Name: 不要輕易拿自己和別人比較！ ► 大多數人沒聽過的「普萊斯定律」 - Dr. Jordan B Peterson 喬登·彼得森（中英字幕）
Uploaded: 2025-07-18T00:03:32.000Z
Duration: 6 min 16 s
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You know, there's a rule of thumb that if you run a company, that 20% of your employees do 80% of the work, or that 20% of your customers are responsible for 80% of your sales, or that 20% of them are responsible for 80% of the customer service calls.

The rule is, in a given domain, the square root of the number of people operating in that domain do half the productive work.

So you think, well you have 10 employees, 3 of them do half the work.

And if it's 10,000 employees, then it's 100.

And this actually turns out to be a rather ironclad rule.

It applies across very, very many situations.

It applies, for example, to the mass of stars and the size of cities.

So you can see how universal it is as a law.

It's something like those that have more get more, and those that have less get less.

To those who have everything, more will be given.

From those who have nothing, everything will be taken away.

Economists sometimes call that the Matthew Principle.

So what that lays out is a world that's rife with inequality.

So you know, you hear this idea that I think it's the 85 richest people in the world have more money than the bottom 2 billion.

And you might say, to hell with capitalism for producing that.

It's like, sorry, you got your diagnosis wrong.

No matter what society you study, you get a Pareto distribution of wealth.

You get a Pareto distribution of number of records recorded.

You get a Pareto distribution of number of songs written or goals scored.

Any creative product has that characteristic.

And it's partly because as you start to become successful, let's say, people offer you more and more opportunities.

And as you start to fail, people move away from you and you plummet.

So what it means is that there is always a landscape of inequality.

What that means is there's always going to be people around that are better at something than you are.

And that's a problem because you can get jealous and you can get bitter and you can get resentful.

And worse, you can get hopeless, you know, because you look like...

He was decrying his lack of success in the world.

And he said, you know, his roommate, his college roommate was doing much better than he was.

It's like, oh, you're not doing as well as Elon Musk.

Well, I mean, you can see it would take it rather personally because they were roommates and everything.

It's like, yeah, well, you and like 7 billion other people, you know.

But I thought it was instructive because, well, because you have to be careful who you compare yourself to.

Now, you can't just not compare yourself to successful people, right?

Because then you don't have anything to aim at.

You need an ideal because you have nothing to aim at.

So how the hell can you have the benefits of having an ideal without having the crushing blow that goes along with having the judge that always regards you as insufficient?

We don't want to let your distance from the goal crush you.

And then you got to make the goal, break the goal down into parts so that you can move towards it.

And you have a fairly high likelihood of doing it.

So that's a bit of practical, I wouldn't say advice.

It's some practical knowledge about how to go about achieving an aim.

Set a high aim but differentiate it down so you know what the next step is.

And then make the next step difficult enough so you have to push yourself past where you are.

But also provide yourself with a reasonable probability of success.

It's also what you do with children, right?

You want to push them because they need to grow up and be more than they are, right?

But you don't want to crush them with constant failure.

So what you do is aim high and make the goal difficult but proximal.

Who do you know that you can compare yourself to?

Aim high but use as your control yourself.

So your goal is to make today some tiny increment better than yesterday.

This doesn't have to be some imposition of external morality.

You know where you're weak and insufficient and where you could improve.

Think, okay, well, this is what I'm like yesterday.

If I did this little thing, things would be just an increment better.

And, well, that's a great thing because you get the ball rolling.

And incremental improvement is unstoppable.

And it starts to generate Pareto distribution-like consequences.

And I've seen that happen in people's lives over and over.

People write me all the time and tell me that they're doing that.

But I've seen that happen in people's lives continually.

The goal should be, how could I conceive of my life so that if I had that life, it would clearly be worth living so I wouldn't have to be bitter, resentful, deceitful, arrogant, and vengeful?

Because that's what endless failure does to you.

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不要輕易拿自己和別人比較！ ► 大多數人沒聽過的「普萊斯定律」 - Dr. Jordan B Peterson 喬登·彼得森（中英字幕）

phenomenon

constant

practical

achieve