Home Pastors Pastor Blogs A Love Affair with Personality.

A Love Affair with Personality.

If you spend any time watching television today, there is a chance you will be amazed at the types of characters that are famous for doing, well, nothing. They are famous simply because of the personality they have and their presence in front of a TV audience. We shouldn’t be surprised. Our culture loves to honor the spotlight, whether or not the one being made famous has much substance or not.

Look at John Wayne. I don’t know much about his personal life, but that’s beside the point. Through the characters he played, we get the impression that he’s a tough guy who drinks whisky and wins fights. Regardless of whether or not that is true in real life, his on-screen personality dictates our perception of him. Take any reality TV stars of today you’ll find the same kind of example.

I’ve been reading an incredible book about communication entitled, “The Revolutionary Communicator” by Jedd Medefind and Erik Lokkesmoe. It’s one of my favorite books that I’ve read this year. In the book they talk about a study that was done looking at American Literature since 1776. In the first 150 years, the main themes of literature emphasized character and people’s abilities to get things done. The next 50 and 25 year periods showed a dramatic increase in the emphasis of techniques and personality skills to be used to portray an image. So in short, image and personality have become more important than character and actual ability. 

In truth, personality can only take you so far. If you don’t have character and actual ability, you may be able to scrape by for a while, but sooner or later people will see what there is to be seen.

So the question is:

Are you working at building your character or building your image?

I’ll leave you with a quote from Plato: May the inner and the outer person meet.

Have a great weekend!

-SHF