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

by Benjamin P. Hardy

Purpose trumps personality. Without a deep sense of purpose, your personality will be based on avoiding pain and pursuing pleasure, which is an animalistic and low-level mode of operating. This is the common view and approach to personality for most. However, when you’re driven by purpose, you’ll be highly flexible and you’ll make decisions irrespective of pain and pleasure to create and become what you want. Moreover, if you are serious about your purpose, it will change your personality. Your purpose isn’t something you discover, but something you ultimately choose for yourself. Stop looking for it and make the choice, then allow that choice to transform you. Rather than your decisions and goals being the by-product of your personality, your personality should become the by-product of your decisions and goals. As you proactively and intentionally make positive decisions, develop skills, and seek out new experiences, your personality will develop and change in meaningful ways. It will adapt to the level of your goals and decisions, rather than your decisions and goals falling to the level of your current personality. Trying to discover your personality leads to inaction, avoidance of hard conversations, distracting yourself through consumption, and making excuses for how you’re currently living. It puts you in the passenger seat of your own life. Instead, you can, and should, be the driver. You can be the creator.