Is your personality fixed, or can you change who you are?
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So I did. And even though I was nervous as hell, I did it during the game, in the guise of my character. For a couple years, I was really into the game. It was my life every weekend. I probably spent more social time pretending to be someone else than I did being myself.
And a funny thing happened... I became that guy for real. It's not just that I'm no longer nervous, I genuinely enjoy talking to new people. I barely recognize my old introverted self.
So I believe this. Who we are is just a snapshot in time.
E.g., I feel once you get used to 'increased social stimulation' it becomes harder to spend solid chunks of time by yourself doing deep/creative mental work.
Any comments?
Now I can do either, without even thinking about it. It's like a lightswitch, when I'm in a group I can just start chattering away, but when I get up a code editor I don't even think about getting down to it, itjust happens.
It never occurred to me my feelings were depression until my sister revealed her struggle with it as an attempt to get me to go to therapy. Could have saved many years if someone had just told me, "no, this is not a healthy lifestyle, staying in and reading books and playing games, to the exclusion of making any new relationships".
I've purposefully changed my personality (behavior?) twice, about to start my thrice effort.
The first time, nor longer wanting to be angry, and having run out of ideas, I decided to pretend to be happy. I had read that you can't unlearn a habit, only replace it. So I played chipper all the time. When asked how I was, I'd say something like "Phenomenal!" Initially, it was sarcastic.
Then one day I woke up and I felt phenomenal. I was gobsmacked. I didn't even know the change was taking place. The transition took about three years.
The second time, I ran for office. Deluding oneself is part of the job. A bit like how sales people can convince themselves the next customer will say "Yes!"
This book came out after my first change. It jives with my experience.
How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work
https://amzn.com/078796378XI have in my mind him paying his dealer in 20c pieces (I live in Australia so we don't have quarters). 20c pieces are actually quite large (11.2g) so a couple hundred dollars in 20c pieces is 11.2 x 5 x 200 = ~11kg (25 lbs). This was not some easy theft!
When I started to learn Japanese I was given the advice to pick a persona from a movie or something to copy. This makes it much easier to mold your speech and become fluent faster. The strange thing was that I started to develop that personality in Japanese and before I knew it I had a completely different character when speaking Japanese than when speaking English. Even stranger, I liked myself a lot better in Japanese. It's one of the reasons I chose to stay in Japan.
Because I now have an English speaking job I'm slowly trying to learn how to be my Japanese self in English, but I find it difficult :-)
My Japanese persona is chirpy with a rhythmic speed.
My English is cold, monotonous and logical with a dry sense of humour. I honestly feel like a totally different person when I'm speaking Japanese.
I've found this quote, and the generalization to personality traits in general, to be quite accurate. I've changed dramatically over the years.
It's important to note, though, that the biggest changes I've experienced occurred when I didn't have anyone around who knew the old me. Only then was I really free to explore who I could become. I think this is one of the beautiful things about anonymous online forums. They allow us to explore different mindsets in a way that wasn't possible prior to the internet.
Farewell happy Fields
Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.
I am sympathetic to Lucifer's point of view.
Today, I'm capable of, and enjoy, stereotypically introverted activities such as math and programming, and those things have helped me advance my career, but I don't need them as an escape from society.
When asked, I tell people that I'm mildly extroverted. My main reason is simply that there's a stigma against introverts in our society.
It's all practice. So if you practice being a new you, you will become good at being that person. And it so happens that's how we become good at our first selves. We just don't remember it, and it was likely unintentional. As we mature, we are given every right to choose the adult we wish to be, and how to behave. But making the leap requires incentive, intention, and some real effort, because practice is labor. Except when it becomes a labor of love, we become empowered by it, not tired by it. That is why passion is paramount, and we should all have a passion for who we are.
The trick is, and what I learned over time - labour comes first, then comes the passion. Rarely it is the other way around. Waiting for passion to strike is why a lot of people (recent version of myself included!) are stuck.
The problem is:
1) We hate to admit it sometimes. If you're reading a comic book or playing video games, we make it not count. Parents are guilty of this with their children also. Passion is not a choice between school subjects or job titles. There are kids with a passion for picking their nose. It won't get them anywhere, but they toyed around, discovered it, and found it. It's passion. It's what turns you on.
