If You Want A New Life, Watch This

00:00:00drew did you notice notice what i'm a new person i completely knew i did not notice this completely new top to bottom i can't believe you didn't notice okay tell me did you see the white wall yeah okay new studio this is my wall all right i replaced my black wall with my white wall okay so brand new studio yes new microphone yeah New jacket. Mm-hmm. I shaved. Mm-hmm. Which I haven't done in a while. I've noticed. I'm a new person. I think it's a little more complicated than that. If you were as superficial as I am. Oh. Right? Oh, okay. There is no soul within this walking meat robot. Vessel. Known as Mark Manson. Sitting across from me now. Therefore, the fact that I changed my jacket and shaved and sat us in front of a new wall. I see. Is the entirety of myself. What does constitute change? That's a good question. Yeah. you know, the Buddha said there's no such thing as self. Can you change that which does not exist? Can you just read the intro, please? Okay. All right. I'll read the intro. Here we go.

00:01:13Welcome to Solved, everybody. I am Mark Manson, and today we're talking about ch-ch-ch-changes. I'm going to take a not-so-wild guess and say that if you're listening to this, you have tried at some point in your life to make a big change. You've read the books, you've done the courses, you've woken up at 4 a.m. like a paled-faced Victorian factory owner and journaled your intentions into a leather-bound notebook while the rest of the world slept. Why do I let you write the intros? Why do I let you write the intros? You have tried, dear listener. Nobody can say you have not tried. And yet, you are still the same you. Still caught in the same patterns that you've tried to escape. And you're still in the same petty feud with your mailman since 2009. I've never met my mailman. For the record. Fortunately, I have some good news. But I also have some bad news. The good news is, all of that fruitless effort is not evidence that you're a lazy sack of shit. Or it might be, actually.

00:02:09We'll get to that. You're not uniquely doomed to always be the same hapless lost soul you think you are. You can change. Change is just really fucking hard. But the bad news is that you can't change everything about yourself. And you definitely cannot change all of the things at once. There is a subtle art to change. And we're here today to uncover how all of it works. And here's what most people get wrong. I'm going to say, Most people don't fail at change because they lack discipline or commitment or the right morning routine. They fail because they keep aiming at the wrong target over and over for years on end. What we're going to discover is that who you are is actually a layered system. And if you don't know which layer you're dealing with, it doesn't matter how hard you try. It doesn't matter how many tactics or tips you implement. It's just not going to work. You can be a genuinely motivated person solving the wrong problem. So in this episode of Solved, we're going to talk about why your brain is actively working against you every time you try to change, and why insight, self-awareness, and understanding your patterns on its own can be almost completely useless. We're going to talk about why the most popular personality test in the world, taken by millions of people every year, predicts almost nothing useful about you and what actually does. So,

00:03:26We're going to talk about the real reason you revert to your old self every time you go home for the holidays, and why it has nothing to do with how triggering your parents are. We'll discuss how the world came to misunderstand the most famous psychology experiment about self-control, and what the researchers were actually arguing for. We'll get into why trying to suppress a bad habit is one of the most reliable ways to make sure it sticks, and We'll talk about the one category of change that is faster, deeper, and more permanent than anything else in psychology and the four-step pattern behind every single case of it. And we'll talk about why harrowing traumatic events often lead to the most durable change in your life. This and much, much more. The argument that we're going to make in this episode is that you're not stuck because you're a lazy sack of shit or cosmically cursed, but because you've spent years heroically trying to change the wrong layer of yourself. We're going to point you to the right layer and then give you the actual practical steps to change.

00:04:21Because once you understand which part of you actually needs to change, it stops feeling like a character flaw and it starts feeling like a problem with an actual solution. One that does not require you to wake up at 4am and inject exotic vegetable juices directly into your bloodstream every day. Does anybody do that? I am New York Times bestselling author Mark Manson, and this is Drew Burney, my co-host, producer, lead researcher, and the only person who has ever been known to formally ask to stop raising his hand in therapy. Oh boy. And this is Solved, the most comprehensive podcast in the world where every episode we aim to solve one problem in your life once and for all. Today, we are solving how to change, how it happens, how to do it, and how to make sure it sticks. Let's do it. Let's. I'm already tired. So our story begins with a chance encounter between Sigmund Freud and a recent college graduate. And this encounter would go on to change the path of the field of psychology and influence how we see human nature. So there was a young man named Gordon Alport.

