Commentary

When we are young, our parents and all the books teach us how different we all are from each other. Kids revel in this strange reality by asking each other things such as “What is your favorite color?” They compare answers and thrill in just how interesting it is that each person sees the world in a different way.

As we get older, this reality comes into final relief. Among our classmates, this guy is good at math, she is good at reading, he is excellent at sports, and that person is just a goof. And our systems of education have variously attempted to sort people by their strengths while correcting their weaknesses.

There was a moment, when I was a junior in high school, when the yearbook was distributed—or maybe we had to buy one, I don’t recall. Anyway, the idea was that everyone should sign each other’s yearbook.

Many people wrote in mine: “Don’t ever change.” How odd, how utterly implausible. How completely ridiculous. Of course I’m going to change. Should I stay 17 forever, lost, restless, and confused like every young man? Looking at other people’s books, I saw that most people wrote this in their friends’ books. It was like some kind of mantra.

A corollary exhortation we heard a lot was to “be yourself.” I never had any idea what that even meant. It’s not possible to actually be someone who is not oneself. Maybe it means don’t pretend to be someone you are not. That’s good advice, but hard for an age that is pretty much defined by trying on new personas every season if not every day.

All of this surely traces to some strange anxiety of youth. We saw our friends go through the great transition of middle school and come out the other side as people we barely recognized. All of us were pretty much in a constant state of upheaval. The drama never ended.

At this time, it became very fashionable to take personality tests. The one that floated around and felt like science was called Myers-Briggs. It divided the human personality into four dichotomies with opposing dichotomies within each. You could be introverted or extroverted, intuitive or sensing, thinking or feeling, judging or perceptive.

You take a big test and end up as a personality type, the science of which was further confirmed by the letters attached to oneself: INFP, ESTJ, and so on through every possible combination, 16 in all. People loved it because it seemed to explain something—it did not really explain anything—and it was about ourselves, perfect for the Me Generation.

My father was an academic who dabbled in these tests as part of his studies and research, so he enjoyed giving them to me. Each time I took the test, I got better at it. After all, all of these things are tautological. You like parties? Extrovert. You like being alone? Introvert. So on it went.

Pretty soon I became good at gaming the test. I could shape-shift into a different letter combination with each taking. The whole thing made me laugh. The entire endeavor was silly, I concluded. Yes, we all have different personalities and preferences, things that make us happy or miserable, skills we possess or do not possess.

I was hardly alone in figuring out the scheme. Later research found that roughly half of people get a different type on a retest a few weeks later. Far from revealing intrinsic traits, it tested mostly what kind of person we aspire others to regard us as being.

The human personality, as we call it, is more than just a complicated system. It is, as Bret Weinstein would have it, a complex system. That is different. Complex systems elude rational mechanization and attempts to codify and manage them. Their depths of complexity exceed the human capacity for understanding them well enough to control them.

One thing that annoyed me about the test is that it nowhere showed curiosity about what it is we can and cannot do. I was great at music, much less good at science. I had a fine intuition but less interest in labs and biology. That was true because I spent nearly every spare hour practicing music.

Was I good at music because I practiced so much, or did I practice so much because I had an innate talent for music? We can puzzle about such questions for years and never come up with a stable answer with predictive power. But this much I do know: If I had spent the same amount of time on math and science, I would have loved those too because I would have become good at them.

Why? Because music and science both rely on abstract symbolic manipulation, a skill I possess; navigation relies on a separate spatial faculty I do not have. The criterion is not only practice versus biology; it’s which faculty the task loads, and whether practice compounds or merely maintains. If practice compounds, it’s smart to train it. If repetition and focus only hold you at baseline, it’s best to delegate it.

As one gets older, one realizes that it is far less fruitful to focus on one’s own personality and inclinations and instead think about our strengths (meaning competencies) and weaknesses (meaning incompetencies) in what we actually achieve in life. Inner reflection and obsessiveness about precisely who we are can lead to psychopathology. A far better plan is to figure out what one can do and cannot do and allocate one’s time to improving that side of life.

Whenever a friend has a personal tragedy in life and comes to me for advice, I listen carefully and empathetically, but I always look for an opening to give what is my best advice. Get to work. Develop a skill. Get excited about something you can do. It could be cooking, cleaning, sewing, or learning a new software platform. Whatever it is, make it active, something to occupy one’s hands and mind. This is the best path out of trauma.

This is a much better path than the fashion these days of seeking counseling or therapy, services that have become little more than self-pity sessions and sales funnels for pharmaceuticals.

All of which leads to my main point. A key feature of maturity has nothing to do with being oneself, whatever that could mean, or never changing, however absurd that would be. It is all about doing a daily inventory of one’s strengths and weaknesses in everyday tasks, the management of one’s own temperament and attitude, and the protocols in the treatment of others.

These strengths and weaknesses are different for every person, just as the children’s books taught. A person can have a strength in fast action, decisive judgment, and clarity of purpose. That same person can have a weakness of temper, anger, and impatience, traits that need curbing and controlling through disciplined work.

Here’s an example from my own life. I’ve always had a terrible, awful, pathetic, and embarrassing sense of direction. As a child, when I would leave the campsite for the bathroom, I could not find my way back. I could barely figure out where my classrooms were, from middle school through college. It’s a terrible source of anxiety for me, so you can imagine how happy I was when GPS came along.

Other people are the opposite. They can go into a new city and magically know where everything is. I cannot fathom this skill. For years, I tried desperately to fix my problem, thinking it was a lack of attention and awareness and hence fixable. Sure, there are certain tricks I learned, but, in the end, I came to realize it is just the way my brain is structured. Realizing this weakness, likely with a biological root, came as a relief.

So it is with strengths. The longer I’m in professional life, the more I hone in on precisely what I do well and construct my days around spending as much time and energy doing that. That’s helpful because then I’m fortunate to be in a position to seek out people who can take tasks I do not do well off my list. Not everyone can do this, sadly, which is a main frustration of professional life today.

Our politics are focused on identity, but identity is not a revealing or satisfying unit of self-knowledge. If we believe otherwise, we can be driven to a mentality of privilege, on one hand, or despair, on the other, as if everything is written and nothing is really within our capacity for control. In reality, who and what we are ultimately traces to our capacity to grow and flourish regardless of innate identity or environmental circumstances.

If I could go back to my high school days, this is precisely what I would have written in yearbooks and what I hope people would have written in mine: Figure out your strengths and weaknesses, improve what you can, accept what you cannot improve, and seek out settings that allow you to flourish as an individual.

Sure, the thought and language are perhaps beyond the average 17-year-old, but it’s far better advice than following the crowd or wallowing in self-pity, which seems to be the main cultural habit of the young today.