Jordan B. Peterson '12 rules for life' book summary. These are the only lines you need to read.

Every time I pick a new book I also create a fresh note at Evernote app to keep the quotes from the book I always want to remember.

It took me more than quarantine to finish Jordan B. Peterson book '12 rules for life'. The experience reminded me my mood swings: some days I couldn't start my work day on time repeating in my mind just one more page. While other days, it felt worse than headache.

Finally, just a few days ago I felt the disappointment of hitting the hard surface - back cover of the book.

If you still didn't read it or already forgot what was it about, I'm proudly saying you don't need to go through this reading amusement mood hills and valleys (again), I'm sharing with you the summary of the book. Be prepared it's not short but it's all you need to know from 409 pages.

I'd like to start with these two quotes before hitting the first rule cause this is so me:

Alongside our wish to be free of rules, we all search for structure.

If you don't reach for ideals (it's uncertain that our ideals are attainable) you will never feel that your life has a meaning. 

Now let's hit the rules one by one.

1 rule. Stand up straight with your shoulders back.

Every system must play its role properly, and at exactly right time, or noise and chaos ensure. It is for this reason that routine is so necessary.

To stand up straight with your shoulders back is to accept the terrible responsibility of life, with eyes wide open. It means deciding to voluntarily transform the chaos of potential into the realities of habitable order.

2 rule. Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping. 

Chaos (associated with feminine) is the despair and horror you feel when you have been profoundly betrayed. It's the place you end up when things fall by, when dreams die, career collapses, marriage ends. It's those things and situations we neither know nor understand. Order (associated with masculine) is explored territory. Order is tribe, religion, heart, home and country. Its the floor beneath your feet and your plan for the day. Order is the place where behaviour of the world matches our expectations and our desires. But order is also tyranny when demand for certainty and uniformity and purity becomes too one-sided.

Order is not enough and chaos can be too much.

You need to place one foot in what you have mastered and the other in what you still need to know. This is the position where the terror of existence is under control where you are secure but also alert and engaged.

There are so many ways that things can fall apart or fail to work altogether, and it is always wounded people who are holding it together!

Happy is not synonymous with good. You don't feed your child with candies all the time even he is happy that time, you brush the teeth and out on the snowsuit even if he doesn't like it. So why would you think it acceptable to do anything less for yourself? Same in career what would challenge me and render me productive and helpful so that I could shoulder my share of the load and enjoy the consequences?

You need to know where you are to start chart your course. You need to know who you are to understand your armament and bolster yourself in respect to your limitations.

And another mention from Nietzsche:

He whose life has a why can bear almost any how.

3 rule. Make friends with people who want the best for you.

They will encourage you when you do good for yourself and others and punish you carefully when you do not.

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

Winning at everything might only mean that you're not growing and growing might be the most important form of winning. 

Before you can articulate your own standards of value, you must see yourself as a stranger and then you must get to know yourself.

We succeed when we score a goal or hit a target.

We cannot navigate without something to aim at, and while we are in this world we must always navigate. To see we must focus and to focus we need to pick one thing above all else on which we focus. 500 tiny actions and small decisions compose your day, aim one or two at better result. Aim small and ask yourself what small thing would I like as a reward? 

You see things that facilitate your movement forward, toward your desired goals. Seeing is very difficult, so you must choose what to see and let the rest go.

Life doesn't have the problem. You do. If your life is not going well perhaps it is your current knowledge that is insufficient not life itself.

You cannot aim yourself at anything if you are completely undisciplined and untutored.

Rule 5. Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.

We feel more negative about a loss of a given size than we feel good about the same sized gain.

Rule 6. Set your house in perfect order before you criticise the world.

Start to stop doing what you know to be wrong.

Say only those things that make you strong.

Do only those things that you could speak of with honour. 

Rule 7. Pursue what is meaningful (not what is expedient).

Instead of asking what should I do today, ask how can I use my time to make things better instead of worse? 

To have meaning in your life is better than to have what you want, because you may neither know what you want nor what you truly need. 

Rule 8. Tell the truth - or at least don't lie.

You can use words to manipulate the world into delivering what you want.

It's what everyone does when they want something and decide to falsify themselves to please and flatter. It's called life-lies.

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

Reality cannot be improved by falsification.

Insanity is doing the same thing over and over while expecting different results.

An inauthentic person continues to perceive and act in ways of his own experience has demonstrated false.

What saves is the willingness to learn from what you don't know.

Set your ambitions even if you are uncertain about what they should be.

If you pay attention when you are seeking something you will move towards your goal.

It is the faith that Being can be corrected by becoming.

It is the spirit of exploration itself.

Everyone needs a concrete specific goal - an ambition, and a purpose - to limit chaos and make intelligible sense of his or her life.

Things fall apart. What worked yesterday will not necessarily work today. Things fall apart: this is one of the great discoveries of humanity.

Rule 9. Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don't.

It's amazing what people will tell you if you listen.

Memory is not a description of the objective past. Memory is a tool. Memory is the past guide to the future.

The purpose is not to remember the past. It's to stop the same damn thing from happening over and over.

You talk with not to.

There is no audience, there are individuals.

The conversation of mutual exploration requires people who have decided that the unknown makes a better friend than the known.

You already know what you know, after all - and, unless your life is perfect, what you know is not enough.

When listening to the other person you are reporting what information has done to you - what new things it made appear within you, how it has changed your presuppositions, how it has made you think of new question.

A conversation where it is the desire for truth itself - on the part of both participants - that is truly listening and speaking. It's the state where you are stable enough to be secure but flexible enough to transform.

Your wisdom consists not of the the knowledge you already have but the continual search for knowledge which is the highest form of wisdom.

Wisest man is who knows that what he knows is nothing.

Rule 10. Be precise in your speech.

We see tools and obstacles, not objects and things.

The world reveals itself to us as something to utilise and something to navigate through - not as something that merely is.

Don't ever underestimate the destructive power of sins of omission.

Rule 11. Do not bother children when they are skateboarding.

Competence is that makes people as safe as they can truly be.

People don't seek to minimise the risk, they seek to optimise it.

Too much protection devastates the developing soul. 

Rule 12. Pet a car when you encounter one on the street.

People are social and antisocial.

People need both: cooperation (for safety, security and companionship) and competition (for personal growth and status).

Being of any reasonable sort appears to require a limitation (nobody likes all perfect).

When you love someone, it's not despite their limits. It's because of their limitations. 

Coda.

You don't get piece by being right. You just get to be right.

To speak peace, you have to decide that you want the answer more than you want to be right.

What shall I do with my life? Aim for paradise and concentrate on today. Which means orient yourself properly and then concentrate on the day. Aim continually for heaven while you work diligently on earth. Attend fully to the future in that manner while attending fully to the present. Then have the best chance of perfecting both.

I hope it revealed things you knew that you did not know you knew. 

So did it?