By Walt Hickey
Double feature today!
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week, I spoke to Olga Khazan who wrote the brand new book, Me, But Better. Olga appears all the time in Numlock because I really like her work, she’s a staff writer at The Atlantic and previously wrote a delightful book that I really enjoyed called Weird: The Power of Being an Outsider in an Insider World.
The book dives into the science of personality, where it comes from, and the real ways that we can change our own personalities in one direction or another. In it, Olga becomes a guinea pig for all kinds of radical experiences to change her personality.
Olga can be found at The Atlantic, and the book is available wherever books are sold.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
Olga Khazan, thank you so much for coming on.
Yeah, thanks so much for having me.
You are the author of the brand new book Me But Better. I loved your book Weird which was out just a few years ago. This book is all about how to change your personality. It is a really exciting journey. I know that it started with an article that you published in The Atlantic, but what drew you to the art and science of changing one’s personality?
Really it’s because personality is at the root of so much self-improvement and personal growth. I noticed that I tended to see things really negatively a lot of the time, and I was also really socially isolated. it was keeping me from enjoying life and appreciating what I had and just getting the most out of what life had to offer me. I really saw personality change as a way to fix all or improve that in one fell swoop.
Great. You talk a lot from the framework of the Big Five. I really enjoyed how grounded in the scientific literature it was. The Big Five is potentially somewhat different from the Myers-Briggs structure that a lot of people know. Before we dive into how you went about doing a gut renovation on your personality, I would love to hear a little bit about what the Big Five are, where you came in on some of it, and what you wanted to see if you could change.
Yeah, so generally the accepted scientific view today is that there are five traits that make up personality. You can remember them with the acronym OCEAN. The first is Openness to experiences, which is like imaginativeness and creativity. The next is Conscientiousness, which is being super organized, being on time. The next is Extroversion, which is being friendly and cheerful and sociable. Then there’s Agreeableness, which is being warm, empathetic and also trusting of others. Then there’s Neuroticism, which is a bad thing; it is depression and anxiety. The opposite of that, which is the one that you want, is emotional stability.
When I started taking these scientific personality tests at the start of the project, I scored very low on Extroversion, very high on Neuroticism and I scored about average on Agreeableness. Those were the ones that I wanted to change.
That’s fascinating. I want to actually follow up with that. I did not hear you put a good, bad valence on any of the other ones besides neuroticism. It seems like most of these…people can have a full and fulfilling life with one or the other. What made Neuroticism pop out?
You can have a full and fulfilling life without being on the outer extreme on any of these, but I would say it’s generally better to be higher on all of them other than Neuroticism. You don’t want to be all the way to the extreme. You don’t want to be so agreeable that you’re just like a doormat. It’s generally better for your mental health and well-being and stuff to be pretty agreeable, pretty extroverted, pretty conscientious.
Neuroticism popped out to me because that is one that I was super high on. It’s very bad for your mental health. The definition is pretty much having bad mental health. It was keeping me from having a fun life, having a good life. Your happiness is determined by how you feel moment to moment and not by how many goodies you have. Even when I had a lot of goodies, I was sort of still miserable.
Fascinating. Just to get into some of the literature on that, there was this amazing study that you cited in the book that says knocking down your Neuroticism by a few points was worth the equivalent of getting a $300,000 annual income increase. It seems like this is a really significant reverberation on just how people assess themselves.
Yeah, even a really minor decrease in neuroticism can have a really big benefit for your life and have a lot of benefits for your mental health. This is why people spend so much time in therapy and get on SSRIs and things like that. Both of those have been shown to decrease neuroticism. So it really is a very popular personality trait that people like to work on.
So how’d you go about it?
For Neuroticism, the technique is really a lot of meditation. It’s really hard to get away from that. People keep wanting me to say something else, but it’s a lot of mindfulness meditation. The other component that I did was gratitude journaling. You can do this exercise where you write a letter to someone in your life that you’re really grateful for, which will inevitably make you just weep hot tears because you’re like “I’m so thankful.” So you can do exercises like that.
But really the day-to-day practice that I did and that people recommend is mindfulness meditation. In particular, a lot of the Buddhist teachings in the mindfulness class that I took were really helpful to me. I think often in the day-to-day of life, I get really wrapped up in these negative thought spirals, and it really helped me have a more realistic way of looking at things that were less negative.
