Ει τα παρά τοις άλλοισιν ειδείης κακά, άσμενος έχοις αν, α νυν έχεις.
“If you knew the troubles of others, you’d gladly keep your own.”
– Philemon of Syracuse, 300 BC
Stand up straight with your shoulders back
Be combative! Adopt a stance of ready engagement with the world, to further your career perhaps, or to resolve a long-standing problem, or in the service of others, or to undertake a selfless act of sacrifice. Reflect that in your posture.
When a lobster loses a fight, he crunches down and looks smaller. When he wins a fight, he stretches out, and looks bigger. So, he’s signalling to other lobsters the tally of his victories.
You might think, ‘So what’?
The lobster runs on serotonin, a neurochemical. When he loses the serotonin levels go down, and if he wins, they go up, and he stretches out and he’s a confident lobster. One of the consequences of that, is if he loses a battle and you give him the equivalent of anti-depressants, he’ll go back and fight again.
Stand up straight with your shoulders back
So anti-depressants work on lobsters. ‘Who cares?’ Well, we diverged from lobsters from an evolutionary standpoint 350 million years ago, and it’s the same circuit. It’s unbelievable, and that shows you how deep inside you, how basic, how primordial that circuit is in you.
It’s sizing other people up and looking at where they fit in the hierarchy. The idea of the hierarchy is at least 350 million years old. That’s before there were trees. So much for the idea that human hierarchies are a social and cultural construct, based on the biases of men. No. That’s wrong. It’s unbelievably wrong.
Lobsters have had hierarchies from a third of a billion years ago, and that’s not a social construction, it’s part of being itself. And if you only see a hierarchy as power and tyranny, then you’re looking at the world wrongly.
Stand up straight with your shoulders back
This says, I’m open to the world, signifying competence and confidence. We admire the courageous. So how courageous can you get? Well, you practice.
The best way you present yourself to the world is to stand up, forthrightly, to stretch out and to occupy some space. Do that and other people take you seriously – they’ll start treating you like you’re a number one lobster instead of a number ten lobster. Because one of the universal strategies about how to be successful, is to confront things that frighten you directly and boldly.
Tell the truth
You are one speck of dust among 7 billion. But you can do some simple maths. You know a thousand people. They know a thousand people. That means you are one person away from a million people, and two people away from a billion people. And you’re at the centre of that network. The way networks work is that information propagates in a network manner. So, don’t underestimate the power of your speech, or your actions, or of truth. You’re powerful.
State who you are. Tell the truth. You can’t lie and get away with it. You will pay a price for everything you do and don’t do. You choose the poison.
So, the best advice, for less anxiety and more positive productivity, is to only compare yourself to who you were yesterday, and not to who someone else is today.
Source: This article is comprised entirely from the words, lectures and books of Jordan Peterson, Professor of Psychology, Toronto University
James Neophytou
