Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You

While “know thyself” and “to thine own self be true” are fundamental tenets I had heard long before I began looking into the brain, I had no idea how to go about getting that knowledge or how to act on it until we made these discoveries about how people think differently.

The challenge in seeing a person, therefore, is to adopt the kind of double vision I mentioned in the chapter on hard conversations. It means stepping back to appreciate the power of group culture and how it is formed over generations and then poured into a person. But it also means stepping close and perceiving each individual person in the midst

in ways that we have come to expect. They also elicit stability because they keep us behaving in ways that they have come to expect. This mutual stabilization of our social environment plays a big part in the creation and maintenance of the two overarching aspects of personality that I now turn to: character and sense of identity.

From the moment he had started on the project and begun to observe Sam from afar, Ian had found the same thought often crossing his mind: how shockingly just like he’d been in high school Sam still was. When the oddball in your high school class became one of the richest people in the world, you sort of assumed the oddball must have changed. Sam ha