Hello friends, and Merry Christmas! I hope you’re having a fantastic time and taking a break!
Very hard trivia for the special Christmas edition: can you find the leopard in this picture?
Today I have worked on quite a special post: this is the first one I do not write alone but 4 hands with a special guest… my wife Elisa. I admit I have basically forced Elisa to help me here but this is a topic we have spent a lot of time talking about, and where actually she has done far more research and reading than me. We have written this post together but I admit that most of the credit goes to her as she was the one sparkling the conversation, and with the most interesting insights.
The starting point this time is not a tweet but a book, a bestselling book called “12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos” by Jordan Peterson, a writer than then became super controversial with a lot of positions we both strongly disagree with. At the end of the post we actually have our reflection on this issue of dealing with opinion makers that provide good insights yet have many things you don’t agree with. This is something I admit I spend a lot of time thinking about, and where I would love to hear your thoughts.
Elisa bought this book a couple of years ago, driven by the positive commentary (4.5 stars on Amazon and 57k reviews) it has online and the buzz it generated. The book was on my to-read list but I had never read it, and we have dissected it so much while she was reading it (Elisa forced me to read some passages in order to talk about it) that I admit I have not read it in its entirety, yet I familiarized a lot with the concepts through Elisa and the discussions we had.
As I said the author is quite a controversial and opinionated personality, and arguably the book taps cheekily into the “self-aid books” (e.g. “the 10 rules to…”). The book contains some things we do not argue with, or that the two of us see from different angles but in my opinion this was an amazing read because it did what most books should do: it pushed us to think, reflect, read more and more importantly discuss. Elisa and I have spent a lot of time talking about some of the topics of the book, as they present moral values discussions and can sparkle profound debates.
When discussing with Elisa on what to write from the book we believe there is more than one post that could sparkle from it, and to avoid remaining on the surface we agreed to focus this post on 2 of the 12 principles, that we present below together with our considerations.
1. Make friends with people who want the best for you
The first principle of the 12 that we’d like to cover is about friendship. I recently bumped into the chart below that induced me to think about friendship, family and the time we dedicate to them:
The starting principle is to surround yourself of people that “elevate you, rather than being around people that drag you down to their lows”. This is one of the most controversial parts of the book for us, when thinking about it… does it mean that you self-select your friends to have only the “cool” ones (i.e. the happy, succesfull, interesting friend)? Isn’t this exactly the contrary of the traditional meaning of friendship of being there for someone, especially in the time of needs?
Peterson has a very strong argument, which to be honest I still struggle with, that problematic and what he defines “low achieving” people are often not innocent victims of the events but people that don’t work hard enough to drag themselves out of the adverse circumstances. He argues that actually being friend with this type of people is very easy, because it’s easy to make material progress when starting from a low point: it is easy to feel good that you’re improving their lives, because very small things feel very important to them. He argues that by doing that you’re actually not helping this friend but rather validating their victimization and enabling their troubled way of living. The author argues that this kind of people tend to destroy teams, friends and situations dragging people around them down to their level. By being a commiserating friend, he argues, you’re not only not helping them but you’ll also end up losing your standards and being negatively influenced in your decisions and behaviors.
On the other hand he believes that if you surround yourself of successful, positive people they will provide a high standard of comparison. Being surrounded by such people will result in you comparing your life and achievement to them, eventually being inspired to do better. This type of friends will encourage you to pull out the very best version of you. This type of relationship often form a “do your best” sentiment, which is usually mutual and it will push and inspire you, but it will also result in you being proud and happy of their achievements.
This concept that “helping problematic people often it’s just an easy, narcissistic way to validate yourself” is something that frankly I am not sure I fully agree with. While I understand some of the points the author makes, for instance the benefit of having positive peers and setting a high bar for yourself, I see that more applicable in other environments (e.g. in a working setting I believe that is indeed stimulating) rather than in personal relationships. But I do acknowledge that this view of friendship is probably driven by the culture I grew up in, which is permeated by the catholic western values of the importance of helping others even before yourself.
While super controversial I understand that in a self-centric focus, which for instance could be very important for someone who is struggling and who needs uplifting, the argument is valid… when reading this content not as a “guide for life” but rather as an intellectual provocation, I believe there’s some good that could come out of it. Personally I am of the opinion that friends are really the key to happiness (I am writing this after a great evening with life-long friends which was as always fantastic) and this idea of “selecting” friends sounds a bit dry to me. At the same time when thinking back I believe we all can appreciate that we like to hang out more with some people vs others, and there must be a reason for that…
I thought back about this reading a tweet where a journalist shared the chart below and claimed “There is a 100% chance that this graph is a core reason for America's surge of anxiety and depression. Time spent with other people has plummeted—for every age group, ethnicity, gender, geography, and income level”. One could argue that the happiness deriving from friendship is not only driven by just time spent with people. I would argue, contrarily to what Peterson says, that happiness and sense of meaning also comes from spending time with others that need you (or spending time engaging in tasks that serve others). It is about social mattering, having a meaningful social role, not just being with people.
2. Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. Make your child eminently desirable socially.
One of the parts of the book that sparkled more conversation for us was around children education, having 2 young kids we obviously spend a lot of time thinking about what we’re doing with them, if we’re taking the right choices, if there are things we should not do etc… Obviously we, nor I believe anyone, take the author’s considerations as “parenting manual”, but again I believe this is a good food for thoughts as anyone applies her/his set of values to these principles.
The concept of the paragraph starts from the author’s consideration that some parents often say things like “I never dislike my kids, I always like them!”. This sounds like b***t to most parents! Kids, like adults, can be annoying sometimes, they can be hard to be around, they might not understand the moment, etc. A lack of acknowledgement that your kids can indeed at times be dislikeable could actually hurt kids.
