The science of personality and the art of well-being with Brian Little
33:41 Share

TED Audio Collective.

This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Whether you love true crime or comedy, celebrity interviews or news, you call the shots on what's in your podcast queue. And guess what? Now you can call them on your auto insurance too with the Name Your Price tool from Progressive. It works just the way it sounds. You tell Progressive how much you want to pay for car insurance, and they'll show you coverage options that fit your budget. Get your quote today at Progressive.com to join the over 28 million drivers who trust Progressive. Progressive.

Progressive Casualty Insurance Company & Affiliates. Price and coverage match limited by state law. These days we're surrounded by photo editing programs. Have you ever wondered what something or someone actually looks like under all the manipulation? I'm Elise Hugh and you might know me as the host of TED Talks Daily. This October, I am giving a TED Talk in Atlanta about finding true beauty in a sea of artificial images.

I'm so excited to share the stage with all the amazing speakers of the TED Next conference, and I hope you'll come and experience it with me. Visit go.ted.com slash TED Next to get your pass today. Hey, everyone. It's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking, my podcast on the science of what makes us tick. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking. My guest today is Brian Little.

In 2001, when I was a junior in college, I signed up for his personality psychology class, and it changed the course of my life. I was mesmerized by his deep insight, his boundless curiosity, and his care for his students. Brian is the reason I became a professor and a psychologist. I couldn't think of a more meaningful career than trying to pay forward what I'd learned from him. Fifteen years later, I got to open for him on the TED stage. Brian's TED talk on the puzzle of personality has been viewed more than 17 million times,

If you haven't watched it, you're in for a treat. He has a unique ability to make you think as hard as he makes you laugh. Brian is the best-selling author of the books, Me, Myself, and Us, and Who Are You, Really? He's won numerous awards for his excellence in teaching at Harvard, McGill, Carleton, and Cambridge, and for his distinguished contributions to personality science. He's best known for his pioneering research on personal projects. Personal projects are the answer to the question, what do you think you're doing?

They're your priorities in life, from walking the dog to raising an independent child. Today, we're going to do a deep dive into how your projects shape your happiness. So I love this unscripted podcast format because it gives me an excuse to talk to a fascinating person every week. However, what I really miss is having a co-host who I can banter with and talk

I don't think there's been an episode yet where I haven't thought to myself, oh, I would love to talk to Brian about this. No, that's not a cool thing. I figured if you're not my co-host, you can at least be my guest. Oh, I thought you're going to segue now into showing who your real guest is. And then we would interview her or him. Yeah. I wonder if we could do an episode where we pick a person who we think is interesting and

And we each have a goal of talking to them about the same topic and then compare what the questions looked like and how we learned different things from the way we engaged. That's actually a fascinating idea. Are you in? Yeah. I have such a vivid memory of having my arm twisted to take your class when I didn't think personality was an important part of psychology, which is embarrassing in hindsight. Yeah.

and being riveted by your ability to captivate an audience by your wisdom and wit and encyclopedic knowledge, and then being blown away again when I scheduled a short meeting with you and you spent hours asking about my life story. Can I just ask you why? What did you think you were doing? I had taken early retirement and had won a fellowship to go to the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard.

And when I had the opportunity to teach a course, I was overjoyed. And I thought, oh, I had the chance to actually meet some students who have a glorious past behind them and see if we can keep that going. And it was sort of fortuitous that one of the first who said, can I talk to you?

