Personality - the five components

Personality trait	Low scorers are:	High scorers are:	Relevant situation	Brain mechanism
Neuroticism	Unflappable	Anxious, easily stressed	Potential Threats or dangers	Amygdala & Serotonin levels
Openness	Practical, concrete	Imaginative, metaphysical	Words and Ideas	Mental association mechanisms.
Conscientiousness	Spontaneous	Disciplined	Plans & Goals	Dorsolateral prefrontal lobe
Agreeableness	unempathetic	Empathetic	Other People	Theory of mind mechanisms
Extroversion	Quiet, stoical	Outgoing enthusiastic	Potential rewards	Midbrain dopamine reward system.

Our genes play a part in determining our personality by determining the capacity of the various brain functions - Personality traits. The environment that provides feedback to personality traits will reinforce those traits driving them up or down as the case may be.

There is a place, an environment, that optimizes an individuals characteristics for maximum happiness and success. Find that environment and life is sweet. Animals that are more adventurous in times of scarcity do much better than those who are cautious and reserved. But in times of plenty the adventurous come to grief more often than the cautions. Before we choose a career we should know our personality profile so we can choose the one that contributes best to our well being, the one we can be happiest with and most successful at.

Being High in Extroversion will attract certain types of situations bringing certain types of life opportunities. The extroverts have more sexual partners, they do better in economic and career terms on average. They are more likely to be hospitalised as a result of an accident or illness and their family lives are less stable. They are more likely to divorce.

Highly agreeable individuals have good social networks and support. But by focusing on others they do worse in their careers as they do not put themselves first and do not focus on what they want.

High openness has been linked to increased social and sexual success. They do not do well in times of difficulties and stress as they are not practical enough. They are best in government jobs where there is security and well defined tasks to perform.

The Highly neurotic people do better when their threat of danger is real as their vigilance will serve them better. They become unhappy when there is nothing to worry about. Being neurotic is how they are.

So if you are not happy where you are you should do some profiling of yourself and change the niche you occupy in this complex world. Go and find your happiness. (reference New Scientist 9 Feb 2008, p34.)

Applying Hertzberg's two factor theorem would suggest we should eliminate from our environment all those things that make us unhappy and we should add to our environment those things that make us happy. It is not enough to Remove the things that make us unhappy as this will not make us happy, it will only reduce the level of unhappiness. We must also think about what makes us happy and add those things to our lives as well.

A model of ourselves in our reality is that attitudes determine expectations and behaviours. With an Attitude of failure (A belief that we might fail) we will choose avoidance strategies and avoidance strategies do not deliver success - we fail. We are human and so we can choose what we want to believe. We can choose to think and feel how we want to think and feel. We do not have to suffer from bad feelings, anxiety or worry, we can choose and be what we want to be - to a point. Tell ourselves a lie often enough and that lie becomes the truth but we must not let ourselves become delusional. We must work out what can be achieved and work to that. If someone else can do it we can probably do it also. Know-how is something we can learn and train for and it requires us to adopt the attitude that will maximise our probability of success. We owe it to ourselves to give ourselves the best chance of success. Having the most successful attitudes and strategies maximises our probability of success.

Successful outcomes require both successful attitudes and successful strategies. If we do not know those successful strategies no amount of successful attitude will guarantee success. Just feeling / being positive is not enough

If we are prepared to study attitudes and strategies and practice or roll play them till they become easy for us to implement then our ability to be successful is magnified many fold. An example is encompassed by the one liner:
"To have a friend we must first be one for by being friends we can have friends."
An attitude of friendship is not enough, we also need to know how to be a friend as well. Learning what other people think and what their expectations are and being able to meet those expectations brings us closer to being able to be friends and thus have friends. Giving to people what we might think they want will only attract those who are happy to take from us and this is most unsatisfactory - givers attract takers. Respecting others, their bodies, their ideas, their feelings, their property as we would want ours to be respected is an ideal worth striving for. Listening to others as we would want them to listen to us and being considerate to others as we would want others to be considerate to us is part of the value system that works best. We should choose our friends carefully and we should choose those who respect our ideas, feelings, body and property as there is nothing worse than the feeling of having been violated.

There is a lot on the internet that we can learn from. Use google and look up how to be charming, how to win friends and influence people, having good first impressions, and you can find more and more to study.