Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.
—Daniel Gilbert, PhD
In 2012, Vanessa O’Brien was knee deep in mud in the middle of the Sugapa Valley jungle. She and a small band of explorers were attempting to summit the Carstensz Pyramid, which at 4,884 meters (16,024 feet) above sea level is the highest mountain on the island of New Guinea.
Pulling herself through the mud, smashing her face into hard branches, getting cut and bruised, climbing over huge trees with her five-foot, four-inch body, trying to pick herself up and immediately finding herself back in the mud facedown, Vanessa was crying.
But not just crying, she was having a full-blown emotional breakdown and identity crisis.
In the midst of this breakdown, Vanessa’s psychology began to unravel. Her views of the world, including of herself, were coming apart at the seams. For someone used to succeeding, some very dark thoughts were racing through her mind:
Nothing is going to get better for me.
It just gets worse.
Every step I take feels like I’m going backward.
Everything I do is wrong.
Why can’t I do this?
What the hell?!
The sheer difficulty, pain, and frustration of what Vanessa was experiencing pushed her outside her frame of reference. Everything she thought she knew now seemed wrong. Her identity wasn’t as clear as it had been. The world and life felt confused.
All she could feel was pain and torture.
Her ego and identity cracked wide open. The result of this experience—which ultimately ended in the successful summit—was that she was no longer the same person.
Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. said, “A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”
For Vanessa O’Brien, having her mind and identity stretched wasn’t a singular event but a common occurrence over the course of a decade.
For most of Vanessa’s life, she was commonly considered a type A personality. In 2009, she was working successfully in the financial industry. A career-driven woman, she would describe her life as “very predictable.” Not much deviated in her world.
The only thing Vanessa really thought about was her work and getting to the next rung on the corporate ladder. Her greatest excitement was the two-week vacations she took with her husband every year, where they’d sightsee and scuba dive.
Fast forward to 2019 and Vanessa has a completely different personality. No longer does her life fit within the narrow confines of her career-driven goals. Rather than being what she would consider “career” or even “goal” driven, she is now “purpose-driven.”
If you had a conversation with Vanessa in 2009, you would have heard a lot about her career. She probably wouldn’t have asked you any questions about yourself. If you weren’t in the financial industry, there wouldn’t be much the two of you could discuss. You’d likely be uninteresting to her. Given that her work was her life, she wouldn’t give you much time because she was pretty busy.
If you had a conversation with Vanessa in 2019, you’d hear a lot about the state of the planet. You’d hear about glaciers melting. You’d hear about human potential and about how not only do we as people have the capability to change our lives, we have the responsibility to save our planet.
During that conversation, Vanessa would ask lots of questions about you. She’d be interested in what’s important to you and what drives you. She’d be willing and open to answer your questions. She wouldn’t be in a hurry, but totally present and in the moment. You’d feel inspired and at peace in her presence.
If Vanessa were to take a personality test in 2009, all of her responses would be self-focused and targeted around her only priority in life, her career. She would score very high on conscientiousness and extroversion and she would score low on openness to new experiences, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
Personality tests are generally self-reported. And it’s likely that Vanessa would view herself as emotionally stable, given that she rarely put herself outside her comfort zone. As she herself stated, her life and routine were highly predictable. Moreover, Vanessa would also likely view herself as extroverted, given the social requirements of climbing the corporate ladder.
Rather than being self-absorbed, the 2019 Vanessa is far more others-oriented. She used to desire being the spotlight and the star. Now she’d rather be at the tail end of her group on a big climb, ensuring that everyone on her team safely makes it to the top. Rather than having a well-trodden path to her future as the linear-thinking and ladder-climbing 2009 Vanessa, the 2019 Vanessa would describe her future as more “uncertain.”
It’s not that she doesn’t have goals or ambitions. Her goals are actually bigger and her purpose clearer than ever. However, her goals aren’t already carved out for her. Rather than ascending a single humdrum path, Vanessa now horizontally crosses multiple boundaries on a path she herself is blazing.
She is charting territories that not only she but no one else has charted before. She’s constantly taking on new challenges and trying things for the first time in her life. For example, she’s currently writing her autobiography, detailing the story of how she went from corporate ladder climber to world-renowned mountain climber holding multiple Guinness World Records. She’s leading and is involved in multiple organizations. She travels the world giving talks.
Her fascinating and exciting life isn’t all laughter and sunshine. By constantly engaging in work and activities that are new and different, she experiences a much wider spectrum of emotions. Some days are extremely painful, complex, and confusing. Other days, though, like when she’s out in the mountains, can only be described as ecstasy, deeply meaningful, and undefinable bliss.
Thus, if Vanessa were to take a five-factor personality test in 2019, her responses would be very different from her 2009 self. Having given up her path of achieving narrowly defined career goals in favor of taking on new challenges and pushing herself past her limits, she would likely score higher on neuroticism, openness to new experience, and agreeableness, and lower on conscientiousness and extroversion. She treasures her solace now more than ever, despite being more and better connected to others.
Remember, personality tests are self-reported. Our view of ourselves is constantly changing based on our current focus, context, and emotions.
Vanessa’s life is far from the predictable and consistent one it once was, and that has made her a more fluid, open, and adaptable person. Her big-picture purpose has her involved in activities, projects, relationships, and situations she could not have initially planned for. But she’s committed—fiercely committed—and thus willing to do whatever it takes to move her purpose forward.
Vanessa’s purpose, not her personality, is the determining factor in what she can do and what she does do. Moreover, in relentlessly pursuing her purpose, her personality has changed dramatically and will continue to change.
According to the futurist, author, and founder of XPRIZE, Peter Diamandis, “A single individual driven by a purpose can change the world. And you can change the world. I truly believe that.”
Diamandis calls this “MTP,” or “Massively Transformative Purpose.” The idea is simple: You have a purpose so big and inspiring that pursuing it transforms your entire life. You’re the one who selects and chooses that purpose. You invest yourself in it. You shout it from the rooftops. You change yourself and your life for it. You improve the world through it. From Diamandis’s perspective, and mine, you can and should have a personal MTP, as well as a professional or organizational one.
A single day in Vanessa’s 2019 life would be unfathomable to 2009 Vanessa. What is “normal” to 2019 Vanessa would be incredibly uncomfortable, and likely even unattractive or uninteresting, to 2009 Vanessa. From 2019 Vanessa’s perspective, she can barely even relate to her former self. Even still, she is empathetic and grateful to her former self, and humbled by her future.
Now all Vanessa wants to do is contribute, serve, and connect. She’s far kinder, more focused on other people, more flexible and patient, and more focused on what she considers the big picture. When I asked her who she sees as her future self, she said she sees herself as a philanthropist.
How did this happen? How did Vanessa O’Brien go from a self-absorbed type A corporate desk jockey to an adventurer, philosopher, and philanthropist, interested in saving the planet?
How did she transform from someone who didn’t take on significant physical challenges to becoming the first American and British (she has dual citizenship and thus qualifies for both) woman to climb K2, which at 8,611 meters (28,251 feet) above sea level is the second-highest mountain in the world, and harder to ascend than Everest?