It was a guy called Adam Grant. Now, talk about luck. There's nobody I could have thought of who had more potential. So I was right for mentoring students that would explode into productive careers. And you just happened to stumble into that open door. Well, I couldn't be more thankful that I did. And

If I heard you right, are you saying that if we had met 10 years earlier, you wouldn't have changed my life? I don't think I would have. I would have been so busy with cumulative students and with my own research and with putting everything into my lecturing that I may not have had the opportunity to

in my project space to sit down at the faculty club with you and talk about Adam's journey. I don't know whether to be extra grateful because of that or to be really annoyed by the fact that something so important could depend so heavily on chance. Oh, the contingencies of life. I mean, they're stunning, aren't they? Contingency in our lives is absolutely central to

my mature view of where personality psychology is right now, that we are looking so hard for causal mechanisms that we often fail to appreciate how we create the situations that we find ourselves in. But sheer chance comes booming out of the left visual field. And all of a sudden you've got a new research idea or you've fallen in love with

Or all of a sudden you've got clarity on something you'd never thought of before. And that seems to me to be part of the magic of what it is to be a human being. And if we have no room for it in a scientific psychology, then we're the more impoverished by that, I think. I think that's well put. So you mentioned falling in love. Let's talk about how you fell in love with psychology. Yeah.

I was a strange undergraduate. At one point, I majored in English and bacteriology. I would say, sure. And I was absolutely torn between the arts and the sciences. And I took, in my third year, I guess, a couple of psychology courses that totally hooked me. Neurons in the Morning and Narratives in the Afternoon.

And I could draw on Shakespeare to evoke the language of personality challenges. I can draw on some of the biological science that I was interested in to explain the propensities that drive us to act the way we are. And to me, it was just intoxicating.

It was also, again, just sheer luck. I had been going into the neuropsych side of things when I discovered this book that had been misshelved that was supposed to be the anatomy book on the brain. And in fact, it was George Kelly's Psychology of Personal Constructs. And I sat down on the floor in the library and read it and couldn't put it down and changed my views right there.

that I wanted to go into psychology, but not neuroscience so much as the study of personality. So again, fortuity, luck, a misshelved book. I see it as absolutely marvelous how fortuity can just plunk itself down on us, change our life trajectory. It can add a kind of gratitude to life that you say, what?

Isn't it fabulous that I met Adam that day at the faculty club? And these are the things that I think we shouldn't be annoyed with, but we should...

take in as part of what it is to be a human being. That's a perspective that I need to internalize. You're much better at accepting a lack of control in life than I am. Yeah, probably. Yes. A lot better. It's partly due to age. I'm twice your age. You give up the sense that I can control things. And remember Aaron Antonofsky, the sociologist. I was just going to say sense of coherence, Antonofsky. So it's not that I am in control, but things are under control.

And so if, as we are lucky enough to have loving, supportive people in our lives, I may not be able to control everything, but I think there is a predictable, relatable sense of surety in my environment, even when I no longer have the control to do it myself. There's a part of me that when I hear about the importance of serendipity in life, I'm

I think, well, that's unfair because many people miss out on those chance connections. And it's also frustrating because I can't plan to create more of them. And what you're saying is there will be enough of them. Yes, that's a good way of putting it, Adam. Yeah, yeah. Sufficient unto the day. I loved how when you introduced personal projects, you opened my eyes to the possibility that personality was not just the traits we have.

But it's the choices we make and the things we do. We need to look at what in John's life, in Joanna's life, is the meeting point of her propensities and her predicament of the time, her situation at the time.

And that has occupied me for the last 123 years now. The phrase that always sticks with me that you coined was that they capture both our trivial pursuits and our magnificent obsessions. How many projects does a typical person have and what are they like? Yeah, people generate about 15 different projects. If we give them 20 minutes to sit down and the range of content is quite stunning. I use the term trivial pursuits because some of them

clearly seem to be trivial, you know, like pick up my shoes from the shoe repair place. But it didn't take long for us to realize that those trivial pursuits may, from the perspective of the pursuer, be pretty consequential. The best example I can use is, you know, the project of put out the dog into the backyard and

