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Your life is still wet cement
Underestimating change
The tendency is probably built into us: at every age, people massively underestimate how much their life will change. At 40, 50, 60, or 70 the thought is the same, that there has been a lot of change and the person is different from before, but now they are set.
Treating the cement as dry means solving for one fixed self, and people tend to think very statically that way. Staying open to experiences and curiosity matters because a person may not know what will fit.
Freeing, not depressing
Neil deGrasse Tyson has described how some people find the enormity of the universe depressing and others find it freeing, liberating, and optimistic. The wet-cement view belongs with the second reaction, and Warren Buffett is in that group.
At Columbia, already sure he wanted to be an investor, Todd Combs took a personality test and came out an INTJ while wondering whether private investing or venture might suit him better than public markets.
Why do people think they're finished changing?
Psychologists call this the end of history illusion. A 2013 study in Science by Jordi Quoidbach, Daniel Gilbert, and Timothy Wilson surveyed more than 19,000 people aged 18 to 68. Participants at every age said they had changed considerably over the past decade but expected to change little over the next. The pattern held for personality, values, and preferences.
How much does personality change in adulthood?
A 2006 meta-analysis led by psychologist Brent Roberts, covering 92 longitudinal studies, found that personality traits keep shifting through adulthood. On average people became more socially dominant, more conscientious, and more emotionally stable as they aged. The largest changes came in young adulthood, between roughly ages 20 and 40. Some change continued into the sixties and beyond.
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