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I think all of us, at some point,
have wondered why we are the way we are.
Maybe you’re a little neurotic, a worrier,
or maybe you’re a tad abrasive, confrontational,
or a bit evasive.
Maybe you don’t think enough about others,
or maybe you do, but just a little too much.
We see our faults as faults.
But aren’t they really just our personalities?
And what is that exactly?
A personality.
Is it something we’re born with?
Does it shift over time?
Can we think and act our way into being a different and,
hopefully, better person?
I’m Sean Elling, and this is “The Gray Area.”
Today’s guest is Olga Hazan.
She’s a staff writer at The Atlantic
and the author of the book “Me But Better–
The Science and Promise of Personality Change.”
The book is a joy to read, full of ideas,
but also personal in the sense that Olga documents
her year-long effort to change things
she doesn’t like about her own personality.
Along the way, she does a nice job of weaving in the science
and marking the limits of what we know and don’t know.
It’s honest, curious, and reflective.
And so, it turns out, is Olga.
So I invited her on the show.
Olga Hazan, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for having me.
So let’s start with the basics here,
because personality is one of those concepts
that we all intuitively understand what it signifies,
at least loosely.
But it is pretty tricky to define.
You’ve now written a book on it, so give me
your neatest, clearest definition.
Yeah, personality is the consistent thoughts and behaviors
that you have every day.
And some researchers think that, in addition
to just having those thoughts and feelings and behaviors,
they also help you achieve your goals.
So depending on what your goals are,
your personality kind of helps you get there.
An example of this would be the personality
trait of agreeableness, which helps you make friends
and social connections.
So people who tend to be more agreeable also
tend to value friendships and connections
and achieve more of those.
You use the word consistent there.
To what extent is personality just a performance?
And to what extent is it something much more concrete?
So personality is, in some ways, a performance.
Let’s say you describe yourself as an introvert,
but you have to give a big talk.
And it’s very important to your career
that this talk go well, right?
You are probably going to perform, to a certain extent,
extraversion.
Or let’s say you’re going into a room full of investors,
and you have to raise money for your startup,
but you’re just a very introverted coder guy who just
wants to code all day and not talk to anyone.
You’re going to perform extraversion in that situation,
too, because it’s very important for you
to get whatever is at the end of that performance.
The money or the professional accolades
or whatever comes with it, it doesn’t have to be financial.
It could be going on a first date is kind of a performance
as well.
So we do all perform elements of these traits
every single day.
But what most researchers think is
that there is sort of a tendency that we all
have toward a certain pattern of behaviors and thoughts that
are more or less consistent, especially if we don’t try
to change them in any meaningful way,
that you kind of get up and you have these little patterns
that you fall into.
And that’s sort of like your, quote, unquote,
“natural” personality.
So we have what people call the big five personality traits–
neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness,
which you just mentioned, openness to experience,
and conscientiousness.
Are these categories generally accepted
in the field of psychology, and how useful do you find them?
They are generally accepted.
That’s now, if you read a personality study,
it will be most likely based on the big five.
So things like Ania Graham and Myers-Briggs
are not generally accepted.
That said, they are imperfect.
There are some cultures that have traits
that are very important in those cultures
that the big five doesn’t really pick up as much.
Meanwhile, things like openness, it’s sort of a catch-all.
It doesn’t really map very cleanly onto someone’s personality
as other people would observe it.
So yeah, it is valid.
It has weaknesses.
But personality is so hard to measure and kind of scientifically
get your head around that it’s sort of the best
that we have right now.
Well, part of the inspiration for this project
is that you wanted to change some things about yourself.
So what did you want to change?
And why don’t you love yourself, Olga?
Don’t you know you’re good enough and smart enough
and people like you?
Why do you want to change?
Yeah, so I did want to change.
And I also love myself.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
Though I know that it can feel that way,
that if you admit that you want to change,
that it can feel like you’re saying that you don’t love
yourself.
But I think that’s where the idea of personality traits
as tools to help you achieve your goals
can be really helpful.
Because we all have goals we want to achieve,
even if we all like our lives and ourselves.
And for me, what I realized is that things were going well.
I had a pretty nice life.
Nothing was seriously wrong.
But my reactions to situations were not benefiting me.
They were kind of undermining me and making me not
able to enjoy my life.
So I start the book out with this actually great sounding
now as a new parent of this great sounding day in Miami,
where honestly, all that happened
is that I got a bad haircut, then immediately
had to get professional photos taken,
then got stuck in traffic, and then
had this weird debacle with a grocery store shopping cart.
And honestly, just because of my high neuroticism at the time,
the accumulation of all of those small things
made me have this epic meltdown when I got back to my hotel.
And I realized that that happened a lot in various ways.
Small things would happen that would make me not
able to appreciate the big picture or not
able to just be happy with what I have or be grateful.
And so that’s really what I wanted to work on
is appreciating my life for what it was.
And also just outside of neuroticism,
I was feeling the COVID social isolation.
And I wanted to deepen my social connections as well.
So that’s why I wanted to change.
Would you say that you had or have a tendency to catastrophize?
Because I do.
And I don’t know if that’s a function of neuroticism
or something else, but I would say that is the one thing
that I’m trying most aggressively to stop.
Is that tendency part of neuroticism?
Or is it a little more complicated than that?
Yeah, it’s definitely part of neuroticism.
Neuroticism is sort of the trait that’s–
so to kind of simplify it, it’s associated
with depression and anxiety.
And basically, all those are just like a feeling of threat.
Like you just constantly see threats everywhere.
The reason you’re catastrophizing
is not because you’re silly or because you’re not realistic,
but because you kind of can see the threats coming
from every direction.
And you’re like, how do I prevent those from happening?
And that’s what makes people who are high in neuroticism
so miserable.
Well, I like the–
I think it was Jud Brewer argument
that you talk about in the book that anxiety is a habit loop
where anxiety triggers the behavior of worry, which
feels like it’s a temporary relief,
but really it just makes us more anxious in the long run.
And this is something–
this is something neurotic people do by default, right?
I mean, it’s just the first instinct.
Oh, yeah.
I always thought anxiety and worry were the same thing.
But worry is actually–
it’s a behavior.
It’s almost like a self-soothing behavior.
And people who are very anxious think
that if you just worry enough, you won’t be anxious anymore.
But instead, worry kind of sometimes
can make you more anxious.
Like you’re never going to get to the end of the worrying.
Well, it’s also about the discomfort with uncertainty,
right?
You talk about the neurotic person
is the one who gets the have a second–
do you have a second slack from your boss and freaks out?
I’m the type.
If I get that, do you have a second out of nowhere
from the boss?
