PDF Summary:Personality Isn't Permanent, by Benjamin Hardy

In Personality Isn’t Permanent, organizational psychologist and entrepreneurial speaker Benjamin Hardy argues that, while most people see personality as fixed and essential to who they are, this is false and unhealthy. In reality, he explains, personality is highly changeable—and with the right approach, you can become whoever you want to be.

In this guide, we’ll explore Hardy’s arguments about commonly-held misconceptions about personality and what the truth about personality is. We’ll also discover how, with the right mindset and strategy, you can create the future you’d like to have and become who you want to be.

Along the way, our guide will explore both parallels and differences between Hardy’s ideas and those of other personal growth authors.

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On a smaller scale, this involves choosing behaviors that are consistent with your primary goal. For instance, you might choose leisure activities that replenish you and leave you energized to keep making progress instead of things that merely stimulate you and leave you feeling drained. On a larger scale, this involves basing your broader life commitments on your primary goal. For example, you might choose a job that pushes your comfort zone but helps you develop skills that will help you reach your goal.

People’s Recognition of the Value of Delayed Gratification Throughout History

Doing what’s uncomfortable in the moment but better for you in the long run may be one of the deepest, most fundamental strategies for living a good life—so fundamental that humans have known it throughout all of recorded history.

Psychologist Jordan Peterson argues that the millennia-old religious practice of ritual sacrifice reflects our ancestors’ knowledge of the benefits of delaying gratification. While people might see ancient sacrifice rituals as barbaric and superstitious, Peterson argues that they were symbolic representations of the truth that you have to sacrifice short-term comfort for the future to have a good life.

Ancient Stoic philosophers also recognized the value of delayed gratification. Marcus Aurelius, arguably the most famous of the Stoics, preached the importance of delaying gratification, arguing that it’s better to suffer and be better for it in the future than to have it easy today.

These ancient truths about the importance of delaying gratification are also recognized by modern science. Psychology research shows that resisting impulses is necessary for making healthy lifestyle decisions, completing your goals, and maintaining healthy relationships. This research supports Hardy’s argument that you should prioritize long-term benefits over short-term gratification. Furthermore, Hardy adds to this research by clarifying that your primary goal helps you choose behaviors that have long-term benefits.

Strategies for Making Goal-Oriented Decisions

Hardy offers a few strategies to help you make better decisions and use your time more intentionally. These include the following five strategies:

1) Go to Bed and Wake Up Earlier

If you wake up earlier than usual, Hardy says, you can use the extra time in the morning to work toward your goals. Since making progress gives you a sense of momentum, doing so first thing in the morning will help you feel motivated for the rest of your day.

At the other end of the day, if you commit to going to bed earlier, you’ll have less free time in the evening. This will pressure you to use your downtime for more restorative and rewarding things like spending time with family rather than watching a mindless TV show.

(Shortform note: While this advice may be helpful for most people, some individuals may not benefit from sleeping and waking earlier. In Why We Sleep, Matthew Walker says that some people focus better in the evenings and worse in the mornings, and that it’s strongly tied to genetics. This is the result of evolution; it was adaptive for our ancestors to have some people awake later than others so that there were always people watching out for predators. Unfortunately, it’s extremely challenging to change when you feel naturally most rested. If you are someone who focuses better in the evenings, modify Hardy’s advice to suit your specific needs.)

2) Surround Yourself With Reminders of Your Goals

Hardy also advocates that having small, frequent reminders of your optimal future in your environment helps you stay focused on your primary goal This translates to more motivation and self-control. Thus, it makes it easier to continue living your new lifestyle and prevents you from lapsing into unhealthy habits. A reminder could be a certain book that’s always on your nightstand or getting a tattoo related to a commitment you’ve made.

Remind Yourself of Your Goals by Choosing Different Environments

While Hardy does touch on the idea of altering your overall environment in the book, he mainly focuses on adding small token reminders to your environment—such as symbolic items to help you remember your primary goal. An additional way to consistently remind yourself of your new identity and lifestyle is making commitments that change the environments you’ll be in on an ongoing basis.

For instance, enrolling in therapy and joining a sports team are commitments that involve regularly spending time in new environments. When you commit to spending time in environments that help you reach your goals—for example by helping you become more fit or attain new skills—the environments themselves can serve as constant reminders of your primary goal and optimal self.

3) Limit Access to Temptations and Distractions

The more accessible temptations are, the easier it is to give in to them. Therefore, Hardy says that increasing the difficulty of seeking out temptations—things that would distract or impede you from meeting your goal—helps you resist them. For example, if you’re trying to eat healthily, not keeping unhealthy food in the house makes it a lot harder to cave to temptation—doing so would require a whole trip to the store.