2) It can be passion against. If you hate your job, it isn't because you don't have passion for it, and no, no amount of waiting will grant it. What you have is passion against it. And this is where most of the anti-passion sentiment comes from. They find passion too illusive and metaphysical, all not knowing it came and passed already. It was the loathing they had for their job. Sadly, they overcame it. They overcame their passion.
3) We don't act on it. Unless you're still picking your nose, we need to act on our passion more. There are youtube millionaires that play video games all day. Someone has to draw comic books, and they're all adults. Not all passions will lead to professions, but it should still be your goal.
Of course, passion does not equal happiness nor success. It's what you do with it.
Anecdotally, the parallels between love is uncanny. 1) We often hate to admit who we fell for, 2) we can be passionate against someone (opposite side of the same coin, just see 90% of romantic comedies), and 3) if we don't act on it, it never flourishes.
And love does not equal happiness nor success. It's what you do with it.
And we always fall in love. Maybe it's just who you're staring at when it happens...
Passion feels to me like a gift from the universe, you never know when or where it will strike. It feels intuitive to me that no amount of struggle will make me have a passion for cleaning toilets.
Of course, cleaning enough toilets could create a passion in me for not cleaning toilets, but I'm hopeful that there's easier ways to achieve it.
Also it feels like when I'm engaged in an activity as unpleasant as cleaning toilets, that expense of energy is actively preventing me from thinking about things that I am passionate about.
Yes and no. According to my subjective perception of life you only know in hindsight whether you were practicing or not. Sometimes you feel really enthusiastic about something and decide to work very disciplined at it (and really do it) but you get no results and are no wiser as to why that is. Other times you don't even intend to do anything about something you want to change but your subconsciousness practices "for you" so to speak and all of a sudden you do the right things in the right moment without understanding why you're able to do it.
In fact, for many areas of my life I feel like I improve most when I can afford to do nothing for weeks and all of a sudden I get hit by one or two massive insights. It's sort of like all the information required for a change is already there but my brain needs massive amounts of thinking capacity to compute and suggest the right actions.
You are always practicing. It's only in hindsight whether you know you were doing it right.
If you're late for work, you've just practiced being late for work. If you made an excuse, you just practiced making an excuse. If you lie, you just practiced lying. And that's why we're screwed. The notion that practice only happens when we decide we're practicing is nonsense. If you lie 90% of the time, you will become a great liar. That's the nature of practice.
Take an aspiring athlete. They all practice hard. The advantage isn't in practice. If your shooting form is bad, every shot you take with that form is reinforcing a bad practice. That's why getting it right and only doing it right is so important. Taking it slow and being intentional with every action is the only way to do this. What we must practice is mindful control of every action, because it's all practice.
This is also why "pretend" is just another word for practice. To pretend requires being mindfully in control of your actions.
[...]
> I barely recognize my old introverted self.
Shyness and introversion aren't the same thing. Sounds like you were shy, but not anymore. Whether you're introverted/ambiverted/extroverted is another matter.
Sounds pretty neat! Almost like a game based therapy when used in this context.
I think the concept of the fixed personality has done a lot of damage to people for the sake of predictability. That we're moving closer to embracing freedom of self on such a fundamental level is one of the truly encouraging things about this time.
This has been done and done again for as long as there have been societies. The surveillance state will seal this freedom away for good. Then we will have order and we will "like" it.
Although I don't like all the spying that goes on either, I don't believe that there is a conspiracy to remove ADHD from the population. If ADHD or another personality disorder is helpful for some reason, eg for programmers, then it will remain.
As long as people can do their jobs well enough and better than someone without ADHD, the "powers that be" will allow them to remain.
Bosses aren't giving psychological diagnoses, they are simply monitoring that the battery hens are still laying enough eggs.
Krulak himself says it best:
"We cannot anticipate and train Marines for each situation they may face. All Marines must, therefore, possess a moral consistency to serve as their compass. Making the right ethical decisions must be a thing of habit. This is why we created the Transformation process where we recruit bold, capable, and intelligent young men and women of character and recast them in the white hot crucible of recruit training. We immerse them in the highest ideals of American society -- the time honored values of our Corps -- honor, courage, and commitment. We place these values on them in a framework of high institutional standards to which they are held strictly accountable. We further foster the acceptance of these values through the unit cohesion and sustainment phases."
