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

by Benjamin P. Hardy

I came to grasp just how finite life is, and how coddled many are from the realities of the world.

I’m an ordinary person experiencing a humbling and transformative life. I want to help you do the same—whatever that means or looks like for you.

Your personality changes over time regardless of intention. But once you make it intentional, your level of change will be dramatic and directed, not random.

The personalities of nearly everyone in the study were completely different than the researchers expected.

There was little to no overlap from the questionnaires taken sixty-three years earlier. As the researchers state, “We hypothesized that we would find evidence of personality stability over an even longer period of 63 years, but our correlations did not support this hypothesis.”

when asked to analyze the difference between their former and current selves, people can easily recognize changes in their personality over the previous ten years. Even still, people consistently expect only minor changes to occur over the next decade.

This is why, regardless of the evidence of change from our former to our present selves, we still often feel like the same person. In the present, we always feel like “ourselves,” despite the fact that our consistent emotions and behaviors—even our habits and environment—are entirely different from what they were years ago.

adults become less creative and imaginative as they age, and increasingly fixed and dogmatic in their narrow viewpoints.

identity researcher Dr. Hal Hershfield said, “The analogy of the future self as another person may seem like a strange one, but it is rather powerful when it comes to understanding long-term decision-making.”

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.

Life starts taking on a whole new meaning when you begin thinking right now what your future self will want. Rather than making decisions based on your current identity, you could begin making decisions your future self would love and appreciate.

Yes, people’s behavior can appear to be, and often is, predictable and consistent over time. But the reason for that consistency is not a fixed and unalterable personality. Instead, there are four far deeper reasons, which keep people stuck in patterns: They continue to be defined by past traumas that haven’t been reframed. They have an identity narrative based on the past, not the future. Their subconscious keeps them consistent with their former self and emotions. They have an environment supporting their current rather than future identity.

“I cried because I had no shoes until I met a man who had no feet.” No shoes is relative.

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.

It isn’t the contents of your past that need changing, but how you view them today. As Marcel Proust said, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

Every time you face your past, you change it. Every time you face your future with honesty and courage, you become more flexible and mature. You build confidence, which enhances your imagination. You stop being as limited by who you were and how you feel, and instead, you’re enabled to be and do what you want, regardless of what is involved in being and doing it.

inspiration follows action, not the other way around.

what you do for a living is much less important than how you do it.”

Both passion and motivation are effects, not causes. As Dr. Jerome Bruner, a Harvard psychologist, said, “You more likely to act yourself into feeling than feel yourself into action.” As stated previously, confidence is the same way. You can’t have it first; it must come as a by-product of chosen and goal-consistent action.

Personality—like passion, inspiration, motivation, and confidence—is a by-product of your decisions in life.

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.

Why be limited based on who you currently are? Why avoid failure and default due to a fragile identity? Why not watch yourself become someone great as a result of your own choosing and efforts?

the initial personality you fall in love with will not be the same person two, five, ten, or twenty years later. As the context and complexity of the relationship evolves—jobs, money, moving to new locations, kids, travel, aging, tragedies, successes, new information, new experiences, cultural shifts, identity shifts—each party’s personality will change.

Your authentic self is not who you currently are, and it is definitely not who you used to be. Your authentic self is what you most believe in and who you aspire to be. Moreover, your authentic self is going to change. Being authentic is about being honest, and being honest is about facing the truth, not justifying your limitations because you don’t want to be uncomfortable have hard conversations.

“If the ladder is not leaning against the right wall, every step we take just gets us to the wrong place faster.”

You will only be able to control your time and yourself when you truly determine what you want for yourself.

Your goals must be consciously chosen and then fiercely pursued.

Spending your days on activities leading you to something incredibly important, something you truly value, ...

Knowledge is key to setting goals. You can’t pursue something you don’t know exists.

Creating better goals—and thus designing a better future—requires learning more, changing your perspective, and opening yourself up to something new.

Don’t avoid experiences that will shape and transform you. Your future self must be stronger, wiser, and more capable than your current self. That can only happen through rigorous, challenging, and new experiences.

Desires aren’t innate. They are trained and fueled. They are clung to and identified with. Your desires shouldn’t be mistaken as the “real” you. They are simply things you’ve attached meaning to, which you can also detach from or change the meaning of.

You can get yourself to want anything. You might as well be intentional about what you train yourself to want.

Right now, you don’t truly want what your future self wants. Your future self is an acquired taste.

You can build confidence through small but consistent actions reflecting your future self. You can also build confidence through daring and bold power moves toward your future self.

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

Your future self isn’t you. Your future self would do things differently, hopefully better, than how you do things now.

Your future self should be evolved and different from your current self.

To stay the same, although it is expected and even culturally celebrated, means you’re not learning, advancing, and changing. Instead, you’re stuck in a story, avoiding...

Who cares who you’ve been. Who do you want to be? That’s your true and authentic self (for now).

When you truly commit to the results you want, then your life starts improving. Your future self and the one major goal is what you should be committed to. Everything you do needs to be filtered through that one major goal.

“Are you interested in achieving these goals, or are you committed?” to which Assaraf responded, “What’s the difference?” His mentor responded: “If you’re interested, you come up with stories, excuses, reasons, and circumstances about why you can’t or why you won’t. If you’re committed, those go out the window. You just do whatever it takes.”

You’ll know you’re serious about improving your results when you really begin tracking everything you do, down to the minutest detail.

“When performance is measured, performance improves. When performance is measured and reported, the rate of improvement accelerates.”

According to expectancy theory, you cannot be motivat...

A prediction error is another term for failing. Failing is another term for learning. And learning is another term for changing.

Avoid consumption at night. Create peak experiences in the morning.

My goals are framed by answering the following questions: Where am I now? What were the wins from the past ninety days? What are the wins I want from the next ninety days? Where do I want to be in three years? Where do I want to be in one year?

The truth about personality is that it can, should, and does change. Your goals shape your identity. Your identity shapes your actions. And your actions shape who you are and who you’re becoming. This is how personality is developed.

making commitments about ourselves and our future should not be done while we’re in a traumatic or emotionally broken state.