How did she become someone who received the Explorer of the Year award in 2018 from the Scientific Exploration Society and the Fearless Girl award in 2019 from New York congresswoman Carolyn Maloney?
How was she able to set the Guinness World Record for climbing the highest peak on every continent in 295 days, the fastest time by any woman?
How was she able to become purpose-driven and interested and caring toward other people?
How was she able to become kinder, more considerate, more philosophical, and more conscious about herself and reality?
If you sat Vanessa down with some of her colleagues from the financial industry, they’d be shocked by what she’s done over the previous decade and who she’s become.
But how did this all happen?
It really comes down to a few key things.
Vanessa’s change started with the market crash of 2008. Given the change in context, she and her husband decided to move to a new country and start fresh. The pain of the market crash and the confusion it caused led her to question what really mattered to her. She decided she needed a new purpose in life, something that would give her more meaning.
With the help of some friends, she selected a new and challenging goal: to climb Mount Everest. Through the process and pain of achieving that goal—as well as some humbling failures along the way—her identity, personality, and views of the world changed, leading to other goals and pursuits.
Over the ten years following, she continuously pursued bigger and more challenging goals, which led to experiences that altered her identity, perspective, and purpose. Through her experiences, her expectations were often shattered, causing her to rethink her former views. As she put it, “Often, those who you’d expect the most from give the least and those you expect the least from give the most.”
Vanessa has let go of her past. Her ego that was once tied to her salary, her title, and her material possessions has been destroyed. She’s embraced a massively transformative and meaningful purpose in her life. She is now focused on the future, and in doing as much good as she possibly can. She cares less about what others think of her.
Because of these extreme changes, Vanessa is what personality psychologists would call an outlier. Some might even diagnose her with a personality disorder. But really, she is not so different a person from you or me. Yes, she has done incredible, exceptional things, but it would be a mistake to think she is somehow inherently different, or a freak exception to a rule.
She isn’t “special” or “different.” She’s actually ordinary, but has chosen to become extraordinary, exposing the lie that our personality is innate, stable, and consistent over our lives. Indeed, the science of personality and our own lives tell a completely different story from what many of us have been told.
The average person’s personality may not change as drastically as Vanessa O’Brien’s has, given that few would proactively put themselves through the physical and emotional rigors Vanessa has. But everyone’s personality is going to change, and indeed has already changed.
Personality is not stable but changes regardless of whether you’re purposeful about that change or not.
In fact, psychologists agree that you shouldn’t be surprised to get different test scores on the same personality test at different times or even in different settings.
Personality, it turns out, is far more dynamic and malleable than was previously thought. Despite this fact, and the growing body of science that proves it, many psychologists and the general public continue to see personality from the perspective of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s—as a fixed and unalterable trait. Many Baby Boomers, who grew up in a culture emphasizing “traits,” still hold to the views that people are born “hardwired” at birth. This culture of traits is easily evidenced by the leadership dynamics of that era—white, male, tall, etc. It often manifests as racism.
Emerging science and a changing world prove the opposite.
People can and do change.
A lot.
And in a world where information, travel, connection, and experience are easier to get than ever before, many of the constraints of previous generations are gone. Choice is far more abundant, even overabundant. And as a result, responsibility for choice, and who we become as individuals and societies, is far higher.
This chapter’s job, then, is to debunk the pervasive and destructive myths about personality, which are:
Personality can be categorized into “types.”
Personality is innate and fixed.
Personality comes from your past.
Personality must be discovered.
Personality is your true and “authentic” self.
These dominant views, although potentially helpful in one’s formative years, are ultimately destructive. They lead people to adopt a narrow and fixed mindset about themselves. They lead people on a misguided hunt to “discover” their “true” selves, which, for most, is an indecisive journey to mediocrity.
As a human being, it is your responsibility to create yourself through the decisions you make and the environments you choose. And as you’ll find, you have been creating yourself all along, even if unintentionally.
After debunking the five myths and rejecting them with science and common sense, I’ll walk you through an accurate and useful view of personality in chapter 2, empowering you to take your personality—as well as your own past and future—squarely into your own hands. The remainder of the book will teach you how to become the person you want to be.
There is no such thing as a pure extrovert or a pure introvert. Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum.
—Dr. Carl Jung
There are two types of people in the world: those who believe there are two types of people in the world, and those who don’t.
According to the Myers-Briggs, however, there are actually sixteen types of people in the world.
But wait, according to the Revised NEO Personality Inventory, there are only six types of people.
For me, though, there are only four types of people in this world: Hufflepuffs, Gryffindors, Slytherins, and Ravenclaws.
So, what gives?
Are there two types of people in the world? Are there four? Are there six? Or is it sixteen?
The first myth of personality is that there are personality “types.” There is no such thing as a personality type. Personality types are social or mental constructions, not actual realities. The notion is a surface-level, discriminative, dehumanizing, and horribly inaccurate way of looking at the complexity of what is a human being.
There is no science behind the idea of personality types, and most of the popular personality quizzes were actually created by people who had no business trying to define people.
In the 2018 book The Personality Brokers: The Strange History of Myers-Briggs and the Birth of Personality Testing, Dr. Merve Emre explains that personality testing has become a $2 billion industry, with the Myers-Briggs test being the most popular of them all. Interestingly, neither Katharine Briggs nor her daughter, Isabel Myers, had any training in psychology, psychiatry, or testing. Neither ever worked in a laboratory or an academic institution. Since access to universities for women was limited, the two developed their system from home, instead of in a lab or at a university.
Katharine Briggs used her experience as a wife and mother, not science or psychology, to develop her theories in the early 1900s. Noticing that she and her spouse responded differently to life, and that one child was more reclusive than the other, she wanted to devise a system that accounted for social nuances.
According to Briggs, a person can put themselves through a lot of psychological pain by trying to solve incompatibilities. Instead of trying to change oneself, Briggs proposed that the differences in how people respond to life are innate and unchangeable. They are hardwired dispositions to be recognized and accommodated.
No matter who you are or how you show up in life, your behavior should be accepted as “normal.” That’s what Briggs argued. If you’re shy, people around you should account for that in how they deal with you. If you’re a nervous wreck, they should make accommodations for you. If you’re kind and compassionate, they should always expect you to behave in that manner.
Under this paradigm, the way you react to life is just “who you are,” and you shouldn’t be ashamed of it. You shouldn’t try to change who you are, and you couldn’t if you tried. Even if these traits are limitations, there’s nothing you can do about it. Just live with the constraints God or your DNA has given you.
Although entertaining, type-based personality tests are unscientific—and would have you believe that you are essentially more limited than you really are. They portray an inaccurate and overly simplified portrait of people, filled with broad and sweeping generalizations, that anybody could feel relates to them. These tests oversimplify psychology, making people think they know more about it than they really do. Of this, Wharton business professor and organizational psychologist Dr. Adam Grant explained, “The Myers-Briggs is like asking people what do you like more: shoelaces or earrings? You tend to infer that there’s going to be an ‘aha!’ even though it’s not a valid question. . . . [It] creates the illusion of expertise about psychology.”
