Month: March 2021

Revisiting 12 Rules for Life: Do Not Let Your Children Do Anything That Makes You Dislike Them

Kyle

Note: This is a repost of a blog series that I started in January 2018. Because this was prior to the blog being syndicated on PeakD, and it was some of my most-viewed content on the old blog. I’m going to be editing these slightly, but I’m also going to be adding my own thoughts as I re-read what I wrote. You can find the original post here.

For those of us just joining me, I’ve been reading Jordan B. Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Amazon Affiliate link).

Rule 5 is the first rule of Jordan Peterson’s that is going to force you to look outside yourself. Where the first four rules all deal with self-improvement and self-concept, the fifth rule is no less centered on reflection and analysis, but requires a different approach.

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Jordan Peterson’s Beyond Order Rule 3: Do not hide unwanted things in the fog. (Part 1)

Kyle

Continuing my series on Beyond Order, I’m going over the first half of the chapter containing the third rule. You can read the previous part here. I’ve been breaking down the chapters into halves so that I can give a deep overview of my thoughts on each and not become overwhelmed by length while doing so, but this is a shorter chapter.

I think it’s also part of Peterson’s theories of the mind that he’s never explained this way before, though I’ve heard similar theories from other people and it’s loosely tied to his idea that you should give problems names. There’s a distinct twist on that idea in this chapter, though.

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Revisiting 12 Rules for Life: Compare Yourself to Who You Were Yesterday

Kyle

Note: This is a repost of a blog series that I started in January 2018. Because this was prior to the blog being syndicated on PeakD, and it was some of my most-viewed content on the old blog. I’m going to be editing these slightly, but I’m also going to be adding my own thoughts as I re-read what I wrote. You can find the original post here.

For those of us just joining me, I’ve been reading Jordan B. Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Amazon Affiliate link).

Rule 4 of Jordan Peterson’s book involves comparing yourself against yourself rather than against other pressures. This is not something that is uncommon; it’s been found in a lot of self-help advice, but Peterson’s approach either came across clearer or otherwise had a different approach than the other ways I’ve heard it said. I’ve also been listening to Stephen R. Covey’s Seven Habits of Highly Successful People on Audible (Amazon affiliate links), and it said something very similar in one of its chapters, so that’s an indication that it could be on me; then again, Covey claims to be more “old-school” than most (in that he rejects some of the trends of the 20th century, a trend Peterson shares).

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Jordan Peterson’s Beyond Order Rule 2: Imagine who you could be, and then aim single-mindedly at that. (Part 2)

Kyle

Continuing my series on Beyond Order, I’m going over the second half of the chapter containing the second rule. You can read the previous part here. I didn’t do a great job at actually breaking the chapter down equally, so I actually just have like a third of the chapter in this deep dive, but it was a part of the text that I highlighted pretty heavily as I went through because it was interesting.

This part of Beyond Order draws heavily on Peterson’s Maps of Meaning (both Amazon affiliate links), though it also treads new grounds. I’m not sure how much of this stems from Peterson’s recent experiences and how much of it comes from a different analytical lens toward his source material, but I enjoyed this chapter more than any other part of Peterson’s writing except perhaps portions of Maps of Meaning.

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Revisiting 12 Rules for Life: Make Friends With People Who Want the Best For You

Kyle

Note: This is a repost of a blog series that I started in January 2018. Because this was prior to the blog being syndicated on PeakD, and it was some of my most-viewed content on the old blog. I’m going to be editing these slightly, but I’m also going to be adding my own thoughts as I re-read what I wrote. You can find the original post here.

For those of us just joining me, I’ve been reading Jordan B. Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Amazon Affiliate link).

After reading this chapter, it should be of little surprise why Peterson is appealing to the burned out youth of the Millennial generation. After all, growing up in a small town with little future other than a vague promise of “leaving”, and watching many of his friends with even less possibilities will naturally resonate with the disaffected.

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Jordan Peterson’s Beyond Order Rule 2: Imagine who you could be, and then aim single-mindedly at that. (Part 1)

Kyle

Yesterday I did an exploration of the first chapter of Beyond Order, Jordan Peterson’s follow-up book to 12 Rules for Life. You can read it here. I’ve made the executive decision that in the future I’m probably going to split each of these into two parts, because I have a lot of other things that I need to be focusing on simultaneously and part of the point of this series is to take a deep dive into the book. Also, WordPress was slowing down as I was wrapping up yesterday, which turned the writing process a tad painful.

