Mark Manson

And I distinctly remember so many older readers and fans writing in and saying, getting older is great.

You know who you are.

You accept yourself.

You know how to work with your strengths and weaknesses.

And I really do think a lot of our young adulthood is spent both...

trying to influence who we are a little bit because you know at that age you still are a little bit malleable and you still can kind of nudge yourself in a certain direction but also you're trying to understand who you are you're trying to figure out like okay am i an extroverted person like if you asked me at 25 if i was extroverted i probably would have said yes

just because I liked the party and I was dating a lot.

I didn't know.

I didn't have a clear understanding because I had not lived in enough context enough.

So some of this is simply like living enough life to get an accurate perception of who you actually are at a base level.

And

I don't want to say give up on trying to change that base level, but accept that base level, right?

And Carl Rogers does have that beautiful quote where he says that it's by accepting myself that I'm finally able to change, right?

It's like understanding like, okay, this is my starting point.

i accept the starting point now how do i work and move forward from here it's about reorienting the question of what do you want to change why do you want to change it how changeable is it and if it is something as fundamental as your agreeableness or your conscientiousness or how open you are to new experiences i would say it's not worth the effort like all of the evidence is so stacked

against you, the amount of effort it takes to move a personality trait just a tiny bit, that effort is so much better used in other places.

Now you know what to do.

It is in a lot of ways, the most fundamental component of our psychology.

It's interesting when we were developing Purpose, a hill I was willing to die on, I told the team, I was like, we have to have a big five personality assessment in the onboarding itself, right?

So it's like when you sign up for the app,