Who are successful people and what are their personality traits? Did their personality type lead them to be successful? Many experts agree that an individual's personality type plays a big role in their ability to succeed as certain personality types are more determined to be successful. For a better understanding of this field, it is necessary to define the two most important terms in this topic: Personality and Success.
According to psychology, personality is a set of psychological characteristics and mechanisms within the individual which are relatively permanent. These characteristics can affect an individual’s interactions and their adaptation to their environment.
On the other hand, success is defined as a happy and satisfying result.
This definition of personality is quite complex and to understand it better it is important to understand that personality is influenced primarily by biological factors, environmental factors, and, finally, a cognitive level. If we look at the world we live in, we will see that we are surrounded by stress daily, and according to this fact, we can relate stress and success. Certain studies show that some personality types cope better with stress than others. As an example, we will take the theory of the “Big five”.
The big five dimensions of personality include Extraversion, Agreeableness, Neuroticism, Openness, and Conscientiousness.
Extraversion refers to sociability, and these people are talkative, outgoing, and sociable. The opposite of Extraversion is Introversion. Introverts are quiet, reserved, and often shy. Agreeable people feel good when they help others; they are altruistic, cooperative, and kind. Having low levels of this trait means that a person is less likely to get along with others, trust them and be sympathetic to the needs of other people around them. Neuroticism is a general tendency to experience negative feelings such as anxiety, depression, anger, guilt, and hurt.
On the other hand, people with a low level of neuroticism are emotionally stable, calm, and relaxed. Openness includes creativity, curiosity, and people with high levels of these characteristics are not afraid of changes. They like new ideas and experiences. People with lower levels are afraid of changes, they prefer familiar over new and tend to have a conservative attitude. Conscientiousness reflects the predisposition to be responsible, organized, hard-working, and goal-directed.
If an individual has low levels of this characteristic, they are often carefree and hedonist.
If we look back at these “big five” dimensions, it is undeniable that we can relate them to the word success. They are all important, but according to some studies, there is one characteristic that has the biggest impact - Neuroticism.
Neuroticism is a general tendency to have negative feelings and emotions. People with high levels of this attribute are more likely to be moody, depressed, and sad. However, people with low levels of neuroticism are emotionally stable, calm, and know how to deal with stress.
Previously, we mentioned stress as a term connected with success. Can stress and emotionally unstable individuals be successful? Maybe, but according to logic, there is a very low chance. To be successful, a person needs to be calm, emotionally stable, and ready for challenges. Success is a very attractive goal; all of us tend to want to be successful - but the path to success can be very long, challenging, and often a stressful process. People nowadays tend to hurry; they want everything immediately and forget those good things that take time. Success is a good thing, is it not?
So, we can say that our personality type is connected to our chance of success. Personality type is something that defines us, our habits, behavior, tendencies, way of understanding, etc. At the beginning of this article, we said that alongside biological factors, also environmental influences can affect our personality.
Therefore, bearing this in mind, we can say that we are born with some traits, and we have tendencies, and characteristics, and we inherit a lot from our parents. Later, our attributes are shaped by our experiences and relations. This explains why someone can be born with great potential but never succeeds because their surroundings were not motivational. And on the other hand, someone born with a lower capacity but motivated and had a good support system can achieve great things.
To conclude, personality type and success are connected, and there are a lot of other factors affecting our journey to success. It is important to nurture our good and positive traits, grow every day, and have a goal. And like Arthur Ashe said: “Success is a journey, not a destination”.
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