Fascinating. I always love it when you ask “What’s the one simple trick to solving your problem?” It’s always just “Oh, you just have to exercise every day. Oh, you just have to meditate”
I know! Just completely change your life in every way and spend all your time on self-care.
Let’s go through some of the other ones. Definitely Extroversion I think is a really interesting one. Again, you have happy introverts in life. You have happy extroverts in life. You wanted to get more extroverted.
I think I would still identify as an introvert. It’s not like you have to abandon that identity if that’s important to you, but really it’s about: am I getting enough social connection to fill up that bucket in my life? I really was not. I almost reflexively (even before the pandemic) if people would invite me out for a happy hour or something, I would just reflexively say no. Now as a new parent, I’m kicking myself because I’m never going to get to go to happy hour again. I would kill for a happy hour with people. Please come have happy hour with me.
I would just kind of say no because I was like, “Well, I don’t know if it’s going to be that fun. Who all is going to be there?” I was doing these cost-benefit analyses. I found that once I actually forced myself and I was like “Okay, I’m actually going to go out a lot. I’m actually going to socialize. I’m going to do improv. I’m going to go to Sailing Club.” Once I go to these things and do them, I actually do feel happier. I felt better afterward, even if I wasn’t in the mood to go beforehand.
Again, you took some incredibly extreme steps over the course of this. People should consult a doctor before joining an improv group. But you went ahead and did that.
Yeah. Improv was probably the scariest thing for me to try. But it was also the most efficacious, I would say.
Really?
Yeah, because it is such good practice with so many things that bother neurotic, introverted control freaks. It’s basically shattering the pretty little world that you live in, if you’re like me. It’s a completely uncontrolled environment. You don’t get a say over what is said or what happens in improv because it’s all up to other people. It’s a performative thing, which makes me very uncomfortable. I have stage fright. It’s silly, and I have issues being silly. It’s spontaneous. It is very whimsical. It involves really reading other people very closely, moment to moment, which can also be really challenging if you don’t get out much and you are super introverted. So I would say improv just plunges you into figuring out other people all in one go.
Amazing. I want to back out a little bit and talk about this book in the context of your previous book. Can we talk a little bit about the distinction between personality and identity? Your previous book, Weird, really honed in on some of the advantages of being weird, being somewhat different than those around you had. It was interesting in this book because you were pursuing qualities that not necessarily made you less weird necessarily, but also made it easier to plug in with other people at times, right? Obviously, these are different things, but you’re still a very unique person. You still have a fascinating background. I don’t think any part of this book really comes across as you losing anything. It’s interesting to just have this book and it just in perspective of your previous one, just because it seems like it’s an interesting way to perceive working on yourself without changing yourself too fundamentally.
Yeah, that’s an interesting point. I think, honestly, what this helped me to do is to embrace the positive things about being weird or my unusual identity. For people who haven’t read my previous book or don’t know who I am, I am a Russian immigrant and I grew up in West Texas. That element of me was like in this book, Weird, where wrote about other people and how being different from other people around you can be both a source of pain and a source of strength.
I think now I am better able to focus on the source of strength element of this because I am less sensitive by virtue of being less neurotic to the slight microaggressions that you sometimes get if you don’t totally belong in your milieu. A lot of the other people who were “weird” that I interviewed, picked up on.
There’s a scene in the book where I describe going to a bar and the bartender weirdly asked me if I’m always alone. It sent me on this spiral of like, what’s wrong with me? Like why would someone ask me if I’m always alone. That’s so weird. I was like, was my outfit really bad? Do I look like I’m homeless? I just sort of started spiraling, you know, but that kind of thing honestly happens a lot less since I started doing this. I feel like, now, I would respond to that with “Nope, just for the moment” and not think much of it. I don’t know. So it gave me some perspective on my weirdness, I guess.
That’s fascinating. Again, I really enjoyed the book because it talks about a lot of effective ways to change elements of people’s personalities that they might want to adjust. In personality, it just seems like there’s a lot of pseudoscience. There’s a lot of rumors. There are a lot of things that don’t work. What are some of the things that you looked into that never really panned out, or things that aren’t as effective as people might think at changing their personality?
Oh, good question. So for me, for Openness to experiences, a big suggestion is traveling. A lot of the studies on increasing openness suggest that you travel. I definitely have had travel experiences where they’ve totally opened up my mind and I’ve been like “Whoa, man,” and had all these ideas and felt more creative afterward.
