I have never been a fan of personality tests. Even scientifically valid ones like the Big 5. When I tried some of them for each question I often ask myself what role or identity that I should respond to a question from. Because of the context of the situation, I would behave differently in varying situations. The answer for the same question is different from a work context (even there whether I am coaching a team or coaching senior management) or a family member, friend, or my spouse.

Recently I read about the “Theory of multiple intelligences” by Howard Gardner and just for fun, I wanted to score myself to see how I would rate myself. I made up a term for this exercise. I call it Life IQ. First, some assumptions that I made:

• I would give all the 10 intelligences equal ratings. This itself skews everything and loses its ability to mean something.

• I would not score myself greater than 7 in any rating so that there is always room for growth. There are no specific criteria for each rating or score. I made those up too.

• I would score myself at different ages to see what the growth has been. Only these ages were pivotal changes in my life and it was good to see where I possibly stood at each of those times.

Some interesting pictures emerged when I made sense of these patterns. I understand where my modeling struggles come from. I was not very good with my drawing and painting skills and I believe I need to work on acquiring some basic artistic skills if I need to make a breakthrough here. I understand that it is too late to become an athlete of some sort, but there is definitely good scope in improving my interpersonal skills which impede me in a variety of ways - this change is hard due to ways I am wired, but this too is possibly in the way to the progress that I am trying to make. In a big way at that.

For even more fun I scored myself at pivotal moments in my life to see how I had potentially been and when and where the growth was. Some patterns emerged including:

• I believe that most of my growth (40%) has been in the last 15 years with significant updates to my linguistic-verbal, logical, teaching, existential and naturalistic skills.

• It wouldn’t be too far of the mark to say that possibly 2/3rds of my vocabulary and English language nuances were acquired in the last 10 years

• In fact, most of my knowledge in history, psychology, neuroscience, sociology, thinking tools, coaching and teaching skills have been acquired in the last 10 years at best

• Though I wish my growth had been quicker in earlier years, I am of the firm belief that the only pathway to what happens to one in life is the lived pathway. No other imagined scenario will be therefore valid.

• I have never been athletically or musically vibrant in my life and I guess that’s me.

Any way I look at this as more of an introspection exercise. There is no meaning to these measures anyway as the scores I gave myself were all made up. In some way. And certainly not to compare with anyone else - the value of the compares was mostly to review how I have grown through time.

Was it an exercise in futility? Possibly. Was it fun? Bloody, yes!

Data set: