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This article is an excerpt from the Shortform summary of '12 Rules for Life' by Jordan Peterson. Shortform has the world's best summaries of books you should be reading.

1. Peterson journeys broadly, discussing discipline, freedom, adventure and responsibility, distilling the world's wisdom into 12 practical and profound rules for life. 12 Rules for Life shatters the modern commonplaces of science, faith and human nature, while transforming and ennobling the mind and spirit of its readers.
2. 12 Rules for Life by Jordan Peterson. Read More on Amazon Read the Original Get My Searchable Collection of 200+ Book Notes. 12 Rules for Life by Jordan.
3. The 12 Rules for Life is a book by Jordan B. Peterson that touches on many topics including science, philosophy, psychology, religion, and politics. It is a self-help book, and at its core are two key concepts. Firstly, that you should take personal responsibility for your life and the life of those in your charge (your children).

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12 Rules for Life is one of the bestselling books in recent times. Famous author Jordan Peterson lays out 12 simple rules on how to conduct your life.

The key point: individual responsibility. Take responsibility for your own life. Don’t worry about other problems – fix your own first. If everyone did this, many society-level problems would be solved.

Learn the key points of the 12 Rules for Life rule list, and get a summary of each of the 12 Rules below.

Introduction to 12 Rules for Life

Most humans crave order and meaning in their existence, to deal with the terrifying uncertainty of the world. For much of history this function was served by religion, with rules handed down by gods and supernatural surveillance of behavior.

But take away religion, and a void remains. There is no scientific code of ethics that inherited the stabilizing role of religion. In the absence of clear rules and a moral compass, people are prone to nihilism, existential angst, and misery.

In 12 Rules for Life, Peterson argues that there is a right and wrong way to conduct your life. In contrast, he rejects the ambiguity of moral relativism, the idea that good and evil are subjective opinion and that every belief has its own truth. Moral relativism tolerates all ideas to avoid being “judgmental,” and prevents adults from telling young people how to live. It also rejects thousands of years of development of virtue and how to live properly.

As a solution, in his 12 Rules for Life list, Peterson focuses on individual responsibility. The central tenets are:

• Take responsibility for your own life. Don’t worry about other problems – fix your own first. If everyone did this, many society-level problems would be solved.
• Walk the line between order and chaos, where life is stable enough but also unpredictable enough to provoke personal growth. In other words, push yourself to the limit of your ability and challenge yourself.
• Acknowledge that life is suffering. Your goal is to make progress to avoid suffering.
  • Overprotective adults avoid discussing suffering with their children, with the hope that it will protect them from it. This just makes children unprepared to deal with suffering when they run into it.
• If we lived properly as the above, we would be resistant to the pains of existence and to the enticing lures of empty ideologies promising safety.

That this book has hit such a chord support the first point, that most people crave order and structure. The rest of this guide clarifies the 12 Rules for Life list, with themes of individual responsibility, being truthful to yourself, and defining your own meaning for life.

The 12 Rules for Life List

Rule 1: Fix your posture. Others will treat you with more respect.

• There is a part of your brain that is constantly monitoring signals to figure out your position in society. How you see others, and how others treat you, affect how you view yourself. If others kowtow to you, you elevate your own impression of status. If others denigrate you, you lower your internal status.
• If you slouch, you convey defeat and low status to others; they will then treat you poorly, which will reinforce your status. (This can be reinforced in serotonin signaling, related to depression)
• Fix your posture to get others to treat you better, which will make you feel better and stand tall, thus kicking off a virtuous cycle.

Rule 2: Take care of yourself, the way you would take care of someone else.

• Many people are better at filling prescriptions for their dogs than themselves. Similarly, you may self-sabotage yourself daily – by not taking care of your health, not keeping promises you make to yourself.
• Peterson argues that you do this because of some self-loathing – that you believe you’re not worth helping. Instead, you have to believe that you have a vital mission in this world, and you are obliged to take care of yourself.
• Nietzsche: “He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.”

Rule 3: Surround yourself with people who want you to succeed.

• Surround yourself with people who support you and genuinely want to see you succeed. You will push each other to greater heights; each person’s life improves as the others’ improve. They won’t tolerate your cynicism, and they will punish you when you mistreat yourself.
• Don’t associate with people who want to drag you down to make them feel better about themselves.
• Don’t accept charity cases by helping people who don’t accept personal responsibility for their actions. People who don’t want to improve can’t be helped.

