Anyone who takes full responsibility for their learning journey already has one of the biggest autodidact personality traits: Accountability.

Whether we’re talking about Margaret Cavendish, Benjamin Franklin or Giordano Bruno, an autodidact is anyone who gets actively designs their own learning cycles.

That doesn’t mean the autodidact never takes courses or listens to teachers.

It means you choose your teachers rather than settling for the ones the system assigns.

Some part of your personality provides you with the motivation and wherewithal needed to arrange your own semesters.

How do I know?

I’ve memorized multiple Sanskrit chants, published dozens of books, earned a PhD, studied multiple languages and built more than one business.

All by following the autodidactic path for decades.

But here’s the real question:

Why do personality traits matter? And how do they connect with neuroplasticity, motivation and memory?

More importantly:

Can you develop these personality traits if you don’t already have them?

Yes, you can. And on this page, I’ll show you the most important traits and how to train each one into your system with surprising ease

Ready?

Let’s dive in.

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The 7 Most Important Autodidact Personality Traits

The list you’re about to read contains some personality traits you’ll have heard before, such as curiosity.

But I’m not listing them just to check off boxes on a list. I’ll also challenge common assumptions and dig into the nuances that often get overlooked.

Why?

Because when we gloss over the details, we miss the real keys to developing ourselves as lifelong learners.

One: The “Cognitive Engine” of Curiosity

A lot of people have heard about Benjamin Franklin’s kite experiment.

It’s a classic case of curiosity driving an autodidact to run tests in order to produce evidence that solved a mystery.

But Franklin was also trying to avoid getting hurt. He realized that using conductive rods in the experiment would likely cause some serious damage, if not kill him.

So part of Franklin’s success that you can model is that he turned the question of electricity into a project.

Then he used analytical thinking to guide his curiosity and help him create measurable experiments.

Like Thomas Jefferson, Franklin journaled frequently, something you can start to do yourself.

Even if you don’t initially feel curious about boring topics you need to cover, simply starting to write has helped a lot of people.

I know it sounds counterintuitive, but journaling has helped me become a much more curious person. For example, I created a feedback loop around language learning using The Freedom Journal.

It helped me keep curious enough to keep moving forward when I started to find a Mandarin I needed to complete starting to get tedious.

I’ve also used journaling to explore why things I’m passionate about sometimes grow less interesting over time. This curiosity led me to discover the concept of “topic exhaustion” and develop strategies around overcoming it.

Two: High Openness to Experience

People with high openness tend to be mentally adventurous.

According to this study, people with high openness also excel at abstract thinking, artistic expression and intellectual curiosity.

Margaret Cavendish, which was the Duchess of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, is one of my favorite examples of this personality trait.

That’s partly because she was also blessed with a number of polymathic personality traits too. But I also really just like her philosophical works precisely because they were so open during a time when her world was so closed.

Although Cavendish was excluded from academic circles (and was even mocked for trying to enter them), she still became one of the first women to publish under her own name in both philosophy and science.

The process she used is easy to follow, and easier than ever before in our times. Cavendish:

• Read across disciplines like natural philosophy, poetry, politics and theology


• Imagined alternative political and social structures


• Self-published her controversial ideas even though she knew they would be rejected


• Innovated by writing fiction to express scientific and political ideas

This final strategy is what you could think of as a cross-modal learning strategy.

If you want to learn more about how to bring multiple learning modes together, here’s my guide to becoming a polymath.

At the end of the day, openness isn’t really intellectual.

It’s about emotional courage. And the way you develop that so you don’t remain stuck within a limited range of interests?

In my experience with releasing deeply personal books like The Victorious Mind, I found that you really just have to get started.

I had very low openness before I published it and now am quite the opposite. And I’ve learned a lot more as a result.

Three: Tolerance for Ambiguity & Uncertainty

I don’t blame you if not having all the answers up front makes it hard to take action.

But you can develop the personality traits needed to feel utterly confused and still make progress.

Giordano Bruno is one of my favorite examples when it comes to epic achievements in the face of historical, intellectual, theological and existential complexity.

In case you don’t know him, he literally lived in a world where you could be burned alive for asking the wrong questions – and that’s exactly what happened to him.

He proposed an infinite universe filled with endless worlds and argued that no central authority could grasp the entire picture. Not Aristotle, not the church, not even Bruno.

Bruno also questioned whether Jesus had free will during his Inquisition and dared to imagine that human memory could be exercised so well that it came to model infinity.

How can you face so much uncertainty in your lifelong learning? And is it worth taking inspiration from rebels like Bruno?

Well, we’ve known since at least 1962 through scientific studies like this one that an tolerance and intolerance for ambiguity shape the careers we pursue. So I think the answer is yes.

And as someone currently developing a unique bookshop, I know that I’ve had to increase my tolerance substantially.

Here’s how lessons from Bruno’s life hav