Personality Isn't Permanent: Break Free from Self Limiting Beliefs and Rewrite Your Story by Benjamin Hardy
BOOK REVIEWS BY BINOD
BINOD’S RATING: 7/10Benjamin Hardy draws on research to kill the popular misconception that personality--a person's consistent attitudes and behaviors--is innate and unchanging.
Hardy’s idea is to set people free from the limiting belief that our "true selves" are to be discovered. He shows how we can intentionally create our desired selves and achieve amazing goals instead. He offers practical advice for personal reinvention.
“People should be living by acting bravely as their future selves. Not by perpetuating who they formerly were.”
Key points
What is taught by parents, teachers, and society is that each one is born with a certain ‘personality’ and one should just live with it. The generally accepted norm of personality so far has been that it is innate, fixed, unalterable. In fact, the most common advice is that if one can ‘discover one’s personality’ half the battle is won. Right? Wrong, says Dr. Hardy.
Hardy starts by dissecting the following personality ‘myths’:
Personality can be categorized into “types”;
Personality is innate and fixed;
Personality comes from your past;
Personality must be discovered;
Personality is your true and “authentic” self.
Personality is largely a construct of who you are at this point in time in your current circumstances, and that personality is flexible and thus we have a choice over who we are and who we are becoming. In other words, the question “who am I?” should be replaced by the question “who am I becoming?” or “who do I want to be in the future?”
Hardy states that “you are not a single and narrow “type” of person. In different situations and around different people, you are different. Your personality is dynamic, flexible, and contextual. Moreover, your personality changes throughout your life, far more than you can presently imagine.”
His biggest pet peeve is the personality tests like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. Hardy believes that due to one’s naive acceptance of a 15 minute, pseudo-scientific personality test, one can succumb to the dangerous idea that the trajectory of their life has been predetermined by their innate personality. Such an idea is a dangerous and misleading myth. “The real lesson of the Myers-Briggs test”, as Hardy puts it, “is not some insight into your personality, but the incredible power of marketing.” This ‘incredible power of marketing’ has led this pseudo-scientific exercise to become a multi-million-dollar industry.
Another misconception is that inspiration triggers action. In fact, to the contrary, action causes inspiration. In fact, the action comes before confidence, motivation, and passion.
Personality—like passion, inspiration, motivation, and confidence—is a by-product of your decisions in life. It’s a limiting and ineffective idea to view your personality as the driving force for the decisions you make in your life.
Actually, purpose trumps personality. Because without a deep sense of purpose, your personality will be rigidly based on avoiding pain and pursuing pleasure, which is a low-level mode of living. When you’re driven by purpose, you’ll be highly flexible, and you’ll make decisions irrespective of pain and pleasure to create and become what you want.
There are four major factors that keep people stuck in their patterns. These are past trauma that has not been reframed, an identity narrative of the past, their subconscious that maintains consistency with their former self and emotions, and an environment that supports their current rather than a future identity.
Hardy urges simple methods for readers to become more aware of their predilections and living environment in order to make conscious changes, such as journaling, fasting, donating to charity, waking up an hour earlier, and pursuing different hobbies.
Your past experiences are not “to” you but rather “for” you so you should learn from failures and trauma to succeed.
So many people come into therapy with the irreconcilable beliefs that personality can’t be altered, and that they want to change. When we try to explore suppressed emotions and their history, they often don’t want to “go there.” Hardy makes a compelling argument that without “going there,” there won’t be any change.
While personality isn’t permanent, intentional change is emotionally rigorous—it doesn’t exactly feel good and can even be shockingly painful. But change is possible. To say, “That’s just the way I am because of my past” is to declare you’re emotionally stuck in your past.
In short, your personality is an effect, not a cause. The primary causes shaping your personality are your goals and the identity and behavior that flow from those goals. For most people, personality is a reaction to life events, circumstances, and social pressures. It isn’t intentionally designed. Personality isn’t questioned. It isn’t chosen.
“The world is viewed through the lens of your identity.”
What rocked
It’s a well-structured argument, right from the 4 myths of personality to the 4 factors that keep people stuck in habits.
This book takes on the multibillion-dollar personality testing business. I never liked snake oil salesmen.
I loved all the quotes he added in there.
The concepts are simple and are well fleshed out.
It has so many interesting anecdotes drawn from real life.
What sucked
A lot of talk without a lot of research.
Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they’re finished.
Conclusion
This book is for everyone, no matter where you are in life. It will expose the chinks in your thinking, compromises you may have unknowingly made about your true potential, and wake you up to your greater self.
When you’re intentional about where you’re going, you can become who you want to be and let go of who you’ve been. Your past doesn’t need to be a prologue. You don’t have to continue to behave in the same way as before. You can change—and radically so.
Personality isn’t permanent. You get to choose.