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

by Benjamin P. Hardy

The argument of this book is that your “personality” doesn’t matter. Even more, your personality is not the most fundamental aspect of who you are. Instead, your personality is surface-level, transitory, and a by-product of something much deeper.

The most fundamental aspect of your humanity is your ability to make choices and stand by those choices, what Viktor Frankl called the last of human freedoms, “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 ...

Making decisions and “choosing your own way” are not necessarily easy. There are constraints that both limit and heavily infl...

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 you...

You become who you choose to be. Yet, fully choosing who you are and will become is rare. We’ve been brainwashed into believing we don’t have such a choice. Facing the responsibility and freedom of choosing your own way is, indeed, scary.

When you decide who you’ll be and the life you’ll live, you can have anything you truly want. You can become an outlier. You can have experiences that not only shock other people but shock yourself. “Is this really happening to me?” will become your common experience.

You don’t have to be limited by what other people say you can have or achieve. If you want to be more confident and creative, or more extroverted and organized, you can become any or all of those things. If you’re timid but want to become a powerful, bold, and inspirational leader, you can become that as well.

That’s the truth of personality. It’s not innate but trained. It can and does change. It can and should be chosen and designed. Choosing one’s own way is a primary purpose of our lives. Yet there is a fear in making choices, because choices have consequences. As a result, people avoid making decisions, fail to choose their own way, and limit their capacity for growth, learning, and change.

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. They see something different and more meaningful and they never stop fueling that vision. Every single day, they maintain their vision of faith and hope and take courageous steps in that direction, accompanied by much failure and pain. With each step forward, their confidence increases and their identity becomes more flexible and less constrained by what was.

You can be the narrator of your life’s story. You don’t have to be defined by your past. It doesn’t matter what your past identity or outcomes were.

This is how successful people live: They become who they want to be by orienting their life toward their goals, not as a repeat of the past; by acting bravely as their future selves, not by perpetuating who they formerly were.

In Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert Pirsig wrote, “Steel can be any shape you want if you are skilled enough, and any shape but the one you want if you are not.”

The fact is, basing your life off personality tests, or any other external measure, is elementary and lazy. Sure, it’s helpful when growing up to get guidance and direction, but fundamental to maturity is making your own decisions, defining a meaningful purpose for yourself, and elevating yourself and others through that purpose.

Remember, personality tests are self-reported. Our view of ourselves is constantly changing based on our current focus, context, and emotions.

Vanessa’s purpose, not her personality, is the determining factor in what she can do and what she does do. Moreover, in relentlessly pursuing her purpose, her personality has changed dramatically and will continue to change.

According to the futurist, author, and founder of XPRIZE, Peter Diamandis, “A single individual driven by a purpose can change the world. And you can change the world. I truly believe that.” Diamandis calls this “MTP,” or “Massively Transformative Purpose.”

Personality is not stable but changes regardless of whether you’re purposeful about that change or not. In fact, psychologists agree that you shouldn’t be surprised to get different test scores on the same personality test at different times or even in different settings.

Personality, it turns out, is far more dynamic and malleable than was previously thought. Despite this fact, and the growing body of science that proves it, many psychologists and the general public continue to see personality from the perspective of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s—as a fixed and unalterable trait.

Choice is far more abundant, even overabundant. And as a result, responsibility for choice, and who we become as individuals and societies, is far higher.

As a human being, it is your responsibility to create yourself through the decisions you make and the environments you choose.

There is no such thing as a pure extrovert or a pure introvert. Such a man would be in the lunatic asylum. —Dr. Carl Jung

The first myth of personality is that there are personality “types.” There is no such thing as a personality type. Personality types are social or mental constructions, not actual realities. The notion is a surface-level, discriminative, dehumanizing, and horribly inaccurate way of looking at the complexity of what is a human being. There is no science behind the idea of personality types, and most of the popular personality quizzes were actually created by people who had no business trying to define people.

Although entertaining, type-based personality tests are unscientific—and would have you believe that you are essentially more limited than you really are. They portray an inaccurate and overly simplified portrait of people, filled with broad and sweeping generalizations, that anybody could feel relates to them. These tests oversimplify psychology, making people think they know more about it than they really do.

We’ve got an entire generation of social media personality gurus who can tell you anything and everything about you, from who you should date and marry to whether you should have kids or not to what you should do for work, and whether or not you’ll be successful and happy—all based on your score on a particular test. It feels scientific, but really it’s just superstition dressed up as science.

