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Chapter 1: What is the layered system of personality and behavior?
Drew, did you notice?
Notice what?
I'm a new person. Completely new. I did not notice this. Completely new. Top to bottom. I can't believe you didn't notice.
Okay. Tell me.
Did you see the white wall? Yeah. Okay. New studio. This is my wall. All right. I replaced my black wall with my white wall. Okay. So brand new studio. Yes. New microphone. Yeah. New jacket. I shaved. Which you haven't done in a while, I've noticed. I'm a new person.
I think it's a little more complicated than that.
If you were as superficial as I am. Oh, okay. There is no soul within this walking meat robot known as Mark Manson.
Sitting across from me now.
Therefore, the fact that I changed my jacket and shaved and sat us in front of a new wall is the entirety of myself.
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Chapter 2: How does change relate to personality traits and behaviors?
They quit here, in the boring humdrum middle. That's why Shopify is so effective. It's the e-commerce platform behind 10% of all e-commerce in the United States, from brands like Allbirds or Gymshark to someone who just sold their first t-shirt this morning. Inventory, payments, analytics, it's all in one place.
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But we're going to continue with Alport here because he really did stumble upon, I mean, some people would definitely argue the most important branch of psychology or at least probably the most stable and replicable branch of psychology and how we understand people today.
Chapter 3: What are the common misconceptions about change?
So Alport returned to Harvard, and he started thinking very deeply about this problem. And if you think about it, it's actually a very difficult problem, which is, A, how do you define who a person is? Because you can't define change unless you can actually define who somebody is. And then secondly, once you define who that person is, how do you actually measure if they have
changed at all or not there are a lot of different approaches a lot of different schools of thought obviously the freudian school of thought had to do with unconscious motivations and drives there was another school of thought that emerged slightly after this called behaviorism which we've talked about in previous episodes which was all about just measuring actual actions and behaviors kind of treating the human mind as like a input output machine alport stumbled upon a pretty novel approach to this problem
I did not appreciate how brilliant this was until we started researching for this episode. So I had heard about this before, but up until we started prepping for this episode, it really gave me an appreciation of just how brilliant this was. So there was a guy in the 19th century
named francis galton he was darwin's cousin he was a bit of a polymath uh wrote books and papers and articles on all sorts of different topics also was like apparently a virulent racist and nationalist and like proto-nazi but we'll leave that for another podcast yeah But Galton had a really interesting insight.
He said that if you want to actually measure who a person is, you should start by looking at language. Because if you think about why we invent words for things, we invent words for things because those behaviors are significant in some way that they're worth identifying with some shared language. piece of meaning, lexical piece of meaning, right?
And so if you go through the dictionary and you identify all of the words that could be used to identify a person or a person's behavior, that should give you a nice, well-rounded look at
how do how do you define a person and you can probably find all sorts of commonalities among those words and start grouping them in certain ways allport decided to take this on and he did it with one of his phd students they found the biggest dictionary they could possibly find and they started going word by word and singling out every word that could be possibly used to identify a human or a human behavior
And they initially pulled out 17,953 words. This took them multiple years. They're just flipping through a dictionary. Can you imagine? Like, can you imagine? Like, first of all, you were a PhD student. Like, can you imagine somebody asking you like, oh, what's your PhD work on? And you're like, I'm reading the dictionary. To understand human behavior.
This is what happens when you're incredibly bored, right? So with no phones around, anything like that, flipping through a dictionary is better than that.
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Chapter 4: How do environmental factors influence our behaviors?
That means that you're probably going to be conflict avoidant, right? You're going to be very uncomfortable dealing with confrontation. And let's say that you are in a workplace that is very confrontational. It's very, a lot of status games going on, a lot of people talking shit, a lot of office politics. you're gonna develop an adaptation to that environment as a highly agreeable person.
You're probably gonna try to stay out of things. You're probably just gonna try to keep the peace. You're not gonna stick your neck out. You're not gonna take sides in any conflicts. And not only are you going to be predisposed to that behavior, but you are going to develop beliefs and emotional patterns that reinforce that behavior for yourself.
So you're gonna tell yourself things like, I don't stoop to that low of like talking bad about my coworkers. Like, I don't want to get involved. You're going to tell yourself things like, I'd rather just focus on my tasks. You know, maybe when people in the office start arguing, you like put your headphones in, like that's a behavioral adaptation.
Chapter 5: What adaptations do we develop in response to our environments?
Like when people are shouting or arguing or things get awkward, it's like you just check out. Or I can give you an example from my own life, right? So I'm low extroversion. So I'm an introvert, but I'm extremely high in openness to new experiences. So I crave novelty. I crave adventure. I crave excitement. And so when I was younger, I wanted to go out and party. I wanted to go on adventures.
