So, attend carefully to your posture. Quit drooping and hunching around. Speak your mind. Put your desires forward, as if you had a right to them — a… - Jordan Peterson

You might think, "Well, compassion is a virtue." Yes, it's a virtue, but any uni-dimensional virtue immediately becomes a vice, because real virtue is the intermingling of a number of virtues and their integration into a functional identity that can be expressed socially. Compassion can be great if you happen to be the entity towards which it is directed. But compassion tends to divide the world into crying children and predatory snakes. So if you're a crying child—hey, great. But if you happen to be identified as one of the predatory snakes, you better look the hell out. Compassion is what the mother grizzly bear feels for her cubs while she eats you because you got in the way.

I don't think that you have any insight whatsoever into your capacity for good until you have some well-developed insight into your capacity for evil.

If you want to do something that's difficult and that requires energy, a lot of different subsystems in your mind are going to throw up objections. It's why — well, maybe that isn't what you should be doing right now. Maybe you should be doing the dishes, or vacuuming, or watching TV, or looking at YouTube. Or if you're really sneaky: when you're trying to do something hard, what your brain does is give you something else hard to do that's not quite as hard, so that you can feel justified in not doing the thing you're supposed to, because you're doing something else useful. And if you give in to that temptation — which you often will — then it wins. And because it wins, it gets a little dopamine kick, and it grows stronger. Anything you let win the internal argument grows, and anything you let be defeated shrinks, because it's punished — it doesn't get to have its way.

So that's another thing really to remember: don't practise what you do not want to become. And because those are neurological circuits, you build those things in there, man. They're not going anywhere. You can build another little machine to inhibit them — that's the best you can do. Once they're in there, you can't get them out. And the ones you build to inhibit can be taken out by stress, and the old habits will come back up. So you've got to be careful what you say and what you do, because you build yourself that way.