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

In order to truly understand, we need to ask you the question crucial to revealing your idiogenic nature: What do you think you’re doing? In other words, what does this mean to you?

personal project. I began to consider the implications of humans pursuing personal projects in their lives—everyday pursuits that are trivial or transformative, singular or communal, brief encounters or enduring commitments.

Projects like “sitting in” or “going to the demonstration” or “seeking justice” were now commitments—acts of meaning with consequences for the person I was becoming.

Choose a diverse set of people to share your projects with, communicate clearly about what matters to you, share projects wholeheartedly with the most important people—and you grant yourself a greater chance of success.

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.

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

Personal: Personal projects are framed through the idiosyncratic lens of the project pursuer.

Set: A project encompasses a series of actions that are considered interrelated by the project pursuer.

The latter are how you personally view and interact with that context: