Tag: openness

The Hand We’ve Been Dealt

The Hand We’ve Been Dealt

AP2

I want to finish this series of posts on personality I’ve put together over the past couple of months by giving you an analogy.

To first recap, there are five major personality traits: extraversion, neuroticism, conscientiousness, openness and agreeableness.

Wherever you lie on the spectrum of each trait – whatever the circumstances that shaped you – this is the hand you’ve been dealt in this game we call life. 

If you’re lucky you may have a couple of aces up your sleeve. Maybe, if you’re not so fortunate, you have a couple of 2’s and 3’s to contend with. 

Maybe, just maybe, you have a royal flush!

However lucky you may or may not be, what matters is less the hand you’ve been dealt but how well you play it.

So I want you to take a long objective look at that hand and think about two things. The first is what game you should be playing. What game is your personality hand best suited to? 

A royal flush may be helpful in a poker game, but different games suit different hands. You might not want a royal flush.

If you’re high in extraversion you’ll feel energised working with lots of people. However, if you’re highly introverted it will exhaust you. You’ll be far better off working alone or with a small group of people.

If you’re high in agreeableness you’ll want to work for people – you’ll gain a huge amount from looking after others. If you’re low in agreeableness you’ll want to channel that competitive nature. 

If you’re highly open you’ll be well suited to entrepreneurship or creative endeavours. If you’re high in conscientiousness you’ll be well suited to managerial or administrative positions. 

Wherever your strengths lie, you want to think long and hard about your intrinsic motivations. If your personality hand doesn’t match your job you will be miserable – if not unsuccessful.

This applies to life partners as well. 

Except for those who are highly neurotic, you want someone with a similar temperament. Opposites may attract but they make for terrible life partners. Major personality differences are flash points in any relationship. 

But life isn’t perfect. Finding a job or life partner that matches your hand perfectly is impossible. There will inevitably be differences. There will be parts of your nature that you will have to shift to make things work. 

So the second thing I want you to do is to take a long hard look at the aspects of your personality that are holding you back. What cards in your hand need strengthening?

For someone high in agreeableness the danger is an inability to stand up for oneself and say no. Learning to be more assertive is an excellent way to combat this.

Those low in agreeableness would do well to work on their listening skills. Someone who is highly introverted should consciously work on their social skills.

Those high in neuroticism should think about the things they are avoiding that they ought to be doing, then practise facing them. 

If you’re low in conscientiousness it’s worth making a detailed plan and then breaking it down. If you’re low in openness you should make reading and writing a habit. 

If you’re extremely high in openness, think about the most essential things in your life and then ruthlessly commit to them. 

Wherever you weakness lie, what you want to do is push yourself outside of your personality comfort zone. That’s how you build character.

The strange paradox here is that by practising what you aren’t, you become more comfortable with who you are.

This is because your identity is self-regulating. Much like the thermostat on you’re air conditioner.

To change the setting of your personality thermostat you have to challenge your identity. The primary benefit comes not from shifting the setting but from expanding the zone – the temperature range – around your innate setting. 

What you’re doing is broadening your personality by breaking down the limiting parts of yourself, the narrative about who you are (or aren’t) that keeps you tightly bound within a narrow temperature range. 

By expanding the limits of that temperature range the real you has the space to breathe and shine through. Because you know you can be who you need to be when the occasion calls for it.

That’s the real trick. When you can change the cards in your hand to suit the game at play, there’s no telling what you can achieve. 

I believe it’s the difference between winning and losing in this game we call life.

Thank you for taking the time to read my series on personality. You can find a link to the other posts below. At some point I’ll attempt to package everything into a small ebook to give away. For now, I wouldn’t mind some feedback if you have any? Did you enjoy this series on personality? Would you like me to do more of the same? Let us know in the comments below.

