Personality Isn't Permanent: Break Free from Self-Limiting Beliefs and Rewrite Your Story

by Benjamin P. Hardy

Instead, your personality is surface-level, transitory, and a by-product of something much deeper.

“To choose one’s own way.” Choosing your own way has at least two key meanings: making decisions about what you want to happen and choosing how you respond to what does happen. Choosing one’s own way is what makes one human—and the more you own the power of your own decision-making, the more your life and outcomes will be within your control.

The two most crucial factors influencing your ability to make choices are your social and cultural environments, as well as your emotional development as a person. The more emotionally evolved you become, the less defined you’ll be by your past and the less constrained you’ll be by your circumstances.

Instead of being fixed, you will be flexible. Instead of avoiding or suppressing emotions, you’ll embrace and be transformed through them.

Through your learning and experience, you’ll transform as a person.

“It is our choices, Harry, that show what we truly are, far more than our abilities.”

You become who you choose to be. Yet, fully choosing who you are and will become is rare.

Creativity is risky business. It requires vulnerability and courage—with a high probability of mistakes and failures along the way.

When you decide who you’ll be and the life you’ll live, you can have anything you truly want.

You’re becoming increasingly confident in your ability to see something in your mind and then watch it unfold experientially. You’re seeing yourself become surrounded by others who live by creation and design, rather than default and passivity.

That’s the truth of personality. It’s not innate but trained. It can and does change.

Yet there is a fear in making choices, because choices have consequences.

In order to become a new person, you must have a new goal— a purpose worth pursuing. Your goal is the reason you develop new attributes and skills, and have curated transformational experiences. Without a meaningful goal, attempting change lacks meaning, requires unsustainable willpower, and ultimately leads to failure.

The only thing “special” about those who transform themselves and their lives is their view of their future. They refuse to be defined by the past.

People use the past as the excuse to remain stuck in habits and attitudes that keep them from growing.

Blaming the past means you’re off the hook. You’re not responsible and you have no personal agency.

The most successful people in the world base their identity and internal narrative on their future, not their past.