Conceptualizing Success: Optimized Suffering, The Idea Of Process, Daring To Hope

Now Professor Emeritus at the University of Toronto, Dr. Jordan B. Peterson has dedicated much of his career — and life — to teaching. Having been bestowed the title of honor in recognition of his service, leadership, research, and teaching, Peterson’s distinguished career and sphere of influence has set him apart. His instructional practices did not end when he exited the classroom; rather, it seems they had only just begun. Peterson continues teaching on a variety of subjects outside the classroom, just as he does in his new series, “Success,” available on DailyWire+. 

Today, Peterson remains steeped in his roots, leaning on his knowledge of psychology, religion, philosophy, and literature. At the same time, he will tackle any topic of conversation and answer any question posed to him; he is not one to shy away from a challenge. Addressing the topic of success, however, is no challenge to Peterson, but it is one he parses with careful consideration. His assertions are not without support, and he foregrounds his teaching on success with knowledge from his experience, practice, and research. 

The beginning of the third episode opens with Peterson, still seated, reiterating a main point in the first. He refutes the notion that happiness and the absence of suffering are requirements for success. “Success is not a matter of mere happiness. Success is not a matter of mere absence of suffering” he says, using firm hand gestures that denote his seriousness. People often think they want an easy life, but he counters this idea, saying, “It’s very often the case, when people look back on their lives, they’re happiest about the things they did that were maximally challenging.”

With the happiness and absence of suffering hypothesis cast aside, Peterson identifies optimized suffering as a worthy matter of success instead — specifically, “optimized challenge in the pursuit of maximal integration.” Here, Peterson harkens back to one of his foregrounding teaching topics: being reasonably embedded in a social hierarchy. 

Peterson has long since established the need to be embedded in a hierarchy; without being so, a horrible life expands multidimensionally. In the absence of an intimate partner, a family, any friends, a career or job, all that is left is pain. But Peterson is a problem-solver, not simply a problem-poser. He identifies a problem and almost seems to accept the responsibility of owning it, of solving it. The diagnosis is between the individual and the hierarchy itself. 

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Taking a lesson he has explicated thoroughly over time — that as deeply social creatures, we must be a harmonious player in a multidimensional symphony of social interaction — Peterson connects this teaching to the point at hand: optimized challenge in the pursuit of maximal integration. When you engage in competition to challenge yourself, you let go of skills that are counterproductive and develop new skills as a consequence of being challenged, he explains. “When you’re playing the game, you’re not just trying to win the game, you’re trying to become a better player while you play it.” Thus, striving to operate at all levels — with a partner, family, community, town, city, nation — in a way that makes you better at those levels is formative of success. 

This means success is not an apex; it is, instead, a journey to pursue. “You think you’re going to hit a pinnacle, and that there’ll be something static about that pinnacle and that you’ll have accomplished something and you’ll be done. Well, the problem with that is, success is not a place you get to and stay.” Again, integration is required. Understanding the idea of process is necessary in order to conceptualize success, to truly understand it. As Peterson knowingly professes, “Wherever you are, you’re definitely not at your final destination.” Recalling people he has met who peaked in high school, Peterson states the truth in this example: many, many years remain to go downhill. Success as an end state is a thought which must be opposed. 

To provide support for these already well-founded truths, Peterson draws on Fyodor Dostoevsky, the nineteenth-century Russian author — one that captured and held Peterson’s attention for decades. In “Notes from Underground,” Dostoevsky posits that if people were provided a worry-free life with nothing but the opportunity to enjoy, they would destroy it within a week just to have something unexpected happen. Though the idea that “if we only had enough, everything would be alright” is foolish, it is, in large part, due to our “history of privation.” Regardless, Peterson knows we are not created for the sole desire of satiation. We are, instead, built for adventure. 

He continues, saying, “That adventure is part and parcel of being pushed to that development edge in the context of, let’s say, the competitive play we have to engage in.” This brings about the issue of a zero-sum attitude — an attitude of limitation, lack, and insufficiency — which must be done away with. Instead, a perspective that hones in on opportunity because “abundance is a consequence of proper social integration and social structure” is needed. Peterson speaks with an air of optimism, asserting that “the world’s an ever expanding set of possibilities.” He is also realistic, acknowledging that people face differing opportunities and limitations, which he lays claim to having witnessed with patients in his psychological practice. But even so, he has encountered people looking for opportunity. He shares a moving story of one patient in particular who “had enough largeness of soul to notice that there were people who were even worse off than her — and then wanted to do something about it.” 

What of those who have been given much? “I think that with each of your talents, they come accompanied by a requisite responsibility,” Peterson says. “Very few gifts come without a price.” There is no shortage of causes for someone’s presumed limitations or constraints, as he makes evident in the list he poses: narrowness of vision and conceptualization, cynicism, bitterness, shallowness, lack of discipline, corrosive self-criticism, excuse-making and rationalization, outright deception, and sins of omission. People sometimes impose constraints on themselves for self-justifying reasons, not a direct indication of their environment. 

When self-justification of constraints becomes the reason for limitations, comparison can easily ensue. Comparison has the potential to lead to envy, but “casual envy is not that wise,” Peterson warns. Here, he tells a story of triumph, of a man who faced constant trouble, “that kind of tragic trouble that never goes away,” but managed to create a successful life for himself. Peterson knows this upward striving feat can be accomplished by having a default proposition of knowing there are ways you can “get your act together” that would “open the world up to you.” 

Peterson ends with hope, naming “the courage of hope” as part of success. He seems to know the viewer may tilt their head in confusion at the idea of hope being associated with success, but his reasoning makes sense. Seeing that life is cataclysmic yet still daring to hope is, indeed, courageous. “The development and cultivation of that existential courage, that’s also core to what constitutes success — and that’s the practice of virtue.”

Whether intentionally or by happenstance, Peterson comes full circle and gives the viewer a chance to embark on a journey toward optimized challenge. He inquires, “How much of what isn’t working for you in your life is a consequence of your failure to seize the moment and blindness to the opportunities right in front of you?” 

Consider the call to seize the moment, identify the opportunities in your path, engage in what is maximally challenging, and pursue your adventure to success.