I realize, interacting with students, teenagers and younger co-workers peers that many believe that their personality traits are a leading factor in deciding what do to or how to tackle their own career. Although younger people ask these questions more explicitly, older adults also seem to think along the same lines. I personally find it to be far more irrelevant than most people think. Besides my job, where I observe successful people doing the same role with drastically...
There is a real and useful distinction the post keeps circling without naming: personality is not the same as the soul. Personality is the surface, the temperament, the set of reactions other people meet first. It is largely given to you and it is not the
There is a real and useful distinction the post keeps circling without naming: personality is not the same as the soul.
Personality is the surface, the temperament, the set of reactions other people meet first. It is largely given to you and it is not the deepest thing about you. What the Grant story actually shows is a man whose character, his settled orientation toward justice, mercy, and duty, was steady while his outward personality looked like failure. The Church would call that the difference between disposition and virtue, between what you were handed and what you make of it.
So I would not say personality matters less than you think. I would say it matters less than your character does, and the two get confused constantly.
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I realize, interacting with students, teenagers and younger co-workers peers that many believe that their personality traits are a leading factor in deciding what do to or how to tackle their own career. Although younger people ask these questions more explicitly, older adults also seem to think along the same lines. I personally find it to be far more irrelevant than most people think. Besides my job, where I observe successful people doing the same role with drastically different personalities. One of my main hobbies is reading biographies, where I get to observe a bit more the personalities of different historical figures put in the same position and succeeding regardless.
The premise
You can do pretty much anything regardless of your personality. Of course, talent, drive, persistence, hard work, and external factors, such as luck, opportunity, and support, affect how likely it is that you can succeed. But your personality, although important, is not a gatekeeper at succeeding in any profession. You can be a great salesman while being introverted, a great manager while being disorganized and messy, great soldier while being compassionate and caring, a great artist while being organized and methodical... You just need to be aware of the goal you want to achieve and know yourself, how you can use your own personality to your advantage.
When it comes to challenges of a bizarre and possibly supernatural nature, it’s not enough to be the smartest, the worthiest, or even the true chosen one. Sometimes, success requires a very specific kind of personality. Though there are numerous possible permutations of this trope, one of the most popular involves an individual or organization setting some kind of a test to look for a desirable candidate for whatever they need…
There are other examples of related tropes where certain roles need to show a very concrete personality (The Drill Sergeant, The Leader, Compassionate Caregiver, Eccentric Artist, Sensitive Artist… There are endless tropes that we see over and over again in media, and it definitely has an influence on us. However, when put against real-world examples, we find real people cannot be categorized like this based on these tropes.
Let’s start with some examples
Let’s take an example of a position that we constantly see represented in media, that of a General of an army. Often Generals are represented in a fairly standardized way: ruthless, strong lack of empathy, goal-driven, insensitive to their losses, authoritarian, stoic, ambitious, utilitarian, nationalistic, imperialistic, punitive, expedient, end-justify-means… Very much Type-A, Napoleonic personalities (we will see that not even Napoleon fits his own stereotypes). Think Tywin (Game of thrones), General Zod (Man of Steel), General Shepherd (Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2), Erwin Smith (Attack on Titan)… Some well-known, larger than life figures, especially in the US, have reinforced this perception (Generals Patton and MacArthur) as a realistic one rather than just a couple of cases that fit the narrative versus countless other examples of compassionate, restrained highly successful campaign and battlefield commanders (Eisenhower, US Grant, Omar Bradley, George Marshal…), while we have examples of some that meet the stereotypes and fail the job( George McClellan, even making it to Britannica's list of worst generals in history).
The image of a general is well ingrained in popular understanding of how one should behave, hence when represented in media, it tends to be reduced to the caricature of a general commonly represented to make it easier to recognize and not distract us much from paying attention to the plot. However, besides executing battles, a general also has a family, a personal life, friends, politics and that most of his day-to-day job is just organizational in nature, people-oriented, for which he does require a large degree of interpersonal skills, as well as a great deal of patience and empathy. You may have a handful of battles a year, but the rest of the year is a fairly normal desk job interacting with subordinates, reviewing troop readiness, reading reports… Much closer to a CEO.
