19:14The Mindset Mentor Podcast · Talking Head
The #1 Skill You MUST Learn
A 19-minute framework for collapsing the overwhelming weight of long-term change into three identity words and one day.
June 5thThe argument in one line.
Most people fail to change because they aim at personality traits, which are nearly fixed, rather than behaviors and adaptations, which are genuinely malleable.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You have tried multiple self-help approaches and still revert to the same patterns.
- You want to understand what personality psychology says about how fixed you are before trying another tactic.
- You have told yourself you are just not that kind of person and want a research-grounded framework to test it.
- You find the Big Five mentioned everywhere and want a clear applied explanation of what it means for your own behavior.
SKIP IF…
- You are looking for quick tactical tips. This chapter is foundational theory not implementation.
- You already have a solid working model of the Big Five and trait vs state distinctions.
The full version, fast.
The central error in most self-help efforts is treating personality traits as if they can be switched off by willpower. The Big Five model, the most replicated finding in all of psychology, describes these trait basins. Layered on top are adaptations and behaviors. The reliable path to change runs top-down: change a behavior first, let it forge a new adaptation, and the personality shifts slightly over time. Trying to change from the bottom up is why most attempts fail.
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04:40hostMark Manson
04:40cohostDrew Boerne
Where the time goes.
00:00 – 05:19
01 · Introduction
New studio reveal sets up the central joke. The episode promise: you are not stuck because you are broken, you are stuck because you are targeting the wrong layer.
05:19 – 07:59
02 · When Freud met Gordon Allport
Young Allport visits Freud in Vienna in 1920, makes a throwaway observation about a boy on a tram, gets told was that little boy you, storms out, and launches a lifelong counter-argument to Freudian determinism.
07:59 – 13:31
03 · Are we trapped by our past?
Allport vs. Freud: determinism vs. agency. The philosophical war that still runs under every self-help book.
13:31 – 19:23
04 · Counting personality with a dictionary
Galton lexical hypothesis, Allport and Odbert 17953-word dictionary project, Cattell 16 factors, and the decades-long statistical grind that led toward the Big Five.
19:23 – 24:17
05 · The Big Five explained
OCEAN walkthrough with real examples and trade-offs for each dimension. Conscientiousness predicts job performance; agreeableness predicts relationship satisfaction; neuroticism predicts poor mental health.
24:17 – 27:45
06 · Why neuroticism exists
The evolutionary case for anxiety: every tribe needs one highly neurotic member scanning for danger. Even the worst-seeming trait has a context where it is adaptive.
27:45 – 32:01
07 · Are your traits set like plaster?
Mischel if-then signatures and Fleeson distribution model. Personality as a center of gravity, not a locked setting.
32:01 – 33:42
08 · Mark introversion flip
Personal case study: strong introvert who trained extroversion at university, tested as extroverted for years, reverted after marriage. What it proves about the adaptation layer.
33:42 – 38:25
09 · Drew and the taco truck
Highly agreeable Drew flips out at an elderly driver who delayed him by ten seconds. Even stable traits have situational edge cases.
38:25 – 42:27
10 · The three layers of the self
The core model: traits to adaptations to behaviors. Understanding yourself runs bottom-up; changing yourself runs top-down.
42:27 – 50:01
11 · The two fundamental errors
Error 1: treating a trait like a behavior. Error 2: treating a behavior like a trait. The rest of the episode addresses each layer.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- The most replicated finding in all of psychology is the Big Five personality model, not mindfulness or growth mindset or any habit framework.
- Personality traits are a center of gravity, not a fixed point. You drift away situationally but get pulled back.
- Freud, Allport, and Mischel were all partially right: traits are real, situations matter, and the ego is an adaptation layer we built and forgot.
- The Big Five was discovered by Air Force clerks studying fighter pilots two decades before academic psychologists arrived at the same answer.
- Conscientiousness is one of the strongest predictors of both job performance and long-term health.
- Agreeableness predicts exactly why people cannot stop caring what others think: social harmony feels like oxygen to high-agreeableness people.
- Attempting to change a trait directly is structurally the same mistake as trying to lift a building by pushing on the roof.
- Behaviors are the only layer you can change tomorrow. Adaptations and traits shift downstream from that.
- Insight alone does almost nothing. Change requires a new behavior, not a new awareness.
- Freud unconscious is best understood as a stack of forgotten adaptations built in childhood and left running on autopilot.
- A tribe benefits from having at least one highly neurotic member scanning for danger even when wrong 90 percent of the time.
- The reason you revert to old habits at home for the holidays has nothing to do with your parents being triggering. The environment re-activates old adaptations.
The layer you target determines whether change sticks.