***

You can find more of AP2’s writing here at: https://pointlessoverthinking.com

You can also find him on Medium at: https://anxiouspilot2.medium.com

Or on Twitter at: @AnxiousPilot or @PointlessOverT

You can also email him directly at: anxiouspilot2@gmail.com

Openness: The Gates of Mind

Openness: The Gates of Mind

AP2

“Openness is seen in the breadth, depth and permeability of consciousness, and in the recurrent need to enlarge and examine experience.”

– McCrae & Costa, 1997, p. 826

Openness (which is actually Openness to experience) breaks down into Intellect and Openness. 

Intellects like grappling with ideas. They love to solve complex problems and debate philosophical matters. They have a rich vocabulary and can formulate ideas clearly.

Those high in Openness enjoy the beauty found in nature and art. They see patterns that others don’t. They tend to be very reflective – the so-called daydreamers who always have their heads stuck in the clouds.

Open types love to experience new things, of course. Having a creative outlet isn’t so much a hobby as it is a need. Like oxygen!

In simple terms, we can say that straight Openness is associated with creativity, imaginativeness, and interest in aesthetics, whereas Intellect is related to an interest in ideas.

Both are strongly correlated with IQ. 

Let’s start with creativity and Openness before moving on to Intellect, and the link both have to intelligence.

What Is Creativity?

To quote the dictionary, “creativity is the use of imagination or original ideas to create something.” Inventiveness is a good word. What’s going to help facilitate a creative mind is exposure to many different things, movies, experiences, books, art, theatre, etc, etc.

One way researchers have measured creativity is through divergent thinking tests. These require individuals to come up with as many ideas or solutions to a simple problem.

For example, how many uses can you think up for a brick? 

Less open people typically generate fewer and more obvious answers to this question, like building a wall or a house. Whereas an open person will think weapon, paperweight, doorstop, or putting it on the gas pedal of a car in case you want to drive it off a cliff without anyone in it. (Naturally.)

You can measure creativity by the sheer number of ideas or in terms of originality.

What differentiates an open person’s brain has something to do with latent inhibition, a process also known as learned irrelevance. 

Of course, it’s impossible to take in every detail the world throws our way. Learning what to ignore is critical, otherwise we would become overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data presented.

So what our clever little minds do is cull irrelevant information. The cost here is this information may be helpful later on. When later on arrives, we may fail to recognise its significance, to unlearn its irrelevance. 

Researchers have tested latent inhibition by “exposing participants to seemingly unimportant stimuli that later form the basis of a learning task.”

For the average person, this information – having been rendered irrelevant – gets filtered out. So it fails to penetrate awareness. Open people, on the other hand, are far more likely to bring that information to mind.

This is what, in part, makes Open people great problem solvers. The ability to connect seemingly unrelated dots, to see things that others don’t. 

The Costs of Openness

So, you can think of latent inhibition as the brain’s filter. Open-minded people have a leakier consciousness that lets more information in.

You might think that’s great because you notice more. That must be an advantage. This is true, but it also means you’re more likely to struggle with distraction. Focusing on the task at hand can be tough if you’re always off in the clouds. 

That’s the price you pay for a creative mind, of course. A wandering mind is a creative one. But it’s also one prone to overthinking and anxiety.

Those who are excessively high in Openness and low in Conscientiousness (in particular) may be so drawn by new ideas/beliefs – so susceptible to changing winds – that they struggle to form a coherent life structure.

Put another way, they have trouble defining themselves. 

It can be a curse for someone high in neuroticism too. 

Openness is, in some sense, a drive to explore the unknown. To buck conventions and take a step out into chaos. It’s a risker mode of existence. That nature can be hard to reconcile if you’re highly neurotic. 

The danger for a closed-minded individual is ignoring what is pertinent. The warning signs that what you are doing or thinking is wrong.

We shouldn’t always follow the standard operating procedures (as we say in aviation). Often we need to think laterally to overcome a problem. To adapt to an ever-changing world.