We’ve got an entire generation of social media personality gurus who can tell you anything and everything about you, from who you should date and marry to whether you should have kids or not to what you should do for work, and whether or not you’ll be successful and happy—all based on your score on a particular test. It feels scientific, but really it’s just superstition dressed up as science.
In social science, there are four standards to determine the merit of a proposed theory: Are the categories (1) reliable, (2) valid, (3) independent, and (4) comprehensive? For the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, the evidence says no, no, no, and no. The real lesson of the Myers-Briggs test is not some insight into your personality, but the incredible power of marketing. That’s the real brilliance of Myers-Briggs.
Although there remains disagreement among psychologists regarding whether personality can change or not, there is agreement that personality tests such as Myers-Briggs should not be taken seriously for the four reasons just listed. And that “personality types” as popularized by such tests and pop psychologists don’t actually exist.
When done intentionally and strategically, defining yourself as a certain “type” of person, or giving yourself a specific label, may be useful. For instance, Jeff Goins had always wanted to be a writer, but hadn’t done anything about it. Yet, when he labeled himself as a “writer,” that identification bolstered him to start writing, and, ultimately, to become a successful author. Thus, Goins was intentional about the label he chose, and that label helped him achieve his goals.
Labels can serve goals, but goals should never serve labels. When a goal serves a label, you’ve made the label your ultimate reality, and you’ve created a life to prove or support that label. You see this when someone says, “I’m pursuing this because I’m an extrovert.” This form of goal-setting occurs when you base your goals on your current persona rather than setting goals that expand upon and change who you are.
Your personality should come from your goals. Your goals shouldn’t come from your personality. Paul Graham—the entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and author—wrote, “The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.” When someone proactively labels themself an “introvert” or even an “extrovert,” they’ve officially made themself “dumber”—unless for some reason one of those labels will enable them to achieve a particular goal.
Research shows that labeling or diagnosing can be helpful for practitioners for guiding therapy. However, these labels should rarely be given to clients. The label becomes infused as a significant aspect of the client’s identity, greatly limiting their capacity to change.
Labels create tunnel vision. Assuming a label can lead you to being “mindless,” stopping you from seeing all of the times the label isn’t true. As Harvard psychologist and mindfulness expert Dr. Ellen Langer has said, “If something is presented as an accepted truth, alternative ways of thinking do not even come up for consideration. . . . When people are depressed they tend to believe they are depressed all the time. Mindful attention to variability shows this is not the case.”
“Personality” is far more nuanced and complex than an overly simplified generalization or category. It’s not an isolated trait uninfluenced by context, culture, behavior, and a thousand other factors. Of this, Dr. Katherine Rogers, a personality psychologist, said, “We know that personality doesn’t work in types. . . . I wouldn’t trust the Myers and Briggs to tell me any more about my personality than I would trust my horoscope.”
Dr. Rogers is completely right. And this is incredibly good news! When you allow yourself to stop defining yourself as a certain “type,” such as “introvert” or “extrovert,” you become far more open. Your possibilities and choices expand. Your responsibility and agency increase. You can do what you want to do, regardless of how you currently see yourself.
Despite the unscientific nature of type-based personality tests, they continue to be a pervasive fad in pop culture and also in corporate America. Many people’s livelihoods are on the line based on how they respond to one of these tests. Countless careers have been ruined or derailed because they weren’t the right “Color” or “type” for the position or culture.
You are not a single and narrow “type” of person. In different situations and around different people, you are different. Your personality is dynamic, flexible, and contextual. Moreover, your personality changes throughout your life, far more than you can presently imagine.
At different stages and seasons of your life, you’re going to display a different personality. Heck, over the course of a single day, you could portray dozens of different personalities. As podcaster Jordan Harbinger said in an interview, “Before coffee, I’m an INTJ. After coffee, I’m an ENTJ.”
Rather than looking at personality as a “type” you fit into, view it as a continuum of behaviors and attitudes that is flexible, malleable, and based on context. The most scientifically backed theory of personality breaks it up into what are called the “five factors”:
How open you are to learning and experiencing new things (openness to new experience)
How organized, motivated, and goal-directed you are (conscientiousness)
How energized and connected you are around other people (extroversion)
How friendly and optimistic you are toward other people (agreeableness)
How well you handle stress and other negative emotions (neuroticism)
None of these five factors are “types.” Instead, we are all somewhere on a continuum of each of these factors based on our preferences, experience, and situation. In different situations and circumstances, you’ll show up differently in all of these—sometimes for better and sometimes for worse.
For example, researchers have found strong correspondences between the demands of a social role and one’s personality profile. If a particular role requires that the person be conscientious or extroverted, then she’d exhibit a much higher degree of conscientiousness or extroversion. Yet once she leaves that role and takes on another requiring less conscientiousness or extroversion, she will manifest lower levels of these “traits.” Longitudinal research highlights that a person’s personality can often be explained by the social roles they espoused and relinquished throughout their life stages. Thus, social role is an oft-studied and tangible predictor of personality.
Although we think of ourselves as consistent, our behavior and attitudes are often shifting. It isn’t our behavior that is consistent, but rather our view of our behavior that makes it seem consistent. We selectively focus on what we identify with and ignore what we don’t. In the process, we often miss or purposefully disregard the many instances when we’re acting out of character.
Recent research shows that people want to view themselves as more fluid and flexible, and have specific desires to improve their personality. Less than 13 percent of people reported being satisfied with themselves as they are. Generally, they wanted to score higher on openness, conscientiousness, and extroversion. They wanted to score lower on neuroticism.
For those interested in improving themselves for a specific reason, recent science shows that such changes are possible. A 2015 study by Drs. Nathan Hudson and Chris Fraley showed that personality can be intentionally changed through goal-setting and sustained personal effort. Research from Drs. Christopher Soto and Jule Specht shows that personality changes accelerate when people are leading meaningful and satisfying lives.
Each of the five factors will change over your lifetime whether you attempt to change them or not, but you certainly can consciously change any and all of them. Vanessa O’Brien set the goal of climbing Mount Everest, and that goal led her to being more open to new experiences.
It should be noted that current and developing research on personality flexibility is conservative in expected change, at least in the short term. However, as will be shown throughout this book, the depth of change is not due to impossibility. Rather, people on average don’t make incredible and purposeful changes due to emotional and situational reasons, both of which are controllable.
Intentional change is emotionally rigorous—it doesn’t exactly feel good and can even be shockingly painful. If you’re unwilling to put yourself through emotional experiences, shift your perspective, and make purposeful changes to your behavior and environment, then don’t expect huge changes (at least in the short run). Becoming psychologically flexible is key to personal transformation, not overattaching to your current identity or perspectives. Becoming insatiably committed to a future purpose and embracing emotions rather than avoiding them is how radical change occurs.
Extreme change is more than possible. Indeed, all of the five factors are behaviors and, really, all are learnable skills. You can learn to become more open to new experiences, just as you can actually learn to become less open. You can learn to become more organized and goal-focused. You can learn to become more introverted or extroverted. You can learn to be better at relating to different types of people. You can become more emotionally intelligent rather than reactive and victim-oriented.