WHAT TO LEARN
Sustained change fails not from lack of effort but from aiming at the wrong tier of identity: personality traits resist direct pressure while behaviors yield immediately.
01Introduction
- The premise that you are broken or uniquely undisciplined is almost always wrong. The real diagnosis is that you have been targeting the wrong layer of yourself for years.
02When Freud met Gordon Allport
- A single humiliating encounter in 1920 launched the entire field of personality psychology as a counter-argument to Freudian determinism.
03Are we trapped by our past?
- The tension between feeling trapped by your history and believing you have genuine agency maps onto a real and unresolved debate in psychology that has been running for over a century.
04Counting personality with a dictionary
- The Big Five emerged from literal dictionary scanning, not theorizing. Decades of failed replication preceded it, meaning the current consensus survived a long filter of failed alternatives.
05The Big Five explained
- Each Big Five dimension has genuine trade-offs in both directions.
- Conscientiousness is the single strongest trait predictor of both job performance and long-term health.
06Why neuroticism exists
- High neuroticism is not simply a deficit. In a small group navigating genuine uncertainty, one highly anxious person scanning for danger provides a real benefit to everyone who is not paying close enough attention.
07Are your traits set like plaster?
- Personality operates more like a distribution around a center of gravity than a fixed setting. You have a home position, situational forces move you away, and you tend to drift back when those forces are removed.
08Mark introversion flip
- Building an adaptation that works against your base personality trait is possible but costs energy proportional to the gap.
09Drew and the taco truck
- Even stable high-scoring traits like agreeableness have situational edge cases. Knowing your profile tells you your default, not your ceiling or your floor.
10The three layers of the self
- Understanding yourself runs bottom-up: traits inform adaptations inform behaviors. Changing yourself runs top-down: start with a behavior, build an adaptation, let the trait shift slightly over time.
- Freud unconscious is most usefully understood as a stack of forgotten adaptations built early in life and left running on autopilot.
11The two fundamental errors
- The two fundamental errors are mirror images: treating a trait like a behavior and treating a behavior like a trait.
- Behaviors are the only layer of the self that can change tomorrow.
Terms worth knowing.
- Big Five (OCEAN)
- The five most replicated personality dimensions: Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism. Independently discovered by Air Force researchers in the 1960s before psychologists arrived at the same model two decades later.
- Lexical hypothesis
- The idea originating with Francis Galton that every meaningful human trait will eventually acquire a word in natural language, so a complete dictionary scan should capture the full space of personality.
- If-then signatures
- Walter Mischel term for situational patterns in personality: a person behaves consistently not across all contexts but in specific if-situation-X-then-behavior-Y patterns.
- Adaptation layer
- The middle tier in the three-layer model: the identities, beliefs, habits, and coping strategies built on top of base personality traits to help a person function in their environment.
- Trait vs. behavior error
- One of two fundamental mistakes in self-change: either treating a trait as if it can be switched like a behavior, or treating a behavior as if it reflects a permanent trait.
Things they pointed at.
Lines you could clip.
02:50
“You can be a genuinely motivated person solving the wrong problem.”
09:18
“Freud argued the whole point of psychoanalysis was to turn hysterical misery into common unhappiness.”
41:59
“The way to understand yourself is bottom up. The way to change is top down.”
37:44
“My introversion just feels like my default. If there is no outside pressure on me, I default to being a sack of potatoes on the couch.”
08:04
“There is no soul within this walking meat robot known as Mark Manson.”
Where the conversation goes.
00:00 – 01:15sparseSetup and comedy hook
01:15 – 05:19denseEpisode promise and argument
05:19 – 13:31steadyAllport vs. Freud origin story
13:31 – 19:23densePersonality measurement history
19:23 – 27:45denseBig Five deep dive
27:45 – 38:25denseTrait stability and situational variation
38:25 – 50:01denseThree-layer model and change mechanics
Word for word.
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00:00Drew, did you notice?
00:02Notice what?
00:03I'm a new person. I Completely new. I did not notice this.
00:08Completely new. Top to bottom. I can't believe you didn't notice.
00:10Okay. So tell me. Did you see the white wall?
00:14Well, we're yeah. Okay. New studio.
00:16This is my wall. Alright. I replaced my black wall with my white wall.
00:20Okay. So brand new studio. Yes.
00:23New microphone. Yeah. New jacket.
00:26Mhmm. I shaved. Mhmm.
00:29Which haven't done in a while. I've noticed. I'm a new person.
00:32I think it's a little more complicated than that. If you were as superficial as I am. Oh.
00:38Right? Oh, okay. There is no soul within this walking meat robot known as Mark Manson.
