Who Are You, Really?, page 1
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
CHAPTER 1
Scanning Your Personality: The Big Picture
CHAPTER 2
Personal Projects: The Doings of Personality
CHAPTER 3
Personal Contexts: The Social Ecology of Project Pursuit
CHAPTER 4
The Myth of Authenticity: The Challenge of Being Oneself
CHAPTER 5
Well-Doing: The Sustainable Pursuit of Core Projects
EPILOGUE
APPENDIX
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
WATCH BRIAN R. LITTLE’S TED TALK
RELATED TALKS
MORE FROM TED BOOKS
ABOUT TED BOOKS
ABOUT TED
NOTES
BIBLIOGRAPHY
For Hilary and Benjamin
INTRODUCTION
Who are you? It’s a nosy question, I know, and perhaps even an uncomfortable one. If I asked you that question over a beer at a bar, you’d probably bolt for the door. But once you realized I was merely an inquisitive psychologist, I suspect you’d have a list of personality traits at the ready. “I’m an extravert,” you might say proudly. Or “I’m a nurturer,” or “I’m a worrier,” or “I am the fifth least narcissistic person on earth.” Each of us has a sense of the basic traits that define us.
Next, if I asked you why you are that way, you’d probably also have some answers already in your quiver. “Because I’m from the west coast,” you might say. Or “Because I’m an oldest child,” or “Because my dad was a drinker,” or “Because the Great Recession hit while I was in high school.” You’d have good reason to make those connections. It’s clear that outside influences—your home life, the community where you grew up, the political milieu into which you were born—have shaped your life and the way you behave.
And that’s it, you might think, it’s settled. You are who you are because of your inherent nature coupled with the external forces that have influenced you throughout your life. It isn’t really that complex, is it? You’ve spent enough years getting to know yourself that you should have the picture of your personality put together by now. Right?
You’d better settle in, because our exploration of you is just getting started.
You see, genetics and experiences aren’t everything. There is a third force that also determines your personality. And when it comes to this force, our usual assumptions have it backward; it’s not who you are that explains what you do, it’s the other way around. That, in fact, is the very idea I’m about to present to you. It is an important new way of looking at personality, and it is what I’ve spent the better part of a half-century researching and understanding.
Your life and your identity derive from more than just your inborn traits and your circumstances; they are borne of your aspirations and commitments, your dreams and your everyday doings. These defining activities are, in two words, your personal projects. Personal projects can range from the seemingly trivial pursuits of particular Thursdays to the overarching quest of your life. They include endeavors small and large, from the intimate to the professional, from the mundane to the existential. They range from “taking out the garbage” to “taking out my political opponent.” These personal projects, for better or worse, are shaped in part by both our biological traits and our social contexts. But they transcend each. Because unlike nature and nurture, they are one feature of human life that is not given to us by heredity or society but is generated from within.
You might already be wondering how much your activities could really affect something that seems as stable as your personality and sense of self. The answer is perhaps more than you might imagine. Personal projects are central not only to who you think you are but also to how well you are doing in life—whether you are flourishing or floundering, or like most of us, just muddling through as best you can. Your personal projects, in short, are key to your prospects. Learn to understand them and their impact, and you learn to guide your life in the direction you want it to go.
In these pages we’ll look closely at your personality in terms of how your life has gone and how it is going now. But we’ll also be concerned with how it might yet go in the future. This is where your personal projects come in: Once you can clearly identify your personal projects and their power, you’ll also see the degrees of freedom or spaces for movement that are open to you in determining your own course. My own personal project with this book is to help you see and steer your life—and to do this before kids with scrapes, cats with furballs, or friends who really need to talk right now divert you from plotting your future self.
As I want to make this personal for both of us, let’s start with my own account of how I came to study human personality. It was an unusually hot September afternoon in 1965 when I cautiously tapped on the office door of Professor Theodore R. Sarbin. Sarbin was an eminent scholar of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley. I was a second-year graduate student eager to join his research group. The door swung open and a voice intoned loudly, “WHO ARE YOU?” I inferred from Sarbin’s stentorian voice and the way he drew out the “o” in “who” that this was more than a desire to know my name. He wanted me to declare my identity! Or what role I was playing, what self I was enacting at that very moment. So I said, in a self-mocking, elevated tone: “A seeker after truth.” Sarbin rolled his eyes, snickered, and said, “Oh no, not another one.”
A more honest answer to Sarbin’s question would have been less grandiose but more complex and interesting. I could have described the personality traits that I’d known were mine since childhood: introverted, curious, and affable. I could have described my roles in relation to other people and the world: a psychology student, a passionate dabbler in piano, and a Kennedy supporter still aching from the assassination. But that was a lot to spurt out in a professor’s doorway. Besides, even that would not have contained an entirely accurate picture. Because at that precise moment in my life, I was undergoing a radical change spurred by the extraordinary political events unfolding around me, which I will get to shortly.
