The secret to living a meaningful life
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170131-the-secret-to-living-a-meaningful-life
Your ambitions to improve your life do not need to be confined by your personality.
Brian Little, one of the world’s leading experts on personality psychology, is renowned as a public speaker. If you watch his recent TED talk on personality, as millions of others have, you will see an engaging and witty orator holding his audience’s attention with aplomb. You’d probably conclude that Little is an extravert: he’s not only good at what he’s doing, but he seems to be revelling in the opportunity.
You are especially likely to be happier if your personal projects feel attainable. In fact, Little has found that our confidence in achieving our projects is an even more important factor for our wellbeing than how much meaning a project has. Put differently, there are few things worse than having a core personal project that feels unobtainable. In fact, findings show that when someone is engaged in a personal project that makes them stressed and miserable, this is an even more powerful drag on their wellbeing than other more obvious factors like poverty. The perfect combination is to have one or more sustainable core projects that feel within reach and are also full of personal meaning, reflecting what matters to you in life.
There are many other findings to bear in mind. Your projects are likely to be more sustainable and joyful if you are pursuing them for your own reasons, and not simply to please someone else, for instance, and romantic partners tend to be happier together if they share some of the same personal projects.
Reframe your plans
Armed with this kind of knowledge, you can look back at your notes and perform a kind of personal project appraisal. Are there any projects that you’ve marked as lacking progress, or that you’ve identified as highly stressful and feeling impossible to achieve? If so, and if these projects have little meaning or importance, then perhaps you should consider dropping them.
All of which paints an optimistic picture of our capacity for change. For Little, three forces govern our lives: our biogenic natures (whether we are physiologically extravert, introvert or whatever), our sociogenic natures (how we are raised, the culture we live in and the company we keep), and finally, our idiogenic or “third natures”, which are comprised of our personal projects and the free traits we express in pursuit of them.
留言列表