00:44Sitting across from me now. Therefore, the fact that I changed my jacket and shaved, and sat us I in front of a new wall is the entirety of myself.
00:52What does constitute change? That's a good question. You know, the Buddha said there's no such thing as self.
00:57Can you change that which does not exist? Can you just read the intro, please?
01:02Okay.
01:03Alright. I'll read the intro. Here we go.
01:13Welcome to solved, everybody. I am Mark Manson, and today, we are talking about changes. I'm gonna 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.
01:26You've read the books. You've done the courses. You've woken up at 4AM like a pale faced Victorian factory owner and journaled your intentions into a leather bound notebook while the rest of the world slept.
01:37Why do I let you write the intros? You have tried, dear listener. Nobody could say you have not tried, and yet you heard the 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.
01:54I've never met my mailman, for the record. Fortunately, I have some good news, but I also have some bad news.
02:00The good news is all of that fruitless effort is not evidence that you're a lazy sack of shit, or it might be actually, but we'll get to that.
02:11You'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.
02:20But 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.
02:34Most 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.
02:45What we're gonna 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 gonna work.
02:59You can be a genuinely motivated person solving the wrong problem. So in this episode of solved, we're gonna 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 gonna talk about why the most popular personality tests in the world, taken by millions of people every year, predicts almost nothing useful about you and what actually does.
03:26We're gonna 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.
03:43We'll get into why trying to suppress a bad habit is one of the most reliable ways to make sure it sticks. 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. We'll talk about why harrowing traumatic events often lead to the most durable change in your life.
04:03This and much, much more. The argument that we're gonna 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.
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?
04:40I am New York Times bestselling author Mark Manson, and this is Drew Boerne, my cohost, producer, lead researcher, and the only person who has ever been known to formally ask to stop raising his hand in therapy. Oh, boy.
04:53And 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.
05:09Let's do it. Let's I'm already tired.
05:19So our story begins with a chance encounter between Sigmund Freud and a recent college graduate.
05:26And 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.
05:35He had just graduated from college. It was around 1920, and he had just finished up a a study abroad program in Turkey.
05:42Like 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.
05:55He was world renowned by this point, and a lot of people would make pilgrimages to Vienna to to meet him and to even be analyzed by him.
06:04So Alport wrote a letter. He reached out. Freud said, sure.
06:08Come on by, And they set up the meeting. It's important to note that Gordon Allport was not a psychologist. He didn't study psychology in school.
06:16He didn't really know a whole lot about it. He just kinda 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. Right.
06:28So Alport shows up in Vienna, goes to Freud's office. Freud's office is famously super weird.
06:34It'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.
06:47And this poor college kid is just like, oh my god. Like, what is what what is happening?
06:53This is 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.
07:14And 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?
07:32Gordon did not take this well. That's very Freudian. Yeah.
07:36Yeah. He did not take it very well. He kind of freaked out.
07:40He 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 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 on a very base level instinctively that human beings, we are not our past.
08:07We 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.
08:22It actually gets at a very deep philosophical question of, are we restricted to who we were in our past? Are we are we confined by our childhood experiences? Are we doomed to repeat the things that our parents did to us or genetic heritage?
08:39Or do we have agency? Do we get to dictate and decide who we are moment to moment?
08:46And Gordon Allport 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.
09:00They 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.
09:11And 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.
09:27So Alport just rejected this. He was like, there's gotta be a better way. Like, I can change my decisions.
09:33I've changed in my life. Like, there's gotta be a more objective way to measure these things. So measure who is a person, and then how do they change over time.
09:42And so when he returned to grad school, he switched to psychology,
09:46and he decided to tackle this problem. This debate still goes on today. Right?
09:51We still feel this tension. I I think anybody you talk to, they're gonna have some idea about how fixed they are versus how much they can actually change, and that's that's a tension that goes on within us. There's still debate, a large debate as we're gonna get into here as well.
10:04That is a real tension that we all feel. Yeah. I mean, it's in some ways, you feel
10:10trapped. 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.
10:18Right. Right. Or like you, you know, you see something you do that, like, your dad did.
10:22Right? And you're like, well, that's just how I am because of that. Yeah.
10:24Because of my dad. Into all of that. Right.
10:26But there's there's that real tension. We all feel that. Yeah.
10:28We're always answering that question too. It turns out it's completely natural to feel those two sides of the tension, and we're gonna 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?
10:54How 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.
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12:10Go to shopify.com/solved. But we're gonna 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 in how we understand people today.
12:28So 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 someone somebody is.
12:46And then secondly, once you define who that person is, how do you actually measure if they have changed at all or not? There are a lot of different approaches, a lot of different schools of thought.
12:56Obviously, 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 out push put machine.