I’m filing for food stamps before lunch.
It’s just my mind just goes there.
OK, this is becoming too much about me already.
No, it’s OK.
Yeah, I know.
I’m right there with you.
But uncertainty is wrapped up with this, right?
It’s just– it’s an uneasiness about what the future might
hold and our ability to control or not control.
And so you’re just anxious about the world.
And I mean, I’m sure there’s evolutionary utility in that.
But boy, past a certain point, it just
becomes pathological, really.
Yeah, I mean, that’s a huge part of it.
Neuroticism is all intertwined with a feeling
of wanting control, of really fearing uncertainty.
In the modern world, it’s all about learning
how to live with uncertainty and accept
that there is uncertainty in the world without letting
it rule you, basically, this fear of uncertainty.
What about agreeableness?
Agreeableness sounds pretty agreeable.
I mean, nobody wants to be called disagreeable, I don’t think.
But is agreeableness more complicated than that?
I mean, how much agreeableness is too much?
When do we need to be a little disagreeable?
Yeah, agreeableness was one of the ones that I was working on.
And it’s basically like warmth and empathy toward others
and also trust.
And that element of agreeableness can be really good.
And it can deepen your relationships
and give you more fulfilling friendships.
Where some people say that they’re actually too agreeable
and they want to pair back is when they feel like they’re
being people-pleasers.
And they feel like people walk all over them
or they don’t know how to say no.
So part of agreeableness is learning
how to communicate boundaries, how to make friends,
but also not just by saying yes to everything
that your friends ask of you.
And to still have your own boundaries and your own things
that you’re willing and not willing to do.
So for your year-long personality transformation
project, you did focus on all five of these traits
to varying degrees.
Which did you find was the hardest to tweak in any direction?
So neuroticism was the hardest by far for me.
It is because the way to improve on neuroticism
is meditation or any kind of mindfulness practice.
It can be yoga, not core power, like slow contemplative yoga.
It can be different forms of mindfulness,
but it’s basically mindfulness.
And I found that really challenging.
I am not a natural meditator.
I kind of have a loop of ongoing concerns and worries
and to-do list when I’m not thinking about anything.
I don’t like it when people are too relaxed.
I find that irritating.
Really?
Why?
I just– I think it was a little bit hard for me
to let go of my anxiety.
Because on some level, I think–
and I still sometimes kind of think this–
I think that anxiety is protective, at least for me.
It forces me to do things.
And it helps me.
It is like the fire under me.
And I think at times, I was a little bit like, oh, sure.
This is fine for people who don’t have a lot going on,
but I need my anxiety.
How long did you try meditating?
I mean, did you ultimately find it to be helpful?
Did you score less neurotic at the end of that practice?
I think I did meditation really, really seriously
for about six months of this.
And it did work in the sense that my neuroticism went down.
But when I said that neuroticism is depression and anxiety,
it was actually mostly my depression score that went down.
So I became less depressed.
And my anxiety also went down, but it was still quite high.
It was not as high as it had been,
but it didn’t go away completely.
But I think one reason why I became less depressed
is that the class that I took, which was called MBSR–
it was the meditation class that I took–
had a lot of Buddhist teachings that were part of it.
So one of the things that my meditation teacher said
was things happen that we don’t like.
And for me, even though obviously things
happen that we don’t like, I realized
that I was someone who, when things would go wrong,
I would start to blame myself very intensely.
And I would have this very intense self-blame that would
be very hard to break out of, even if it was something that
was clearly not my fault.
It was like an act of God or really awful traffic
or just something that had nothing to do with me.
I would start to be like, well, I should have left earlier.
I should have, blah, blah, blah, I should have predicted this.
And I think just this reminder that things happen that we don’t
like and that everyone has things that happen in their life
that they would rather not happen.
And we all have to deal with that.
I don’t know, that was weirdly very helpful to me.
What is the scientifically best personality?
And look, there is a part of my philosophical soul
that shudders, even at asking this question,
because I don’t think science can make these kind of value
judgments.
But what I’m getting at is, what does the research
on happiness and personality tell us
about what kinds of traits tend to be most correlated
with happiness and well-being and a flourishing life?
If your goal is happiness, which I am not saying that it has
to be, there’s more life than happiness.
But as far as happiness, well-being, longevity,
all those goodies, it’s basically being high but not
too high on all of the five traits.
So being pretty extroverted, pretty agreeable,
pretty open to experiences, quite very conscientious,
and then very emotionally stable.
You say in the book that extroverts are happier, in part,
because they interpret ambiguous stimuli more positively.
How true is this?
I mean, I’m sure there are some people out there
who might find this kind of claim a little crude.
So how clear is the evidence on this?
How confident are we that extroverts in general are happier?
I mean, they certainly look like they’re having more fun,
but that’s anecdotal.
So the evidence that extroverts are happier
is pretty consistent.
It’s been replicated quite a few times,
including by researchers who weren’t connected
to the original studies and were dubious,
and they replicated it.
And the one researcher who did that, who I talked to,
is himself an introvert.
So it is pretty clear.
The reasons why are less clear.
So as you mentioned, one interpretation
is that they walk into a room full of people,
and they’re all strangers, and they don’t immediately
get a smile out of anyone.
It’s just kind of a straight-faced kind of people
are like, what are you doing here?
I, an introvert, would be like, oh, my god.
I’m not supposed to be here.
Nobody likes me.
I need to leave kind of just like flea, flea, flea.
It’s that self-talk, right?
All that self-chat-er.
Right, right, right.
An extrovert would be like, oh, awesome.
I just need to introduce myself around.
And pretty soon, people will warm up to me.
They just have a different interpretation of events
that helps them be happier.
They are more active.
They’re just always out and doing things,
like the people who are signed up for a million clubs
and things are extroverts.
And they have more social connections, not just friends.
They also have more weak ties, more acquaintances,
just people they talk to throughout the day.
And that helps them feel happier.
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(upbeat music)
– Well, let’s talk about change,
the science of personality change.
As you say in the book, there is this idea
that at around 30, our personalities are set like plaster.
How true is that?
I mean, how fixed is our personality?
– So that idea is sort of not considered
totally true anymore.
There’s been quite a bit of research that shows
that even when people don’t try to change,
they actually end up changing
over the course of their lives.
So one example is that people get less neurotic
as they get older.
They also tend to get less open to experiences.
So if you ever notice that people get more conservative
as they get older, that could be
because openness to experiences goes down.
In studies where they follow people
over decades and decades, most of those people
in those studies change on at least one personality trait
from young adulthood to late adulthood, their 60s.
So it’s true, you’re not gonna be like unrecognizable
probably, but people do change over time
just kind of naturally.