If you have a belief – if you only ever look for/accept what confirms that belief – your idea of the world may crash violently with reality. This can be hard to reconcile if you don’t learn to open your mind – if not for you, then for those on who you enforce your particular worldview. 

The Link to Intelligence.

It’s difficult to talk about Openness without mentioning intelligence.

I should say, a straight IQ test is still the best way to measure intelligence, although you’re unlikely to be low in IQ if you score high in either Intellect or Openness. However, it’s not uncommon to be low in Intellect but high in IQ. 

This is because Intellect is a measure of interest in abstract ideas, essentially, whereas an IQ test is a measure of processing speed, verbal ability, working memory, and problem-solving capacity.

You can, broadly speaking, break general intelligence into Fluid intelligence and Crystallised intelligence.

Fluid intelligence is like your brain’s processing speed. Provided you are given the proper nutrition in childhood, it’s pretty much set from birth. It slowly declines with age.

Crystallised intelligence is a measure of what you know. It’s the knowledge you’ve accumulated from prior learning and past experiences. It increases with age.

There’s an interesting split here.

Straight Openness is more closely linked to verbal or Crystallised intelligence, whereas Intellect is more closely related to non-verbal/general or Fluid intelligence. 

How to Broaden Your Mind

Now, one question that often arises – something that has created a lot of heated debate – is whether or not one’s intelligence can be increased. The answer is both yes and no.

For the most part your Fluid intelligence is fixed but you can increase your Crystallised intelligence. But here’s the thing. Crystallised intelligence and Fluid intelligence are intertwined.

You increase Crystallised intelligence by using your Fluid intelligence to reason and think about abstract problems.

So here’s a suggestion. 

Find an idea that really grabs you. Something that is difficult to wrap your head around, that you can grapple with. Then read as much as you can about it. Listen to all sides of the argument.

Really seek to understand. 

Finally, consolidate your learning by writing about it in your own words. It is one of the best ways to do so.

Trying to learn something new is a habit that’s worth developing for life. It turns out that increased Crystallised intelligence actually compensates for the decline in other cognitive abilities as you age.

It’s like an old chessplayer competing against a younger apprentice. The younger kid may be able to think quicker, but the more senior player has a considerable breadth of knowledge to draw on. 

Some Closing Thoughts

I want to finish this post by bringing up a final point about intelligence. 

Sometimes, something of a superiority complex is found in naturally intelligent people. If you have an IQ of 115 or greater, that puts you in the top 15 % of the population. What’s more, most people you know are probably just as smart as you are. 

You’re not seeing the whole picture. 

There are just as many people at the other end of the IQ spectrum. Those who score less than 83 are not eligible to be inducted into the United States army. They really struggle to look after themselves in a modern complex industrial society. 

What that means is (I’m taking an educated guess here that I’m talking to the top 15%) you’re really fucking lucky. If you have a high IQ that is something to be extremely grateful for. 

Not to belittle any hard work for whatever successes you may have accomplished, but IQ is the most significant determinant of success. Nothing else comes close.  

You’re not better than someone just because you’re smarter than them. And there’s a reason why researchers have often found an inverse correlation between intelligence and conscientiousness. 

Those who struggled more at school often had to work much harder to pass the bar. In the process of learning to work hard, many of these kids often end up outpacing everyone else later in life. 

There is something significant to be said about that. Of course there are many things that make up one’s character. Intelligence is but one.

I want to stress that all of us are closed-minded to a large degree. Nature didn’t intend for everyone to open natured for good reason. It is a rare trait to be highly open in nature.

If we didn’t compartmentalise the world – if we didn’t attach labels, draw lines or make assumptions – we wouldn’t have a psychological grounding to stand on.

We have to close our minds to a large extent in this world. If you remain open to absolutely everything, you will never become anything. 

That means make some tough choices. That means coming to terms with the world we have closed ourselves off from and the one we have locked ourselves into. 

I believe that not only is that ok, it’s necessary.

