How you talk changes how you think. That's why propaganda works. In fact, most people don't even realize they've changed.

I've purposefully changed my personality (behavior?) twice, about to start my thrice effort.

The first time, nor longer wanting to be angry, and having run out of ideas, I decided to pretend to be happy. I had read that you can't unlearn a habit, only replace it. So I played chipper all the time. When asked how I was, I'd say something like "Phenomenal!" Initially, it was sarcastic.

Then one day I woke up and I felt phenomenal. I was gobsmacked. I didn't even know the change was taking place. The transition took about three years.

The second time, I ran for office. Deluding oneself is part of the job. A bit like how sales people can convince themselves the next customer will say "Yes!"

This book came out after my first change. It jives with my experience.

  How the Way We Talk Can Change the Way We Work
  https://amzn.com/078796378X

> How you talk changes how you think.

When I started to learn Japanese I was given the advice to pick a persona from a movie or something to copy. This makes it much easier to mold your speech and become fluent faster. The strange thing was that I started to develop that personality in Japanese and before I knew it I had a completely different character when speaking Japanese than when speaking English. Even stranger, I liked myself a lot better in Japanese. It's one of the reasons I chose to stay in Japan.

Because I now have an English speaking job I'm slowly trying to learn how to be my Japanese self in English, but I find it difficult :-)

This happened to me without deliberately picking a persona to model.

My Japanese persona is chirpy with a rhythmic speed.

My English is cold, monotonous and logical with a dry sense of humour. I honestly feel like a totally different person when I'm speaking Japanese.

This is interesting. When I try to speak my second language (my parents' native language) as my regular self, I struggle. But when I am impersonating characters it flows so quickly I surprise myself.

I still remember one of my highschool English teacher's quoting Chaucer: "The mind is its own place, and in itself, Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven"

I've found this quote, and the generalization to personality traits in general, to be quite accurate. I've changed dramatically over the years.

It's important to note, though, that the biggest changes I've experienced occurred when I didn't have anyone around who knew the old me. Only then was I really free to explore who I could become. I think this is one of the beautiful things about anonymous online forums. They allow us to explore different mindsets in a way that wasn't possible prior to the internet.

That's John Milton's Paradise Lost, from the point of view of Lucifer:

  Farewell happy Fields

  Where Joy for ever dwells: Hail horrours, hail

  Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell

  Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings

  A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time.

  The mind is its own place, and in it self

  Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.

https://www.dartmouth.edu/~milton/reading_room/pl/book_1/tex...

I am sympathetic to Lucifer's point of view.

My mistake, thanks for the correction!

I did something similar. I was going through a hard time personally and I found myself being negative about everything. I decided to start a "negativity jar" into which I put 20c everytime I said something negative. I promised my suffering work colleagues I would spend the proceeds taking out to dinner at the end of the year. It really work well and a few hundred dollars later I was out of my reflexive negativity rut. The only downside was the resident junkie at work stole all the money - at least everyone was understanding on why they missed out on dinner.

Whoah hold on, are you saying you had an actual known heroin addict at your place of work long enough for you to deposit hundreds of dollars in quarter increments? The casual delivery of this left turn is comedy gold.

Yes. When I started he was on methadone, but I guess like a lot of addicts he relapsed. The temptation of all that easy money must have been too great.

I have in my mind him paying his dealer in 20c pieces (I live in Australia so we don't have quarters). 20c pieces are actually quite large (11.2g) so a couple hundred dollars in 20c pieces is 11.2 x 5 x 200 = ~11kg (25 lbs). This was not some easy theft!

Ah, Australia, that explains it, I've live in both the US / UK, so I'm used to 25c or 20p, but not 20c.

Did you say negative things about the junkie?

I actually laughter about it at the time due to the irony. He was actually quite a nice person (apart from his drug habit). My problems were minor by comparison.

I have found very small financial rewards/penalties to have a massive ability to help me make changes in my life

It was the whole ritual that helped. My colleagues were also really helpful and would pull me up when I said something negative that also helped.

You must have really had a lot of negativity to save a few hundred dollars in 20c increments!

Yes. I really was in a bad way at the time. The important thing is I got out of the hole and the cost was minor in comparison.

"There are no actors, only actions." -- Nietzche

It's all practice. So if you practice being a new you, you will become good at being that person. And it so happens that's how we become good at our first selves. We just don't remember it, and it was likely unintentional. As we mature, we are given every right to choose the adult we wish to be, and how to behave. But making the leap requires incentive, intention, and some real effort, because practice is labor. Except when it becomes a labor of love, we become empowered by it, not tired by it. That is why passion is paramount, and we should all have a passion for who we are.

> Except when it becomes a labor of love, we become empowered by it, not tired by it. That is why passion is paramount, and we should all have a passion for who we are.

