12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos
August 16, 2024
4 min read
📚 arvy's Book Club
arvy's Teaser: Life is chaos. Markets are chaos. Your portfolio is chaos. Jordan Peterson's prescription — take responsibility, pursue meaning over comfort, and build order in your own life first — applies to investing more directly than you'd expect. Here's what a clinical psychologist's 12 rules teach about discipline, self-knowledge, and the hardest investing skill of all: doing the right thing when everything feels wrong.
The Book in 60 Seconds
12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos (2018) by Jordan Peterson draws on psychology, philosophy, mythology, and clinical experience to present 12 principles for living with discipline and meaning. Peterson's thesis: life contains unavoidable suffering, and the only antidote is responsibility — taking ownership of your actions, your environment, and your future. The book became a global phenomenon, selling millions of copies and sparking intense cultural debate.
Jordan Peterson · 2018 · Psychology, Philosophy & Self-Development
Thierry's all-time favourite
Idea 1: Set Your House in Perfect Order Before You Criticise the World
Peterson's Rule 6: before blaming external forces for your problems, take responsibility for what you can control. Clean your room. Fix what's broken in your own life. Build the discipline to manage your own affairs before criticising how others manage theirs.
The investing translation is direct: before blaming the market, interest rates, or geopolitics for poor returns, audit your own system. Is your 3a maxed? Is your savings plan automated? Are your fees low? Are you diversified? Are you checking your portfolio daily (you shouldn't be)? Most poor investment outcomes aren't caused by markets — they're caused by the investor's own behaviour.
You should take care of, help, and be good to yourself the same way you would take care of, help, and be good to someone you loved and valued.
The Investor Lesson
Set your financial house in order first. 3a maxed. Savings plan automated. Fees minimised. Portfolio diversified. Only then worry about what the market is doing. 90% of investing success comes from the system you build, not the market's behaviour. (→ Savings Plan)
Idea 2: Compare Yourself to Who You Were Yesterday, Not to Who Someone Else Is Today
Peterson's Rule 4 attacks the comparison trap: your only meaningful benchmark is your own past self. Comparing yourself to others — who have different starting points, resources, and circumstances — is a recipe for resentment and paralysis.
In investing, this is the FOMO trap. Your colleague's crypto gains, your friend's property portfolio, the influencer's stock picks — none of them are your benchmark. Your benchmark is: am I in a better financial position than I was a year ago? If your savings plan is running, your 3a is maxed, and your portfolio is growing — you're winning, regardless of what anyone else is doing.
The Investor Lesson
Stop comparing portfolios. Your only benchmark is your own progress: Am I saving more than last year? Am I invested in quality? Am I not panic-selling? That's what matters. FOMO destroys more wealth than bear markets. (→ Psychology of Money)
Idea 3: Pursue What Is Meaningful, Not What Is Expedient
Peterson's Rule 7 — his deepest: short-term pleasure often leads to long-term pain. Meaning comes from sacrifice — doing the hard thing now because it builds something that matters later. Expedience is comfortable. Meaning is effortful. But meaning compounds.
The investing parallel: spending everything today is expedient. Saving and investing is meaningful. The CHF 500/month you invest instead of spending doesn't feel good today. But 30 years from now, when it's CHF 610,000, it's the most meaningful financial decision you ever made. Investing is delayed gratification — Peterson's "meaningful over expedient" principle in financial form.
The Investor Lesson
Investing is the financial expression of choosing meaning over expedience. Every CHF you invest instead of spend is a sacrifice that compounds into freedom. The used car instead of the lease. The 3.5-room flat instead of the 4.5. Every CHF not spent on status compounds silently into independence. (→ Pillar 3a)
What This Means for Swiss Investors
| Peterson Rule | Swiss Investor Application |
|---|---|
| Set your house in order | 3a maxed, savings plan automated, fees low, diversified. Fix your financial system before blaming the market. |
| Compare to your past self | Your benchmark is your own progress. FOMO — chasing others' gains — destroys more wealth than crashes. |
| Meaning over expedience | Every CHF invested instead of spent is meaning over expedience. Tax-free capital gains in Switzerland reward those who choose delayed gratification. |
arvy's Take
What holds up: Peterson's rules — responsibility, self-comparison, meaning over comfort — are directly applicable to investing. The "set your house in order" principle alone would improve most people's financial lives more than any stock pick. Thierry's all-time favourite for a reason: the book is about discipline, and discipline is the most undervalued investing skill.
What's missing: Peterson is polarising, and the book's cultural-war associations may distract from the actual content. Some sections meander through mythology and biblical exegesis when the practical application could be more direct. And it's not a finance book — the investing connections require the reader's effort.
What we'd add: Peterson gives you the discipline framework. Housel gives you the financial application. Sun Tzu gives you the patience. Together: take responsibility for your finances, build the system, stop comparing yourself to others, and invest in what's meaningful — not what's trending.
3 Sentences to Remember
1. Set your financial house in order before blaming the market. 90% of investing success comes from the system you build.
2. Your benchmark is your own progress, not someone else's portfolio. FOMO kills more wealth than bear markets.
3. Investing is meaning over expedience. Every CHF invested instead of spent is a sacrifice that compounds into freedom.
Buy the book
English (Amazon) · Deutsch (Amazon)
Also in Book Club: Psychology of Money → · Let Them Theory →
Set your house in order. Build the system.
Discipline, responsibility, and meaning — applied to your finances. 3a maxed. Savings plan automated. Quality compounding. From CHF 1/month.
This article was written by Thierry Borgeat, Co-Founder of arvy, and reviewed by Patrick Rissi, CFA, and Florian Jauch, CFA.
Disclaimer: This article is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute personal investment advice. Amazon links are affiliate links. arvy is a FINMA-supervised asset manager.
