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How do we define ourselves? Because it turns out that the self is operating on three different layers simultaneously. So we've established the personality traits, right? It's like it's the basin. It's the center of gravity. It's your natural tendency towards a pattern of behavior over a long period of time. And yes, your personality, it is largely unchangeable. It can be changed slightly over a very long period of time. But yes, your personality is largely unchangeable.

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But we're going to argue in this episode that that is probably not what you should be focusing on. The best thing you can do with your personality is just a self-understanding of like, this is my natural set point. And so I need to be aware, right? It's like my natural set point is to be quite introverted.

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And so my awareness of that allows me to build adaptations and different patterns of behavior around that natural set point. And that's layer two, which is the adaptation layer. A lot of what we consider who we are, a lot of our self-definition, our identity, our understanding of ourselves and the world, a lot of our patterns and habits and routines, like these are all adaptations to moderate relationships.

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our natural personality, and then the environment around us, right? So simple example is that I was a very introverted kid when I went to university. I realized that left to my own devices, I'm just going to sit in my dorm and play video games all day, every day. I'm never going to make friends. I'm never going to have a girlfriend.

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So I had to develop an adaptation, which is an identity of a party guy, a guy who was very social, who went out a lot, who knew a bunch of different people. And that adaptation allowed me to adapt to my environment to get my needs met and to become a happier and more well-rounded individual.

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So that's layer two. The third layer is our actual behavior, right? It's the old maxim, you are what you do repeatedly. And the simplest way to change who you are in some ways is to simply change a behavior. To go from somebody who never exercises to somebody who exercises. To go from somebody who never speaks up for themselves to somebody who speaks up for themselves. And all three of these layers are very different.

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deeply interlinked. They flow in both directions. So one way to think about it is kind of a bottom-up

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point of view, which is that on your base layer, you have your personality traits, which is like your natural set points, your center of gravity, your natural tendencies. On top of that, you've built your layer of adaptations, right? Your different belief systems and identities and habits to help you interact with the world around you. And then those adaptations produce behavioral outputs.

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And those behavioral outputs are ultimately how other people understand and relate to you. So the bottom-up point of view is kind of the accurate depiction of, I guess, who you are, quote-unquote.

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Now the top-down version of the three layers is how we change. So what we're going to discover in this episode is that the starting point is always the behavior. You change a behavior because that new behavior begins to create a new adaptation, and that new adaptation will suddenly shift behavior.

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the set point of your personality or where you exist among the spectrum of your potential personality. So the way to understand yourself is bottom up, start with traits, move to adaptations, and then move to behavior. The way to change is to start with behavior, move that down into adaptation, and then let that

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slightly alter your personality. Easy. Yeah, so fucking easy. So easy. This framework is really important, and we're probably going to reiterate it throughout the episode, because when people want to change consistently over a long period of time, and they keep failing over and over,

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It's usually because they're making one of two mistakes. And I'm just going to call these the two fundamental errors of change. So the first one is that they are treating a trait like a behavior, right? So it's like somebody's just like, I'm going to be extroverted now. Okay.

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and they think they can just decide tomorrow to go be an extrovert. Or they're going to say, I'm going to be really organized and conscientious. Your traits are not switches that can be flipped. Like they are extremely hard to alter and in many cases cannot be altered. And so the goal with traits is not to change them. It's to understand them so you can adapt to them. The second error is treating a behavior like a trait. So it's saying, okay,

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wow, I never get off the couch and go to the gym. I must just be a lazy person, and I'm never going to change that. And again, you're making a fundamental error. You're taking a behavior, something that is very easily changed, and then you are judging it as a permanent trait of your personality, which is just simply not the case. And so the goal with behaviors is to change them, and we're going to have a whole section in this episode on how to change behaviors. Okay.

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And the goal with traits is to understand them. And then the adaptations is all the psychological layers that we build in the middle to make the two coalesce and synchronize. Right, right. Okay, so it would be easier if we could change traits. That'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? Correct. So the most reliable way to do this, you're saying,

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is to start with the behaviors and then work those into your adaptations, what you're calling, and then those will adapt to your traits. And we're going to start with traits in this process because I think it's extremely important for people to come to terms with their own personality traits. Understand yourself first. There's two ways that this can really go wrong. One is that people just...

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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 and 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 and then secondly

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Those adaptations, when you do decide to take on new behaviors, those new behaviors need to be aligned and adaptable to your personality trait, right? So I am very introverted, but a big part of my job is doing public events, like going and doing public speaking, going and meeting like hundreds of fans, right? Right.

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doing tons of media, like a dozen interviews in a single afternoon, it can be exhausting. And so I have had to learn the behaviors and build up a skill set so that I can be adaptable to my environment. But that doesn't necessarily change who I am. It just simply is building an adaptation that fits in with my personality. And even then, it's even though I've built that skill set, I do a fraction of the speaking and appearances that a lot of other people do.

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in our industry do. And a lot of that's just driven by my personality. It's important to understand the personality because A, it sets the parameters of like kind of who you can be. And then B, it helps you understand which behaviors are reasonable to pursue and which ones are maybe a little bit less reasonable to pursue. Now, the interesting thing about this three layer cake of personality is that

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everybody kind of ended up being partially right. Right. Right. So like we've talked about so far. Yeah. So like Gordon Alport was right. And all the personality psychologists were right. And that like, you do have these baked in tendencies that are very measurable and appear repeatedly across cultures and across languages and across context and time. Walter Mischel was also correct. And that situations matter and most behavior is adaptable and you can change behavior depending on the situation and the environment.

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And funny enough, Freud was also correct because Freud's theory of the ego was that our self-identity, the way we come to see ourselves and identify ourselves, is itself an adaptation between who we are and our environment, which fits right in with this. And one way to look at Freud's theory of the unconscious is that

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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 so they've just been running on autopilot beneath the surface of consciousness. And gives you a sense of, this is just me. Yeah, this is just how I am. I can't handle these situations, or the world is just an upsetting place, or whatever. Whatever baked-in beliefs you've carried over from your childhood trauma,

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Those are adaptations you developed at an early age and then just forgot they were there. So throughout the rest of this episode, we're going to go through these three layers one by one. We're going to be spending quite a bit of time on each one so that listeners can really understand what they're working with and really understand themselves at each of these three layers. And then we're going to talk about the most evidence-based ways of approaching how to change each of those layers and how much each of those layers can change. What we're going to find is that

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The bottom layer, traits, do not change very much. You can change them a little, but not a whole lot. The middle layer, the adaptations, you can change, but it's a lot of work and it takes a lot of time. The top layer, behaviors, you can change tomorrow. And it's just really about understanding and strategizing correctly how to approach it. Now, as we go through this, we're going to take some pretty fascinating twists and turns. We're going to talk about everything from horoscope readings to morning routines and

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Why you should always leave your gym shoes by the door. And towards the end of the episode, we're actually going to talk about the one way that we know of that the research knows of to actually completely change your life extremely quickly, like even overnight. Yeah.

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but we're also going to explain why you might not want to. But first, in the next chapter, we're going to start by digging further into the personality research, really understanding our personality traits, really understanding these default set points that we all exist with, how to come to terms with them, how to understand them, how to correctly identify them, and then how we can better work with them throughout our lives. But to explain it,

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We're going to start with a failed novelist and how she created one of the biggest corporate scams in modern history. Hey guys. So if that scratched an itch for you, the full episode is going to ruin you for every other podcast. Check out the full episode on Spotify. Search for Solved with Mark Manson. We go absurdly deep on every topic, so consider yourself warned. You won't regret it.