00:05:35He had just graduated from college. It was around 1920, and he had just finished up a study abroad program in Turkey. Like many recent college grads, he wanted to backpack across Europe. And on his way back, he thought, what would be cooler than to stop in Vienna and visit Sigmund Freud? Now, Freud at the time was an intellectual celebrity. He was world-renowned by this point, and a lot of people would make pilgrimages to Vienna to meet him and to even be analyzed by him. So Alport wrote a letter. He reached out. Freud said, sure, come on by. And they set up the meeting. It's important to note that Gordon Alport was not a psychologist. He didn't study psychology in school. He didn't really know a whole lot about it. He just kind of wanted to see Freud just the same way like, you know, you would probably want to go see Justin Bieber or I would want to go see, you know, Lady Gaga. So Alport shows up in Vienna, goes to Freud's office. Freud's office is famously super weird. It's full of, like, all sorts of Egyptian artifacts and, like, weird ancient texts and all this stuff. And Freud just sits there and stares at him for minutes. Like, multiple minutes go by, and this poor college kid is just like...

00:06:50Oh, my God. Like, what is what what is happening? So it's like it's like this old Viennese guy who's staring into your soul. And so just to make small talk, Gordon Alport decides to talk about a little boy that he saw on the tram on the way over. And he noticed that this little boy was obsessively cleaning the areas of the train around him and complaining to his mother about how dirty everything was. And he thought this was really interesting and that Freud would find this interesting because there's clearly some sort of psychological thing going on with this boy. And like Freud's into psychological things, right? And Freud just stared at him and said, was the little boy you? Gordon did not take this well. It's very Freudian, yeah. He did not take it very well. He kind of freaked out. He got, actually, he got very offended, and he left Freud's office in a bit of a huff. And as he made his way back across Europe, he kept thinking about the encounter, and he really just rejected this whole notion that there was anything in his unconscious that had anything to do with who he was. He believed...

00:08:01on a very base level, instinctively, that human beings, we are not our past. We are what we do. And ultimately, this schism of philosophies would result in multiple decades of research and different approaches to human behavior and how we can actually change ourselves, whether we can actually change ourselves. It actually gets at a very deep philosophical question of, oh, Are we restricted to who we were in our past? Are we confined by our childhood experiences? Are we doomed to repeat the things that our parents did to us or genetic heritage? Or do we have agency? Do we get to dictate and decide who we are moment to moment? And Gordon Alport felt very strongly that we do. So when he went back to Harvard to do his graduate program, he decided to study psychology. And he decided to try to find this out, to try to prove this, that people are not their past. They actually get to choose who they are moment to moment. And this was important because up until this point, Freud just absolutely dominated our understanding of the human mind and human identity. And Freud believed that we had a limited capacity to change. Freud argued that the whole point of psychoanalysis was to turn, quote, hysterical misery into common unhappiness, which is just a bundle of joy in a fruit basket.

00:09:27So Alport just rejected this. He was like, there's got to be a better way. Like, I can change my decisions. I've changed in my life. Like, there's got to be a more objective way to measure these things, of measure who is a person and then how do they change over time. And so when he returned to grad school, he switched to psychology and he decided to tackle this problem. This debate still goes on today, right? We still feel this tension. I think anybody you talk to, they're going to have some idea about how fixed they are versus how much they can actually change. And that's a tension that goes on within us. There's still a debate, a large debate, as we're going to get into here as well. That is a real tension that we all feel. Yeah, I mean, in some ways you feel... trapped i mean there's certain certainly things about myself that i feel like trapped in sometimes and then there's there are other things where i'm like no i'm just being lazy right right or like you you know you see something you do that like your dad did right and you're like well that's just how i am because of that yeah because i get into all of that right there's there's that real tension we all feel that yeah we're always answering that question too

00:10:30It turns out it's completely natural to feel those two sides of the tension. And we're going to explain in this chapter the psychological explanation of why each person feels that tension within themselves and how both sides of that tension are simultaneously true. But before we answer whether change is actually possible, we actually have to look at a more important question, which is how do you even measure what somebody is? How can you even measure change until you know who a person is in the first place? And it starts in a very unusual place, which is a dictionary. This episode is brought to you by Shopify. There's a moment a few weeks into starting something new where you realize that the change you signed up for is not the change that you're actually making. You wanted to launch a clothing line, but now you're having to be a tax person. Now you have to be an SEO person. You're a customer service person on a Sunday night. People don't usually quit at the scary launch moment. They quit here in the boring humdrum middle. That's why Shopify is so effective. It's the e-commerce platform behind 10% of all e-commerce in the United States. From brands like Allbirds or Gymshark to someone who just sold their first t-shirt this morning.

