Detailed and Reliable — LOW
Nurturing – LOW
Tough — LOW
Today I went through a part of Ray Dalio’s personality test. It takes 40 minutes to complete. I gave up after just 10. But based on those 10 minutes, Dalio’s test still spit out an uninspiring estimate of who I am (results above).
You’ve probably heard of Dalio. He’s a billionaire investor. A few years ago, he wrote an influential book about his way of thinking, called Principles. Well, now he has released a free online personality test, called Principles You.
Dalio got enthusiastic about personality tests a while back. He started by giving a bunch of his employees the Myers-Briggs.
“It gives you clarity of how people think!” Dalio said.
And to prove his point, he had those same employees fill out a survey after they got the test results. “How accurately does this describe the way you think?” 85% gave it a 4 or 5 on a scale of 1-5.
Impressive, except:
If you’ve been reading my blog over the past few weeks, you’ll know I recently wrote about cold reading. That’s when you tell people something about themselves without knowing anything about them.
In the very first cold reading experiment, all the way back in 1949, 39 students were all given the same personality profile. It came straight out of a horoscope.
And after reading their profile, 34 out of 39 students gave the profile either a 4 or a 5 on a scale of 1-5. That’s 87%. A finding that has been replicated since, and not just by Dalio.
But what the hell do I know?
I’m just some guy. And Ray Dalio is a billionaire.
Maybe his Principles You test really is more useful and accurate than a horoscope.
Either way, all I really want to suggest is that, up and down the success and skepticism ladders, people love categorizing others… and they LOOOVE being categorized themselves.
I think those two loves come from very different drives. I won’t get into that here. But I will leave you with this:
Entire businesses have been built by putting people into buckets. (Michael Gerber’s E-Myth comes to mind.) And if you need a unique mechanism… or you need a unique position in the market… then perhaps you can get started by creating a new diagnostic test. My suggestion for a name? Buckets You.
On a related note:
If you are honest, ambitious, and reliable, then you might get a lot of value out of subscribing to my email newsletter. Click here to try it out.