YOU, BUT BETTER: The Science and Promise of Personality Change

The Next Big Idea

Next Big Idea Club

Self-improvement, Arts, Books, Society & Culture, Education

4.5 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 20 March 2025

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Can you change who you are? When reporter Olga Khazan decided she was tired of being a “high-strung misanthrope” (her words), she turned to science for answers. What she discovered about personality — and how to change it — might surprise you. Host: Daniel Pink Guest: Olga Khazan Book: Me, But Better This episode was recorded live at Politics and Prose on March 12th.

Transcript

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0:00.0	LinkedIn Presents
0:01.3	I'm Caleb Bissinger, and this is the next big idea.
0:10.3	Today, don't love your personality.
0:13.6	Guess what? You'll go first. I'd like to be a little more outgoing, a little more extroverted. I'm not shy. I genuinely enjoy other people's company. But I don't know, socializing makes me nervous. Like, even with friends, family, people I love,
0:57.1	I can't always relax.
1:00.3	It's something of a relief then
1:02.2	to know that I'm not alone in wanting to tweak my traits.
1:06.5	Studies have found that 90% of people want the same thing.
1:10.7	They want to edit their personalities.
1:13.4	But how? How do you do that? You can't just snap your fingers and become a different person.
1:20.7	Or can you? Enter Olga Hazan. That name may ring a bell.
1:28.6	She's a staff writer at the Atlantic.
1:30.5	We had her on the show all the way back in 2020
1:32.9	to talk about her last book, Weird.
1:35.9	Like me, like everyone,
1:37.8	she wanted to be different.
1:39.6	But instead of a personality touch-up,
1:42.2	she sought a full-blown makeover, a self-described high-strung
1:47.0	misanthrope. She wanted to be, I don't know, what's the opposite of that? Maybe a chilled-out
1:53.2	social butterfly. That may sound like a tall order, impossible even. But as she dug into
2:00.8	the scientific research, Olga discovered that it's not actually a Herculian
2:06.1	or Sisyphian task.
	...

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