I Took a Personality Test and Failed Miserably

Two years ago, I took the Big Five Aspects Scale per­son­al­ity test. 

I’ve been strug­gling with per­son­al­ity issues since adolescence. 

The prob­lem? There was a mis­match between my exist­ing tal­ents and my ambi­tions in life.

I read self-help books to get to the bot­tom of my per­son­al­ity prob­lem, but none addressed my par­tic­u­lar issues. Maybe I found the wrong books; I don’t know.

At one point, I even dealt with men­tal burnout. I took the SSRI drug Sertraline (Zoloft) for nine months. (Result? I did­n’t like it.)

I had to find a dif­fer­ent approach:

Taking the Big Five Aspects Scale Test

Two years ago, I decided to take the most researched and well-doc­u­mented per­son­al­ity test, the Big Five Aspects Scale. ¹See my test res­ults: The Identity Project: My Big Five Aspects Scale Test Results.

What did I learn?

I’m excep­tion­ally high in Openness to Experience (Openness and Intellect) and mod­er­ately low in Conscientiousness (Orderliness and Industriousness).

And sure enough: all my tal­ents are typ­ic­al for people high in Openness. No sur­prise there, perhaps. 

However, I also real­ised that my ambi­tions in life depend on being high in Conscientiousness — which I’m not.

So, Openness to Experience is in my wheel­house.
Conscientiousness isn’t.

The weird thing is that I thought I would be high in Conscientiousness.

Suppressing Openness to Experience

I’ve always admired people who are excep­tion­ally high in Conscientiousness. They’ve been my role models.

Have I been admir­ing these people because they demon­strate qual­it­ies that I lack? And has this admir­a­tion some­how giv­en me stand­ards I can­’t live up to?

Being very low in Volatility and Enthusiasm has allowed me to pre­tend to be high in Conscientiousness well enough to fool even myself.

Conversely, I’ve sim­ul­tan­eously been sup­press­ing my Openness-type talents.

This “intern­al per­son­al­ity battle” between my great but repressed Openness traits and my lim­it­ing but idol­ised Conscientiousness traits has been caus­ing me severe prob­lems for decades.

Scary — but also good to know.

How I Changed My Life Accordingly

So, how did identi­fy­ing my strengths and weak­nesses via the Big Five Aspects per­son­al­ity test help me take action?