Perhaps the most damaging aspect of putting people into categories or types is that such categories can be viewed as innate and unalterable. When you see people as being incapable of change, you begin to define them by their past. If someone has done something in the past, you view them as being a certain type of person who will always do that kind of thing rather than recognize that they may have changed.
The limitations of this view are brilliantly explored in the French novel Les Misérables by Victor Hugo. The novel tells the story of two people—Javert, the self-righteous police officer who believes people cannot change, and Jean Valjean, an ex-criminal who changes his life and dedicates himself to a higher and holier way. Javert cannot accept that Valjean has truly changed. In Javert’s mind, a person should never be forgiven for past deeds. If a person has done wrong, he believes they are fundamentally bad.
Throughout the novel, Javert and Valjean encounter one another in various situations. It becomes Javert’s obsession to bring Valjean to justice. All the while, Valjean is simply trying to live a life redeemed of his criminal past, one in which he helps other people who are struggling. In the end, Javert commits suicide because he cannot reconcile the contradiction that is Jean Valjean. Instead of changing his mind, he kills himself.
In a recently published longitudinal study spanning more than sixty years, researchers were flummoxed by what they found. The personalities of nearly everyone in the study were completely different than the researchers expected.
The study began with data from a 1950s survey of 1,208 fourteen-year-olds in Scotland. Teachers were asked to use six questionnaires to rate the teenagers on six personality traits: self-confidence, perseverance, stability of mood, conscientiousness, originality, and desire to learn.
More than sixty years later, researchers retested 674 of the original participants. This time, at seventy-seven years old, the participants rated themselves on the six personality traits, and also nominated a close friend or relative to do the same. There was little to no overlap from the questionnaires taken sixty-three years earlier. As the researchers state, “We hypothesized that we would find evidence of personality stability over an even longer period of 63 years, but our correlations did not support this hypothesis.”
This is the way academics say, “We were totally wrong about everything.” Personality changes over time.
Longitudinal studies are incredibly difficult to perform, so they are rarely done. In the unusual instances where a follow-up test is administered to study participants, it is usually within a few weeks or months. Under these conditions, it would be easy to conclude that personality rarely changes. If you were to take the same personality test three or six months apart, you’d likely get a similar score, unless something drastic happened during those few months.
The longer the interval between tests, the more different the outputs will be. As the researchers of the sixty-three-year study further concede, “Our results suggest that, when the interval is increased to as much as 63 years, there is hardly any relationship at all.”
Not only does your personality change over time but it changes far more than you’d expect. According to research done by Harvard psychologist Dr. Daniel Gilbert, over a ten-year period of time, you’re not going to be the same person.
In his research, Dr. Gilbert asked people how much their interests, goals, and values had changed over the previous decade. He then asked them how much they expected their interests, goals, and values to change over the next ten years.
What Dr. Gilbert found is that when asked to analyze the difference between their former and current selves, people can easily recognize changes in their personality over the previous ten years. Even still, people consistently expect only minor changes to occur over the next decade.
In psychology, the name for this phenomenon is the “end-of-history illusion,” and it occurs in people of all ages who believe they have experienced significant personal growth and changes up to the present moment but will not substantially grow or mature in the future.
As Gilbert says, “Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.”
Human beings have a weird way of thinking that who we are in the present moment is the “arrived,” “finished,” and “evolved” version of ourselves. This is why, regardless of the evidence of change from our former to our present selves, we still often feel like the same person. In the present, we always feel like “ourselves,” despite the fact that our consistent emotions and behaviors—even our habits and environment—are entirely different from what they were years ago.
We are highly adaptive. Even after going through extreme change, we quickly adapt to that change and it becomes our new norm. Hence, we may feel like the same person as we age and gradually change, but we aren’t actually the same. Life is “normal,” but not compared to what it was before.
An obvious way to see that our personality has changed over time is how we respond to our previous decisions. People often remove tattoos their former selves thought were a good idea. People divorce partners their former selves assumed they’d always love. People work hard to lose belly fat their former selves had no problem eating to gain. People quit jobs they were desperate to get.
People often make decisions their future selves aren’t happy with because, as a rule, we aren’t very good at predicting our own future. It’s not that we can’t predict our future but that we don’t.
It’s harder to imagine the future we want than to remember the past we’ve lived through. Imagination is a skill to be developed, one that few adults truly master. Instead, adults become less creative and imaginative as they age, and increasingly fixed and dogmatic in their narrow viewpoints.
Quick question: How much time do you spend imagining your future self?
For most people, the answer is not very much.
What I’ve just described are two major obstacles that prevent people from predicting and creating their future personality:
We assume our present personality is a finished product (the end-of-history illusion).
We overemphasize the importance of the past, which leads us to become increasingly narrow in how we view ourselves and the world.
Your personality changes. It has changed and it will continue changing in the future. Consequently, it’s time to start thinking about who your future self is going to be. You don’t want to be surprised, disappointed, or frustrated by where you’re at and who you become. You don’t want to leave your future self hanging due to neglect, bad planning, or poor decisions on the part of your present self.
It’s best to make decisions based on what your future, not your present, self wants. It’s best to decide and act from the vantage point of your desired circumstances, not your present ones. As American jurist and religious leader Dallin Oaks said:
We make countless choices in life, some large and some seemingly small. Looking back, we can see what a great difference some of our choices made in our lives. We make better choices and decisions if we look at the alternatives and ponder where they will lead. . . . Our present and our future will be happier if we are always conscious of the future. . . . “Where will this lead?” is also important in choosing how we label or think of ourselves. . . . Don’t choose to label yourselves or think of yourselves in terms that put a limit on a goal for which you might strive.
The first step of this imaginative process is to distinguish your present self from your future self.
They aren’t the same person.
Your future self will be a different person from whom you currently are. It’s bad for decision-making to assume your future self will be the same person you are now. Of this, identity researcher Dr. Hal Hershfield said, “The analogy of the future self as another person may seem like a strange one, but it is rather powerful when it comes to understanding long-term decision-making.”
Who you want to be in the future is more important than who you are now, and should actually inform who you are now. Your intended future self should direct your current identity and personality far more than your former self does.
Hopefully, your future self will be far wiser and have a far wider range of experiences than your current self. Your future self will have greater opportunities, deeper relationships, and a better self-view. Hopefully, your future self will have greater agency and choice than your current self, with more knowledge, skills, and connections.
It’s also possible that your future self could be more limited than your current self, depending on what you do in the here and now. If you engage in unhealthy behaviors, make terrible choices, or develop bad habits, then your future self will have less freedom than your current self. Sometimes, things that seem small and harmless—like watching YouTube videos before bed, or having an extra drink at the bar—can cascade and compound into huge problems over time.
I’m sad to say that some of my own friends and extended family members are now in terrible situations due to their own poor decisions. Their life isn’t how their former selves thought it would go, not due to some freak accident but to their own lack of intention, planning, and goal-directed action. They got lax, and now they’re paying the price. And it’s not just their situation that is worse but they themselves—their personality, views, and relationships—are far worse than what they once were.