Rule 4: Judge yourself by your own goals, not by others’.

• With mass media, it’s easy to compare yourself to the best of every field (looks, wealth, marriage, career) and think of yourself as miserably outclassed. But modern society is so complex that everyone has different goals – which makes comparing to other people pointless.
• Drill deeply into your discontent and understand what you want, and why. Define your goals.
• Transform your goals into something achievable today. If it’s not within your control, look somewhere else. Let every day end a little better than it started.
• If you do this correctly, you’ll stop being obsessed with other people’s success, because you have plenty to do yourself.

Rule 5: As a parent, train your children to follow the rules of society.

• Children test boundaries of behavior to learn the rules of the world. As a parent, your purpose is to serve as a proxy for society. You must teach the child what is acceptable, and what isn’t.
• Children who receive no/incorrect feedback will learn the incorrect boundaries of behavior. They will be poorly adjusted and rejected by society, which will severely hamper their happiness. If you don’t teach children the rules, society will punish them for you, far less mercifully.
• Set the rules, but not too many. Use the minimum necessary force to enforce the rules.

Rule 6: Before blaming anything else, think: have I done everything within my ability to solve the problem?

• It’s easy to blame the outside world, a group of people, or a specific person for your misfortunes. But before you do this, question – have you taken full advantage of every opportunity available to you? Or are you just sitting on your ass, pointing fingers?
• Are you doing anything you know is wrong? Stop it today.
• Stop saying things that make you feel ashamed and cowardly. Start saying things that make you feel strong. Do only those things about which you would speak with honor.

Rule 7: Do what is meaningful to you, and you will feel better about existing.

• Doing good (preventing evil from happening, alleviating unnecessary suffering) provides your life with meaning. Meaning defeats existential angst; it gratifies your short-term impulses to achieve long-term goals; it makes your life worth living.
• Think – how can I make the world a little bit better today? Pay attention. Fix what you can fix.
• Think more deeply – what is your true nature? What must you become, knowing who you are? Work toward this.

Rule 8: Act only in ways in line with your personal truth. Stop lying.

• You may lie to others to get what you want; you may lie to yourself to feel better. But deep down you know it’s inconsistent with your beliefs, and you feel unsettled.
  • Lies can be about how much you enjoy your job; whether you want to be in a relationship; whether you’re capable of something; that a bad habit isn’t that bad for you; that things will magically work out.
• You must develop your personal truth, and then act only in ways that are consistent with your personal truth.
• Once you develop your truth, you have a destination to travel toward. This reduces anxiety – having either everything or nothing available are far worse.
• Act only in ways that your internal voice does not object to. Like a drop of sewage in a lake of champagne, a lie spoils all the truth it touches.

Rule 9: Listen to other people thoughtfully. You’ll learn something, and they’ll trust you.

• People talk because this is how they think. They need to verbalize their memories and emotions to clearly formulate the problem, then solve it. As a listener, you are helping the other person think. Sometimes you need to say nothing; other times, you serve as the voice of common reason.
• The most effective listening technique: summarize the person’s message. This forces you to genuinely understand what is being said; it distills the moral of the story, perhaps clarifying more than the speaker herself; and you avoid strawman arguments while constructing steelman arguments.
• Assume that your conversation partner has reached careful, thoughtful conclusions based on her own valid experiences.

Rule 10: Define your problem specifically. It becomes easier to deal with.

• Anxiety usually comes from the unknown. You don’t know what the problem is, or something vague seems really scary. Specificity turns chaos into a thing you can deal with.
• If you had a cancer in your body, wouldn’t you want to know where it is, what it is, and how exactly to treat it? Why don’t you treat every other problem in your life with the same clarity?
• Be precise. What is wrong, exactly? What do you want, exactly? Why, exactly?
• In interpersonal conflicts, specify exactly what is bothering you. Don’t let it spiral into an inescapable cobweb. If you let everyday resentment gather, eventually it may bubble up and destroy everyone.

Rule 11: Accept that inequality exists.