If you're in a wheelchair and the building code is such that you're not able to get out easily, there are barriers, literally, to your easily completing that project. Then to say, oh, it's a trivial pursuit is really unfortunate. And it goes to the whole business of people are pursuing projects that matter to them. What are the barriers, both internal and

and external that will facilitate or frustrate that pursuit. And once we think of projects that way, then we start to get, I think, a more humane conception of what people are about in their daily lives. And so I always feel a little guilty about coining the terms trivial pursuits. Now, there's a whole literature, mainly out of philosophy, that argues that it's important that we have a

life project that brings meaning in our life. And I think there's some danger in that if you just have one overriding project, because if these affordances dry up or your internal resolve lessens, then you may find that you've got nothing left. And so having a

several core projects or interchangeable projects or buffer projects seems to be a better way of dealing with the complexities of life than being driven only to have that one overriding goal. I think psychologically, if you have vested everything in one project and you're rigidly unable to

dissociate from that project when things are going wrong, then problems may be ahead. We know that depression can arise out of that, as Eric Klinger taught us and so on. I remember when I did my undergrad thesis using projects, it was so exciting to see the data come in because following your methods, I was able to ask people, what are the projects that you're working on? And then see the texture of them.

I have to ask you, what are some of your favorite personnel projects that people have shared over the years? Be a better druid. I thought this was a delightful project. Be a druid may be one, but be a better druid. Always intrigued me as to, does it mean you hug the tree even harder or what? That's a flippant view of druidism. So my apologies to any druids who are listening. The first three projects that I got from a university sample

So the very first three that I looked at were clarify my philosophy of life, develop a more philosophical understanding. The third was get laid.

And I thought, well, that sort of captures the ecosystem of college life in the days when I was carrying that out. Okay, so we all have a range of projects. Understanding what our projects are tells you a lot about how our lives are going.

And I think one of the most powerful points you've made from your research on projects is that well-being depends on the sustainable pursuit of core projects. Right. What are the features of projects that are most relevant to well-being? There are five that I, over the years, settled on. One is how meaningful are your projects? And by this we mean, are they enjoyable? Are they

consistent with your values? Are they self-expressive? That is, do you see yourself in these projects as they express who you are instead of being alien or alienating? Interestingly, meaning is not the best predictor of well-being.

In order to see how meaning plays out in our lives, you need to take a second of the five, which is the manageability of your project. So you can have deeply meaningful projects, but if they're low in likelihood of successful completion, what we call efficacy, control to an extent or a sense of coherence over them, adequate time, these are the manageability functions. So core projects that are meaningful...

but are also high on manageability.

are conducive to well-being. If they are not manageable, meaningful projects do not add to predicting your global subjective well-being. So we should beware of purpose without the potential for progress. Absolutely. The single most important dimension out of personal projects in predicting various outcome measures like health and well-being and happiness is

is the sense of efficacy, the likelihood that you perceive successful completion of these projects. If you're engaged in projects that are drenched with meaning, but you see as hopeless, find the perfect person in my life. Likelihood of successful completion, two.

Those people tend not to be as globally happy as those who have concordance between manageability and meaning. Oh, that's funny. I thought you were going to say, find the perfect person. Those people tend not to exist. Oh, yeah, they do. There are 12. There are 12 of them.

Oh, you haven't learned that yet. That's my next year's seminar, Adam. You must sign up for it. The 12 Perfect People in the World. Oh, where were we? Okay, so we have meaning and manageability needing to go hand in hand in some ways. Right. And the third of the five, I used to call it community, but we now call it connection with others. Not connection between projects, but connection with other individuals. And there are two components of that, one of which has become...

based largely on your work.

Originally, we thought connection in your projects was how much support you get from them. So you could have meaningful and manageable projects, but nobody gives you credit for them. Nobody likes them. They find them boring and uninteresting. They don't want you to incorporate them into your life with them. And so that's likely not to be a sustainable project unless you're going to be off on your own completely in a hermitage somewhere.

