DAY 2 - MYTHS

Wed, 9/2 7:40AM • 9:35

SUMMARY KEYWORDS
future, personality, person, training, daniel gilbert, compassionate, myths, current, today, concepts,
totally different, key, decisions, context, present, week, crucial distinction, ted talk, harvard
psychologist, human beings

00:01
Hello, and welcome back to the Create Your Future Self Program. This is day two. I'm Dr. Benjamin
Hardy, author of Personality Isn't Permanent. If you haven't gotten this book, please get it. This book
makes a deep dive compliment to this course does the 30 day course you're gonna get new trainings
literally every day with journal prompts and challenges throughout the week. And if you read Personality
Isn't Permanent, it will deepen and solidify your understanding of these concepts. I challenge you
please go get the book. So today I'm going to talk about the myths of personality, the myths of basically
everything that society teaches you to ultimately eliminate your ability to make your own choices. So let
me go ahead and share my screen one more time with you. So this is all about week one week one is
where I'm going to help you realize that you're the one creating and choosing who you become. So
today I'm going to dispel the myths of personality. These are other concepts and I'ma share with you in
the future. But here's a quote from Dr. Daniel Gilbert and linked down below this TED Talk called the
Psychology of Your Future Self in Daniel Gilbert is a Harvard psychologist. But this is what he says in
his TED Talk. He says human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished. So let
me explain this. Basically, what the research shows is you're not you're not the same person, you were
10 years ago, you're not the same person. But who you are right now. So you can recognize you're not
the same person you were 10 years ago. Think about it. Who were you 10 years ago? Do you see the
world the same way? Do you have the same goals? Do you have the same environment? Do you have
the same belief system in every way? Probably not. Let me give a quick personal example. So a couple
weeks ago, my former self came back to bite me in a small way. And I took full ownership and it really
worked. But so I'm in a part of a lot of business collaborations. And one of the collaborations that I'm in
is a partnership where we we create products together and we create concepts and books together.
Well, basically, it became apparent that a couple years ago, I did a training a training just like this
Where I was using some of their ideas, um, and I went maybe a little overboard in teaching them to the
point where it may have been close to like an IP and fridge fringe, like where I was stealing their
intellectual property, or maybe I was just overdoing it where I was, I wouldn't say I was taking credit
because I was giving them credit, but it was just a little questionable. And someone had informed them
of that training. And I actually had totally forgotten about it, because it was like, well over two years ago,
and I was, you know, I hadn't thought about it in quite a long time. Well, when I when it got brought up
to me. This friend said, Hey, I, you know, one of our clients saw this training and we want your
explanation of this I looked at and I was like, holy cow, like well, I went back watched it. And I could tell
that I had genuine intent, but I also could see my error and but I could also tell that the former version of