13:15Alport 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 we started prepping for this episode, it really gave me an appreciation of just how brilliant this was.
13:31So there was a guy in the nineteenth century named Francis Galton. He was Darwin's cousin.
13:37Was He a bit of a polymath, wrote books and papers and articles on all sorts of different topics. Also was, like, apparently a a virulent racist and nationalist and, like, proto Nazi.
13:49But we'll leave that for another podcast. Yeah. But Galton had a really interesting insight.
13:55He said that if you wanna actually measure who a person is, you should start by looking at language.
14:02Because 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 piece of meaning, lexical piece of meaning.
14:17Right? 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 how do how do you define a person.
14:33And you can probably find all sorts of commonalities among those words and start grouping them in certain ways. Allport 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 a human behavior.
14:55And they initially pulled out 17,953 words. This took them multiple years.
15:00They're just flipping through a dictionary. Can you imagine? Like, can you imagine, like first of all, you were a PhD student.
15:07Like, can you imagine somebody asking you, oh, what's your PhD work on? And you're like, I'm reading the dictionary to understand human behavior.
15:15This is what happens when you're incredibly bored. Right? This is so this with no phones around or anything like that, flipping through a dictionary is better than that.
15:22See, it could be worse guys. It could be worse. It could be worse.
15:25They narrowed this list down to 4,500 distinct
15:28descriptions or characteristics. And then once they got down to 4,500, they just published the list and left it for other people to to deal with.
15:36And the reason for that primarily was because they simply did not have the technology or the the means to, like, 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 What combination.
15:55Language and Yeah. And do all sorts of combinatorial factoring and all this stuff.
16:00So it wasn't until the nineteen forties with the very first early computer systems that you were even able to, like, 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.
16:20If we have all these words to describe human behaviors and human traits, clearly, like, a lot of them must be similar. A lot of them must be used interchangeably.
16:29Right? You can say somebody is a very exciting person. You can also say that they're a very fun person.
16:33Right? Like, those are two very similar ways to describe somebody, and they're probably referring to slightly different surfaces of the same character trait.
16:42So 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 these 16 factors were kind of the the very, very earliest edition of today what we would call a personality test or personality traits.
17:02Now the problem with Cattell's 16 factors is that nobody could replicate them. Researchers would go out and interview people and, like, 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.
17:16And this same problem continued to happen for the next twenty years or so. There was a there was a guy named Hans Ein Einsenk who narrowed it down to three factors, but that seemed implausible.
17:28There were a number of researchers in the sixties 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 is the big five, which is what all this is driving towards, was originally discovered by a couple Air Force clerks, which is fascinating.
17:47And 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
18:09profession? They're looking for an aptitude test early around that. Right?
18:12Like Yes.
18:13Yeah. Which makes sense. I mean, the military.
18:15Right. If there's You the right people in the right spot. Right.
18:18If there's any profession that, like, really needs to objectively understand how good a person is or not, it's gonna be the military, which interestingly, I believe the IQ test was Yeah. Created for the military as well.
18:28And notice there there's stakes involved here, and that's kinda like that was, yeah. Anyway, it wasn't just academic in that sense. Yeah.
18:33Exactly. Yeah. Two men by the name of Ernest Toups and Raymond Crystal independently landed on the big five.
18:40And this I believe this was, like, 1963.
18:42Yeah. Early sixties. Yeah.
18:43And
18:44they correctly identified what we today know as the five fundamental traits of human personality and the the five traits that really define each of our uniqueness and 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 filed away with a bunch of other internal research and wasn't read for Yeah.
19:04It was like a bulletin, basically. You know? It was like an Air Force bulletin that just didn't get circulated outside.
19:09Yeah. And so it's funny because psychologists would take another twenty years to land on the big five.
19:15And it was only later I believe it was in the nineties that they actually just, like, randomly discovered that these these guys in the air force The eighties nineties. Yeah.
19:23Independently discovered the big five twenty 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 we have ever found.
19:49Is 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 datasets too? Yeah.
19:59No. I don't know. Like, anything.
20:01Yeah. 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 in psychology, period.
20:14Yeah. Full stop. Yeah.
20:16So this is, like, as credible as it gets. Right.
20:19Right. It doesn't mean it's perfect necessarily. It's It's not perfect.
20:21Absolutely the best thing we have right now. Yeah. If you've ever heard the acronym OCEAN, right, so that stands for openness to new experiences, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism.
20:33And I'll just give a very, very brief explanation of what each one of those. Okay.
20:39So openness to new experiences is generally people who are open to new experiences. So it it maps pretty well to creativity, adventurousness Novelty seeking.
20:50Novelty 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.