Additionally, limit reminders of temptations so that you think about—and therefore give in to—them less. For instance, if you’re trying to use your time more intentionally, turning off notifications on your social media means you won’t be constantly reminded of this potential distraction and will thus be less likely to indulge in mindless scrolling.

(Shortform note: Since you can’t always avoid being around temptations, it’s important to know how to resist them when they’re easily accessible. In The Willpower Instinct, psychologist Kelly McGonigal suggests a strategy called “surfing the urge” for handling feelings of temptation as they arise. Rather than trying to ignore your urges, she argues you should accept urges as they come up—but choose not to act on them. She argues this is because trying to resist a thought makes you obsess about it, while allowing yourself to have the thought helps you let it go.)

4) Journal Intentionally to Change How You Think

Hardy recommends regularly writing about your goals and optimal future as a way to keep yourself in touch with your ideals and your vision for the future. Not only does it remind you of your commitments, but it also can be a helpful way to process information and change the way you think about your life and yourself.

By setting aside time to intentionally write and think about things from a more intentional perspective than your habitual one, you practice and get better at new ways of thinking. For example, journaling as your future self can help you learn how to think more like them, and journaling about things you’re grateful for can increase your overall gratitude in life.

(Shortform note: Science bears out the idea that journaling about your future self and your goals helps you achieve goals. One study showed that college students assigned to write down their future goals experienced higher academic achievement and were less likely to drop out. Additionally, writing your goals down helps you internalize a more vivid image of what your goals are, and people whose goals can be described specifically and vividly are 1.2 to 1.4 times more likely to complete their goals than others.)

5) Use Pressure Strategically

Hardy argues that increased pressure to complete your goals helps you build motivation and become more flexible and creative in the way you overcome obstacles. By strategically subjecting yourself to increased pressure, you can force yourself to quickly meet goals that you would otherwise never achieve or that would take a much longer time. One way of increasing feelings of pressure is by putting yourself under strict time constraints (like telling your boss you’ll have an important project completed by a challenging deadline). Another way to do this is by putting yourself under financial constraints (like having a friend hold onto a large sum of money that you don’t get back until you complete a goal).

Acting Before Feeling Prepared Helps You Accomplish Goals

In The 50th Law, Robert Greene and rapper Curtis Jackson (better known as 50 Cent) discuss a similar way to meet your goals that also involves putting yourself under pressure: acting before you feel prepared. Committing to actions and decisions before you’re actually prepared to heightens the pressure to meet your goal: You’ll feel like you’re at greater risk of failure than you would if you felt prepared before starting. And, they argue, this increased pressure—by increasing your spontaneity and motivation to succeed—helps you accomplish a goal more successfully than if you wait until you feel ready.

Robert Greene gives an example of this concept from his own life: He decided to move to France despite having limited savings and not being fluent in French. His limited savings meant he needed to get a job quickly, and his lack of fluency meant that this would be challenging to do.

Because he had no choice, he began trying especially hard to learn French, going out of his way to ask strangers to explain vocabulary he didn’t understand. According to him, by putting himself in this position before he felt ready, he was able to creatively problem solve and become fluent very more quickly than if he had a basic understanding of French prior to moving.

Part 4: Change Your Narratives to Serve Your Primary Goal

Now that you know how to structure your life around your primary goal, you’ll now focus on changing your thoughts that stand in the way of your goal and becoming your optimal self.

The unhealthy ideas that your personality is fixed or that you’re determined by your past come from narratives—or stories—you tell yourself about who you are and the events that happen to you. The narratives you tell yourself can either help you or hinder you in reaching your goal. In this section, we’ll discuss how unhelpful narratives are formed, why they hinder your progress, how trauma—the most destructive kind of narrative—works and limits your ability to grow, and how to heal your narratives and traumas.

How Narratives Are Formed

Most people think they see the world objectively. However, Hardy says this is untrue. Your memories and everyday perceptions are not just the objective things you observe: They’re the objective observations plus the narratives you tell yourself about them. When something significant happens, you consciously or unconsciously form an explanation for why it happened and what that means about you and the world around you.

For instance, if you got into a car accident while texting, you would perceive the objective facts—you were texting and driving, and got into an accident—and you would tell yourself a story about what happened and what it means. In this example, your narrative might be that you got into the accident because you were texting while driving, that you have a bad habit of distracted driving, and that this means that you’re an irresponsible person.

