Scoring my Life IQ
Muse #218 - when in doubt, make it up
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:
