1042: Self-Improvement through Personality Change with Olga Khazan

How to Be Awesome at Your Job

How to be Awesome at Your Job

Success, Career, Self-improvement, Health & Fitness, Sharpening, Business, Education, Selfhelp, Collaboration, Winning, Meaning, Development, Mockaitis, Skills, Training, Mental Health, Speaking, Decisions, Careers, Interview, Fun, Money, Writing, Thinking, Wins

4.6 • 1K Ratings

🗓️ 20 March 2025

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Olga Khazan discusses the surprising findings on how personality change can be possible and beneficial.

— YOU’LL LEARN —

1) The problem with “authenticity”

2) The surprisingly simple secret to changing your personality

3) The simple interventions that make us less neurotic

Subscribe or visit AwesomeAtYourJob.com/ep1042 for clickable versions of the links below.

— ABOUT OLGA —

Olga Khazan is a staff writer for The Atlantic and the author, previously, of Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World. She has also written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Vox, and other publications. She is a two-time recipient of the International Reporting Project’s Journalism Fellowship and winner of the 2017 National Headliner Award for Magazine Online Writing. She lives with her husband and son in Northern Virginia.

• Book: Me, But Better: The Science and Promise of Personality Change

• Substack: OlgaKhazan.substack.com

• Writer Profile: Olga Khazan, The Atlantic

— RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THE SHOW —

• App: TapeACall

• Website: PersonalityAssessor.com

• Term: Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR)

• Course: 8-week MBSR courses

• Study: “Is Personality Fixed? Personality Changes as Much as ‘Variable’ Economic Factors and More Strongly Predicts Changes to Life Satisfaction” by Christopher J. Boyce, Alex M. Wood, and Nattavudh Powdthavee

• Researcher: Nathan Hudson

• Author: Jon Kabat-Zinn

• Book: How to Say Babylon: A Memoir by Safiya Sinclair

• Book: The Secret Life of Secrets: How Our Inner Worlds Shape Well-Being, Relationships, and Who We Are by Michael Slepian

— THANK YOU SPONSORS! —

• Earth Breeze. See all that BambooHR can do at bamboohr.com/freedemo

• Strawberry.me. Claim your $50 credit and build momentum in your career with Strawberry.me/Awesome

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	If you behave in a way that aligns with the kind of person that you'd like to be,
0:12.8	you can actually shift your personality in that direction.
0:16.4	One study found that even a small reduction in neuroticism was like earning $314,000 more dollars a year.
0:23.5	One of the takeaways is that you can improve your life even if nothing in your life really improves.
0:28.8	Like I had the same exact job before and after this project.
0:31.8	I live in the same house, but I honestly feel like a lot better and more fulfilled.
0:35.8	And to me, that's sort of the difference that a small
0:38.3	amount of reduction in neuroticism can do.
0:45.8	That's Olga Kazan. She's an award-winning writer for The Atlantic and a two-time author. Her
0:50.6	latest book is Be, but Better, the Science and Promise of Personality Change. So you'll learn,
0:55.2	one, the problem with authenticity. Two, the surprisingly simple secret to changing your personality.
1:01.7	And three, the simple interventions that make us less neurotic. And if you want to get a summary write-up
1:06.8	of some of these actionable takeaways, I recommend being signed up for the free Gold Nugget
1:09.8	email newsletter at Awesome at your job.com.
1:12.7	I'm Pete McItis. This is How to Be Awesome at Your Job. And now, here's Olga.
1:21.2	Olga, welcome. Hi, thanks so much for having me. Oh, I'm excited to talk personality. We are going
1:27.2	to get into the goods.
1:29.1	Could you kick us off with a particularly fascinating discovery you made while putting together
1:34.0	me but better? One finding that really surprised me is that when introverts are told by
1:40.8	researchers to go out and act like extroverts for a little while.
1:44.5	So to socialize with people for a few minutes and then come back.
1:47.8	And they're like, okay, how did that feel?
	...

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