But what kind of the heart of my book is about
is about changing your personality intentionally,
which is sort of an even newer branch of research
where they actually ask people
if they would like to change their personalities,
give them activities that are meant
to help change their personalities
and then kind of measure their personalities after the fact.
And so then your personality would change even more.
– This part of it is so interesting to me.
I mean, I’ve had psychologists on the show
before people like Paul Bloom who I love.
I think he’s just fantastic.
And I may be bastardizing his argument here.
So if you’re listening, Paul, you can write in and tell me.
But he always says something to the effect,
not necessarily that we look, you are your brain
and that’s it.
But he does suggest that by the time you’re pretty young,
five, six, seven, eight, whatever,
somewhere around there, your personality is kind of clear
and it’s kind of constant.
You kind of are what you are.
You can tinker a little bit at the margins
and the environment matters.
Of course, it always matters,
but you really are sort of, you kind of are what you are,
which isn’t to say that you can’t change anything,
but you kind of are what you are.
I mean, do you think that is a little overstated?
– Yeah, I mean, I think,
so there is a little bit of truth to that.
So part of personality is inherited, right?
It is genetic.
So like, in some ways you start to see
someone’s personality emerge in childhood
and like they’re gonna be kind of like that.
You know, probably for the rest of their lives,
like, you know, barring anything major.
But when you talk about tinkering at the margins,
like that is actually like quite important.
Like a lot of therapy is basically
just tinkering at the margins.
Like one of the books that I read kind of
in reporting out my book is 10% happier.
And that was Dan Harris meditating every day
for like an hour a day, just to become 10% happier.
– That’s a lot though.
10% is a lot.
– Yeah, yeah.
I mean, but that’s, so like it kind of is,
it depends on how you look at it.
Like, I was a really anxious kid and I’m an anxious adult.
You know, does that mean that I am exactly the same
as I was when I was seven?
I mean, you know, I’m recognizable,
but I also think that I have knowledge and tools now
to like control my anxiety a lot better obviously
than I did when I was a kid or a teen, even a young adult.
So I don’t know.
I think that’s true, but also the margins
are really important.
– Yeah, no, there’s a lot of difference in that.
Little tweaks here and there do matter.
So, you know, thoughts and behaviors
are these two elements of personality.
I mean, how much power do we really have
to alter our behavior by consciously,
deliberately altering our thoughts?
I mean, how clear is that relationship?
Because if it is fairly clear that that is,
seems like one of the more reliable ways to go about,
you know, making some of these tweaks.
– The traits where it’s all behavioral
are definitely the easiest to change.
So conscientiousness is a good example of this.
It’s the one that’s all about being organized
and on time, eating healthy, you know, exercising.
What they’ve found is basically that
you don’t have to like really want it
in order to become more conscientious.
You just kind of have to do the stuff
associated with conscientiousness.
So like making the to-do list,
making the calendar reminders,
leaving, you know, whatever, 10 minutes earlier,
you know, decluttering your closets.
Like if you do enough of that stuff,
kind of regularly and consistently,
that is conscientiousness.
Like you will become more conscientious.
You will get stuff done and like achieve your goals
and have a higher level of conscientiousness.
With some of the other ones like neuroticism
or even agreeableness,
like the reason why they’re harder to change
is that you have to really want it.
And it is kind of more about your thought processes
and like challenging your thoughts
and, you know, thinking about situations differently.
Like if I was to revisit that day in Florida,
now or in Miami,
I wouldn’t necessarily like do anything differently.
I would just think about it differently.
And I would be less anxious
as a result of how I was thinking about it.
But like that is obviously harder
than like making a to-do list.
– Well, I did, I like that quote from Jerome Brunner
in the book.
You more likely act yourself into feeling
than feel yourself into action,
which kind of just feels like, you know, fake it
till you make it.
– So Nate Hudson, who’s like the main researcher
that does the personality change research
is I think my quote from him was like,
fake it till you make it is a reasonable way
to do personality change.
And that’s because a lot of this is sort of like
the actions kind of make you think
about things differently.
So one example for me was with Extraversion,
where I really did not want to go to all the stuff
that I signed up for.
So I signed up for like improv class
and I just really dreaded it every single time.
I did not really want to go,
but I kind of found that if I like made myself go,
it would make me happier.
And I did have a good time and I enjoyed it,
but it just like my thought process around improv
was I’m not good at it.
I’m not going to have fun.
I don’t like this.
I’m an introvert.
So that was like sort of the clearest example of how
sometimes you just kind of have to do something
and the thoughts will follow from there.
– I want to talk more about improv.
I’ve always wanted to do it.
But again, I’m an introvert.
And I feel like I would just be paralyzed up there.
But tell me about how long you did that
and how transformative it was.
– Improv was probably one of the best things I did.
And also the scariest.
I did that for about a year kind of like,
but it was like several sessions of improv
that I guess altogether was about a year of a year’s worth.
And I was at times so afraid that I froze up
and like didn’t know what to say next.
But something that’s really cool about improv is that like,
it’s all about learning that other people
can supply part of the interaction, right?
Like you’re not responsible for everything
going right in improv.
It’s okay if things are just kind of chaotic and strange
and not going perfectly.
And I don’t know, it’s like a good lesson
to have for social interaction.
‘Cause a lot of times when you’re just out there
dealing with people, it’s going to be kind of crazy
and you just kind of have to roll with it.
And I don’t know, to me that was like a good thing to see.
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(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
– Well, look, there’s a,
I think a very important question you posed near the end.
And I wanna ask it here.
How do you know when to keep trying to change?
I mean, how do you know when you’ve tried enough?
I mean, isn’t there some point at which
you do more harm by resisting who you are?
And would be better off just making peace with that.
– Yeah.
I mean, this is like, you know,
it’s not gonna be a hard and fast rule for everyone.
But what I found is that when I was doing things
that were like no longer enjoyable on any level
and were not getting me any closer to like what I valued
or like what I actually wanted
is sort of when I would give up on them.
So the big example of this is that I led a meetup group
for a while based around foreign films, which is my hobby.
And I just like didn’t really enjoy it.
I just don’t like running meetings.
I do moderate professionally for work,
but like I just don’t like to do it in my free time.
I guess I just, and it kind of like wasn’t, you know,
I didn’t have that high afterward,
like I did after improv where I was like,
yes, that was so fun.
I kind of felt just like, oh, thank God that’s over.
And to me, that was like a sign
that it was maybe just time to wrap up
and like hand it over to someone else.
And I think that’s okay.
Like you don’t, you know,
trying something doesn’t mean you’re like stuck with it
for life.
