What are characteristics of a person?

The five basic personality traits is a theory developed in 1949 by D. W. Fiske (1949) and later expanded upon by other researchers including Norman (1967), Smith (1967), Goldberg (1981), and McCrae & Costa (1987).

Researchers had spent years before trying to pin down character traits as a way of analysing people’s behaviour. At one point, Gordon Allport found over 4000 traits. Even when this was reduced to 16 it was seen as too complicated. This is where the five big personality traits began.

These broad categories have been researched and developed over the years and, whilst there is extensive study into each area, researchers don’t always agree on the definition of each characteristic.

Openness is a characteristic that includes imagination and insight. The world, other people and an eagerness to learn and experience new things is particularly high for this personality trait. It leads to having a broad range of interests and being more adventurous when it comes to decision making.

Creativity also plays a big part in the openness trait; this leads to a greater comfort zone when it comes to abstract and lateral thinking.

Think of that person who’s always ordering the most exotic thing on the menu, going to different places and having interests which you would never have thought of… that is someone who has a high openness trait.

Anyone low in this trait tends to be viewed with more traditional approaches to life and may struggle when it comes to problem solving outside their comfort zone of knowledge.

Conscientiousness is a trait that includes high levels of thoughtfulness, good impulse control, and goal-directed behaviours. This organised and structured approach is often found within people who work in science and even high-retail finance where detail orientation and organisation are required as a skill set.

A highly conscientious person will regularly plan ahead and analyse their own behaviour to see how it affects others. Project management teams and HR departments regularly have highly conscientious people working in their teams to help balance out the structural roles within the overall team development.

A good example of a conscientious person would be someone you know who is always planning ahead for the next time you meet - and in the meantime, regularly staying in contact, checking in on your wellbeing. They like to organise around certain dates and events and are focused on you when you meet.

People low in conscientiousness tend to dislike structure and schedules, procrastinate on important tasks and fail to complete tasks as well.

Extraversion (sometimes referred to as Extroversion) is a trait that many will have come across in their own lives. It’s easily identifiable and widely recognisable as “someone who gets energised in the company of others.”

This, amongst other traits which include, talkativeness, assertiveness and high amounts of emotional expressiveness, have made extraverted people widely recognisable over many years of social interaction.

We all have that one friend or family member - or several - who aren’t exactly wall flowers in a social interaction. They thrive on being the centre of attention, enjoy meeting new people and somehow tend to have the biggest friends and acquaintance group you have known.

The opposite is, of course, someone else in our lives we may know, an introvert. They prefer solitude and have less energy in social situations. Being at the centre of attention or making small talk can be quite taxing.

Extroverts tend to have very public facing roles including areas such as sales, marketing, teaching and politics. Seen as leaders, extroverted people will be more likely to lead than stand in the crowd and be seen to not be doing anything.

People who exhibit high agreeableness will show signs of trust, altruism, kindness, and affection. Highly agreeable people tend to have high prosocial behaviours which means that they’re more inclined to be helping other people.

Sharing, comforting and cooperating are traits that lend themselves to highly agreeable personality types. Empathy towards others is commonly understood as another form of agreeableness even if the term doesn’t quite fit.

The opposite to agreeableness is disagreeableness but it manifests in behaviour traits that are socially unpleasant. Manipulation and nastiness towards others, a lack of caring or sympathy, a lack of taking interest in others and their problems are all quite common.

Agreeable people tend to find careers in areas where they can help the most. Charity workers, medicine, mental health and even those who volunteer in soup kitchens and dedicate time to the third sector (social studies) are high in the agreeableness chart.

Neuroticism is characterised by sadness, moodiness, and emotional instability. Often mistaken for anti-social behaviour, or worse a greater psychological issue, neuroticism is a physical and emotional response to stress and perceived threats in someone’s daily life.

Individuals who exhibit high levels of neuroticism will tend to experience mood swings, anxiety and irritability. Some individuals who experience sudden changes in character from a day-to-day perspective could be highly neurotic and respond to high stress levels in their work and personal lives.

Anxiety, which plays a large part in the makeup of neuroticism, is about an individual's ability to cope with stress and perceived or actual risk. People who suffer with neuroticism will overthink a lot of situations and find difficulty in relaxing even in their own space.

