Jordan Peterson looks into your soul, predicts your career success.
Unlike many other interviews where Peterson answers many of the same questions and responds to many of the usual charges, here Rob Moore engages Peterson in an exchange that feels a lot more like two guys in a bar knocking back a couple of beers. Tweet
Highlights
Two guys walk into a bar. Bartender says, "What'll it be?"
Jordan Peterson and Rob Moore say a lot of very smart stuff.
Bartender says, "Thanks! You guys made that a double."
If you’ve watched any Jordan Peterson interviews online, you know that he’s going to get grilled about the differences between men and women, and gender equality and related topics.
And once you see Peterson interviewed, you’re likely to have one of two responses:
- “Turn that damn guy off.”
Or: - “Who is this guy? I want to hear more!”
If you fall into category two, we highly recommend this video in which Peterson is interviewed by Rob Moore, a British author, entrepreneur and investor.
Unlike many other interviews where Peterson answers many of the same questions and responds to many of the usual charges, Moore engages Peterson in an exchange that feels a lot more like two smart guys in a bar knocking back a couple of beers.
Here is Jordan Peterson’s take on careers and self-motivation and entrepreneurship:
There are simple jobs and complex jobs. That’s the first thing that’s worth knowing. And it’s a continuum really, but a simple job is one where once you’re trained, you just repeat what you’re doing. So, so factory line work would be what would be an example of that or. Or checking out people at a grocery store, restocking, grocery shelves or, or jobs like that.
The best predictors for success in those jobs is conscientiousness. Trait, conscientiousness, and conscientious people are orderly and industrious. And we don’t exactly know why they are. It seems like it’s associated oddly enough, with such things as disgust sensitivity. So maybe people are conscientious because they get disgusted with themselves if they’re not useful and they get guilty if they’re not engaging in productive enterprise; maybe that’s a marker for a kind of complex social responsibility.
It’s IQ that predicts how fast you learn the job, but not how well you do it once you learn it.
The entrepreneurs are different because for simple jobs it’s IQ that predicts how fast you learn the job, but not how well you do it once you learn it. And what predicts there is conscientiousness.
So basically, if you’re hiring people, you want conscientious people, that’s the most important thing, and then the second most important thing is you want people who are relatively low in trait neuroticism, which has a negative emotion dimension, because they’re less likely to be absentee and so forth.
A complex job is one where the demands change on a regular basis. And so most managerial administrative positions are complex jobs because you can’t learn the job once. And the best predictor for complex jobs is IQ, and the second predictor is conscientiousness, with IQ three times more powerful than, than conscientiousness as a predictor.
So that’s the first simple versus complex. And then the second category scheme would be something like managerial slash administrative versus entrepreneurial. And the entrepreneurial types, actually they’re over with the artists.
So the best predictor for entrepreneurial success first is IQ but second is trait openness, which is the creativity dimension.
So entrepreneurial types tend to be very high in trait openness, and that sets them with the artists and also with the political liberals, because the best predictor of political liberalism is…openness.
And here are a couple of other Jordan Peterson hot-takes that are worth watching for:
- If you want genuine diversity, you go for diversity of temperament, not diversity on the basis of ethnicity and that sort of thing.
- There’s an advantage to being around disagreeable people. Agreeable people won’t produce a lot of conflict, but disagreeable when people tell you what they think.
- You should be very thankful that sales and marketing people exist, even though there’s that, what would you call it, mercantilist commercial element to it that some consider distasteful from the perspective of higher aesthetics. But don’t confuse your ignorance of something important, like sales and marketing, with your moral purity.
- Don’t be contemptuous of your damn sales and marketing people, because you’re bloody lucky you’ve got them. That’s a set of skills you need to develop if you’re a creative person and an artist; don’t be contemptuous of those skills with your false romanticism.
- Is there something wrong with generating money? It depends on what you’re going to do with the money. If you’re going to spend it all on hookers and cocaine, then probably that’s reprehensible.