21:04You're probably very high in openness to to new experiences. People who are very low in openness, they tend to be very regimented. They tend to like rituals and routines.
21:14They are not very open minded. They're very traditional. They like to do things the way things have always been done because it's more dependable.
21:20It's more reliable. The interesting thing about all five of these traits is that none of them is necessarily right or wrong.
21:28We're all high or low in all of them. Each one comes with trade offs. Right?
21:33So if you're high in openness to experience, you're probably gonna be a very creative individual. You're probably gonna be a very spontaneous individual, and that's great in a lot of contexts, but it's also bad in other contexts.
21:43Right? 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 gonna perform very well.
21:54So 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.
22:01I am personally extremely high. You know? I'm actually You are.
22:04I'm, like, ninety ninth percentile. You are up there for sure. Yeah.
22:06And openness to new experiences. Yeah. I think I'm slightly over average, but not not not like you.
22:12You're not a degenerate like I am. Yeah. Second one is conscientiousness.
22:16So conscientiousness is somebody who's very conscientious, is very detail oriented.
22:21They're very organized. They're very reliable, predictable.
22:25They like things to be in order. They like to have structure and schedules.
22:31I'm definitely not super high in conscientiousness. I I actually I think when I was younger, I was I was extremely low, but I think now I'm probably around average. K.
22:40I don't know. We'll get to that.
22:44What is that supposed that might be. Well, yeah. What what is that supposed to be?
22:47No. No. I don't think you're super high in conscientious.
22:50Not super high. No. Yeah.
22:51I think maybe slightly above average or right around average, I would say. Yeah. Then there's extroversion,
22:57which this one I I imagine is probably the one everybody's heard of. Yeah. Introversion versus extroversion.
23:02Has a label for themselves for this for sure. Yeah. Yeah.
23:04Then there's agreeableness, which is how much people prioritize social harmony, getting along with each other, cooperation, making sure everybody's happy.
23:14So like a very highly agreeable person is it's gonna 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.
23:27They'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?
23:42Those people are probably very high in agreeableness. And so that that is a challenge for them to let go of that social harmony and to allow themselves to be disliked. And then finally, there's neuroticism.
23:54And 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.
24:06Highly neurotic people, they tend to experience more dissatisfaction in their relationships. They tend to experience more conflict,
24:14and they struggle to cope with stress more often. People would wonder, like, why would neuroticism even like, why? Why do we have that?
24:22If you're in a a chaotic unstable environment, go.
24:26Go. Do it. Can I guess what you're gonna say?
24:28Is only the paranoid survive? Yes. Right?
24:31In a lot of ways, that's 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 forgot probably should be a little bit more worried. And, you know, the point is it's not all black and white.
24:43Yes. Okay? Even neuroticism That's true.
24:45Isn't 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 Yeah. To, like, call out risks and dangers even if they're wrong 90% of the time.
24:56Yeah. You just hope it's not you. So yeah.
24:58They all have advantages and disadvantages. And so I think what makes us
25:02interesting 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.
25:19You kinda want a division of labor across,
25:22you know, the social the social cohort. There's diversification there that Yeah. Yeah.
25:26It helps everybody out. Yeah. Another one of the reasons that this this framework, the big five framework, has lasted throughout the decades too, is that it does actually have predictive power.
25:36Unlike 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.
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.
25:53Yeah. They will work harder.
25:55Usually, you 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.
26:08Extraversion, that is a really good predictor of, like, social integration and your social relationships. Same thing with agreeableness too.
26:16That 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?
26:23Well, 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.
26:32Okay? Should mention this real quick too. There's another model called the HEXACO model that adds one more dimension, which is the dimension of honesty and humility.
26:41There's still some debate. This has been around for a little while. There's still some debate about how universal that is.
26:45The big five, it's been replicated across time. It's been replicated across many, many cultures.
26:50Hundreds of thousands, if not millions of of subjects have have taken the big five test across the world. It's been found that it's it is actually very consistent Yeah.
26:59Across a lot of different populations. Now that said, okay, we can we can predict those things.
27:06But 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 gonna be the first one to talk.
27:21It's actually not that specific. Okay? It predicts tendencies,
27:24but it doesn't predict, like, microbehavior.
27:27Exactly. Yeah. This is at the population level kind of at the at the aggregate level, or even within a person, it's out over long periods of times and many, many interactions with the world or the people around you.
27:37Right? 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?
27:45Right? Are they set like plaster?
27:47Yeah. Which is what William James said. Right.
27:50Right? Which is he he believed that who you were at 30 was who you were gonna be forever.
27:55Right. And there's not really anything you could do about it. Kind of a modification of Freud there.
27:59Right? 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.
