The Truth About Your Personality - Dr Benjamin Hardy - #185

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Oh, hello, friends, welcome back. My guest today is Dr. Benjamin Hardy, and we are talking about his new book, Personality Isn't Permanent. The clue is in the title. If you thought that your personality was an immutable characteristic, some innate, inbuilt, unchanging North Star that is going to guide you for the rest of your life, you're about to get red-pilled out of existence over the next 50 minutes. This conversation is really cool. There's tons of implications for how we view ourselves, our own sense of identity, how we deal with past traumas, loads of other stuff. Also if you're a fan of Enneagrams or Myers-Briggs or Colour Wheel personality tests, I've got some bad news for you. Ben reckons that they're mostly bollocks. So anyway, enjoy that. I also wanted to give a massive thank you to everyone who supported the launch of the Modern Wisdom Ultimate Life Hacks List at the start of this week. Like the most insane response I've ever had to putting something out. So thank you to everyone who has gone and downloaded it. It is still available for free. If you haven't got your copy yet, just go to chriswillex.com/lifehacks and get your copy for free over 200 ways that you can upgrade your life instantly. Right. That's it. Dr. Benjamin Hardy. Let's learn why personality isn't permanent.
Benjamin Hardy in the building. How are you doing, man?

**Benjamin Hardy** (1:44)
Doing good. Happy to be with you, man. Really happy to be with you.

**Chris Williamson** (1:46)
Very happy to be with you. Talking about personality today. How do we define it? What is a personality?

**Benjamin Hardy** (1:54)
Well, there's a lot of different ways to look at it, but I think kind of the most surface level, just basic way of looking at it is that it's your consistent attitudes and behaviors. You know, just a person's consistent way of being.

**Chris Williamson** (2:05)
Okay, so the way that you act in the world.

**Benjamin Hardy** (2:09)
Yeah, very much act and how you kind of and your attitudes, so it's how you show up regularly in situations.

**Chris Williamson** (2:15)
Okay, that seems pretty basic. That doesn't seem like there should be any debate about what's going on with it. You know, this is what you do. That's your personality. Okay, so what are the biggest myths about personality?

**Benjamin Hardy** (2:30)
One being that it's hardwired, that it's innate, that it can't change, that the best way to understand your personality is by looking to the past and, you know, which makes sense. I mean, if you're trying to understand who a person is going to be, it makes sense to go and look to the past and be like, oh, well, that's how that person's been. So that's probably how they're always going to be. Other kind of general views are that it's something you can discover. Because it's innate, because it's viewed as hardwired, your job is to discover it. And then once you've finally discovered who you truly are, then you can finally go and create that life that's tailor-made and fit perfectly for you. And you can find your perfect spouse and perfect friend, so it all fits nice and neat, and you don't have to go through any change or grinding. You know, just your life will be perfect once you've found that out.

**Chris Williamson** (3:12)
Just falls into place.

**Benjamin Hardy** (3:14)
Exactly.

**Chris Williamson** (3:15)
Okay, so if you're not, or if that's a myth, if one of the myths is that you discover your personality, which by the definition that we came up with earlier on is the way that you act in the world. If you don't discover that by looking backward, how do you discover what your personality is? Is there anything to discover?

**Benjamin Hardy** (3:38)
It depends on how you want to look at it. I think that there are things you can learn about yourself without question. But ultimately, your personality should be something you design yourself. That's obviously the core argument. The book is that it can be a choice. The research is pretty clear that over time, your personality is going to change. You, as an example, are not the same person you were five or 10 years ago.
You actually have changed. You've actually probably changed more than you think you have because we see the world through the lens of our identity. And so we think we've actually probably changed less than we actually have because we see the world through our identity. One important crucial thing here, just to clarify, is that identity and personality are two different things. Identity is how you define and describe yourself. It's your self-concept, whereas personality is how you consistently act in the world. But your identity is way more important. Your identity, again, is how you define and describe yourself. So if you said, I'm an introvert, that's a statement about your identity. It may not actually be true. In fact, I would say it's not always true. But your self-concept drives your behavior and your behavior over time becomes your personality. And so a big problem with identity is that we get very fixated on our identity. You know, we define ourselves certain ways. This is the type of person I am. It's shaped by the stories we tell about ourselves. And those stories are usually either present-based or past-based. Very rarely will you hear someone talk about who they aspire to be.