Openness: what high and low look like

What high Openness looks like

Your attention keeps wandering off to the interesting thing. You collect ideas the way other people collect mugs, and you would rather do something in a new way than in the way that already works. Three unfinished projects is not a failure of character; it is what a high dial costs.

Signs, day to day:

• six tabs open on a subject nobody asked about
• redecorating the room in your head while someone talks
• starting the book, then the other book
• a playlist that makes sense to nobody else
• getting restless a month after everything is settled

What it's for: high Openness is one of the traits that predict how well people take to training, to learning something genuinely new (Barrick & Mount 1991). The same restlessness that leaves projects half-done is what makes you quick in a room where nobody has done this before.

What low Openness looks like

You like the thing that works. Novelty has to earn its place, and most of it does not. People read you as grounded, which is half right: you are not closed, you are unconvinced.

Signs, day to day:

• the same order at the same place, happily
• asking what problem the new system solves
• finishing what you started
• a home that stays where you put it
• noticing that the exciting idea has no plan under it

The quiet cost: a low score can pass on the thing that would have suited you, and can read a change of direction as a loss of nerve when it is sometimes only a change of direction.

Neither is the good one

The dial isn't a scale from dull to interesting. High Openness with high Conscientiousness finishes the strange project, which is rare. High Openness with low Conscientiousness has nine beginnings and a very good time. Low Openness with high Conscientiousness is the person everything else quietly runs on. The pairing is what makes the pattern; the pattern is what we write your insight about.

What moves it, a little

Traits move when you do trait-relevant things repeatedly, not when you intend to (Hudson et al. 2019), and the shift is modest: across the five traits, intervention studies average about a third of a standard deviation over roughly six months, most of it in emotional stability (Roberts et al. 2017). For Openness that is one unfamiliar thing a week, small enough to actually do. That is the whole design of a Daily Action inside the Journey, and it is why we don't promise to "fix" anything.

How the science works →

Three Archetypes led by imagination

See the Archetype gallery →

Questions people ask