Because we don’t, can’t, and never will be able to see the whole picture. But that idea, paradoxically, is the one we must always remain open to.

This is part of a series of posts on the Big Five Personality Traits. Please find previous post below:

***

You can find more of AP2’s writing here at: https://pointlessoverthinking.com

You can also find him on Medium at: https://anxiouspilot2.medium.com

Or on Twitter at: @AnxiousPilot or @PointlessOverT

You can also email him directly at: anxiouspilot2@gmail.com

Conscientiousness: The Ruthless Pursuit of Order.

Conscientiousness: The Ruthless Pursuit of Order.

AP2

Of all the interplay between character traits, I find the relationship between conscientiousness and openness the most interesting.

The lines are blurred, of course, especially when you break these traits down into their respective aspects, but it appears there is an inverse correlation.

This makes sense when you consider that lateral thinking requires taking an idea from one domain and applying it to another. It involves exposure to lots of different things.

The jack-of-all-trade types.

When you ruthlessly chase a goal, you have to compartmentalise the world. You’re less concerned with out-of-the-box thinking. Dedication to the task at hand means excluding everything else.

This is what it takes to be a very successful master of one.

The Benefits of Conscientiousness

Conscientiousness can be broken down into the following two aspects: Industriousness and Orderliness. 

Those who score high in Industriousness are driven, focused and determined. They finish what they start. I’m sure you’ve all heard of the buzzword known as Grit? 

Well, it’s the same thing.

Those high is Orderliness want everything to be in its place, every detail taken care of. They hate mess (and messy people). They believe in following the rules and dislike having their routine disrupted. 

So, to summarise, conscientious people may be described as careful, reliable, well organised, self-disciplined, and persevering.

Well sign me up batman! 

No wonder our results-obsessed society makes a song and dance about this character trait. It’s easy to see why you would want to be more conscientious. 

What’s less easy to see are the costs associated with higher conscientiousness.

And let’s be clear, conscientious is the highest predictor of success after IQ. 

To quote this paper from the American Psychological Association, “It is one of the most reliable predictors of work outcomes, including job performance, leadership, income, and occupational attainment. 

It also predicts marital stability and, conversely, a tendency not to experience divorce. Finally, conscientiousness is an independent predictor of major depression above and beyond other personality traits, such as neuroticism. 

It seems that if one is interested in either living or promoting the possibility of a long, healthy, successful, and happy life, one should be interested in conscientiousness.”

Wowza! Like I said…

But this begs the question, since the benefits are so obvious, what are the costs of being highly conscientious? What are the benefits of being unconscientious?

The Ruthless Pursuit of Order

Now, here’s where shit gets really interesting.

It turns out that orderliness is one of the strongest predictors of conservatism. Of course, conservatism is part of the process by which we establish borders and barriers between things. 

It’s resistance to change. Why? Because change often brings a certain amount of chaos along with it. And too much chaos can be a dangerous thing.

I find this infinitely fascinating because guess what the highest predictor of liberal beliefs in character traits are? That’s right, openness.

Open people like to think laterally. They want information and ideas to flow freely because it opens up new possibilities. They want to flatten borders and tear down walls. Open people hate being boxed in.

What is the definition of creativity if not to think outside the box?

But those who aren’t creative couldn’t care less. They crave order to a much higher degree. They want to remain dutifully within the damn box.

Of course, there are pros and cons at either end of the liberal/conservative divide here. Boxes are both good and bad. They provide protection but also restrict the free flow of information and ideas. 

Now, one of the biggest killers historically has been pathogens. You’re probably wondering what that has to do with anything?

Well, high orderliness is linked to heightened disgust sensitivity. One prominent example of this, sitting at the extreme end of the spectrum, is obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Another theory (called the parasite stress hypothesis) found a very high correlation between the prevalence of pathogens in authoritarian regimes. 

The reason for this, in part, is because diseases historically weren’t well understood, if at all. Its control often depended on the adherence to ritualised behavioural practises. 

