 About once every few years we get one of these books where the contents are supposed to be life-changing but when you start reading a book you hear the same old cliches you have to face when scrolling through social media. But when Jordan Peterson takes control of these cliches, the work combination, the tone, the velocity of speech, they simply work. And Jordan Peterson is a Canadian psychology professor at the University of Toronto, a sighted scholar and one of the most influential public intellectuals of the English speaking world. And three years passed since the release of his first mainstream book, 12 Rules for Life which was centered around Jordan's idea of order versus chaos. And now he is back and his new book, Beyond Order, 12 More Rules for Life is the yang to the yin, adding some chaos and disruption to your existence purposefully, thus completing the first piece of the puzzle, 12 Rules for Life. Savly influenced by yang, Nietzsche, Dostoevsky, Goethe and many more, Jordan Peterson uses their philosophy as spiritual windshields as one of the purposes of the humanities is to teach one how to live well. And I want to give a quick heads up that this book is dense and contains a lot of sub points that feed into the main chapter and this is why you should read it carefully and thoroughly. The first rule in the book states that one should not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement. Now we are surrounded by social structures and to operate within these structures one needs to acknowledge and understand the complexity of such arrangements or at least try to comprehend how these came to life. Because we have a system where the people who inherited the structures have no idea why their grandparents even developed them. And these social institutions have to wrestle with chaos and novelty, they must adapt and constantly morph into something up to date. And there will always be limitations on how the world must be perceived and acted upon if an individual aims to solve a particular problem, the complexity of his simple solution will cascade across multiple domains. It must also appeal to others, it must be able to operate within other structures and provide benefits for others. It cannot simply be good for you but the people around you as well including your family, community and ultimately the world. And Peterson states that a good solution to an important problem must be repeatable without decay across repetitions. Repeatable in a word across people and across time. And these universal constraints that are biologically manifested and socially imposed decrease the complexity of the world to a universally understandable domain of value. And criticizing creative achievement is another thing we are doing on an individual level. This reflects in our behavior in how we interact with one another and how we compete with each other. Sure it can come in handy to spit on Justin Bieber due to the never-ending manifestation of groupthink as it is quite easy to drink a glass of wine and casually trash talk others while we have never sung a song on the streets or performed a live concert. But what if we start looking deeper within one another or at least attempt to consider the complexities of our world so that we can gradually push and better understand creative achievements and how these can push the world forward. And although we are kind of in a state where we are sort of amusing ourselves to death right now let's face it creative achievement is difficult to catalyze and also maintain. This is why we need to fix the basics first and we must perfect ourselves and solve the main problems which manifest across multiple dimensions of human behavior and innovation will be the cherry on top. Now since childhood we absorb and learn to see and act by following the heroes and stories that are captivating to us and this raises the question who are you or at least who could you be feeding into the second rule of the book imagine who you could be and then aim single-mindedly at that. And you are all starting with a clean slate and we immerse ourselves into the wonders of the world. We resonate with a particular type of character or story or life and these are a call to action for the untapped potential that lies burbied within our human natures and might never emerge and develop without that call. And we are all part nature and part culture and let's face it a really good story can trigger an outstanding burst of insane motivation a really good story will sketch the eternal battle between good and evil will clear up the fog will set you on a path to discovering yourself and get the gist of the moral and moral position you will stand for both on a social and personal level and this is very much true for me as well naturally when I was young I was watching a lot of cartoons and if I start thinking deeply about these characters I still kind of resonate with them till this day and the same goes for the movies I watched once I grew older and you know started developing a little bit of taste and I found that I value truth and freedom and privacy but also lean a bit toward introversion and somehow solitary lifestyle and Jordan Peterson provides a meta answer to the who are you question and this is indeed an ideal type of answer but you know attempting to get as close as you can to this ideal will also get us closer to our true selves we are part of the eternal force that constantly confronts the terrible unknown voluntarily and we can become so sharp and so dangerous that if we had to use our true power in a controlled manner we will get absolutely deadly in a way that can keep evil in its layer we are able to manipulate chaos and turn it into controlled order and GP states that this unperceivable veil of true self is transmitted in a form of stories that are difficult to consciously understand and remember that the mirrors in your mind can also reflect the best of yourself and not the worst of someone else now the third rule states that you should work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens and this particular chapter is especially interesting because most humans do not know their actual limits we are living in a world of instant gratification and let's face it they are kind of soft and GP has a special type of suggestion and that is to ask ourselves how hard can we work on something and the advice might seem pretty standard but what you can do is pick something that you want to do and you say to yourself okay i'm going to hammer this particular task and work on it as hard as i