Jordan Peterson: "You're underestimating how much you can improve" "If the gap between you and your ideal is so great that it paralyzes you, you've created a dragon you don't have the tools to master. So you have to scale the dragon down to size. You want to scale it down until it's a size you're willing to move toward, however small that is." Jordan explains the math behind growth: "There's a gospel principle called the Matthew Principle: to those who have everything, more will be given. It implies that reality works like this: when you're moving up, it's exponential. When you're going down, it's downhill, then cliff. So it doesn't matter how small your first steps are, even if they're shameful in their size. Because if you're disciplined, you'll speed up extraordinarily rapidly. The ball doesn't roll in a linear fashion. It rolls in a geometric fashion." He shares his own story: "When I first started going to the gym, I was 23. I weighed 135 pounds at 6'1". Very thin. I smoked like mad, drank too much. I wasn't in good shape. I went to this swim class, it was me, a really overweight young guy, and seven women over 70. They could outswim me. It was pretty damn humiliating." Jordan continues: "Then I started lifting weights. I'd be underneath the bench press trying to lift 75 pounds, and some muscle-headed bastard would come over and tell me how to do it. It's embarrassing. Lots of people won't go to the gym because they're embarrassed about how they look. But you start at the bottom where you're weak. If you want to rectify what's weak, you have to accept that the first steps are going to be painful." The result: "It took me about 3 years, but I stopped smoking, stopped drinking, and gained 40 pounds of muscle. I got a lot more physically confident. A lot more coordinated. Then I could dance, so that was better when I was going out in graduate school." He explains why self-reflection matters: "If your plans didn't work out, sit down and say: 'Even if the world was conspiring against me and my failure was 95% the fault of external circumstances, what did I do that wasn't as good as it could have been? Where did I fail to look?' To ask that question, you have to want the answer. That's what it means to knock, to ask, to seek. You have to want to know." Jordan concludes: "One of the reasons you confess your sins is because you want to discover where you're insufficient. It's painful, but the advantage is you can rectify the error. And then as you move forward, you're stronger."