Review: Rule#3 – Make friends with people who want the best for you

Rule #3: Make friends with people who want the best for you

Rule #1: Stand up Straight with your shoulders back and Rule#2: Treat Yourself like someone you are Responsible for helping of Dr. Jordan Peterson’s Book: 12 Rules for Life: an antidote to Chaos were well-written and a delight to wrap my head around. Chew on like a fine steak, as it were. But they had some problems. Problems in structure, problems in figuring out their purpose. In Rule #3, Dr. Peterson has settled down a bit. Less psychiatry and more therapist. A clear purpose and message that was much easier to understand and move with. I enjoyed the direct purpose of it, even if I missed the more metaphysical aspects of his first two Rules.

Thesis:

Cut the people who are dragging you, and the world, down and into a worse place. Align with people who challenge you to rise and be better.

Summary:

If your life is on the ‘worse’ side of where you want it to be, look hard at your friends. Are they dragging you down? Are they working to make our shared existence on earth better? Or are they playing their part in sustaining hell? We stay with friends for many reasons, not least of which is laziness. It is easier to bum around with bum friends than to align ourselves with friends who challenge us to be better versions of ourselves. Loyalty to old friends who have given up is a strong anchor as well. But to be better people, we have to associate with better people – excellence demands it.

My Reaction:

This Chapter, Rule #3, is Dr. Peterson’s most coherent and direct so far. I liked it. I agreed with it. I suspect that this rule is not so much of a challenge for most people reading this book – after all, if you are honestly reading this book, you are probably interested in being a better person, whatever that means to you. Associating yourself with better people would not be a new concept for you. So, I suspect, Dr. Peterson knows this and didn’t spend the chapter encouraging us to associate with better people. His readers already know this! He does spend most of this chapter building an argument about why our ‘friends’ from the past, the ones who have not accepted responsibility for their own lives let alone the well-being of the world-at-large, should be gently cut loose. Harsh? Perhaps, but I know I have a couple of friends in my life that don’t bring out the best in me and I have already, instinctively, distanced from them a bit. Dr. Peterson spends a great deal of time discussing how hard, and how necessary this is. He also recognizes the difference between wanting to help someone who doesn’t want to ‘get better’, and helping someone earnestly trying to improve themselves. They aren’t the same!

What I liked most about this chapter is the layered meaning.

One of the most difficult things about Japanese poetry is the extremely subtle layers of meaning hidden in plain sight:
古池や 蛙飛び込む 水の音 (ふるいけや かわずとびこむ みずのおと)
Translation: An old pond— A frog jumps in, The sound of water.
Pretty simple. What is this poem about? Turns out, everything. The ‘old pond’ represents Order and eternity, the frog – Chaos and change. The water mediates between Chaos and Order and restores the balance. This haiku is a verbal picture of the twin dragons, Order and Chaos, and their eternal, balanced, struggle. The water, us, is the Way (Tao big-W Way) to exist between these two beasts.
Complicated, layered, subtle – and just a phrase about a frog jumping into the water…
So it is with Dr. Peterson’s Rule #3. While we are reading about cutting off ‘bad’ friends, we are reading about what we need to be doing to be a ‘good’ friend, not least (maybe primarily!) to ourselves. Do we demand excellence, every day, from that friend in the mirror? Or are we lazy? Do we let ourselves ‘cruise’ along in the fog of mundanity? This isn’t a chapter about finding a ‘good’ friend – despite the title of the chapter- but about what it MEANS to be a ‘good’ friend. There was much less ‘psychiatrist’ in this chapter and a lot more ‘therapist’. It fit well, and the first Rule/Chapter that flowed smoothly and directly, IMHO.

On to Rule #4: Compare yourself to you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today —->