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Zusammenfassung von Personality Isn't Permanent

Name: Personality Isn't Permanent
Rating: 4.6 (270 reviews)
Author: Benjamin Hardy

Benjamin Hardy

Break Free from Self-Limiting Beliefs and Rewrite Your Story

4.6 (270 Bewertungen)

22 Min.

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Personality Isn't Permanent
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What’s in it for me? A blueprint for redesigning your personality.

Countless studies show that people regularly get different scores on the same personality tests when they sit them at different times or in different settings.

If you’ve ever been enticed by clickbait to an online personality test, you’ll know that lots of tests rely on sloppy metrics. That’s part of the problem, but there’s another reason even supposedly well-designed tests throw up contradictory results: they’re rooted in a misunderstanding about what personality actually is.

For decades, we’ve been taught to think of personality as a fixed, unalterable trait. This idea, however, doesn’t stand up to the latest psychological research. Personality, it turns out, isn’t hardwired at birth – it’s malleable and dynamic. Put differently, people can, and do, change.

That’s good news. Because nothing is set in stone, you get to decide what kind of person you want to be. In these blinks, you can find out how.

Along the way, you’ll also learn

why you shouldn’t pay personality tests any more heed than horoscopes;
how to rewrite your past and set yourself up for a better tomorrow; and
why getting up one hour earlier boosts your chances of success.

Personality testing isn’t about science – it’s about making money.

How many types of people are there in the world?

Well, that depends on who you ask. One of the best-known personality tests, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, identifies 16 different kinds of personality. Then there’s the Revised NEO Personality Inventory, which claims that there are six different personality types. Other tests say three, or thirty-three.

So why do the people who design these tests come to such radically different conclusions? Here’s the short answer: personality testing is pseudoscience. Because there’s no way of proving or disproving any individual theory, test designers can come up with any answer they please. Usually, that’s little more than a way of marketing their product.

The key message in this blink is: Personality testing isn’t about science – it’s about making money.

Take it from Merve Emre, the American author who literally wrote the book on personality testing. In her 2018 history of the industry, The Personality Brokers, Emre points out that the market for tests is worth around $2 billion. That’s a huge incentive for designers to pump out questionable tests and cash in on lucrative opportunities to “explain” the results they generate.

This isn’t a recent development, though. As Emre shows, the very origins of personality testing are steeped in pseudoscience. Myers-Briggs tests, for example, were developed in the early twentieth century. Neither Katherine Briggs nor her daughter, Isabel Myers, had a scientific background. In fact, they’d never so much as stepped foot in a lab.

Instead, the test was based entirely on Briggs’s personal experiences. After noticing that she and her husband responded differently to similar situations and that one of their children was much more shy than the other, she began to speculate on personality differences.

Myers and Briggs didn’t just identify different personalities, though – they also claimed that these were innate. The flip side of this idea was that you shouldn’t try to change your personality. Rather, it was up to others to accommodate your hardwired dispositions. So-called “traits” like kindness or stinginess, Myers and Briggs believed, aren’t virtues or vices to be cultivated or abandoned – they’re simply the way you are.

This is why the realization that such testing has no foundation in scientific evidence can be so liberating. When you stop thinking that you’re, say, “naturally” introverted or impatient, it becomes possible to think about ways of changing your personality if you want to!

Personality modifies over time, but we struggle to anticipate the inevitability of more transformation in the future.

In 2016, a team of researchers published the results of a long-running study in the journal Psychology and Aging. Launched in Scotland in the 1950s, the study asked teachers to rate 1,208 14-year-olds on a number of personality traits such as self-confidence, originality, and desire to learn.

Sixty years later, 674 of the original participants were retested. This time, they rated themselves. The result? There was virtually no overlap between the two tests. That surprised the researchers. They had hypothesized that they’d find evidence of personality stability over the decades. The data, however, didn’t support this hypothesis. Instead, it busted a myth at the heart of personality testing: the idea that personalities are fixed.

More often than not, the idea of an authentic self holds us back.

Across the United States, teenagers have recently begun calling on their teachers to excuse them from classroom presentations. Their reasoning? As one teen put it in a tweet that was shared over 130,000 times, “forcing” students to present in front of the class was making them “anxious.”

Interestingly, many teachers seem to agree, and pedagogical techniques that are less demanding than speaking in front of your peers are increasingly popular. This might sound like a positive, feel-good story about how open-minded these teachers are, but the outcome of this response is actually negative. By catering to these demands, schools are validating the notion that teenagers lack psychological flexibility, which is ultimately impacting their ability to grow as people.

Understanding why you do what you do is the first step towards redefining who you are.

What is personality? So far, we’ve seen that notions of an innate, unchanging, or authentic self owe more to marketing and misunderstanding than they do to scientific evidence. Worse, these ideas stymie growth and keep you trapped in your comfort zone.

So let’s try out a different definition: personality isn’t something that just exists out there in the world – it’s something you do. Personality, in other words, is shaped by what you spend your time doing. Change that and you’ll change who you are.

Committing to a single goal focuses your mind and raises your chance of success.

In early 2000, the British rowing team was preparing for that year’s summer Olympics. History wasn’t on the rowers’ side. No British crew had won gold since 1912. But they did have one thing going for them – commitment.

Their commitment was reflected in a simple question the rowers asked themselves before making any decision: “Will it make the boat faster?” Answering this question told the rowers what to do, whatever the situation – like whether or not to eat a donut, go to bed or stay up and have a beer.

Getting up early gives you a chance to learn, which will help you change and grow as a person.

Once you’ve defined your goal, you’ll need to start taking small steps towards it on a daily basis. The most effective first step? Start your day one hour earlier than usual.

If you only wake up when you have to, you’re ultimately arranging your waking hours around “urgent” tasks. Completing these tasks then takes up your whole day, leaving no time to pursue your goal. This kind of routine rules out meaningful change because all you have time to do is maintain the status quo.

Changing the narrative about your past can alter your future.

When the author met Ken Arlen, a one-time chain smoker, he hadn’t smoked for 40 years. What was interesting about Ken, though, was how he’d stopped smoking.

Ken started smoking cigarettes in high school in the 1970s. Tobacco was widely accepted back then. Marijuana, by contrast, wasn’t. So, Ken used the former to hide the smell of the latter from his parents. Soon enough he was hooked on cigarettes and going through a pack a day. Every attempt to quit failed.

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Personality Isn’t Permanent (2020) debunks the myths surrounding personality that get in the way of a life of personal growth, development, and success. The biggest misconception according to psychologist Benjamin Hardy is the notion that our personalities are innate and fixed. Correcting this error isn’t just a scientific advance, though – as we’ll see in these blinks, it also opens up a path to personal reinvention.

Bestes Zitat aus Personality Isn't Permanent

I wasnt being true to myself, I was being true to the self I wanted to become. – Adam Grant

—Benjamin Hardy

Wer Personality Isn't Permanent lesen sollte

Self-improvers interested in new perspectives
Rationalists fed up with evidence-free advice
Anyone looking to kick a bad habit

Über den Autor

Benjamin Hardy is an organizational psychologist and the author of the bestselling Willpower Doesn’t Work. A prolific blogger, Hardy’s practical, science-driven advice has reached over 100 million readers. Hardy is also a regular contributor to Forbes, Fortune, Psychology Today, and many other outlets.

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