In his book 12 Rules for Life, Jordan Peterson’s fourth rule is this: “Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.” Simply put, this rule is all about not letting yourself becoming discouraged and resentful because you think other people have it better than you. It is about looking at yourself and trying to make yourself a better person than you were yesterday.
Or more simply still, it is all about having the right standards for yourself. The fact is, it is a good thing to acknowledge other people who are better than you or have more talent than you in a variety of ways. The way a kid becomes a better basketball player is because that kid watches Michael Jordan, is inspired by Jordan, and wants to be more like Michael Jordan on the basketball court. There are a number of musicians that I am in awe of, and that make me want to get better at the guitar and learn how to write songs.
Acknowledging greatness and talent in others is bound to inspire and challenge us to get better in those areas in our own lives. And sure, even though no one (not even Lebron James!) is ever going to “Be like Mike,” and even though I will never play the guitar like Eric Clapton or write songs like Sting, their greatness and genius can be the catalyst for many athletes and musicians to get better themselves. And in the attempt to be a better athlete or musician, oftentimes there will be an internal voice that says, “That attempt was okay, but you can do better. You’re not like Mike—keep striving to get better!”
At the same time, though, that internal critic can easily go too far and lead you into some very unhealthy thinking. If you find yourself always thinking, “I’ll never be like Mike. I’m never going to be good. I’ll never be good enough.” And if that internal critic is so persistent that you end up giving up and don’t even try…because it is too hard, or because you don’t see progress as quickly as you’d like to see it—Peterson suggests that that internal critic, so vital for spurring you on to being better, has probably become something more sinister and self-defeating.
The fact is, if you want to get better at anything, you have to challenge yourself. And if you’re going to challenge yourself, you have to put yourself in difficult situations where you might fail—and you probably will fail. It is then that you take stock, figure out what you did wrong, and then jump back up on that horse and do it again, this time with the wisdom you learned from your previous failure. If you only do things where you know you can win all the time, then, as Peterson states, “But winning at everything might only mean that you’re not doing anything new or difficult. You might be winning but you’re not growing, and growing might be the most important form of winning” (88).
And that is the reason for his fourth rule: if you only compare yourself to people who are clearly better than you, then you are probably going to get discouraged and give up. You will never be like Mike; I will never be like Sting. That’s not the point, and that shouldn’t be the goal. The goal, as cheesy at it sounds, is for you to be as good as you can be and take pleasure and satisfaction in that. And the best way to do that is to keep a clear focus on your own progress—are you better than you were yesterday? Have you progressed in your life from where you were at this time last year? Basically, are you moving in the right direction? As long as you can see that progress in your own life, you will be inspired to keep progressing.
Bigger Things in Life
Of course, all this isn’t just applicable to basketball and music. It’s applicable to virtually every aspect of life. And when it goes awry, it can lead to a life of resentment, where all you do is compare yourself to other people that you deem better than yourself. The end result of such thinking leads to being disgusted not only with yourself (because you don’t have that person’s stuff or talent or whatever), but also being disgusted with that person—you despise him/her because, “Who do they think they are?” but then you despise yourself because you really wish you could be like that person and have what that person has.
Well, Peterson basic addresses that kind of destructive thinking by pointing out the importance of having the right standards. He writes, “Perhaps you are over-valuing what you don’t have and undervaluing what you do. There’s some real utility in gratitude. It’s also good protection against the dangers of victimhood and resentment. Your colleague outperforms you at work. His wife, however, is having an affair, while your marriage is stable and happy. Who has it better? The celebrity you admire is a chronic drunk driver and bigot. Is his life truly preferable to yours? When the internal critic puts you down using such comparisons, here’s how it operates: First, it selects a single, arbitrary domain of comparison (fame, maybe, or power). Then it acts as if that domain is the only one that is relevant. Then it contrasts you unfavorably with someone truly stellar, within that domain” (89).
If there is one thing we should all have learned by watching all those VH1 “Behind the Music” documentaries, it should be this: no one should want to have the life of so many rich and famous celebrities and musicians—they’re actual lives have been horrible!
Finding Your Way in the World
When it gets right down to it though, the underlying point in Peterson’s fourth rule really boils down to what it takes to forge your own path and make sense of your own life. It entails that challenge that confronts us all: leaving being the protection of our childhood, taking from our parents the valuable lessons they’ve taught us, and venturing out into the world on our own, and using those lessons to guide us but not dictate to us what we should do (if we did that, we’d show ourselves to still be children).
In a very real sense, “obeying the rules” can be a prison. It confines us to perpetual childhood, where we never find the courage to test the limits in order to truly know what is wrong and what is right, good, and beneficial. Simply put, in order to become a fully mature human being, you have to take the chance to step out from under that protective mindset of childhood and to search for meaning in your own life. In that respect, Peterson provides what should be a challenge to each one of us: “Dare, instead, to be dangerous. Dare to be truthful. Dare to articulate yourself, and express (or at least become aware of) what would really justify your life” (91).
