Page 7 - My FlipBook

and avoid common pitfalls. Scientists and sociologists call these
similarities “personality traits”—and once you know yours, they can
serve as signposts to point you in the right direction and make your
progress through life just that much smoother.

But don’t be fooled: Personality is a hard thing to pin down. It is
very complex and always evolving. A host of external factors help to
shape it, such as your inherited temperament, your family and social
environments, your peers, your education, and your activities; but
despite our personal styles and quirks, there are common themes that
researchers have been able to identify and measure. Most have to
do with how our human brains process and integrate information,
which influences emotions and behavior, which then impacts how
we interact socially with others. If you were a computer, then your
physical body would be your mainframe and your personality traits,
or the fundamental psychological factors that shape how you relate
to the world, would be similar to your operating system.

Happily, you are a human and not a machine—you have vast and
unprogrammable depths—but you can start now to identify certain
basic tendencies, or traits, in your personality that will help you
understand what you really want out of your life and to make an
informed decision about your future. After all, when it really comes
down to it, the only difference between doing something you love
and doing something you hate is your ability to know what you love
and pursue it. Maybe you think you know yourself pretty well by
now, but chances are you aren’t aware of things going on in your
subconscious (the hidden part beneath your conscious mind), as well
as habits you’ve acquired over the years.

part one: you are here 19