She's got a nice...personality. This old trope from buddy comedies always bothered me. It's become accepted hollywood slang now for "he/she is actually ugly", when in fact we all know people whose beauty (or ugliness) can't be captured in photos because their way of living in our four dimensional space-time world just doesn't shine through on two dimensional paper. You can take care of your body by eating well, exercising, sleeping, etc. - but that's about the extent of what you can do to improve your physical beauty (short of drastic surgical enhancements). You're kind of born with what you have and most of us are rather average looking.

But personalities...they vary much more widely and we can do so much to affect them. Everyone's got eyes, ears, a nose, and a mouth, pretty much in similar proportions give or take a few millimeters, but think of the vastness in difference between the personalities of people like the Dalai Lama, Eric Cartman, Abraham Lincoln, Jerry Sandusky, Helen Keller, and Steve Jobs. They all were born into this world as dependent little babies (well except for South Park's Eric Cartman), but through years of hard work or sloth, their genetic predispositions were shaped by social and environmental interactions that made them into the personalities they ended up with. Isn't a great personality much more inspiring than someone who was born with slightly bigger, bluer eyes than the rest of us?

So what do we mean when we talk about personality? I'm going to quote at length below from my philosophy to show the different roots and branches of it. Personalities are multi-leveled and highly detailed little things - kind of like the tree in this picture, growing from a single seed in many different directions searching for ways to meet all the needs and desires that are inside of us. Sometimes our personalities grow in a single direction, neglecting other possibilities around us, but that isn't the way to grow to your fullest potential. Better to know thyself and explore your personality far and wide.

Our individual bodies and minds combine to give us personalities. Psychologists currently list three levels of personality.

1. Basic Traits / The Big Five (OCEAN) - Openness to new experiences, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism
2. Characteristic Adaptations - personal goals, defense mechanisms, values, beliefs, life stage concerns
3. Life Story - past, present, and future woven into a vitalizing myth

While your genes and your upbringing play a large role in shaping the tendencies of your personality, they are in no way fixed at any time in your life. Actively seek to know and improve these personality traits - they are yours to build.

In the early 2000’s, positive psychologists created another way to look at your personality - as an inventory of character strengths. Sifting through 200 catalogs of virtue (Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, Augustine, Bible, Talmud, Confucius, Buddha, Lao Tze, Bushido, Koran, Upanishads, etc.) yields 24 strengths in 6 categories.

1. Wisdom / Knowledge: 1) Curiosity; 2) Love of Learning; 3) Judgment; 4) Ingenuity; 5) Emotional Intelligence; 6) Perspective
2. Courage: 7) Valor; 8) Perseverance; 9) Integrity
3. Humanity: 10) Kindness; 11) Loving
4. Justice: 12) Citizenship; 13) Fairness; 14) Leadership
5. Temperance: 15) Self-Control; 16) Prudence; 17) Humility
6. Transcendence: 18) Appreciation of Beauty / Excellence; 19) Gratitude; 20) Hope; 21) Spirituality / Philosophy; 22) Forgiveness; 23) Humor; 24) Zest

We are not born with these strengths, but we are born able to learn them and we feel happy when we do. Know your strengths. Build them.

Psychologists have devised many instruments to test personalities. Use them. Know thyself.

• The Big Five
• The 16 Personality Factor Questionnaire 
• Authentic Happiness Character Strengths
• strengthsfinder
• Myers-Briggs Type Indicator
• DISC assessments
• IQ
• EQ
• Multiple Intelligences (Logical-Mathematical, Spatial, Linguistic, Bodily-Kinesthetic, Musical, Interpersonal, Intrapersonal, Naturalistic, Existential)
• Attachment styles
• Measures of Self-control (Marshmallow Test, Dual N-back)
• Bain gender
• Grit

That's all I'll say for now about our personalities. I'm moving to Australia next week where I'll be spending the next five months in Canberra where my wife will be doing research for her sabbatical. I'll try to back blogging about the next elements of my Evolutionary Philosophy in about two weeks time. Hopefully, I'll have lots of pictures of kangaroos and platypuses to use for metaphors about hopping to it and embracing your many parts. In the meantime, go take some of these free psychological tests I've listed above. Let me know if you find anything interesting.