The opposite of doing just that is the way of resentment, that mindset that inner-critic gone awry—as I mentioned earlier. To the point, if you feel that the odds are stacked against you to where resentment becomes a very attractive choice, Peterson breaks it down into really one of two possibilities: either you are simply being immature and unwilling to really try—and in that case the best thing to do is get smacked upside the head and be told to grow up; or there really is tyranny afoot, and you really are suffering from injustice—in that case, though, keeping quiet about it and festering in resentment doesn’t get you anywhere. If that is the case, there truly is only one viable option available to you: speak up and fight it. You can’t afford to remain silent, because, as Peterson says, “the consequence of remaining silent is worse. Or course, it’s easier in the moment to stay silent and avoid conflict. But in the long term, that’s deadly. When you have something to say, silence is a lie—and tyranny feeds on lies” (91).
In that respect, I find it odd that so many critics of Peterson accuse him of excusing authoritarianism and promoting tyranny. Anyone who reads his book knows that is the exact opposite of what he says. He makes it pretty clear: when there is true tyranny and injustice, you have a moral obligation to speak out against it.
Your Focus Determines Your Reality
The final point Peterson makes in his discussion of his fourth rule is that your reality is largely determined on where you put your focus. He illustrates this point by talking about an experiment someone did in which he showed a video clip of two teams of three people, one team was wearing black, the other white, and they were bouncing a ball to one another. He told the viewers to count how many times the white team bounced the ball to each other. After a few minutes, he asked them how many, and the response was “15.” He then asked, “Did you see the gorilla?” None of them knew what he was talking about, so he showed them the video again and told them not to count—and sure enough, in the video there was a man in a gorilla costume that walked in the middle of the screen, beat his chest, and then walked off. The viewers totally missed it because they had been focusing on counting the number of times the white team passed the ball.
Peterson’s point is that our brains simply cannot focus on everything, every moment of the day—it would be sensory overload. And so, we’ve learned to notice only the things that we focus on. When applied to our situations in life, the lesson is simple: if you feel your life is horrible or if you find yourself in a constant state of resentment, perhaps the reason is because you are focusing on the wrong things. Perhaps you need to train yourself to focus on other things that are right in front of you that will bring more happiness to your life. Too often, people give up and give in to resentment because they are focusing on things far off that they feel they can never achieve.
Just think of when you had writer’s block because you needed to write a paper, and the thought of having to write 10-15 pages was so daunting that you couldn’t even begin. Instead, as a writer, I’ve learned to say to myself, “Just start writing—don’t worry about punctuation or grammar; don’t worry that you don’t know what you fully think about the subject yet. Just start writing what you know and think about it.” For it is in the process of writing that I learn to formulate my thoughts—the process is what gets me to the goal.
Life can be like that. If I can bring Star Wars into the mix, that is what Yoda is telling Luke Skywalker during his training to be a Jedi in The Empire Strikes Back: he was so pre-occupied with the future that he was failing to be mindful of where he currently was at. The point is that if you learn to focus on the small, daily things right in front of you that you have the power to change, not only will you find yourself happier and your life more meaningful, but also you will find yourself progressing closer to that ultimate goal that was so daunting at first. As Peterson says, “And with each day, your baseline of comparison gets a little higher, and that’s magic. That’s compound interest. Do that for three years, and your life will be entirely different” (96).
Final Thoughts About Faith
In his discussion about the importance of where you put your focus, Peterson weaves in a discussion about faith. Oftentimes, “religious faith” in our day and age is depicted as something no better than childish belief and ignorance. Peterson, though, argues that true faith really is about where you choose to put your focus. He writes that faith “is instead the realization that the tragic irrationalities of life must be counterbalanced by an equally irrational commitment to the essential goodness of Being. It is simultaneously the will to dare set your sights at the unachievable, and to sacrifice everything, including (and most importantly) your life” (107).
What does the writer of Hebrews say? “Faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.” In other words, faith is fully acknowledging the pain and suffering of this world and choosing to focus on the good you can do in the here and now, knowing that those small steps of goodness will eventually bring us to that ultimate salvation that we might yet fully see yet…perhaps only just in part. Simply put, it means following the way of Christ, going into your Gethsemane, perhaps bearing the burden of your particular cross that has been foisted upon you unjustly, knowing that resurrection will come.
That mindset is life, even in the face of death. And it is the total opposite of resentment. In light of that, Peterson ends his chapter with these insightful words: “Realization is dawning. Instead of playing the tyrant, therefore, you are paying attention. You are telling the truth, instead of manipulating the world. You are negotiating, instead of playing the martyr or the tyrant. You no longer have to be envious, because you no longer know that someone else truly has it better. You no longer have to be frustrated, because you have learned to aim low, and to be patient. You are discovering who you are, and what you want, and what you are willing to do. …You are less concerned with the actions of other people, because you have plenty to do yourself. Attend to the day but aim at the highest good. Now, your trajectory is heavenward. That makes you hopeful. …To journey happily may well be better than to arrive successfully” (111).
