Jordan B Peterson: Cleaning your room and Beyond

Dr. Jordan B Peterson is a Canadian Psychologist, clinician and a professor at the university of Toronto. Before I had read his books I was hardly interested in reading anything that was non fiction( I had finished the Percy Jackson series in a binge.I thought tittles like his(12 rules for life) were absurd in a way because they dictated a set of ideas which people were supposed to cling or they would perish(A set of religious ideas in some sense) but as I later saw it was far from that .Dr. Peterson had entered the public sphere(of the Internet)around 2016 when he refused he opposed a bill that required professors and students to call other students by the pronouns they wished.

He drew more attention when he published his second book 12 Rules for life: an antidote to chaos which was a success despite how bad bad the critics painted it to the general public. But the work of Dr. Peterson that drew much of my attention was a series of Youtube lectures tittled : The Psychological significance of the biblical stories in which he tries to understand the meanings of the stories in Genesis from a psychological perspective and extract underlying ideas which can be helpful to understand how the world works whether you believe those stories to be true (scientific truth) or not.

I think what makes the works of JBP exceptional is that he talks about the things that we implicitly know to be true(i.e we act as those things are true) but have not found a way to express them explicitly.And just that ability to be articulate makes him a good public speaker and writer(Though he can lose you easily with his ideas as sometimes he keeps piling one top of another).

In these two books Dr Peterson talks about simple ideas which he thinks will help you structure your life better in one way on another. In one chapter he talks about the importance of cleaning your room and how that one simple thing can propel you to fix other things that you are not happy with and move. Cleaning a room seems complex especially if it is a mess but you can decompose that into micro tasks that you can do at pace you’re comfortable with(e.g folding your clothes,picking up things scattered on the floor ,ordering your dressing table e.t.c) and you can extend that to your ideas about your work, studies and relationships.

They are not rules which you have to abide but like everything they are modicums of advice which you take according to your taste and eventually help you to construct a hierarchy of ideas that are part of your moral and psychological compass therefore helping you navigate the world.

As with most public figures it is easy to find something you do not agree with them on and I personally find some of his ideas not as important to me but I feel in the grand scheme of this he is a positive force and the world needs more him.

He equally has another book which was his first actually : Maps of Meaning;the architecture of belief which I am yet to read.

You can check out his Youtube channel and other interviews( my favourites being those he did with Piers Morgan , Cathy Newmann and the other BBC reporter).

Below is the outline of the 24 rules from the two books

Until the next one.