00:11:39inventory, payments, analytics, it's all in one place. Email and social campaigns, like you have a marketing team behind you, and 24-7 support so when you get stuck at midnight, you're not actually alone. It can't make you the type of person who finishes things, but it can definitely take 14 of the jobs off your plate. So the one job you actually came to do is the one you spend most of your time on. Start your business today with the industry's best business partner, Shopify, and start hearing... Sign up for your $1 a month trial today at shopify.com slash solved. Go to shopify.com slash solved. But we're going to continue with Alport here because he really did stumble upon, I mean, some people would definitely argue the most important branch of psychology or at least probably the most stable and replicable branch of psychology and how we understand people today. So Alport returned to Harvard and he started thinking very deeply about this problem. And if you think about it, it's actually a very difficult problem, which is, A, how do you define who a person is? Because you can't define change unless you can actually define who somebody is. And then secondly, once you define who that person is, how do you actually measure if they have change?

00:12:51changed at all or not. There are a lot of different approaches, a lot of different schools of thought. Obviously, the Freudian school of thought had to do with unconscious motivations and drives. There was another school of thought that emerged slightly after this called behaviorism, which we've talked about in previous episodes, which was all about just measuring actual actions and behaviors, kind of treating the human mind as like a input output machine. Alport stumbled upon a pretty novel approach to this problem, I did not appreciate how brilliant this was until we started researching for this episode. So I had heard about this before, but up until we started prepping for this episode, it really gave me an appreciation of just how brilliant this was. So there was a guy in the 19th century named Francis Galton. He was Darwin's cousin. He was a bit of a polymath, wrote books and papers and articles on all sorts of different topics. Also was like apparently a virulent racist and nationalist and like proto-Nazi. But we'll leave that for another podcast.

00:13:53But Galton had a really interesting insight. He said that if you want to actually measure who a person is, you should start by looking at language. Because if you think about why we invent words for things, we invent words for things because those behaviors are significant in some way that they're worth identifying with some shared language. piece of meaning, lexical piece of meaning, right? And so if you go through the dictionary and you identify all of the words that could be used to identify a person or a person's behavior, that should give you a nice, well-rounded look at what How do you define a person? And you can probably find all sorts of commonalities among those words and start grouping them in certain ways. Alport decided to take this on and he did it with one of his PhD students. They found the biggest dictionary they could possibly find and they started going word by word and singling out every word that could be possibly used to identify a human or human behavior. And they initially pulled out 17,953 words. This took them multiple years. They're just flipping through a dictionary. Can you imagine? Like, can you imagine? Like, first of all, you were a PhD student. Like, can you imagine somebody asking you like, oh, what's your PhD work on? And you're like, I'm reading the dictionary. Yeah.

00:15:12To understand human behavior. This is what happens when you're incredibly bored, right? This is so there's no phones around anything like that. Flipping through a dictionary is better than that. See, it could be worse, guys. It could be worse. It could be worse. They narrowed this list down to 4,500 distinct descriptions or characteristics. And then once they got down to 4,500, they just published the list and left it for other people to deal with. And the reason for that primarily was because they simply did not have the technology or the means to statistically analyze these words at the time. Computers had not been invented yet. And so you would have to literally calculate all 4,500 of these words, how prevalent they are, how much they occur in human language and do all sorts of combinatorial factoring and all this stuff. Yeah. So it wasn't until the 1940s with the very first early computer systems that you were even able to start processing some of this stuff. And this is when you start getting some researchers taking that list of 4,500 words and then trying to use statistical and mathematical means to clump them into clusters to identify, okay, if we have all these words to describe human behaviors and human traits...

00:16:24clearly like a lot of them must be similar. A lot of them must be used interchangeably, right? You can say somebody is a very exciting person. You can also say that they're a very fun person, right? Like those are two very similar ways to describe somebody. And they're probably referring to slightly different surfaces of the same character trait. So there was a guy named Raymond Cattell who was the first person to do this. And he went through all 4,500 words and he boiled them down to what he called the 16 factors. And these 16 factors were kind of the very, very earliest edition of today what we would call a personality test or personality traits. Now, the problem with Cattell's 16 factors is that nobody could replicate them. Researchers would go out and interview people and ask them a battery of questions and do the same statistical analyses that Cattell was doing, and they would get completely different factors than he was getting. And this same problem continued to happen for the next 20 years or so. There was a guy named Hans Eidensink who narrowed it down to three factors, but they

00:17:26that seemed implausible. There were a number of researchers in the 60s that also came down, you know, were able to narrow it down to, say, seven factors or six factors or five factors. Now, interestingly, today, what we know as the big five, which is what all of this is driving towards, was originally discovered by a couple Air Force clerks. which is fascinating. And the reason the air force discovered this was because they were studying fighter pilots. They wanted to understand why are so some people just so cool and calm and functional and like an air fight. And why do some people freak out or they're not able to like maintain their composure or they're, they're not able to, to, you know, last in such like a demanding profession. They're looking for an aptitude test early around that, right? Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Which makes sense. I mean, the military, right. You need the right people in the right spot. Right. If there's any profession that like really needs to objectively understand how good a person is or not, it's going to be the military. Which interestingly, I believe the IQ test was created for the military as well.

