It is more difficult to rule yourself than to rule a city.
Interpretation
Self-discipline is harder to achieve than external authority. Mastering oneself is a greater challenge than managing others.
This quote by Jordan Peterson highlights the complexity of self-control and personal governance compared to the task of managing others outwardly. It suggests that true leadership begins within, as the ability to direct one's own life and actions requires immense effort, introspection, and sacrifice, often surpassing the challenges faced when leading a group or community.
In practice
Use this quote in a self-improvement workshop to emphasize the importance of internal mastery.
Part of the reason there's an injunction to the truth, for example, is that if you're in a circumstance of extreme uncertainty, your best weapon, let's say, or your best tool or your best defense is the truth, because it keeps things simpler.
I don't tell people, 'You're okay the way that you are.' That's not the right story. The right story is, 'You're way less than you could be.'
Once someone has spent enough time cultivating bad habits and biding their time, they are much diminished. Much of what they could have been has dissipated.
If you learn a martial art, you learn to be dangerous, but simultaneously, you learn to control it.
Life is tragic. You are tiny and flawed and ignorant and weak, and everything else is huge, complex, and overwhelming.
Music has an intrinsic meaning, which has always been mysterious to me.
I am trying to do two things: dare to be a radical and not a fool, which is a matter of no small difficulty.
I am alive and well and unconcerned about the rumors of my death. But if I were dead, I would be the last to know.
When God's hand is on thy back, let thy hand be on thy mouth, for though the affliction be sharp it shall be but short.
I feel it's the conscious mind that messes things up. The conscious mind is constantly telling you, this might happen or that might happen, even before it has happened. Your conscious mind tells you the next ball might be a out-swinger, but when it's coming at you you realize it's an in-swinger... so literally, you've played two balls.
On a spiritual level, it's as though with my sighted eye I see what's before me, and with my unsighted eye I see what's hidden. It's illuminated life more than darkened it.
Problems can only be solved by the people who have them. You have to try and coax them and love them into seeing ways in which they can help themselves.
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