Life starts taking on a whole new meaning when you begin thinking right now what your future self will want. Rather than making decisions based on your current identity, you could begin making decisions your future self would love and appreciate.
It’s your responsibility to set your future self up for as much opportunity, success, and joy as possible. This is how you become the person and create the life you want, rather than becoming someone with regret.
Describe your future self.
Because sometimes the past deserves a second chance.
—Malcolm Gladwell
A common scientific premise of many theories is known as “causal determinism”—the idea that everything that happens or exists is caused by antecedent conditions or events. From this view, people are determined—not influenced—by prior events, like one domino in a toppling chain.
In looking at human behavior, psychologists have come to agree that the best way to predict future behavior is by looking at past behavior. And for the most part, that perspective is validated over and over. Indeed, people seem quite predictable over time.
The important question is, Why?
A dominant view of predictable behavior is that “personality” is a stable “trait” that is for the most part unchangeable. However, as will be shown throughout this book, this explanation is a gross and inaccurate oversimplification, which ultimately leads to mindlessness, justification, and a lack of radical progress and intentional living.
Yes, people’s behavior can appear to be, and often is, predictable and consistent over time. But the reason for that consistency is not a fixed and unalterable personality. Instead, there are four far deeper reasons, which keep people stuck in patterns:
They continue to be defined by past traumas that haven’t been reframed.
They have an identity narrative based on the past, not the future.
Their subconscious keeps them consistent with their former self and emotions.
They have an environment supporting their current rather than future identity.
These are the levers that drive personality—and whether you realize it or not, you can control them. When you change, reframe, or manage these levers, your personality and life can change in intentional and remarkable ways.
It’s up to you whether you allow these four levers to hold you hostage—keeping you stuck and making change feel nearly impossible—or whether you utilize them to become the person you want to be.
Throughout this book, I’ll show you how each of these four levers impacts your personality and suggest strategies for leveraging each lever intelligently. You’ll be equipped to control these levers rather than be controlled by them, so you can become who you choose to be rather than what former experiences or “life” has led you to be.
For now, let’s look at some stories and science that should shift your perspective on whether your past truly does “cause” your present.
Tucker Max is the cofounder of a successful publishing and media company, a husband, and a father of three children. Today, his family is the most important thing in the world to him. But in 2006, when he was a different person, he published a book called I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell. It instantly took off, became a number one New York Times bestseller, and sold millions of copies.
The book, as well as other books that followed, recount the repetitive nights of Max’s twenties and early thirties that were filled with excessive drinking, sex with a succession of random strangers, acting cocky and belligerent to anyone who came across him, and saying the most malicious and sexually degrading things to everyone around him, both men and women.
Due to the major success of the book as well as Max’s surging fame, I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell was made into a major motion picture and released in 2009. Expectations for the film were high, and despite criticism of his style and attitude, Max felt validated by his success and the expectations riding on the film. But upon release, the film bombed badly at the box office, and was universally panned by critics as one of the worst films of that year.
Nearly a decade later, in a 2018 interview with Tom Bilyeu, Tucker explained the film’s failure as one of the worst experiences of his life, and by far one of his greatest disappointments. The sheer pain of the experience ultimately led him to finally face the demons he’d been running from his entire life.
His ego had been cracked wide open, leaving him vulnerable and unsettled. It forced him to admit, to himself, that he wasn’t happy.
In 2012, after three years of therapy, self-reflection, honesty, and change following the movie’s failure, Tucker Max released a public statement via an interview on Forbes stating that he was officially putting his former lifestyle behind him: “I publicly, explicitly retire. I want to be free to move on with my life, and I think the way I have to do that is to set a public end to this.”
When you talk to Tucker today about his former life, he isn’t bitter, angry, or embarrassed. He told me that whenever he reads his former writings, it’s like reading the words of a completely different person. A clear sign of his own emotional healing is that his own past is viewed empathetically and even positively, not negatively.
“When I think about the person I was, I feel bad for that guy,” Tucker told me. “I can now understand why he was acting the way he was. I feel extreme compassion for him.”
This, more than anything else you’ll find in this book, is what’s most incredible, hopeful, and redemptive: that when you begin actively and intentionally moving forward in your life, not only does your future get better but your past does as well. Your past increasingly becomes something happening for you, not to you.
Tucker’s “failure,” although tortuous in the moment, was exactly what he needed. It happened for him, not to him. And since then, it has led him to having a much higher and empowering purpose for his life.
As you truly learn and have new experiences, you begin to see and interpret your past in new ways. If your view of your own past hasn’t changed much over recent months or years, then you haven’t learned from your past experiences and you’re not actively learning now.
An unchanging past is a sure sign of emotional detachment and rigidity—an avoidance of facing the truth and moving forward in your life. The more mature you become as a person, the more differently you’ll view prior experiences. I’ve recently been humbled by how I acted, even last year, in my business and relationships.
Your past can change, and it must change.
Your past evolves as you evolve.
In order to understand how the past changes, you need to know a little bit about how your memory works, and even how “history” works in general.
History is constantly being altered and revised based on who’s telling the story and how far back in time it was. For example, if you read a history book written in the United States from the 1950s on the origins of the Cold War, you’d get a definitive answer backed with extensive evidence that Soviet Russia was to blame. The book would refer to Stalin’s takeover of Eastern Europe, his refusal to grant the democracy he had promised his people, and his desire to spread communism to all corners of the globe.
If you picked up a US history book from the late 1960s, though, you’d likely read a different tale. You’d read of America’s desire to capture economic control of Europe to secure the dollar’s role in those countries. You’d read of Truman’s forcefulness at the Potsdam Conference and his use of the atom bomb. Rather than Russia being responsible, you’d learn that responsibility for the Cold War was actually Washington’s, and that Stalin merely acted defensively after having lost over twenty million people as a consequence of the Second World War.
By the 1980s and ’90s, the story would be retold afresh from a new perspective. Historians would argue that the Cold War was unavoidable given the ideological differences existing between East and West. You’d read of the futility of placing blame on one person or even one country in particular.
Like history, which constantly changes with time and perspective, our own personal narratives also adapt or change over time and with each retelling. One reason for this is that your memory is not an inert filing cabinet. Instead, it is fluid and constantly changing as you have new experiences. In fact, your memory changes by simply recalling a particular memory. Each is a web of connections, and when a new connection is integrated into a memory, the whole of the memory changes instantly and imperceptibly.
The more times a particular story is told, the more altered that story becomes. As time goes on and culture shifts, our view of history and particular events shifts as well. So too with memory. The past, and how we view it, is more a reflection of where we currently are than of the past itself. As the psychologist Dr. Brent Slife states in the book Time and Psychological Explanation:
We reinterpret or reconstruct our memory in light of what our mental set is in the present. In this sense, it is more accurate to say the present causes the meaning of the past, than it is to say that the past causes the meaning of the present [italics mine]. . . . Our memories are not “stored” and “objective” entities but living parts of ourselves in the present. This is the reason our present moods and future goals so affect our memories.