28:09If you go back and look at James, he believed we couldn't. Freud didn't really believe we could. Even 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.
28:27Right? So it's like we're consistently landing on this idea of like, nope. This is who you are.
28:32Good luck. Right. Right.
28:34Yeah. So so the the researchers who found all of those all those studies I was talking about all over the world across time, across cultures, Costin McRae were were their names. They're two famous personality psych psychologists and researchers.
28:46They 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.
28:52Like, what are we even doing this episode for? Yeah. Yeah.
28:56I mean, if William James says we can't change, if Freud says we can't change, if Gordon Alport and the personality psychologist concluded that we can't change, like, what the hell are we doing a six hour change episode on, Drew? Are we crazy?
29:09Are we making things up? No. We're not making things up.
29:13It turns out there's more to this story, and there's more to us than simply our personality traits. This episode is brought to you by Factor.
29:22One of the big things that came up on today's episode is that you don't change yourself by trying harder. You change by redesigning your environment so the thing you wanna do is easier than the thing you don't. It turns out food is the easiest place to test this.
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30:09The behavior doesn't change because you try harder, it changes because your environment changed for you. So head over to factormeals.com/solved202650 off and use the code solve twenty twenty six fifty off to get 50% off and a free daily greens per box with a new subscription only while supplies last through 09/27/2026.
30:31See website for more details.
30:33There was a researcher, Walter Mischel. He'll come up a few times.
30:37Okay? So in the late sixties, 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 extroversion.
30:53I can't tell you if they're gonna speak up in this situation or not. They just couldn't do it. Came up over and over again.
30:59William Fleason was another researcher at this time who found that personality seemed to be more like a distribution. Okay. There was a tendency, kind of a stable basin around which you would kind of float.
31:10Interesting. Like a center of gravity. Like a center of pulled back to.
31:13Exactly. Yeah. Exactly.
31:14There's like a fabric around you that pulls you back into this 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.
31:25So kind of together, Michel came up with the idea of this if then signatures. Okay? Yes.
31:31You 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.
31:40Right? 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 you two are alone, obvious.
31:47So we all know that experience. Right? The question then becomes then, so which one of those is the real us?
31:53Is that even the right question to ask? Your high in openness, let's say, or or you're introverted, Where do you flip those scripts?
32:01So interestingly,
32:02the the one trait that has flip flopped quite a bit throughout my life is introversion, extroversion, and it and it took me a long time to recognize this pattern. So when I was very young, I always tested as an a pretty strong introvert.
32:15And then once I got to university and started drinking and partying and meeting girls, I would always test as an extrovert.
32:23But 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?
32:31So they ask you questions like, you know, when you're 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.
32:49And so what would happen is that I would start answering that question differently in my twenties, which would then trigger a a report of high extroversion.
32:58And 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 gonna get into the explanations of like why this happens. Right?
33:09Because it because you could look at that. You could say like, well, that's me changing. Right?
33:13Changing throughout my life. It's like, okay. Well, what changed?
33:16Did 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 Fleisen would argue, yes.
33:30That's what I did. There were certain contexts where I learned that it was adaptable to be more extroverted. And we're gonna get it all into what those adaptations are and how you can develop them for yourself.
33:42Mine is actually the
33:44one that's most salient to me anyways, agreeableness. I'm an agreeable person. I have a need to please.
33:50Sometimes it gets a little toxic, but usually, I think it's it's fairly healthy. I like to help people. I like to You you are very easygoing.
33:55It's it's interesting because we've worked together for a long time. I know that when you speak up and disapprove of something, I'm like, okay. It must be bad.
34:03Okay. That's because it's like if Drew That's where wanna go. Yeah.
34:06Drew is raising a fuss, it's like, okay. It must be bad. Yeah.
34:09Yeah. I I do. I I like calm and going with the flow and everything like that Yeah.
34:13Until I don't. Yeah. Okay?
34:15And this was very salient to me a few weeks ago or and it was probably a month ago at this point. True Hulk smash? Is the is this where this is going?
34:21So okay. I wanna preface this too. Do you remember the Values episode when I had the allegory of the taco truck?
34:28Yes. And I almost got into a fistfight with the guy at a taco truck. I forgot about the allegory of the taco truck.
34:32Right. So I'm gonna 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.
34:39This is not a pattern. This okay. Well, it is a little bit of a pattern, but it's not a a frequent occurrence.
34:45It's not a frequent occurrence. You're not starting fights at Taco Trucks on a regular basis. So just a little bit of background.
34:50There's just one keep you away from Taco Trucks. I was was having a very agreeable Drew does the day Okay.
34:58Kind of day. Okay? And I I went to yoga.
