Podcast

Discovering Personality – Dr Jordan Peterson

Introduction
There is a fair bit of personality in a new-born.

There’s a fair bit of temperament in its nascent form within the first 6 months.

That doesn’t mean you can’t learn new things. Some things will come easier to certain people
and some things will be more difficult.

You should tailor your career to your personality. If you’re extroverted, for instance, you might
do sales.

Wisdom is being able to expand your personality. An extrovert, for instance, should be able to
become an introvert in the necessary circumstances.

Similarity in personality is preferable for romantic partners. Except if one is high in

neuroticism, it’s better for the other to be low in neuroticism.

You have to be pretty tyrannical to have all of your children end up the same given the innate
variability in childhood temperament. A good household should (as a result) have children that
are different from one another.

You see this happen on a sociological scale: In more egalitarian societies there’s more
difference between men and women. Because the egalitarian societies are largely less
authoritarian. So, people end up more different because their intrinsic temperament
variability is allowed to manifest itself.

All of the other personality tests pale in comparison to the big 5.

Political leanings are generally dependent on personality. Liberals and conservatives are both
right but at different times. That’s why we need both sides to constantly engage in dialogue to
figure out which is correct at any given time.

Grit is a variant of conscientiousness.

Meyers Briggs is radically out of date (made in 1930s). Before the modern understanding of
biology.
 For hiring, you want employees high in (1) general cognitive ability: openness, intellect,
and IQ; and (2) conscientiousness (for managers). These people are good at executing what’s
already been implemented.

You also need entrepreneurs and creatives to come up with new ideas.

You can’t get everything you want in one employee.

In most businesses, the majority of the work is done by a minority of people (the top
performers). You need to identify your top performers and hire more people like them and fire
the bottom 10% of workers.

Poor nutrition in early life stunt’s cognitive ability development. If a child is well-nourished then
they will develop as high an IQ as their biology allows.

Introduction to Personality Psychology

Complexity: there are so many things that you don’t know. When your car breaks down you
realize how complex the system is. At any location, there is someone who can come tow your car
away or fix it. Or you could realize how complex a computer is.

 How do you survive in the world with limited knowledge?

Everyone has a low-resolution map of everything. But sometimes, getting from point A to point
B requires a more detailed map. That is when we realize that we have insufficient data to
complete our task. That initially creates anxiety but it also creates opportunity.

People don’t like to have their belief system challenged because it questions their map’s
validity in relation to the real world. And it can be a threat to your perceived social status and
social status regulates your emotions on a biochemical level.

Your personality creates a framework for which you perceive relevant facts. There are too many
facts to know all of them, so our personality screens facts for what seems relevant to us and
matches our map.

Our perception is tied to our intent and our intent is tied to our values.

Humans reduce complexity by only focusing on one thing. That’s why people don’t notice the
gorilla in the basketball video. When we only focus on one thing, we are blind to basically
everything else.
In an argument, it is extremely difficult to get everyone on the same page because some people
pay attention to other facts or words more and other people zone out and don’t hear certain
parts. And their entire perception is coloured by their values and intent.

What you see is determined by your value structure. So, if you don’t like what you see, think
about chasing your value structure.

Your personality is like a functional map of the world that increases the probability that
you can rely on quick judgments to solve the complex problems that you will be faced
with in a world beyond the comprehension of any individual. You come pre-programmed
with sets of low-resolution general solutions.

A personality trait is simply a low-resolution solution to a complex problem.

Why would people vary in their personality traits? Wouldn’t they all be the same? The
world isn’t the same all the time. So different personalities are better adapted at different
times.

There are only 4 dimensions in the world: Height, width, length, and time.

Humans have 5 dimensions of personality. That makes them very complex.

From a Darwinian perspective, the way that organisms adapt to a complex world is by
having all kinds of variations. So, we have personality variations and some percentage of
people will have the best personality traits for any given location and time.

Humans have evolved structures that help us process the world for it to be not
overwhelming. These structures can be separated into motivational systems and emotional
systems.

The Five Factor Model

Short-term tactics to increase profit can hurt a company in the long run.

The big 5 personality traits worked for predicting someone’s future behavior. Other
personality tests don’t do this.