"Just as we expect a Marine to employ his weapon under combat duress, we must likewise demand that he employ his mind. Marines need to be comfortable with using their intuition under highly stressful circumstances. In short, we must make intuitive decisionmaking an instinct, and this can only be accomplished through repetition. Training programs and curricula should routinely make our Marines decide a course of action under cold, wet, noisy conditions while they are tired and hungry and as an instructor continually asks them "what are you going to do now, Marine?!!"
[1] http://www.leatherneck.com/forums/showthread.php?46546-%91Tu... [2] http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/usmc/cultivating_intuiti...
Similarly extreme extroverts tend to be toned down a bit in military training, til they reach about the same level.
Myself and any one of those introverts would now probably be regarded as fairly confident extroverts compared to civilians, and so much of that is thanks to military training.
I could go on at length about my personal experience (which is quite dramatic) but since I enjoy my privacy I'll just pass along a funny story about massive personality change induced by brain injury: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2130900/Chris-Birc...
I view this as a failure of modern statistically driven social sciences. Just because it happens to only a few in a hundred people, doesn't mean it's an anomalous behaviour. People are messy. When put in differing circumstances, people show amazing plasticity in their behaviour. And controlling for all those social and biological pressures is very hard to do.
Researchers are also aware that personality changes population-wise with age, and also that individuals also experience personality changes -- but generally not in a medically interesting way in the sense of a reliable and precise intervention to effect positive changes.
I'm also reminded of studies on the transferability of personality traits with adopted children (no significant correlation! amazing! same correlation with biological parents compared to those children raised by their biological parents), or reared-apart monozygotic twin studies, or reared-apart dizygotic twin studies, and so on. The collective portrait of many data points suggests a set of stable biological factors to personality, as opposed to personal experience.
Of course, if you took a decent sized plow and cut a channel through the landscape early enough, you could direct the development of the river to exactly where you wanted it. If you wait too long, redirecting the river becomes a major engineering task; involved, but still entirely doable.
Shouldn't the unique experience of an entirely different household have some effect on personality?
This pattern is observed all the time for tastes. We have genetically predetermined preferences, but overwhelmingly what we end up liking is the result of social conditioning.
It seems to me that certain aspects of a person are very malleable, taste being one of them. But many other things apparently are not (IQ, or various other measures of 'intelligence', if I recall correctly).
From my experience in the social sciences, we tend to underestimate the role of genetics more often than not.
On the other hand, when a child displays an initial dislike for like Taylor Swift, her friends might say "you're crazy, Taylor Swift is awesome."
It's all just neural networks being reinforced or inhibited, the primary contribution of genetics is the default state of the network. In the case "fixed" personality characteristics, our culture is to reinforce the default networks, while for things we view as mutable, we have no qualms about training away default behavior.
And I suspect that the genetics does also set a limit as to how far one can bend, too. This too, will vary between persons.
"Entrepreneurship doesn't happen. The data are very clear on this. Most people who start businesses fail."
Just because something is really hard does not mean it is not of much interest theoretically or practically. Everything that is meaningful in human endeavor has been "really hard."
I think that it is actually really important to study and understand personality change. Frankly, a lot of people have negative, (self)destructive personalities, and they would be much better served with positive, constructive personalities. Maybe if we understand how people change, we could come up with a consistent, efficient method to help those people, rather than shrugging and saying "haters gonna hate."
Those stories have so much appeal and longevity exactly because the spectator can see someone like himself changing. The underlying motif is that anyone can go from weakling to hero, under the right circumstances.
I'd consider taste to be a cultural thing and rather changeable. And 'heroism' strikes me as something that I'd call 'character' rather than 'personality'.
But it might also be a difference in contexts: I mostly speak Russian with my immediate family and English with other people.
Who we are is 20% or more (depending on the person) the country/culture/language we're in at the time, and that's true for everyone.
I maintain the same kind of drive I've always had, consuming every piece of data I can get my hands on, but that consumption has changed me.
