Mark Manson

So one way to think about it is kind of a bottom-up approach.

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

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.

Now 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.

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

slightly alter your personality.

Easy.

Yeah, so so fucking easy.

So easy.

This framework is really important and it's 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,

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.

and they think they can just decide tomorrow to go be an extrovert.