It is more difficult to rule yourself than to rule a city.
Interpretation
Self-discipline is harder to achieve than external authority. Mastering oneself is a greater challenge than managing others.
This quote by Jordan Peterson highlights the complexity of self-control and personal governance compared to the task of managing others outwardly. It suggests that true leadership begins within, as the ability to direct one's own life and actions requires immense effort, introspection, and sacrifice, often surpassing the challenges faced when leading a group or community.
In practice
Use this quote in a self-improvement workshop to emphasize the importance of internal mastery.
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.
The fewer data needed, the better the information. And an overload of information, that is, anything much beyond what is truly needed, leads to information blackout. It does not enrich, but impoverishes.
Good questions work on us, we don't work on them. They are not a project to be completed but a doorway opening onto greater depth of understanding, actions that will take us into being more fully alive.
A fault is fostered by concealment.
Everything's been said, but it needs saying again.
By cultivating the beautiful we scatter the seeds of heavenly flowers, as by doing good we cultivate those that belong to humanity.
In the Universe the difficult things are done as if they were easy.
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