I remember clearly the first major change to another person I ever experienced. it was after reading the giver when I was a child. I can't even recall who I was before I read that book, but I know he was a lesser mortal than I.
the next major change was after my parents split and I got a new abusive step mother. before that I would cry at a whim, every time I watched fern gully I cried, but after that woman I rarely showed emotion. I was hard and thought hard thoughts, I was a total gangsta, a white suburban gangsta but after a long time trying I finally got street cred. spent time in the kiddie can and all that.
my next major change was actually in military school after gaining too much street cred. something changed in me on the long drive through the desert of Nevada to a large training camp called rite of passage. I kicked ass there, no idea why, but I changed, and became a leader. moved up the ranks and got posted to the cross country cycling team.
and that's where we come to the change that stuck for so many years. In ROP I became captain of my cycling team and we got the opportunity to ride across America. that ride changed me in so many ways. I used to think I couldn't attain my dreams, now I was in a dream.
the next time I changed fundamentally was when I became a father. not in your usual lets get married and have a family way, no, it was as unplanned and crazy as you can get, but I still changed, stepped up to the plate and reflected on my past lives and Knew I could do it.
now I'm an older man, and I am changing at a more observable pace, I can see my views solidifying and it's a little scary, I don't want to be stuck in my ways. but I am comforted by the fact that any day, I can change, at least for now.
1) make a list of all your chronic symptoms over time
2) speak to a doctor about your particular concerns re: hormone levels, and get blood tests taken
3) if your doctor reckons, based on the results, that treatment is justified, I guess you're on your way; if not:
4) study the literature - if you disagree with your doctor about your results, you should be able to find literature that quantitatively supports your position based on your test results and symptoms
5) if you can find supporting literature, ask your doctor for treatment (don't be confrontational when dealing with your doctor, treat them as a resource and a partner, and respect their opinion even if you disagree with them based on what you've learned)
6) find another doctor if your doctor won't agree with a reasoned opinion
If you need help with this stuff, there may be practitioners out there more in tune with chronic illness than your bog-standard GP. I'm partial to the ancestral health movement and paleo diet therefore I'd look here: [1].
Finally, I'd recommend the work of Paul Jaminet - I found his book [2] and his Retreat (which includes personalised health coaching based on blood test results) [3] both to be incredibly helpful in dealing with my own long-term health issues.
I'd propose that a complete set of research would learn that there are some personality traits that are malleable and there are some that are not. Moreover, those two sets would not be the same for everyone, and there is likely a great deal of diversity.
The main argument of the article, supported by quite a bit of evidence, is that a lot of what we take as "personality" is not fixed at all and instead tends to change with situations.
That means that we behave "good" just to the extent that we're aware that we might feel guilty and not much farther - and in that sense, we can train ourselves into greater moral fortitude with deliberate practice in empathy, exposure to diverse views, and development of a personal ethical philosophy. I don't see "personality" as crucial to that - it can differ - and changes in environment and status have a huge impact on what we perceive as acceptable, as well as medically diagnosed conditions that literally disable our ethical senses. Across a population, what is probably most important is to have a little bit of wisdom distributed among everyone so that we aren't burdening each other constantly. "Crossing the line" into violence happens after a huge, huge number of other failures have already taken place.
Systemically, we aren't even to the point where we might discuss this as a problem, though. We don't yet see wisdom as something everyone needs in the same way that we think that everyone should be fed, housed, and clothed: If you have those things and you're unhappy, the systemic recourse is to engage in consumer activities marketed around your perceptions of unhappiness.
I think the personality you see in others depends highly on the situation. Shy people may become extroverted under right circumstances, or stingy people generous.
Of course. You think all of the Nazi officials were rotten from their childhood, teenage years, early career, etc?
Some were -- most not. They were "model citizens" as you say. It was the circumstances and belief in Fuhrer etc. that led them to become bad, but after some threshold we can say they were bad.
You can say the same for a changed personality :p
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Five_personality_traits
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality_psychology#Persona...
All that means is that they are somehow connected.
They are still 2 different environments, which different rules -- which is what people actually mean when they say "alternate reality", and not "complete isolated reality space".
So the counter-proof is more like saying "If there's Canada, and we get to there from here, the they are no longer Canada".
What are the borders of reality?
That place would just have to comply with a different set of rules compared to anywhere else to be justified to call it an "alternate reality" (e.g. no gravity, fire is cold, etc).
Heck, we even call experiences like living with the Amish an "alternative reality", and those are on our very same universe/world, and with all the known laws of physics and basics intact.
If it can really be changed (not just pretend, but really become), then there is no "true self", there's only a "current self".
