[robbedpeter]

And there's always Tony Robbins, Jordan Peterson, and a wealth of other self-help types. Picking any system is better than nothing, and gives you context for selecting good ones once you're familiar. Coast on other people's wisdom until you earn your own.

[dgfitz]

I would hesitate to endorse Robbins. He’s had a litany of sexual abuse claims against him, among other legal problems

[shard]

I despair at the modern trope of dismissing something of worth due to a person's thoughts/actions in an unrelated area (in modern parlance, "cancelling" someone). It seems like an ad hominem attack to me. How will this trend evolve in the future? Will the works of people like Beethoven, da Vinci, Einstein be cancelled due to them being meat eaters? (Substitute someone of equal stature if the people listed are actually vegetarians)

[solveit]

Life wisdom would seem to be an area where you should be wary of following advice from serial sex abusers... (I know nothing of Robbins, I just wanted to discuss the general heuristic).

[dgfitz]

I would encourage you to read at least the Wikipedia page of Robbins. I’m no fan of cancel culture either, but he doesn’t seem like a good person or someone I’d take advice from.

[Chris2048]

> in an unrelated area

But what his area? If it's living a successful, balanced life like himself, then his person problems are relevant to his self-help franchise.

[Apocryphon]

Now that’s moral relativism gone amuck.

[basq]

true words spoken by a false man, makes them false.

[hattori31]

If a part of person is false, doesnt mean everything is false. If you cheat on your wife doesn't mean you never loved her. Mistakes are part of being human.

[robbedpeter]

Well, no. That's what thinking is for. To separate words from their source and consider them for their content. A reading of Principia Mathematica by Hitler doesn't tarnish or invalidate the words in any way. Context matters.

Basing judgment on the source of an idea isn't a perfect tool for navigating life. If someone is telling you lots of true things but in a way to compromise you, or to sell you something, or to get you to join a cult, then who that person is provides valuable context.

If you want a system, Peterson has a ready-made and inoffensive set of rules to play off of. It has a built in technique to improve on the rules that doesn't compromise your ability to think about new material (whereas scientology or other religious systems cripple you deliberately.) Identifying a collection of true things is the point, and then looking for good faith operators willing to share their model of successful behavior.

Robbins is a typical self help guy, and the value is there, but to me it's been most useful as a baseline against which to measure other systems. Robbins represents the line of hucksterism for me, where if you're playing with those ideas and presentation techniques you might not be legitimate. I think he's mostly just over that line on the side of authentic, but he often falls short.

[basq]

Peterson is a disheveled, drug addicted, religious nut. He doesn't have anything to teach anyone.

Robbins is a sex predator.

Not role models, not teachers.

Poison the milk, poison the ghee.