But for this book, I went to Lisbon, Portugal, which has completely exploded as a travel destination recently. I really am not kidding when I say that if you walk around the streets of Lisbon, it’s pretty rare to actually hear Portuguese. Mostly, I heard Australians, British people and people from other Western European countries who were like tourists. I was obviously also a tourist, so I’m not saying that it’s wrong to be a tourist or that it’s bad. But there’s something about it that didn’t work on me. I just felt like I was at Disneyland or something. I was like, “Okay, now we’re all going to this church. Now we’re all looking at this thing.” It didn’t feel, I don’t know, I guess very genuine. Whatever the sojourner effect is supposed to be didn’t work on me.
That’s interesting. With the openness to experience element, you wrote a little bit about how there are some people for whom this is just a bolt from the blue. They have an experience, and it permanently changes their personality forever. They’ve been studied a little bit, but that is the exception to the rule in many ways.
Yeah. So there's this guy who wrote this book, Quantum Change, which is a very weird book. He interviewed people who said their personalities did change after some epiphany or something happened. And these epiphanies were really weird. They happened in all sorts of circumstances. Some of them were cleaning their toilets. Some of them were smoking pot or doing whatever. A lot of it was rock bottom type stuff, like “I was an alcoholic” type thing. But that, I would say, is the exception. For the people who I interviewed for this book (who changed their personalities), it was more of a methodical pursuit of something over time. They had to build and build and build towards something rather than just snap, I’m different now.
Interesting. One of the ones that you wrote about, Conscientiousness, You approached somewhat with trepidation because you scored very high on Conscientiousness already, right?
Yes. Yeah.
So it also seems that Conscientiousness is (based on what you just said) one of the harder ones to change. If you have to be conscientious about changing your personality, it’s tough to become more Conscientious, you know?
Yeah, and one thing that really seemed to make the difference for people…I interviewed one woman who really wanted to start a business, but she was not very self-directed, I guess is the best way to put it. She just wasn’t really a natural self-starter, so she didn’t know how to get up and go and do something like that. Then I interviewed another guy who really wanted to go to grad school for psychology, but he got to college without ever having written a paper before, and he never studied. He actually bought a book called How to Make A’s because he did not know how to make A’s. One thing that really made the difference for folks like that who are like “I don’t know what I’m doing” is having a big goal that was really, really important to them. It was like the big project that they were working toward.
What research tells us is that having these personal projects that are really important to you can really inspire personality change when it gets really challenging. Having a good career in academia was just so important to this guy that it didn’t matter to him that he wasn’t really the typical candidate for that thing. For the woman who wanted to start a business, she had ended up in a dead-end job and she really did not want to return to that. So they both had these fires under them. They were like, “I’m going to achieve this thing and it is going to require conscientiousness.” So that is what kept them going.
Yeah, I really identified with that chapter just because (not to talk down a previous version of myself too much) I was occasionally living the dissolute drunken journalist lifestyle. Then, I started writing a daily newsletter and at a certain point, that really does give you a long-term daily obligation that was fairly instrumental to my own Conscientiousness. I really identified with that chapter and those folks who managed to get a specific goal to change them up, you know?
Yeah. Yeah. There was actually another dissolute drunken journalist in that chapter who was actually one of the most remarkable transformations of all the people I talked to. He did, he was drinking so much, like a case of beer a day, basically. Then the pandemic started and he actually didn’t have an obligation. It was a lack of an obligation. He got laid off when the pandemic started and he was like, “Oh, am I just going to drink the pandemic away? I need to have some sort of structure or something that I’m doing that isn’t this.” So that was, weirdly, what clicked for him. It doesn’t always have to be work, but it often is.
I feel like there was this trend for a while: there was a lot of work coming out that was very, very clearly heavily influenced by the pandemic. I do not describe this work as heavily influenced by the pandemic because it’s very clearly very resident beyond simply that era. That being said, the pandemic has come up a lot.
People sometimes just needed a big break, a bolt from the blue, something that shook them out of their daily lives to change up one or more of their personality traits. How much is that a factor in this? I know in your own experience, it came up to some extent. Big life changes come around all the time, it doesn’t have to just be a pandemic, but how do those give us opportunities to change who we are?