(Shortform note: In 12 Rules for Life, Jordan Peterson clarifies that interpretation happens while you experience an event—and your brain usually doesn’t take all the objective facts into account alongside your narratives. Rather, your brain registers those objective facts that align with your narrative or that you deem significant, and it unconsciously tunes out the unaligned or insignificant objective facts. For instance, after the car accident, your interpretation would include only the details relevant to your narrative—such as the fact that you were texting—while omitting irrelevant details such as the color of your dashboard or whether there was a change in your cup holder.)

Unhealthy Narratives Limit What You Can Achieve

Your narratives have the power to shape how you see and feel about yourself as a person. Sometimes you’ll tell yourself unhealthy narratives about your life—narratives that frame you in an unnecessarily negative light or as incapable of overcoming an event. By doing this, you decrease your confidence, which gets in the way of meeting your primary goals in two distinct ways.

First, people often tell themselves narratives that frame them as being powerless victims of a thing that happened and therefore unable to do anything about it. At a day-to-day level, this looks like seeing inconveniences as a bigger deal than they need to be. An example is sleeping through your alarm and telling yourself that this means you’re going to fall behind on your work and have a bad day. At a more significant level, someone who grew up with an absent parent might tell themself that their current problems are the parent’s fault and that they can’t do anything about it.

Second, people also often see an event as proof that their limitations are fundamental to them and unchangeable. For instance, someone who tries speaking up in a social setting and gets spoken over might interpret this as proof that they simply aren’t capable of being assertive.

Pessimism Isn’t Always Unhealthy

Throughout the book, Hardy frames unhealthy narratives as ones that are pessimistic —arguing that focusing on the negatives and telling yourself cynical narratives makes you feel victimized and unable to overcome obstacles. However, pessimism—despite its negative reputation—is not intrinsically unhealthy.

For some people, telling themselves pessimistic narratives actually empowers them to accomplish goals. Believing that things will go poorly can cause negative emotions such as anxiety that pessimists can use to their advantage; they don’t want things to go as poorly as they expect them to, and this motivates them to work harder for success than they otherwise would. That said, for most people, Hardy’s argument that telling yourself pessimistic narratives is unhealthy is true: Pessimism is associated with negative consequences for both mental and physical health.

The Most Limiting Kind of Narrative: Traumatic Narratives

Hardy argues that the most limiting kind of unhealthy narratives people tell themselves are around traumas. When most people think of trauma, they think of horrific events that cause PTSD. However, Hardy explains that you can also think of trauma as any negative event that leads to lasting fear, shame, and unhealthy narratives about yourself. By this definition, everyone has trauma.

The Consequences of Expanding the Definition of Trauma

Some might argue that Hardy’s broad use of the word “trauma” is irresponsible. This broadening of the definition of “trauma” is part of a phenomenon called “concept creep,” and it comes with some negative consequences. Concept creep is where a word that denotes a form of harm—such as “bullying” or “neglect”—has its definition expanded to include other, less harmful things. For instance, people used to see bullying just as intentional harassment, but the term has expanded to include unintentional meanness and inconsiderate behavior.

Concept creep makes people take some overlooked forms of harm more seriously by placing them in the same category as more serious things, which legitimizes them. By expanding the definition of “bullying” to encompass more than just blatant aggressive behavior, people start calling other kinds of mistreatment “bullying,” leading them to see these lesser forms of mistreatment as more problematic and harmful than they did before.

While this is helpful in some cases, it carries negative consequences. When we use the same words for both significantly and mildly harmful things, we equate them—meaning we experience them the same way. Thinking of an embarrassing moment in your past as a trauma, rather than just an upsetting memory, can actually make this event have more power over you—making you feel more disempowered and ashamed about it than you otherwise would.

How Trauma Works

So how does trauma work? Hardy claims that when an event is frightening or emotionally painful enough, sometimes a person unconsciously develops a deeply entrenched, unhealthy narrative about it. For instance, if you asked someone out as a kid, and they laughed at you, you might develop a deep belief that you’re an unappealing person to date.

The traumatic narrative serves a defensive purpose: to prevent you from feeling similar types of pain in the future by encouraging you to avoid similar situations. If you develop negative beliefs about yourself after an emotionally painful experience, you’ll be more likely to avoid similar kinds of experiences that could make you feel the same type of emotional pain. Building on the last example, if you believe you’re unappealing to date, you’re much less likely to try expressing romantic interest to anybody and risk further rejection.