I wanted to travel. I wanted to do all these things that required me to be around other people quite frequently. But as an introvert, the social aspect of going out all the time felt quite exhausting. And so I developed an adaptation to help me with that, to fulfill my need for openness to new experiences, my need for novelty, while also quelling my introversion. And that was...
alcohol i started drinking a lot right at first it was really helpful because not only did it make me less introverted when i was around other people but alcohol itself is a novel unique experience right it's spontaneous it's exciting all sorts of fun adventures happen when you're drunk it helped me fulfill my need for a lot of novelty seeking and adventure but at the same time it kind of
Chapter 6: How can we effectively replace maladaptive behaviors?
made it easier to do it as an introvert.
I can identify quite a bit with that too, actually. Yeah. Because I feel like I'm, I like, I always wanted to go out and have adventures. I want to see the world. I want to do all that, but you're right. I'm just around people. I'm like, but that requires a lot of being around people.
That's interesting too, because like when I quit drinking and I was like, well, now I'm boring and I just want to stay home and I want to introvert. So we'll get into that. We'll get into changing adaptations later, but I think for now. That's an interesting one though, because it's different traits.
The tension of those two things comes to a head, and you reconcile them in some way, and it's not always healthy. That's interesting.
Here's another example. So I am relatively low in conscientiousness, not super low, but like pretty like average, but I'm extremely low in neuroticism. Very, very low. It takes a lot for me to like get worked up or upset or like super stressed out. And so the result of that was that throughout school, I was highly unorganized. I rarely did homework.
And because I had so much need for novelty seeking, I found homework boring and I just wouldn't do it. But because I had low neuroticism, I didn't stress out about tests. So I was actually a really good test taker. So I was always that kid that would get like an A minus or a B plus on the test without having to study very much, but like didn't turn in half of his homework assignments.
Interestingly, i kind of developed an identity as an underachiever even since i was probably like eight or nine years old like my whole life i remember teachers telling me like you could do so much better you have so much potential if you just cared if you just tried and eventually that just became how i saw myself the underachiever
And interestingly, the beliefs that we develop about ourselves in particular are some of our most potent adaptations because our beliefs about ourselves impact so many of our other motivations, goals, and behaviors. It really wasn't until I got out of school and I was able to like self-direct the things that I worked on that I realized that it was like, oh, I'm not actually lazy.
When I was in school, I just never was in a situation where there was something I wanted to work on.
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Chapter 7: How can adopting professional behaviors help with personal change?
Basically like adopt all of the behaviors in the environment of a professional, even though you're not a professional. Because his point is that by treating yourself as a professional, you will start behaving like a professional. It will actually become easier to behave as a professional writer than it is to not behave as a professional writer.
Because what he's noticed throughout his career is that so many aspiring writers, they see themselves as like, oh, well, I'm just this aspiring novelist, like nobody's read my stuff, nobody's gonna care. And so they don't take it very seriously because they assume nobody else is gonna take it seriously.
And his point is like, just start taking it seriously, even though you haven't actually done the thing yet. and then the behavior will follow.
Love Steven, love environmental design stuff, insert the friction where you don't wanna do the behavior, remove friction where you do want to, love all that, that's great. I think there's a little bit though, kind of in our industry and just in the larger culture in general, willpower has become a little bit of a bad word. Like, oh, don't depend on your willpower, right?
It's a depletable resource and you can't depend on it. It's not reliable. I agree with all that.
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Chapter 8: What role does willpower play in achieving lasting change?
That's true. But there's still gonna be times where you need to just grit through it and do it. You were just talking about how do we get ourselves to do things that we don't wanna do, but we know they're good for us. I think at some point, you're not gonna be able to control your environment completely.
You're not gonna be able to like set up your professional office like Steven wants you to, and it's not always gonna work. And there's gonna be times where you just don't wanna do it. And we've done this before too. We've talked about like the pitfalls of relying on willpower. Again, I think they're true, but I think maybe we've taken that too far sometimes.
We say, just don't even worry about it, just don't even try to do it. You still have to do hard things that you don't wanna do at some point, right? How do you actually see this? Because I'm confused by it a bit, I guess.
I see willpower as like the tool of last resort, right? It's like the break in case of emergency. Like if it's your primary tool, you're done. You're gonna fail. But you're absolutely correct. Like there are gonna be days, no matter how well your environment's set up, no matter how many nudges and like,
how much friction you remove from whatever your goal is, there are going to be days where you're like, I really don't want to do this. Right. And that's the moment where willpower kicks in. Right. And it's like, okay, I have to like maintain consistency here.
Okay.
So it does have a place, but like the goal should be to use it as sparingly as possible.
Right, yeah, okay. I do like it too. I think you've said this before. I've seen it in several places, I think, but use your willpower to set up your environment or like when you have it, right?
That's a good way to go about it too. And this is something James talks about a lot too, right? He says that you don't rise to the level of your goals. He says you sink to the level of your systems. Generally speaking, in that moment when you are super motivated,
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