Personality Isn't Matter

challenges the conventional understanding of personality as a fixed trait, arguing instead that it is malleable and can be reshaped throughout life. Drawing on psychological research and personal anecdotes, Hardy offers insights into how individuals can redefine their identities and achieve their goals. Here are ten key lessons and insights from the book: 1. Personality is Fluid: Hardy asserts that personality is not static; it evolves with experiences, environments, and choices. He emphasizes that individuals can change their personalities by changing their habits, mindsets, and environments, debunking the myth that one must be confined to their past traits. 2. The Power of Future Self: A central theme in the book is the concept of the "future self." Hardy encourages readers to envision the person they want to become and to use this vision as motivation to make choices that align with that identity. By focusing on who they want to be rather than who they currently are, individuals can create a more compelling narrative for their lives. 3. Limiting Beliefs: Hardy discusses how self-limiting beliefs can hinder personal growth. He emphasizes the importance of identifying and challenging these beliefs, suggesting that many of them are based on past experiences rather than current realities. By reframing these beliefs, individuals can unlock new possibilities for themselves. 4. Creating an Empowering Environment: The author highlights the significance of the environment in shaping behavior and identity. Hardy argues that surrounding oneself with positive influences, supportive relationships, and inspiring contexts can facilitate personal transformation and reinforce desired changes. 5. The Role of Identity: Hardy emphasizes that identity is a choice. He encourages readers to consciously choose the identities they wish to adopt and to align their actions with those identities. This alignment between identity and behavior is crucial for lasting change. 6. The Importance of Goals: Setting clear and meaningful goals is a key component of Hardy's philosophy. He argues that goals should be aligned with one's future self and identity. By pursuing goals that resonate with their desired self, individuals can motivate themselves to take action and make progress. 7. Embracing Discomfort: The book discusses the necessity of stepping outside one's comfort zone to foster growth. Hardy posits that discomfort is often a sign of progress, and embracing challenges can lead to greater resilience and adaptability. 8. The Role of Reflection: Hardy highlights the importance of self-reflection in the process of personal growth. Regularly assessing one's thoughts, actions, and beliefs allows individuals to identify areas for improvement and to ensure that they are living in alignment with their future self. 9. The Impact of Storytelling: The author underscores the power of storytelling in shaping one's identity. Hardy encourages readers to rewrite their personal narratives in a way that empowers them and reflects their aspirations, allowing them to take control of their life stories. 10. The Continuous Journey of Growth: Finally, Hardy emphasizes that personal development is a lifelong journey. He encourages readers to adopt a growth mindset and to view challenges as opportunities for learning and development, reinforcing that change is always possible regardless of past experiences. "Personality Isn't Permanent" by Benjamin Hardy provides a compelling framework for understanding personality as a dynamic and changeable construct. Through lessons on envisioning the future self, challenging limiting beliefs, creating supportive environments, and embracing discomfort, Hardy empowers readers to take control of their identities and reshape their lives. The insights encourage a proactive approach to personal growth, emphasizing that individuals have the capacity to redefine themselves and pursue meaningful goals throughout their lives.

Psychologist and bestselling author Benjamin Hardy, PhD, debunks the pervasive myths about personality that prevent us from learning—and provides bold strategies for personal transformation In Personality Isn’t Permanent , Dr. Benjamin Hardy draws on psychological research to demolish the popular misconception that personality—a person’s consistent attitudes and behaviors—is innate and unchanging. Hardy liberates us from the limiting belief that our “true selves” are to be discovered, and shows how we can intentionally create our desired selves and achieve amazing goals instead. He offers practical, science-based advice to for personal-reinvention, • Why personality tests such as Myers-Briggs and Enneagram are not only psychologically destructive but are no more scientific than horoscopes • Why you should never be the “former” anything--because defining yourself by your past successes is just as damaging to growth as being haunted by past failures • How to design your current identity based on your desired future self and make decisions here-and-now through your new identity • How to reframe traumatic and painful experiences into a fresh narrative supporting your future success • How to become confident enough to define your own life’s purpose • How to create a network of “empathetic witnesses” who actively encourage you through the highs and lows of extreme growth • How to enhance your subconscious to overcome addictions and limiting patterns • How redesign your environment to pull you toward your future, rather than keep you stuck in the past • How to tap into what psychologists call “pull motivation” by narrowing your focus on a single, definable, and compelling outcome The book includes true stories of intentional self-transformation—such as Vanessa O’Brien, who quit her corporate job and set the Guinness World Record for a woman climbing the highest peak on every continent in the fastest time; Andre Norman, who became a Harvard fellow after serving a fourteen-year prison sentence; Ken Arlen, who instantly quit smoking by changing his identity narrative; and Hardy himself, who transcended his childhood in a broken home, surrounded by issues of addiction and mental illness, to earn his PhD and build a happy family. Filled with strategies for reframing your past and designing your future, Personality Isn’t Permanent is a guide to breaking free from the past and becoming the person you want to be.

