Mark Manson

Is 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 to like call out risks and dangers, even if they're wrong 90% of the time.

That's right.

Yeah.

You just hope it's not you.

So yeah.

They all have advantages and disadvantages.

And so I think what makes us interesting 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.

You kind of want a division of labor across, you know, the social cohort.

Right, there's diversification there that helps everybody out, yeah.

OK, it predicts tendencies, but it doesn't predict performance.

like micro behaviors.

Exactly.

Yeah, which is what William James said, right?

Which is he believed that who you were at 30 was who you were going to be forever.

And there was not really anything you could do about it.

It's interesting to me that this idea that we can even change ourselves is such a recent idea.

If you go back and look at James, he believed we couldn't.

Freud didn't really believe we could.