Of course, those who rank lower on the neurotic level will exhibit a more stable and emotionally resilient attitude to stress and situations. Low neurotic sufferers also rarely feel sad or depressed, taking the time to focus on the present moment and not get involved in mental arithmetic on possible stress-inducing factors.

Originally developed in 1949, the big 5 personality traits is a theory established by D. W. Fiske and later expanded upon by other researchers including Norman (1967), Smith (1967), Goldberg (1981), and McCrae & Costa (1987).

It’s suggested that as early the late 19th century social psychologists were trying to gain a more scientific understanding of personality but it wasn’t until the first official study in the 1930s by Gordon Allport and Henry Odbert that personality had some sort of scientific acknowledgement. They took 18,000 words from Webster’s Dictionary to describe personality traits and found adjectives that described non-physical characteristics creating a 4500 word bank of observable behaviour markers.

Later studies were able to identify many overlaps and specific traits per person which has allowed a more condensed and comprehensive review of personality traits. The big 5 are still widely used today as the basis of global study.

When thinking about the big 5 personality traits, hiring managers, CEOs and even the candidates are wise to think about why they are important when it comes to joining a team. Before we go into the reasons why they are important, let’s quickly remind ourselves of what they are.

The five broad personality traits described by the theory are extraversion (also often spelled extroversion), agreeableness, openness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism.

The five basic personality traits is a theory coined in 1949 by D. W. Fiske (1949) and later expanded upon by other researchers including Norman (1967), Smith (1967), Goldberg (1981), and McCrae & Costa (1987).

So, why are they important when it comes to candidate selection?

The big 5 personality traits help us to not only better understand how they compare to others and to put names to their characteristics, it’s also used to explore relationships between personality and many other life indicators.

Think about knowing how agreeable your personality is and what this means to co-worker relationships? Or how neuroticism may have an impact on work-life balance? Overall, however, we can begin to break down why they’re important in different areas such as;

How will people get along? Are you building a team where communication or trust may be stifled or open? Will you have a member of the team who can relate to others and be conscientious with others?

High five tendencies in openness, agreeableness and even extroversion can lead to better team management and team building. Someone who exhibits high agreeableness for example is capable of being cooperative, trustworthy and straightforward, making them easy to work with but also, showing the necessary skills for effective team management.

Low five tendencies in something like extroversion can be difficult for understanding employee motivations. Whilst having a high-five tendency in agreeableness which encompasses empathy, makes it easier to get to the root causes of motivations and even gain a better understanding of people generally.

Something such as high-openness where embracing differences and embracing challenges can lead to more openness about who is hired, and finding solutions in different ways and areas. Whilst a team made up of mostly conscientious individuals is a team formation with the highest chance of being successful.

These teams will often display a good work ethic, produce high-quality work and be cooperative. This in return will lead to more solutions being put forward about who is required and where diverse teams can be built over time to help answer these problems.

Again, something like high extroversion personality traits would be essential in developing interactions whilst  being highly agreeable is better suited to open communications.

From nature and nurture to age and maturation, the big 5 traits have been widely studied where we can see what influences their impact on a person’s behaviour and character.

Personality has often been hypothesised as a question of nurture or nature. One particular study looked at 123 pairs of identical twins and 127 pairs of fraternal twins. “The findings suggested that the heritability of each trait was 53 percent for extraversion, 41 percent for agreeableness, 44 percent for conscientiousness, 41 percent for neuroticism, and 61 percent for openness.”

It has also been widely recognised that the older we get, the more our behaviour traits will change. We become less extraverted, less neurotic, and less open to new experiences whilst our agreeableness and conscientiousness will grow as we get older.

The general consensus is that men and women are actually more alike than what normative social science would have us believe. But as the title would suggest, there are some exceptions.

Weinsberg and DeYoung in 2011 studied the big 5 traits and in particular Gender Differences in Personality across the Ten Aspects of the Big Five. They concluded that women tend to score higher on Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism than men.

Other studies have concluded that whilst the differences may be present, some traits are not extensively separate. Getting older will tend to align behaviour traits such as agreeableness and extraversion where both genders tend to score lower as time moves on.

If you’re looking to build a great leader, then you need to consider the importance of the big 5 model as it will give you all the tools you need to understand where the leaders in your organisation may secretly be hiding.

For example, you may think that an extrovert may be a good leader. Although extraverts tend to show good leadership skills, be sociable and encourage discussions, research has suggested that too many extroverts in a team can actually cause a decrease in effectiveness.

