Why Personality Matters

Your personality traits can affect your life more than how much money you have and how smart you are

ME, BUT BETTER, my book about personality change, is out now. If you haven’t yet, please pick up your copy today. And if you’ve read the book, it would mean the world to me if you could leave an Amazon review. Thank you!

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Photo by Ben Rosett on Unsplash

As I’ve been promoting my book on personality change, I’ve been getting one question over and over: Why is personality important? That is, why should you want to change one or more of you personality traits?

The answer is that personality determines, to a pretty significant degree, our health, happiness, and how well our lives go. If you care about how long you’ll live, how much you’ll achieve, or how well your marriage turns out, you should care about personality. In fact, in some situations, personality matters more than two things that Americans think matter more than anything: How much money you have and how smart you are.

Some particularly striking evidence for this comes from a study by University of Illinois Psychologist (and Personality Ninja Master) Brent Roberts. For the study, he and his co-authors looked at data from dozens of longitudinal studies to evaluate the effect of personality on three important variables: longevity, divorce, and occupational attainment. Why these three? Because a long life, a good marriage, and a good job are three things all people tend to want, and they also can feel devilishly out of reach.

But what Roberts found was surprising: Personality traits had a major impact on all three of those things.

First, neuroticism, the trait associated with depression and anxiety, increases the likelihood of divorce, but the traits of conscientiousness and agreeableness decrease it. Neurotic people are high in what scientists call “negative emotionality,” which means they bring a lot of criticism and negativity to their relationships. They might also overreact to small issues with their partners or spark unnecessary conflicts, which can lead to strife and breakups.

Meanwhile, people who are more conscientious, extroverted, and less neurotic tend to achieve more at work and get better jobs—both because they do better in the workplace and because managers like them more and promote them faster.

And conscientious people tend to live longer, because conscientiousness is related to eating right, exercising, and avoiding reckless behaviors like drinking too much. Extraverts also tend to live longer, potentially because they tend to experience more positive emotions, which may protect them from stress, and because they have more social relationships, which are known to boost well-being. And neuroticism, conversely, is associated with a shortened lifespan.

What’s more, these studies found that the effect of personality traits on these outcomes matched and at times outweighed the effect socioeconomic status and IQ. How rich you are and how smart you are are generally thought to be two of the most important elements of your life, but this research suggests personality traits are even more important than that.

As you can see in the above chart, “C,” or conscientiousness, is more closely correlated with mortality, or how long you’ll live, than either IQ or socioeconomic status (SES.) Extroversion also beats them both out, though not by quite as much.

And when it comes to occupational outcomes, personality traits matter more than socioeconomic status or parental income, and nearly as much as IQ:

To me, this is really reassuring, because it means being highly organized or very outgoing could make you as successful as being really smart. And while you can gradually increase your IQ and become smarter, personality change is much easier than IQ change. For my book, I interviewed multiple people who became much more conscientious, for instance, even in adulthood. That conscientiousness became the key to their professional success, which is a phenomenon this study backs up.

These findings should give hope to us all: That we’re not trapped being a certain way. If you want to improve your life outcomes, you don’t have to make more money or wish you had gone to an Ivy-League school. You can work on your personality traits instead—they’re far more malleable. And, as it turns out, impactful.

P.S. A quick letter of recommendation: I recently had the BEST time on Maya Shankar’s podcast, a Slight Change of Plans, and her newsletter is equally fascinating and revelatory!