Hello,
This week, I explain why people are sometimes paralyzed by the thought of moving ahead and how that paralysis can be overcome to pursue what is most valuable. Then, Chris Christie joins me to discuss teachers unions, the Ukraine/Russia war, the Biden laptop scandal, and Donald Trump as the Republican candidate. From the archives, I revisit a lecture about the psyche during the process of transformation.
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Advice
Pursue The Ideal And Be A Beacon To The World
Why do people not look up and move ahead? The answer is, you start formulating an ideal, you formulate a judge, and it is pretty easy to feel intimidated in the face of your own ideal. That is what happens to Cain versus Abel, for example. It is really easy to destroy the ideal instead of trying to pursue it because then you get rid of the judge. But it is way better. Lower the damn judge if it is too much. If your current ambition is crushing you, then maybe you are playing the tyrant to yourself and you should tamp down your ambitions, not get rid of them by any stretch of the imagination, but at least put them more reasonably within your grasp. You do not have to leap from point one to point 50 in one leap. You can do it incrementally.
I really like this idea. I think it is a profound idea—the process of recapitulating yourself continually. It is a Phoenix-like process. You are shedding all those elements of you that are no longer worthy of the pursuits that you are valuing. The idea is that as you do, you shape yourself ever more precisely into something that can withstand the tragedy of life and that can act as a beacon to the world. That is the right way of thinking about it—maybe first to your friends and then to your family.
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One of the first series Jordan produced with The Daily Wire is “Dragons, Monsters, and Men.” In this four-part series, he uncovers how to discover your purpose and slay the dragons in your way. This series focuses on the pursuit of greatness. To see more content with Jordan, join DailyWire+ for exclusive content unavailable anywhere else.
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The Power Of Writing And The Path To Critical Thinking
The best way to teach people critical thinking is to teach them to write. It is very hard to teach people to write because it is unbelievably time intensive. Marking a good essay is really easy. You did everything right. Marking a bad essay? Oh my. The words are wrong, the phrases are wrong, the sentences are wrong, they’re not ordered right in the paragraphs, the paragraphs are not coherent, and the whole thing makes no sense. So trying to tell the person what they did wrong? Well, you did everything wrong. Everything about this essay is wrong. That is not helpful either. You have to find the few little things they did half right, and you have to teach them what they did wrong. It is really expensive. The best thing you can do is teach people to write because there is no difference between that and thinking.
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The Capacity To Let Things Go
In one of my 2017 lectures, I frame the self as the element of the psyche that remains intact across transformation. To allow a continual process of transformation to occur, we must let things go as they need to go. Part of doing that is admitting when you’re wrong and identifying where you have more potential.
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Thank you for reading,
Dr. Jordan B. Peterson
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