Your personality is mostly determined by factors outside your control and changing it fundamentally is EXTREMELY difficult, contrary to what other people might be espousing

People on this forum mostly say: ‘oh, I know a guy who is ugly but he has a girlfriend because he has a good personality’, as if that person is solely responsible for his personality and anyone can change their personality in a couple months’ time ‘if only they put in the effort’. This is akin to rich people saying that the poor are just not trying hard enough. It is a toxic attitude, and I am going to detail why below.

In my opinion, the base of your personality in adult life is mostly explained by the formula below:

Base of your personality = (Genetics + Family Environment)*School Environment

In other words, the school environment is an amplifier of your genetics and family environment.

Almost everybody has close to zero influence on the factors that determine their personality up until they finish high school, are able to work and earn their own money, and are able leave their family behind (typically age 18).

Starting from this base, you can make slight improvements or changes, however any significant changes or improvements are going to take years of deliberate practice and therapy (I am talking probably 10+ years of constant practice). The vast majority of people do not significantly change their personality.

On top of this base, you can have significant trauma events outside of your control which can severely impact your personality, for the better or for worse. Examples include a near-death experience in a car crash, the loss of a parent or sibling early in life, the loss of a great friend due to suicide, either yourself or someone really close to you dealing with disease such as cancer and surviving, etc. Let’s break them down one-by-one with examples.

Genetics – this has been spoken about before, so I am not going to delve into it too much

• Height
• Looks: Acne, Crooked Teeth, Defects
• Intelligence
• Inherited personality traits (studies show that 20% to 60% of your personality is genetic)
• Physical ability / Natural talents

Family Environment

• Was your family supportive or abusive?
• Did you grow up without a father?
• Did you grow up poor, middle class, or rich?
• Did your parents sign you up to extracurricular activities such as team sports or dancing, or did your parents leave you in front of the TV or the computer so you were not bothering them too much?
• Did you grow up with siblings, or were you an only child?
• Did your parents have a large social circle? Were they charismatic? Could you develop that charisma effortlessly while young by i.e. observing your father interacting with his friends at a bbq?
• Did you grow up with pets?
• Did your parents feed you a diet consisting of mostly McDonald’s, ready meals, and soda from an early age?
• Did your parents help you overcome various genetic defects? For example, did they pay for you to fix your crooked teeth in middle school, so that you had perfect straight teeth in high school?

School Environment

The factors described above are summed up and are compounded by the school environment, where you can develop positive or negative feedback loops. Of course, life is not black and white, few people have all the factors above as 100% positive or 100% negative.

Let’s have two scenarios for the same person with the following genetic characteristics:

Short height, slightly ugly, average intelligence, crooked teeth, severe acne as a teenager, and a natural talent for guitar

Scenario A. The person who is lucky to be born in a good family, one of two children (his sibling is a girl close to his age), who stayed in the same area throughout all his childhood:

• Will probably be involved in a bunch of extracurricular activities from an early age to discover his talents and foster social connections with both genders – team sports, dancing classes, language classes, he is also likely to discover his innate talent for guitar and develop that skill. The parents are going to be supportive whenever there is a setback and give advice on how the young boy should react in various social situations. The young boy is going to get comfortable interacting with the opposite gender via dance classes, and also through his interactions with his sister (and his sister’s friends), and with the same gender via team sports – developing ability to banter, camaraderie, and a large social circle.

• Will probably have a good diet at home, coupled with the extracurricular activities above, he is likely to not get fat, likely even fit.

• The parents are going to get him braces in middle school to fix his teeth, so he is going to have perfect straight teeth in high school.

• The parents are going to take him to a dermatologist so that his severe acne is treated or kept under control.

• As a result of the above – clear skin, straight teeth, being comfortable around girls, having a wide social circle from team sports + his sister’s friends + classmates, and discovering his innate talent for guitar, the guy has no problem getting a girlfriend in high school, gaining experience with women, which further raises his confidence and self-esteem.

• Starting from this base, life is pretty easy for him. He is likely going to go to a good university, and life is pretty much set from here. He is probably the example that people usually point to when they think of a person who is ugly but pulls girls way above their league.

Now let’s investigate the situation in which things do not go so well.

Scenario B. The person who is unfortunate to be born in an abusive, poor family, as an only child, who moved a few times throughout his childhood:

• The parents cannot afford any extracurricular activities for the young man, and whenever he gets bad grades at school, his dad calls him dumb, and incapable, and even sometimes beats him up. The child never discovers his aptitude for guitar.

• The parents are growing him up on a diet of fast food and soda because they do not know how to cook and they know nothing about nutrition.

• As a result of the above, the kid gets fat.

• In middle school, the kid starts to get bullied for the fact that he is fat, ugly, has crooked teeth, and has started to also develop acne. The kid does not know how to react to this, and his self-esteem is already low from being called dumb, incapable, and being beaten up by his father at home.

• As a result of the bullying and the treatment he receives from his father, the kid retreats into the world of video games to escape reality. This means that he does not develop any social skills until the age of 18 and he has no experience with women.

• Somehow, he manages to get into university and move away from his toxic family.

• Midway through college, his mum, the only person in the family whom he felt cared for him, sadly passes away. He cuts contact with his abusive father because he finds out that he had been cheating on his mum in the lead-up to her death.

• Despite the setback, he manages to finish college, while working part-time at McDonald’s. He now works in accounting making decent money.

• However, he has the following to deal with: acne + acne scars left over from adolescence, crooked teeth, childhood trauma + the trauma of his mother passing away + low self-esteem due to his father crushing it to the ground over the 18 years he had been at home. This is his base. People keep telling him that it’s not his looks holding him back, it’s his personality, and he can just work on it for a couple of months and he can pull models. He just does not try hard enough and does not want it enough. 'Look at the guy in Scenario A. If he can do it, so can you! You are just not trying hard enough!'

Conclusion

Yes, there are people out there who got really unlucky in terms of genetics, however, the successful ones more likely than not got really lucky in terms of growing up in the right family, which helped offset their genetic shortcomings! There is a massive survivorship bias there.

What about the people who had the misfortune to draw the short straw both in terms of genetics AND in terms of family? Starting from a situation like that: years of bullying and abuse, addiction to fast food, lack of social skills, low self esteem, among others, requires MONUMENTAL AMOUNTS OF EFFORT.

However, people (and especially women it seems – the ‘empathetic’ gender) do not care about your starting point and how much you have improved. They only care about your current results. How can you be a fun and charismatic guy when you were born ugly, and on top of that you developed low self esteem due to not only your peers in school bullying you, but also because your father beat the shit out of you when you were young, and verbally abused you and your mother, only for you to then face years of rejection from women, while also not having any siblings that you are close with? ‘just improve your personality bro’