If you're not going to be rewarded for your virtues, and instead you're going to be punished for them, then what's your motivation to continue?
Interpretation
The quote questions the value of maintaining one's principles if they lead to punishment instead of reward.
Jordan Peterson's quote highlights a crucial dilemma that individuals might face in life: the challenge of adhering to their virtues in the face of adversity. When good actions result in negative consequences, it creates a significant motivation crisis, making one wonder whether their efforts toward integrity and righteousness are worth the sacrifice. This brings into question the nature of reward and punishment in society and challenges the individual to consider the purpose and impact of their moral choices.
In practice
Use this quote in a motivational speech about the importance of staying true to one's values.
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.
Make yourself a "capacity" and I will make myself a "torrent."
The message of frustration is an exciting signal. it means that your brain beleives you could be doing better than you currently are.
Most of the time, creative entrepreneurs lose interest long before their marketing message loses its power.
Keep doing some kind of work, that the devil may always find you employed.
I'd be more frightened by not using whatever abilities I'd been given. I'd be more frightened by procrastination and laziness.
One by one I have seen obstacles removed, errors corrected, prejudices softened, proscriptions relinquished, and my people advancing in all the elements that go to make up the sum of the general welfare. And I remember that God reigns in eternity, and that whatever delays, whatever disappointments and discouragements may come, truth, justice, liberty and humanity will ultimately prevail.
Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.