I missed blogging on Friday because I was off in the Lake District without any Internet access. This picture I took during one of our hikes though reminds me of something I was thinking about while I was out there: the choices we make. We feel that our choices lay down a path to the future, but that path is not paved or set in stone. Our paths are more like the dirt road in this picture - easily changed, the details bending quickly out of view, and perhaps leading off to some hoped-for mountaintop destination, but one that is shrouded in mist.

Without access to the Internet, I spent some evenings last week relaxing in front of the television. One of the local stations was playing The Iron Lady, a story about Margaret Thatcher, so there were commercials galore advertising it. In that movie, the former Prime Minister quotes her father (who was repeating an ancient unattributed saying) with some lines that really stuck with me: 

Watch your thoughts; they become your words.
Watch your words; they become your actions.
Watch your actions; they become your habits.
Watch your habits they become your character.
Watch your character; it becomes your destiny.

In next week’s post, I’ll be delving into the elements of personality, or character, that lead to your mist-shrouded destiny, but this week I’m thinking about last week's post where I talked about planning your resolutions using Maslow's hierarchy of needs as a handy checklist of the needs and desires that lie at the intersection of your body and mind. At the top of that list were the things we need to live self-actualized lives - morality, creativity, spontaneity, acceptance of facts, etc. We would all like to lead such lives, but turning that desire into action is not such an easy thing to do. Resolutions - actions intended to change our habits - are designed to do just that.

For my own New Year’s resolution, I didn’t want to pick just one or two typical actions like promising to eat better (a level one physiological need), write more (a level two safety need providing more employment security), or spend extra time with my wife (a level three need for love and belonging). I know that my days are already full. Nature abhors a vacuum, and so do our lives. In the same way that gas expands to fit any container, so too do the tasks of our work or the details of our days. If I wanted to resolve to add a new task to my day, I’d need to make room for it somehow by cutting out some other less important task. But which one?

For my New Year’s resolution, I resolved to be better about choosing how I spend *all* of my time. I know that as I’ve made this leap to writing from home on a full time basis, I’ve slowly crafted an entirely new set of habits about how I spend my days and not all of them are as productive as I’d like them to be. In order to quantify just how out of balance these habits are (or are not), I decided to really measure what I was doing. Rather than just sit in philosophical contemplation until I deduced what felt like the right blend of action, I decided to take advantage of two things available to the modern philosopher - the fact that smart phones are with us at all times, and the apps that others have developed that can be put to good analytical use.

After a bit of searching, I chose to use HoursTracker to create a list of tasks that I fill my days with and then check in and out of those tasks as I do them so that I can evaluate at the end of each day, week, or month, exactly how well I’m apportioning the limited time I have on this earth. So far, I’m just exploring the use of the app and getting used to continually monitoring my actions. Since I’m between homes right now on a bit of a holiday before I settle in to Australia for 6 months, I’m not in any kind of routine that I can truly analyze just yet, but I can already tell you that just making a point to check in to my phone every time I am “playing games” or “websurfing” or “watching videos” is already forcing me to live a more examined life. I haven’t yet decided how to group my activities for analysis, but I’ll report back when I do. Having just turned 41, I’m approaching 500 months of life. I’m hoping for some radical life extension therapies to become a reality during the rest of my life, but if they don’t, then I probably have around 500 (give or take 100) months left. That is a graspable number and one I don’t want to squander any of. I want my time here to build towards something. I want to live Maslow’s self-actualized life. Soon, I’ll have some neat pie charts to show how I’m doing that. Those are my thoughts that have been turned into words that will turn into actions that will change my habits. That's my resolution.