(Shortform note: Scientists believe that trauma evolved to help human beings survive. This is largely because of fear avoidance. Most of the fear our ancestors experienced was the result of facing genuine danger. By developing extremely uncomfortable feelings associated with the memory of scary events, humans were more likely to avoid placing themselves in situations that reminded them of these events and were generally also dangerous.)

While these negative narratives and beliefs help you avoid short-term discomfort, they lead you to see yourself as less capable and ashamed of yourself. Unresolved traumas—or events that you still carry unhealthy narratives about—make you feel defined by your past and incapable of changing your personality.

According to Hardy, unresolved trauma can also prevent you from doing things necessary for meeting your primary goal. For instance, if your primary goal is to become a CEO, but you have a traumatic memory that makes you doubt your competence as a leader, you might avoid putting yourself in leadership positions. Additionally, negative attitudes toward yourself from unresolved trauma lower your self-esteem and confidence in general, both of which are necessary ingredients for feeling empowered and motivated enough to complete your primary goal.

(Shortform note: The shame caused by traumatic narratives can get in the way of meeting your goals in more ways than Hardy mentions. In Daring Greatly, Brené Brown says that shame activates your body’s fight or flight response, preventing you from thinking critically. Additionally, she argues, shame makes you afraid to take risks. These can both get in the way of helping you meet your goal by making you see yourself as incapable of overcoming obstacles—since you can’t think as rationally—and by making you afraid to try—since facing obstacles involves risking failure.)

Heal Yourself by Changing Unhealthy Narratives

Fortunately, Hardy says you can change your unhealthy narratives so they don’t block you from meeting your primary goal and becoming your optimal self. To do this, reshape your narratives to be in service of your future goal, choosing narratives that frame you in a positive light and as empowered.

We’ve synthesized Hardy’s advice on how to change your general unhealthy narratives into four main strategies: identify with your future self, focus on the positives, consider more of the context, and—specifically for healing traumatic narratives—share your trauma.

1) Identify With Your Future Self

Rather than thinking about yourself as the person who has your current limitations, think of yourself as the person who’s going to overcome these limitations—defining yourself based on who you will be, not who you’ve been. For instance, instead of thinking of yourself as someone who’s not confident and never has been, think of yourself as someone who will be confident in the near future. By identifying more with your future self than your current limitations, you see your limitations as temporary—and therefore feel empowered to overcome them. As a result, you feel more deeply that you can change, and you have greater hope and motivation.

(Shortform note: In addition to thinking about yourself in terms of your optimal self, the opposite—thinking about an undesired future self—is helpful too. When you imagine a future where you’ve failed to reach your primary goal, you’re likely to feel discomfort and anxiety. You can use these uncomfortable emotions as fuel to meet your goals. Since you feel motivated to avoid feeling this way in the future, you’ll feel more motivated to keep working toward your primary goal.)

2) Focus on the Positives

When an event happens to you that you wish hadn’t, it’s easy to tell yourself narratives that frame you as a disempowered victim of bad circumstances. But Hardy argues that no event is intrinsically good or bad—they all have positive and negative aspects.

By focusing on the positive aspects of events, it becomes easier to accept them. This helps you feel motivated and empowered to keep working toward your goal when things happen that would usually make you feel unmotivated and disempowered. Telling yourself narratives that focus on being grateful for the positives in a situation helps you see the negative aspects as less important and helps you feel less victimized. As a result, you can more easily recover from a negative experience without losing momentum or hope.

For example, if your car breaks down, your gut reaction might be to tell yourself the narrative that this is an awful event that will ruin your day and get in the way of working on your goal. Instead, tell yourself a more positive narrative. You might focus on the fact that you broke down in a convenient location, and tell yourself that this lucky fact means you can still have a good day and get your work done.

In addition to making the best of a negative situation, you can also turn a negative situation into a positive one. With creative problem-solving, you can make events that would usually present obstacles to your goals into events that help you meet your goals. To do this, find the opportunities the obstacle presents you with, and take advantage of them. For instance, maybe you’ve been wanting to get more fit. Your car breaking down can be the perfect excuse to begin biking to work.

The Ancient Art of Focusing on the Positives

In his book, The Obstacle Is The Way, Ryan Holiday suggests that both of these strategies for overcoming obstacles by shifting your mindset have a long history, dating back to antiquity. He argues that the Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome were unlike most philosophers in history in that they were practical—focusing on how to improve people’s lives instead of speculating about the nature of reality. The Stoics were proponents of the idea that shifting your mindset is the key to a good life, and they wrote extensively about strategies for overcoming obstacles by changing your narratives about them.

