To become acquainted with oneself is a terrible shock. - Carl Jung

Human beings are confusing. Granted, this shouldn’t come as a great shock to most people. Personally, it only takes me a few minutes of watching TikTok to be convinced that the human mind is an inexplicable mystery. What’s especially striking, though, is how often we are equally confused about ourselves as we are about others. When we get confused about others’ behaviors, we can at least say, “Well, I can’t read their thoughts”. But this excuse doesn’t work for our own thoughts and actions. After all, we literally can read our own minds.

I have realized in recent years that most people could benefit from learning more about themselves. Although human psychology is elusive, we can strive to understand it through standardized personality testing. In my opinion, everyone should do a personality test at least once in their life.

What is a personality test? It is an attempt to describe human psychology into measurable variables, such as extroversion or neuroticism. Usually, they are conducted through self-report questionnaires. Originally, these tests were used for personnel selection in the armed forces, back in the 1920s. Since then, a wide variety of personality scales have been developed.

Some of the more common personality frameworks include the Big Five and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. It’s worth trying out a few different alternatives to find out which works best for you – personally, I’ve gained a lot by learning about the Big Five.1 There are various online tests available. For example, a detailed, but paid ($10) Big Five test is the Understand Myself assessment. There are also free alternatives, such as here and here. Some examples of Big Five alternatives include PrinciplesYou and 16Personalities.

Questionable life choices

Personally, I could have benefited from more self-knowledge back when I was in high school. Back then, I had somehow come to the conclusion that what I wanted to do with my life was to become an accountant. Becoming an accountant sounded like a good idea to me because 1) you made a lot of money, and 2) it was high status and sounded important. In hindsight, this was a terrible decision. The environment was an incredibly bad fit for me and I could not relate to my classmates whatsoever. It took me just three months to drop out of my studies and find myself back where I started.

Looking back on this experience, I realize that a poor grasp of my own personality was to blame for my misguided career choice. I had a clear plan for what my career would look like, but I had a poor grasp of how I would fit into that plan.

As Mike Tyson once said, “everybody has a plan, until they get punched in the face”. In my case, fresh out of high school, life immediately handed me an uppercut to the jaw and put me back in my place. I eventually ended up in the right place, studying computer science and artificial intelligence, and being much happier in that environment.

This experience made me realize that earlier in life, it is especially valuable to do a good amount of exploration, trying out different things to discover what you like and don’t like. Before committing to important life choices, you ideally want to test your plan with no strings attached, so you can experiment quickly and adjust your plans if things don’t work out as expected. In my case, it probably would have been sufficient to spend a summer internship at an accountancy firm to realize that my personality was a bad fit for the average personality type there.

Although it’s not uncommon for a teenager to be confused about who they are or want to be, it’s not entirely uncommon for adults to struggle with their identity as well. So, how can personality tests help?

First of all, knowing your personality type can help you to navigate career choices more effectively. For example, if you’re strongly introverted, you’re probably better off not becoming a sales person. If you’re highly disagreeable, a career as a nurse is probably not the most logical choice. If you’re high in neuroticism, you might want to avoid high stress jobs like day trading. While there are exceptions, your personality traits should already give you a pretty good idea of what not to do with your life.

Secondly, learning about personality types is a great way to collaborate more effectively with other people. It’s easier to understand people who are similar to you, but much harder to understand those who are radically different. Having a mental framework of personality is useful because at some point, we all collaborate with people who do not share our personality traits. If we don’t make an effort to understand their behavior, frustration and miscommunication are bound to occur.

Here’s an example. I recently found out about the difference between “linear” and “lateral” thinkers. A linear thinker tries to solve problems step-by-step in a structured way, while a lateral thinker tends to take a big-picture view and connects ideas in more intuitive ways. To a linear thinker, a lateral thinker can come across as chaotic and unstructured. Conversely, a linear thinker can come across as rigid and dogmatic to a lateral thinker. At the same time, these two ways of thinking are complementary, because they each have blind spots. Linear thinkers can compensate for the blind spots of lateral thinkers, and vice versa.

Finally, relationships are greatly helped by awareness of personality types. Finding a suitable partner tends to be a question of finding someone who’s personality type is at least somewhat compatible with yours. The more divergent your personality type is to that of your partner, the harder it will be to understand each other, which will inevitably lead to friction. This is not to say that one should strive to find a partner who is exactly like them, but having some overlap in terms of personality traits tends to be better than having no overlap at all.

Above all, knowledge of one’s personality should serve as a compass for making life decisions, both at the micro and macro level.

Someone who has used personality testing with great effect is Ray Dalio – one of the world’s most successful investors. He uses personality testing extensively as a tool to understand both himself and the people around him. In his company, Bridgewater, they use an idea called baseball cards to describe the personality types of employees. These baseball cards contain various personality scores obtained from personality tests, providing perspective on someone’s strengths and weaknesses, as well as their communication style. According to Dalio, striving to understand the psychology of each employee has been a crucial part of the success of the company.

Where to go from here

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that getting to know yourself is not easy – it takes time and effort to do well. In the meantime, we can use personality testing as a useful tool to bootstrap the process.

I encourage everyone to take a personality assessment at least once. It shouldn’t take more than an hour or two, and you just might gain lifelong benefits from it. That seems like a pretty good investment to me.


  1. Aside from the Big Five test itself, I’ve also learned a lot from Jordan Peterson’s lectures on this topic. ↩