Dr. Jordan B. Peterson

Now, and so what do I mean by that?

Well, imagine you're out on a date.

Okay, you're in a restaurant.

There is a lot of things you could pay attention to.

You could pay attention to the waitress who happens to be more attractive than your date, let's say.

Now, that's not a strategy of value that's going to endear you to your date.

Right, so what do you do if you're polite and you have a clue?

And this is what you do with the person of the opposite sex, say, that you're with all the time, is you...

You attend to the facts that accompany them.

You prioritize your perception so that in the restaurant, for example, you don't listen to the conversations two tables away, although you could.

You listen to what your date is saying.

And the way you do that is you focus on what it is that she's uttering and you suppress into invisibility everything else.

And what that means is that you put her utterances at the pinnacle of a structure of value and you subsume everything else beneath that.

And you do that with every single glance you take.

You couldn't even focus your eyes if you didn't do that.

As perception, visual perception, auditory perception, they cannot be dissociated from action.

You don't see and then act because you can't see without acting.

And it's the same with all of your senses.

And so you have to make a decision about what's important first.

literally with every glance, even with the unconscious movements that keep your eyes actually functioning, because they're vibrating constantly, even though you don't know that, because your brain corrects for it, you have to live within a hierarchy of value.