Jordan Peterson discusses the importance of self improvement. #jordanpeterson #SelfImprovement #psychology #MentalHealth

What could you do to improve yourself? Well, let's step one step backward. The first question might be, why should you even bother improving yourself? And I think the answer to that is something like, so you don't suffer any more stupidly than you have to. And maybe so others don't have to either. It's something like that. You know, like there's a real injunction at the bottom of it. It's not some casual self-help doctrine. It's that if you don't organize yourself properly, you'll pay for it. And in a big way, and so will the people around you. Now, and you could say, well, I don't care about that, but that's actually not true. You actually do care about that. Because if you're in pain, you will care about it. It's very rare that you can find someone who's in excruciating pain who would ever say, well, it would be no better if I was out of this. It's sort of pain is one of those things that brings the idea that it would be better if it didn't exist along with it. It's incontrovertible. Well, so then the question might be, well, how would you go about getting your act together and the answer to that? And this is a phenomenological idea too. It's something like, look around for something that bothers you and see if you can fix it. So now you think, well, let's say you go into a, you can do this in a room. It's quite fun to do it. Just when you're sitting in a room, like a room, maybe your bedroom, you can sit there and just sort of meditate on it and think, okay, if I wanted to spend 10 minutes making this room better, what would I have to do? And you have to ask yourself that, right? It's not a command. It's like our genuine question. And things will pop out in the room that you know you, like there's a stack of papers over there that's kind of bugging you and you know that maybe little order there would be a good thing. And you know, you haven't, there's some rubbish behind your computer monitor that you haven't attended to for like six months. And the room would be slightly better if it was a little less dusty and the cables weren't all tangled up the same way. And like if you allow yourself just to consider the expanse in which you exist at that moment, there'll be all sorts of things that'll pop out in it that you could just fix. And you know, I might say, well, if you were coming to see me for psychotherapy, this easiest thing for us to do first would just be to get you to organize your room. You think, well, is that psychotherapy? And the answer is, well, it depends on how you conceive the limits of your being. And I would say, start where you can start, you know? If something announces itself to you, which is a strange way of thinking about it, as in need of repair that you could repair, then hey, fix it. You fix 100 things like that. Your life will be a lot different.