If you're not going to be rewarded for your virtues, and instead you're going to be punished for them, then what's your motivation to continue?
Interpretation
The quote questions the value of maintaining one's principles if they lead to punishment instead of reward.
Jordan Peterson's quote highlights a crucial dilemma that individuals might face in life: the challenge of adhering to their virtues in the face of adversity. When good actions result in negative consequences, it creates a significant motivation crisis, making one wonder whether their efforts toward integrity and righteousness are worth the sacrifice. This brings into question the nature of reward and punishment in society and challenges the individual to consider the purpose and impact of their moral choices.
In practice
Use this quote in a motivational speech about the importance of staying true to one's values.
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.
I'm doing what I think I was put on this earth to do. And I'm really grateful to have something that I'm passionate about and that I think is profoundly important.
The simple act of paying positive attention to people has a great deal to do with productivity.
My TV show had been cancelled; nothing else had gone anywhere; some alliances I had made petered out and nothing came of them and I was looking at a long, long year ahead of me in which there was no work on the horizon, the phone wasn't ringing. I had two kids, one of them a brand-new baby, and I didn't know if I would be able to keep my house.
What's the point of being the best in the world if you scratch and claw your way to the top, and you push everybody down instead of lifting everybody else up with you?
God doesn't require us to succeed, he only requires that you try.
If you don't come walking back to the pits every once in a while holding a steering wheel in your hands, you're not trying hard enough
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