But of course, people didn’t know which ritualised behavioural practices reduced the risk of infection. So, to be sure, best to conform across the board.

It was foreigners, non-conformers, dissenters, and other “dirty liberals” who often posed the most significant health threat. 

Herein lies the biggest danger of being too conscientious. I think the word tolerance fits the bill very nicely – or rather, intolerance. 

Most authoritarian regimes are driven by their need for order at the expense of everything else. It takes over. 

To use an extreme example, Hitler was one conscientious motherfucker. The man went from failed artist (perhaps, unsurprisingly, now that I think about it) to commandeering the most powerful military in the world in the matter of two decades. 

He was incredibly focused and determined in the pursuit of his goals. Do we think that was a good thing? No. Why? Because his values were fucked, and so, as a result, was the rest of Europe. 

Here is where the idea of pathogens will raise hairs on the back of your neck. Hitler often used the metaphor that the Aryan race was a body threatened by pathogens. 

Of course, the Nazi party enacted many twisted policies in the name of “racial hygiene.” And how do you deal with pathogens? You sterilise them, of course. You destroy them. 

You set fire to them.

This brings up a point I want to make about “success.” The ability to implement an idea isn’t nearly as important as the idea itself. If you’re driven by terrible values, we may all suffer the consequences. 

How to Become More Conscientious

On the flip side – to come back to the benefits of conscientiousness – a good idea isn’t worth a damn if you’re unable or unwilling to implement it. 

This is where open types can struggle. They come up with a myriad of excellent ideas that they often fail to put into practice. 

Part of the problem is their nature. They shrug their shoulders at mess. They are the laid-back, happy-go-lucky, Big Lebowski types. 

Unconscientious people are much more interested in seeing where the wind takes them.

This makes them more adaptable, of course. It means they are more accepting of change, but it can come at a significant longer-term cost if they never commit to anything. 

I think it’s crucial for those sitting on the lower side of the spectrum to recognise this. 

Contrary to many a liberal’s belief, success isn’t all down to dumb luck or natural talent (unless you believe that free will is an illusion). Hard work most definitely does pay off. Talent is wasted without it. 

The question is, then, how do we become more conscientious? 

To take a leaf out of the conservative’s book, I think the idea of setting clearly defined boundaries is a good one. Learn to set and follow a schedule. (Punctuality is heavily linked to conscientiousness.) 

When you commit to working, learn to block out the outside world. Focus has much more to do with eliminating distractions than it does to do with applying effort. 

Literally put up a wall by locking yourself in a room. Don’t allowing yourself to check your phone till you’ve finished writing that goddamn blog post about conscientiousness, you open-headed dope!

You know all this, of course. So you also know it’s much easier said than done. A significant part of the problem is not knowing what we want our lives to be about. What we want to make of ourselves. 

So, you want to create a vision for yourself – to have a clearly defined philosophy that helps you to stay on track. 

Warren Buffet recommends the following 3-step process: 

  1. Write down a list of 25 career and/or life goals. 
  2. Circle the five highest. Just five.
  3. Take a hard look at the other 20 and avoid them at all costs. 

It’s also worth asking to what extent these five goals serve a common purpose? The more they’re part of the same value hierarchy, the more focused your passion, the better. 

Ironically, it’s when we define the parameters this way our creativity starts to flourish.

To finish with an analogy, music follows a specific set of rules. They are a limited number of notes one can play. But within those rules, the possible number of melodies are almost infinite. 

Open people need not look at a box as limiting. Defining your own limitations might just be the very thing that sets you free.

This is part of a series of posts on the Big Five Personality Traits. Please find previous post below:

***

You can find more of AP2’s writing here at: https://pointlessoverthinking.com

You can also find him on Medium at: https://anxiouspilot2.medium.com

Or on Twitter at: @AnxiousPilot or @PointlessOverT

You can also email him directly at: anxiouspilot2@gmail.com