So interesting. I would have put the contribution part of that more under meaning than connection. Oh, how interesting. But it may be both. All right, we'll have to follow up on that one. For sure. Next Thursday at 4 o'clock. It's not in my calendar. I think a lot of people would stop here and say, if I have projects that are meaningful and manageable and that connect me to other people,

I'm good. You say not so fast. There are two dimensions that remain. One is positive affect and the other is negative affect. If we put it simply, the relative preponderance of positive emotions in your projects is going to make them more sustainable. Clearly, you can have meaningful, manageable, supported projects that matter to other people. But if they're unrelentingly unfulfilled,

stressful for you, they're not going to be sustainable. You're going to burn out. This was a big aha moment for me back when I was in college. I remember at the time, you know, reading your work on projects and saying, okay, I would love to study this, but also this is really relevant to my life. So I made a list of my projects. I started rating them on meaning, manageability, connection, and I felt like things were going well.

And then I discovered that some of my most meaningful projects were among my most stressful ones, too. Which I think is a common experience for a lot of people. And I was puzzled at first. Why is that? I chose this project. I love this project. I remember doing this with the decision of, should I give up my diving career? Yes. The manageability was there. And...

The meaning in it came from challenging myself and trying to pursue personal growth, but also from a team and a coach who were depending on me. And it was my strongest source of belonging on campus. And yet it was extremely stressful. The more stressful part was when I got to the cross-impact matrix, where you created this module for asking, how do these projects affect each other? Right.

And I realized that the diving project in and of itself was a core project for me, but it was having a negative impact on every other project that I had. It was interfering with my ability to do the deep dive into psychology I wanted because it was so time-consuming. It was preventing me from working enough hours to be able to pay for school. It was constraining the friendships and relationships that I was trying to build. And I think it was an epiphany moment that...

Even a project that you love and care about can become a tremendous burden if it has a negative impact on your other core projects.

Wow. You've never told me that. I haven't. I don't think I've crystallized it until now, actually, in thinking back to that. It was a big light bulb moment for me, and it's a big part of why I ended up walking away from diving, because I realized that the project was a net negative in my life, even though it had been one of the most positive forces. I also used to tease you by saying it's just dropping. How's your dropping going, Adam? And I realize now, geez, that's pretty cheeky.

for a guy for whom it has been a core project in his life. I will never, ever say that again.

I think it was a good reminder that there's more to life than diving. Yeah. I mean, I think there are a lot of coaches who would describe diving as a controlled fall. The cross impact of one project on others is extremely consequential and often invisible to us. We choose projects on the basis of thinking this is going to be meaningful and manageable and it's going to connect me to others and I'm going to enjoy it. And all those things might be true. But it still might be...

a problematic project if it interferes with the rest of my priorities. You alluded to this kind of issue earlier. There's the joint cross-impact matrix, which is how does your project impact on the projects of others? And you said one of the stress-inducing aspects of giving up diving was that you'd be giving up mentoring others and you would be, in a sense, letting them down.

We have a matrix that allows you to plot your projects against those of your loved ones, say, or in marital counseling or against your coach or against your boss in an organizational setting. I didn't even realize, somebody might say, that my jogging project is keep fit by jogging when I get home from work, that it interferes with your partner's project.

spend quality time with my partner. And so they're a revelation, not in the burning bush sense, but in the micro sense, a revelation that with a slight change in the scheduling of my projects, I'll spend half an hour and have a cup of coffee and how's your day with my partner? And then she can go out and jog after that.

These kind of insights come from doing this. So, Brian, can we do a lightning round? Yep. Tell me in a sentence what you think is the most interesting recent finding in personality psychology. No. I can't put in a sentence, so I won't. I think the fact that there are some genetic determinants of personality, which in interaction with social features like

loneliness that a person experiences. Opens up some fascinating research possibilities. The interaction between genetics and genomic analysis and social ecology, that's a really rich vein I'd love to see people exploring. You've spent a lot of your career studying introversion and extroversion. What do you think is the biggest misconception about introverts? That it's fixed. That label is sufficient to

account for everything that's important in your life, there's a tendency for people to glom on to these labels. And we're not like that. I mean, all the evidence is that people in the quotidian, in the daily life,

act both introvertedly and extrovertedly. And under the view of traits that I buy, which is a kind of act frequency or what I call an act saliency approach, some individuals more frequently act in a way that we would see as extroverted than others who act in a way that we would see as more introverted. The question is, what are the occasions that demand me, for example, to act in an extroverted way?