• Peterson criticizes the postmodern assertion that gender is merely a social construct, and that there are no differences between males and females. He disagrees that there needs to be complete equality, in every behavior and preference, at all times.
• Instead, Peterson calls for recognition that inequality does exist. Males and females have different natural instincts and different preferences, and we shouldn’t deny that they exist. If we ignore this, we can create policies that force people against their nature, which can have unintended consequences.
• For example, Peterson feels we’re at risk of “feminizing” young boys by excessively protecting them from danger. Boys by nature are more aggressive. This is biological. They want to prove competence to each other. They want to inhabit that level of risk that pushes them to grow. Let boys be boys.

Rule 12: Life is tough. Take time to indulge in little bits of happiness.

• Life is tough. Good people get hurt. Suffering is pervasive.
• You can hate the universe for this. Or you can accept that suffering is an undeniable part of existence, and loving someone means loving their limitations. Superman without any flaws is boring and has no story.
• Notice little bits of everyday goodness that make existence tolerable, even justifiable. Watch the girl splash into a puddle. Enjoy a good coffee. Pet a cat when you run into one.

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Like what you just read? Read the rest of the world's best summary of '12 Rules for Life' at Shortform. Learn the book's critical concepts in 20 minutes or less.

Here's what you'll find in our full 12 Rules for Life summary:

• Why standing up straight will make people treat you differently
• How to find meaning in your life and work
• Why you're lying to yourself without realizing it

Jordan Peterson has some frank life advice for you. Informed by 30 years of clinical psychology practice and extensive study of our political, social, and evolutionary history, he has distilled his life pro tips into the book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos.

Jordan Peterson is a Professor of Psychology from Canada. He's contributed to more than 100 scientific papers on the subjects of personality, aggression, social conflict, and the psychology of religion, for which he's been cited more than 10,000 times in the literature. From Harvard to the University of Toronto, Peterson has established a career researching, lecturing, and working in clinical practice.

Peterson makes headlines, however, for his protests against legally enforced speech, the labelling of all white people as privileged, and the problem with diversity as an ideology. His fight is with the subversive nature of extreme political agendas—be they far-left or far-right—with a focus on the modern trend for political correctness within North American universities, such as the human costs of seeking equality of outcomes.

Having faced the backlash from surface-skimming media analysis, it's pretty hard to debunk Peterson's arguments on an academic level. His claims are rooted in empirical observations of humanity. He holds a mirror to Mother Nature and reveals her to be a cold-blooded killer; as are we, her creations.

Peterson's chilling conclusion is that all human beings are monsters. We can be good monsters, or we can be evil monsters—it all depends on our life circumstances—but we certainly have the power for monstrosity within us. Informed by his studies of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, he contextualises history's greatest atrocities while providing compelling arguments for their very existence.

It's from this vantage point that 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos takes stock of the human experience, urging us to pursue meaning in the light of life's tragic underpinnings. It is a psychological, philosophical, historical, biological, religious, and personal manifesto, from a man who's making a giant existential omelette and breaking more than a few eggs in the process.

The 12 Rules for Life

This rule stems from biology. By posturing yourself in a confident manner, you create a positive feedback loop in your brain that makes you feel good. The release of serotonin improves your mood and that further improves your default posture.

Meanwhile, your body language signals to other people that you are successful and confident. They respond to you more positively as someone who might have something valuable to offer, including knowledge, connections and social validation.

Thus, this small initial correction can have wide-ranging effects on your mood and social status.

Why a lobster, though? Like humans, lobsters make dominance displays and have evolved social hierarchies. We also share similar neurochemistry due to our common evolutionary tree.

And so while it may seem stark to compare mammals with molluscs, we're all made of the same genes and proteins. It's the same reason that we trial chemotherapy drugs on zebrafish.

Peterson's critics claim hierarchies are a modern construct for oppression. However, the study of animal behaviour across multiple phylogenies demonstrates otherwise. Natural selection supports the intrinsic value of social hierarchies through 500 million years of evolution.

Check out Robert Sapolsky's field studies of social hierarchies in baboon troops in A Primate's Memoir: Love, Death and Baboons which informed his work into stress, social status and the biology of depression.

Stand up straight with your shoulders back.

People are better at giving medication to their pets than to themselves. Why do we fail so miserably to take proper care of ourselves?

This rule draws from depth psychology. Humans are self-conscious creatures. We understand emotional abstractions like shame, disgust, love and mortality. And so, unlike all other animals, we know ourselves to be tragically and fundamentally flawed.