Peterson claims that “Parents need to act as parents, a kid can have hundred of friends but only two parents, and the parents have the responsibility of discipline to educate their children to act in the world they have chosen to live in”. The pillar of this concept is that lack of rule can hurt kids similarly to abuse (strong wording, but I think the concept is clear).
Now, personally I struggled initially with this concept because I never saw myself as a strict parent . The author has, however, an argument that I do understand better: “Your job as a parent, especially a kid 0-4, is to make her/him eminently desirable socially. You measure your success by how many kids want to play with your kid. This is important because you open to your child the world of all other kids, if a kid knows how to play (which is the most important thing for kids), she/he will have a better development opportunities. Furthermore, if you don’t allow kids to engage in dislikable behavior also adults will love them, because people naturally like kids and kids bring the best out of people. Adults will then like spending time with your kid, and teach them things and smile at them and entertain them.”
Personally this is something very reasonable to me, by having a kid that is enjoyable to be with, you basically open for her/him a larger number of opportunities of engaging with different people and thus more opportunities to develop. Being a conflict-avoider though, I personally struggle with confronting children and being strict with them. But the author has a good point to understand the value of this: “Discipline can create conflicts and unpleasant situations with your children but your role as a parent it is not to create a shelter around your kids, your kid needs to know how to play following the rules but he also needs to know how not to fail and how to handle frustration and pain. This doesn’t mean that you’ll need to child to conform, you’ll simply reward the positive attitudes that will lead him to success and satisfaction.”
Does this mean that you need to have a lot of rules? Actually not: “In order to do that the rules must be limited, few of them, well stated and always followed. You should use the minimum force, which means that you should use the small intervention request in order to apply a certain rules, avoiding long conversations or bargains.”
Again, I do not believe these considerations should be taken as a parenting manual nor obviously they are a “one size fits all”. Every parent and kid has different situations, set of values and constraint that result in a multitude of educating systems. However, having a clear “goal” (i.e. make the kids socially desirable) did help me and Elisa optimize and evaluate our parenting choices. One of the hardest things with raising a kid is indeed the lack of short-term feedback (“Am I doing well?”) and having some sort of evidence of how our children do socially helps us fine-tune and modify our approach. This is obviously just our way, I know many parents have different approaches that work very well for them (e.g. limiting as much as possible the screen time of their kids or incentivize them to play with certain toys, etc).
These “pillar” does not obviously influence everything we do, and certainly things are not linear (i.e. there’s no precise definition of “likeability”, and that is also not something that is unchanged over time). However these points allowed us to discuss and debate about how to be parents and initiated some very deep conversations about moral values and life goals.
How do you deal with controversial opinion makers?
To conclude the post I actually would like to spend a few lines on something I often think about, and where I would love to hear your thoughts: how to deal with an opinion maker that has opinions you like, but also things you totally dislike. Peterson is a very good example, as said above both Elisa and I find several arguments he makes in the book compelling and overall agreeable. At the same time the guy is super controversial, and has a lot of opinions that we totally disagree with: for instance the NYT has a famous article where he argues he is the Custodian of the Patriarchy, and he got an immense amount of coverage when he was suspended from Twitter for super strong discriminating positions I disagree entirely with, and very recently re-instated.
Elisa and I have often discussed this, how do you react to this controversy? Can we debate on someone’s individual opinion prescinding from the rest of his profile? Or is that not possible and it would actually be diminishing vs condemning stupid points the person makes on lateral topics? Elisa has a quite strong stance that you “never have to idolatrize a person that writes or says something you find interesting and agree with. You discuss the topic, not the person”. I admit that I have more problems with that and I find myself, especially recently, avoiding some topics because I do not appreciate the debate or the division they could create. But I am not sure I like that!
Elisa has an interesting analogy for this: would you go to a bald hairdresser? Or would you trust a cardiologist who is also a smoker? Or a dietist who is obese? Her point is that you trust the person on the specific task or topic, you do not have to judge his entire value set when doing that. Because that would mean “idolatrizing him”. I agree with this point, but admit I struggle a bit, because taking the concept to the extreme “would you be ok praising Hitler’s communications skills?”. I do not have a strong opinion, and when we have this discussion Elisa often says that I am “playing the Nazi card” (or Reductio ad Hitlerum, if you did not know this actually existed) which is the well known attempt to invalidate someone else's position on the basis that the same view was held by Adolf Hitler or the Nazi Party”.
Do you have thoughts on how to deal with this controversy? I would love to hear your thoughts!
Have a fantastic day
Elisa & Giovanni
p.s. Ok, I know the trivia was very hard… but if you did not find the leopard in the picture (solution at the bottom), can you at least find the bear in this picture??? :)
THINGS I LIKED THIS WEEK
I read a really entertaining novel, I admit to go back to Ken Follet when I want a “can’t-put-down” type of book. And “Never” was exactly that. I believe this makes a great Christmas Holidays book if you’re looking for one!
Youtube offered $2B to buy the rights of “Sunday Night” NFL games. I find it very interesting how in the era of original content sport is basically the only live event that attracts new customers and that can differentiate streamers… and if I think as a customer actually football is the only content that would really make me switch platform…
This tweet:
Nice Read! Merry Christmas to both of you guys!
My opinion is that - more than the controversial nature of the opinion maker - what really matters is to which extent the reader is able to contextualize, scrutinize and audit both the nature of the opinion maker himself/herself and his/her opinions. Eventually, you should be able to extrapolate the learning and apply it to your set of values; this is the only way to avoid the risk of being an accomplice!