00:18:28And notice there's stakes involved here. Yes. That was... Yeah. Anyway, it wasn't just academic in that sense. Exactly. Yeah. Two men by the name of Ernest Toops and Raymond Crystal independently landed on the Big Five. And this, I believe this was like 1963. Yeah, early 60s, yeah. And they correctly identified what we today know as the five fundamental traits of human personality and the five traits that really define each of our uniqueness and who we are as an individual. But the funny thing is, is that they... They published it internally at the Air Force, and then it just got filed away with a bunch of other internal research and wasn't read for... Yeah, it was like a bulletin, basically. Yes. It was like an Air Force bulletin that just didn't get circulated outside of that. Yeah. And so it's funny because psychologists would take another 20 years to land on the Big Five. And it was only later, I believe it was in the 90s, that they actually, like... randomly discovered that these guys in the Air Force had independently discovered the Big Five 20 years prior to psychologists. So this brings us to the Big Five. And everybody listening to this has probably taken a Big Five personality test at some point in their life, whether you realize it or not. The Big Five are called the Big Five because these are the most replicated, dependable, durable, persistent, stable traits of human characteristics and behaviors that,

00:19:48That we have ever found. Is there anything you know of that's been replicated more across more cultures and more consistently than the big five? And across the big, that big of data sets to know, I don't know. I think I don't know this for sure, but I would guess if I was a betting man, which I am, I would bet a lot of money that the big five is the single most replicated finding ever. in psychology, period, full stop. Yeah. So this is like as credible as it gets. Right, right. It doesn't mean it's perfect necessarily. It's not perfect. It's absolutely the best thing we have. Yes. If you've ever heard the acronym OCEAN, right? So that stands for openness to new experiences, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. And I'll just give a very, very brief explanation of what each one of those is. So openness to new experiences is generally people who are open to new experiences. So it maps pretty well to creativity, adventurousness. novelty seeking, novelty seeking people who, you know, if you, if you're somebody who like loves parties, you love trips, you love travel, you love spontaneity. You're very open-minded about how other people live or other people's ideas. You're probably very high in openness to new experiences. People who are very low in openness, they tend to be very regimented. They tend to like rituals and routines. They are not very open-minded. They're very traditional. They like to do things the way,

00:21:18Things have always been done because it's more dependable. It's more reliable. The interesting thing about all five of these traits is that none of them is necessarily right or wrong. We're all high or low in all of them. Each one comes with trade-offs, right? So if you're high in openness to experience, you're probably going to be a very creative individual. You're probably going to be a very spontaneous individual. And that's great in a lot of contexts, but it's also bad in other contexts, right? Right. So if you're in a situation where you do need to be very regimented and you do need to be very repetitive and intentional and you do have to follow tradition, you're probably not going to perform very well. So a lot of this, it's not that any trade is good or bad, except for one, which we'll get to in a second. It's just that they're different. I am personally extremely high. I'm actually like 99th percentile. You are up there for sure. Yeah. And openness to new experiences. Yeah. I think I'm slightly over average, but not like you. You're not a degenerate like I am. Second one is conscientiousness.

00:22:16So conscientiousness is somebody who's very conscientious is very detail oriented. They're very organized. They're very reliable, predictable. They like things to be in order. They like to have structure and schedules. I'm definitely not super high in conscientiousness. I actually I think when I was younger, I was I was extremely low, but I think now I'm probably around average. OK, I don't know. We'll get to that. What is that supposed to be? We'll get to why that might be. Yeah. What is that supposed to be? No, no, no. I don't think you're super high in conscientiousness. Not super high, no. Yeah. I think maybe slightly above average or right around average, I would say. Yeah. Then there's extroversion, which this one I imagine is probably the one everybody's heard of. Yeah. Introversion versus extroversion. Everybody has a label for themselves for this, for sure. Yeah. Yeah. Then there's agreeableness, which is how much people prioritize social harmony, getting along with each other, cooperation, making sure everybody's happy. So like a very highly agreeable person is it's going to be very important to them that that people like them, that people get along with each other, that there's no conflict, that everybody's on the same page. People who are very disagreeable are comfortable with conflict.

00:23:27Um, they're comfortable being alone. They're comfortable being disliked. It's funny because as you know, probably the single most common question we get from readers I get from fans is how do I stop giving a fuck what other people think about me? Those people are probably very high in agreeableness. Um, and so that, that is a challenge for them to let go of that social harmony until allow themselves to be disliked. And then finally, there's neuroticism. And this is probably the only thing that you can maybe argue that you don't want to be high in. Neuroticism, it predicts a tendency towards negative emotions, particularly anxiety, depression, stress. Highly neurotic people, they tend to experience more dissatisfaction in their relationships. They tend to experience more conflict. And they struggle to cope with stress more often. People would wonder, like, why would neuroticism even, like, why? Why do we have that? If you're in a chaotic, unstable environment, go, go, do it. Can I guess what you're going to say? Is only the paranoid survive? Yes. Right. In a lot of ways, that's true. And you could make the argument, too, that, yeah, the people who are more neurotic are looking out for everyone who's not so neurotic and probably should be a little bit more worried. And, you know, the point is, it's not all black and white.