Pareto principle example: If you have 10 salesmen, 3 of them will make half of your sales.
If you have 100 salesmen, 10 of them will make half of your sales. If you have 1000
salesmen, 30 of them will make half of your sales. A small number of people end up doing
most of the work and a small number of people end up accruing most of the gain. There’s some
overlap between those who do most of the work and those who accrue most of the gain but it’s
not perfect.

In the 5-trait analysis, extraversion and openness clump together. So do agreeableness,

conscientiousness, and neuroticism (but reversed—emotional stability).

The more traits you add, the higher resolution your results will be. The 2 trait is extraversion and
openness. The 5 trait is the 5 traits from the test. The 10 trait is the extended version of the 5
traits. There are 2 traits that make up each of the 5 traits. A 100-question test can give you a
pretty accurate 5 trait and 10 trait test.

There are 2 possibilities: (1) personality only has 5 dimensions. (2) personality only has 5
dimensions because of a limitation of language to represent personality.

A lot of the psychological measures don’t exist. They’re just a variation of the big 5. Self-
esteem, for example, can be predicted with extroversion minus neuroticism. People with high
self-esteem have more positive emotion and less negative emotion. It’s not about how you view
yourself. It’s about the relative balance between positive and negative emotion and a huge
chunk of that is biologically determined and part of your essential temperament. Also, it’s not
obvious that more self-esteem is always better than less because you might be worried and
anxious but that could make you more sensitive to threats in your environment. Other people
who are not worried about threats could be more likely to be injured or die.

The big 5 theorists are arguing that they need to recreate the diagnostic scheme for
personality disorders because the forms of psychopathology are actually extreme forms of
the underlying big 5 personality trait structure. That argument has been going on for 30
years.

Anxiety and depression are highly correlated to neuroticism.

Impulsivity, being inattentive, and sociability are highly correlated with extroversion.

Being interested in people and wanting to take care of people—empathy is highly correlated to
agreeableness.

Competitive and predatory are correlated with disagreeableness.

Orderliness and industriousness are correlated with conscientiousness.

Creativity and intelligence are correlated with openness.

The Big 5 and IQ are like a periodic table for personality.

High IQ and conscientiousness generally predict academic success.

Children have some innate personality. They typically develop more in adolescence and
adulthood.

Extraversion
Extraversion is the tendency to experience positive emotion.

Extraversion is made up of assertiveness and enthusiasm.

This trait is normally distributed, meaning that most people fall somewhere in between these two
extremes.

Extraversion trait descriptors:

 Sociable vs retiring
 Fun-loving vs sober
 Affectionate vs reserved
 Friendly vs aloof
 Spontaneous vs inhibited
 Talkative vs quiet
 Make eye contact
 Drawn to sales and personnel work like nursing and teaching
 Impulsive (they discount the future more)
 Gamble more

Assertiveness trait descriptors:

 Take charge
 Have a strong personality
 Lack the talent for influencing people (reversed)
 Know how to captivate people
 Wait for others to lead the way (reversed)
 See myself as a good leader
 Can talk others into doing things
 Hold back my opinions (reversed)
 I’m the first to act
 Do not have an assertive personality (reversed)

Enthusiasm trait descriptors:

 Make friends easily

 I am hard to get to know (reversed)
  Keep others in distance (reversed)
 Reveal little about myself (reversed)
 Warm-up quickly to others
 Rarely gets caught up in the excitement (reversed)
 I’m not a very enthusiastic person (reversed)
 Show my feelings when I’m happy
 Have a lot of fun, laugh a lot

Individuals low in extraversion (introverts) don’t like talking about themselves, rarely get
excited, don’t show their feelings easily, and tend to hold back.

You can get people to change their personality to an extent. But at some point, you get
diminishing returns. An extreme introvert, for instance, can become more extroverted but they
will never be as extroverted as an extreme extrovert.

It’s a lot easier to adjust the job relative to you that to adjust you relative to the job. That
means that you should find a job that suits your personality rather than trying to change
your personality.

From a Darwinian perspective, you want to find a niche that allows your personality to
thrive.

The world seems to favour extroverts at the moment but there are still niches for
introverts to thrive. Blogging in the early 2010s or newsletters today, for instance.

Extraverts tend to value the present more than the future.

Introverts tend to value the future more than the present.

Personality traits are highly genetically influenced.

