Does success change people?
What Bill Murray, David Bowie, and a team of professors have to say
Does success change people? Does hitting your career goals, your financial goals, your life goals, turn you into somebody better than you were before? Or somebody worse?
Was the best version of you just waiting to get out? Ready to be set free, only to be held back by the circumstances of poverty, living in the hinterlands, or having your good work ignored by the powers that be?
Or is it the opposite?
Is it that love of money is the root of all evil? Does fame, in the words of the Thin White Duke, “take interesting men and thrust mediocrity upon them”?
Bill Murray, another someone who knows the topic, warns:
“I always say to people who want to be rich and famous: 'try being rich first'. See if that doesn't cover most of it. There's not much downside to being rich, other than paying taxes and having your relatives ask you for money. But when you become famous, you end up with a 24-hour job.”
So how does success change people? Some professors looked at how much people’s personalities changed after achieving monetary or status success.
I’m not going to bore you with the research details, but basically the way they think about it is that there are five main components of personality:
- Outgoing
- Sensitive
- Open-minded
- Detail-oriented
- Agreeableness
We know that different scores on these five personality traits can predict what might happen in your career. But what they wanted to find out is, after you’ve had that success, do these personality characteristics change?
The professors made 7 predictions before starting the study, and they predicted they’d find:
- Success makes people less sensitive
- Success makes people more outgoing
- Success makes people more open-minded
- Success makes people less easy-going
- Success makes people more detail-oriented
- Success would change young people more than old people
- Success would change men more than women
I like how the professors were willing to make firm predictions before the study, and shared those predictions with us. It takes guts, and you often don’t see that in university types.
So what’s your guess? Does more money make you nicer, more easy-going, more curious? Or does it make you more fragile and less friendly? Does fame make you a recluse or an attention hog?
Now of course, the answer for each person is different, but what they found was…
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