Book review
The Best Book On Personality I’ve Read
A book that truly respects its topic richness by being alike
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Personality is a complex beast, right?
This invisible substance that you always carry with yourself and that happens to be altered— sometimes slightly, sometimes a whole lot more —when you:
- meet people
- meet another type of people
- are by yourself
- do certain things
- don’t do certain things
- evolve in a common environment
- evolve in an uncommon environment
- and much more.
In short, it’s an ever-changing multifaceted beast, yes, you understood it right.
So did Benjamin Hardy, PhD, the author of Personality Isn’t Permanent. And it’s exactly what his new book is about: the ever-evolving nature of personality and the million ways that exist that can change it— for the better or not.
This short post constitutes my personal review of this very book —that I enjoyed a lot by the way.
Here, I’ll focus on a few isolated parts of the book that really resonated with me thanks to prior, and sometimes very fresh, life experiences.
What exactly is personality
Considering how this book depicts personality, I think I scored 60/100 on its meaning. I knew plenty of things when it comes to it, however, I seemed to be wrong on some assumptions.
For instance, one of them is that I knew it wasn’t fixed.
But I didn’t know it to that degree. I thought that parts of it were ingrained in us and that throughout our life we would be discovering it bit by bit, while still changing some of the discovered bits.
It seems like I was wrong.
The book teaches us that the rich substance that personality is is something that— if I understood correctly—, is completely malleable and that none of its parts is innate.
Understand passion better
I was guilty of the “finding our passion” thingy, but this book made me totally understand it.
By guilty I mean that I had the belief that finding our passion was about trying things here and there and feeling at a certain moment if it clicked or not. Where I was wrong here is in the degree of “trying”.
From what I learnt in the book, trying here and there won’t really enable us to understand if we have a passion for something or not —and it totally makes sense now that I write down this very truth. It is the deliberate practice of a given matter over a long period of time that would do so.
And I could have understood this sooner. Indeed, I have one thing in my life that perfectly illustrates this case:
Programming.
This was there, right in front of me. I am passionate about coding, but it’s only after programming for years that I became passionate about it.
I didn’t wake up one day telling myself: “Woh, weeing lines of code in an elegant way will be my jam for the next five years!”. I first had to discover the discipline, diligently dedicate time to learn it, discover it —to a certain depth —, before ultimately ending up adoring it.
And that was the same thing with writing.
The same lengthy process of discovering and familiarizing myself with the subject to a certain depth is what made it click in my noddle.
The charity nugget
I knew about tweaking the subconscious in order to attract what I want. However, this one book learnt me a nugget about donations that enabled me to understand a recent event, and understanding feels nice.
The recent event in question is that in April 2019 my income increased manyfold.
The book explains a certain concept that links charity to income. When I read that, I jumped onto my bank statements from 2019 and looked for the first time a particular line appeared on it.
You feel the coming thing, isn’t it?
The month following the first appearance of the line I was looking for, was the moment my income augmented. I’m letting you get the book (link at the end of this post) to learn the exact details of the juicy nugget I’m referring to.
Romantic relationships
I never believed in “the one”.
I always thought that many people could be the one —and I’m not talking about pansexuality.
To me, a relationship that is exceptional —such as the one you have with “the one” — is simply the byproduct of dedication and effort towards common purposes that melted together in many ways.
You can MAKE someone be your ONE as it “simply” requires work, dedication, respect and communication, communication, communication.
The book fully agreed with my thinking and is full of excellent examples to accurately illustrate what I simply had in mind regarding the topic of romantic relationships.
And it’s not only this topic that is IMO incredibly well-described thanks to relevant stories and experiences, it’s every single topic or even subtopic that this books deals with that always hit the finger on the nail.
Enforcing a positive environment
In all his examples on the importance of getting our environment right in order to indeed make it an ally in the pursuit of our goals instead of a deadwood, the one that stroke me the most was the “forcing function”.
It’s the third component of what he calls environmental design.
Prior to this book, I knew how impactful our environment was on the person we are, however, I didn’t know to this depth how much it indeed influences us.
The book thus learnt me to be even more attentive to my environment, and I’m grateful for this. Because by being more in control of my environment, I am —by extension—more in control of my personality, and will thus better be able to direct my life in the exact direction I want to lead it.
Bottom line
In the book, the author gives us rock-solid foundations to understand what personality is, how it could be changed — whether consciously or unconsciously — and how to protect us from having it being changed in ways we didn’t want.
He also instructs us how much our personality dictates our life.
In brief, if we don’t tame the beast it is, it will tame us, and our whole life — by extension. Generally, it is the opposite that we want to see happening, and this book is the perfect arsenal for empowering us to make it a reality.
I won’t further spoil you when it comes to the content of Personality Isn’t Permanent, I think it’s definitely a great read and a book to return to quite often, so if you are interested in learning more about it, buy it AND read it!
To me, it is so much worth the investment.
Also, I am persuaded that from now on, this book will accompany me on my quest to getting closer and closer to the person I aspire to be, to my future self in other words. ;]