can flat out until i deplete my tank simply to see what my limits are how far can i get until i get tired of bored frustrated or how far can i get until i break and give up and this is one of the things that you will need to do at least once in your life and if you find that particular point of exhaustion then you will know when to pull back once you start approaching that limit and next time operate within that limit and you should focus doing this when you're young because obviously that's when you have the most amount of energy but it's never too late and this is how you can get resilience as well you make a list of things a list of challenges and you start attacking them with full force just to simply discover what your limits are and of course the challenges must match the particular person as sometimes you might have to face burdens that you cannot carry and i view this as taking small doses of poison simply to end up to a point where you will be harder to kill whenever there's a hard challenge that you need to face now the fourth rule states that one should not hide unwanted things in the fog and Jordan Peterson constructs a very good argument exploring that particular moment when you have something running in your mind something you know you need to face challenge and tackle either mentally or verbally but you simply choose not to do so one of the most common examples where people are hiding unwanted things in the fog and that Jordan Peterson had to deal with in psychotherapy is actually marriage but he's going to expand on that in a future chapter and it's not just about marriage it's also about the things that people are hiding from each other when having to deal with the triviality of daily life because there's oftentimes a complexity of micro problems you choose to simply ignore and if you do not face that particular something if you choose to ignore it and hide it in the fog hiding under the table at some point this will explode and what you will find out through exploration and self-improvement is that the stuff you are afraid of you're scared of is most of the time not that real we suffer more in imagination than in reality so what you can do is start asking yourself a question such as what might my problem be and you will have a starting point and now you can at least try to guess about your stability and rule number five takes us deeper and deeper and this one states that you should abandon ideology and with this one gp goes far away into the last quarter of the 19th century a time when the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche announced that God is dead and Nietzsche holds that we have blood on our hands because we haven't simply killed God but we also killed that which gave our life meaning and the remaining escape from nihilism is the birth of a new type of individual the super human one that's strong and powerful in a way that allows the creation of new personal values and with God being dead the emergence of the superhuman is a necessity so that society would not drift toward the opposing rocky shoals of despair and over systemized political theorizing and this is not as simple as it seems with psychoanalysts such as young arguing that we are not sufficiently in position of ourselves to create values by conscious choice and this raises the question what makes us think that we are capable of creating ourselves ex nihilo from nothing from scratch and this brings one more problem onto the table which is if we leave our lives according to our freshly created values and centered around those what remains to unite us gp argues that it is much easier to blame a system with the victims of the systems being supported by ideologue always being innocent and the perpetrators of the system as evil because if the power is the problem those who have the power are the singer of cause of the world's suffering and once each system would have identified the source of evil they would have something to aim for a world where only you and people who think like you are good is also a world where you are surrounded by enemies bent on your destruction who must be fought and gp constructs this idea that it's much more safer morally for you to at least attempt to remove the speck of dust in your eye which is also part of the messianic path which is also part of the imitation of the hero and this is not going to be a political issue you need to solve for a sociological one but mostly a spiritual and a psychological one because a sophisticated writer is not going to divide characters in the book by saying that one is good and another is evil it will be more complicated than that an almost eternal battle and struggle between light and darkness so ideology is dead and with god being dead as well what should we do we should at least try and begin to tackle problems that are not so macro level inclined and do this on an individual level addressing problems that are smaller in scale and embedding this type of default into your own being while simultaneously taking responsibility for the consequences and results so have some humility clean up your room take care of your family follow your conscious straighten up your life find something productive and interesting to do and commit to it when you can do all that find a bigger problem and try to solve that if you're there and if that works too move on to even more ambitious projects and as a necessary beginning the process abandon ideology now coming in full force with rule six which states that you should notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated and opportunity is missed by a lot of people because it looks like work in a culture of instant gratification and excess dopamine bursts more work is seen as a daunting monster if you think about it we are kind of putting this type of mindset right from school the time where you could do some extra homework that was not a requirement but it could get you additional points in the long run and this skill happens when we grow up as well and in order to develop the skills to be able to seize opportunities one must pay attention first so you can start asking what would happen if I took responsibility you can then start confronting what GP calls a dragon that's just the size that you are likely to defeat fill up that empty glass of water if you're a guest offer to help clean the dishes in the workplace offer to help complete the tasks no one else is doing and remember that it appears that the meaning that most effectively sustains life is to be found in the adoption of responsibility