Who Are You, Really?: The Surprising Puzzle of Personality (TED Books)

what you do affects who you are. This is because personal projects are all about the future—they point us forward, guiding us along routes that might be short and jerky or long and smooth.

most important aspect of manageability, however, is your sense of efficacy—the expectation that your projects are going to be successful.

these detailed measures can be grouped into five broad clusters: project meaning, manageability, connection, positive feelings, and negative feelings.

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.

when it comes to well-being, projects can trump traits.

personal projects are moving pictures; their full meaning is not apparent until the entire sequence comes into view.

This capacity for shape-shifting is a startling and fascinating aspect of our personalities. Your ability to act beyond the bounds of your personality is where the purpose of my impertinent questioning at the bar becomes fully clear, because the reason we often take on new traits is to more effectively pursue our personal projects.

In context: Personal projects are enacted in physical, social, cultural, and temporal contexts, and these contexts, as we’ve discovered, can stimulate, potentiate, inhibit, or block project pursuit.

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.