You actually don’t want to be happy all the time. Maniac people are extremely happy—they
don’t feel sadness during their episodes. But it can cause you to discount the future heavily
which is not good for you in the long term. So, you want to regulate your emotions—you don’t
want to be happy all the time.

Being at the top of the hierarchy causes you to feel better at the biochemical
level. Uncertainty makes you age faster. So, when people are trying to cling to their position in
the dominance hierarchy, they’re doing it in part because their life depends on it.

Match the punishment to the crime. Focus on the smallest possible unit of correction. Instead of
saying that someone is a failure because they dropped a spoon, for instance, show them some
tricks for holding spoons—give them the smallest change in information possible so that the
map that they navigate the world isn’t shattered.
  The way to do it is to come up with a small list of things they’re doing great at and then
have one little thing that they could improve.

Depressed people think that any error is evidence of their incompetence. If they burn dinner, for
instance, they think they’re incompetent and get suicidal. Their error mechanism is off because
everyone who’s incompetent burns dinner but not everyone who burns dinner is incompetent.

Seeing progress is even more validating than moving towards your goal. It’s also
validating (and often more so) because your map of navigating the world (your plan) is
working and that means that you have the competence to conduct something that
works. But the problem is that there is randomness in the world, so you have to not become
overconfident after you’ve had success because your success could just come from randomness.

The more extroverted you are the more pleasure you feel per unit of success.

Mania, grandiosity, and narcissism are when success causes people to become over self-
confident.

Motivations help you establish goals and emotions keep you on track.

The two hemispheres of the brain are used for separate things:

 Left: Positive emotion and movement forward.

 Right: Negative emotion and uncertainty.

People who are depressed show righter hemisphere activation.

Neuroticism
If extraversion is positive emotion, neuroticism is negative emotion. These emotions
represent separate systems in the brain. Consider the following complementary questions:
How happy should you be when things are going well? How upset should you be when things
are going wrong? Fundamentally, there is no right answer to these questions. Best practices
change depending on the environment, which explains why variation in these traits has
persisted.

Neuroticism is also known as negative emotion.

In general, people are more sensitive to negative emotions than they are to positive
emotions.
 Defensive aggression [neuroticism] functions as protection against injury. Negative
emotion helps us avoid pain and suffering by motivating us to act carefully. However, some
people have so much negative emotion that they can become overwhelmed and even
incapacitated by it.

Evolutionarily, it’s better to be anxious than injured or dead.

Withdrawal reflects a person’s sensitivity to physiological preparedness and the “freeze”

tendency. An example of this is the expression “deer in headlights,” when a person is frozen by
fear and anxiety.

People in chronic pain are often depressed. SSRIs can relieve depression and pain.

SSRIs mimic being higher up in the dominance hierarchy. That makes people feel better on a
biochemical level.

Withdrawal trait descriptors:

 Often feel blue

 Filled with doubts about things.
 Feel threatened easily.
 Feel depressed
 Worry about things
 Easily discouraged
 Become overwhelmed by events
 Afraid of many things

Volatility reflects a person’s sensitivity to defensive aggression. People who are volatile are
touchy and are more likely to hyper-respond to negative situations. An example of this might be
someone who curses while driving or stuck in traffic.

Volatility trait descriptors:

 Associated with defensive or predatory aggression

 Get angry easily
 Get upset easily
 Can’t keep emotions under control
 Change mood frequently
 Moods go up and down easily
 Easily annoyed
 Getting easily agitated
 Can be stirred up easily
 Hyper-reactive to frustration, disappointment, and pain
 Depression and anxiety disorders are more common in people with high levels of negative
emotion. Both disorders can be treated by encouraging the person to take on manageable
tasks that improve their lives.

When treating depression, it’s important to look at a person’s life situation as a whole:

 Do they have a meaningful job?

 Have they received enough education?
 How fulfilling is their social life? (Do they have friends and/or an intimate relationship?)
 Are they in good physical health?
 Do they use their free time in a meaningful way?

Dr. Peterson’s clinical experience has shown that if a person answers yes to all of these
questions and still experiences depression, they’re likely to benefit from antidepressant
medications. However, if the patient is unfulfilled in these basic life areas, medication is
unlikely to make a difference in their depression. Instead, they may greatly benefit from
lifestyle improvement.

SSRI medications are also used as painkillers, which illustrates how deeply the emotional and
physical pain systems are intertwined.