Whilst extroversion is typically the strongest characteristic, followed by conscientiousness, openness to experience, neuroticism and finally agreeableness being the least common, you want to think about what makes a good leader.

For example, conscientiousness, or self-discipline, is one of the most important factors in a leader, particularly under stressful situations when responsibility and reliability is pertinent.

What you get with a conscientious leader is someone who is diligent over individual tasks, and will stay with them until completed and therefore, trust is put in their direction as someone who is reliable. Something like being a reliable individual is also closely related to intelligence on the matter at hand. While there may be many other forms of intelligence that the individual may lack, knowledge about the relevant situation is key.

Openness to experience is important when leading a team. Leaders will find themselves in situations that are out of their hands, a constantly evolving situation where if there is an unexpected issue or there is something coming down the pipeline, their ability to take executive decisions is only a positive. There is also a level of creativity that comes with openness and in difficult situations or confusing times, a resourceful leader - usually high in openness is a benefit.

The two of the big 5 least attractive to leadership roles are neuroticism and agreeableness. The former will find teams being led by someone unsure of the decisions being made and potentially worse, being scared about the decision being made so no decision is made at all. The latter may have more people skills but that doesn’t mean that they have leadership traits. They may find themselves pleasing people rather than actually keeping the task in mind.

One of the key components to all of this however is that the Big 5 is not definitive and does not mean leaders can be predicted based on personality types. Other factors are far more important to appointing and training leaders, but this is a helpful exercise for those looking to reach leadership positions.

We can successfully measure personality traits with different tools and techniques. All in all, these tests are trying to discover how much your behaviour varies from high to low in the five traits which include; Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism.

Traditionally, a big 5 personality test is taken with a questionnaire and a multiple choice response.

For example, these questions will ask how much a person agrees or disagrees that he or she is someone who exemplifies various specific statements, such as:

The responses, Strongly agree to Strongly Disagree (with alternatives in between) will determine to what scale the person may be grouped into different personality traits.

Assessments based on the big 5 personality tests are very reliable, provided that sufficient research has been carried out and substantiated.

It is, to date, the most scientifically validated and reliable psychological model to measure personality. It is used to help predict behaviour as well as personality.

It remains a dependable model that businesses and scientific studies have been able to use consistently over a long period of time in helping to create new models, which predict someone’s behaviour at work, response to stressful situations and even understanding aspects of recorded social studies.

When hiring employees (or testing current ones), the big 5 personality traits help us understand behaviour in the workplace and accurately predict, in many cases, future performance. Each personality type will have an impact within the working environment and amongst other staff. Being able to identify where there could be a positive or negative impact can help influence decisions around hiring or retaining staff.

A candidate with a high openness score would be willing to learn new skills and tools. Presented with more abstract problems, they are more likely to think of abstract solutions and would be focused on tackling new problems that were perhaps previously overlooked.

Candidates with a high conscientiousness score wouldn’t necessarily be sat at their desk until midnight every evening! They would however be keen to get their work done, meet deadlines and be a self-starter; requiring little hand-holding to get the task done. Someone scoring low on the other hand, would need a lot more focus, time and attention to the task at hand.

The ideal extraversion scores would depend on the role you’re hiring for. Seen by many to be leaders in a team, a high extraversion score would do well in environments where they thrive off interaction with others:; sales, marketing & PR all require a level of people- facing skills. More technical job setups where specific focus or a degree of isolation is needed would, however, not be a good fit.

A candidate who shows high agreeableness would suit a role where personal skills and an ability to be at the service of others are needed. Of course, the opposite would be bad in a strong team environment and cause significant issues in order to work towards a common goal or task.

Finally, a candidate who exhibits high neuroticism will not be suited to a role where there are consistent changes, tasks that require strong self-starter tendencies or high stress levels. Those with low neuroticism scores will, however, thrive in these kinds of workplace scenarios.

These traits help us to understand how we may behave in the future, in our workplace and under certain circumstances as. For businesses, they can identify future talent, derailers and even potential for success.

The Thomas Workplace Personality Test covers areas of personality testing based on Big 5 theory. Also known as the High Potential Trait Indicator (or HPTI), it provides valuable insight into a person's strengths and potential derailers, including their leadership potential.

