There are several problems with this. One is that neither Ms. Briggs nor her daughter, Ms. Myers, had any qualifications in the field of psychometric testing when they designed the test. Another is that test takers often don’t settle neatly into any of the categories when they take the MBTI. They tend to be just a little more to one side of the line or the other (a little more extroverted than introverted, for example), rather than being clearly one thing or the other. Most telling, though, is that many people who repeat the test end up in a different box when they do so. It’s true in at least half of the cases, according to some studies. This suggests either that a huge percentage of the population has serious personality disorder problems, or that the test might not be such a reliable indicator of “type” after all.
My guess is that sixteen personality types might be a bit of an underestimate. My personal estimate would be closer to six billion (though I’ll need to revise that estimate in future editions of this book, because the population keeps growing).
Another test is the Hermann Brain Dominance Instrument. I feel a bit more relaxed about this one, because it talks about cognitive preferences in terms that I believe most people would find acceptable. Like the MBTI, the Hermann Brain Dominance Instrument (HBDI) is an assessment tool that uses participants’ answers to a series of questions. It doesn’t seek to put people in a box. Instead, it tries to show people which of four brain quadrants they tend to use more often.
The A quadrant (cerebral left hemisphere) relates to analytic thinking (collecting data, understanding how things work, and so on). The B quadrant (limbic left hemisphere) relates to implementation thinking (organizing and following directions, for example). The C quadrant (limbic right hemisphere) relates to social thinking (expressing ideas, seeking personal meaning). The D quadrant (cerebral right hemisphere) relates to future thinking (looking at the big picture, thinking in metaphors).
The HBDI acknowledges that everyone is capable of using each of these thinking styles, but tries to indicate which of these styles is dominant in any individual. The function of this seems to be that people are more likely to be effective at work, at play, at any pursuit, if they understand how they approach each of these tasks. Though I’m suspicious of typing people categorically, and I still think four modes may be too few, this seems to me to be a more open approach than Myers‐Briggs.
The risk in saying that there is a set number of personality types, a set number of dominant ways of thinking, is that it closes doors rather than opening them. To make the Element available to everyone, we need to acknowledge that each person’s intelligence is distinct from the intelligence of every other person on the planet, that everyone has a unique way of getting in the zone, and a unique way of finding the Element.
Do the Math
At the age of two, Terence Tao taught himself to read by watching Sesame Street, and he tried to teach other kids to count using number blocks. Within the year, he was doing double‐digit mathematical equations. Before his ninth birthday, he took the SAT‐M (a math‐specific version of the SAT given primarily to college candidates) and scored in the ninety‐ninth percentile. He received his Ph.D. at age twenty. And when he was thirty, he won a Fields Medal, considered the Nobel Prize of mathematics, and a MacArthur Fellowship.
Dr. Tao is extraordinarily gifted. He’s earned the moniker “the Mozart of Math,” and his lectures—his math lectures—draw standing‐room‐only crowds. His academic record suggests that he could have been successful in several disciplines, but his real calling, his discovery of the Element, came via math when he was still a toddler.
“I remember as a child being fascinated with the patterns and puzzles of mathematical symbol manipulation,” he told an interviewer. “I think the most important thing for developing an interest in mathematics is to have the ability and the freedom to play with mathematics—to set little challenges for oneself, to devise little games, and so on. Having good mentors was very important for me, because it gave me the chance to discuss these sorts of mathematical recreations; the formal classroom environment is of course best for learning theory and applications, and for appreciating the subject as a whole, but it isn’t a good place to learn how to experiment. Perhaps one character trait which does help is the ability to focus, and perhaps to be a little stubborn. If I learned something in class that I only partly understood, I wasn’t satisfied until I was able to work the whole thing out; it would bother me that the explanation wasn’t clicking together like it should. So I’d often spend a lot of time on very simple things until I could understand them backwards and forwards, which really helps when one then moves on to more advanced parts of the subject.”
“I don’t have any magical ability,” Dr. Tao told another interviewer. “I look at a problem, and it looks something like one I’ve already done; I think maybe the idea that worked before will work here. When nothing’s working out then I think of a small trick that makes it a little better, but still is not quite right. I play with the problem, and after a while, I figure out what’s going on. If I experiment enough, I get a deeper understanding. It’s not about being smart or even fast. It’s like climbing a cliff—if you’re very strong and quick and have a lot of rope, it helps, but you need to devise a good route to get up there. Doing calculations quickly and knowing a lot of facts are like a rock climber with strength, quickness, and good tools; you still need a plan—that’s the hard part—and you have to see the bigger picture.”
Terence Tao probably finds himself in the zone regularly. In addition to being born with rare skills, he is also extremely fortunate because he arrived at his version of the Element when he was very, very young. He found the place where his brilliance and his passion met, and he never looked back.
What we can glean from his devotion to math and the magnetic pull it has for him has resonance for all of us. I think it is significant that he discovered his passion at such a young age and could express it before he was out of diapers (I’m not certain about whether Dr. Tao was still in diapers at age two, actually; I suppose he could have been a toilet‐training genius as well). He could be what he was naturally inclined to be before the world put any restrictions on him (we’ll talk more about these restrictions later in this book). No one was going to tell Terence Tao to stop doing math because he’d make more money if he were a lawyer. In that way, he and others like him have an unencumbered path toward the Element.