35:01I was You were centered. Centered.
35:03I know Your inner peace. Yogis are very agreeable people. For the most part.
35:08They they are accepting and wanna, you know Yeah. Of course. Eager to please.
35:11Yep. Right outside, there was a a charity that was set up.
35:15I bought five book bags for kids who were, you know, victims of domestic abuse and fleeing their homes and need a book bags. I'm like, I'm I'm a good person. Look how, you know, good I am.
35:23I buy these five book bags. Later on that night, I needed to I was gonna help out a friend. I was I went to another friend's house to pick something up and take it over to them.
35:32When I was driving over there, I did some boneheaded things in the in the street. It was a residential street, nobody around. Sun was shining.
35:39I couldn't see very well. Yeah. And I realized when I parked, there was somebody behind me, like, waiting for me.
35:44And 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 would do, like, delayed him by ten seconds. Wouldn't let it go to.
35:55Honking at me, yell at me, and so I flip him off. Okay? I was irate.
36:01I rate at this guy. Okay? Because it's I'm like, dude, I it's Yeah.
36:04Come on, man. Ten seconds. Yeah.
36:05Yeah. Like, come on. But I flip him off.
36:08He calls me a prick. I called him a crusty old toddler, I think, because they're words I use.
36:14I know. I know. So in the span of one day, that's what happened.
36:17Okay. Right? Generally speaking, though, I'm agreeable.
36:20I'm Yeah. I'm So which one is the real Drew? Which one is the real Drew in that situation?
36:25And, again, if you go back and listen to the the allegory, the taco truck, there's a similar Our are
36:31getting a a certain impression of
36:33of Drew Bernie. Suffice it to say, I I restored my agreeableness. I went into my friend's house.
36:38He's like, I know that guy. He's an asshole. This is where he lives, and there was a whole thing that went down.
36:42Okay? But I wasn't proud of that. Yeah.
36:45I went and I apologized to him. We buried the hatchet. It was cool.
36:48Whatever. But I'm agreeable until I'm not. Yeah.
36:51There's just situations where that can come out for me. Okay?
36:55And 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.
37:04Yes. For sure. And you can push yourself out of that Yeah.
37:07Yeah. Temporarily.
37:09Let's say you are naturally very introverted. You can train yourself to be extroverted, but it's gonna demand a lot more energy
37:16than it it would, say, if you're naturally extroverted. Like That was the question I was gonna ask you is that when you were, like, in that more extroversion and you've come back to introversion,
37:26which one of those like, were you more exhausted in one of those situations? Absolutely. I mean, the the extrovert that extroverted period of my life, it felt like it was like work.
37:36You know? It was like a task. It was a skill I was, like, consciously developing.
37:41Whereas 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.
37:52Yeah. I imagine that experience with the the crusty toddler. It was probably very draining for you.
37:57Yes. Like, was Incredibly. You probably felt exhausted by the end exhausted afterwards.
38:01Whereas, buying the book bads bags for a bunch of kids, like, probably just felt very natural. Whereas, like, somebody who's extremely disagreeable, calling that old man a crusty toddler probably would probably feel very natural to them.
38:12It wouldn't be draining at all. I think what we're driving at here and why we're pushing on this on in in the first chapter of this episode is because we really just want to establish the framework of, like, who a person is. How do we define ourselves?
38:27Because it turns out that the self is operating on three different layers simultaneously.
38:36So we've established the personality traits. Right? It's like it's it's the basin.
38:39It's the center of gravity. It's your natural tendency towards a pattern of behavior over a long period of time.
38:46And, yes, your personality, it is largely unchangeable. It can be changed slightly over a very long period of time, but we're gonna argue in this episode that that is probably not what you should be focusing on.
39:00The best thing you can do with your personality is just a self understanding of, 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.
39:19And 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 in the world, a lot of our patterns and habits and routines, like, these are all adaptations to moderate our natural personality and then the environment around us.
39:41Right? So simple example is that I was a very introverted kid when I went to university.
39:49I realized that left to my own devices, I'm just gonna sit in my dorm and play video games all day every day. I'm never gonna make friends. I'm never gonna have a girlfriend.
39:58So 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.
40:08And that adaptation allowed me to adapt to my environment to to get my needs met and to become a happier and more well rounded individual.
40:18So that's layer two. The third layer is is our actual behavior. Right?
40:22It'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.
40:42And all three of these layers are very deeply interlinked. Right?
40:46They 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.
41:00On 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.
41:11And then those adaptations produce behavioral outputs, And those behavioral outputs are ultimately how other people understand and relate to you.
41:20So the bottom up point of view is kind of the accurate depiction of, I guess, who you are, quote, unquote.