Developed by Ian MacRae and Adrian Furnham in 2006, the HPTI has been designed based on an ‘optimality’ model, which assumes that personality traits can be considered ‘optimal’ based on the requirements of a particular job role or position, such as senior executive leadership.

Want to find out your dominant positive characteristics? Complete our free questionnaire and we will rate all 58 character traits specifically for you based upon your answers. We also provide a downloadable PDF summary that explains how to interpret your results.

Accepting - Able or willing to accept something or someone.

Admiring - Feeling or showing esteem and admiration for someone or something; warm approval.

Brave - Ready to face and endure danger, pain, difficulty or challenges; showing courage; courageous, fearless, valiant.

Confident - Feeling or showing confidence in oneself; self-assured; self-confident.

Cooperative - Involving mutual assistance in working toward a common goal; collaborative.

Creative - Relating to or involving the imagination or original ideas, especially in the production of an artistic work.

Curious - Eager to know or learn something.

Decisive - Having or showing the ability to make decisions quickly and effectively; settling an issue; producing a definite result.

Determined - Having made a firm decision and being resolved not to change it; processing or displaying resolve; purposeful, resolute.

Disciplined - Possessing discipline; self-control, showing controlled behavior.

Dynamic - Positive in attitude and full of energy and new ideas; energetic, active.

Empathetic - Showing an ability to understand and share the feelings of another.

Enthusiastic - Having or showing intense and eager enjoyment, interest, or approval; passionate.

Fair - Impartial and honest; free from self-interest, prejudice, or favoritism; just, equitable.

Flexible - Ready and able to change so as to adapt to different circumstances; adaptable, accommodating.

Focused - When a person pays particular attention to something; to concentrate attention or effort.

Forgiving - Ready and willing to forgive; compassionate, merciful, humane.

Generous - Showing kindness toward others; showing a readiness to give more of something, as money or time, than is strictly necessary or expected; giving.

Genuine - Truly what something is said to be; authentic; real, actual, original, true.

Grateful - Feeling or showing an appreciation of kindness; thankful; appreciative, indebted.

Happy - Feeling or showing pleasure or contentment; cheerful, content, joyful.

Hardworking - Tending to work with energy and commitment; diligent.

Honest - Free of deceit and untruthfulness; sincere; truthful, direct, candid, forthright.

Hopeful - Feeling or inspiring optimism about a future event.

Humorous - Having or showing a sense of humor; causing laughter or amusement; funny; amusing, laughable, comical.

Independent - Free from outside control; not depending on another's authority; not depending on another for livelihood or subsistence; self-sufficient.

Intelligent - Having or showing intelligence, especially of a high level; brilliant, bright, sharp.

Kind - Having or showing a friendly, generous, and considerate nature; affectionate or loving.

Loving - Feeling or showing love, affection, great care or warm regard; affectionate.

Loyal - Giving or showing firm and constant support or allegiance to a person or institution; faithful, devoted.

Modest - Unassuming or moderate in the estimation of one's abilities or achievements; unpretentious, humble.

Motivated - Provided with a motive; having an incentive or a strong desire to do well or succeed in some pursuit; inspired, driven, encouraged.

Nurturing - To take care of, feed, and protect someone or something, and help him, her, or it to develop; help or encourage.

Open-Minded - Willing to consider new ideas; unprejudiced.

Optimistic - Filled with hope and confident about the future.

Organized - Having one's affairs in order so as to deal with them efficiently; orderly.

Outgoing - Friendly; socially confident; unreserved, extrovert.

Patient - Able to accept or tolerate delays, problems, or suffering without becoming annoyed or anxious.

Perceptive - Having or showing sympathetic understanding or insight; notice and understand things that many other people do not.

Polite - Having or showing behavior that is respectful and considerate of other people.

Positive - Constructive, optimistic, or confident.

Practical - Of or concerned with the actual doing or use of something rather than with theory and ideas; likely to succeed or be effective in real circumstances; hands-on, pragmatic.

Relaxed - Free from tension and anxiety; at ease.

Reliable - Consistently good in quality or performance; able to be trusted; dependable.

Reserved - Slow to show emotions or opinions; quiet, private.

Resilient - Able to withstand or recover quickly from difficult conditions; tough.

Respectful - Feeling or showing deference and respect.

