Last month, I moved a kennel of 23 dogs and myself from Vancouver Island to the mainland Vancouver area, flew my 18-year-old grandson out from Toronto to stay with me indefinitely, and experienced stricter and stricter lockdown measures due to the SARS-2 coronavirus (which causes the COVID-19 disease).
My blog has suffered as a result. I like to research, make sure I’ve got all my facts straight, then write and rewrite until I’m happy with the result. This approach, while helpful to readers, doesn’t lend itself well to a daily blogging routine, especially when life gets in the way.
I think I’ll probably need to create shorter and simpler posts if I want to keep to a daily schedule.
I have a few moments now and, in the spirit of making things easier for myself, I’m going to copy/paste Jordan Peterson’s answer to the Quora question, “What are the most valuable things everyone should know?”.
You can read the whole thing here but it has disappeared from Quora in the past which is why I’m copying it verbatim.
This is a slightly modified version based on Akira the Don’s version (as read by Jordan Peterson). You can listen to that on YouTube here. It’s called “42 Rules” but I’ve counted only 40 in the list.
Twelve of the items in this list became his best selling book “12 Rules for Life”.
Over the next few months (probably not daily), I’ll go through each of the rules separately and write down my thoughts.
- Tell the truth or at least don’t lie.
- Do not do things that you hate.
- Act so that you can tell the truth about how you act.
- Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient.
- If you have to choose, be the one who does things, instead of the one who is seen to do things.
- Pay attention.
- Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you need to know. Listen to them hard enough so that they will share it with you.
- Plan and work diligently to maintain the romance in your relationships.
- Be careful who you share good news with.
- Be careful who you share bad news with.
- Make at least one thing better every single place you go.
- Imagine who you could be, and then aim single-mindedly at that.
- Do not allow yourself to become arrogant or resentful.
- Try to make one room in your house as beautiful as possible.
- Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today.
- Work as hard as you possibly can on at least one thing and see what happens.
- If old memories still make you cry, write them down carefully and completely.
- Maintain your connections with people.
- Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or artistic achievement.
- Treat yourself as if you were someone that you are responsible for helping.
- Ask someone to do you a small favour, so that he or she can ask you to do one in the future.
- Make friends with people who want the best for you.
- Do not try to rescue someone who does not want to be rescued, and be very careful about rescuing someone who does.
- Nothing well done is insignificant.
- Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world.
- Dress like the person you want to be.
- Be precise in your speech.
- Stand up straight with your shoulders back.
- Don’t avoid something frightening if it stands in your way but don’t do unnecessarily dangerous things.
- Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them.
- Do not transform your wife into a maid.
- Do not hide unwanted things in the fog.
- Notice that opportunity lurks where responsibility has been abdicated.
- Read something written by someone great.
- Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street.
- Do not bother children when they are skateboarding.
- Don’t let bullies get away with it.
- Write a letter to the government if you see something that needs fixing and propose a solution.
- Remember that what you do not yet know is more important than what you already know.
- Be grateful in spite of your suffering.