How do real generals compare to the stereotype
Well, let’s start with one fairly known in the United States. Ulysses S. Grant. Growing up, Grant was often a defender of the downtrodden, very compassionate. He never bullied or attacked anyone, however, he got multiple times in fights with other boys to defend smaller ones from bullying. He loved animals, leading to him being the best horseman in his unit and making money on the side breaking wild horses while deployed. He was attached to animals, which led to him not being able to stand working in his father’s tannery, not being able to eat meat unless it was burned to a crisp with no trace of blood... One time, he lost his temper with a soldier in his own army that was beating his own horse and had the soldier tied to a tree until he got the lesson. Grant was also famously gullible due to his nature of always seeing only the best in people, losing often large parts of his fortune to get-rich-quick schemes. Later, as a president he built an administration which got famously corrupted, despite Grant being genuinely transparent and clean of any ill-intention.
Was he utilitarian? Not quite, the one moment in his life where he got a slave inherited from his father-in-law, he freed him for free since he couldn't stand the idea of owning a human being. In case you don’t see the huge implication of this, at the time, Grant and family were fairly poor and a slave was practically worth the rest of Grant’s net worth combined. He could have sold him if he didn’t want to be a slave owner and yet chose to free him without getting anything for him. His biography, by Ron Chernow, is one of the best readings I can recommend.
Was he a type-A personality? Assertive, successful in business, and extroverted? Sadly not, he famously failed many of his endeavors in his twenties and early thirties, eventually ending up as a clerk in his father’s shop, which he disliked to no end.
Was he authoritarian and punitive with his troops? Rarely if ever. One of the striking events where you could see him punishing a soldier was the event described above, where he punished one by tying him to a tree (no execution, no corporal punishment) for beating his horse and a couple similar incidents.
Was he charismatic? Did he give great speeches? Not by most records, he was a fairly plain, "democratic", looking man, who shied away from giving battlefield speeches and relied on battlefield successes to keep the morale up. His troops did love him though for other reasons, but cinematic, General speeches were not part of it and he had very little motivational presence, besides being famously stoic and composed in battle.
And yet he rose through the ranks to become one of the greatest American warriors of all time, if not the greatest General the US ever had. Grant, gullible and a failure in most undertake businesses, was able to see the big picture and win a war unlike any other on American soil. He won where 6 Union generals failed before him to defeat Lee in the Eastern Theater of war, understood the enemy as well as they could understand themselves and was the first to understand how modern weaponry changed the principles of wars understood so far. His Vicksburg campaign is, to day, one of the masterpieces of military history where he displayed unmatched creativity.
He put his empathy and strong sense of justice to work in taking care of his soldiers, giving the Union meaning by taking the emancipation effort to heart and, later, in helping bring the confederates back to be Americans. (Which, to day, is one of the few insurrectionists groups that never tried again.) He was called a Butcher many times due to the nature of his work, and yet he was one of the most sensitive generals to have ever led an army in a campaign. His wartime nickname was “Unconditional Surrender” Grant, yet his personality was highly collaborative and empathic, rather than asserting his own will by force in his interactions with his own peers. His personality, plain, simple, and sensitive, would have never been believed as to be that of one of the greatest warriors in history, and yet it was.
U.S. Grant, the most unlikely US General
And he is not the only example. Countless leaders through history face the need to lead troops in battle while their personalities are dramatically different from the stereotypical general, and yet they succeed:
Dwight D. Eisenhower: Modest coalition-builder who prioritized allied lives, logistics, and restraint over personal glory and reckless offensives.
Omar N. Bradley: Always put soldiers’ welfare first, shunned publicity, known for calm, humane leadership.
George C. Marshall: Organizational genius; saved lives through planning and diplomacy, refused personal credit and theatrical command.
Marcus Aurelius: Philosopher‑emperor who emphasized duty, restraint, compassion, and ethical treatment of soldiers and subjects. His Meditations are a masterpiece.
Alfred the Great: Defended Wessex, protected civilians, reformed laws, promoted education, and negotiated fair settlements with Viking invaders.
