10 step guide for clear thinking – Jordan Peterson’s book

  • Here is something to think about: the person  who can formulate and communicate the best argument almost always wins.
  • So, unless you want to stay an ignorant, unhealthy lightweight, learn to write (and to think and  communicate). Otherwise those who can will ride roughshod over you and push you out of the  way. Your life will be harder, at the bottom of the dominance hierarchies that you will inevitably  inhabit, and you will get old fast.
  • If you sharpen your capacity to think and to communicate as a consequence of writing, you are  better armed. The pen is mightier than the sword, as the saying goes. This is no cheap cliché.  Ideas change the world, particularly when they are written. The Romans built buildings, and the  Romans and the buildings are both gone. The Jews wrote a book, and they are still here, and so is the book
  • the very top of  the most complex hierarchies (law, medicine, academia, business, theology, politics) nothing is  more necessary and valuable. If you can think and communicate, you can also defend yourself,  and your friends and family, when that becomes necessary, and it will become necessary at  various points in your life.
  • The primary reason to write an essay is so that the writer can formulate and organize an  informed, coherent and sophisticated set of ideas about something important.