The following is a review of Dr. Benjamin Hardy’s yet to be launched book ‘Personality Isn’t Permanent’ (releasing on June 16 2020) This book will shake up the $2 billion personality testing business. The deeply held faith that is taught by parents, teachers, and society, in general, is that for the most part, each one is born with a certain ‘personality’ and one should just live with it. In fact, the most common advice is that if one can ‘discover one’s personality’ half the battle is won. Right? Wrong, says Dr. Hardy. So much has gone in to create designer clothes, designer hairstyles, designer perfumes but Dr. Hardy shows you can ‘design your life’. Personality succumbs to Purpose. Everything yields to your Purpose including DNA. Another misconception of modern society is that inspiration triggers action. In fact, to the contrary, action kindles inspiration. Just as in the alphabet, Action comes before confidence, motivation, and passion. Action kindles confidence which shows positive responses that in turn triggers motivation and over time manifests as passion. This passion knows no limits and can far exceed the wildest projection of your future self or who you want to be. It all begins with purposeful action. After this, Dr. Hardy expertly points to the four levers you can use to move the world and win: trauma, identity narrative, subconscious, environment. These four levers can be configured to propel you to a brilliant joyful future or to set you back in misery and low growth. Dr. Hardy shows you with examples, how these seemingly innocent factors can become lifelong barriers, and how they can be tamed. This book is for everyone, no matter where you are in life. It is a scientific, progressive layered approach to understanding who you are and why you believe who you are. It shows you where you could be and how to get there. It will expose the chinks in your thinking, compromises you may have unknowingly made about your true potential, and wake you up to your greater self. Read it. Get another copy. Gift it to someone you care about. The book launches on Jun 16 by the Penguin Random House. Benjamin Hardy Personality Isn't Permanent: Break Free from Self-Limiting Beliefs and Rewrite Your Story

Personality Isn't Permanent is an interesting book with lots of useful information within its pages. In fact, there is a lot here that I think a reader would find very useful and would be worth paying attention to. However, the problem with this book is that it doesn't really have a huge amount to do with changing your personality. It's more about just being successful. Now that in itself is an interesting book, and I'd be happy to read that. However, it doesn't give me a blueprint for changing my personality. That's not to say this book doesn't touch on that, but it's hardly its primary focus as the title promises. The other thing I didn't like about this book was the fact that to me is based on a fairly incorrect premise. The author is essentially writing this book because he hates personality tests and the fact that they box people into neat little categories that you're not allowed to change from. However, in that statement, there is an important place where I think the author is missing the point, and that is where personality quizzes say people can never change. I have come across a lot of personality tests over my time and I've never come across that sentence that says people will never change. That is a misunderstanding of what these things are. I recently read a book called Surrounded by Idiots that dealt with a very similar topic to this. They make it very clear in that book that these personality traits are not universal, are not perfect descriptions, and also are subject to change. The point of these tests is to help understand what personality type someone has at the moment so that you can identify strengths, weaknesses, and maybe even improve yourself. In my case, as a bit of an emotional idiot, it was a very useful guide to understanding other people around me and their motivations. I have already put it to use to mend bridges and relationships with the people in my life. However, I fully understand that it is a guide based on the present and that what I learn today is subject to change as people change. It doesn't make the personality test wrong, it just means that someone has changed their classification. If they were to take the test again they would probably get a different result. Overall I'm saying that this is a book based on an incorrect assumption, and it is arguing a point that doesn't necessarily need to be made. More than that, it isn't even really doing a good job of making that argument because this isn't a book about personality, but about success, and a useful one at that. With that in mind, I can't rate this book higher than a 3.

