Pearls&Grit

It’s always fun to take those quizzes online that predict where you should live, and what your headstone will say or who might be your celebrity twin. What makes them so fun is that sometimes, they are borderline correct.

The geniuses that create those algorithms.

I always enjoyed the more legitimate tests that ask very specific questions in effort to categorize your personality, both in strengths and in weaknesses. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is one of those tests that gives you real results in terms of the “color” of your personality.

CLICK HERE TO TAKE YOUR OWN MYERS-BRIGGS PERSONALITY TEST!

As a bandy youth in my 8th grade leadership class, at the beginning of the year, we took a personality test before we selected our team members for the year. This particular test categorized the different personalities into colors: the oranges, the blues, the golds, and the greens. Theoretically, we were supposed to choose three other people, who were three different colors from ourselves and create fierce groups of unstoppable LEADERSHIP!

My test results basically told me that I was painfully out of place in a leadership class and that I should try to blend back into the furnishings as soon as possible. It told me that although the color brown wasn’t a viable result, I was, in fact, a brown.

This meant that I neither planned the party, cooperatively provided food for the party, punctually arrived at the party, nor did I bring the party with my high levels of enthusiasm.

My brown personality just didn’t go to the party.

So, my 14 year old self turned to my fellow left-hand-side, back-row dwellers and we created our less than astonishing group of leaders. Our culminating accomplishment was the time we took our assigned hallway bulletin board and removed every scrap of paper and every lingering staple. We stripped that board down to its very bones of spongy cork, then spent a week cutting out large, black block letters that we arranged on our board to say: USE YOUR IMAGINATION. (I thought it was very pithy.)

As an aside, I am happy to report that despite our lack of enthusiasm in 8th grade leadership class, we have all turned into well-adjusted and successful adults. Take that Mr. Kohler! (And if you read this by some crazy strange stroke of the universe, we’re also sorry). As another aside, this was also the class in which I was so bored, I stapled my finger just to see what would happen. It hurt and it made a dreadful popping sound.

These days, as an adult (at least in years), I have cultivated myself into what I would consider a well-rounded introvert.

Now, I may even attend the party.

What kind of personality do you consider yourself? What was your color when you took those personality assessment? Let me know! I am genuinely curious how you feel about your results!