00:24:43Yes. Okay. Even neuroticism. That's true. That is true. Is not all black and white. You probably, if you're in a small tribe of like 20 people, you probably want one really neurotic person in the group to like call out risks and dangers, even if they're wrong 90% of the time. That's right. Yeah. You just hope it's not you. So, yeah. Yeah. They all have advantages and disadvantages. And so I think what makes us interesting individuals is the unique combination of traits that we have. And then if you think about how we evolved in these tribal systems, right? It's like every tribe needs to have some people extremely high in each of these traits, but you don't want everybody high in each one of these traits. You kind of want a division of labor across, you know, the social, the social cohort. There's diversification there that, yeah, helps everybody out. Yeah. Another one of the reasons that this framework, the Big Five framework, has lasted throughout the decades, too, is that it does actually have predictive power. Unlike a lot of the other models that came before this, the Big Five can actually predict some outcomes. Conscientiousness, you kind of already alluded to this already. Yeah.

00:25:45It's one of the strongest predictors of job performance, actually. Also like long-term health as well. Conscientious people will take care of their health more. They will work harder usually or show up to work on time more or put in those extra hours more. They're more likely to do that. Okay. Neuroticism too. That's actually one of the most consistent predictors of like poor relationships and poor health as well. Poor mental health, especially too. Yeah. Extroversion. That is a really good predictor of like social integration and your social relationships. Same thing with agreeableness too. That actually is one of the best predictors of relationship satisfaction. So all those people come to you and they say, how do I not give a fuck? Well, it's like, you need to give a fuck about something. Yeah. Obviously. openness to that will predict things like creativity and even even political liberalism too okay should mention this real quick too there's another model called the hexago model that adds one more dimension which is the dimension of honesty and humility there's still some debate this has been around for a little while there's still some debate about how universal that is the big five it's been replicated across time it's been replicated across many many cultures hundreds of thousands if not millions of subjects have taken the big five test

00:26:55across the world, it's been found that it's, it is actually very consistent. Yeah. Um, across a lot of different populations. Now, That's it. Okay. We can predict those things. But notice what I said is that like conscientiousness predicts job performance. It predicts long-term health. I can't actually tell you necessarily, though, that if you are high in extroversion, that you got a meeting on Tuesday, I can't say you're going to be the first one to talk. It's actually not that specific. Okay. It predicts tendencies, but it doesn't predict... Like micro behaviors. Exactly. This is at the population level, kind of at the, at the aggregate level, or even within a person, it's over long periods of times and many, many interactions with the world or the people around you. Right. So there was this question that came up out of all of this was, you know, those tendencies, are they, are they set in stone? Right. Are they set like plaster? Right. Yeah, which is what William James said. Right. Which is he believed that who you were at 30 was who you were going to be forever. Right. And there was not really anything you could do about it. Kind of a modification of Freud there. Right. It's like, like all these things have happened to you up to this point. It's interesting to me that this, this idea that we can even change ourselves is such a recent idea. If you go back and look at James, he believed we couldn't. Freud didn't really believe we could.

00:28:14Even Alport, I mean, like this lineage that we're tracing that ends up becoming personality psychology. Most of the personality psychologists from the eighties and nineties also landed on the conclusion that you couldn't change these. Right. So it's like, we're consistently landing on this idea of like, no, this is who you are. Good luck. Right. Right. Yeah. So the researchers who found all of those studies I was talking about all over the world, across time, across cultures, Costa and McRae were their names. They're two famous personality psychologists and researchers. They basically came to the conclusion that, yeah, it's pretty much set. There's not a whole lot you can do about it. So, I mean, it raises the point, like, what are we even doing this episode for? Yeah. Yeah. I mean, if William James says we can't change, if Freud says we can't change, if Gordon Alport and the personality psychologists concluded that we can't change, like what the hell are we doing a six hour change episode on Drew? Are we crazy? Are we making things up? No, we're not making things up. It turns out there's more to this story and there's more to us than simply our personality traits.