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me didn't know I was in air, I was doing my best. But with the current eyes that I have the current
knowledge I have the current maturity I have in the current knowledge of business. I could see holy
cow, that was a big mistake. So I immediately owned it, we removed the training. And I was able to
resolve it very quickly. But here's kind of the key, is first off, I'm not mad at my former self, but I can
clearly see that my former self was an error. And the current version of me wouldn't do what my former
self did. So my current self is different from my former self, and I, but I don't, but I'm not angry at my
former self. I'm compassionate and empathetic towards my former self, because I know that they were
working with limited understanding. They were less mature, less knowledgeable, maybe had the wrong
motives. Who knows. But the key point here is, is that I'm not the same person I was two years ago. I'm
not even the same person I was a year ago. I love what Alain de Botton said. He says, "If you're not
embarrassed of who you were 12 months ago, you didn't learn enough." There's another quote from
Ernest Hemingway, where he basically says that true nobility is not being superior to your fellow man,
but being superior to your former self. And so you're not the same person. You were in the past. You
want different things, you have a different level of maturity. You know, I can compare myself to my
former self. Five, six years ago, I had zero kids, now I have five minutes fixed on the way, I have a PhD,
I'm now making 10 times, maybe 100 times more money than I was five years ago. And so I'm in a
totally different mindset in different place. But I'm not angry at my former self. Well, the same is true of
other people first, so first off, you want to view your former self as a different person. But you also want
to recognize that other people are different than who they were in the past as well. I can speak about a
lot of people, but my dad being one, my dad was a drug addict when I was growing up. But he's not that
guy anymore. So I don't need to keep seeing him as the guy he was 20 years ago. But I also don't need
to be mad at who he was 20 years ago. And in fact, the more I have context and understanding, the
more I can be compassionate towards my father's former self and maybe better understand why he
made the decisions he did. But I can also appreciate that he's not that same guy today. He's not who
he was. But the goal is, is that the past is something to be compassionate towards and to be grateful for
because you can see the amazing transformation that's already happened. And so you're not the same
person who in the past, but here's another. Here's the funny part. And again, this goes back to the
Daniel Gilbert quote, again, from the TED Talk. He said, "Human beings are works in progress that
mistakenly think they're finished." So even though we can see that we're not the same person we were
in the past, as a general rule, we think that who we are today is who we're always going to be. We don't
imagine our future self as a different person. And here's the reality, in 5-10 years from now, your future
self, the person you're going to become is going to be more different than you expect. Because you
actually expect it, they're not going to be much different. Most people think that their futures that who
they are today is who they're always going to be, which is false. That's actually one of the key myths of
personality is that who you are as who you've always been in who you're always going to be, and that
your personality is innate, and that your personality is this is something you discover. Personality if you
had like a bull's eye rings of a bullseye personality is like one of the outer rings it's very surface level. It
changes based on context on situation. It changes to about life. And so your personality is not the most
fundamental aspect of yourself. But a lot of people think that your personality is the true you that it
comes from your past. And so the best way to know who you are is to look back to who you were in the
past. That's actually the opposite. Your personality, in many ways comes from your view of your own
future. A big problem with that for most people is that their view of their future is that they're going to be
the same person as they are right now. They don't have a very imaginative future of themselves being
a totally different person in a totally different situation doing different things. And that's your fault. You

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know, in psychology, there's a concept called prospection. It's really the idea that as conscious human
beings, we're different from plants and animals. Because we can imagine different futures, we can
imagine a million different future scenarios and then we can make decisions based on which one we
think is best, that allows us to be conscious human beings. And so your view of your future is actually
the thing driving who you are today. So my question for you is how different is your future self than your
current self? If you think that your current self is the be all end all, then you have what Carol Dweck
would call a fixed mindset. People with a fixed mindset believe that who they are today is who they're
always going to be. And they're defined by where they're at right now, you know, kids who, you know,
like, let's just say a little kids who fail a test with test with a fixed mindset. They're completely
determined by who they are in the present, they don't believe that eventually, they can pass that test
and get way beyond it. People with a growth mindset don't really care who they are today. They know
that they're different from their past, and they know that their future self is going to be very different.
And that's what you want to do is you want to view your future self as a very different person. And then
you want to work on your perception skills, your imagination skills, and begin thinking about who do you
want your future self to be? Because they can be very different, and they will be different. There'll be in
a new world, think about how different the world is now than it was five years ago, the world's probably
going to be even more different in five years. So your future self is going to be in a totally different
context. They're also going to be dealing with new challenges, new problems, you might be in a totally
different situation with totally different mindsets and goals. And so you need to start thinking about who
is your future self key to making quality decisions in the present. And there's a lot of research on this.
The key to making quality decisions in the present is to first off, view your future self as a different
person, but also know who you want them to be. Because if you don't know where you want to go, then
it doesn't matter what you do right now. But if you are clear on where you want to go, then you can
direct your present decisions to actually create that future. So if you don't know who your future self is,
then you can't live presently in the future. And Viktor Frankl said that same thing in Man's Search for
Meaning. He said, without, you know, having a clear purpose, your present loses meaning it loses
context, the context is your future. So down below, I want you to just reflect on how different you are
from your former self. What are some of the differences that are clearly you know, clearly different from
you and who you are in the past? You could just choose any time frame you want, maybe three to 5-10
years, but also how is your future self going to be different from your current self? What are some of the
things your future self will be doing that your current self isn't doing? Or what are some of the things
your future self no longer does that you're still doing maybe some of the addictions you have that your
future self has gotten rid of long ago. So I want you to just distinguish that your future self, your current
self and your former self are three different people. And I want you to take some time in your journal,
just take a few minutes to reflect on the questions down below. In what ways are you different from your
former self? And in what ways is your future self different from you? All right. Next training, I'm gonna
bust the myth of personality tests, and how those can really mess with your identity. And I'm also going
to explain the difference between identity and personality because that's a very crucial distinction. All
right, see you tomorrow on day three. Talk to you later.

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