Who Are You, Really?: The Surprising Puzzle of Personality (TED Books)

by Brian Little

The five dimensions spell out an acronym—OCEAN (or CANOE if you prefer): Open to Experience (vs. Closed) Conscientious (vs. Casual) Extraverted (vs. Introverted) Agreeable (vs. Disagreeable) Neurotic (vs. Stable)

Because the same dimensions emerge in virtually all countries, cultures, and linguistic groups, these can be regarded as universal dimensions of personality.

Introverts can take some comfort, however, in the fact that there is a quality/quantity trade-off in various types of task performance: Extraverts opt for quantity over quality and introverts the reverse.

Not surprisingly, when we look at which of the Big Five traits best predict whether a person will be happy, stable extraverts are the most happy and neurotic introverts the least.

In the evolutionary provenance of human personality, I suspect that stable extraverts were the first to discover prey, and we all benefited from eating what they caught. To survive, however, we also needed the neurotic introverts who were especially likely to discover predators. We should be equally grateful to them for decreasing our chances of being sniffed out, hunted down, and eaten.

If biogenic forces shape your first nature, then sociogenic forces sculpt your second nature.

In other words, your social contexts can affect your biology. And the reverse is also true—biogenic personality traits can directly influence the social contexts of your life.

Yet there is a second, more fundamental mistake with looking at yourself as simply a biogenic creature or a sociogenic self, even if you assume these identities can interact and influence each other. Both assume that you are a passive recipient of forces that play on you—that you are not an agent of your own development but a pawn moved by the power of genes or environment or both.

But there is a third nature that shapes us in powerful ways. This is your idiogenic self, derived from the Greek idio-, meaning personal or particular to oneself.

The essential idea behind personal construct theory is this: All individuals are essentially scientists erecting and testing hypotheses about the world and revising them in the light of their experience. Those hypotheses are called personal constructs, and they are the conceptual goggles through which we view the world.

You are inquisitive, prospective, and exploratory. And to understand you, we need to know the personal constructs through which you interpret objects, events, other people, and yourself.

To best understand human personality and our capacity to flourish, we need to explore not two but three sources of self: the biogenic, the sociogenic, and the idiogenic.

personal projects in their lives—everyday pursuits that are trivial or transformative, singular or communal, brief encounters or enduring commitments.

Your relatively fixed traits set some limits on the destinations that your projects might explore. Your social and cultural environments will open up some paths and shut down others. And the way you construe the journey—the way you define, describe, and judge your own projects—will be central to whether you keep exploring, turn back or, alas, crash and burn. In short, project quests involve the interplay of all three aspects of our personality—the biogenic, sociogenic, and idiogenic—and their success is essential for flourishing.

Because in an important sense, as go your projects, so goes your life.

There is now a significant body of research demonstrating that “intrinsically regulated” project pursuit will be more successful and lead to greater well-being than “externally regulated” pursuit.

Generally speaking, to the extent that a person is engaged in projects that are meaningful, manageable, and connected with others, and that generate more positive than negative feelings, their well-being will be enhanced. And it is hardly surprising to find that those whose projects are meaningless, chaotic, isolating, and overwhelmingly negative do not flourish.

The greatest value in thinking of personality as “doing projects” rather than “having traits” is in three powerful words: potential for change. We can consciously choose and adapt our projects in ways that we cannot change our traits.

In short, when it comes to well-being, projects can trump traits. This should give you some hope that you are not the victim of the traits with which you entered this world. Your deeds speak louder than your dispositions.

In fact, one of the things that makes you so intriguing is your ability to sometimes act “out of character.”

These people are engaged in what I call “free traits.” And they are doing so to more successfully pursue a personal project.

described himself as being a site-specific extravert but an introvert most of the time.

That's exactly me!

grumpy, taciturn, impatient flight attendant isn’t going to last, nor is a sweet, engaging, and forgiving bill collector. But a person who is not biogenically suited to a certain role may still desire to fill it. So to survive in their fields, they become site-specific free-trait adopters.

we practice such free traits often enough, they can creep into our personalities in more pervasive and permanent ways.

So how do we recharge after the stressful effects of free-trait behavior? By finding or creating the right environment, or what I call a restorative niche, to reconnect with our biogenic selves and prevent burnout, which is key to the success of any personal project.

As for your own restorative resources, they become most apparent when everyday constraints are lifted and you can act spontaneously.

Just as you can pick up a free trait to overcome your biological first nature, you can actively alter your environment to clear a path for your personal projects.

Whatever the passion, a study of the personal projects of individuals in long-term romantic relationships found that the larger the number of shared projects between partners the stronger and longer lasting those relationships were.

So, in sum, there are various ways you can shape your closest social environment to support your projects. Choose a diverse set of people to share your projects with, communicate clearly about what matters to you, share projects wholeheartedly with the most important people—and you grant yourself a greater chance of success.

There is perhaps no more frequently offered advice that we give to others who are making a hard decision than “Just be yourself.” But in many ways this is not a particularly helpful piece of advice, in part because it is vague but also because, as controversial as this may sound, it may not actually be in the person’s best interests.

It simply means that being a sincere person can mean different things at different times, and that who you are really might differ depending on the circumstance.

Cynthia’s case is an intriguing example in light of our earlier discussion about free traits. She displayed aspects of her natural disposition toward anxiety, thinking this would be well received as honest.

Showing your vulnerabilities is not thee same as being authentic.. totaly different things!

I imagine this “fake it till you make it” strategy can, at first blush, feel disingenuous to some. But I believe that changing your personality to match different situations isn’t inauthentic at all.

If you strongly agreed with each of these statements, you are likely to be a high self-monitor. That means you pay close attention to how you behave in different situations, varying your behavior in response to the environment around you.

In the end, we return to two pivotal questions: Who are you? and How are you doing? The first concerns your identity and personality; the second, whether your life is going well. And we’ve concluded that each of these is intimately related to the personal projects you are pursuing.

Having core projects is why you get up in the morning. They bring meaning and significance and direction to our lives and, ultimately, define who we are.

Bernard Williams, a philosopher who has thought deeply about this subject, has speculated that without such projects in our lives we may be inclined to wonder if it is worth carrying on at all.

Biogenic alignment: Aligning your core projects with your biogenic traits increases their sustainability.

Make them public: A powerful way of enhancing the likelihood of our projects progressing well is the commitment that we make to them.

Though this can fireback sometimes

Men, for example, find that when they make stressful projects visible, their projects become vulnerable, whereas women show the reverse pattern—publicizing stressful projects makes them less vulnerable.

Reframe your goals:

Reframing your personal projects by slightly changing the way you phrase them boosts their sustainability, helping you reach your goal.

There is much written about the need for work-life balance as a way of minimizing the stress of multiple demands. But sometimes balance is not possible—the demands of your professional life call for a sustained period of action. Or a child’s sickness simply can’t be ignored. In both cases you give priority to a project that comes with a sense of urgency and importance that requires you to be strategically unbalanced. Your other projects, neglected for the moment, can return to the forefront at a later time.

Well-said about work-life balance

By examining your core projects and how they can be sustained you will increase your power to change the trajectory of your life.

George Kelly made about such an approach to life: “A good deal is said these days about being oneself. . . . This strikes me as a very dull way of living; in fact, I would be inclined to argue that all of us would be better off if we set out to be something other than what we are. Well, I’m not so sure we would all be better off—perhaps it would be more accurate to say life would be a lot more interesting.”

Ultimately, we found that the most illuminating measure of our well-being is not well-being at all but well-doing—a

Instead, I’d like to leave you with one final piece of advice—one that may seem surprising: Embrace the unexpected.