– Yeah, and look, I ask this in part
because I am sympathetic to the idea that,
you know, being a little maladapted to a world
that’s actually pretty shitty in lots of ways
isn’t the worst thing.
And our society has a way of conspiring
to make good and honest people feel weird and unlikeable.
And that’s a society problem, not a you problem,
but also it is generally healthy to be well adjusted.
So I don’t want to gloss over that either.
– Yeah, and I mean, even things like neuroticism,
you know, in small amounts or in certain situations
can have some benefits.
Like, I mean, I never did away with my anxiety completely.
It’s now like at more manageable levels,
but it’s not like gone.
And, you know, in the last chapter,
I interviewed Tracy Dennis Tawari,
who is a psychologist.
And she talks about how anxiety can have
some positive elements.
And when her son was born, he had like a heart condition.
And she talks about how anxiety really helped her
prioritize like finding the right specialists,
you know, getting him the right treatment,
coming up with a good treatment plan,
you know, all of the things that are involved
in caring for a sick child.
It would be hard to do that stuff
if you were completely not anxious,
like if you just didn’t care about anything.
Like anxiety is in some ways a way of caring.
So, you know, I think it’s fine to like find ways
of living with your anxiety,
but to not like do away with it entirely.
– Well, what are the most concrete,
practical interventions you discovered along the way
that people might find useful in their own efforts
to improve or align their values and actions?
– Sure, I will just toss some out
that I found worked really well for me.
I would sign up for something.
Don’t just tell yourself you’re gonna go out
to drinks with your friends more.
Like sign up for a thing that like requires you to be there.
With improv, you couldn’t miss more than two classes.
So you had to go, even if you didn’t feel like going.
– Accountability, right?
There’s some accountability.
– Yeah, like that’s what I would do for extroversion
is I would sign up for a thing.
For conscientiousness,
I would actually start by decluttering.
Like if you feel like you’re really disorganized
before trying to like quote unquote get organized,
I would just throw away as much stuff as possible.
That was like the loud and clear thing
that all the professional organizers told me
is that like it’s all about just like having less stuff
in your life.
And that can be like, you know, commitments too
and like sort of extraneous stuff that you’re doing.
And I honestly would take a meditation class
for anyone who’s interested in, you know,
reducing their neuroticism to whatever degree.
Even if not, like it’s just like an interesting
intellectual exercise and, you know,
possibly an emotional exercise.
– Yeah, I found the ACT acronym, the ACT acronym,
pretty handy actually.
It’s, you know, accept your negative feelings,
commit to your values and take action.
And you can say anything you like about that,
but certainly the acceptance part seems really fundamental.
I mean, one thing that comes across
in a lot of the stories you tell in the book
is that it doesn’t matter who you are,
what you do, where you are,
you’re going to have negative feelings all the damn time.
And we add so much unnecessary suffering to our lives
when we resist those feelings.
Anyway, I’ll let you say anything you want about that.
– Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, I thought that’s so helpful.
And that was really how a lot of the people who
I talked to who did change their personalities
kind of muddled through
because those first few attempts at, you know,
being extroverted or, you know,
even being conscientious can feel really uncomfortable.
Like getting up at, you know,
5 a.m. to go for a run is uncomfortable.
And so they really were just like,
I’m going to feel uncomfortable.
Like I’m not going to like this at first,
but it’s important to me that I keep doing this.
And so I’m going to take action and actually do it.
And I don’t know.
I think that’s like a good little rule to live by
for things that matter to you.
– How important is it to really believe in your own agency?
Is that a fundamental precondition of any kind of change?
To believe that it’s possible
that you have the freedom and the will to do that?
– The argument that I always get into with people is like,
some people think that like people never change, right?
And kind of the extension of that is like,
I will never change because people never change.
And if that’s truly what you think,
you probably aren’t going to try to change
and you probably won’t change.
There does have to be like some fundamental openness
to change in order to even like embark on something like this,
because it takes a lot of like energy and courage
to do some of this stuff.
And you can’t follow through on it
if you think that like it’s not going to work.
– All right.
Once again, the book is called “Me but Better,
the Science and Promise of Personality Change.”
Olga Hazan, this was fun.
Thank you.
– Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
This was great.
(upbeat music)
– All right, I hope you enjoyed this episode.
I know I did.
Personality change is something I thought about a lot
over the years in part because I’m constantly trying
to fix things about myself.
This book and this conversation gave me
some useful perspective on that,
both that it’s completely cool
to want to improve things about yourself,
but also it’s important to make peace with who you are
and not make yourself miserable fighting that.
But as always, I want to know what you think.
So drop us a line at the grayarea@box.com
or leave us a message on our new voicemail line
at 1-800-214-5749.
And once you’re finished with that,
please go ahead, rate and review
and subscribe to the podcast.
This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey,
edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Christian Ayala,
fact checked by Melissa Hirsch,
and Alex Ovington wrote our theme music.
New episodes of the grayarea drop on Mondays,
listen and subscribe.
The show is part of Vox,
support Vox’s journalism by joining
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– All right, Sean, you can do this promo
talking about all the great Vox media podcasts
that are gonna be on stage live
at South by Southwest this March.
You just need a big idea to get people’s attention,
to help them keep them from hitting the skip button.
I don’t know.
I’m gonna throw it out to the group chat, Kara.
Do you have any ideas?
– In these challenging times, we’re a group of mighty hosts
who have banded together to fight disinformation
by speaking truth to power,
like the Avengers, but with more spandex.
What do you think, Scott?
– I’m more of an X-man fan myself.
Call me professor.
Can I read minds?
I can’t really read minds,
but I can empathize with anyone having a mid-life crisis,
which is essentially any tech leader, so.
– Mines are important, Scott, but we’re more than that.
I think that you can’t really separate minds from feelings.
And we need to talk about our emotions
and explore the layers of our relationships
with our partners, coworkers, our families, neighbors,
and our adjacent communities.
I just wanna add a touch more.
From sports and culture to tech and politics,
Vox Media has an All-Star lineup of podcasts
that’s great in your feeds, but even better live.
– That’s it, All-Stars.
Get your game on, go play, come see a bunch of Vox Media
All-Stars, and also me at South by Southwest
on the Vox Media podcast stage,
presented by Smartsheet and Intuit.
March 8th through 10th in Austin, Texas.
Go to voxmedia.com/sxsw.
You’ll never know if you don’t go.
You’ll never shine if you don’t glow.
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I think all of us, at some point,
have wondered why we are the way we are.
Maybe you’re a little neurotic, a worrier,
or maybe you’re a tad abrasive, confrontational,
or a bit evasive.