00:29:20There was a researcher, Walter Mischel. He'll come up a few times. Okay. So in the late 60s, he actually started arguing the exact opposite. That actually there wasn't any such thing as like a stable personality that we could point to. And again, make those specific predictions. Precisely because he was doing studies showing I can't this person's high in extraversion. I can't tell you if they're going to speak up in this situation or not. They just couldn't do it. Came up over and over again. William Fleeson was another researcher at this time who found that personality seemed to be more like a distribution. There was a tendency, kind of a stable basin around which you would kind of float. Interesting. Like a center of gravity that you get pulled back to. Exactly. Exactly. There's like a fabric around you that pulls you back into this well. Gotcha. So if you're high in extroversion, yeah, generally you're high in extroversion, but that doesn't mean you're not introverted in certain situations either. So kind of together, Mischel came up with the idea of this if-then signatures. Okay.

00:30:16Okay. Yes. You have this kind of not really set point, but distribution around which you float, like I said. And then in certain situations you change, we've all experienced this, right? The hats you wear, or, you know, you're, you're probably not the same person around your grandma as you are your best friend when two are alone. Obviously. So we all know that experience, right? The question then becomes then, so which one of those is the real us? Is that even the right question to ask? You're high in openness, let's say, or you're introverted. Where do you flip those scripts? So interestingly, the one trait that has flip-flopped quite a bit throughout my life is introversion, extroversion. And it took me a long time to recognize this pattern. So when I was very young, I always tested as a pretty strong introvert. And then once I... got to university and started drinking and partying and meeting girls, I would always test as an extrovert. But that's because partying was like a big part of my life and I was dating a lot. So I was going out all the time and it is self report, self identification, right? So they ask you questions like, you know,

00:31:19You know, when you're at a party, are you standing on the corner by yourself against the wall or are you in the middle of the room talking to lots of people? And I, like, spent many years intentionally training myself to be the guy in the middle of the room talking to lots of people, even though it didn't come naturally to me. And so what would happen is that I would start answering that question differently in my 20s, which would then trigger a report of high extroversion. And then interestingly, once I got married and settled down and, you know, started going to bed at nine like an old man. Now I now I show up as an introvert again. We're going to get into the explanations of like why this happens. Right. Because you could look at that. You could say, like, well, that's me changing. Right. Changing throughout my life. It's like, OK, well, what changed? Did I actually ever stop being an introvert or did I just become an introvert that like trained himself to behave as an extrovert for a certain period of time and in a certain context? And Michel and Fleason would argue that.

00:32:16Yes, that's what I did. There were certain contexts where I learned that it was adaptable to be more extroverted. And we're going to get it all into what those adaptations are and how you can develop them for yourself. Mine is actually the one that's most salient to me anyway is agreeableness. I'm an agreeable person. I have a need to please. Sometimes it gets a little toxic, but usually I think it's fairly healthy. I like to help people. I like to. You are very I know that when you speak up and disapprove of something, I'm like, okay, it must be bad. Okay. That's because it's like if Drew is raising a fuss, it's like, okay, it must be bad. Yeah. Yeah. I do. I like calm and going with the flow and everything like that until I don't. Yeah. Okay. And this was very salient to me a few weeks ago or probably a month ago at this point. Drew Hulk smash. Is this where this is going? So, okay. I want to preface this too. Do you remember the values episode when I had the allegory of the taco truck? Yes. And I almost got into a fist fight with the guy at a taco truck. I forgot about the allegory of the taco truck. Right. So I'm going to tell another story that's kind of in that same vein. I just want you to know that these incidences are seven years apart from one another. This is not a pattern. Okay. Well, it is a little bit of a pattern, but it's not a frequent occurrence. It's not a frequent occurrence. You're not starting fights at taco trucks on a regular basis. So just a little bit of background. There's this one day. We're just going to keep you away from taco trucks. I was...

00:33:40I was having a very agreeable Drew does the day. Okay. Kind of day. Okay. And I went to yoga. I was... You were centered. I was centered. Your inner peace. Yogis are very agreeable people too for the most part. They are accepting and want to, you know, Yeah, of course. Eager to please. Yeah. Right outside, there was a charity that was set up. I bought five book bags for kids who were, you know, victims of domestic abuse and fleeing their homes and needed book bags. I was like, I'm a good person. Look how, you know, good I am. I buy these five book bags. Later on that night, I needed to, I was going to help out a friend. I went to another friend's house to pick something up and take it over to them. When I was driving over there, I did some boneheaded things in the street. It was a residential street, nobody around. Sun was shining. I couldn't see very well. Yeah. Now I realized when I parked, there was somebody behind me, like waiting for me. And it's this older man, probably about 70 years old. And he's in this little Honda Civic. And he's throwing a fit, like a toddler, in the middle of the street that I delayed him by 10 seconds. Wouldn't let it go to. Honking at me, yelling at me. And so I flip him off.