This idea that our present shapes the meaning of the past may not initially make sense. But as you’ll soon see, it’s actually not that complex. For instance, imagine getting to work one morning and being called in to meet with your boss. Surprisingly, and seemingly out of the blue, she offers you a 10 percent raise. You’re thrilled! You walk out of her office on cloud nine.
During lunch that same day, you share the good news with your colleague who holds a similar position. She then informs you that she too got a raise earlier that day, but her raise was 15 percent.
How are you feeling with that new information? Still on cloud nine? For most people, probably not.
Why not, though? The 10 percent raise didn’t change . . . but the meaning of it did.
The new context changed everything. Ten percent, by itself, doesn’t actually mean much. It only means what it is contrasted against. Before, you were contrasting your 10 percent raise with your former income. Now you’re contrasting it against your colleague’s 15 percent raise.
The present context shifted the meaning of the past. This truth is embodied in a quote by Saadi Shirazi, who said, “I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.” No shoes is relative.
Context changes everything. Personality tests ignore context by assuming “you” are your score in every context.
Context also changes memory. The content of the memory changes because, like a recipe, more has been added in. Thus, new experiences alter former memories, adding new perspective and meaning to those memories. Sometimes, new experiences can lead to the entire forgetting of former experiences.
Our past, like our personality, is not unchanging and fixed. It is far more about context than content. Context is always superior to content because it determines the meaning, focus, emphasis, and even appearance of the content. When you change the context, you simultaneously change the content!
Just because something happened in the past doesn’t mean the event or experience is “objective.” This can be a bitter pill to swallow, especially for people who insist on the past or specific events being understood a particular way.
Our past, like any experience or event, is a subjective perspective, which we ourselves ascribe meaning to—whether positive or negative, good or bad. Without question, experiences from our past can and do impact us. But it isn’t actually our past that is impacting us, but our present interpretation and emotional attachment to that past.
To say, “That’s just the way I am because of my past” is to declare you’re emotionally stuck in your past.
Trauma can and does happen to all of us, both in large and small degrees. When our trauma is unresolved, we stop moving forward in our lives. We become emotionally rigid and shut off, and thus stop learning, evolving, and changing. As such, our past becomes rigid as well, and our memory persists in an unchanging and painful way.
By continually avoiding our past traumas and the emotions they create, our life becomes an unhealthy and repetitive pattern. When this is the case, then, yes, our past does become an accurate predictor of our future. It’s not because personality is unchanging, but rather because we’re avoiding that change. Lessons are repeated, learned.
A clear indicator that someone has unresolved trauma is that his life and personality are repetitive for an extended period. But as he faces, opens up about, becomes more aware of, and ultimately reframes his trauma, he allows himself to take a positive and mature view of his past. His present and future will then stop reflecting his past.
Tucker Max views his former self with compassion and greater understanding. He no longer identifies with his former self. They are two totally different people with different values, goals, and context. And although Tucker wouldn’t necessarily want to be his former self, he has empathy toward that person and others like him.
Tucker’s view of previous events continues to evolve as he evolves. He is not the victim of his past. His past isn’t causing him to be the way he presently is. Instead, the meaning of his past continues to expand and change because he chooses not to be stuck there.
Tucker chose to move forward in his life, and continues to do so. He’s learning, having new experiences, and integrating his experiences to evolve himself and the meaning of his life. Increasingly, Max’s future self, which includes his values and his family, is who is pulling his present self forward.
Therefore, it is foolish to say that Tucker’s past is what is causing him to be who he is. In fact, his past is continually changing in light of who he is becoming.
The same is true of you and me.
How we describe, interpret, and identify with our past has far more to do with where we are, here and now, than it has to do with our actual past.
If you’re still angry with your parents for your childhood, for example, this speaks more to who you currently are than what actually happened in your childhood. To continue blaming any person or event from the past makes you the victim, and reflects more on you than whoever or whatever it is you’re blaming.
I don’t want to nor am I trying to discount your experiences in any way. Perhaps you have lived through some truly horrific events. Perhaps you saw things you believe you can never unsee. Such experiences may have been extremely difficult to deal with, potentially leaving you feeling misunderstood and alone.
But “changing your past” doesn’t mean you should change or discount the content of any of those experiences! They can actually be a gold mine of insights, meaning, and possibility.
It isn’t the contents of your past that need changing, but how you view them today. As Marcel Proust said, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” It’s not about seeing a million things, but being able to see the same things a million different ways. And hopefully in better and more useful ways.
Viewing your past in more effective and healthy ways is a natural aspect of evolving as a person. Seeking new experiences is an essential and powerful part of this evolution. However, far too often, people fail to learn from or be transformed by their experiences. Instead, they often avoid them, or fail to learn from them as they happen.
In order to actively create new experiences and be transformed by them, you’ll need to become more psychologically flexible. Psychological flexibility is the skill of being fluid and adaptive, holding your emotions loosely, and moving toward chosen goals or values. You need psychological flexibility to reframe your past and imagine a future self. The more flexible you become, the less you’ll be overwhelmed or stopped by emotions. Instead, you’ll embrace and learn from them.
Becoming psychologically flexible is part of becoming more emotionally evolved as a human being. Emotional development is at the core of understanding personality. The less emotionally developed and flexible a person is, the more they will avoid hard experiences. The more they’ll be limited and defined by painful experiences from their past. This is counterintuitive, as many people come to believe the best way to deal with hard experiences is by burying their emotions and fighting a silent battle, alone.
You become more psychologically flexible and emotionally evolved by facing your past, head-on, and by getting help from other people. Every time you face your past, you change it. Every time you face your future with honesty and courage, you become more flexible and mature. You build confidence, which enhances your imagination. You stop being as limited by who you were and how you feel, and instead, you’re enabled to be and do what you want, regardless of what is involved in being and doing it.
Emotions are the doorway to growth and learning. The reason people’s personalities plateau and get stuck in repetitive cycles is because they are avoiding the difficult and challenging emotions involved in learning and in connecting with themselves and others. As a result, they remain weighted down by their limited perceptions of their past far longer than necessary.
Life isn’t about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.
—George Bernard Shaw
I have a friend named Kary. She’s in her early forties and has never been able to find work she can stay passionate about. Every few years, she changes industries and never drives significant change in her organization.
She’s frustrated because she feels like she doesn’t really know who she is. She sees a lot of her friends and colleagues who know something she doesn’t. “It seems they have discovered the secret of life,” she told me, “They have found and maximized their talents and passions.”
Kary is still waiting to find herself. She’s passive, not active, about life. She’s hoping that at some point, lightning will strike, she’ll have an epiphany, and then she’ll be able to move forward with confidence. Then she’ll be able to truly be who she really is.
What Kary fails to understand is that inspiration follows action, not the other way around. Lightning isn’t going to strike for her. Unless and until she takes action, her confidence and imagination will remain low. She needs to decide what she wants and begin moving forward. With progress—even miniscule progress—her clarity and confidence will increase, opening the door for greater flexibility and change.
Kary’s concern that she hasn’t “found” herself or her passion isn’t new or unique. Common cultural wisdom suggests that your “passion” is something you discover and then maximize. If you don’t have a passion, you’re a nobody. You’re uninteresting. That’s the message of today’s pop culture, which fits nicely with our culture’s obsession with personality tests. Passion is viewed as something to be discovered because, like personality, your passion is something assumed to be innate and unique.