The trick is, and what I learned over time - labour comes first, then comes the passion. Rarely it is the other way around. Waiting for passion to strike is why a lot of people (recent version of myself included!) are stuck.

Passion always comes. It's what you're doing when it comes, whether you can recognize it, and whether you can run with it. Choosing to be gritty first is not a requirement. Chances are, you'd have still found passion elsewhere doing other things. You've just found a way to successfully seek it in labor.

The problem is:

1) We hate to admit it sometimes. If you're reading a comic book or playing video games, we make it not count. Parents are guilty of this with their children also. Passion is not a choice between school subjects or job titles. There are kids with a passion for picking their nose. It won't get them anywhere, but they toyed around, discovered it, and found it. It's passion. It's what turns you on.

2) It can be passion against. If you hate your job, it isn't because you don't have passion for it, and no, no amount of waiting will grant it. What you have is passion against it. And this is where most of the anti-passion sentiment comes from. They find passion too illusive and metaphysical, all not knowing it came and passed already. It was the loathing they had for their job. Sadly, they overcame it. They overcame their passion.

3) We don't act on it. Unless you're still picking your nose, we need to act on our passion more. There are youtube millionaires that play video games all day. Someone has to draw comic books, and they're all adults. Not all passions will lead to professions, but it should still be your goal.

Of course, passion does not equal happiness nor success. It's what you do with it.

Anecdotally, the parallels between love is uncanny. 1) We often hate to admit who we fell for, 2) we can be passionate against someone (opposite side of the same coin, just see 90% of romantic comedies), and 3) if we don't act on it, it never flourishes.

And love does not equal happiness nor success. It's what you do with it.

And we always fall in love. Maybe it's just who you're staring at when it happens...

I am unconvinced by the idea that passion comes only after labour.

Passion feels to me like a gift from the universe, you never know when or where it will strike. It feels intuitive to me that no amount of struggle will make me have a passion for cleaning toilets.

Of course, cleaning enough toilets could create a passion in me for not cleaning toilets, but I'm hopeful that there's easier ways to achieve it.

Also it feels like when I'm engaged in an activity as unpleasant as cleaning toilets, that expense of energy is actively preventing me from thinking about things that I am passionate about.

Well if that's the case, then whether we will undergo a personality change is not necessarily entirely in our control, because we may not develop the passion for the labor of personality change. It just might not "strike".

> So if you practice being a new you, you will become good at being that person.

Yes and no. According to my subjective perception of life you only know in hindsight whether you were practicing or not. Sometimes you feel really enthusiastic about something and decide to work very disciplined at it (and really do it) but you get no results and are no wiser as to why that is. Other times you don't even intend to do anything about something you want to change but your subconsciousness practices "for you" so to speak and all of a sudden you do the right things in the right moment without understanding why you're able to do it.

In fact, for many areas of my life I feel like I improve most when I can afford to do nothing for weeks and all of a sudden I get hit by one or two massive insights. It's sort of like all the information required for a change is already there but my brain needs massive amounts of thinking capacity to compute and suggest the right actions.

> you only know in hindsight whether you were practicing or not

You are always practicing. It's only in hindsight whether you know you were doing it right.

If you're late for work, you've just practiced being late for work. If you made an excuse, you just practiced making an excuse. If you lie, you just practiced lying. And that's why we're screwed. The notion that practice only happens when we decide we're practicing is nonsense. If you lie 90% of the time, you will become a great liar. That's the nature of practice.

Take an aspiring athlete. They all practice hard. The advantage isn't in practice. If your shooting form is bad, every shot you take with that form is reinforcing a bad practice. That's why getting it right and only doing it right is so important. Taking it slow and being intentional with every action is the only way to do this. What we must practice is mindful control of every action, because it's all practice.

This is also why "pretend" is just another word for practice. To pretend requires being mindfully in control of your actions.

In a related way, I was almost pathologically shy as a teenager, and even into my college years. What may have helped me break out of my shell was becoming a performing jazz musician, and discovering that I could make glaring mistakes with practically no consequences. I also did a bunch of teaching.

Today, I'm capable of, and enjoy, stereotypically introverted activities such as math and programming, and those things have helped me advance my career, but I don't need them as an escape from society.

When asked, I tell people that I'm mildly extroverted. My main reason is simply that there's a stigma against introverts in our society.

But is there any side to your old self that you miss, or was a good thing that is not there any more?

E.g., I feel once you get used to 'increased social stimulation' it becomes harder to spend solid chunks of time by yourself doing deep/creative mental work.

Any comments?

Similar thing happened to me (for promoting my business at networking events, not LARPing), but I never lost the deep creative mental work habit. I just went to networking events constantly, but kept on coding when I wasn't doing that sort of thing.

Now I can do either, without even thinking about it. It's like a lightswitch, when I'm in a group I can just start chattering away, but when I get up a code editor I don't even think about getting down to it, itjust happens.