00:34:45Okay, I was irate. Irate at this guy. Okay, because I'm like, dude, it's 10 seconds. Like, come on. But I flip him off. He calls me a prick. I called him a crusty old toddler. I think is the word I use. I know. So in the span of one day, that's what happened. Okay. Right. Generally speaking, though, I'm agreeable. I'm, I'm. So which one's the real Drew? Which one is the real Drew in that situation? And again, if you go back and listen to the allegory of the taco truck, there's a similar thing happening there. Our listeners are definitely getting a certain impression of that. of drew burney suffice it to say i i restored my agreeableness i went into my friend's house he's like i know that guy he's an asshole this is where he lives and there was a whole thing that went down okay but i wasn't proud of that i went i apologized to him we buried the hatchet it was cool whatever But I'm agreeable until I'm not. Yes. There's just situations where that can come out for me. Okay. And I'm sure everybody has something like that, you know? So just know that, yes, these things are, you do have this stable basin usually where you're around, but you can get knocked out of that. Yes. For sure. And you can push yourself out of that. Yeah. Temporarily. Let's say you are naturally very introverted. You can train yourself to be extroverted, but it's going to demand a lot more energy from you.

00:36:03than it would say if you're naturally extroverted. That was the question I was going to ask you is that when you were like in that more extroversion and you've come back to introversion, which one of those, like, were you more exhausted in one of those situations? Absolutely. I mean, the extrovert, that extroverted period of my life, it felt like it was like work. You know, it was like a task. It was a skill I was like consciously developing. Yeah. Whereas my introversion just feels like my default. It feels like if there's no outside influence or pressure on me, I default to being a sack of potatoes on the couch. I imagine that experience with the crusty toddler. It was probably very draining for you. Yes, incredibly. You probably felt exhausted. Very exhausted afterwards. Whereas buying the book bags for a bunch of kids, that probably just felt very natural. Whereas somebody who's extremely disagreeable, calling that old man a crusty toddler would probably feel very natural to them. It wouldn't be draining at all. I think what we're driving at here and why we're pushing on this in the first chapter of this episode is because we really just want to establish the framework of who...

00:37:10Who a person is? How do we define ourselves? Because it turns out that the self is operating on three different layers simultaneously. So we've established the personality traits, right? It's like it's the basin. It's the center of gravity. It's your natural tendency towards a pattern of behavior over a long period of time. And yes, your personality, it is largely unchangeable. It can be changed slightly over a very long period of time. But we're going to argue in this episode that that is probably not what you should be focusing on. The best thing you can do with your personality is just a self-understanding of like, this is my natural set point. And so I need to be aware, right? It's like my natural set point is to be quite introverted. And so my awareness of that allows me to build adaptations and different patterns of behavior around that natural set point. And that's layer two, which is the adaptation layer. A lot of what we consider who we are, a lot of our self-definition, our identity, our understanding of ourselves and the world, a lot of our patterns and habits and routines, like these are all adaptations to moderate relationships.

00:38:23our natural personality, and then the environment around us, right? So simple example is that I was a very introverted kid when I went to university. I realized that left to my own devices, I'm just going to sit in my dorm and play video games all day, every day. I'm never going to make friends. I'm never going to have a girlfriend. So I had to develop an adaptation, which is an identity of a party guy, a guy who was very social, who went out a lot, who knew a bunch of different people. And that adaptation allowed me to adapt to my environment to get my needs met and to become a happier and more well-rounded individual. So that's layer two. The third layer is our actual behavior, right? It's the old maxim, you are what you do repeatedly. And the simplest way to change who you are in some ways is to simply change a behavior. To go from somebody who never exercises to somebody who exercises. To go from somebody who never speaks up for themselves to somebody who speaks up for themselves. And all three of these layers are very different.

00:39:30deeply interlinked, right? They flow in both directions. So one way to think about it is kind of a bottom up. point of view, which is that on your base layer, you have your personality traits, which is like your natural set points, your center of gravity, your natural tendencies. On top of that, you've built your layer of adaptations, right? Your different belief systems and identities and habits to help you interact with the world around you. And then those adaptations produce behavioral outputs. And those behavioral outputs are ultimately how other people understand and relate to you. So the bottom-up point of view is kind of the accurate depiction of, I guess, who you are, quote-unquote. Now the top-down version of the three layers is how we change. So what we're going to discover in this episode is that the starting point is always the behavior. You change a behavior because that new behavior begins to create a new adaptation, and that new adaptation will suddenly shift behavior. the set point of your personality or where you exist among the spectrum of your potential personality. So the way to understand yourself is bottom up, start with traits, move to adaptations, and then move to behavior. The way to change is to start with behavior,