But first some context: Psychology at the time was still grappling with whether biological or social forces were more powerful, more consequential, in shaping our personalities—what, back then, we called the nature-nurture debate.
“I am, in essence, my brain, Professor Sarbin,” I could have said, aligning myself with the believers in nature, or biological determinism. Indeed, the opportunity to explore the biological basis of behavior was the reason I had chosen to go to Berkeley in the first place. Prior to grad school I had been a research assistant in a neuropsychology laboratory, and when I applied to grad school, I was convinced that what shapes our personalities is primarily genetic and neuropsychological—what I call biogenic influences. I believed that the study of the brain would be the best route to understanding who we really are.
Or I could have sworn my allegiance to the nurture camp. I was a short, skinny kid from the west coast of Canada, the son of a whimsical Irish father and a nurturing English mother, and raised in a whimsically nurturing environment. These sociogenic influences aligned with Sarbin’s view of what shapes our behavior: He saw individuals as the products of social and cultural forces that provide codes, roles, and scripts for how to live.
At the time, there was also a new twist developing around the nature-nurture debate. An interdisciplinary team of psychologists and anatomists at Berkeley had demonstrated that by enriching the external living environments of rodents, they could directly change the animals’ brain structure and biochemistry.1 Animals reared with social stimulation and complex, exploratory objects in their cages (“friends and toys,” as the researchers put it) literally had heavier brains and more complex neural circuitry. This was groundbreaking and controversial stuff, carrying potential implications for improving the quality of life for mice and men (and wolves and women). Yes, biological influences were necessary for a full understanding of behavior, but they were not fixed and immutable; change was possible.
By now, of course, psychology has moved way beyond the old nature-nurture debate of my student days. We now know that these influences are interpenetrating. It is possible to nurture our natures—that was, after all, the lesson we were taught by those little rodents with friends and toys in Berkeley.2
But as I would come to understand, these answers to “Who are you?” simply don’t provide the best insights for understanding our true natures. What I have been exploring since that fateful knock on Sarbin’s door is how our singular, idiosyncratic pursuits—our personal projects—not only rival the biological and social explanations for who we are, but transform the way we think about each of them. These projects are even powerful enough drivers to make us act out of character, redefining our very personalities. I’ve experienced this myself.
As I hinted earlier, I was in the midst of a fundamental personal transformation when I entered Sarbin’s office. I had arrived in Berkeley a year earlier in September 1964, the very week that the Free Speech Movement (FSM) began on campus. The university administration had just banned tables from the area students were using to recruit volunteers for freedom rides in the American South. The policy sparked student demonstrations, sit-ins, and teach-ins. Protestors claimed that the massive, distinguished university—a self-proclaimed multiversity—was in thrall to its Nobel laureates and industrial contracts and had little concern for its students.
The FSM captured my imagination, and its impact was palpable. It was a call to action—to get involved in projects that became deeply personal, even self-defining. Suddenly the introspective psychology student in me, one who would rather sing about revolution than start it, felt driven to speak out to overcome injustice. This was new, and it shook my sense of identity to its roots. What’s more, that shift propelled me not only to think and feel new things but to act in new ways. This pursuit that I had chosen was, almost invisibly, reshaping the person I was. Projects like “sitting in” or “going to the demonstration” or “seeking justice” were now commitments—acts of meaning with consequences for the person I was becoming.
Which takes us back to the question I originally asked you—the same one that Sarbin startled me with that sweltering day when I knocked on his door: “Who are you?” Understanding yourself as simply the product of biogenic forces prodding you or sociogenic forces shaping you is unduly limiting. I want to convince you that you are also shaped by the personal projects that draw from both your biology and your culture and can, as we will see, transform both. Such projects may cause you to stretch yourself in new directions, to create a sense of meaning in your life. This new way of thinking about yourself will allow us to ask: Who are you, really? And equipped with that self-knowledge, you can then understand how you’re doing—and begin actively navigating your future.
1
Scanning Your Personality: The Big Picture
So, how are you doing? Are you happy? Are you accomplishing the things that matter to you? Are you living up to your capabilities? Are you able to love and be loved? Are you physically well? Is there some laughter in your life? If you answer yes to all such questions, we might say that you are flourishing. If you answer with an emphatic “No!” or even an eyeball-rolling “Seriously, get real,” you might be better described as floundering. And in between these extremes, we might find you in the middle, doing reasonably well considering the circumstances.
