A personality is like a kitchen. Without the right utensils and ingredients, every meal is be bland and unsatisfying. Similarly, a kitchen can be unbalanced, such as my kitchen at home. At home, we are fed mostly rice and soup. Three thousand days of rice and soup, and your body and stomach will only think of rice and soup. Likewise, a personality that is shaped continuously in one direction will grow lopsided.

There are many ways that your personality can get stuck, like my diet of rice and soup:
- repeated biases from your parents
- a feedback loop with your friends (you choose friends that fit your personality, which then only amplify your personality)
- lifestyle selection bias (you choose to do things that fit your personality, which then, only amplify your personality)

If every interaction over every day is like an echo chamber, exposing you only to ideas and belief systems within your "comfort zone," after 20 years, you will find yourself as a cemented statue. In my case, I find myself with my wheel in the mud, as I get depressed, neurotic, and anal in situations that most people would not.

That which is flexible will not break.

In order to better stock my personality kitchen, I'm going to dig through Aesop's Fables. While these fables may seem like trivial kid's play, of these 82 stories, I guarantee that the majority are lessons you or I have not internalized. From vanity, to greed, to power, to tolerance, there is something to learn. Even these fables may not be enough, as they are from a Western perspective. Who knows what the Asians and Africans are cooking up.

(I got this idea of using fables to change personalities from Judith S. Beck's Cognitive Therapy: Basics and Beyond. The theory is that a personality is founded on internalized core beliefs, and that metaphors or fables can be tapped to help change those beliefs.)