00:40:50move that down into adaptation, and then let that slightly alter your personality. Easy. Yeah, so fucking easy. So easy. This framework is really important, and we're probably going to reiterate it throughout the episode because when people want to change... consistently over a long period of time and they keep failing over and over, it's usually because they're making one of two mistakes. And I'm just going to call these the two fundamental errors of change. So the first one is that they are treating a trait like a behavior, right? So it's like somebody's just like, I'm going to be extroverted now. and they think they can just decide tomorrow to go be an extrovert. Or they're going to say, I'm going to be really organized and conscientious. Your traits are not switches that can be flipped. Like they are extremely hard to alter and in many cases cannot be altered. And so the goal with traits is not to change them. It's to understand them so you can adapt to them. The second error is treating a behavior like a trait. So it's saying, okay,

00:41:52wow, I never get off the couch and go to the gym. I must just be a lazy person, and I'm never going to change that. And again, you're making a fundamental error. You're taking a behavior, something that is very easily changed, and then you are judging it as a permanent trait of your personality, which is just simply not the case. And so the goal with behaviors is to change them, and we're going to have a whole section in this episode on how to change behaviors. And the goal with traits is to understand them. And then the adaptations is all the psychological layers that we build in the middle to make the two coalesce and synchronize. Right, right. Okay, so it would be easier if we could change traits. That would be nice and fast if we could flip that switch. It's just not likely or maybe even impossible to do that, you're saying? Correct. So the most reliable way to do this, you're saying? Right. is to start with the behaviors and then work those into your adaptations, what you're calling, and then those will adapt to your traits. And we're going to start with traits in this process because I think it's extremely important for people to come to terms with their own personality traits. Understand yourself first. There's two ways that this can really go wrong. One is that people just...

00:43:08don't accept their own personality traits. They're introverted and they think they're a loser because they're not an extrovert. So if you judge yourself for not having the right personality, you're just setting yourself up for a lot of shame and self-loathing, which is not good. And then secondly... Those adaptations, when you do decide to take on new behaviors, those new behaviors need to be aligned and adaptable to your personality trait, right? So I am very introverted, but a big part of my job is doing public events, like going and doing public speaking, going and meeting like hundreds of fans, right? Right. doing tons of media, like a dozen interviews in a single afternoon. It can be exhausting. And so I have had to learn the behaviors and build up a skillset so that I can be adaptable to my environment. But that doesn't necessarily change who I am. It just simply is building an adaptation that fits in with my personality. And even then, it's even though I've built that skillset, I do a fraction of the speaking and appearances that a lot of other people

00:44:13in our industry do. And a lot of that's just driven by my personality. It's important to understand the personality because A, it sets the parameters of like kind of who you can be. And then B, it helps you understand which behaviors are reasonable to pursue and which ones are maybe a little bit less reasonable to pursue. Now, the interesting thing about this three layer cake of personality is that. everybody kind of ended up being partially right. Right. Right. So like we've talked about so far. Yeah. So like Gordon Alport was right. And all the personality psychologists were right. And that like, you do have these baked in tendencies that are very measurable and appear repeatedly across cultures and across languages and across context and time. Walter Mischel was also correct. And that situations matter and most behavior is adaptable and you can change behavior depending on the situation and the environment. And funny enough, Freud was also correct because Freud's theory of the ego was that our self-identity, the way we come to see ourselves and identify ourselves, is itself an adaptation between who we are and our environment, which fits right in with this. And one way to look at Freud's theory of the unconscious is that

00:45:32It's a bunch of old adaptation layers that we have forgotten that we developed in childhood. And then we grew up and forgot that we created them. And so they've just been running on autopilot beneath the surface of consciousness. And gives you a sense of this is just me. Yeah, I'm just this is just how I am. I can't handle these situations or like the world is just an upsetting place or, you know, whatever. Whatever baked in beliefs you have you've carried over from your childhood trauma is. Those are adaptations you developed at an early age and then just forgot they were there. So throughout the rest of this episode, we're going to go through these three layers one by one. We're going to be spending quite a bit of time on each one so that listeners can really understand what they're working with and really understand themselves at each of these three layers. And then we're going to talk about the most evidence-based ways of approaching how to change each of those layers and how much each of those layers can change.

00:46:29The bottom layer, traits, do not change very much. You can change them a little, but not a whole lot. The middle layer, the adaptations, you can change, but it's a lot of work and it takes a lot of time. The top layer, behaviors, you can change tomorrow. And it's just really about understanding and strategizing correctly how to approach it. Now, as we go through this, we're going to take some pretty fascinating twists and turns. We're going to talk about everything from horoscope readings to morning routines and Why you should always leave your gym shoes by the door. And towards the end of the episode, we're actually going to talk about the one way that we know of, that the research knows of, to actually completely change your life extremely quickly, like even overnight. but we're also going to explain why you might not want to. But first, in the next chapter, we're going to start by digging further into the personality research, really understanding our personality traits, really understanding these default set points that we all exist with, how to come to terms with them, how to understand them, how to correctly identify them, and then how we can better work with them throughout our lives. But to explain it,

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