Biogenic traits deeply influence whether you flourish or flounder. You may be temperamentally predisposed to viewing your life positively and optimistically, even though the objective reality that you confront might be rather bleak. Or despite living in a relatively safe, nurturing, and prosperous environment, you may see your life as half empty, or utterly miserable. The forces of nature and nurture that provide answers to “Who are you?” are also key to answering the question “How are you doing?” The relation between these biogenic and sociogenic influences can be simply graphed as:
Whether you are flourishing or floundering, in other words, is partly determined by the combination of biogenic and sociogenic sources that impinge on you during the course of your life. These aren’t the only influences, but we need to understand how they work before we explore how your personal projects empower you to deliberately design who and how you are. So let us begin with a brief tour through the inner biogenic and the outer sociogenic forces that shape your personality.
Personal Zoom: Scanning the Inner You
Imagine a microscope that dips under your skin and zooms down to reveal your tissues, organelles, cell nuclei, chromosomes, and genes. It darts up to your brain and homes in on a single neuron firing a squirt of neurotransmitters and the explosion of activity in associated cells. It then zooms out to focus on the physical body reading this book wondering about who it is and how it’s doing. This “it” is the biogenic you.
Within personality psychology, those who study the biogenic perspective explore how your relatively stable personality traits influence your quality of life. These stable traits correspond to differences in brain structure and function—those microscopic events we just saw when zooming in on the inner you. These biogenic features can be assessed by measures of electrical activity in various regions of your brain or through analyses of patterns of neurotransmitter activity. They can also be revealed through personal genomic analysis, which can now be done for roughly $200. In My Beautiful Genome, the Danish science writer Lone Frank relates the fascinating account of her quest to examine aspects of her personal genome and its links to her health and personality. She discovered that she had a gene variant that predisposed her to negative emotionality and what she most agreeably describes as her “own miserably low score on agreeableness.”3
Some of these biogenic personality traits will incline you toward being happy or healthy or accomplished or, conversely, will explain why you despair over life’s various hiccups. Let’s say your life is flourishing right now—you are happy, healthy, and successful, certainly compared to your mopey best friend, but maybe even in an absolute sense. This may be due to your having biogenic features of temperament and personality that dispose you to adopt a positive outlook. Even when life sucks, your stable dispositions make you resilient and buoyant. You continue to grow and prosper. Indeed, you may have pronoia, the delusional belief that other people are plotting your well-being or saying good things about you behind your back.4 Your friend’s stable traits, in comparison, may not be conducive to flourishing at all. She is angry and defiant and unsatisfied, and according to her mother, she was like this from birth. She is temperamentally disposed to being ill-disposed. She flounders.
The Big Five: The Original You
Did you know that it is virtually impossible for you to lick the outside of your own elbow? And did you know, strange as it may sound, that how you responded to that piece of information—whether and how you attempted the pursuit—might provide a hint about the stable traits you are born with and that form the bedrock of your personality? Let me explain: While there are thousands of ways we might distinguish people on the basis of their traits, personality psychologists have reached a consensus that people vary from one another along five basic dimensions: the Big Five traits. The Big Five have major consequences for how our lives play out.5 If you would like to get a quick assessment of where you stand on these major traits, the Appendix provides some questions that can guide your own self-assessment.
The five dimensions spell out an acronym—OCEAN (or CANOE if you prefer):
Open to Experience (vs. Closed)
Conscientious (vs. Casual)
Extraverted (vs. Introverted)
Agreeable (vs. Disagreeable)
Neurotic (vs. Stable)
Each of these traits has a strong biogenic base, and researchers in personality neuroscience are now identifying the neural structures and pathways underlying them.6 Because the same dimensions emerge in virtually all countries, cultures, and linguistic groups, these can be regarded as universal dimensions of personality. This doesn’t mean that all humans are the same—far from it. Rather, it means that everywhere we go, individuals differ from one another along these dimensions. Also, these five traits do not have rigid boundaries; individuals are aligned with each trait on a spectrum, with most of them piled up in the middle of the range and fewer appearing at the extremes. Here is a short overview of each one.
Open to Experience
Those who are high in openness to experience are easily attracted to new ventures and show alacrity in exploring alternative ways of doing things. Those low in openness prefer the tried and true and would, unlike their more open friends, be very comfortable using a phrase like “tried and true.” A landmark study at the Institute of Personality Assessment and Research at Berkeley (now the Institute of Personality and Social Research) revealed that openness to experience was the defining feature of individuals who are exceptionally creative.7 In an intriguing study by one of the prime developers of the Big Five, open individuals were found to experience aesthetic chills or piloerections—their hair stood up—when exposed to music or art that moved them.8