There are three possible ways to deal with anxiety as an adult:

1. Have a plan. Finding a simple yet motivating plan of action can reduce anxiety.
2. Don’t underestimate the utility of routine. Even simple routines like going to bed and
eating at the same time each day can help reduce anxiety.
3. Expose yourself to unfamiliar situations voluntarily. Anxiety is best cured by a voluntary
confrontation with the fearsome things. Like the children in Dr. Kagan’s assessment,
increasing your proclivity for dealing with new “threats” or situations can reduce anxiety as you
become more familiar with those situations.

Both anxiety and depression can be fixed with self-improvement. If clients still have
anxiety or depression after their life is structurally sound, SSRIs can help.

Neuroticism is particularly related to the self-rumination and self-preoccupation aspects of

self-consciousness, whereas extraversion is more related to awareness of the self and
identification of internal states.

Agreeableness
Agreeable people can be described as kind, warm, polite, and accommodating, while
disagreeable people can be described as selfish, ruthless, and vengeful.
Agreeableness is the tendency to weigh others’ interests against your own. Someone who is
agreeable will value others’ interests more than their own, while the opposite is true of
someone who is disagreeable.

Conservatives tend to be higher in politeness and lower in compassion. Liberals tend to be the
opposite.

Women are higher in compassion and politeness than men.

Clinical psychologists’ most commonly seen illness is negative emotion—anxiety and

depression. The second is people who are too agreeable who need assertiveness training.

The trait is composed of two aspects: compassion and politeness.

People who are high in compassion are interested in others’ needs and problems.

They are sympathetic and generous with their time, and they are more likely to take the interests
of others into account. Compassionate people often:

Compassion trait descriptors:

 Feel others’ emotions

 Inquire about others’ well-being
 Sympathize with others’ feelings
 Not indifferent to the feelings of others.
 Take time for others.
 Take an interest in other people’s lives
 Have a soft side
 Like to do things for others
 Interested in other people’s problems

People who are high in politeness have respect for authority. They are not pushy or insulting
and are careful with their words.

Politeness trait descriptors:

 Respect authority
 Don’t believe I am better than others
 Hate to seem pushy
 Don’t take advantage of others
 Avoid imposing will on others
 Rarely put people under pressure
 Avoid insulting people
 Avoid conflict
  Not out for personal gain

The downside to this behavior is that people who are high in agreeableness may be too caring,
and excessively agreeable behavior among adults is a somewhat counterproductive
strategy. Over time, agreeable people can become resentful or passive-aggressive.

To combat high levels of this trait, clinical psychologists use assertiveness training to help
their patients learn to put their own interests forward. As an example, assertiveness training
can help people learn to negotiate for better salaries at work.

Conscientiousness and agreeableness increase with age.

Siblings play an important role in the development of social behaviors, including autonomy.

Children and adults who have agreeable parents should work to develop their own autonomy.

Over-supervision of children inhibits their ability to become fully autonomous.

Disagreeable people are often described as stubborn, callous, ruthless, and vengeful. Although
these descriptions sound very negative, there are some advantages to being low in
agreeableness. For example, disagreeable people get paid more on average for the same work
(because they ask for higher wages), are unlikely to be used by others, and do not become
resentful because they don’t do things they don’t want to do.

Excessively low agreeableness often translates to violent and criminal behavior: extreme
disagreeableness is the best predictor of incarceration. Both incarceration and extreme
disagreeableness are significantly more common in men.

Many men who have predatory aggression also have the capacity to be maternal.

While the distribution of the trait in each sex is not too far apart in the middle, the difference
becomes apparent at the tail ends of the normal distribution model. Almost all of the most
disagreeable people are men, and almost all of the most agreeable people are women.

Competitive sports are abstractions of hunting.

Competitive sports show the positive side of predatory aggression.

Personality Differences: Men and Women

The biggest differences between men and women in Big Five personality traits are in
agreeableness and neuroticism, with women scoring higher in each. This is true cross-
culturally.

The differences are great enough that if you picked a random man and a random woman from
the population and guessed that the woman was more agreeable, you would be right 40% of the
time.

The highest difference between men and women is in compassion, with women scoring higher
than men. In order of highest differences, women also score higher than men in withdrawal,
politeness, volatility, openness, orderliness, and enthusiasm. Men score more highly in
assertiveness than women.

