12 Rules For Life summary

If your dog was sick and the vet prescribed it medication, you wouldn’t second-guess the doctor and leave the prescription unfilled would you? And yet, one-third of people ignore the medical prescriptions they’re given by doctors, which begs the question: why do we take better care of our pets than ourselves?

Part of the reason is that, because we’re always conscious of our own flaws, we feel self-loathing, which, in turn, can lead to unnecessary self-punishment and a sense that we’re unworthy of feeling good. Thus, we take better care of others than ourselves.

One of the author’s childhood friends never left the prairies of his northern Canadian hometown, Fairview, Alberta. Instead, he stuck around and ended up among the town’s other ne’er-do-wells.

Every once in a while, the author would return home and catch up with his friend – and each time, his friend’s slow, sad decline became more apparent. What was once youthful potential became aging resentment.

There used to be such a thing as being a big fish in a small pond. But now, thanks to the internet, even the concept of a small community is a thing of the past. These days, we’re all part of a global community, and no matter where you are, there is always someone better than you.

This brings us to the issue of self-criticism. Now, it’s important to be critical of one’s self – if we weren’t then we’d have nothing to strive for, no motivation to better ourselves and our lives would quickly become meaningless.

If you’ve ever seen parents ignoring a child who’s wreaking havoc, you may have wondered: are they just bad parents or are they being clever by allowing the child to tire himself out?

Approaches to child-rearing have changed over the years, often as a result of the age-old nature-versus-nurture debate, and differing opinions about the kinds of instincts we’re born with.

There’s no point in mincing words: the world is full of challenges and suffering – but this isn’t cause for despair.

Nevertheless, many people throughout the ages have seen life as so cruel and unfair that drastic responses are justified. The Russian author Leo Tolstoy saw existence as so absurdly unjust that he suggested there were only four valid responses: childlike ignorance, hedonistic pleasure, suicide or struggling on despite it all.

Have you heard the story about the monkey who got caught with his hand in the cookie jar? As the story goes, there was a cookie left inside an open jar, and the opening of the jar was just big enough for the monkey’s hand to enter – but not big enough for his fist to come back out with the treat in it. So, if he insisted on trying to hold onto his treat, he would be stuck.

The moral here is that there is a price for greed: the monkey got himself captured because he refused to just let go of the cookie.

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche believed that you could measure the strength of a person's spirit based upon how much undiluted truth they can tolerate. While truth is often considered a valuable commodity in our culture, we nevertheless tell lies all the time.

One of the main reasons for lying to ourselves and to others is to get what we think we want. The Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler called these life-lies, and they’re characterized as the things we’ll do and say to turn a poorly-thought-out goal into a reality.

Thousands of years after his death, the ancient philosopher Socrates is still considered one of the wisest men who ever lived. One of the reasons for this is his belief that the only thing he was certain of was that he knew nothing, and this was a driving force in his conversations and his openness to learn.

When you engage in genuine conversation, it should be a similar process to thinking.

Life truly is an enormous and complicated tapestry, and yet we tend only to see the isolated parts we need to see. If you’re walking along and see an apple on the ground, you probably don’t think of the branch, tree, roots and soil that were all connected before it fell.

The reason is that we tend only to recognize or pay attention to the things that are either useful to us or stand in our way. The apple catches our attention because it represents food and sustenance. But we don’t consider the tree and the soil because they are of no use for satisfying our needs.

In George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier, the author comes to the conclusion that socialism was attracting defenders in England, not because of sympathy for the harsh conditions facing miners, but out of hatred for the rich and powerful.

Today there are similar attitudes toward the male-dominated leadership known as the patriarchy.

Have you ever had to care for a sick person? It can be one of life’s more difficult challenges. The author’s daughter has been coping with severe arthritis since she was six years old. She has suffered from constant pain, requiring frequent injections and multiple surgeries for joint replacements.

If you had a daughter in this situation, you might think life is unfair – but it’s important to recognize that the dark bits of pain, suffering and sorrow are what give the good moments their value.