I went into this book as part of a mini-book club with two of my friends. The book was chosen after my friend Tyler heard an enjoyable and informative podcast that featured Benjamin Hardy. I was looking forward to this book, especially because when I read popular psychology books I really try to focus on those written by authors that have academic credentials in the field: Hardy boasts a PhD. I enjoyed the beginning of this book, where Hardy discussed the flexibility of personality and why personality tests fail us by suggesting that our personalities are fixed both in time and context. However, beyond this discussion--which was made enjoyable by some memoir-like aspects of Hardy's own life and experience--I found the book overly simple, lacking evidence or hard scientific discussions, and not really having to do with personality at all. The majority of Hardy's book deals mostly with positive habit formation. He talks about the merits of going to sleep and waking up early, meditation, fasting, journaling, and visualization of your future. These topics could be of merit to someone who is interested in changing the day-to-day of their life, however, it simply wasn't the discussion that I thought would dominate the book. Additionally, the way in which Hardy presents these habits presents, what I feel, is a false dichotomy. For example, he suggests at one point that the difference between successful writers and mediocre ones is waking up early. While this may have worked for him, it actually goes against research in sleep health and wellness that shows that some people are early risers--obviously, Hardy falls into this category--and others are not. For the latter group, waking up early is actually detrimental to concentration, productivity, and overall health (Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams). Instead of presenting the habits that have served him well and suggesting that others seek habits that would work for them, Hardy suggests that the habits that worked for him are a rule rather than an example. For an author who, in Chapter One, denounces Myers and Briggs for using their experiences as "a wife and mother, not science or psychology, to develop" their famed personality test, Hardy ultimately presents his reader with very little science or psychology himself. Overall, Hardy is an optimistic, goals-driven individual whose personal story is indeed inspirational and one that I would love to know more about. In fact, I think I would enjoy a memoir by Hardy more than I enjoyed this book. I think that if a reader was interested in adopting a more stoic lifestyle and needed a gung-ho starting point, this would be a good book to wet their feet. If you're looking for a scientific exploration of personality, how it is formed, why, and how we can leverage understanding of it, look elsewhere.

This book isn't about personality so much as it's about habits and actions. The author argues they are the same. I argue that whether this is true or not, the book's a worse Atomic Habits. Hardy flip-flops between ideas between paragraphs. He criticizes theories like the enneagram and MBTI for being pseudoscience (reasonably so) but goes on to offer nothing but anecdote to support his own contrasting views. I don't care if you know someone who went from banker-to-mountain-climber. Who does? As another reviewer pointed out, that's not relatable to most readers. I want stronger evidence than Elon Musk's dream of dying on Mars to back up points. Coupled with the over-simplified definition of personality he relies on throughout the book, most of his points have dropped all their water by the 20% mark. The idea that we choose how to act and our actions shape our character is fine, but he fails to address what makes us want/not want to choose what we do/don't do. Social pressures are offered as an explanation, but he doesn't delve into why this would be the case. He also doesn't explain how people who DON'T succumb to social pressures (anyone gender non-conforming, anyone with even slightly esoteric interests) gravitate to the passions they have. His presentation of humanity as this semi-robotic, unthinking mass is unconvincing to anyone who actually lives on the planet. I could make some complaints about his writing here, too, but they're secondary to how unconvincing the content is. The one I'll mention is that after spending several rambling pages explaining that focusing on the "process" of an aim is inferior to being entirely goal-focused, he uses tactical and strategic as antonyms (what?) and then goes on to detail how you should sleep/wake an hour earlier if you're serious about your goals... which is a process change. That requires focusing on your process. Which is what he just told us not to do. I... OK? Finally, Hardy relies too often on long, winding success stories as proof of his point in this book. Name drops include Elon Musk, Mark Wahlberg, Gandhi, Matthew Mcconaughey... If there is any credence to Hardy's view, you won't find any evidence of it between the front and back covers of Personality Isn't Permanent. I've quite literally never been so irritated by a book before.

I took three pages of notes, hoping to use the ideas at work and at home. Therefore, it's safe to say it's had an impact. Because I read his blog posts, much of the information isn't new to me, but having it in book form is helpful because it's contextualized into steps and deeper reasoning. I decided to also use the end of chapter questions for journaling prompts, which has been at a lull lately. The book celebrates the importance of reframing our past and using future goals to frame our present in order to get the most out of life and live more freely. Behavior is goal-driven (77), so finding that ONE goal and allowing that to ignite motivation is Hardy's path to transform past trauma into a freer present. I would be wary of thinking that this book alone will give you the tools necessary to heal from trauma, alas, it's probably not possible, but it's a great way to explore what memories need attending to or to be able to pinpoint where to start in the deep work. Finding "empathetic witnesses" allows us to leverage our trauma, identity narratives, subconscious, and environments in ways that help us live the life we desire, outlines Hardy throughout the book. Perhaps you're looking for where to start on your post-quarantine experience. This is a good first step: https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/bo... "We understand the meaning of our experiences through stories" (151), so this research and storytelling will serve many readers well. Here's a link to a copy of the first chapter: https://benjaminhardy88-gmail-com.ck....