Napoleon: Imagined as a ruthless general, yet he wrote Clisson et Eugénie ( a romantic novel), patronized science (Institut d’Égypte) and preferred small councils to large public oratory.
Real world is complex
And most professions are complex as well. In life you can rarely get by by just relying on one skill or one personality trait. It is almost always a combination of an enormous number of skills, personality traits, and external factors. And, you being great at some skills is an advantage that doesn’t necessarily make you successful in pursuits that stereo-typically need these skills, as often there’s a lot of invisible work on the background that require very different skills to ones would assume.
As shown before with the General example, most of the time is not battlefield time, but rather organizational, desk work, planning, reviewing, and just plain interacting with your soldiers and officers. Majority of jobs are like that as well. Your natural personality may come in handy some of the time, may work against you some other. It is on you to understand yourself well and be realistic about what you’re naturally good at, what you need to learn, what you need to get help with, and where you need to be creative to make up for your shortcomings.
I agree with the article point: no single personality is required for success. However, I do not think it fully answers the question in the title. It focuses on whether someone with a particular personality can achieve a certain outcome, when the more relevant question is how personality affects how that person achieves it.
Using an example from media 😉 Rush (2013) portrays James Hunt and Niki Lauda as two successful Formula One drivers with very different personalities. James races with instinct and a willingness to take risks. While Niki does it through discipline and careful preparation. Their differences do not prevent either of them from succeeding, but they shape how each do it.
Personality matters. It literally defines you. It does not, however, determines what you can achieve. It influences the path you take to do it. Therefore, in my opinion: your personality shapes how you realize a goal, not if you can do it.
This matches what I see from the hiring side, but I would push on where the real distortion sits. The post is right that wildly different personalities do the same job well. The problem is the gate, not the job. We interview for an archetype, the confident one who performs leadership in a 45-minute panel, and we systematically underrate the quiet person who will actually run the team once they are in it. Then we act surprised when the charismatic hire turns into a liability and the awkward one is the best manager on the floor. Personality doesn't gatekeep the work nearly as hard as our hiring rituals gatekeep the entrance.
Okay, genuine question, not a gotcha. 'Know yourself and use your personality to your advantage' sounds great, but what does that actually look like on a normal Tuesday? Like if I'm the disorganized-but-good manager he mentions, what is the move that morning, in plain terms? One concrete example would help, because right now it lives at about 30,000 feet for me.
Notice what this post quietly does. It takes the question "who am I" and answers "whoever the job needs you to be."
That is not liberating, it is the exact ideology late capitalism wants you to internalize. "You can be a great salesman while being introverted" really means: your inner life is raw material, sand off the parts that cost the firm money, you owe the role your adaptation. The general-as-CEO comparison is telling. The whole frame treats the human as infinitely retoolable labor.
Meanwhile "personality" itself has been turned into a product. MBTI at the corporate retreat, your "brand," your StrengthsFinder. The post is right that the trope is fake. It is naive about who profits from telling you to override yourself for the role.
Half this thread is going to talk past itself because "personality" is doing two jobs at once here.
There is personality as temperament: the fairly stable Big Five dispositions, your baseline on extraversion, neuroticism and so on. And there is personality as character: the values and habits you act from. The post slides between them. "You can be a great soldier while being compassionate and caring" is a claim about character. "A great salesman while being introverted" is a claim about temperament. They are not the same claim and they are not equally true.
Once you split them, the disagreement in the comments mostly evaporates. Temperament rarely gatekeeps a job; it taxes you in it. Character, on the other hand, very much shapes which jobs you can do well without corroding.
There is a real and useful distinction the post keeps circling without naming: personality is not the same as the soul.
Personality is the surface, the temperament, the set of reactions other people meet first. It is largely given to you and it is not the deepest thing about you. What the Grant story actually shows is a man whose character, his settled orientation toward justice, mercy, and duty, was steady while his outward personality looked like failure. The Church would call that the difference between disposition and virtue, between what you were handed and what you make of it.
So I would not say personality matters less than you think. I would say it matters less than your character does, and the two get confused constantly.
Refreshing to read 2000 words of "stop using your Myers-Briggs result as a doctor's note."
