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> You don't become more extroverted, but you can improve your social skills.

The way I did it is: I learned to _pretend_ to be extroverted. It works!

It works, but it's incredibly exhausting and not fun at all, so why bother?

It is exhausting, but it can be fun. My motivation was to network during conferences. I ended up meeting interesting people, having good conversations, and enjoying myself more.

Yes, thats a win but use it casually when needed because it depletes you. You can’t change your nature, but you can oscilate it here and there. A drink helps too

Because the alternative is you hide at home and get depressed and then go off and kill yourself because life isn't worth living anymore.

If you're genuinely an introvert, the alternative is you "hide at home" and have fun doing so. And socialize infrequently with few very close friends (basically, quality over quantity).

Yep; this.

I'm pretty good at socializing when I need to. I'll still most likely be wishing throughout that I was out eating dinner or having a beer at a brewery by myself with a good book or HN on my eInk tablet. Being by myself is extremely restorative and makes me happy.

I think this is what having an introverted personality is like.

The difference is between gaining a skill vs loving what you do. Introverted person practice socializing is more of a skill development than actually loving every moment of it. True introverts are happy being alone (they are not lonely as in a negative sense).

I think it is easier for introvertes to gain extrovertion skill (clear benefits) than extroverts to gain introversion skills (benefits of being alone is not that obvious)

I used to be a lot more introverted until I realized the value of extroverted behavior is not so superficial.

For some reason, and especially on HN, extroversion is seen as a simple meaningless choice at best or sociopathic and manipulative at worst. It's really about finding new ideas, updating your mental models, and making rational decisions. So many things in life depend on your surroundings. if you're not interacting with the humans in it, you are just avoiding change. If you only socialize on the internet and with groups of like-minded people you find in real life, you are being manipulated.

I think there's some truth to this - you may still have the tendencies to be introverted, neurotic, disagreeable, etc., but you can choose how much you let those tendencies drive your behavior.

You have a choice of how to respond to your feelings - if you feel introverted, so you never talk to people, it dominates your life and personality. If you feel introverted, but you frequently talk to people anyway, you can make friends, participate in activities, and reduce the impact of those feelings on your life.

"I have a tendency (diagnosis), therefore I'm excused" or "I have a tendency, so I've created habits to create good results in spite of it."

And with practice, it gets easier, though it may always take work, and much more effort than for people to whom it comes naturally.

Maybe this doesn't change your personality to "I naturally socialize with others", but maybe it lets you change to "I can enjoy socializing with others".

Also if you have learned all the skills appropriate for your natural personality, it might be a bit "fish out of water" if your personality were to suddenly change. You might change from a hermit into an extrovert who really chases human contact but poor social skills, say. That sounds like it'd lead to a lot of trouble.

I'm not sure there's a material difference, though.

> You don't become more extroverted, but you can improve your social skills.

What's the difference, though? Having well-developed social skills is an aspect of extraversion.

> You don't become less neurotic, but you can learn to manage stress, or just avoid stressful situations altogether with proper planning.

Isn't this the same thing as being less neurotic? If the overall effect is lower stress when confronted with the same situations and stimuli, then hasn't your personality changed?

> You don't become more agreeable, but you can learn to become more considerate.

Being considerate is just an aspect of agreeableness. If you become more considerate, then you do become more agreeable.

> You don't become more conscientious, but you can make a framework to complete your tasks: schedules, checklists, etc...

I would argue that the act of making those schedules and checklists in order to ensure you get your tasks done is, in and of itself, an act of being conscientious, so teaching yourself to do those things does indeed make you a more conscientious person.

> You don't become more open, but you can educate yourself on opposing viewpoints.

What is the goal of educating yourself on opposing viewpoints if not to understand different people better? You may still disagree with those viewpoints just as strongly, but the simple fact of a newfound willingness to educate yourself is an increase in openness.

To me, you are focusing on the mechanism here, and not on the outcome. After reading this article I found and took a big-five test[0] and found that some questions did try to assess how you feel about aspects of yourself, but many (most?) are about outcomes in your life. That is, "do you feel like it's easy to complete tasks?" is a different question from "do you tend to complete tasks?" The first one is about how it feels: even if you do tend to complete your tasks, you may feel like it's only because you've created your task-completion framework, but it takes concerted, difficult effort to stick with the framework. The second is about the outcome: you do complete your tasks, and the mechanism behind it isn't relevant. I think both things (the feelings and the outcome) are important to assessing the personality traits, to be sure, but changing the outcome (even if the feelings have not changed at all) is a material change. And I'd suspect that, if you do succeed in changing the outcome, the feelings will change over time, at least to some extent.

[0] https://bigfive-test.com/ (doesn't require some bullshit registration to see your results)

I think there is a big difference. You can go against your traits, but it will take effort. That is, it will feel like work, not fun.

Many people are good at their job while not particularly enjoying it, they like the money, status, recognition, etc... they learned the skills to make it easy for them, but the job itself is just a mean to an end. This is like these programmers who may be skilled, but during their time off, they won't do so much as touching a computer.

This is the idea behind a "social introvert", they socialize for the benefits of socializing, like for their career, or simply maintaining friendships, because even introverts want friends. They can be good at it, they can do it with little effort, but they don't enjoy it. Extroverts will socialize just for the sake of it, even if it is detrimental, as in partying all night when there is work to do.

Same idea for all the other traits, you can go against your personality, but it will cost you. Do it too much, and you will burn out. That's why I think you should be honest with yourself. For example, if you are low on openness, it is good reading on opposing viewpoints, it may help you understand customer needs at work, hold more interesting conversations, etc... so it is worth the effort. However, it doesn't mean you should force yourself to spend a week in a hippie festival if you can't stand drugs just because you pretend you are open. Actually open people will not force themselves to go, in fact, they are more likely to force themselves to be reasonable and not go.