41:28Now the top down version of the three layers is how we change. So what we're gonna 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 the set point of your personality or where you exist among the spectrum of your potential personality.
41:54So the way to understand yourself is bottom up. Start with traits, move to adaptations, and then move to behavior.
42:00The way to change is to start with behavior, move that down into adaptation, and then let that slightly alter your personality.
42:09Easy. Yeah. So so fucking easy.
42:12So easy. This framework is really important, and it's we're probably gonna reiterate it throughout the episode. Because when people wanna 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.
42:27And I I'm I'm just gonna call these the two fundamental errors of change. So the first one is that they are treating a trait like a behavior. Right?
42:35So it's like somebody's just like, I'm gonna be extroverted now, and they think they can just decide tomorrow to go be an extrovert. Or they're gonna say, I'm gonna be really organized and conscientious.
42:46Your traits are not switches that that can be flipped. Like, they are extremely hard to alter and in many cases cannot be altered.
42:54And 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.
43:04So it's saying, wow. I'm I'm I never get off the couch and go to the gym. I must just be a lazy person, and I'm never gonna change that.
43:14And, 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.
43:25And so the goal with behaviors is to change them, and we're gonna 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 is all the psychological layers that we build in the middle to make the two coalesce Yeah.
43:44And and synchronize.
43:45Right. Right. Okay.
43:46So it would be easier if we could change traits. That'd 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?
43:56Correct. So the the most reliable way to do this, you're saying, 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.
44:09And we're gonna start with traits
44:11in this process because I think it's extremely important for people to come to terms with their own personality traits. Yourself first. There's two ways that this can really go wrong.
44:20One is that people just don't accept their own personality traits. Like, they they're introverted, and they think they're a loser because they're not an extrovert.
44:27And it's like so if you judge yourself for for having not having the right personality, you're just setting yourself up for a lot of shame and self loathing, which is not good.
44:38And 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.
44:49Right? 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.
44:59Right? Doing tons of media, like a dozen interviews in a single afternoon. It can be exhausting.
45:04And so I have had to learn the behaviors and build up a skill set so that I can be adaptable to my environment, but that doesn't necessarily change who I am.
45:14It just simply is is building an adaptation that fits in with my personality. And even then, it's even though I've built that skill set, I do a fraction of the speaking and appearances that a lot of other people in in our industry do, and a lot of that's just driven by my personality.
45:30It's important to understand the personality because a, it sets the parameters of, like, kinda who you can be, and then b, it helps you understand which behaviors are reasonable to pursue and which ones are are maybe a little bit less reasonable to pursue. Now the interesting thing about this three layer cake of personality is everybody kinda ended up being partially right.
45:55Right. Right? So like we've talked about so far.
45:56Yeah. So like Gordon Allport was right, and all the personality psychologists were right. And that, like, do have these baked in tendencies that are very measurable and appear repeatedly across cultures and across languages and across context and time.
46:11Walter Mischel was also correct in 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 the way we come to see ourselves and identify ourselves, is itself an adaptation between who we are and our environment, which is fits right in with this.
46:40And one way to look at Freud's theory of the unconscious is that it'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 that so they've just been running on autopilot beneath the surface of consciousness.
46:57And gives you a sense of this is just me. Yeah. I'm just is just how I am.
47:01I can't handle these situations, or, like, the world is just an upsetting place or, you know, whatever whatever baked in beliefs you you've carried over from your your childhood trauma, those are adaptations you developed at an early age and then just forgot they were there.
47:18So throughout the rest of this episode, we're we're going to go through these three layers one by one. We're gonna be spending quite a bit of time on each one so that listeners can really understand what they're working with and and really understand themselves at each of these three layers.
47:33And then we're gonna 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. What we're gonna find is that the bottom layer traits do not change very much.
47:46You 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.
48:03Now as we go through this, we're gonna take some pretty fascinating twists and turns. We're gonna 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 gonna 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.
48:29But we're also gonna explain why you might not want to. But first, in the next chapter, we're gonna 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.
48:52But to explain it, we're gonna start with a failed novelist and how she created one of the biggest corporate scams in modern history.
49:03What's up, everybody? Thank you for watching. This video is just one chapter of a much larger podcast episode about change, where Drew and I cover everything from specific ways to change an annoying behavior to deep identity level changes.
49:16We'll be releasing new chapters every few days on YouTube, but if you wanna watch or listen to the full episode right now, click on the links in the description to watch everything on Spotify. And if you like the show, please don't forget to subscribe. And if you wanna work on the topic at your own pace, we have a free PDF guide and workbook with all of the resources, citations, and exercises at solvepodcast.com/change.
49:39So I will see you soon.
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