It is important to understand that there is more personality diversity within men and women
than there is between them. The same is true when it comes to race and ethnicity. This means
that diversity is not to be found in group identity, rather, diversity is found in individual
differences in personality.

It is important to understand that even a small difference in means is magnified at the tails
of the distribution. For example, almost all of the most disagreeable people are men. Extremely
low agreeableness is a good predictor of incarceration, and there are fifteen times as many men
in prison as there are women.

A related theory called the greater male variability hypothesis argues that the greater
variability in traits seen in men is a consequence of the fact that men are more disposable as
they are less likely to reproduce successfully. This theory may explain why IQ is more variable in
men: men are overrepresented in extreme deviations in IQ (both high and low).

From where do sex differences in personality derive? There are two major theories that may
help answer this question:

1. The first theory is social constructionism, which argues that differences in personality
arise due to differences in the way men and women are socialized.
2. The second is the biological hypothesis, which argues that differences in personality are
linked to biological differences such as genetic differences.

Few theorists endorse pure social constructionism or pure biological determinism and
instead believe that the differences arise from elements of both culture and genetics.

In this lecture, however, Dr. Peterson makes a compelling argument for favoring the
biological hypothesis. Researchers ranked countries by how egalitarian their policies were
between the sexes. They then administered the Big Five to people from these countries and
related the results to how egalitarian the countries were rated. Contrary to their expectations,
they found that personality differences were the largest in the most egalitarian countries. Since
these countries have tried to minimize cultural influences on sex differences, this is compelling
evidence that differences in personality are biologically rooted.

How do sex differences in personality affect occupational choices?

 Personality psychologists have discovered a trait-like behavior called interest that helps
us understand sex differences. There are two major categories of interest: interest in
people versus interest in things. This is one of the largest documented personality
differences between men and women; men are more interested in things than people,
and women are more interested in people than things.
 Men and women do not differ significantly in measures of IQ or conscientiousness,
which are the two biggest predictors of long-term success. Thus, Dr. Peterson
argues that it is interest, not ability, that mediates differences in occupational
choice between men and women. The most male-dominated occupations include
engineering, mechanics, and repairs, all of which reflect an interest in things. The
most female-dominated occupations include nursing, teaching, and childcare, all of
which reflect an interest in people.

Conscientiousness
Conscientiousness is associated with work and organization.

Conscientious people are careful, reliable, organized, self-disciplined, and persevering.

Unconscientious people are carefree, laid-back, happy-go-lucky, messy, and inattentive.

Orderliness is associated with political conservatism.

Orderliness is related to disgust sensitivity.

Social policy can be based on mitigating pathogen prevalence. Like sexual temperance in
the late 1800s or mask usage in response to COVID-19. This is partially why conservatives
like closed borders.

Industriousness is (possibly) associated with guilt and shame. Industrious people may
work hard because they don’t want to be useless. Not working hard is not morally
acceptable to them.

Conscientiousness is composed of two aspects: industriousness and orderliness.

Industrious people carry out their plans, avoid wasting time, finish what they start, and always
know what they are doing. They are typically hard-working.

Industriousness trait descriptors:

 Carry out my plans

 Don’t waste time
 Don’t find it difficult to get down to work
 Finish what I start
 Get things done quickly (don’t postpone)
 Always know what I’m doing
 Not easily distracted

Orderly people keep things tidy, use a schedule, and like routines and details. They are often
described as clean and organized.

Orderliness trait descriptors:

 Tidy
 Like order
 Bothered by messy people
 Want everything to be just right
 Bothered by disorder
 Like routine
 See that rules are observed
 Want every detail taken care of

Conscientiousness is one of the best predictors of life success, second only to IQ. Despite its
high predictive utility, conscientiousness has continually evaded the efforts of personality
psychologists to link it to other theories. Dr. Peterson’s research team initially believed
conscientiousness would map activity in the prefrontal cortex of the brain, which is associated
with the human behavior of planning. However, when they investigated this hypothesis, they
found no correlation. Dr. Peterson and his students then tried to link conscientiousness to a
variety of tasks having to do with detail orientation, delay of gratification, and IQ, but again,
found no correlations.

 Despite this, conscientiousness continues to predict life success (in terms of financial
and career success) better than almost any other psychological construct.

