"Intelligence (psychometrically measured IQ) is the best predictor of performance in complex, ever changing environments. Conscientiousness is the (next) best predictor, particularly in the military, in school and in conservative businesses. Agreeable people make better caretakers; disagreeable people, better disciplinarians and negotiators (within reasonable bounds). Open people are artistic, creative and entrepreneurial. Extraverts are good socially. Introverts work well in isolation. People low in neuroticism have higher levels of tolerance for stress (but may be less sensitive to real signs of danger)."  - Jordan B Peterson Clips

In Dr. Jordan B Peterson's Discovering Personality course, he will teach you how to leverage your personality differences, understanding yourself and others based on the “Big Five” model of personality, so you can be as successful as possible. It condenses a college semester’s worth of information into five streamlined hours and covers the nuances of the Big Five, the most reliable and widely accepted personality model in existence.

I think about this because I'll tell you what it is that you need to do to be successful. Some of these things aren't so malleable but others are things that you can work on. IQ, that's a rough one. Because there's no evidence as far as I can tell that you can do a thing about your IQ.

I was just reading a paper by Dan Simon today. It's a relatively recent review Dan Simon did the invisible gorilla stuff and he was looking because there's all these companies that claim that these online brain training exercises can produce cognitive improvements, and he reviewed the literature again and I've reviewed that literature like six times in the last 15 years because I keep hoping that someone will crack the problem but it's always the same answer.

It's like, you do brain training games to get better at the game, a lot better at that game, you get slightly better at similar games but distil games that are still heavily cognitively loaded doesn't affect your performance at all, zero, none, so the issue of how to raise IQ, that's a killer. No one knows, how to do it. I can tell you how to stop your IQ from decreasing as you get older that's not so bad because it does that fluid IQ decreases from the time you're 20 and pretty rapidly.

It's a physical health is the best preventive so exercise, physical exercise, weirdly enough. You know, you think, why? Well, your brain uses oxygen like mad right and it needs to be kept clean and well oxygenated and physical exercise both, like weightlifting, so anaerobic and aerobic exercise, both seem to be very effective at staving off.

Cognitive declines across the lifespan so that's a really useful thing to know, because that's the only thing we know that does that, so then the next best predictor of lifetime success is conscientiousness. Well, so and although of the two aspects of conscientiousness say orderliness and industriousness the better predictor is industriousness.

So the question is, well, what can you do about your industriousness? And the answer to that is, that's kind of rough, too, because there's a strong genetic component, but you can work on micro habits with regards to your conscientiousness.

And I think the best micro habits this is partly to do with this future authoring program processes. I think the best thing you can do with regards to your conscientiousness is to set up some aims for yourself, goals that you actually value, and the future authoring program helps people do that and basically it does a situational analysis of, it helps you do a situational analysis of your life more than a psychological analysis.

I would say and so the questions are something like, alright you're going to have to put some effort into your life and you need to be motivated to do that and so what are the potential sources of motivation. But you could think about them in the Big Five manner. You know, If you're extroverted, you want friends. If you're agreeable, you want an intimate relationship. If you're disagreeable, you want to win competitions. If you're open, you want to engage in creative activity. If you're high in neuroticism, you want security.

Okay, so those are all sources of potential motivation that you could draw on that you could tailor to your own. You know your own personality but then there are dimensions that you want to consider your life across and so we asked people about, you know, if you could have your life the way you wanted it in three to five years.

If you were taking care of yourself properly, you know, what you would want from your friendships, what you would want from your intimate relationship, how you would like to structure your family, what do you want for your career, how are you going to use your time outside of our job and how are you going to regulate your mental physical mental and physical health and maybe also your drug and alcohol use, because that's a good place to auger down.

You know, because alcoholism, for example, wipes out. You know, five to ten percent of people so you want to keep that under control. And then, maybe you develop a vision of what your life, what you would like your life to be and that associates the goal. Well. Once the goal is established and then you break down the goal into micro processes that you can implement. The micro process has become rewarding, in proportion, in relation, to their causal association with the goal and that tangles in your incentive reward system. You know, we talked about the dopaminergic incentive reward system and that's the thing that keeps you moving forward and the way it works is that it works better if it produces positive emotion when it can see you moving towards a valued goal.

Okay, what's the implication of that better have a valued goal because otherwise you can't get any positive motivation working out and so the more valuable the goal in principle, the more the micro process is associated with that goal start to take on a positive charge and so what that means is, well, you get up in the morning and you're excited about the day you're ready to go and so, as far as I can tell what you do is you specify your long-term ideal.

Maybe you also specify a place you want to stay the hell away from so that you're terrified to fail as well as excited about succeeding because that's also useful. You specify your goal, you do that in some sense as a unique individual, you want to specify goals that make you say, “Oh”. If that could happen as a consequence of my efforts it would clearly be worthwhile, because the question always is: Why do something? Because doing nothing is easy you just sit there, and you don't do anything. That's real easy.