Responsible - Having an obligation to do something, or having control over or care for someone, as part of one's job or role; accountable.

Sensitive - Having or displaying a quick and delicate appreciation of others' feelings; careful; delicate; diplomatic; subtle.

Serious - Acting or speaking sincerely and in earnest, rather than in a joking or halfhearted manner; earnest, sincere, wholehearted.

Skilled - Having or showing the knowledge, ability, or training to perform a certain activity or task well.

Spiritual - Sacred and spiritual connection of the spirit; relating to, consisting of, or affecting the spirit; sacred matters, religious values, virtues and beliefs.

Steadfast - Resolutely or dutifully firm and unwavering; committed, dedicated.

Strong - Having or marked by great physical or intellectual power; having great resources (talent); not mild or weak; powerful.

Thoughtful - Showing consideration for the needs of other people; showing careful consideration or attention; caring; understanding; sympathetic.

Thrifty - Using money and other resources carefully and not wastefully; frugal, prudent, economical.

“Your mindset is about what you see, think, and believe. … It is the internal lens through which you see and navigate life. Mindset influences everything you see, as well as everything you do.”

Mindset is who you really are at your core. It’s your habitual way of thinking. While it’s not easy to change, the purpose of life is to evolve and become better a human being. So you should think about these human qualities from time to time and always endeavor to do better. Your mindset is what really differentiates you from your peers. If you work hard at developing what Jo Wong likes to call your human qualities, you’ll set yourself up for success in work and in life.

“Men acquire a particular quality by constantly acting in a particular way.”—Aristotle

Having the right mindset can be a competitive advantage when you’re seeking employment or advancement. According to Reed and Stoltz:

“Given the choice between someone with the desired mindset who lacks the complete skillset for the job and someone with the complete skillset who lacks the desired mindset, a total of 96 percent of the employers surveyed picked mindset over skillset as the key element in those that they seek and retain.”

These employers also believe that it’s much more likely that a person with the right mindset will be able to develop the required skillset than that a person with all the hard skills would develop the right mindset. Plus, the tactical skills that jobs require change over time, while the desired mindset is a constant. This is especially true of user experience jobs. The tactical skills that it takes to be a UX professional are forever evolving.

There are several qualities that it is especially important for UX professionals to have. These qualities are at the core of what makes UX professionals successful: empathy, intuition, creativity, passion, and the desire to learn throughout their career.

empathy—“The ability to understand and share the feelings of another.” —Oxford Dictionaries

First and foremost, UX professionals must be empathetic. As a UX professional, the primary focus of your work is on the wants and needs of the people who use the products that you create. Empathy enables you to understand other people’s motivations, needs, and emotions more deeply, and you can use that understanding to create better products for them. Having empathy lets you accurately perceive people’s needs—without your own lens introducing any distortions or occlusions. Whether you’re a UX researcher, strategist, or designer, empathy is an essential quality for you to develop. Being empathetic lets you look at things from different people’s perspectives and internalize what you see.

Having empathy—whether for colleagues, family, or friends—comes from focusing on someone else’s needs, struggles, and feelings. It requires that you open your heart to them and put their needs before your own. That you be fully with them in the moment. That you look deeply into their eyes and really see them for who they are. You need to be open to many different types of people from many different cultures. But you can’t connect with people when you’re feeling worried, defensive, angry, frightened, or ashamed.

“Empathy is about standing in someone else’s shoes, feeling with his or her heart, seeing with his or her eyes. Not only is empathy hard to outsource and automate, but it makes the world a better place.”—Daniel H. Pink

“If there is any one secret of success, it lies in the ability to get the other person’s point of view and see things from that person’s angle, as well as from your own.”—Henry Ford

intuition—“The ability to understand something immediately, without the need for conscious reasoning.”—Oxford Dictionaries

Having intuition is being open to the mysterious workings of your own mind—seeing what is or what might be clearly in your mind’s eye. Sometimes, through intuition, holistic solutions to problems may arise fully formed—or very nearly so—from your subconscious mind. At other times, your intuition may give you just the seed of a great idea. Intuition lets you draw connections between diverse inputs without conscious thought. The effort lies in gathering the relevant data for your subconscious mind to work on.

Intuition often plays a strong role in decision making. You rely on intuition when you must make decisions and take action on them very quickly, the problem or the solution is ambiguous, or there's no precedent to follow.