While Stoicism was a formal movement, Holiday says Stoicism has existed as a mindset in people all across history. Most of the world's highly successful figures, historical and current, reached their success by applying Stoic principles to their lives, whether or not they ever even heard of Stoicism.

3) Consider More of the Context

According to Hardy, unhealthy narratives are often the result of failing to see the big picture—noticing only the details of an event that support a negative view of yourself. By considering details that don’t feed into your unhealthy narratives, you can change your narratives and break free from negative beliefs about yourself.

For instance, imagine you get turned down for a date. It might feel natural to tell yourself that it’s because you’re unappealing, but this ignores tons of factors that could have contributed to getting rejected. Perhaps the person who rejected you was having a bad day and would be thrilled to meet you on a different day. And even if they weren’t attracted to you, this doesn’t mean that others won’t be.

(Shortform note: One phenomenon that contributes to developing unhealthy narratives thanks to seeing only some of a situation’s context is confirmation bias. Confirmation bias is a common cognitive bias where people tend to seek out—and therefore notice—evidence to support what they already suspect is true. If you tend to think of yourself in negative terms, you'll be more likely to notice details about events that support a negative interpretation of the event. The way to counteract confirmation bias is to adopt a “falsification bias,” trying to notice evidence that’s contrary to your suspicions. While it’s not intuitive, it’s highly effective for cutting through bias and is the fundamental strategy of scientific reasoning.)

4) Heal Trauma by Sharing It

While all the techniques for healing general unhealthy narratives apply to trauma, Hardy states that healing trauma is often a little more complicated to heal. Since traumas are more deeply rooted in your emotions and subconscious than other, everyday unhealthy narratives, restructuring your narratives around trauma requires more than just challenging the way you think.

Reframing and healing traumatic memories requires you to share and process these memories with a trusted, compassionate person. When you process your trauma with a safe person, you gain clarity about it and see it in new ways.

Why Does Sharing Trauma With a Safe Person Help?

Besides gaining clarity about your trauma and seeing it in new ways, there are several more ways that sharing trauma helps you heal.

Not sharing your trauma reinforces the belief that the event is something to feel ashamed about. When you share your trauma, and the person accepts you without judgment, this undermines that belief, which leads to greater acceptance of the event and self-compassion.

Additionally, telling the full story of your trauma out loud helps you put it all into perspective. Usually, traumatic memories are disorganized, with greater significance assigned to the aspects of the memory that support self-limiting narratives and beliefs. When you tell the full story out loud, you think of the event more chronologically. By organizing the memory, you see more of the context, including the aspects that undermine your self-limiting beliefs about it. This helps you interpret the memory and develop new narratives that don’t reinforce self-limiting beliefs.

Part 5: There Is No Endpoint

Now that you know how to change your life, there’s one more important thing to keep in mind going forward: There is no endpoint. Hardy tells us that the point of working on your primary goal isn’t to reach an ideal future where you get to just relax and enjoy the permanent happiness that comes with having finally done enough work. In fact, this isn’t even possible. In life, there is no endpoint at which you’ve done enough that you don’t have to keep growing. You should enjoy the fruits of your labor, but you shouldn’t count on them for permanent satisfaction.

(Shortform note: This way of thinking—that once we reach some ideal future, we’ll finally be happy all the time—is called the “arrival fallacy." While it might feel like you’ll experience enduring happiness once you marry your ideal partner, earn a better salary, or move into your dream home, the things you accomplish and acquire will never provide lasting happiness on their own.)

In reality, psychological well-being comes not just from the results of your growth, but from the process of growing. If you go more than a while without growing, you’ll begin stagnating or regressing. Therefore, you should continue growing throughout your life. After completing your goals, including your primary goal, you should quickly set new ones and begin striving towards them. This, Hardy argues, is the key to a satisfying life.

Why Focusing Less on the Journey Ahead Can Lead to Satisfaction

While Hardy suggests focusing on continual growth as a source of well-being, another strategy that you can use in addition to this is simply accepting the present moment unconditionally.

In Four Thousand Weeks, Oliver Burkeman says that since you can never do enough to be happy, you’re free to stop trying so hard. Though it’s false, most people subconsciously believe that getting enough things done will eventually make them permanently happy. Seeing through the myth that contentment is the result of accomplishments frees you to choose to feel content now, unconditionally. If the things you haven’t done yet don’t actually stand between you and your happiness, then you’re free to accept things as they are, right now. Happiness is never permanent, but living with this mindset makes you happier more often.