Maybe you don’t think enough about others,
or maybe you do, but just a little too much.
We see our faults as faults.
But aren’t they really just our personalities?
And what is that exactly?
A personality.
Is it something we’re born with?
Does it shift over time?
Can we think and act our way into being a different and,
hopefully, better person?
I’m Sean Elling, and this is “The Gray Area.”
Today’s guest is Olga Hazan.
She’s a staff writer at The Atlantic
and the author of the book “Me But Better–
The Science and Promise of Personality Change.”
The book is a joy to read, full of ideas,
but also personal in the sense that Olga documents
her year-long effort to change things
she doesn’t like about her own personality.
Along the way, she does a nice job of weaving in the science
and marking the limits of what we know and don’t know.
It’s honest, curious, and reflective.
And so, it turns out, is Olga.
So I invited her on the show.
Olga Hazan, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much for having me.
So let’s start with the basics here,
because personality is one of those concepts
that we all intuitively understand what it signifies,
at least loosely.
But it is pretty tricky to define.
You’ve now written a book on it, so give me
your neatest, clearest definition.
Yeah, personality is the consistent thoughts and behaviors
that you have every day.
And some researchers think that, in addition
to just having those thoughts and feelings and behaviors,
they also help you achieve your goals.
So depending on what your goals are,
your personality kind of helps you get there.
An example of this would be the personality
trait of agreeableness, which helps you make friends
and social connections.
So people who tend to be more agreeable also
tend to value friendships and connections
and achieve more of those.
You use the word consistent there.
To what extent is personality just a performance?
And to what extent is it something much more concrete?
So personality is, in some ways, a performance.
Let’s say you describe yourself as an introvert,
but you have to give a big talk.
And it’s very important to your career
that this talk go well, right?
You are probably going to perform, to a certain extent,
extraversion.
Or let’s say you’re going into a room full of investors,
and you have to raise money for your startup,
but you’re just a very introverted coder guy who just
wants to code all day and not talk to anyone.
You’re going to perform extraversion in that situation,
too, because it’s very important for you
to get whatever is at the end of that performance.
The money or the professional accolades
or whatever comes with it, it doesn’t have to be financial.
It could be going on a first date is kind of a performance
as well.
So we do all perform elements of these traits
every single day.
But what most researchers think is
that there is sort of a tendency that we all
have toward a certain pattern of behaviors and thoughts that
are more or less consistent, especially if we don’t try
to change them in any meaningful way,
that you kind of get up and you have these little patterns
that you fall into.
And that’s sort of like your, quote, unquote,
“natural” personality.
So we have what people call the big five personality traits–
neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness,
which you just mentioned, openness to experience,
and conscientiousness.
Are these categories generally accepted
in the field of psychology, and how useful do you find them?
They are generally accepted.
That’s now, if you read a personality study,
it will be most likely based on the big five.
So things like Ania Graham and Myers-Briggs
are not generally accepted.
That said, they are imperfect.
There are some cultures that have traits
that are very important in those cultures
that the big five doesn’t really pick up as much.
Meanwhile, things like openness, it’s sort of a catch-all.
It doesn’t really map very cleanly onto someone’s personality
as other people would observe it.
So yeah, it is valid.
It has weaknesses.
But personality is so hard to measure and kind of scientifically
get your head around that it’s sort of the best
that we have right now.
Well, part of the inspiration for this project
is that you wanted to change some things about yourself.
So what did you want to change?
And why don’t you love yourself, Olga?
Don’t you know you’re good enough and smart enough
and people like you?
Why do you want to change?
Yeah, so I did want to change.
And I also love myself.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
Though I know that it can feel that way,
that if you admit that you want to change,
that it can feel like you’re saying that you don’t love
yourself.
But I think that’s where the idea of personality traits
as tools to help you achieve your goals
can be really helpful.
Because we all have goals we want to achieve,
even if we all like our lives and ourselves.
And for me, what I realized is that things were going well.
I had a pretty nice life.
Nothing was seriously wrong.
But my reactions to situations were not benefiting me.
They were kind of undermining me and making me not
able to enjoy my life.
So I start the book out with this actually great sounding
now as a new parent of this great sounding day in Miami,
where honestly, all that happened
is that I got a bad haircut, then immediately
had to get professional photos taken,
then got stuck in traffic, and then
had this weird debacle with a grocery store shopping cart.
And honestly, just because of my high neuroticism at the time,
the accumulation of all of those small things
made me have this epic meltdown when I got back to my hotel.
And I realized that that happened a lot in various ways.
Small things would happen that would make me not
able to appreciate the big picture or not
able to just be happy with what I have or be grateful.
And so that’s really what I wanted to work on
is appreciating my life for what it was.
And also just outside of neuroticism,
I was feeling the COVID social isolation.
And I wanted to deepen my social connections as well.
So that’s why I wanted to change.
Would you say that you had or have a tendency to catastrophize?
Because I do.
And I don’t know if that’s a function of neuroticism
or something else, but I would say that is the one thing
that I’m trying most aggressively to stop.
Is that tendency part of neuroticism?
Or is it a little more complicated than that?
Yeah, it’s definitely part of neuroticism.
Neuroticism is sort of the trait that’s–
so to kind of simplify it, it’s associated
with depression and anxiety.
And basically, all those are just like a feeling of threat.
Like you just constantly see threats everywhere.
The reason you’re catastrophizing
is not because you’re silly or because you’re not realistic,
but because you kind of can see the threats coming
from every direction.
And you’re like, how do I prevent those from happening?
And that’s what makes people who are high in neuroticism
so miserable.
Well, I like the–
I think it was Jud Brewer argument
that you talk about in the book that anxiety is a habit loop
where anxiety triggers the behavior of worry, which
feels like it’s a temporary relief,
but really it just makes us more anxious in the long run.
And this is something–
this is something neurotic people do by default, right?
I mean, it’s just the first instinct.
Oh, yeah.
I always thought anxiety and worry were the same thing.
But worry is actually–
it’s a behavior.
It’s almost like a self-soothing behavior.
And people who are very anxious think
that if you just worry enough, you won’t be anxious anymore.
But instead, worry kind of sometimes
can make you more anxious.
Like you’re never going to get to the end of the worrying.
Well, it’s also about the discomfort with uncertainty,
right?
You talk about the neurotic person
is the one who gets the have a second–
do you have a second slack from your boss and freaks out?
I’m the type.
If I get that, do you have a second out of nowhere
from the boss?
I’m filing for food stamps before lunch.
It’s just my mind just goes there.
OK, this is becoming too much about me already.
No, it’s OK.
Yeah, I know.
I’m right there with you.
