12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos | Part 3

Cancel Your Toxic Friends. Find People Who Want the Best for You.

Making friends is hard, but living with toxic people is harder

Not everyone who comes into your life is meant to stay.

I’ve experienced having no friends, great friends, and a not-so-great friend.

I used to go to Vietnamese school on Saturdays. My parents thought it would be good for me to maintain our native language by learning it in a class.

In reality, I was brute-force memorizing a language I could barely read.

As I went through Vietnamese school every year, kids would drop out because they convinced their parents to spare them the torcher. The longer you stayed in the program, the smaller your class became.

I remember looking around one day and realizing that I no longer had any friends in my class. They had all left the program and were probably sleeping in on Saturdays now.

Those lucky bastards.

While I stayed for a couple more years and would talk to acquaintances during break time, the overall experience became quite lonely. I wasn’t particularly sad but I was also never happy when I attended the class without friends.

In high school, I met great friends. Not many, but they were there.

They were the kind of friends that made me think, Am I even worthy of being this person’s friend? I wanted to be like them. I wanted to make myself better so they would continue to want to be around me. They helped me when I struggled and made me feel confident.

I’ve also had a friend where, to this day, I’m unsure if they’ve provided a net positive or net negative impact on my life. I walked on eggshells around this person. I watched my words in case I said something that might make them jealous.

We had some good times, which is probably why I continued to be a part of their life. The stress would get to me, however, and sometimes I would be up wondering if I did something wrong.

I also wondered if I could help change them. Make them a less volatile person. Give them confidence. This turned out to be extremely difficult when I was still developing these qualities myself.

Relationships are hard, but they’re also the most rewarding part of life. Friendships have the potential to propel you to new heights or drag you down into the deepest of chasms. Choose them wisely.

This is the third installment in a series of articles on Jordan Peterson’s book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, where he uses his expertise in psychology to suggest the principles needed to live a good life.

This is the previous installment if you missed it:

The third rule for life is

“Make friends with people who want the best for you.”

You should tread with caution when it comes to the people you bring into your inner social circle. You are the average of the 5 people you spend the most time with.

If you want a good life, you better make sure your friends want you to have a good life as well.

Even someone who grows up relatively average, in a non-abusive household of average income can end up with many struggles later in life if they get caught up with people who don’t care about their wellbeing.

Friends who aren’t aiming upwards — who aren’t seeking to improve their lives — might be taking more than they are giving to you. Sometimes, when you encounter people like this, your inclination is to help them. This might be due to loyalty from past history with this person or you are trying to convince yourself and others that you have something to offer by befriending them.

However, it is very difficult to tell if someone sincerely wants to be helped or if they want to exploit a willing helper. The famous psychologist Carl Rogers believed that it’s impossible to convince someone to change for the better — they must already have the desire to improve before they can be helped.

It is also much easier for someone to drag you down than for you to bring them upwards. Imagine a new colleague joining your team at work because your boss is trying to encourage better performance from him. Since your team has been doing an outstanding job your boss thought surrounding the slacker with motivated people would rub off on him. Instead, when your team gets busy, the colleague starts up into old habits and falls behind. Other people on the team pick up the slack. Then they wonder why they need to work harder than the new guy when they’re all getting paid the same. Over time, everyone starts doing less just because they saw from the new colleague that they could.

It’s not selfish to want to surround yourself with good people. It’s a sensible, healthy choice. Associating with those whose lives would improve if yours also did means that you’ll have friends who keep you accountable. They motivate you to improve yourself and call you out when they know you can do better.

If you have a friend whose friendship you wouldn’t recommend to your sister, or your father, or your son, why would you have such a friend for yourself?

Befriending good people is no easy task, but it’s a major step in setting yourself up for a good life.