I’ve long believed that our choices about which projects to take on are among the most important decisions we make, and now I have evidence to back it up.

In an article on the TED blog and a paper called The Methodology of Personal Projects Analysis, research professor Brian R. Little examines how the pursuit of “personal projects” powerfully affects the trajectory of our lives. 

Little pioneered the development of a field called Personal Projects Analysis, or PPA, to study how the pursuit of such projects is a fundamental component of human well-being.

“Personal projects” by his definition include not just formal ones you might focus on at work, but informal ones as well. Toddlers are pursuing a project as they learn to walk. Lovers are pursuing a project as they fall in love. All the way to the highest reaches of human achievement, like landing on the moon.

The key factors in making them “personal” are that they are personally meaningful and that they are freely chosen, not imposed from the outside. Little’s research has shown that such “intrinsically regulated” projects tend to be more successful and lead to greater well-being than “externally regulated” projects.

Little and his colleagues have studied the projects of thousands of people, and found that they tend to have 15 active projects on average at any given time, falling into 6 major categories:

  1. Occupational/Work: “Make sure the department budget is done.”
  2. Interpersonal: “Have dinner with the woman in the floppy hat.”
  3. Maintenance: “Get more ink cartridges.”
  4. Recreational: “Take a cruise holiday.”
  5. Health/Body: “Lose fifteen pounds.’
  6. Intrapersonal: “Try to deal with my sadness.”

They have found that a person’s collection of personal projects not only shapes their life but even who they are at their core.

This is a fundamentally different view of “personality”: We are not limited to a collection of traits fixed at birth, or shaped in childhood. We evolve over time through personally meaningful pursuits we decide to take on. This opens up the possibility that we can purposefully choose the ways we want to change, by choosing projects that give us new skills, perspectives, and ways of thinking.

In other words, by changing what you do, you can change who you are. Your actions speak louder than words, including the words others have applied to you in the form of labels like “introverted” or “extroverted,” “ambitious” or “lazy,” “focused” or “distractable.”

Little’s research found that we can even take on new traits to more effectively pursue our personal projects. We commit to delivering a talk, and as a result, start to take on the traits of a public speaker. We say yes to a new relationship, and begin to change into someone more vulnerable. He dubs these “free traits,” like free-floating personalities, we can grab ahold of and put on like a new outfit.

It turns out that there is more than “nature vs. nurture.” There is more to us than the genes we were born with, and the events that unfolded shortly after our birth. There is a third component – projects – and those projects are actively shaping who we are now and for many years into the future. 

Which is another way of saying, a single creative project can change the trajectory of your life. 

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