I have had a similar experience. There is a weird notion in our culture that introversion vs extroversion is a choice between "creative vs outgoing", with the unstated implication being it's really "creative vs not creative". I spent way too long not taking care of myself because I thought I was an introvert. No, I was depressed and I needed help. But some people seem to wear their introversion like some kind of badge of honor. And then, under some perverse guise of being supportive, we don't call people out on it and tell them they are wrong.

It never occurred to me my feelings were depression until my sister revealed her struggle with it as an attempt to get me to go to therapy. Could have saved many years if someone had just told me, "no, this is not a healthy lifestyle, staying in and reading books and playing games, to the exclusion of making any new relationships".

However here you're using a pathological condition (depression) to make a judgment about a normal one (introversion). That is not necessarily reasonable. Introversion doesn't have to imply asocial; but rather just that the person can't socialize or more generally _absorb external stimulation_, _for an extended enough period_. And the world does need introverted people too who prefer to sit around cooking up ideas in their head as much as it needs extroverted people to put together teams to realize those ideas.

Well, there are trade-offs. I probably read less, but I think I'm more creative, since I collaborate more.

You can practice being more extroverted until you get good at social interaction. I can context switch between the two (introvert / extrovert), but I would tend to think of myself as more innately an introvert in that I am quite happy on my own. The true extroverts seem to find being alone quite hard.

I suppose it's trainable as well. But your past is always a part of you; an extrovert who trained themselves to be comfortable alone may still think of themselves as "more innately an extrovert".

Yes I agree although I have never come across an extrovert who wanted to become more intovert.

>I was the classic "shy until you get to know him" kind of guy.

[...]

> I barely recognize my old introverted self.

Shyness and introversion aren't the same thing. Sounds like you were shy, but not anymore. Whether you're introverted/ambiverted/extroverted is another matter.

The repressed extroverts wouldn't exist if they weren't miming introverts. That fact won't stop them from discovering themselves and assuming every introvert is actually a repressed extrovert. Also that there is only one innate type of human. I fear introversion will come to be seen as a developmental disability.

For anybody else who doesn't know (like me!) LARPing is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Live_action_role-playing_game

Sounds pretty neat! Almost like a game based therapy when used in this context.

Very inspiring account of your own transformation!

I think the concept of the fixed personality has done a lot of damage to people for the sake of predictability. That we're moving closer to embracing freedom of self on such a fundamental level is one of the truly encouraging things about this time.

> That we're moving closer to embracing freedom of self on such a fundamental level is one of the truly encouraging things about this time.

This has been done and done again for as long as there have been societies. The surveillance state will seal this freedom away for good. Then we will have order and we will "like" it.

The surveillance state cannot observe where the personality is made.

Are you sure? I assume you mean they can't observe the mind. But they can. We can now identify psychopaths with brain scans. There are also pro-social psychopaths. Do you think they will continue to have total freedom to live as such when everyone knows what they are? We've already decided ADHD is a disorder. If you want to institute industrialized education and 75% of the population adapts to it then what is the other 25%? I would argue ADHD is adaptive in some other context and that is why it exists. I absolutely love the "hyper-focus" aspect as a programmer. That won't stop the powers that be from assuming there's some mistake in the way I'm configured. This is especially scary when you can detect mental "disorders" via behavior on social media. Also when your boss is spying on everything that you do. Which is basically a thing at every major corporation now. Alternative configurations of the self are a risky endeavor and getting riskier. It makes me sad but I don't want false hope. Whatever idealogical awakening seems to be happening, it isn't being translated into the social structures that control us. Of course the former must precede the latter. But the former keeps popping up with increasing frequency and the latter is always further from reality.

This all sounds a bit paranoid to me.

Although I don't like all the spying that goes on either, I don't believe that there is a conspiracy to remove ADHD from the population. If ADHD or another personality disorder is helpful for some reason, eg for programmers, then it will remain.

As long as people can do their jobs well enough and better than someone without ADHD, the "powers that be" will allow them to remain.

Bosses aren't giving psychological diagnoses, they are simply monitoring that the battery hens are still laying enough eggs.

I didn't suggest there was a conspiracy to remove ADHD. Only that it was seen as a disorder. That has effects. They've learned to accept it in programmers because it's so common. But what if I were something else? If my boss was able to diagnose me via behavior on corporate monitored hardware he could fire me and I'd have no way of knowing if it was bigoted. He may not even really know. It's hard to control subconscious stuff like that. Employers are already doing these things in other ways. They have people take morality questionnaires that arguably measure nothing at all. Ultimately it won't take an obvious form like conspiring to eliminate ADHD. That actually makes it far scarier. We're going to subject the entire population to an arbitrary and systematic prejudice of correlates. Simply because it's good for the bottom line of each individual business to win the hiring competition.

You basically decided to "believe". I'm curious if you feel you "lost" some parts of you that you liked.