You don’t get to choose whether you have a vision for your life, you only get to choose whether it’s any good.
That’s the claim underneath Peterson’s How to Plan Your Life course, and it removes the exit many people are quietly using. Refuse to build a vision on purpose and you don’t get freedom, you get governed by whatever is loudest in you on a given day, which is not neutral. It’s just a worse vision, running you by default.
Here is what to do about it.
Do the arithmetic once
Twenty minutes handled badly, three times a day, is an hour. Across a week that’s seven hours. Across a year it’s over three hundred.
Which means roughly five percent of your entire waking life is sitting inside a handful of short, repeated moments that almost nobody examines.
The drive home, bedtime with your children, the first ten minutes of a difficult conversation, the gap between finishing work and deciding what the evening is going to be.
You don’t need to fix your life, you need to identify twenty of those moments and fix those, which is a different and considerably smaller job.
One of mine was getting to the office, opening my laptop, and instead of dealing with the time sensitive workload first, I’d open Substack to ‘quickly’ see what was going on overnight. I’d tell myself I’d just have a quick look, but there was always something that took me down the rabbit hole.
One or two comments that ‘required’ immediate response, the cross-linking opportunity, the article that should have been posted yesterday but isn’t ready yet, new monetising ideas that I need to run through Claude to find holes in them. The to-do list was getting bigger and bigger, and the ‘quick’ look was turning into hours without me noticing the time passing. That created cognitive dissonance. The customers were waiting more or less patiently and nothing got 100% of my attention.
Once I changed and spent the first 20 minutes in the office identifying what needed to get done and in what order, I became much more efficient, the anxiety disappeared and more gets done, both on the work and the Substack side of things.
Pick one thing that you already know this week and fix it.
Stand at the boundary rather than retreating from it
Everything you experience divides into two territories: what you understand, and what you don’t.
Most people spend their lives trying to shrink the second one to nothing and treat every encounter with it as a failure of preparation. That’s the mistake. The unknown (chaos) isn’t only danger, it’s the sole place new capability has ever come from. Nothing you’re currently good at came from territory you already had mapped.
So, the position to occupy is the boundary, with one foot in each. Not safely inside the walls and not lost in open country.
There’s an old guide buried in the Arthurian legends that makes this practical: the knights each entered the forest at the point that looked darkest to them individually. Not the objectively darkest point. Theirs. Stop waiting for the correct door, any door into what frightens you opens onto the same territory, so take the nearest one.
I remember having to decide about a job change more than once in my life. Two of those come to mind readily and I’ll share one today.
I had a nice job, well paid and comfortable. I was there for six years, I’d built great friendships and relationships both with my colleagues and the customers. It was a good company to work for, they looked after their people.
One day a friend of mine invited me as a plus one to her friend’s wedding in Romania and I decided to go. The friend’s husband to be was an operations manager working for a company in London. He had invited the owner of that company to the wedding as well. Neither of us could speak Romanian so we naturally started chatting to each other. We discussed business, ideas about customer service, and generally we found many interesting topics to talk about.
To cut a longish story short, he offered me a job as head of customer relations, with a package including a 50% rise on my salary and a nice new company car.
I wasn’t looking for a new job as I was happy where I was, but I couldn’t reject an offer like this without thinking about it properly at least. I mentioned it to my family, and my mum, in her subtle way as she always does, tried to discourage me from it.
The big problem for me was the fact that I didn’t know anything about the industry. I had zero experience in that field, including not having the vocabulary specific to it. English is not my native language, and I didn’t even know the terminology in Polish, as I never had the need to know it.
Another problem was the fact that I was going to be the only non-British employee there in a high management position. I didn’t know how I was going to be received.
Eventually I decided to take the risk and step into that chaos. The first three months were tough, but most of my fears didn’t materialise.
I was received warmly, and after showing that I’m a team player, after having conversations with other employees, I was being taken seriously and I knew people respected me. I learned the terminology quickly, I went on a few jobs with engineers to get some hands-on experience, and after a while things didn’t seem as scary as I thought they would be.
I stayed there for two years, after which another opportunity arrived and I had to make that decision again.
Making the decision to leave the comfort of my current job and jump into the unknown was hard, but I don’t regret making it. I learned not only about an industry that was new to me but, more importantly, about myself.
If I had chosen to stay in the zone that I knew (order), I’d never have known what I was capable of.
Know what you’re capable of before life finds out for you
If you assume you’d have been the one hiding people in the attic, you’re probably wrong.
Christopher Browning went through the post-war interrogation records of Reserve Police Battalion 101 in Ordinary Men. That was one of the three books recommended to read alongside the course, which I did.
Middle-aged German policemen, mostly working class, not career soldiers and not selected for cruelty. The detail that does the damage is that they were offered the chance to step out before the first mass shooting, and almost none of them took it.
They arrived there one small step at a time, and each step was small enough to take.