In the book So Good They Can’t Ignore You, author Cal Newport argues that rather than trying to find your passion, you should instead develop rare and valuable skills. Find a need and begin filling it. Once you’ve developed skills and begin seeing success, passion comes as an organic by-product, or an indirect effect. As he writes, “Passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before. In other words, what you do for a living is much less important than how you do it.”
Newport’s perspectives on passion dovetail exactly with the research on motivation. Like passion, motivation isn’t something to be discovered, but to be created through proactive and forward action.
Both passion and motivation are effects, not causes. As Dr. Jerome Bruner, a Harvard psychologist, said, “You more likely to act yourself into feeling than feel yourself into action.” As stated previously, confidence is the same way. You can’t have it first; it must come as a by-product of chosen and goal-consistent action.
Wanting the passion first, before putting in the work, is like wanting to get paid before you begin a job. It’s get-rich-quick thinking and completely lazy. It’s equivalent to wanting a fully developed personality without making any effort, without being creative and taking any action or risks or going through any change. It’s like a spoiled rich kid who wants everything given to them.
Passion is the prize, but you have to invest first.
Personality is no different. It is not something you discover but rather something you create through your actions and behaviors. The idea that personality is to be discovered comes from the same faulty reasoning that personality is innate and past-based.
It’s not.
Personality—like passion, inspiration, motivation, and confidence—is a by-product of your decisions in life. It’s a limiting and ineffective idea to view your personality as the driving force for the decisions you make in your life, such as choosing a career you think fits your current personality.
Do you think Gandhi, Mother Teresa, or anyone else who has made a huge impact made their decisions based on their personality? Or did they make their decisions based on something much bigger, and then became who they were through their commitment to that decision?
Purpose trumps personality. Without a deep sense of purpose, your personality will be based on avoiding pain and pursuing pleasure, which is an animalistic and low-level mode of operating. This is the common view and approach to personality for most. However, when you’re driven by purpose, you’ll be highly flexible and you’ll make decisions irrespective of pain and pleasure to create and become what you want.
Moreover, if you are serious about your purpose, it will change your personality. Your purpose isn’t something you discover, but something you ultimately choose for yourself. Stop looking for it and make the choice, then allow that choice to transform you.
Rather than your decisions and goals being the by-product of your personality, your personality should become the by-product of your decisions and goals.
As you proactively and intentionally make positive decisions, develop skills, and seek out new experiences, your personality will develop and change in meaningful ways. It will adapt to the level of your goals and decisions, rather than your decisions and goals falling to the level of your current personality.
Trying to discover your personality leads to inaction, avoidance of hard conversations, distracting yourself through consumption, and making excuses for how you’re currently living. It puts you in the passenger seat of your own life. Instead, you can, and should, be the driver. You can be the creator.
Another inherent problem with the view that your personality is something you discover is that it leads to very self-centered thinking. Life becomes all about you, you, you. Take, for example, the current frustration with Millennials in the workforce. Millennials, fairly or not, are viewed as lazy and entitled because they are unwilling to do anything they are not passionate about. They fall into the trap of believing their passion is something that should come immediately and instinctively, rather than through the process of developing knowledge and skills and making a contribution.
In an interview on Inside Quest, author and leadership expert Simon Sinek explained that Millennials are never satisfied in their work in part because they were raised to believe they should have anything they want, not because they earned it but simply because they want it. They were given trophies without winning. They were raised on technology and instant gratification. The power dynamic in schools and colleges changed to the point that parents would often argue with teachers about their children’s grades and insist that the teachers hand out a better grade.
Getting trophies for being in last place and not taking the grades you actually earned can harm your confidence in the long term. Sinek and others argue that Millennials haven’t been taught to earn what they want in life, but have come to expect it without effort. Given the lack of self-esteem and the desire for instant gratification, it makes complete sense why personality tests would be so appealing. You get an instant and easy answer without any thought or responsibility on your part.
Personality tests are fast food for the soul. They make you believe you can discover your true self in an instant. Like Katharine Briggs’s suggestion that all behavior should be accommodated to, personality tests can make you feel justified by who you currently are and how you’re doing in life.
You’re not justified. Your personality is not discovered.
Instead of waiting for life to come to you, or for your parents or loved ones to come to your aid, why not take ownership of your own life? Why not learn how to make decisions and direct the ship of your life? Why be limited based on who you currently are? Why avoid failure and default due to a fragile identity? Why not watch yourself become someone great as a result of your own choosing and efforts?
According to Cal Newport, the idea of finding your passion is based on self-absorption. People want to find work they are passionate about because they’ve been taught to believe that work is all about and for them. The most successful people in the world know that work is about helping and creating value for other people. As Newport states, “If you want to love what you do, abandon the passion mindset (‘what can the world offer me?’) and instead adopt the craftsman mindset (‘what can I offer the world?’).”
There’s one final problem with trying to “discover” yourself: It leads you to becoming incredibly inflexible to situations that feel difficult, complex, or outside your “innate” strengths.
Rather than adapting to difficult situations, we lazily apply labels to ourselves, such as “introvert” to justify our lack of willingness, openness, and commitment in various scenarios. As a result, we fall to the level of our labels rather than rise to the level of our commitment. In turn, we avoid conflict, difficulty, and newness, boxing ourselves into a shallow perspective of ourselves. We stunt our growth. We only do what brings instant gratification or immediate results.
Believing you must discover your personality is a fixed mindset that stops you from taking advantage of and creating opportunities that will transform you as a person.
In 2015, during the first year of my PhD program, my wife, Lauren, and I became foster parents of three children. We went from never having raised children before nor having done much by way of studying parenting to having three kids with attachment and other emotional needs thrown at us.
During my first year as a foster parent, I was constantly dealing with challenges that felt like they were far outside what I could handle with my “natural abilities.” I have never been more humbled or broken down. What’s more, I felt almost zero passion or excitement for parenting during that first year. In fact, I often avoided home because it was so difficult and painful. Parenting was, and continues to be, the hardest thing I’ve ever done, as many parents realize. It feels like a magnifying glass on my weaknesses.
I’m often disappointed in my reaction or lack of patience, compassion, and empathy toward my kids. But every once in a while I have a moment when I surprise myself, either by what I’m willing to do for my children or by how much I truly love them.
Being a parent is far from easy or “natural.” It’s a learning curve for everyone. But it has been and continues to be a transformational experience for me, which has made not only me but my entire life better. And parenting is becoming an increasing passion and interest for me, something I want to do and be better at every single day. Something I know I can become great at.
It is often by taking opportunities or responsibilities above (or seemingly “unnatural” to) your skill level and experience that forces the greatest growth. If you’re waiting to find something you feel immediate or intuitive passion for, then you’re going to miss most of your greatest opportunities for growth and success. You’ll miss countless opportunities to become more than you currently are. You’ll fail to realize the truth that your personality, just like passion, is something you create based on what you put into life.
