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Drs. Christopher Soto and Jule Specht shows that personality changes accelerate when people are leading meaningful and satisfying lives.
As Gilbert says, “Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.”
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.
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”
inspiration follows action, not the other way around.
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.
Purpose trumps personality.
Personality tests are fast food for the soul. They make you believe you can discover your true self in an instant.
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?’).”
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.
Your vision of where or who you want to be is the greatest asset you have. Without having a goal it’s difficult to score. —Paul Arden
Dr. Stephen Covey once said, “If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.”
Personal confidence comes from making progress toward goals that are far bigger than your present capabilities. —Dan Sullivan
Mattis, the twenty-sixth United States secretary of defense, put it, “If you haven’t read hundreds of books, you are functionally illiterate and you will be incompetent because your personal experiences aren’t broad enough to sustain you.”
Napoleon Hill stated, “Desire is the starting point of all achievement, not a hope, not a wish, but a keen pulsating desire which transcends everything.”
Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited to all we now know and understand, while imagination embraces the entire world, and all there ever will be to know and understand. —Albert Einstein
in the book The Power of Habit, author Charles Duhigg explains that when you improve one area of your life, all other areas improve as well.
In his book Zero to One, billionaire Peter Thiel explains why “process” thinking leads to mediocrity. Instead, Thiel suggests having a “definite” attitude and purpose. As he states:
A mistake repeated more than once is a decision. —Paulo Coelho
Alain de Botton said, “Anyone who isn’t embarrassed by who they were twelve months ago isn’t learning enough.”
the fixed mindset is an approach to life defined by the past.
As trauma expert Gabor Maté, MD, says, “What we call the personality is often a jumble of genuine traits and adopted coping styles that do not reflect our true self at all but the loss of it.”
Our true and authentic self isn’t who we currently are. It isn’t our limitations. Instead, it is our deepest-held aspirations, dreams, and goals.
Rather than creating the life we want, we build the life that allows our problems to exist unresolved.
Rather than adapting our personality to match our goals, we adapt our goals to match our current and limited personality.
The less you hold on to mistakes or painful experiences, the better you’re able to adapt to what the situation requires and perform in order to achieve your goals. What happened in the past doesn’t impact the next thing you do, or stop you from being entirely present in this moment.
According to Dan Sullivan, the founder of Strategic Coach, when your “status” becomes more important than your “growth,” you usually stop growing.
Confidence is the foundation of imagination, and it comes from seeing progress.
What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we begin from. —T. S. Eliot
As the basketball legend Michael Jordan is credited for saying, “Once I made a decision, I never thought about it again.”
Dr. Hendricks calls this the “Upper Limit Problem.” When you begin making improvements in your life, you’re going to subconsciously try to get back to where you feel comfortable. This is emotional. If you’re not used to feeling amazing all the time, then when you start allowing yourself to feel good, your subconscious will grow uneasy. It wants negative emotions because negative chemicals are what literally make up your body.
stopped
“The way you see [a child] is the way you treat them and the way you treat them is [who] they [will] become.”
Your input determines your outlook. Your outlook determines your output, and your output determines your future.
You need to make one decision that makes a million other decisions either easier, automatic, or irrelevant.
You can choose the kind of personality you are going to have. It is not something you are stuck with. It is not something you have to have, even if you have never elected anything to the contrary.
Life is simple. Everything happens for you, not to you. —Byron Katie