The question is why would you ever do anything and that's how that has to be because you've determined by some means that it's worthwhile and then the next question might be, where should you look for worthwhile things and one would be?

Well, you could consult your own temperament and the other would be, you kind of look at how, look at what it is that people accrue that's valuable across the lifespan. Look, what, so you do a structural analysis of the sub components of human existence and already did that you need a family, you need friends, like, you don't need to have all these things but you better have most of them: family, friends, careers, educational goals, plans, for. You know, time outside of work attention to your mental and physical health, etc… You know, those are that's what life is about and if you don't have any of those things, well, then all you've got left is misery and suffering so that's a bad deal for you.

So, once you set up that goal structure, let's say, and that's really in many ways, that's what you should be doing at universities is. That's exactly what you should be doing is trying to figure out who it is that you're trying to be. Right?

And you aim at that and then use everything you learned as a means of building that person that you want to be and I really mean want to be, I don't mean should be, even those things those things are going to overlap and it's important to distinguish between those because that's partly and this is back down to the micro routine analysis so I started saying, well, you're going to try to make yourself more industrious.

Okay, number one, specify your goals because how are you going to hit something if you don't know what it is, that isn't going to happen and often people won't specify their goals, too, because they don't like to specify conditions for failure. So if you keep yourself all vague and foggy, which is real easy because that's just a matter of not doing as well then you don't know when you fail, and people might say, well, I really don't want to know when I fail because that's painful. It's so I'll keep myself blind about when I fail. That's fine. Except you fail all the time then, you just won't know it until you've failed so badly that you're done. And that can easily happen by the time you're 40. So I would recommend that you don't let that happen so that's willful blindness, right? You could have known but you chose not to.

Okay, so once you get your goal structure set up, you think, Okay, if I could have this life it looks like that might be worth living, despite the fact that it's going to be, you know, anxiety provoking and threatening and there's going to be some suffering and loss involved in all of that.

Obviously, the goal is to have a vision for your life such that all things considered that justifies your effort. Okay, so then, what do you do? Then, you turn down to the micro routines, it's like, this is what I'm aiming for. How does that instantiate itself? Day to day, week to week, month to month. And that's where something like a schedule can be unbelievably useful Google Calendar. It's like make a schedule and stick to it.

Okay, so what's the rule with the schedule? It's not a bloody prison that's the first thing that people do wrong is, well, I don't like to have to follow a schedule. Looks like, well, what kind of schedule you are setting up. Well, I should, I have to do this, then I have to do this, then I have to do this, you know, and then I just go play video game because who wants to do all these things that I have to do. It's like, wrong, set the schedule up, so that you have the day you want. That's the trick. It's like, okay, I've got tomorrow if I was going to set it up, so it was the best possible day I could have.

Practically speaking what would it look like, well, then you schedule that and obviously there's a bit of responsible that's going to go along with that, because if you have any sense, one of the things that you're going to insist upon is that, at the end of the day, you're not in worse shape than you were that then at the beginning of the day. Right? That's a stupid day. You have a bunch of those in a row you just dig, you know, you dig yourself a hole and then you bury yourself in it, like, sorry, that's just not a good strategy, it's a bad strategy.

So, maybe 20% of your day has to be responsibility and obligation or maybe it's more than that, depending on how far behind you are. But even that you can you can ask yourself, okay, I've got these responsibilities I have to schedule the things in.

What's the right ratio of responsibility to reward, and you can ask yourself that just like you'd negotiate with someone who is working for you. Okay. You got work tomorrow, ok, so I want you to work tomorrow. You might say, okay, what you are going to do for me that makes it likely that I'll work for you. Well, you could ask yourself that. Maybe you do an hour of responsibility and then you play a video game for 15 minutes. I don't know whatever turns your crank but you have to negotiate with yourself and not tyrannize yourself, like you're negotiating with someone that you care for, that you would like to be productive and have a good life.

And that's how you make the schedule and then you look at the day and you think, well, if I had that day, that'd be good. Great, you know, and you're useless and horrible so you'll probably only hit it with about 70% accuracy, but that beats the hell out of zero, and if you hit it even with 50% accuracy.

Another rule is aim for 51% the next week or 50 and a half percent for God's sake, because you're going to hit that position where things start to loop back positively and spiral you upward, so that's one way that you can work on your conscientiousness. It's a plan of life you'd like to have and you do that partly by referring to social norms that's more or less rescuing your father from the belly of the whale, but the way other way you do that is by having a little conversation with yourself about as if you don't really know who you are because you know what you're like, you won't do what you're told, you won't do.

What you tell yourself to do you must have noticed that it's like you're a bad employee and a worse boss and both of those work. You know, for you, you don't know what you want to do and then when you tell yourself what to do, you don't do it anyway so you should fire yourself and find someone else to beat…

1. Jordan B Peterson Clips, What To Do To Be Successful | Jordan B Peterson, accessed on August 28, 2020

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