There are two main mental disorders associated with excessive conscientiousness: anorexia
nervosa and obsessive-compulsive disorder.
 1. Anorexia nervosa is a kind of hyper-obsession with bodily purity (or disgust with one’s
body), and mostly affects upper-middle class women. Dr. Peterson believes this may be
related to the fact that members of the upper-middle class are more likely to be
conscientious. They often believe that any amount of fat on the bone makes them “fat” or
overweight.
2. Obsessive-compulsive disorder is a mental illness that often fixates around germs. It is
common for OCD patients to wash their hands excessively because they feel
contaminated. The illness is more complicated than this, but the link between OCD and
orderliness is fairly obvious.

There are two main types of people who will help a business to succeed: conscientious and open
people.

1. Conscientious people are good at implementation and management, especially if they

are also high in IQ.
2. Open people are good at thinking up new ideas and changing the direction of the
company. Businesses need open, creative, and entrepreneurial people to make sure they
aren’t missing out on potentially fruitful opportunities.

Successful businesses tend to capitalize on the complementary strengths of both highly

conscientious and highly open people.

Openness to Experience
Openness to experience is associated with intelligence, creativity, abstract thinking, and
artistic interest.

Openness to experience is composed of two aspects: openness and intellect. Openness is the
Big Five personality trait that is most closely linked with IQ and is closely associated with
creativity.

Open people are described as original, imaginative, creative, complex, curious, and having broad
interests. People who are high in openness to experience are motivated by ideas and/or
aesthetic experience for its own sake and tend to orient their worlds around such pursuits. They
enjoy the beauty of nature, believe in the importance of art, are reflective, become deeply
immersed in music, enjoy poetry, are highly emotional, need a creative outlet, and see the
beauty in things that other people may not notice. Openness is associated with creativity and
interest in aesthetics.

People who are lower in openness are described as conventional, concrete, uncreative, simple,
incurious, and have narrow interests.
People who are high in intellect are quick to understand abstract ideas, can handle a lot of
information, solve complex problems, enjoy philosophical discussions, read often, and think
quickly. The aspect of intellect is the personality reflection of IQ. People who are intelligent tend
to seem interested in and competent at manipulating ideas. Intellect is associated with
intelligence and interest in ideas.

IQ is one of the most reliable measures in all of psychology.

You can create a rudimentary IQ test by gathering a large library of questions that can be about
anything as long as they cover a range of topics. If you randomly select one hundred questions,
administer them to one hundred people, then sort by how many questions they answer right,
you’ll be able to rank order them by IQ. You’ll get the same rank order if you ask the same
people a different set of questions. IQ is one of the most reliable tests ever created, and it is
remarkably stable across time.

The U.S. military has done a lot of research on IQ because they want to be able to easily identify
competent people. Their research revealed that there is no way to train someone with an IQ
lower than 83 that would make them more useful than burdensome, so it is illegal to induct a
person with an IQ under 83 into the U.S. Army.

The army is one of the most eager employers--they don’t turn people away without a good
reason. It is therefore very difficult to find a suitable job for people with extremely low IQs;
often, no such jobs exist. A walloping 10% of the population meets this criterion, and it is
a real struggle for them to get by in the world.

Openness trait descriptors:

 Enjoy the beauty of nature

 Believe in the importance of art
 Love to reflect on things
 Get deeply immersed in music
 Like poetry
 Seldom mention the emotional aspects of paintings and pictures
 Need a creative outlet
 Tend to get lost in thought
 Daydream frequently
 See the beauty in things that others might not notice.

Intellect trait descriptors:

 Quick to understand things

 Understand abstract ideas
 Can handle a lot of information
  Like to solve complex problems
 Find interest in philosophical discussion
 Like difficult reading material
 Have a rich vocabulary
 Think quickly
 Learn things quickly
 Formulate clear ideas

ompleting the Exercise 1

Welcome to the Past Authoring (Autobiography) component of the self-authoring suite. This
exercise is
designed to help you develop a clearer sense of your past, by writing your own story.
Understanding the
defining moments of your life can help to illuminate your present situation, and make it easier to
plan and
determine your future directio
ompleting the Exercise 1
Welcome to the Past Authoring (Autobiography) component of the self-authoring suite. This
exercise is
designed to help you develop a clearer sense of your past, by writing your own story.
Understanding the
defining moments of your life can help to illuminate your present situation, and make it easier to
plan and
determine your future directio