12 Rules for Life

Jordan Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist and, at the time, a professor at the University of Toronto. Published in 2018, the book turns two decades of clinical practice and his earlier academic work (Maps of Meaning) into twelve concrete rules of conduct — grounded in mythology, the Bible, evolutionary biology, and case studies from his own patients.

A few lines worth keeping:

If you will not reveal yourself to others, you cannot reveal yourself to yourself.

If you say yes when no needs to be said, however, you transform yourself into someone who can only say yes, even when it is very clearly time to say no.

Willful blindness is the refusal to know something that could be known.

Only man will inflict suffering for the sake of suffering. That is the best definition of evil I have been able to formulate.

You are by no means only what you already know.

You might be winning but you’re not growing, and growing might be the most important form of winning.

It was for this reason that Nietzsche said that a man’s worth was determined by how much truth he could tolerate.

Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t.

When we’ve been careless, and let things slide, what we have refused to attend to gathers itself up, adopts a serpentine form, and strikes — often at the worst possible moment.

Maybe you’ll get hurt. Probably you’ll get hurt. Life, after all, is suffering. But maybe the wound won’t be fatal.