The single most important factor in determining successful aging is the personality trait of Conscientiousness. Conscientiousness is associated with a great number of positive outcomes in life. As I wrote in the first chapter, the fields of psychiatry and clinical psychology are predicated on the premise that you can change; you can will yourself or train yourself to be more conscientious, even later in life, and the benefits will still accrue to you. The latest science seems to confirm what has been argued, for millennia, by various forms of religion—that personality is malleable and one can
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