12 Rules for Life An antidote to Chaos By Jordon B

This book has a short history and a long history. We’ll begin with the short history.
In 2012, I started contributing to a website called Quora. On Quora, anyone can ask a
question, of any sort - and anyone can answer. Readers upvote those answers they like, and
downvote those they don’t. In this manner, the most useful answers rise to the top, while the
others sink into oblivion. I was curious about the site. I liked its free-for-all nature. The
discussion was often compelling, and it was interesting to see the diverse range of opinions
generated by the same question.
When I was taking a break (or avoiding work), I often turned to Quora, looking for questions
to engage with. I considered, and eventually answered, such questions as “What’s the difference
between being happy and being content?”, “What things get better as you age?” and “What
makes life more meaningful?”Quora tells you how many people have viewed your answer and how many upvotes you
received. Thus, you can determine your reach, and see what people think of your ideas. Only a
small minority of those who view an answer upvote it. As of July 2017, as I write this - and five
years after I addressed “What makes life more meaningful?” - my answer to that question has
received a relatively small audience (14,000 views, and 133 upvotes), while my response to the
question about aging has been viewed by 7,200 people and received 36 upvotes. Not exactly
home runs. However, it’s to be expected. On such sites, most answers receive very little
attention, while a tiny minority become disproportionately popular.
Soon after, I answered another question: “What are the most valuable things everyone should
know?” I wrote a list of rules, or maxims; some dead serious, some tongue-in-cheek - “Be
grateful in spite of your suffering,” “Do not do things that you hate,” “Do not hide things in the
fog,” and so on. The Quora readers appeared pleased with this list. They commented on and
shared it. They said such things as “I’m definitely printing this list out and keeping it as a
reference. Simply phenomenal,” and “You win Quora. We can just close the site now.” Students
at the University of Toronto, where I teach, came up to me and told me how much they liked it.
To date, my answer to “What are the most valuable things …” has been viewed by a hundred
and twenty thousand people and been upvoted twenty-three hundred times. Only a few hundred
of the roughly six hundred thousand questions on Quora have cracked the two-thousand-upvote
barrier. My procrastination-induced musings hit a nerve. I had written a 99.9 percentile answer.
It was not obvious to me when I wrote the list of rules for living that it was going to perform
so well. I had put a fair bit of care into all the sixty or so answers I submitted in the few months
surrounding that post. Nonetheless, Quora provides market research at its finest. The
respondents are anonymous. They’re disinterested, in the best sense. Their opinions are
spontaneous and unbiased. So, I paid attention to the results, and thought about the reasons for
that answer’s disproportionate success. Perhaps I struck the right balance between the familiar
and the unfamiliar while formulating the rules.