Is Your Personality Fixed?

(Note: This article was originally published to JamieMcSloy.co.uk on May 15th, 2019. I’m going through an old backup of the site, which has hundreds of posts that aren’t currently uploaded. As I’m working hard on updating the site – and releasing The Vault, letting these old posts be the daily posts for a while.)

Is Your Personality Fixed?

Recently I got embroiled in a mini-Twitter conversation about whether personality was fixed or not, and whether people can change their core cognitive framework and “completely transform.”

You’ll have to excuse some of the vague terminology in this article.

My initial thoughts as per the tweet:

I’ve experimented heavily with this over years. Would have disagreed in the past. Now agree.

Most people are infinitely more malleable than they think, but not fully malleable by any means. There’s a core “self” that processes the world at a below-subconscious level. https://t.co/yv2MRdrQnR

— Jamie McSloy (@JamieMcSloy) May 12, 2019

And the request for me to fill in the blanks with a blog post:

Would love an article on this. Not sure how to link it with copywriting but it’s interesting as hell. I believe that people can change about 15%. The numbers arbitrary but its the idea that they can nudge themselves in a direction and use secondary actions to course correct 1/2

— Sal t fellow (@Sal_TFello) May 15, 2019

And, to save me having to rewrite again something I’ve already tweeted, let’s paste in some supporting thoughts:

I wrote the other day about personality malleability, and I don’t think anyone really realises the extent to which you can push yourself.

I used to. Need to bring that back.

So many think lifting weights and brushing their teeth twice a day makes them lifehackers.

It’s tragic https://t.co/GS4mcI5gXj

— Jamie McSloy (@JamieMcSloy) May 15, 2019

Now, let’s get to the topic of conversation.

My Experiments And “Life Hacking” Sessions

Throughout the years, I’ve experimented prettily heavy with trying to “transform” and otherwise find the limits of what my personality is.

Picture me in my late teens. It’ll surprise all of you, I’m sure, to know that I was an introverted nerd for my teens.

I’ll cut the story short and surprise none of you by saying I was an introverted nerd during my teens. There’s no surprise. A lot of introverted kids take a while to come into their own and find people they can be social around.

What was different about me was that I decided to take this to an extreme when I decided to try and “fix” my introversion. To again cut the story short, when I decided to say, approach girls, I took a bus to a major city where nobody recognised me, and approached hundreds of girls in a single weekend.

Later, I decided that my flat wasn’t somewhere I should be during the day; so I did the whole “go outside and don’t come back all day” thing. And I told myself to talk to anyone I knew, never say no to parties, and the like.

And this self-transformation tendency through my life hasn’t just been a social thing; I’ve tried different diets, different mental frameworks, I tried polyphasic sleeping for a while; different languages, arts, hobbies, spiritual practices.

I’ve tried all of it.

And to be honest, a lot has changed and I’ve gotten better as the various gaps in my psychological development have filled out, and there’s still a long way to go.

That said…

Under The Hood…

Because of those experiences, I have in the past thought that personality was malleable in its entirety. Honestly, most people are entirely more malleable than they’ll ever believe; I think of World War II where farmhands were given a gun and told they were soldiers or trained as fighter pilots within a matter of weeks and months; and whilst there was a high fatality rate, a lot of those men managed to become soldiers.

And naturally, you can stick a man on a desert island today, or blind-drop someone in a foreign country with nothing, and they’ll have to learn a whole new set of skills and bring other, undeveloped aspects of themselves into use that otherwise might lay dormant their whole lives.

However, what I’m not so sure of when you have dramatic shifts in being is that anything “under the hood” is changing quite so dramatically.

At my height of youthful popularity, I’d go out multiple times a week; get dozens of random notifications as people called, texted and otherwise talked my ear off; this didn’t fundamentally change my tendency towards introversion. I was still an introvert, just an introvert in disguise as an extrovert.

Emotion

At a more subtle level, you have a set of cognitive processes which are likely something you’ll always fall back on; a decision making tree that is possibly impossible to train out; if a martial artist spends their life trying to overcome the basest hardwired physical reactions, then it’s likely that there’s a similar aspect with behaviour change and your mental hardwiring.

Say you err more on the logical side of the spectrum as opposed to the emotional side; you’ll likely never make decisions primarily through emotion in your life, and when people say, “You’re good with emotions” it’s likely because you’ve learned to compensate internally, (i.e. you recognise the need to use some emotion,) and externally, (you realise that other people act emotionally, and thus you get better at reacting logically whilst taking their emotions into account.)

Practicalities

If you’re like me, then you probably read the above and thought, “Jamie… that’s all well and good but what do you actually do with this information?”

I remember years back when a friend tried to explain MBTI and cognitive functions to me asking the same question.

And the reality is, according to said friend, that that’s the sort of question only a certain cognitively-built person is going to ask.

Some people want to know who they are, some people are drawn to new experiences and don’t care about identity, and some folks want to know what they get out of it.

And that’s the sort of thing that I believe is probably hardwired on account of the fact it takes all sorts to build a society, and genetics likely selects for a certain amount of people in any given society to be wired a certain way.

As an example, a society will need a certain amount of warriors and it’ll need a certain amount of peace-minded matronly types. Too many warriors, a warlike band that survives a generation before killing itself; too many lovers, and the competing warrior tribe kills you all.

That’s a tangent, but to close it out; the first thing you have to do is work out what you are, how your brain works and what you want in terms of a vaguer, wider scope in life. It’s worth saying that I don’t believe that you can find this out with an online quiz; it’s something that comes from introspection and self-realisation.

But then… I would say that, given that’s who I am.

We’ll talk about practical applications (so far as we can,) another time.