Waiting for a passionate opportunity to align with your innate personality is equivalent to saying, “There are millions of opportunities for growth out there. But I’m going to wait for the one in a million that exactly fits the narrow experience and perspective I currently have.”
The “problem of discovery” also comes up in relationships. Because people have an idea of a fixed and innate personality, they spend loads of time looking for the “perfect” person to date and marry. Many people never commit to long-term relationships because of this fundamental misunderstanding about people. They think that when they find that “right” person, everything will just work out.
This is ignorance. Creating a successful marriage or partnership is just as difficult, and just as rewarding, as parenting.
Just as you will never “find” yourself, you will never “find” that perfect soul mate. The reason people want to find that perfect person, just like they want to find that perfect job, is because the “discovery” perspective is selfish. The end goal is all about meeting your own gratifications and happiness rather than happiness being the by-product of something much bigger. Of this, Harvard business professor Clayton Christensen said, “The path to happiness is about finding someone who you want to make happy, someone whose happiness is worth devoting yourself to.”
Pro tip: Don’t marry for personality. Why? Because personality will change over time. Obviously, there needs to be a connection. But the initial personality you fall in love with will not be the same person two, five, ten, or twenty years later. As the context and complexity of the relationship evolves—jobs, money, moving to new locations, kids, travel, aging, tragedies, successes, new information, new experiences, cultural shifts, identity shifts—each party’s personality will change.
Moreover, even the most fascinating or attractive personality will lose its novelty over time. Rather than marrying a person for who they currently are, it takes far more wisdom and discernment to marry for who you can see them becoming—their future self—and how they will enable you to become your desired future self. Will marrying this person enable you to do and be all that you truly want? And will you enable them to be all that they truly want? Who and what could both of you become if you were partners?
Marry for aligned purpose, not personality. That purpose will transform both of you over time.
Developing a powerful relationship isn’t about “finding,” but collaboratively creating and becoming new people together, through the relationship. Both parties must adjust and change, becoming a more united whole that transcends the sum of the parts. If one or neither party changes for and through the relationship, then the relationship will be lopsided and will likely fail. High-quality relationships are transformational, not transactional. Often, the transformation is unpredictable and unexpected, as collaboration is a creative act.
The final myth is that your personality is your “authentic” self, which you should be “true” to. This myth leads people to being incredibly inflexible and narrow about how they view themselves.
Take, for example, the fact that many American teenagers are becoming increasingly inflexible. Many students across the country are demanding that they no longer be required to give in-class oral presentations, claiming their issues with anxiety make them “uncomfortable” with presenting in front of an audience. They believe they shouldn’t be required to do something that feels so unnatural.
In an article published in the Atlantic entitled “Teens Are Protesting In-Class Presentations,” one fifteen-year-old tweeted the following statement, which garnered more than 130,000 retweets and nearly half a million likes: “Stop forcing students to present in front of the class and give them a choice not to.” Another teen tweeted, “Teachers, please stop forcing students to present in front of the class & raise their hand in exchange for a good grade. Anxiety is real.” Ula, a fourteen-year-old in eighth grade, reported, “Nobody should be forced to do something that makes them uncomfortable. Even though speaking in front of class is supposed to build your confidence and it’s part of your schoolwork, I think if a student is really unsettled and anxious because of it you should probably make it something less stressful. School isn’t something a student should fear.”
Interestingly, many teachers agree with these students and are looking to provide alternative learning experiences that are less emotionally and socially risky, and instead more comfortable. Rather than helping the students become mature and confident, such teachers are catering to their demands, essentially validating a teenager’s fixed mindset and lack of psychological flexibility.
A fundamental problem with traditional views of a fixed and innate personality is that people feel entitled to do only the things that feel natural or easy to them. If something is hard, difficult, or awkward, then people say, “I shouldn’t have to do this.”
It’s instructive that “authenticity” is a highly prized value in modern society. People believe they have an “authentic” self—their “truth”—which is who they should be true to. This self is seen as innate, the “real” them. This line of thinking leads people to say things like, “I need to be true to myself. I shouldn’t have to deny myself of how I’m feeling. I shouldn’t have to lie to myself. I should be able to do what feels right to me.”
Although well-meaning, this thinking reflects a fixed mindset, and often a reaction to trauma or a lack of healthy connection to parents. Often, kids from really extreme family situations—whether exceptionally strict or with practically zero guidelines—develop this desire for emotional-based self-direction.
I know many people who now, as maturing adults, are choosing limiting lives in the name of “authenticity” and being “real” with themselves. Pop culture has led people, like the eighth-grader mentioned above, to define “authenticity” as “however I feel right now.” In digging deeper and asking questions, I often find that these people have feelings of inadequacy and fear falling short of the demands of their parents.
The desire to be “authentic” keeps people stuck in unhealthy patterns, trapped in their insecurities. Compare the complaining high school students to Wharton business professor and New York Times bestselling author Adam Grant, who explained how he got over his anxiety of public speaking. In order to become who he wanted to be, he had to give up his notions of his “authentic” self. At a commencement speech delivered at Utah State University, Grant said:
If authenticity is the value you prize most in life, there’s a danger that you’ll stunt your own development. When I was in grad school, a friend asked me to give a guest lecture for her class. I was terrified of public speaking, but I wanted to be helpful, so I agreed. I figured it would be a good learning opportunity, so after the class I handed out feedback forms asking how I could improve. It was brutal. One student wrote that I was so nervous I was causing the whole class to physically shake in their seats. My authentic self was not a fan of public speaking. But I started volunteering to give more guest lectures, knowing it was the only way to get better. I wasn’t being true to myself, I was being true to the self I wanted to become.
“Authenticity” these days is usually another way of saying, “I have a fixed mindset. I am a certain way and shouldn’t be expected to do anything but what comes immediately naturally and easy for me. I shouldn’t have to do anything but what feels good, right now.”
Your authentic self is not who you currently are, and it is definitely not who you used to be. Your authentic self is what you most believe in and who you aspire to be. Moreover, your authentic self is going to change. Being authentic is about being honest, and being honest is about facing the truth, not justifying your limitations because you don’t want to be uncomfortable have hard conversations.
Your personality is not something that can be captured by a simple personality test. Your personality isn’t innate and unchanging. It’s not your past, and it’s definitely not the “real” and “authentic” you. It’s not something you have to go out and discover so you can finally start living your life.
Although these perspectives are common, they are destructive myths that limit your potential and freedom as a person. If you’ve fallen prey to any of these cultural myths before, my invitation is for you to let them go, or at the very least question their validity and impact on your life and your future.
When you look at yourself or another person, you don’t just see an unchanged “type.” Instead, what you see is an identity, a story, a lot of history, expectations, culture, and so much more. People are dynamic. We should be more empathetic and understanding rather than judgmental and shallow.
As you will soon find, your personality is something you can decide and create for yourself. Personality is dynamic and malleable. When you understand how it works and the levers that move it, you become the director of who you become. You can radically advance in your life and success. You can become a better learner and be more flexible and adaptive. Your past and your future can increasingly become a story that you shape and define.
The rest of this book will show you how.