Not everyone believes in a pre-ordained destiny or fate, but everyone can agree that time passes by to create the future. What also creates the future is every decision that we make in the present to build towards that future. The ultimate factor that determines how we make every decision is called our character.

Our character is defined by our values and behavioral patterns that we are not always cognizant of. When we choose to engage in harmful mindsets, those mindsets can lead to harmful patterns that are much more difficult to be liberated from. That is called a positive feedback loop. The more a person engages in an activity or pays attention to something, the more they feed the feedback loop. One example is when someone eats a snack like potato chips. The more a person eats potato chips, the more that person will want to keep eating them. Also, the more often a person resists temptation to unhealthy food, the easier it is to not eat that unhealthy food later. Every time a person behaves a certain way, they begin the process of creating a pattern. This is because of neuroplasticity.

Neuroplasticity is the process in which your brain’s neural synapses and pathways are altered as an effect of environmental, behavioral, and neural changes. When certain behaviors are engaged, correlational synapses and pathways are engaged. The more a person engages in the same behavior, the stronger those neural connections are, and thus people are more likely to engage in the same behavior. The other difficulty is synaptic pruning. As people ignore previous skills, the neural connections that once made those skills possible are pruned away from disuse. The more we pay attention to something, the more it becomes a part of us, literally and figuratively. The more we ignore something, the less it is a part of us, literally and figuratively. You could say the brain and its neural connections are like a plant that needs to be watered.

Character is mostly defined as a person’s personality, disposition, temperament and mentality. Since a person’s tastes and values are directly correlated with what they pay the most attention to, these tastes and values and shape a person’s character. Every behavioral pattern contributes to a person’s character, which further contributes to more behavioral patterns. Thus, our character determines our future. Regardless of anyone’s spiritual beliefs, we can all believe based on scientific evidence that character can shape our destiny and is therefore, extremely important.