The whole "I'm an INFP so I can't do hard things" genre is just astrology for people who think they are too smart for astrology. You are not a fixed RPG class. You are a guy who has done three jobs and read one BuzzFeed quiz.
I grew up being told exactly who I was supposed to be, modest, agreeable, soft-spoken, the whole script. When I left, I genuinely did not know which parts were me and which were just the role I had been cast in since birth. For a while I treated "finding my real personality" as the next thing to figure out, like there was a true self under the script waiting to be uncovered.
What the post gets right, and what took me years to feel, is that there may not be a fixed thing under there. I am partly made by what I do now. That is terrifying and also the most freeing thing anyone could have told 22-year-old me.
Before anyone dunks on the self-help crowd, the strongest version of their worry is real: people do want to know who they are before they commit to a path, and that is not vanity, it is a search for integrity.
That said, the post is reaching for something the contemplative traditions said plainly. The Stoics had the idea of roles: you are handed a part to play, and virtue is playing it well, not insisting the part match some inner essence. Buddhism goes further with anatta, no-self, the claim that the stable "me" you are trying to match your career to was never as solid as it feels.
When the post says "know yourself, how you can use your own personality," I would gently flip it. Watch yourself. The self you are protecting is mostly habit, and habit answers to practice.
The post stumbles onto something older than it realizes when it says people "cannot be categorized like this based on these tropes."
The trope is not a bad model of a real fixed self. There is no fixed self for it to be a bad model of. "Personality" is a story we tell after the fact to make a sequence of actions feel like it came from a stable author. Hume already saw the self was a bundle, not a thing. Nietzsche went further: the doer is invented behind the deed because grammar demands a subject for every verb.
Grant did not express a pre-existing general-personality. He acted, won, and then biographers (and he himself) wrote the personality that the actions seemed to require. The order is backwards from how we live it.
Hard skills are measurable, specific, and teachable abilities or technical knowledge gained through education, training, or experience, which is often directly related to a particular job or industry. Examples include data analysis, programming, graphic design, accounting, dancing, painting… They are usually the core of a profession, particularly the part of it excluding interaction with other people. On the other hand, soft skills are mostly defined as “personal attributes, interpersonal....
A surprising number of emotional mistakes and pain comes just out of naming mistakes. Someone says he is angry when he is really ashamed. Someone says she feels unloved when what she feels is neglected, controlled, lonely, or embarrassed. Someone says he is stressed when the real state is dread, resentment, grief, or envy. Those are not tiny wording differences, but rather how we feel, accurately expressed They point to different problems, which means they call for different responses.
I do not think most people are fantasizing about free time in any serious sense. They are fantasizing about free time available for consumption. That is a different thing. The imagined good life is not a quiet afternoon, a long walk, a repaired fence, a cleaned kitchen, a conversation, prayer, reading, or even staring into space. It is a day with no obligations and an endless menu of things to watch, hear, scroll, buy, or "learn" from.
Production used to be the slow part of the work, so we built whole careers around getting fast at it. Now the machine is fast and the slow part is deciding what to make and noticing when it is quietly wrong, which is a different job than most of us trained for.
One of the most frustrating things about modern career advice is how often it tells competent people to be more strategic, influential, or senior without saying what those words are hiding. A lot of the time, what they are hiding is sales.
Strong groups do not become strong only because they agree on a mission. They become strong because people stop feeling abstract to one another, they see each other as people and friends. That is one reason shared meals matter more than most official culture programs. You don't need expensive workshops and getaways to build a team culture. You just need to be present. Have lunch with your team, have them eat together. Have coffee together...
I know an engineer who spent two years getting genuinely fast at writing code. Not sloppy fast, but clean, beautiful, well-tested fast. He could turn a ticket into a working pull request in the blink of an eye. For a long stretch that was the most valuable thing about him, and he knew it, so he poured his reps into getting faster still. It was great to see.
I think a lot of famous tech-management advice only looked wise because of the environment around it. Rising stock prices, captive talent, and equity upside made a lot of bad management survivable. Most organizations do not have those shock absorbers, which is why I think people should stop treating founder mythology as management advice.
