The greatest value in thinking of personality as “doing projects” rather than “having traits” is in three powerful words: potential for change. We can consciously choose and adapt our projects in ways that we cannot change our traits.

select ten of your personal projects that you think are important for understanding you at this point in your life. You then rate each project (from 0 to 10) on approximately twenty dimensions such as how stressful, how enjoyable, how much under your control, and how visible to other people each one is for you.

Extended: A project is not a momentary act but typically a sequence of actions that are extended in space and time (from seconds to decades).

The distinction between the stable and dynamic features is that the former are objective realities:

It’s important to understand how restorative niches work because, when we act out of character, our environments might afford us the opportunity to return to our “natural” state.

while knowing the content of your projects is important, knowing how you appraise them is even more critical.

Hyperconnected Projects: If you rated some of the projects that matter to you as low on “visibility to others” and not much valued by other people, these are flags that such projects might run into trouble. But you may have the opposite problem—you may be hyperconnected with others. Other people usually initiate your projects, they value them deepl

You are inquisitive, prospective, and exploratory. And to understand you, we need to know the personal constructs through which you interpret objects, events, other people, and yourself.

A sense of project meaning rests on how important the project is to you—how consistent with your core values it is and how self-expressive it is (that it really feels like you).