I’ve just taken an online Enneagram test.

Quite good fun it was too.

Any personality test which tells me more about who I am, my traits, quirks, habits & preferences is like catnip to me.  I could gorge on these tests and bask in the results they spit out for hours.

Here are some of the statements I was asked to rank on a scale of 1 to 5:

“I have a major interest in self-improvement”

(ummm - I write about it every day!)

“It’s important to me to be successful”

(how are you defining “successful”?)

“I always finish my chores”

(can you finish a chore you don't start?)

Anyway, turns out I’m a 5 on the Enneagram chart.

From the website:

Enneagram 5’s are alert, insightful, and curious. They’re also independent, innovative, and inventive but can become preoccupied with their thoughts and have a tendency to over-analyse. They can also be detached, highly-strung and intense. They might have problems with eccentricity, nihilism, and isolation but at their best they can be visionary pioneers, often ahead of their time, and able to see the world in an entirely new way.

Sounds about right. 

It pretty much confirms all the other personality tests I’ve taken over the years, from Myers-Briggs to Insights Discovery and even a Snow White & The 7 Dwarves personality test I spotted on Dimstagram a few weeks ago.

(I’m Dopey)

But this is the bit which gets me pondering:

To what extent am I alert, curious & independent because that’s just who I am?  

And to what extent is this my personality because one day, many moons ago, someone told me I was independent, alert & curious and I’ve lived up to these traits ever since?

And not just lived up to them but breathed life into them so every time I take another personality test, it re-confirms & deepens these traits all over again like an echo chamber.

I’m sure the personality test gurus will read this in horror and tell me that a personality test is a measurement the same way a ruler measures the length of a banana.

i.e. a personality is an output, not an input.

I’m not so sure though.

I mean, it’s possible I’m over-thinking it.

(more than possible – I’m a 5 after all!)

But my mind keeps going back to this quote from the American philosopher and big cheese Thoreau:

“I know of no rule which holds so true as that we are always paid for our suspicion by finding what we expect”

So what if our personalities are simply reflections of what we’ve been led to expect about ourselves?

Something to ponder perhaps.

That’s all for today.

 - Tom