But uncertainty is wrapped up with this, right?
It’s just– it’s an uneasiness about what the future might
hold and our ability to control or not control.
And so you’re just anxious about the world.
And I mean, I’m sure there’s evolutionary utility in that.
But boy, past a certain point, it just
becomes pathological, really.
Yeah, I mean, that’s a huge part of it.
Neuroticism is all intertwined with a feeling
of wanting control, of really fearing uncertainty.
In the modern world, it’s all about learning
how to live with uncertainty and accept
that there is uncertainty in the world without letting
it rule you, basically, this fear of uncertainty.
What about agreeableness?
Agreeableness sounds pretty agreeable.
I mean, nobody wants to be called disagreeable, I don’t think.
But is agreeableness more complicated than that?
I mean, how much agreeableness is too much?
When do we need to be a little disagreeable?
Yeah, agreeableness was one of the ones that I was working on.
And it’s basically like warmth and empathy toward others
and also trust.
And that element of agreeableness can be really good.
And it can deepen your relationships
and give you more fulfilling friendships.
Where some people say that they’re actually too agreeable
and they want to pair back is when they feel like they’re
being people-pleasers.
And they feel like people walk all over them
or they don’t know how to say no.
So part of agreeableness is learning
how to communicate boundaries, how to make friends,
but also not just by saying yes to everything
that your friends ask of you.
And to still have your own boundaries and your own things
that you’re willing and not willing to do.
So for your year-long personality transformation
project, you did focus on all five of these traits
to varying degrees.
Which did you find was the hardest to tweak in any direction?
So neuroticism was the hardest by far for me.
It is because the way to improve on neuroticism
is meditation or any kind of mindfulness practice.
It can be yoga, not core power, like slow contemplative yoga.
It can be different forms of mindfulness,
but it’s basically mindfulness.
And I found that really challenging.
I am not a natural meditator.
I kind of have a loop of ongoing concerns and worries
and to-do list when I’m not thinking about anything.
I don’t like it when people are too relaxed.
I find that irritating.
Really?
Why?
I just– I think it was a little bit hard for me
to let go of my anxiety.
Because on some level, I think–
and I still sometimes kind of think this–
I think that anxiety is protective, at least for me.
It forces me to do things.
And it helps me.
It is like the fire under me.
And I think at times, I was a little bit like, oh, sure.
This is fine for people who don’t have a lot going on,
but I need my anxiety.
How long did you try meditating?
I mean, did you ultimately find it to be helpful?
Did you score less neurotic at the end of that practice?
I think I did meditation really, really seriously
for about six months of this.
And it did work in the sense that my neuroticism went down.
But when I said that neuroticism is depression and anxiety,
it was actually mostly my depression score that went down.
So I became less depressed.
And my anxiety also went down, but it was still quite high.
It was not as high as it had been,
but it didn’t go away completely.
But I think one reason why I became less depressed
is that the class that I took, which was called MBSR–
it was the meditation class that I took–
had a lot of Buddhist teachings that were part of it.
So one of the things that my meditation teacher said
was things happen that we don’t like.
And for me, even though obviously things
happen that we don’t like, I realized
that I was someone who, when things would go wrong,
I would start to blame myself very intensely.
And I would have this very intense self-blame that would
be very hard to break out of, even if it was something that
was clearly not my fault.
It was like an act of God or really awful traffic
or just something that had nothing to do with me.
I would start to be like, well, I should have left earlier.
I should have, blah, blah, blah, I should have predicted this.
And I think just this reminder that things happen that we don’t
like and that everyone has things that happen in their life
that they would rather not happen.
And we all have to deal with that.
I don’t know, that was weirdly very helpful to me.
What is the scientifically best personality?
And look, there is a part of my philosophical soul
that shudders, even at asking this question,
because I don’t think science can make these kind of value
judgments.
But what I’m getting at is, what does the research
on happiness and personality tell us
about what kinds of traits tend to be most correlated
with happiness and well-being and a flourishing life?
If your goal is happiness, which I am not saying that it has
to be, there’s more life than happiness.
But as far as happiness, well-being, longevity,
all those goodies, it’s basically being high but not
too high on all of the five traits.
So being pretty extroverted, pretty agreeable,
pretty open to experiences, quite very conscientious,
and then very emotionally stable.
You say in the book that extroverts are happier, in part,
because they interpret ambiguous stimuli more positively.
How true is this?
I mean, I’m sure there are some people out there
who might find this kind of claim a little crude.
So how clear is the evidence on this?
How confident are we that extroverts in general are happier?
I mean, they certainly look like they’re having more fun,
but that’s anecdotal.
So the evidence that extroverts are happier
is pretty consistent.
It’s been replicated quite a few times,
including by researchers who weren’t connected
to the original studies and were dubious,
and they replicated it.
And the one researcher who did that, who I talked to,
is himself an introvert.
So it is pretty clear.
The reasons why are less clear.
So as you mentioned, one interpretation
is that they walk into a room full of people,
and they’re all strangers, and they don’t immediately
get a smile out of anyone.
It’s just kind of a straight-faced kind of people
are like, what are you doing here?
I, an introvert, would be like, oh, my god.
I’m not supposed to be here.
Nobody likes me.
I need to leave kind of just like flea, flea, flea.
It’s that self-talk, right?
All that self-chat-er.
Right, right, right.
An extrovert would be like, oh, awesome.
I just need to introduce myself around.
And pretty soon, people will warm up to me.
They just have a different interpretation of events
that helps them be happier.
They are more active.
They’re just always out and doing things,
like the people who are signed up for a million clubs
and things are extroverts.
And they have more social connections, not just friends.
They also have more weak ties, more acquaintances,
just people they talk to throughout the day.
And that helps them feel happier.
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(upbeat music)
– Well, let’s talk about change,
the science of personality change.
As you say in the book, there is this idea
that at around 30, our personalities are set like plaster.
How true is that?
I mean, how fixed is our personality?
– So that idea is sort of not considered
totally true anymore.
There’s been quite a bit of research that shows
that even when people don’t try to change,
they actually end up changing
over the course of their lives.
So one example is that people get less neurotic
as they get older.
They also tend to get less open to experiences.
So if you ever notice that people get more conservative
as they get older, that could be
because openness to experiences goes down.
In studies where they follow people
over decades and decades, most of those people
in those studies change on at least one personality trait
from young adulthood to late adulthood, their 60s.
So it’s true, you’re not gonna be like unrecognizable
probably, but people do change over time
just kind of naturally.
But what kind of the heart of my book is about
is about changing your personality intentionally,
which is sort of an even newer branch of research
where they actually ask people
if they would like to change their personalities,
give them activities that are meant
to help change their personalities
and then kind of measure their personalities after the fact.