We're in one right now. If I were to be a more typical introverted me, first of all, I would say, Adam, I'm sorry, I can't really do this. But thanks so much for asking me. I hope everything's going well in your life. I can't do it. Well, I don't know. There's a core value for me as being there and rising to occasions. And if I just am boringly introverted the way I truly am,

then I don't think that would end up being a particularly interesting interview. Well, that's exactly where we're going next, to acting out of character. Before we go there, how many personal projects do you have right now? The last time I did one, it was 116. Yeah, I'm not kidding. I mean, genuinely. That might be a few too many. Yeah, yeah. And that's not even chunking.

So one of those is an 800-page compendium on personal projects analysis. That's just one project. However, I have taken my health projects and broken them down into many, many subcategories. Wow. That is definitely a lot. It's ridiculous. I am so easily enthused by and attracted to things that I just can't get enough of life.

And it's a disease. Let's continue the discussion of acting out of character. So you talk about our fates beyond traits. I think this is such a liberating way to look at personality because when we first studied personality in your class, my instinct was to say, I am an agreeable, conscientious introvert. And what you taught me was, no, I didn't choose those traits. I have introversion. Yeah.

I feel pulled toward agreeableness and conscientiousness. But what's much more important than my personality is my principles. And the projects I've often found the most meaning in are the ones in which I transcend my traits to try to be true to my values. Yes. And for both of us, I think that's teaching, which requires us to act somewhat extroverted despite being introverts. Yep. As an agreeable person, I really like to get along with people.

And one of the ways in which I've found myself acting out of character a lot over the past decade in particular is being a good mentor requires me to constantly challenge people. And it requires me to play a more disagreeable role than I might choose for myself. But I care a lot about developing my students just like you do. Also, I think doing whatever this is called, thought leadership, requires me to engage in debates with people who I think are getting the science wrong.

And that involves a level of disagreeableness that if I were choosing how I spend every hour of every day, I would not necessarily opt into. And yet, I think it's extremely important. What do we know about the consequences of these kinds of decisions to act out of character? I have to say I'm very much the same as you. I'm not as good at acting out.

disagreeably as you are. I find it... Oh, no. I don't know if I want to be good at that. No, but I've seen you in your disputes and debates with people in the media and so on, and you can be tough, and you espouse tough love in a way that I would find difficult. I really appreciate how when you're forced to act out of character and be disagreeable, it can really feel awful. I leak...

agreeableness when I'm trying to be disagreeable. So I'll try to attenuate by saying, "This simply won't do." I can't just say, "This simply won't do." I've got to put in these little contingent clauses that extricate me from being disagreeable.

You're better at that than I am. The empirical study of acting out of character with agreeableness, disagreeableness, as far as I know, is not preceded. So this is speculation. And given what we found with extroversion, I want to be very cautious in saying that we're going to expect this free trade argument to hold.

Even with the examples I always gave in the extroversion-introversion acting out of character scenario was that introverts will find it very difficult to act extrovertedly and have to find a restorative niche. The empirical evidence is that it's hard for extroverts

to act introvertedly all day long in front of a computer when they're dying for social contact and excitement. And they've got to have a restorative niche. And it sure as hell isn't sitting under the tree in the garden. It's going down to the pub or it's going to someplace where there's loud music and they can go, and that's different restorative niches for different people. What would be fun to see is the disagreeable people

feel stressed when they have to act agreeable. Yes. And it must be very hard to, you know, if you're in a service job where you have to be pleasant all day, it can be tough. Now, what's the restorative niche for that? That's to go to the gym and pound the punching bag.