This deep knowing prevents us from taking care of ourselves, because we feel we don't really deserve it. I'd bet there's a similar self-destructive thread in tobacco smoking and alcohol abuse. It feels good to administer the punishment we feel we so deserve.

Jordan doesn't stop there. Highlighting your capacity for self-loathing is hardly practical life advice. Instead, he goes on to explain another self-fulfilling prophecy.

In dedicating yourself to a larger cause, you create meaning in your life. It can be anything—from volunteering in a soup kitchen to sewing giant tapestries of kittens—it just has to be a mission outside of yourself. In turn, taking care of yourself becomes a mere necessity toward achieving that goodness.

Pretty slick, Jordy P.

Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping.

Your social group is vitally important. These people reflect your nature back at you, day after day. They are your social barometer, helping you master what's acceptable behaviour in the wider world. For a social species, that's a big deal.

Good friends tell you the truth, even if it hurts. They support you when you're feeling lost. They encourage you to think deeper, take responsibility and find meaning in life.

Bad friends criticise and limit you. They restrict your intellectual and emotional growth. They use you to make themselves feel better. They don't want you to succeed, because then you won't need them anymore.

Choose your friends wisely. Cut out the negative influences. Don't tolerate self-made victims who complain a lot but don't actually want to improve. They are a drain on your emotional resources. Seek positive, ambitious friends and help each other up as far as you can go.

Make friends with people who want the best for you.

There will always be someone who's smarter, funnier and having a better time at life than you. The internet reminds us of that continually.

Don't compare yourself to these perceptions of other people (not least because they're inaccurate). Only compare your present self to your past self, thereby monitoring your own trajectory to betterment.

Set yourself personal goals. What's befitting of your individual talents and interests? What do you see in the world around you that's broken—and how can you fix it? Search for meaningful ways to improve until you have ambitions for your romantic, social, career and creative selves.

Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.

Your main job as a parent is to raise a human being that is competent and socially desirable. Coddling provides short term gratification but actively harms the child's long term confidence by teaching them they are weak and need protection. Compounding this issue, parents won't always be around to buffer their adult children when they need it most.

You child has a finite window of time in which to learn the boundaries of social behaviour. After this, society will punish them for their mistakes by denying them friendships, and later, relationships and career opportunities. The phrase tough love illustrates this necessity.

What's more, a disobedient child fuels resentment in even the most mild-mannered parents. It's in everyone's best interests to teach them the boundaries of acceptable behaviour at the earliest opportunity. Set basic rules and use the minimum necessary force to impose them.

Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.

It's easy to criticise others from a place of blissful ignorance. Setting your own house in order provides hands-on experience of life's challenges. You may discover, for example, that there are no perfect solutions. Perhaps the target of your venom was actually doing a pretty good job all along.

The story of Chesterton's Fence illustrates this.

Imagine a rule-bound conservative walking along a country road when he discovers a fence. He has no idea why the fence is there, but supposes it was put there for good reason. So he leaves the fence well alone and takes a different route on his walk.

Soon after, a freedom-seeking liberal discovers the same unexplained fence blocking the road. 'This fence is limiting my freedom. I don't like it.' He clears the fence away and trundles along the previously forbidden road.

Who is right? It's impossible to know with the information we have. Perhaps the fence had outlived its purpose, or perhaps it was erected arbitrarily or with bad intent. In that case, removing it was for the best. But perhaps the fence was preventing hikers from falling into a surprise sinkhole. Removing the fence could cost lives.

The moral is don't go removing fences—or in political terms, don't go demanding reforms—until you understand the reason for the boundaries in the first place. You may just do more harm than good.

This rule is about having some humility and focusing on fixing your own shortcomings before trying to reorganise the world.

Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world.

This feeds in to an earlier rule about how to cope with existential angst—by finding a meaning to life that's bigger than yourself. It draws from the well-documented psychological benefits of seeking delayed gratification.

Success can often be attributed to this mindset. It means making a sacrifice now for greater overall benefit in future. Think junk food vs healthy eating. Exercising vs slothing about. Cheating vs commitment. Instant gratification feels good in the moment but makes life harder for your future self.

Have some integrity. Define your values. Discover what makes your life worthwhile, so that when times get tough (and they will) you'll have sufficient inner reserves of strength to fight on. What are you fighting? According to the depth psychologist, Carl Jung: it's the absolute terror of existence.