Okay, I’ll admit it. I went into this book with the wrong expectations. As someone who gets a different MBTI result every few weeks (I do it for fun at this point), I was intrigued by the title alone. I only paid attention to that and completely missed the preachy self-help subtitle. Naturally, I ended up disappointed. Someone who despises self-help books recommended it to me, so I assumed it would be more of a psychological, evidence-based look at personality. But it wasn’t just the fact that it’s a self-help book that didn’t work for me; it was the actual messages too. Like, “Don’t marry for personality.” Really? So we should base it on looks instead? 🙄 Another one: “Your commitment in life is reflected 100 percent by the results you’re currently getting.” If you’re going to throw around percentages like that, you need solid evidence to back it up. There are also a lot of messages that just felt like common sense. And that’s the thing; the book is seriously lacking in evidence. Instead, the author leans on fiction books and movies as if they’re scientific research. This just didn’t sit right with me. Not to mention the number of spoilers! He casually mentions that a main character in a book I really want to read dies, and for what? The point wasn’t even worth the spoiler 😒. It felt like most of his “research” came from people he knew, fictions he read, and other self-help books. The constant “Somebody said this” or “Somebody said that” got old real fast. On top of all that, the structure didn’t work for me. It felt all over the place, which only added to my disappointment. That said, I can see how people might like it. If I had read it as a teenager, I probably would have loved it too.

Here's my short review of this book—It had good information; however, I wasn't a fan of the lengthy presentation. In full disclosure, it simply might have been bad timing for me to read the book. I do find myself still thinking about concepts in this book, which is a good sign of good information, but I didn't enjoy the process of reading/listening to it at all. I don't think I'd recommend this book. —— Here's my much more lengthy (obnoxiously lengthy) review of the book: I read this book based on my cousin's recommendation. Although I don't necessarily seek out a lot of psychology books, I do typically enjoy them. Something about this one just rubbed me the wrong way. I don't know if it was bad timing, sleep deprivation, and the bleakness that sometimes comes with that, or if I just wasn't the right audience for the book. It took me about a month to get through the ~7-hour audiobook. Each time I listened, it was a chore to make myself listen to it (I think I've finished three or four other longer books in the time it took me to finish this one). I actually agree with most of what the author said and thought he had some wonderful points, but I think the way he presented some of his information didn't jive with me. I love the idea of thinking about what my future self is and then working towards that. I loved what he said about journaling, empathetic witnesses, trauma, envisioning our future selves, goal setting, etc. But, I didn't love all of his anecdotal case studies that he used to beat the reader over the head driving home his point. I also felt he was tooting his own horn a lot—we get it! you had a hard upbringing and had twins the same year you adopted three foster kids while getting your PhD. Hooray for you 😆 I guess part of me felt the same information could have been shared more effectively in half the time. I'd be interested in trying this again down the road and seeing if I received it better. I probably would have done better with reading the book (rather than listening) and sitting down and doing the various exercises he suggested. Another thing that irked me was the fact that he talked about how awful personality tests are and the assumptions they make about us, but at the same time, he'd often make statements about Millenials or other generations that I felt were just as presumptions, broad, and anti-change as the personality tests he was referring too. I think at the end of the day, his book felt overtly preachy, was too long, and lacked succinctness. I truly do believe we can and should change as people—I feel like if I didn't believe this, I'd be denying all Jesus Christ has done for each one of us. I can see how personality tests can make some stop achieving and trying to change. At the same time, a couple of years ago, we had a church activity where we took the color personality tests with our spouses and they had a trained professional break down the results. It gave my husband and me some awesome "ah-ha" insights about each other and ourselves. The presenter went on to tie his presentation to our divine natures and the plan of salvation which was actually really cool. I'm not saying the author is wrong and the color personality is right, but I do think there is value in some of those tests. I think the tests are very subjective and we shouldn't assume because we're XYZ color or letter combos then "that's just the way we are" and we're incapable of change. I either missed how the author defined personality or he didn't effectively define it as I often found his examples were talking about things I didn't even consider personality: like the kid that plays the trumpet but chooses to hang with the cool and dangerous crowd over playing the trumpet and then he ends up in prison—is playing the trumpet a personality trait?? There were several examples like that that had me questioning what even makes up a personality. If I like to read, is that a personality trait? Or is it just an interest I have? I would be interested to have heard more about personality and mental health. Anxiety, depression, OCD, etc. can greatly limit your ability to do some of the things he talked about and certainly can impact personality. But I guess it was just out of the scope of his book, and that’s okay. I also need to say there were a lot of great points and quotes—there were definitely things I would have highlighted so I could easily reference them later. I have found myself thinking about what he talked about and referenced, which I always think is a sign of a good book—if you’re thinking about it when not reading it. However, at the end of the day, I don't necessarily know if I could recommend this book due to my less-than-ideal experience with it.