Jordan B. Peterson

12 RULES FOR LIFE

An Antidote for Chaos

Foreword by Norman Doidge

Illustrations by Ethan Van Scriver

Table of Contents

Foreword by Norman Doidge

Overture

RULE 1 / Stand up straight with your shoulders back

RULE 2 / Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping

RULE 3 / Make friends with people who want the best for you

RULE 4 / Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today

RULE 5 / Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them

RULE 6 / Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world

RULE 7 / Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient)

RULE 8 / Tell the truth—or, at least, don’t lie

RULE 9 / Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t

RULE 10 / Be precise in your speech

RULE 11 / Do not bother children when they are skateboarding

RULE 12 / Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street

Coda

Endnotes

Acknowledgements

Follow Penguin

Foreword

Rules? More rules? Really? Isn’t life complicated enough, restricting enough,

without abstract rules that don’t take our unique, individual situations into

account? And given that our brains are plastic, and all develop differently

based on our life experiences, why even expect that a few rules might be

helpful to us all?

People don’t clamour for rules, even in the Bible … as when Moses comes

down the mountain, after a long absence, bearing the tablets inscribed with

ten commandments, and finds the Children of Israel in revelry. They’d been

Pharaoh’s slaves and subject to his tyrannical regulations for four hundred

years, and after that Moses subjected them to the harsh desert wilderness for

another forty years, to purify them of their slavishness. Now, free at last, they

are unbridled, and have lost all control as they dance wildly around an idol, a

golden calf, displaying all manner of corporeal corruption.

“I’ve got some good news … and I’ve got some bad news,” the lawgiver

yells to them. “Which do you want first?”

“The good news!” the hedonists reply.

“I got Him from fifteen commandments down to ten!”

“Hallelujah!” cries the unruly crowd. “And the bad?”

“Adultery is still in.”

So rules there will be—but, please, not too many. We are ambivalent about

rules, even when we know they are good for us. If we are spirited souls, if we

have character, rules seem restrictive, an affront to our sense of agency and

our pride in working out our own lives. Why should we be judged according

to another’s rule?

And judged we are. After all, God didn’t give Moses “The Ten

Suggestions,” he gave Commandments; and if I’m a free agent, my first

reaction to a command might just be that nobody, not even God, tells me

what to do, even if it’s good for me. But the story of the golden calf also

reminds us that without rules we quickly become slaves to our passions—and

there’s nothing freeing about that.

And the story suggests something more: unchaperoned, and left to our own

untutored judgment, we are quick to aim low and worship qualities that are

beneath us—in this case, an artificial animal that brings out our own animal

instincts in a completely unregulated way. The old Hebrew story makes it

clear how the ancients felt about our prospects for civilized behaviour in the

absence of rules that seek to elevate our gaze and raise our standards.

One neat thing about the Bible story is that it doesn’t simply list its rules,

as lawyers or legislators or administrators might; it embeds them in a

dramatic tale that illustrates why we need them, thereby making them easier

to understand. Similarly, in this book Professor Peterson doesn’t just propose

his twelve rules, he tells stories, too, bringing to bear his knowledge of many

fields as he illustrates and explains why the best rules do not ultimately

restrict us but instead facilitate our goals and make for fuller, freer lives.

The first time I met Jordan Peterson was on September 12, 2004, at the home

of two mutual friends, TV producer Wodek Szemberg and medical internist

Estera Bekier. It was Wodek’s birthday party. Wodek and Estera are Polish

émigrés who grew up within the Soviet empire, where it was understood that

many topics were off limits, and that casually questioning certain social

arrangements and philosophical ideas (not to mention the regime itself) could

mean big trouble.

But now, host and hostess luxuriated in easygoing, honest talk, by having

elegant parties devoted to the pleasure of saying what you really thought and

hearing others do the same, in an uninhibited give-and-take. Here, the rule

was “Speak your mind.” If the conversation turned to politics, people of

different political persuasions spoke to each other—indeed, looked forward

to it—in a manner that is increasingly rare. Sometimes Wodek’s own

opinions, or truths, exploded out of him, as did his laugh. Then he’d hug

whoever had made him laugh or provoked him to speak his mind with greater

intensity than even he might have intended. This was the best part of the

parties, and this frankness, and his warm embraces, made it worth provoking

him. Meanwhile, Estera’s voice lilted across the room on a very precise path

towards its intended listener. Truth explosions didn’t make the atmosphere

any less easygoing for the company—they made for more truth explosions!—

liberating us, and more laughs, and making the whole evening more pleasant,

because with de-repressing Eastern Europeans like the Szemberg-Bekiers,

you always knew with what and with whom you were dealing, and that

frankness was enlivening. Honoré de Balzac, the novelist, once described the

balls and parties in his native France, observing that what appeared to be a

single party was always really two. In the first hours, the gathering was

suffused with bored people posing and posturing, and attendees who came to

meet perhaps one special person who would confirm them in their beauty and

status. Then, only in the very late hours, after most of the guests had left,

would the second party, the real party, begin. Here the conversation was

shared by each person present, and open-hearted laughter replaced the starchy

airs. At Estera and Wodek’s parties, this kind of wee-hours-of-the-morning

disclosure and intimacy often began as soon as we entered the room.

Wodek is a silver-haired, lion-maned hunter, always on the lookout for

potential public intellectuals, who knows how to spot people who can really

talk in front of a TV camera and who look authentic because they are (the

camera picks up on that). He often invites such people to these salons. That

day Wodek brought a psychology professor, from my own University of

Toronto, who fit the bill: intellect and emotion in tandem. Wodek was the

first to put Jordan Peterson in front of a camera, and thought of him as a

teacher in search of students—because he was always ready to explain. And

it helped that he liked the camera and that the camera liked him back.

That afternoon there was a large table set outside in the Szemberg-Bekiers’

garden; around it was gathered the usual collection of lips and ears, and

loquacious virtuosos. We seemed, however, to be plagued by a buzzing

paparazzi of bees, and here was this new fellow at the table, with an Albertan

accent, in cowboy boots, who was ignoring them, and kept on talking. He

kept talking while the rest of us were playing musical chairs to keep away

from the pests, yet also trying to remain at the table because this new addition

to our gatherings was so interesting.

He had this odd habit of speaking about the deepest questions to whoever

was at this table—most of them new acquaintances—as though he were just

making small talk. Or, if he did do small talk, the interval between “How do

you know Wodek and Estera?” or “I was a beekeeper once, so I’m used to

them” and more serious topics would be nanoseconds.