thus eventually comes to speak of everything." (pp326-7). show less
I see many five-star reviews here, so here is the contrarian position. I’m giving this one star for a couple of reasons.
1. The content does not justify the length of the book. When you strip away the pseudo-profundity and verbosity, you’re left with rather simple ideas you could find in any self-help book or discover on your own. Rule # 1, for instance, essentially states that females prefer males with confidence and that success breeds confidence and further success. This is rather show more obvious without having to understand the evolutionary history of lobsters.
2. The introduction of the book presents the author as an objective investigator of the truth, disillusioned by dogmatic ideology and prepared to demonstrate its dangers. He then proceeds to incessantly quote from the bible, perhaps the most dogmatic text ever written. I didn’t purchase the book to be preached at, and found it unexpected and highly obnoxious.
I understand that the author is interested in story and “archetypes,” but the bible is quoted out of proportion. There are many ancient stories to choose from, each with endless interpretive possibilities, but the bible is, for some reason, the primary text. Now I’m sure this is fine with many people, but I was unpleasantly surprised that I had purchased a book on biblical criticism or theology.
The stories the author has selected to focus on, his preferred interpretations, and the stories he ignores, says more about his psychology than anything else. It appears that he NEEDS religion to be true to prevent his own nihilistic tendencies, a viewpoint he foists on his readers.
More than once he states in no unequivocal terms that Jesus is the “archetypal perfect man.” Perhaps, but without getting into it here, there are many reasons to think perhaps not. For those more philosophically inclined, or for those that appreciate the progress of humanism and science, Socrates, for example, would probably be a better fit for the archetypal perfect man. And if I want insight into morality and human nature from an ancient source, I’d turn to Plato and Aristotle before the Good Book.
Again, this is all too subjective, which is the problem in general with using “ancient wisdom” to support a particular viewpoint. The author presents his interpretive schemes as objective truths about human nature and the only display of humility is found in the introduction.
--------------------------------------
For those seeking an alternative to Jordan Peterson’s dark vision of the world, questionable approach to truth and knowledge, and retreat to religion, they will find the answer in Bertrand Russell, whose essays on religion seem to, at times, be speaking directly to Peterson himself.
Here’s the final paragraph from Russell’s essay Why I Am Not a Christian:
Russell wishes to replace fear, religion, and dogma with free-thinking, intelligence, courage, knowledge, and kindness. To believe something because it is seen to be useful, rather than true, is intellectually dishonest to the highest degree. And, as Russell points out elsewhere, he can’t recall a single verse in the Bible that praises intelligence.
Here’s Russell in another essay, titled Can Religion Cure Our Troubles:
We can see that the Peterson fallacy is at least as old as 1954. The fact that Communism and Nazism committed evils is not justification to return to religious dogma; in fact, that would just be replacing one dogmatic ideology for another.
The solution is not a retreat to the Age of Faith, which was no more pleasant than living under communism; the solution is a renewal of the Enlightenment values of reason, science, humanism, and progress espoused by Russell himself.
---
And here are some worthwhile alternatives to 12 Rules For Life:
The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt
The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User's Manual by Ward Farnsworth
Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects by Bertrand Russell
The God Argument: The Case against Religion and for Humanism by AC Grayling show less
1. The content does not justify the length of the book. When you strip away the pseudo-profundity and verbosity, you’re left with rather simple ideas you could find in any self-help book or discover on your own. Rule # 1, for instance, essentially states that females prefer males with confidence and that success breeds confidence and further success. This is rather show more obvious without having to understand the evolutionary history of lobsters.
2. The introduction of the book presents the author as an objective investigator of the truth, disillusioned by dogmatic ideology and prepared to demonstrate its dangers. He then proceeds to incessantly quote from the bible, perhaps the most dogmatic text ever written. I didn’t purchase the book to be preached at, and found it unexpected and highly obnoxious.
I understand that the author is interested in story and “archetypes,” but the bible is quoted out of proportion. There are many ancient stories to choose from, each with endless interpretive possibilities, but the bible is, for some reason, the primary text. Now I’m sure this is fine with many people, but I was unpleasantly surprised that I had purchased a book on biblical criticism or theology.
The stories the author has selected to focus on, his preferred interpretations, and the stories he ignores, says more about his psychology than anything else. It appears that he NEEDS religion to be true to prevent his own nihilistic tendencies, a viewpoint he foists on his readers.
More than once he states in no unequivocal terms that Jesus is the “archetypal perfect man.” Perhaps, but without getting into it here, there are many reasons to think perhaps not. For those more philosophically inclined, or for those that appreciate the progress of humanism and science, Socrates, for example, would probably be a better fit for the archetypal perfect man. And if I want insight into morality and human nature from an ancient source, I’d turn to Plato and Aristotle before the Good Book.
Again, this is all too subjective, which is the problem in general with using “ancient wisdom” to support a particular viewpoint. The author presents his interpretive schemes as objective truths about human nature and the only display of humility is found in the introduction.
