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

by Benjamin P. Hardy

But there’s a dark reality about them, and the entire notion of “personality” in general, which limits—and in some cases ruins—the lives of countless people.

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.

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.

Through your learning and experience, you’ll transform as a person. Your circumstances will change.

Who you become is a choice—which only you can make.

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

You become who you choose to be.

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

You don’t have to be limited by what other people say you can have or achieve.

That’s the truth of personality. It’s not innate but trained.

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.

You are not “caused” by your past.

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

“Steel can be any shape you want if you are skilled enough, and any shape but the one you want if you are not.”

“A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”

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

“A single individual driven by a purpose can change the world.

Personality is not stable but changes regardless of whether you’re purposeful about that change or not.

As a human being, it is your responsibility to create yourself through the decisions you make and the environments you choose. And as you’ll find, you have been creating yourself all along, even if unintentionally.

There is no such thing as a personality type.

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

“The more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you.”

Labels create tunnel vision.

personality changes accelerate when people are leading meaningful and satisfying lives.

Becoming insatiably committed to a future purpose and embracing emotions rather than avoiding them is how radical change occurs.

Extreme change is more than possible.

Personality changes over time.

Who you want to be in the future is more important than who you are now, and should actually inform who you are now.

“causal determinism”—the idea that everything that happens or exists is caused by antecedent conditions or events.

that when you begin actively and intentionally moving forward in your life, not only does your future get better but your past does as well. Your past increasingly becomes something happening for you, not to you.

Your past can change, and it must change. Your past evolves as you evolve.

your memory is not an inert filing cabinet. Instead, it is fluid and constantly changing as you have new experiences.

Context is always superior to content because it determines the meaning, focus, emphasis, and even appearance of the content.

When our trauma is unresolved, we stop moving forward in our lives.

Marcel Proust said, “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”

Psychological flexibility is the skill of being fluid and adaptive, holding your emotions loosely, and moving toward chosen goals or values.

Emotional development is at the core of understanding personality.

Every time you face your past, you change it.

Emotions are the doorway to growth and learning.

book So Good They Can’t Ignore You,

“Passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before.

You can’t have it first; it must come as a by-product of chosen and goal-consistent action.

Passion is the prize, but you have to invest first.

The most successful people in the world know that work is about helping and creating value for other people.

“The path to happiness is about finding someone who you want to make happy, someone whose happiness is worth devoting yourself to.”

Developing a powerful relationship isn’t about “finding,” but collaboratively creating and becoming new people together, through the relationship.

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.

The desire to be “authentic” keeps people stuck in unhealthy patterns,

If authenticity is the value you prize most in life, there’s a danger that you’ll stunt your own development.

Your authentic self is what you most believe in and who you aspire to be.