Yeah, there’s a lot of interesting research on this actually about how turning points or breaking points can be like a good time to start something new. I know that a lot of people don’t keep their New Year’s resolutions, but it’s actually a good thing to make them. The reason why we pick the first of the year is because it's turning over a new leaf. It’s nice to have those clean breaks sometimes.
I’m not saying that the pandemic was a good thing because it was a nice reset moment for us. But it did play a resetting role for me. It really gave me time to think about what it is that I want and like what’s standing in my way. You do get trapped in your routine — commuting to work, at the office all day, commuting back, now I’m too tired and I don’t want to go back out, I’m just going to sit here and have my wine and watch my TV.
I think just having a break in that routine is what shifted it for me.
Fascinating. There’s one last one that we haven’t really talked too much about: Agreeableness. What did you find with this? Again, this was a category that you didn’t score particularly low on, but you still had a few opportunities to try to shake up your numbers a bit.
Yeah. I think one thing with Agreeableness that I learned is that there’s a lot of room for deepening the connections that you already have. It’s true that I didn’t get out and meet a ton of people, but I also was getting in a lot of fights with my friends. I sometimes found that when I was having conversations, they weren’t very deep or they were surface-y. That would annoy me, then it would make me not want to have any more conversations. One thing that I did that was really helpful for that was go to this conversation workshop in London. This woman, Georgie Nightingale taught us strategies for having deeper and more interesting conversations.
One tip that I will share here is to ask someone what something meant to them. Instead of collecting facts (when you’re asking someone how was your day, how did this go, how did that go, what airline did you take to get here) ask why was that important to you. Or why was that meaningful to you? That will generally lead you into a more interesting tangent. Though, it can be initially a little bit awkward than this is where you’re from, this is what airline you took, this is how many pieces of luggage you packed, the typical third degree we give people.
Got it. All right. I will take that advice — specifically, what did making this book mean to you?
This book made me really happy. I felt like it gave me a reason to break out of some of my habits that I didn’t love. There are some habits that I have kept up. I’m just really glad that I did it before I had a baby.
Yeah. I really enjoyed reading it because it felt very intentional. It was a chance to do work on oneself, but also getting into the data of why this is the way it is. What have you held onto from this process? I know that when you wrote the article in The Atlantic a few years ago, you mentioned that you dropped a few of the habits but what have you still stuck with?
One thing I have stuck with is that I’ve realized that when I am feeling down or depressed or out of sorts, what I should do is actually connect with people and not disconnect. I often thought that I needed more alone time because I’m feeling sad. But actually, what I often need in those moments is more time with other people. That has flipped my approach to a lot of things now where I actually seek out more socializing and more interaction whenever I’m feeling a little bit withdrawn if that makes sense.
That’s really interesting. Is there anything that you tried that you were like, “Oh, this is nice, but I don’t need to be this open to experience.” Is there anything that you dropped off from?
Yeah, there was this thing I did in the Neuroticism chapter that involved noting and noting is very weird. It’s like where you make note of what you’re doing, like thinking, seeing. For example, I’m seeing a red bird or I’m thinking that this is strange or I’m hearing yelling or whatever. I have not kept up with noting. I always found it really weird and hard and I have not been doing it.
That’s interesting. Yeah. I don’t, I don’t think building some dissociation into my day is a good thing for Walter. So I can understand that. Yeah. Again Olga, thank you so much for coming on. I guess I’ll give you just the floor here a little bit. Why don’t you tell folks a little bit about the book, where they can find it and where they can find you?
Yeah. Um, the book is Me, But Better. You can find it wherever books are sold March 11th. I’m Olga Khazan and I have a sub stack under my same name, olgakhazan.substack.com. I also write for The Atlantic and you can find a lot of my writing there.
Yeah. I will just personally say, I really dig the substack. I like your work there a lot. It was really fun to follow some of the work that you were doing on the book from there and definitely strongly endorse it. Also, The Atlantic. Pretty good too. Very good.
Yeah. And The Atlantic is also good!
All right. Well, thank you so much for coming on.
Thank you so much for the kind words and thanks for having me.
Edited by Crystal Wang.
If you have anything you’d like to see in this Sunday special, shoot me an email. Comment below! Thanks for reading, and thanks so much for supporting Numlock.
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Send links to me on Twitter at @WaltHickey or email me with numbers, tips or feedback at walt@numlock.news.
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