Or do something to get your aggression out. I think that's the restorative niche there. Maybe. Or does venting only fuel those flames? There's an interesting debate on that. That's another debate. Exactly. Oh, God. Something else is just added to my to-do list. Uh-oh. I'm not trying to give you another project. But I'm curious about how this plays out with other traits, too. So I think about, for example, being a relatively emotionally stable person but having high anxiety. Am I acting out of character if I act calm? Yeah.

If I'm too calm for too long, do I feel like I'm no longer myself? Or am I learning to expand my comfort zone and make it second nature? Yeah, that's the toughest one. Remember, we've talked about this before, and I remember saying to myself, Adam's got a really good point there. Because intuitively, that doesn't sound right, does it? To say that if I act out of character as a stable person...

Does that take a toll? I mean, that sounds counterintuitive. I can think of situations in which you were forced to be stable, bite the bullet, stand up and do something where you controlled your anxiety level. And the restorative niche for you after that is just to cry your eyes out and to emote, probably with another person.

I've seen situations where somebody has been what I often call a be a big person. And these are sometimes grad students who had to give their first talk at a job talk. And they're big people and they get through it, but they just fall apart later on. And that falling apart is, I think, restorative for them because then they could say, OK, I did it. I did it. I did it.

That's fascinating. One of the things I've learned from listening to you on this topic today that I didn't think about before was, I think I came into this discussion assuming that...

The cost of acting out of character was having to suppress your traits to whatever extent they have a strong biogenetic basis. They don't just vanish. You can't just suppress them forever. And that suppression takes a toll. I think what you've highlighted here, though, is that the sense of volition and choice really matters. And the experience of acting out of character is different when you're being pressured to do it than when you've said, I'm doing this because it's important to me and it's who I am.

I agree completely. The sustainability is greater if it is something that you volitionally undertake rather than something that is imposed on you. That's absolutely true. Well, Brian, this has, as always, been so much fun. So good to see you. Same. We don't get to do it often enough. I'm going to start more podcasts. Sounds great.

What really hit home for me in that conversation was that many of us look at the projects in our lives in isolation. Add ones we're excited about, drop anything that no longer brings joy or meaning. But when we consider our projects as a whole system, we often realize that even some of our favorite projects can interfere with our broader priorities. That's what diving ended up doing for me. The most important question about a project is not whether you love it or hate it.

It's how it affects your ability to pursue the other projects that matter deeply to you. Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant, and produced by Ted with Cosmic Standard. Our team includes Colin Helms, Eliza Smith, Jacob Winnick, Asia Simpson, Samaya Adams, Michelle Quint, Ben Ben-Chang, Hannah Kingsley-Mah, Julia Dickerson, and Whitney Pennington-Rogers. This episode was produced and mixed by Cosmic Standard. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Original music by Hans Dale Sue and Alison Leighton-Brown.

For more from Brian, listen to our work-life episode, Your Hidden Personality. You have been subject to my habit of this ludicrous precision in estimates of quantitative things. It's true. I will never forget you calling someone, a professor I didn't particularly like, the third most boring person on earth.

Absurdly and delightfully specific. I don't know why I do that, but I'm trying to stop some of these verbal tics. I don't think you should. It's my fourth favorite thing you do. Oh, I taught you well, my friend.

Support for the show comes from Brooks Running. I'm so excited because I have been a runner, gosh, my entire adult life. And for as long as I can remember, I have run with Brooks Running shoes. Now I'm running with a pair of Ghost 16s from Brooks.

incredibly lightweight shoes that have really soft cushioning. It feels just right when I'm hitting my running trail that's just out behind my house. You now can take your daily run in the Better Than Ever Go 16. You can visit brookscrunning.com to learn more. PR.