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”—Albert Einstein

“You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”—Steve Jobs

“Sometimes making a decision is hard, not because it is unpopular, but because it comes from your gut and defies a technical rationale. Much has been written about the mystery of gut, but it’s really just pattern recognition, isn’t it? You’ve seen something so many times you just know what’s going on this time. The facts may be incomplete or the data limited, but the situation feels very, very familiar to you.”—Jack Welch

creativity—“The use of the imagination or original ideas, especially in the production of an artistic work.”—Oxford Dictionaries

Being creative is allowing your intuition to reveal possibilities to you and following them in the moment—in other words, it’s being in flow, which Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi defines in his book Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience,as follows:

“The best moments usually occur when a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile. Optimal experience is thus something we make happen. … [Flow is] a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it. … [Flow lets people] achieve a joyous, self-forgetful involvement through concentration, which in turn is made possible by a discipline of the body.”

What prompted Csikszentmihalyi to do research on the flow state? According to Wikipedia:

“Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and his fellow researchers began researching flow after Csikszentmihalyi became fascinated by artists who would essentially get lost in their work. Artists, especially painters, got so immersed in their work that they would disregard their need for food, water, and even sleep. Thus, the origin of research on the theory of flow came about when Csikszentmihalyi tried to understand this phenomenon experienced by these artists.”

Being in flow is a sort of meditative bliss state, in which your mind is more fully concentrated than at just about any other time. Great ideas come to you when you lose yourself in your work. Some of the best creative experiences come from working in collaboration with others—especially when you can achieve a flow state together. Flow brings joyfulness to your work.

Flow is all about focus, which is the antithesis of the monkey-mind nature of most people’s experience of the Web—with the mind jumping quickly from one thing to another. Just as with meditation, you can get better at calming your mind and connecting with your creativity through practice, practice, practice.

The source of creativity is your imagination. When creating, you synthesize all of the ideas that you’ve taken in from myriad sources and, magically, all of those inputs fall into place, forming a cohesive whole. This is your intuition at work.

All creativity involves improvisation—whether you’re designing user experiences, acting on a stage, jamming with a band, doing some form of creative writing, or making up a new recipe.

“To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle requires creative imagination.”—Albert Einstein

“Creativity is just connecting things. … Creative people … [are] able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.”—Steve Jobs

“The organizations of the future will increasingly depend on the creativity of their members to survive. Great Groups offer a new model in which the leader is an equal among Titans. In a truly creative collaboration, work is pleasure, and the only rules and procedures are those that advance the common cause.”—Warren Bennis

“Creativity is contagious.”—Albert Einstein

passion—“An intense desire or enthusiasm for something.”—Oxford Dictionaries

Being an effective UX professional requires great drive, enthusiasm, and focus. To sustain the level of effort and concentration that the work demands, you must have a passion for your work. With passion, your work ceases to feel like work. Your passion keeps you focused on your goals, enables you to get things done and take risks when necessary, and makes it possible for you to realize your vision. Always strive to do great work! Don’t settle for less. Don’t compromise on quality.

Love your work and you’ll have the motivation to continually hone your skills and expand your areas of competency, as you must forever do in this field. When you work with passion, you can reach your full potential.

“Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.”—Steve Jobs

“Pleasure in the job puts perfection in the work.”—Aristotle

“You have to be burning with an idea, or a problem, or a wrong that you want to right. If you’re not passionate enough from the start, you’ll never stick it out.”—Steve Jobs

learning—“The acquisition of knowledge or skills through experience, study, or by being taught.”—Oxford Dictionaries

Being a life-long learner is a quality of successful people. Having the motivation and the ability to learn and grow throughout your life is an essential quality in today’s fast-changing world—especially for UX professionals. You can learn through reading and deep reflection—but most of all you’ll learn through life experience. You can learn by questioning things—and asking the right questions enables you to solve problems. Often, you’ll learn from your mistakes, so life-long learning requires that you have the courage to keep taking risks.

In a field that is as broad and fast-changing as user experience, it’s important that you keep learning throughout your career. Sustaining your commitment to continuous learning takes curiosity about the world in which you live and a desire to improve your mind. The more you learn, the more you can contribute in the workplace and the more likely you’ll advance in your career.

• loyal.
• generous.
• kind.
• sincere.
• persistent.
• open-minded.
• brave.
• quiet.