When done intentionally and strategically, defining yourself as a certain “type” of person, or giving yourself a specific label, may be useful. For instance, Jeff Goins had always wanted to be a writer, but hadn’t done anything about it. Yet, when he labeled himself as a “writer,” that identification bolstered him to start writing, and, ultimately, to become a successful author. Thus, Goins was intentional about the label he chose, and that label helped him achieve his goals.

Labels can serve goals, but goals should never serve labels. When a goal serves a label, you’ve made the label your ultimate reality, and you’ve created a life to prove or support that label. You see this when someone says, “I’m pursuing this because I’m an extrovert.” This form of goal-setting occurs when you base your goals on your current persona rather than setting goals that expand upon and change who you are.

Your personality should come from your goals. Your goals shouldn’t come ...

When someone proactively labels themself an “introvert” or even an “extrovert,” they’ve officially made themself “dumber”—unless for some reason one of those labels will enable them to achieve a particular goal.

Labels create tunnel vision. Assuming a label can lead you to being “mindless,” stopping you from seeing all of the times the label isn’t true.

When you allow yourself to stop defining yourself as a certain “type,” such as “introvert” or “extrovert,” you become far more open. Your possibilities and choices expand. Your responsibility and agency increase. You can do what you want to do, regardless of how you currently see yourself.

At different stages and seasons of your life, you’re going to display a different personality. Heck, over the course of a single day, you could portray dozens of different personalities. As podcaster Jordan Harbinger said in an interview, “Before coffee, I’m an INTJ. After coffee, I’m an ENTJ.”

Rather than looking at personality as a “type” you fit into, view it as a continuum of behaviors and attitudes that is flexible, malleable, and based on context.

Longitudinal research highlights that a person’s personality can often be explained by the social roles they espoused and relinquished throughout their life stages. Thus, social role is an oft-studied and tangible predictor of personality.

Although we think of ourselves as consistent, our behavior and attitudes are often shifting. It isn’t our behavior that is consistent, but rather our view of our behavior that makes it seem consistent.

Intentional change is emotionally rigorous—it doesn’t exactly feel good and can even be shockingly painful. If you’re unwilling to put yourself through emotional experiences, shift your perspective, and make purposeful changes to your behavior and environment, then don’t expect huge changes (at least in the short run). Becoming psychologically flexible is key to personal transformation, not overattaching to your current identity or perspectives. Becoming insatiably committed to a future purpose and embracing emotions rather than avoiding them is how radical change occurs.

Perhaps the most damaging aspect of putting people into categories or types is that such categories can be viewed as innate and unalterable. When you see people as being incapable of change, you begin to define them by their past. If someone has done something in the past, you view them as being a certain type of person who will always do that kind of thing rather than recognize that they may have changed.

Not only does your personality change over time but it changes far more than you’d expect. According to research done by Harvard psychologist Dr. Daniel Gilbert, over a ten-year period of time, you’re not going to be the same person.

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.

As you truly learn and have new experiences, you begin to see and interpret your past in new ways. If your view of your own past hasn’t changed much over recent months or years, then you haven’t learned from your past experiences and you’re not actively learning now.

An unchanging past is a sure sign of emotional detachment and rigidity—an avoidance of facing the truth and moving forward in your life. The more mature you become as a person, the more differently you’ll view prior experiences.

The more times a particular story is told, the more altered that story becomes. As time goes on and culture shifts, our view of history and particular events shifts as well. So too with memory. The past, and how we view it, is more a reflection of where we currently are than of the past itself.

Context is always superior to content because it determines the meaning, focus, emphasis, and even appearance of the content. When you change the context, you simultaneously change the content!

Our past, like any experience or event, is a subjective perspective, which we ourselves ascribe meaning to—whether positive or negative, good or bad. Without question, experiences from our past can and do impact us. But it isn’t actually our past that is impacting us, but our present interpretation and emotional attachment to that past.

To say, “That’s just the way I am because of my past” is to declare you’re emotionally stuck in your past.

Trauma can and does happen to all of us, both in large and small degrees. When our trauma is unresolved, we stop moving forward in our lives. We become emotionally rigid and shut of...

A clear indicator that someone has unresolved trauma is that his life and personality are repetitive for an extended period. But as he faces, opens up about, becomes more aware of, and ultimately reframes his trauma, he allows himself to take a positive and mature view of his past. His present and future will then stop reflecting his past.

How we describe, interpret, and identify with our past has far more to do with where we are, here and now, than it has to do with our actual past.

If you’re still angry with your parents for your childhood, for example, this speaks more to who you currently are than what actually happened in your childhood. To continue blaming any person or event from the past makes you the victim, and reflects more on you than whoever or whatever it is you’re blaming.