LOOK UP, MOVE AHEAD - Powerful Motivational Video | Jordan Peterson

time with me and what should be let go as if it's dead wood. The more dead wood that you let go of and burn off when you have the opportunity, the less it accretes around you. Here's something interesting about forest fires. People have been trying to prevent forest fires for a long time, especially that damn bear, Smokey, right? Because forest fires burn up the forest and that can't be good. But here's what happens if you don't let forest fires burn. Well, forests collect a lot of dry branches, right? Because tree branches die and wood falls on the forest floor and collects and so the amount of flammable material keeps increasing with time. And that's not so bad if it's wet, but if the amount of flammable material is increasing and it gets really dry and then it burns, then you have a real problem. The forest fire can burn so hot that it burns the topsoil right off, in which case you don't have a forest at all anymore, you just have a desert. And lots of trees are evolved to withstand forest fires of a certain intensity and some won't even release their seeds unless there's been a fire. And so a little bit of fire at the right time can stop everything from burning to the ground. And that's also a really useful insight, a metaphorical insight into the nature of sacrifice, right? It's also a lot easier to let go of something when you're deciding to let go of it, because you've decided yourself that you're done with that. It's a weak part of you, it needs to disappear. You do that yourself, it's much better and much easier than it is if it's taken away from you forcibly, in which case you're very much likely to fight it. You know, a lot of what people regard as their own personalities and are proud of about their own personalities aren't their own personalities at all, they're useless idiosyncrasies that differentiate them trivially from other people. They have no value in and of themselves, they're more like quirks. I remember once I was trying to teach a particularly stubborn student about how to write, and she had written a number of essays in university and got universally walloped for them, and the reason for that was she couldn't write, really, at all. She was really, really bad at writing. And so I was sitting down with her trying to explain to her what she was doing wrong, and she was being very annoying about it, very recalcitrant, very, very unwilling to listen. That was a pearls before swine thing, you know? And at one point she said, I can write perfectly well, the university professors just don't like my style. And I thought, what the hell's with you? You can't even write and you think you have a style. Instead of humbling herself, she was proud of her insufficiency. That's arrogance, right? That's not humility, it's self-deception and arrogance. To be proud of your insufficiency, that's a very foolish thing, and that means to cling to the parts of you that are dead. You know, as you elevate your aim, you create a judge at the same time, right? Because the new ideal, which is an ideal you, even if it's just an ideal position that you might occupy, even if it's still conceptualized in that concrete way, that becomes a judge. Because it's above you, right? And then you're terrified of it, maybe. That's why you might be afraid when you go start a new job, right? This thing is above you and you're terrified of it, and it judges you. And that's useful because the judge that you're creating by formulating the ideal tells you what's useless about yourself, and then you can dispense with it. And you want to keep doing that, and then every time you make a judge that's more elevated, then there's more useless you that has to be dispensed with. And then if you create an ultimate judge, which is what the archetypal imagination of humankind has done, say, with the figure of Christ, because if Christ is nothing else, he is at least the archetypal perfect man and therefore the judge. You have a judge that says, get rid of everything about yourself that isn't perfect. And of course, that's also what God tells Abraham, right? He says to be perfect, to pick an ideal that's high enough, and you can do this. The thing that's interesting about this, I think, is you can do it more or less on your own terms. You have to have some collaboration from other people, but you don't have to pick an external ideal. You can pick an ideal that fulfills the role of ideal for you. You can say, okay, well, if things could be set up for me the way I need them to be, and if I could be who I needed to be, what would that look like? And you can figure that out for yourself, and then instantly you have a judge. And I also think that's part of the reason people don't do it, right? Why don't people look up and move ahead? And the answer is, well, you know, you start formulating an ideal, you formulate a judge, it's pretty easy to feel intimidated in the face of your own ideal. That's what happens to Cain versus Abel, for example. Then it's really easy to destroy the ideal instead of to try to pursue it, because then you get rid of the judge. Lower the damn judge if it's too much, like if your current ambition is crushing you, you know, then maybe you're playing the tyrant to yourself and you should tap 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 don't have to leap from point one to point fifty in one leap, right? You can do it incrementally. But I really like this idea, I think it's a profound idea, that the process of recapitulating yourself continually is also the process of, it's a phoenix-like process, right? You're shedding all those elements of you that are no longer worthy of the pursuits that you're valuing. And then I would say, the idea here is that as you do that, 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's the right way of thinking about it. Maybe first to your friends and then to your family. It's like it's a hell of a fine ambition and there's no reason that it can't happen. You know, every one of you knows people who are really bloody useful in a crisis and people that you admire, right? You can think of all those people that you admire as partial incarnations of the archetypal messiah. That's exactly right. And the more that that manifests itself in any given person, then the more generally useful and admirable that person is in a multitude of situations. And we don't know the limit to that. But people can be unbelievably good for things, you know? It's really something to behold.