And so then your personality would change even more.
– This part of it is so interesting to me.
I mean, I’ve had psychologists on the show
before people like Paul Bloom who I love.
I think he’s just fantastic.
And I may be bastardizing his argument here.
So if you’re listening, Paul, you can write in and tell me.
But he always says something to the effect,
not necessarily that we look, you are your brain
and that’s it.
But he does suggest that by the time you’re pretty young,
five, six, seven, eight, whatever,
somewhere around there, your personality is kind of clear
and it’s kind of constant.
You kind of are what you are.
You can tinker a little bit at the margins
and the environment matters.
Of course, it always matters,
but you really are sort of, you kind of are what you are,
which isn’t to say that you can’t change anything,
but you kind of are what you are.
I mean, do you think that is a little overstated?
– Yeah, I mean, I think,
so there is a little bit of truth to that.
So part of personality is inherited, right?
It is genetic.
So like, in some ways you start to see
someone’s personality emerge in childhood
and like they’re gonna be kind of like that.
You know, probably for the rest of their lives,
like, you know, barring anything major.
But when you talk about tinkering at the margins,
like that is actually like quite important.
Like a lot of therapy is basically
just tinkering at the margins.
Like one of the books that I read kind of
in reporting out my book is 10% happier.
And that was Dan Harris meditating every day
for like an hour a day, just to become 10% happier.
– That’s a lot though.
10% is a lot.
– Yeah, yeah.
I mean, but that’s, so like it kind of is,
it depends on how you look at it.
Like, I was a really anxious kid and I’m an anxious adult.
You know, does that mean that I am exactly the same
as I was when I was seven?
I mean, you know, I’m recognizable,
but I also think that I have knowledge and tools now
to like control my anxiety a lot better obviously
than I did when I was a kid or a teen, even a young adult.
So I don’t know.
I think that’s true, but also the margins
are really important.
– Yeah, no, there’s a lot of difference in that.
Little tweaks here and there do matter.
So, you know, thoughts and behaviors
are these two elements of personality.
I mean, how much power do we really have
to alter our behavior by consciously,
deliberately altering our thoughts?
I mean, how clear is that relationship?
Because if it is fairly clear that that is,
seems like one of the more reliable ways to go about,
you know, making some of these tweaks.
– The traits where it’s all behavioral
are definitely the easiest to change.
So conscientiousness is a good example of this.
It’s the one that’s all about being organized
and on time, eating healthy, you know, exercising.
What they’ve found is basically that
you don’t have to like really want it
in order to become more conscientious.
You just kind of have to do the stuff
associated with conscientiousness.
So like making the to-do list,
making the calendar reminders,
leaving, you know, whatever, 10 minutes earlier,
you know, decluttering your closets.
Like if you do enough of that stuff,
kind of regularly and consistently,
that is conscientiousness.
Like you will become more conscientious.
You will get stuff done and like achieve your goals
and have a higher level of conscientiousness.
With some of the other ones like neuroticism
or even agreeableness,
like the reason why they’re harder to change
is that you have to really want it.
And it is kind of more about your thought processes
and like challenging your thoughts
and, you know, thinking about situations differently.
Like if I was to revisit that day in Florida,
now or in Miami,
I wouldn’t necessarily like do anything differently.
I would just think about it differently.
And I would be less anxious
as a result of how I was thinking about it.
But like that is obviously harder
than like making a to-do list.
– Well, I did, I like that quote from Jerome Brunner
in the book.
You more likely act yourself into feeling
than feel yourself into action,
which kind of just feels like, you know, fake it
till you make it.
– So Nate Hudson, who’s like the main researcher
that does the personality change research
is I think my quote from him was like,
fake it till you make it is a reasonable way
to do personality change.
And that’s because a lot of this is sort of like
the actions kind of make you think
about things differently.
So one example for me was with Extraversion,
where I really did not want to go to all the stuff
that I signed up for.
So I signed up for like improv class
and I just really dreaded it every single time.
I did not really want to go,
but I kind of found that if I like made myself go,
it would make me happier.
And I did have a good time and I enjoyed it,
but it just like my thought process around improv
was I’m not good at it.
I’m not going to have fun.
I don’t like this.
I’m an introvert.
So that was like sort of the clearest example of how
sometimes you just kind of have to do something
and the thoughts will follow from there.
– I want to talk more about improv.
I’ve always wanted to do it.
But again, I’m an introvert.
And I feel like I would just be paralyzed up there.
But tell me about how long you did that
and how transformative it was.
– Improv was probably one of the best things I did.
And also the scariest.
I did that for about a year kind of like,
but it was like several sessions of improv
that I guess altogether was about a year of a year’s worth.
And I was at times so afraid that I froze up
and like didn’t know what to say next.
But something that’s really cool about improv is that like,
it’s all about learning that other people
can supply part of the interaction, right?
Like you’re not responsible for everything
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It’s okay if things are just kind of chaotic and strange
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And I don’t know, it’s like a good lesson
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‘Cause a lot of times when you’re just out there
dealing with people, it’s going to be kind of crazy
and you just kind of have to roll with it.
And I don’t know, to me that was like a good thing to see.
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(upbeat music)
(upbeat music)
– Well, look, there’s a,
I think a very important question you posed near the end.
And I wanna ask it here.
How do you know when to keep trying to change?
I mean, how do you know when you’ve tried enough?
I mean, isn’t there some point at which
you do more harm by resisting who you are?
And would be better off just making peace with that.
– Yeah.
I mean, this is like, you know,
it’s not gonna be a hard and fast rule for everyone.
But what I found is that when I was doing things
that were like no longer enjoyable on any level
and were not getting me any closer to like what I valued
or like what I actually wanted
is sort of when I would give up on them.
So the big example of this is that I led a meetup group
for a while based around foreign films, which is my hobby.
And I just like didn’t really enjoy it.
I just don’t like running meetings.
I do moderate professionally for work,
but like I just don’t like to do it in my free time.
I guess I just, and it kind of like wasn’t, you know,
I didn’t have that high afterward,
like I did after improv where I was like,
yes, that was so fun.
I kind of felt just like, oh, thank God that’s over.
And to me, that was like a sign
that it was maybe just time to wrap up
and like hand it over to someone else.
And I think that’s okay.
Like you don’t, you know,
trying something doesn’t mean you’re like stuck with it
for life.
– Yeah, and look, I ask this in part
because I am sympathetic to the idea that,
you know, being a little maladapted to a world
that’s actually pretty shitty in lots of ways
isn’t the worst thing.
