Jordan Peterson: What Kind of Job Fits You?

first of all you need to know them for your own life because you ought to know that there are differences intelligence it’s really important if you go into a job and you’re not smart enough for that miserable time and you’re gonna make life wretched for the people

around you because you won’t be able to handle the position and as you climb hierarchies of intelligence increases and so unless you want to fail you don’t put yourself in well what’s over your head well that’s a tricky thing to figure out I mean you intelligence you have to figure it out with conscientiousness you have to figure it out with creativity you have to figure out with stress tolerance with agreeable Ness because you want to go into a cooperative

environment and not a competitive one if you’re agreeable and with neuroticism you what could probably want to keep the stress level of your job relatively low because those are all places that you can break down and most people have at least one significant personality makeup and you’ve got to be careful not to place yourself in a position where that’s going to be a fatal flaw but what you really want to do as far as I can tell if you want to

maximize your chances for both success and and let’s say well-being is you want to find a strata of occupation in which you would have an intelligence that would put you in the upper quartile that’s perfect then you’re a big fish in a small pond and you don’t want to be this you don’t want to be the stupidest guy in the room it’s a bloody rough place to be so and you probably don’t want to be the smartest guy in the room either because what that probably means is

you should be in a different room right you should look at a place where if you’re right at the top it’s you’ve mastered it it’s time to go somewhere where you’re a little lower so that you’ve got something to climb up for so conscientious for example you’re probably not gonna want a job that you have to work 70 hours a week at because you’re just not wired up that way you’d rather have some leisure and like more power to you if that’s how you’re wired up there’s nothing wrong with having some leisure but if you’re someone who can’t stand sitting around doing anything ever then maybe
you can go into a job that’s going to require you to work 75 hours a week and almost all jobs that are at the top of complex dominance intelligence and insane levels of conscientiousness as well generally high levels of stress tolerance you know because that can knock yo – because there’s going to be sharp fluctuations in your career generally speaking at the higher levels of a structure and you have to make very complicated decisions often with very short

time horizons so you have to decide if that’s what you want so okay so how smart do you have to be to be different things in life well if you were have an IQ of a 116 to 130 which is 85th percentile and above so it’s one person an eighth up to one person in 130 I believe is 85 90 95 is it 95 I think it’s 95 one person aid to one person in 20 then you can be a attorney a research analyst and editor at advertising manager a chemist and engineer and executive manager etc that’s that’s the now that’s not the high end for IQ by the way you know that it can go up well I can go up indefinitely

although there’s fewer and fewer people as it goes up so if you want to be the best at what you’re doing Bar None then having an IQ of above 145 is a necessity and maybe you’re pushing 160 in some situations and maybe that’s making you one person in 10,000 or even one person in a hundred thousand and then also to really be good at it you probably have to be reasonably stressed tolerant and also somewhat conscientious so you know people well you think well why is it that smart people are at the top of dominance hierarchies and the answer to that in part is because they right I mean

everything’s a race roughly speaking and the faster you are the more likely you are to be at the forefront of the pack and intelligence in large part is speed that’s not all of it is so if you’re moving towards something difficult rapidly the faster people are so IQ of 115 110 to 115 so that’s 85th to 73rd to 85th percentile copywriter accountant manager sales purchasing agent registered nurse Sales Account Executive if you look at universities the smartest people are they’re above this

who are the smartest people at university what do you think assists and mathematicians right right I could tell you who’s on the other end but I won’t yeah I’d like to though going down the now 103 to 108 is slightly above average rate 60th to 70th percentile store manager bookkeeper credit clerk lab test your general sales telephone sales accounting clerk computer operator customer service rep technician clerk typist so you see at this level people are people have some technical skill and

some ability to deal with complex things okay that’s dead average 100 is average dispatcher in a general office police patrol officer receptionist cashier general clerical inside sales clerk meter reader printer teller data entry electrical helper 95 to 98 machinist food to partner manager Quality Control checkers security guard unskilled labor maintenance arc welder die setter mechanic good-good IQ range for relatively qualified trades people 87 to 93 messenger factory production worker assembler food service worker nurse’s aide wear host Minh custodian janitor material handler Packer now what you’re seeing what you’re starting to see is that as he moves down the hierarchy the jobs get simpler

they’re more likely to be assigned by other people or they’re repetitive because what IQ predicts to some degree is how rapidly you can learn something but once you’ve learned it it doesn’t predict how necessarily how well you do at it and so the more repetitive jobs ten people with lower IQs are more suited to more repetitive jobs under 87 is there something well no right that’s a big problem and it’s something our society has not addressed at all jobs for people with IQs of less than 85 are very very rare so what the hell are those people supposed to do it’s like 1 it’s 15% of the population

what are they supposed to do well we better figure it out because one of the things that’s happening too is that as the as the high IQ tech geeks get a hold of the world the demand for cognitive power is increasing not you want to be a teller well you know those checkout machines they’re not so simple you want to work at McDonald’s you think that’s a simple job you don’t see robots working at McDonald’s and the reason for that is that what McDonald’s workers do is too complex for for robots to do so well

so this is a discussion that no one wants to have but that’s okay it’s still a problem and it has to be dealt with so the US government I think I told you this at one point already it’s illegal to induct anyone into the US Army if they have an IQ of less than 83 right it’s about 10% of the population because the US Army that and they’ve been doing IQ testing since IQ testing began because they want everybody they can possibly get into the army because in peacetime they use it as socio-economic ladder and in wartime well obviously you need as many soldiers as you can get

your hands on and so you’re not going to be any pickier then you have to be so when the US Army says it’s illegal to induct anybody into the Armed Forces if they have an IQ of less than 83 then you know that they’ve done it for absolute necessity right and when people have made a finding that contradicts what they want to hear and they’re doing it out of absolute necessity you can be reasonably true that it’s one of those facts that just won’t bloody well go away and so you might think well if there’s nothing for someone with an IQ of less than 83 to do in the army what makes you think that there’s something that they can do in the general

population and then the Conservatives will say well they should just work harder it’s like sorry that ain’t going to fly and the Liberals will say well there’s no difference between people anyhow and you can just train people to do everything and that’s wrong so they’re both wrong and they’re seriously wrong and the fact that perspective will take a good cold hard look at this problem means that we’re going to increasingly have a structural problem in our societies because we’re complexify ‘never ething so rapidly that you can’t find employment unless increasingly unless you’re

intelligent you guys are really going to face this you know lawyers are disappearing like mad and the reason for that is you can look it up online increasingly you can do things yourself if you’re smart and so like the working class people being wiped out pretty nicely over the last 30 years by by automation and various other things it’s the low end of the white collar class that’s coming up next so I’m not saying that lower lawyers are in the low end but low end lawyers are in the low end of the white collar class so there’s still going to be plenty of positions for people who are creative and fast on their feet and super smart in fact those people are going to have all the money and that’s already happening to a great degree