Battalion 101 did its despicable work in Poland. I’ve seen the emotions on my grandparents’ faces on the rare occasions when they talked about it, and I could never understand how people can do what the Nazis did.
Reading the book made me think. It doesn’t ask me to forgive what has been done, let alone forget, but it gives me some understanding about human psychology.
Combined with what Asch and Milgram reported I can get some understanding of how it happened without having to justify it. The very uncomfortable question is, would I step out before the first mass shooting if I was in that situation? I want to believe that I would, but the honest answer is that I can’t be 100% sure unless I’m in that situation.
The useful response to this isn’t despair, and it certainly isn’t the comfortable assumption that you’re the exception. It’s preparation. Find out what you’re capable of deliberately, in conditions you control, rather than discovering it in conditions you don’t.
(This is the same argument the Personality and Its Transformations course makes about the shadow, which I wrote up here.) The practical version of that course, the six things actually worth doing, is here.
Give yourself the presumption of innocence
Most people don’t fail through being too generous with themselves, they fail by refusing themselves something they’d hand to a friend without a second’s hesitation.
If you can’t picture yourself as worth the effort, the workaround is to stop trying. Picture someone you actually care about, in your exact situation, with your exact history and constraints.
Notice how differently you’d talk to them, what you’d forgive, what you’d tell them to stop carrying.
Then close the gap between the two standards. Not by lowering the one you hold for them.
Aim the aggression instead of crushing it
Discipline is not suppression, it’s a better game.
You aren’t trying to eliminate the aggressive, ambitious, restless part of yourself. That part is the engine, and people who succeed at removing it don’t become good, they become inert.
What you’re trying to do is give it a game demanding enough that it makes you formidable rather than dangerous.
Whatever you’re currently fighting in your own character was probably never meant to be destroyed. It was meant to be aimed and brought under your control so you can deploy it responsibly and respect yourself accordingly.
(The biological version of this argument, why that energy exists and what it’s for, is in Sapolsky’s Behave, which I wrote about
here.)
The test of a vision
Comfort was never what you actually wanted, and you prove it regularly. People who are comfortable reliably go looking for trouble, which is not the behaviour of a creature optimising for ease.
Maybe I have been thinking about comfort incorrectly. We don’t necessarily want an easy life. We want a life in which the difficulty feels worth having. People routinely choose harder paths when the alternative is comfortable but empty. They climb mountains, learn difficult instruments, build businesses, raise children, study subjects they don’t need to know and deliberately test themselves against things they might fail at. The problem isn’t difficulty. It is difficulty without purpose.
So, the question to ask of any plan for your life isn’t whether it’s safe. It’s whether it’s worth the sacrifice it’s going to demand, because it will demand one either way, and the only variable is whether you chose what you were paying for.
(Full documentation account of the course here.)
If you can’t see the vision, work backwards
The obvious objection to all of this is that you’re supposed to build a vision and you don’t have one. Plenty of people stall here for years, waiting for something to arrive with enough clarity to justify acting on it.
It doesn’t arrive that way, and waiting is itself the default vision taking over.
So work from the other end. You may not know what you want, but you almost certainly know what you’d refuse. Write down the version of the next ten years you’d find unacceptable. Be specific: the work you’d resent doing, the person you’d have become, the things you’d have stopped bothering with.
That document is easier to produce than a vision and does much of the same work, because a clear enough picture of what you won’t have constrains the field enormously. Direction is often just the absence of the paths you’ve genuinely ruled out.
(The argument for building that architecture deliberately rather than collecting ideas and hoping they cohere is here.)
Then keep it in front of you
A vision written once and filed is a vision you no longer have. The reason isn’t motivation, it’s perception: what you’re aiming at determines what you notice, so an aim you’ve stopped consciously holding stops filtering anything.
Which is why the twenty-minute exercise matters more than it looks. Those repeated moments are where a vision either gets enacted or quietly abandoned, and they recur often enough to function as a check on whether the thing is still live.
Read the plan often enough to be irritated by the parts that have gone stale. The irritation is the useful signal.
Which twenty minutes of your day is currently costing you the most?
If you want the apparatus rather than the argument
I build a study pack for every book and course I work through. A briefing to read first, structured notes in lettered blocks, the five ideas that survive if nothing else does, connections to other books, a seven-day behaviour test and flash cards.
The Doors of Perception one is published free and complete, nothing held back, so you can see the standard before you spend anything.
Sources & Disclaimer: How to Plan Your Life by Jordan Peterson (Peterson Academy). Also referenced:
Behave by Robert Sapolsky,
Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning, and Personality and Its Transformations (Peterson Academy). All linked inline above via affiliate links.
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The reading and the arguments are mine. I write here to find out whether I have understood what I read, because explaining something is the cheapest way to discover whether you actually understood it or only recognised it.
AI is the other half of that. I argue with it, it pushes back, and what you are reading is what survived. English is not my first language, so it also helps me produce the clean version.
Nothing goes out that I could not defend if you asked.