And our society has a way of conspiring
to make good and honest people feel weird and unlikeable.
And that’s a society problem, not a you problem,
but also it is generally healthy to be well adjusted.
So I don’t want to gloss over that either.
– Yeah, and I mean, even things like neuroticism,
you know, in small amounts or in certain situations
can have some benefits.
Like, I mean, I never did away with my anxiety completely.
It’s now like at more manageable levels,
but it’s not like gone.
And, you know, in the last chapter,
I interviewed Tracy Dennis Tawari,
who is a psychologist.
And she talks about how anxiety can have
some positive elements.
And when her son was born, he had like a heart condition.
And she talks about how anxiety really helped her
prioritize like finding the right specialists,
you know, getting him the right treatment,
coming up with a good treatment plan,
you know, all of the things that are involved
in caring for a sick child.
It would be hard to do that stuff
if you were completely not anxious,
like if you just didn’t care about anything.
Like anxiety is in some ways a way of caring.
So, you know, I think it’s fine to like find ways
of living with your anxiety,
but to not like do away with it entirely.
– Well, what are the most concrete,
practical interventions you discovered along the way
that people might find useful in their own efforts
to improve or align their values and actions?
– Sure, I will just toss some out
that I found worked really well for me.
I would sign up for something.
Don’t just tell yourself you’re gonna go out
to drinks with your friends more.
Like sign up for a thing that like requires you to be there.
With improv, you couldn’t miss more than two classes.
So you had to go, even if you didn’t feel like going.
– Accountability, right?
There’s some accountability.
– Yeah, like that’s what I would do for extroversion
is I would sign up for a thing.
For conscientiousness,
I would actually start by decluttering.
Like if you feel like you’re really disorganized
before trying to like quote unquote get organized,
I would just throw away as much stuff as possible.
That was like the loud and clear thing
that all the professional organizers told me
is that like it’s all about just like having less stuff
in your life.
And that can be like, you know, commitments too
and like sort of extraneous stuff that you’re doing.
And I honestly would take a meditation class
for anyone who’s interested in, you know,
reducing their neuroticism to whatever degree.
Even if not, like it’s just like an interesting
intellectual exercise and, you know,
possibly an emotional exercise.
– Yeah, I found the ACT acronym, the ACT acronym,
pretty handy actually.
It’s, you know, accept your negative feelings,
commit to your values and take action.
And you can say anything you like about that,
but certainly the acceptance part seems really fundamental.
I mean, one thing that comes across
in a lot of the stories you tell in the book
is that it doesn’t matter who you are,
what you do, where you are,
you’re going to have negative feelings all the damn time.
And we add so much unnecessary suffering to our lives
when we resist those feelings.
Anyway, I’ll let you say anything you want about that.
– Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, I thought that’s so helpful.
And that was really how a lot of the people who
I talked to who did change their personalities
kind of muddled through
because those first few attempts at, you know,
being extroverted or, you know,
even being conscientious can feel really uncomfortable.
Like getting up at, you know,
5 a.m. to go for a run is uncomfortable.
And so they really were just like,
I’m going to feel uncomfortable.
Like I’m not going to like this at first,
but it’s important to me that I keep doing this.
And so I’m going to take action and actually do it.
And I don’t know.
I think that’s like a good little rule to live by
for things that matter to you.
– How important is it to really believe in your own agency?
Is that a fundamental precondition of any kind of change?
To believe that it’s possible
that you have the freedom and the will to do that?
– The argument that I always get into with people is like,
some people think that like people never change, right?
And kind of the extension of that is like,
I will never change because people never change.
And if that’s truly what you think,
you probably aren’t going to try to change
and you probably won’t change.
There does have to be like some fundamental openness
to change in order to even like embark on something like this,
because it takes a lot of like energy and courage
to do some of this stuff.
And you can’t follow through on it
if you think that like it’s not going to work.
– All right.
Once again, the book is called “Me but Better,
the Science and Promise of Personality Change.”
Olga Hazan, this was fun.
Thank you.
– Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
This was great.
(upbeat music)
– All right, I hope you enjoyed this episode.
I know I did.
Personality change is something I thought about a lot
over the years in part because I’m constantly trying
to fix things about myself.
This book and this conversation gave me
some useful perspective on that,
both that it’s completely cool
to want to improve things about yourself,
but also it’s important to make peace with who you are
and not make yourself miserable fighting that.
But as always, I want to know what you think.
So drop us a line at the grayarea@box.com
or leave us a message on our new voicemail line
at 1-800-214-5749.
And once you’re finished with that,
please go ahead, rate and review
and subscribe to the podcast.
This episode was produced by Beth Morrissey,
edited by Jorge Just, engineered by Christian Ayala,
fact checked by Melissa Hirsch,
and Alex Ovington wrote our theme music.
New episodes of the grayarea drop on Mondays,
listen and subscribe.
The show is part of Vox,
support Vox’s journalism by joining
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– All right, Sean, you can do this promo
talking about all the great Vox media podcasts
that are gonna be on stage live
at South by Southwest this March.
You just need a big idea to get people’s attention,
to help them keep them from hitting the skip button.
I don’t know.
I’m gonna throw it out to the group chat, Kara.
Do you have any ideas?
– In these challenging times, we’re a group of mighty hosts
who have banded together to fight disinformation
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like the Avengers, but with more spandex.
What do you think, Scott?
– I’m more of an X-man fan myself.
Call me professor.
Can I read minds?
I can’t really read minds,
but I can empathize with anyone having a mid-life crisis,
which is essentially any tech leader, so.
– Mines are important, Scott, but we’re more than that.
I think that you can’t really separate minds from feelings.
And we need to talk about our emotions
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and our adjacent communities.
I just wanna add a touch more.
From sports and culture to tech and politics,
Vox Media has an All-Star lineup of podcasts
that’s great in your feeds, but even better live.
– That’s it, All-Stars.
Get your game on, go play, come see a bunch of Vox Media
All-Stars, and also me at South by Southwest
on the Vox Media podcast stage,
presented by Smartsheet and Intuit.
March 8th through 10th in Austin, Texas.
Go to voxmedia.com/sxsw.
You’ll never know if you don’t go.
You’ll never shine if you don’t glow.
If you could change anything about your personality, anything at all, what would it be?
And why would you want to change it?Writer Olga Khazan spent a year trying to answer those questions, and documented the experience in her new book Me, But Better: The Science and Promise of Personality Change.
In this episode Sean speaks with Olga about the science of personality change, the work it takes to change yourself, and what makes up a personality, anyway.
Host: Sean Illing (@SeanIlling)
Guest: Olga Khazan, author of Me, But Better: The Science and Promise of Personality Change.
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