Personal Assessment

I've been doing lots of meta-cognition in the past few days, and I've been really interested in sociology (how to persuade people etcetera) and how people think. I hoped that by understanding what causes certain reactions in me, I can influence my decision-making to be less biased against others, and more neutral (less charged with emotions). Even though nothing went according to plan, but I ended up discovering some things about myself.

1) A free personality test that I took on-line tells me that I am of the personality type ENTP, in accordance to the "Jung Typology test". It tells me that I am an inventor. I got curious about the test and looked for other personality types, and found that I could easily categorise people into those categories. I am also shocked at how accurate the description of my personality type is in relation to me. How can something so deceptively simple apply to so many people yet still stay true? I am dumbfounded.

Website: http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes1.htm

2) I realised that my thinking is powered by mostly 'what ifs'. An advantage of this would be that I can quickly explore every possibility in any situation, but a disadvantage would be to choose the wrong scenarios in exams and think too far ahead in terms of answers, which will probably lead to the wrong answer. This is not very beneficial, but a trait nonetheless, thus I shall not attempt to entirely eradicate this feature of my thinking, but instead provide a mental note to not think too far ahead in exams.

3) I perform leadership roles better when under stress (a tight deadline). It is important to note the discovery that my "stress mode" (the manner in which I behave under stress) is similar to the INTJ personality type, without the planning. This means that I do everything systematically (instead of trying to find multiple ways to solve the problem, as usual) and have backup plans in case of anything. An example: There's 5 questions left in the exam and I have 10 minutes left. I rush through the questions, see which questions are easier and do them first. If a question is more difficult than expected, abandon that question for another.

I found out more about the Myers-Briggs test, and it is really interesting. Though the formulas for calculation (or the full test) have not been released onto the web (the full test requires finances), I noticed that the answers to questions relate to a single category in the simplified version of the test. I assume that the test must be a kind of quantitative assessment, seeing that all of the questions are Yes/No questions.

Dear Reader, you should really try the test. You might discover a thing or two about yourself that you never knew!