Your 'Core Project'

A brief note about personality and work.

I’ve been thinking recently about an interview I read a while back between

Adam Grant

and the personality psychologist and Cambridge professor, Brian Little.

In the interview, Little discusses his book Me, Myself and Us: The Science of Personality and the Art of Well-Being, and he argues that personality is not as fixed as we like to think.

He talks about how/why people can act out of character - flexing beyond our normal tendencies - for specific reasons in their lives, such as when they are working to advance their “core projects.” For example, he says about himself:

“I am - and this surprises my students - a very introverted person. I’m off the bottom of the scale as an introvert.

But because of something that matters dearly to me - which is the personal project of professing with passion and alliterating in a public place - I will act as an extrovert when I’m lecturing. I’ll speak loudly as you do when you’re addressing a class at the beginning. I’ll gesticulate wildly. I hope not too wildly because I think we need not to be overbearing when we’re professing - but we need to keep students awake at eight in the morning. So, I act like that, and I’m engaged in what I call a “free trait.”

Whereas we tend to think of personality as being comprised of “fixed traits,” Little describes this sort of acting as taking on “free traits”; essentially ways of behaving that we engage in service of the “commitments that we make to courses of action that matter deeply to us.”

Here’s why this has been top of mind for me recently. I am, I think, at my core “a writer.” Which is to say, among other things, I like to write things down and then not have to deal with them any more, except perhaps insofar as they might create or catalyze interesting conversations with other people.

I’m not particularly interested in (or good at) promoting/selling things. I want things to promote/sell themselves. I am the boy looking at the violin wondering if I stare at this thing hard enough will it play itself?

And yet, part of the project of being “a writer” is trying to find a community of people who are interested in the same ideas and who enjoy reading / talking about / interacting with those ideas.

Thus, the current predicament I’m in: “the writing is done, but it’s not yet time to move on.”

I don’t find book/self-promotion fun or comfortable. I would like someone else to do it for me. I would like to start working on my next writing project, but I am also committed to trying to make this book work as best it can. So, I’m taking on the free traits of a promoter/salesperson and trying to invest as much time and energy as I can into getting this thing on people’s radar as I can before it comes out.

Does this idea resonate? What core project (or core projects) are you working on/toward that may drive you to behave “out of character” during the day?