“Up to a point a man's life is shaped by environment, heredity and movement and changes in the world about him; then there comes a time when it lies within his grasp to shape the clay of his life into the sort of thing he wishes to be. Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of good fortune, or the quirks of fate. Everyone has it within his power to say this I am today, that I shall be tomorrow. The wish, however, must be implemented by deeds.” - Louis L'Amour
What I means is, we can give ourselves names, but who we are is mostly a black box. Any black swan event can change our definition, and the shock doctrine also applies here, in that we are affected by spikes of greatest impressions, not ongoing consistency.
For the most part, we are remembered for our best or worst, but are judged by our last. So in the case of this article, if you commit a horrific crime, that will be what people remember and define you by. And we can do everything in our power to be judged with forgiveness based on our latest actions. But for the most part, it's not until we do something more extreme (shocking) than what has defined us so far that most of us will feel naturally inclined to update our definitions.
But the key takeaway is that even if this is how we define one another, none of it truly predicts what anyone will do next, good or evil, brilliant or lame. Ultimately, we are all much like computer programs that must run their course to know precisely if any of us will halt or not, which leaves personality a mere impossible analysis, much in the spirit of Gödel's incompleteness theorem. We are incomputable, and our inconsistency is what is consistent. The only option is execution -- to let life run its course.
It's true, there is no such thing as personality. But then, why do recruiters want to know about the "profile" of a candidate? What do they talk about when they want someone who is "at harmony with the group"?
If we could really change as we liked, we would not talk about personality. People will always carry a baggage of learned behaviors with them. The sum of this is called personality. It can change of course, but in the "brave new world" that we live in, the incentives to do so never appear.
I haven't thrown a temper tantrum in the middle of a grocery store in 22 years.
Her ideas have had a tremendous impact on various aspects of business, to the point where she's covered in the Harvard Business Review:
https://hbr.org/2016/01/what-having-a-growth-mindset-actuall...
If I spend too many months pretty exclusively within one of those personas I will start to feel the need to express the other.
"It has to do with Mischel's most famous experiment, called the marshmallow test, which he first conducted in 1960. You can still find videos of it on YouTube".
Doesn't it sound like they were put on YouTube in the 60s? :)
See http://www.vox.com/2014/7/15/5881947/myers-briggs-personalit...
The article you linked to uses lack of MBTI in psychology journals as an argument against its validity, but its applications in the field are very limited. You're more likely to find MBTI references in neuroscience journals as there are appears to be clear correlations between type preferences and brain activity patterns[1].
Even so, knowledge of a persons cognitive preferences just isn't very useful. So the main application of MBTI is indeed "just for fun".
This has less to do with personality and more with testosterone.
The supposition that the personality is completely fixed or completely mutable is simply false. There are fundamental constraints to how the personality can be manifested. Histrionic personalities are perhaps those most inclined to believe that their personality is truly self-determined, but they'd also be mistaken.
Who here supposes anyone is a tabula rasa? Who here supposes anyone emerges in this life fully formed and actualized? This is a spurious dichotomy that is erected time to time based on cultural norms and stipulations - much of it propagandising to suit others desires and ends.
The personality is a constellation of aspects that we all show to varying degrees, many of which are in fact out of our control, but some of which nevertheless are capable of being adjusted in accordance with various forms of conditioning. It is in that constellation that we find what the personality is. Emphasizing minute aspects and exaggerating them doesn't constitute the whole personality. This is remarkably uninformative as an article.
How are those beliefs working out for you?
The same goes with IQ. I don't think any average person could ever train their intelligence to be, say, John von Neumann. Thus it is not _completely_ mutable. He was a genetically superior specimen by every account and evidenced such from a very young age. But a good 15-20 point boost, especially if we did not train ourselves to our fullest before? Maybe. I used to process more slowly, now I process faster, because I pushed to think quicker. Thus it is not completely _fixed_, either. Definitely we can eradicate racial IQ gaps, I believe (average Black-White IQ gap in the US is 15 points favoring Whites, by the way.), Rushton et. al. be damned. If I remember right, in some places it was actually done, thus proving its possibility. (Interesting tidbit the racists seem not to address: Bhutan's and China's people are both “Mongoloid Asian" race by racist theory – but Bhutan has IQ 85, China at 105, at least using racists' own data sets. I wonder also what the IQ for rural China vs. urban wealthy China looks like. I suspect the 105 number comes from having a large proportion of the latter in the sample.)