My #1 Book of 2024

 This was the most impressive and brain-stretching book I read this year: 

12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos by Jordan B. Peterson

These are the 12 Rules for life discussed in the book: 

1. Stand up straight with your shoulders back. 
2. Treat yourself like someone you are responsible for helping. 
3. Make friends with people who want the best for you. 
4. Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today. 
5. Do not let your children do anything that makes you dislike them. 
6. Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world. 
7. Pursue what is meaningful, not what is expedient. 
8. Tell the truth, or at least don’t lie. 
9. Assume that the person you are listening to might know something you don’t. 
10. Be precise in your speech. 
11. Do not bother children when they are skateboarding. 
12. Pet a cat when you encounter one on the street. Dogs are ok, too. 

What an amazing and challenging book. Those twelve rules are surrounded by loads of philosophy, wisdom, wit, and personal experience. These rules are a subset of over 60 that the author posted on Quora and eventually paired down for this book. Each rule is designed to help us focus and survive in chaos. Each one is a tiny (or huge) way to bring order and meaning into your world when things fall apart. I noticed that each of these rules resonated in different areas of my life experience. For example, when I was young, athletic, and dangerous, it was second nature to stand up straight with my shoulders back, but time and desk work have taken my posture and turned me into something more bent and beaten down. I have been seeing echoes or repeats of these rules in other books and lessons and wisdom, too. I like the saying, “Do dangerous things carefully.”, which is another way of saying Rule 11. I tried Rule 12, but none of the neighborhood cats will let me pet them, so maybe I don’t understand that rule yet. Rule 10 is critical for me in my job. Precise speech is critical for me to be effective. Rule 5 challenged my parenting paradigm. Rule 7 is a challenge to not fall down the IG-scrolling rabbit hole. This is a deep and heavy book that deals head-on with some of the deepest, darkest bits of chaos in the world and tries to provide some pragmatic order or at least a framework to start working our way toward peace. 

This is not for snowflakes.

(Rated PG-13, Score 10/10, audiobook read by the author, 15:40)