--------------------------------------
For those seeking an alternative to Jordan Peterson’s dark vision of the world, questionable approach to truth and knowledge, and retreat to religion, they will find the answer in Bertrand Russell, whose essays on religion seem to, at times, be speaking directly to Peterson himself.
Here’s the final paragraph from Russell’s essay Why I Am Not a Christian:
"WHAT WE MUST DO
We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world—its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is, and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence, and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. The whole conception of God is a conception derived from the ancient Oriental despotisms. It is a conception quite unworthy of free men. When you hear people in church debasing themselves and saying that they are miserable sinners, and all the rest of it, it seems contemptible and not worthy of self-respecting human beings. We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past, or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time towards a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create.
Russell wishes to replace fear, religion, and dogma with free-thinking, intelligence, courage, knowledge, and kindness. To believe something because it is seen to be useful, rather than true, is intellectually dishonest to the highest degree. And, as Russell points out elsewhere, he can’t recall a single verse in the Bible that praises intelligence.
Here’s Russell in another essay, titled Can Religion Cure Our Troubles:
Mankind is in mortal peril, and fear now, as in the past, is inclining men to seek refuge in God. Throughout the West there is a very general revival of religion. Nazis and Communists dismissed Christianity and did things which we deplore. It is easy to conclude that the repudiation of Christianity by Hitler and the Soviet Government is at least in part the cause of our troubles and that if the world returned to Christianity, our international problems would be solved. I believe this to be a complete delusion born of terror. And I think it is a dangerous delusion because it misleads men whose thinking might otherwise be fruitful and thus stands in the way of a valid solution.
The question involved is not concerned only with the present state of the world. It is a much more general question, and one which has been debated for many centuries. It is the question whether societies can practise a sufficient modicum of morality if they are not helped by dogmatic religion. I do not myself think that the dependence of morals upon religion is nearly as close as religious people believe it to be. I even think that some very important virtues are more likely to be found among those who reject religious dogmas than among those who accept them. I think this applies especially to the virtue of truthfulness or intellectual integrity. I mean by intellectual integrity the habit of deciding vexed questions in accordance with the evidence, or of leaving them undecided where the evidence is inconclusive. This virtue, though it is underestimated by almost all adherents of any system of dogma, is to my mind of the very greatest social importance and far more likely to benefit the world than Christianity or any other system of organised beliefs.
We can see that the Peterson fallacy is at least as old as 1954. The fact that Communism and Nazism committed evils is not justification to return to religious dogma; in fact, that would just be replacing one dogmatic ideology for another.
The solution is not a retreat to the Age of Faith, which was no more pleasant than living under communism; the solution is a renewal of the Enlightenment values of reason, science, humanism, and progress espoused by Russell himself.
---
And here are some worthwhile alternatives to 12 Rules For Life:
The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom by Jonathan Haidt
The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User's Manual by Ward Farnsworth
Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects by Bertrand Russell
The God Argument: The Case against Religion and for Humanism by AC Grayling show less
Jordan B. Peterson can be controversial given his strong opinions on certain topics and the people he interviews for his podcast, but I find him an interesting character.
Given how hyper intelligent he is, it was no surprise that the 12 rules / chapters in this book could get pretty complex at times, and on occasions I had to circle back to make sure I was following the thread of his point, but heavy going as it was from time to time I enjoyed his philosophising and following the meandering show more path of this key point for each chapter.
The rules sound pretty random from the titles, but Peterson covers a lot of ground with each:
Stand up straight with your shoulders back
Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping
Make friends with people who want the best for you
Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today
Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them
Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world
Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)
Tell the truth - or, at least, don't lie
Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don't
Be precise in your speech
Do not bother children when they are skateboarding
Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street
Do I agree with everything Peterson thinks? No (for instance, his thoughts on men and women can be quite stereotypical and black and white), but he's got an exceptional brain and I find his thought process incredibly interesting.
4 stars - thought provoking and insightful. I'll look out for the follow up (but will give my brain a rest first). show less
Given how hyper intelligent he is, it was no surprise that the 12 rules / chapters in this book could get pretty complex at times, and on occasions I had to circle back to make sure I was following the thread of his point, but heavy going as it was from time to time I enjoyed his philosophising and following the meandering show more path of this key point for each chapter.
The rules sound pretty random from the titles, but Peterson covers a lot of ground with each:
Stand up straight with your shoulders back
Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping
Make friends with people who want the best for you
Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today
Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them
Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world
Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)
Tell the truth - or, at least, don't lie
Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don't
Be precise in your speech
Do not bother children when they are skateboarding
Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street
Do I agree with everything Peterson thinks? No (for instance, his thoughts on men and women can be quite stereotypical and black and white), but he's got an exceptional brain and I find his thought process incredibly interesting.
4 stars - thought provoking and insightful. I'll look out for the follow up (but will give my brain a rest first). show less
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