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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.
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 have helped me:
- Reading across opposing viewpoints that don’t easily reconcile has helped me proceed without needing contradictions to resolve
- Regularly watch videos by people I don’t agree with and practice summarizing their arguments
- Encountering paradoxes and embracing them has helped me become more creative
- Bruno has inspired me to study symbolic logic at a deeper level and practice dealing with what some philosophers call “true contradictions”
- No longer make achieving certainty a goal
Instead, I seek depth and breadth of experience and learning. And Bruno teaches us that we call can, because in some sense, the tolerance for ambiguity is a muscle.
I hope you will explore the processes I’ve followed and enjoy dealing with complexity with greater ease. Even under pressure.
Four: Belief in the Ability to Learn Anything
“Belief” sounds wishy washy. But it’s a real thing and when scientists measure it, they tend to use the term “self-efficacy.”
In this study, for example, the researchers found that higher levels of self-belief predicted strong grades.
If you’ve seen my list of books on learning, you might remember how I discussed the predictive processing outlined in Andy Clark’s The Experience Machine.
Basically, people tend to fulfil their destiny based on what they believe about themselves. This is true of both autodidacts and polymaths.
This fact is probably one reason why the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman came up with his own notation to help himself learn advanced mathematical skills.
His habit of simplifying things for himself has come to be known as “The Feynman Technique.”
To use it yourself, start by:
- Explain things to yourself as simply as possible
- Identify the gaps in what you don’t understand
- Relearn confusing parts of the topic and do further research
Overall, the lesson from Feynman is that you really can take charge of your own understanding. Now you have his process and can make it your own.
Five: Resilience & Grit
Imagine being deaf and blind. Yet still having the inner resources needed to learn how to read Braille and go on to earn a college degree.
And that’s not to mention writing fourteen books.
Helen Keller did exactly that, proving that physical conditions don’t have to hold us back. Determination can help us push through all kinds of obstacles.
Then there’s Stephen Hawking. Despite his ALS, he lived to age 76 and taught theoretical physics across his career.
According to Scientific American, maintained a positive outlook.
It’s a weird article though. The neurology professor they interview says he doesn’t believe that one of the most potent success strategies added to Hawking’s longevity.
We’ve just seen through self-efficacy that our believes can shape our outcomes, so I suggest at least experimenting with the following process:
- Redefine your limits without ignoring or denying them
- Be flexible and change your modus operandi as needed, but keep your autodidactic mission at the front of your mind
- Build positive belief systems around your constraints
- Read biographies of people who persisted and extract more clues from their success stories
Six: Metacognitive Awareness
Thinking about your thinking is a powerful trait to have.
I remember one of the first times I noticed it happening to me. During high school, I was sitting on the porch with my friend Dave and pondering how we actually know that the sky is blue.
He said that I was thinking a bit too much, but I persisted. Over time, I watched myself ask questions like these countless times to the point of even questioning the nature of philosophical questions themselves and how they play out in my mind.
Barbara Oakley provides another example I love.
As the author of A Mind for Numbers, she talked about how she flunked math. Badly.
She ultimately had to overcome a number of cognitive blocks around math by thinking about how she was thinking.
Once she cleared them out by analyzing her thought patterns, she went on to become an engineering professor.
Now, she inspires millions of people to think differently about their own thinking. Mindshift is one of her best books on the topic.
But until you get a chance to read it, here are some steps you can follow immediately:
- Reflect on your past failures and how you thought about them at the time
- Ask questions about the assumptions you were making
- Identify better ways to keep moving forward
In Oakley’s case, part of how she improved her math skills involved embracing spaced repetition.
I’ve done that too by using the Memory Palace technique. The results have been truly profound.
And as Peter of Ravenna makes clear in one of the greatest memory improvement books of all time, a lot of his skills with memory techniques came from thinking about how he was using them.
All kinds of so-called “Renaissance Men” had the trait of thinking, and you can pick up more tips from them in this fuller profile of their habits.
Seven: Accountability
James Clear was pretty much just another blogger when I interviewed him on the Magnetic Memory Method Podcast.
I don’t mean that in a bad way.
It’s just that people with blogs were a dime a dozen now, and even with AI, a lot of us are still holding on.
But his commitment to publishing weekly, no matter what?
It’s a prime example of personal accountability.
And you see this autodidact personality trait throughout the lives of all kinds of autodidacts.
Except, it isn’t always true.
For example, Leonardo Da Vinci gave himself all kinds of learning projects in his notebooks.
He would give himself little assignments, from interviewing experts in a variety of fields to learning how birds fly.
But he also left a lot of projects unfinished.
Others?
He returned to years later, and either dabbled with them or brought them to completion.
As someone who has worked on a lot of projects and recently struggled to make progress on one of my “Memory Detective” novels, I feel like I have a sense for why this happens.
As I’ve shared with my audience a few times, I nearly gave up on Vitamin X. But being able to share the struggle is part of what helped me reach the final draft in the end.
To give you a set of steps to follow that will lead to greater accountability, give these a try:
- Write a list of topics you want to master over a one year period
- Use a visible tracking system, like a print calendar or mind map
- Set non-negotiable learning rituals, like always studying in the same place
- Give yourself deadlines and deliberately work towards them
- Stop consuming and do more producing
When I needed to push through the final draft of Vitamin X?
I put aside watching videos and mindless scrolling. I made a daily editing ritual and showed up without pause until it was done.
And to make it impossible to forget my goal, I kept a printed copy of the draft on my desk at all times.
The Tricky Thing about Autodidact Personality Traits (and How to Develop Them)
What many people miss is that autodidactic personality traits aren’t necessarily qualities that you’re born with.
For many people, they’re shaped over time. Or developed in order to solve a problem.
This is a point made by Peter Burke in The Polymath.
And you really can develop in each of these areas.
But the tricky part is that you can’t develop them merely by reading stories of the great autodidacts.
You develop them by designing your own personal operating systems and consistently showing up.
That’s what Benjamin Franklin did. It’s what Bruno did and it’s what I do in order to help students around the world learn faster using the tools taught in the Magnetic Memory Method Masterclass.
If you’re serious about becoming a more curious, resilient and self-directed learner, here are two final suggestions.
First, enrol in my free memory improvement course:
Second, study my full guide on how to become an autodidact.
Both of these resources will help you transform from someone who merely reads about autodidacticism to someone who is a practitioner.
The results are profound, so I wish you godspeed on joining us.
