Book Title: Personality Isn’t Permanent
Author: Benjamin Hardy
Genre: Business, Personal Growth, Psychology
I was thrilled to recently receive an early copy of Ben Hardy’s latest book, Personality Isn’t Permanent. While most of you are probably familiar with Ben and his writing, if not, he’s the top writer on Medium, an organizational psychologist, and writes profusely on the topic of productivity.
To be honest, when I first saw the title of the book, I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. However, since I’ve never been disappointed by a piece of Ben’s writing, I was intrigued to learn more. And I have to say, I genuinely loved this book and would highly recommend it.
If you’re a lover of personal growth content, then this book will tick all of the right boxes for what you probably want in a book. I also really appreciated that there was a nice balance between research based facts with great storytelling and personal experiences. While I find that some business books go too heavy on the research, the stories that Ben wove into each chapter made the book so relatable and kept the reader immersed.
Here is how the book is structured:
Introduction: A Personality Test Almost Ruined My Life
Chapter One: The Myths of Personality
Chapter Two: The Truth of Personality
Chapter Three: Transform Your Trauma
Chapter Four: Shift Your Story
Chapter Five: Enhance Your Subconscious
Chapter Six: Redesign Your Environment
Conclusion: Embrace Your Future to Change Your Past
Let’s Start At the Very Beginning…
The book starts out discussing some of the common myths associated with personality. In fact, I loved this part of the book because I’ve never really been a fan of personality tests. A few of these myths included: personality comes from your past, personality is innate and fixed, and personality can be categorized into types.
One of the biggest life changes that I’ve made in my own life over the past few years is being a future focused person. While it’s important to process our past, it does not define who we are today or tomorrow.
For example, ‘Ben posed the question,
“How could life change if you embraced the truth that your former and current selves are two fundamentally different people?”
For myself, I like to refer to my former self as “Betsy 1.0” and my current self as “Betsy 2.0.” Most of us are pretty hard on ourselves. When I think of Betsy 1.0 it’s a great reminder of how I viewed things when I was in business school.
You see, we all know that the first version of any new app or product won’t be perfect, in fact, we don’t expect it to be. We know that we’ll need to iterate and learn from our mistakes.
The same is true for us as humans, OF COURSE the 21 year old version of you wasn’t perfect, so let it go.
The Truth of Personality
This section of the book held SO MANY nuggets of wisdom and one of the major points was the importance of focus and pursuing one major goal. If you can do this, it will change your life.
In a world where most people believe that more is better, focus is often neglected, sadly.
Ben says, ” Your identity comes from your goals. Being totally bought-in and clear about the end you have in mind instills a deep sense of purpose. You can imagine your future self in the position you want to be. Without a clear outcome, your identity becomes muddled. Who are you really? What are you really all about? What are you going to do? Who are you going to be?”
But, if you’re truly serious about changing your life, focus is the very thing that will push you to the next level, it won’t be easy, but it will be so worth it.
Transform Your Trauma
For most of my life I wrongly viewed trauma as unbelievably severe incidents that happened to other people, not realizing that regardless or how small or insignificant they may seem, we all have experiences with trauma.
I loved the definition that Ben used in the book as he shared, “Trauma, in a variety of forms, is part of each of our lives. It includes any negative experience or incident that shapes who you are and how you operate in the world.”
While you might be tempted to skim or even skip this chapter I urge you not to. Read carefully, take notes, and give yourself time later on to refer back to this and go through the journaling prompts.
As Ben says, “The less you hold on to mistakes or painful experiences, the better you’re able to adapt to what the situation requires and perform in order to achieve your goals. What happened in the past doesn’t impact the next thing you do, or stop you from being entirely present in this moment.”
I keep referring back to this quote and each time it’s just as impactful as the first time I read it.
Shift Your Story
In the next section of the book, you’ll use what you learned about trauma, and will learn more about redefining your story.
“The idea that you should “never be the ‘former’ anything” conveys in one phrase the entire premise of this book. Whether you were an astronaut or a drug addict, you should never be the former anything. Both trauma and achievement can have a powerful impact on your personality. But whichever you experience, you should never get stuck in the past, nor let your past define you.”
Enhance Your Subconscious
This next chapter was absolutely fascinating to me. Whenever I read about how impactful our minds and memories are on our bodies, it always blows my mind, it’s incredible.
Although we tend to think of our memories as abstract and mental, they are physical and physiological. Your physical body is the evidence of your past—the embodied memory of everything that has come before. Or as Bessel van der Kolk, MD, put it in the very title of his book, “The body keeps the score.” The experiences in our lives become our biology. Those experiences are memories stored in specific areas of our body.
Oftentimes we try and mask or emotions mistakenly thinking that eventually they’ll go away, when that’s not the case at all.
The experiences we have transform not only our perspectives and identity, but become our very biology.
Redesign Your Environment
This final chapter about redesigning your environment was so much fun to read!
“Putting yourself in new environments, around new people, and taking on new roles is one of the quickest way to change your personality, for better or worse. Fully take on the roles you assume, and you’ll change from the outside in.”
Another key point is to make sure that you are creating a positive environment for yourself that will provide reminders of the person that you want to become.
“Your environment should be full of strategic reminders of who you want to be, helping you to become your future self.”
Final Thoughts:
Now, if you can’t already tell, I’d highly encourage you to pick up a copy of Personality Isn’t Permanent. While I tried to provide an overview, this is just a small fraction of what you can find in the book. Believe it or not, it was actually quite challenging to condense what I wanted to share since I finished reading the book with a Google Doc 17 pages long filled with notes and favorite quotes.
If this sounds like something you’d enjoy, make sure to check out the book for yourself by clicking here.