When life shatters you into a thousand pieces, what core life pursuits will motivate you to put yourself back together?

Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient).

Spend a full day monitoring your language. If you're like most people, you'll find you lie a lot. We lie to appease our friends, to avoid confrontation, to elevate our social status, to deny deep-rooted personal weaknesses. Lying is a powerful defence mechanism but it doesn't serve your long term interests.

In the last chapter you resolved to pursue what is meaningful, but this can go awry if you lie to yourself. Imagine a student who adopts a trendy anti-establishment stance and spends his whole adult life working angrily to topple the ideological monsters of his imagination.

Lying ruins all of us. (See Sam Harris' Lying for a thoughtful breakdown of how any instance of lying is ultimately harmful.) Set yourself the meta-goal of being authentic; of being as accurate as possible in relaying your vision of the world to others and to yourself.

Once you start telling the truth, you won't want to go back. The truth is liberating, both in relation to the self and others. This life hack will also help you discern value in other people and avoid those who refuse to be authentic with you.

Tell the truth – or, at least, don't lie.

Most people are verbal processors: they need to talk in order to structure their thoughts. As a listener, then, you are helping someone think; to re-arrange their logic or opinions, or to problem solve newly discovered disequilibrium.

If you listen hastily, with judgement, eager to assume the other person's position before they've finished their sentence, you risk making inaccurate assumptions. Proper listening means devoting your entire attention to the speaker's message, even if you disagree with it.

Next time you're in a conversation, focus on proper listening. Allow the other person talk for longer and without interruption, and they will reveal themselves in ways you may not have seen before. Your ambition as a listener is to ask open questions and to summarise the answers in response, thus forcing yourself to distil the speaker's true perceptions.

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

Chapter ten highlights the disintegration of order into chaos, led by imprecise communication and conceptualisation of that which threatens us.

In any conversation, if you identify a problem with clear and careful language, you bring it to the fore as a viable, obedient object. You can then work together to reduce the complexity of the issue and seek a logical solution.

If you leave things vague, everything bleeds together. The problem becomes an indeterminable mess. The baby monster is swept under the carpet to grow into an adult monster, who will jump out and bite you later on.

Articulation is vital as we encroach into issues of increasing complexity. You must make your words work hard for you, or your truth crumbles into chaos.

Be precise in your speech.

'Of course it was dangerous. Danger was the point. They wanted to triumph over danger. They would have been safer in protective equipment, but that would have ruined it. They weren't trying to be safe. They were trying to become competent—and it's competence that makes people as safe as they can truly be.'Jordan Peterson

In well-functioning societies, competence is the major driver of success. If you have a brain tumour, you're going to want the most competent brain surgeon to treat you. You don't care about their bank balance, or their political leanings, or their ethnic background. Competence is king.

Here, Peterson strikes at what Freud called the Oedipal Mother, who overprotects her children hopelessly. Her extreme compassion prevents her children from striking out, making mistakes, and learning how to be self-sufficient—physically, socially and emotionally. Thus the Devouring Mother foreshadows a lifetime of fear and insecurity for her offspring.

Children are little adults on a path to independence. You can't fight their battles for them and you can't make the whole world safe. Allow them to brave first-hand experience with all its inherent dangers. Then, as competent adults, they can fight their own battles and win.

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Do not bother children when they are skateboarding.

This is the simplest piece of advice from Peterson's book and might well be spun as 'living in the moment'. But here's my take.

Humans are the only species to be wrapped up in their own painful, self-conscious existence. (Yeah, you remember chapter two.) And so if you have a grain of empathy in you, to spend time with another human is some degree of work. But we do it because we get a lot of enrichment back.

But non-human animals give us the comfort of companionship without the energy demands of human interaction. Sure, they don't deliver the highest levels of conversation either but that's not the point. When you're stressed out, animals are the least demanding friends you'll ever have.

And it's in these moments, meeting a cat in the street, that you forget about the acute and chronic stresses of your life, and just be with another living creature. They don't judge you or force you to confront your terror, they just want to be with you. And that's absolutely life-affirming.

Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.

Final Thoughts

To hear from Jordan Peterson himself, check out his full psychology lecture series. Here's his first lecture to get you started.

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You can also buy his book 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos on which this article was based.

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