I’m reading the Kindle version (Amazon affiliate link), and I’ve been enjoying the experience. I’m not sure what exactly it is, but it seems like the layout and formatting of Beyond Order was done to a much higher standard than most other Kindle books in a way that I can’t quite explain. It’s slick on my tablet.

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Revisiting 12 Rules for Life: Treat Yourself Like Someone You Are Responsible for Helping

Kyle

Note: This is a repost of a blog series that I started in January 2018. Because this was prior to the blog being syndicated on PeakD, and it was some of my most-viewed content on the old blog. I’m going to be editing these slightly, but I’m also going to be adding my own thoughts as I re-read what I wrote. You can find the original post here.

For those of us just joining me, I’ve been reading Jordan B. Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (Amazon Affiliate link). The second chapter focuses on self-care, and provides some interesting insights and information, plus a lot of actionable advice.

The second chapter of Peterson’s work is engaging. I certainly enjoyed it more than the first, though I also am a fan of archetypes, and the Judeo-Christian imagery in the chapter resonated well with me (I know from looking at Amazon reviews that this is not universally the case).

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Jordan Peterson’s Beyond Order Rule 1: Do not carelessly denigrate social institutions or creative achievement.

Kyle

Jordan Peterson is a Canadian psychologist and writer of several books, including Maps of Meaning and his more famous 12 Rules for Life. Today his next book, Beyond Order released, and I’ve started reading it.

I will not address the foreword. It is tremendous, but the contents are both difficult to condense and personal enough to Peterson that I do not feel a third-party’s attempt to render them would be useful.

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Revisiting 12 Rules for Life: Stand Up Straight With Your Shoulders Back

Kyle

Note: This is a repost of a blog series that I started in January 2018. Because this was prior to the blog being syndicated on PeakD, and it was some of my most-viewed content on the old blog. I’m going to be editing these slightly to make them less wordy, but I’m also going to be adding my own thoughts as I re-read what I wrote. You can find the original post here.

I’ve been hearing a lot about Jordan Peterson recently; he’s been the face of a couple political controversies and also a psychologist with a focus on studying archetypes, so there’s a bit of overlap there that makes me interested in him. When I was reading Jeffrey Tucker’s A Beautiful Anarchy (Amazon affiliate link), one thing that Tucker pointed out is that to really read a book and gain its full benefits you need to take a moment to write about what you have read, so I will attempt to do the same with Jordan Peterson’s book, since I am inevitably drawn to figure out what the fuss is about.

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The New Site and New Plans

Kyle

People familiar with my blog at this domain will notice that the site’s been replaced by an entirely new site, which includes the complete erasure of all past posts.

This wasn’t entirely on purpose. I’d had some issues with the several year old WordPress installation that had been occupying this space, and one of my efforts to fix it seems to have caused the database to get deleted during the updating/transferring process.

Fortunately, everything on the site before the posts I made in January should still be available if you direct the Wayback Machine to blog.homoeoteleuton.com. The posts I made in January (and most of my recent posts from the last couple years) all synced over to my profile on PeakD, so everything’s still available if you’re willing to sort through a couple posts I didn’t think were worth putting up on the blog directly.

This revamp and relaunch has been a long time coming, and the changes should enable me to do some things that were not possible with my previous setup.

Because of my MFA, setting up my author blog, working on a new game, and life situations, I hadn’t been posting stuff here for a while in any case.

I’m reserving this blog more for random stuff, reviews, and musings that don’t fit my brand as a writer. If you want my advice on writing, check out kwilleywrites.com, and if you want to follow my work on games check out the PeakD profile I use for that.

Plans

You might notice that this site’s not running on HTTPS (yet). This is one reason I had to relaunch the site, because some feature or another of the old system wasn’t working for it and it was causing serious issues.

I’m going to take a couple days off touching website hosting back-end stuff before getting that sorted, but by the time you read this there probably won’t be any reason to worry about this.

Another question is what to do with some of my evergreen content.

I’ve concluded that I am a sufficiently better writer now than I was for most of the posts on the old blog. I will not replicate it, and I’m probably not going to port over any of my personal project stuff, which has either gotten its own brand (e.g. Loreshaper Games) or is years out of date.

However, there is a set of content that was both my highest accessed material and topically relevant, which was my breakdown of Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life. The follow-up book, Beyond Order, released today, and over the next couple weeks I’m going to do a similar breakdown of that book and revisit the original with new thoughts and commentary.