There are Four Kinds of People in the world. The problem is that there are many kinds of four-kinds of people in the world. Which one is the right one?
There is the original and most popular – Myers Brings Personality instrument. Technically this one has sixteen types and combinations, but you get the idea. There is the DiSC, the BOSI, Doer-Thinker-Talker-Guard (DTTG), the Beever-Otter-Retriever-Lion (LOGB), KOLBE, and dozens of other matrices to group people into. It may be possible to take any two human traits and put them on perpendicular axes and make up a new matrix of four kinds of people.
While this may should tedious, it is probably the only tool we have to peer deep into the human psyche and try to understand ourselves and others. Think of each of these four-kinds like a window, a window into the human soul; a way to understand a person from different angles. BOSI for example shows you how you relate to entrepreneurship, and how important is it to know what kind of entrepreneur you are. DTTG tries to explain what motivates people. KOLBE measures action and instinct style. It turns out, style is quite a wide part of human behavior – but that’s for another conversation.
There is even a personality type I came up myself. It helps to understand how to prefer to consume and/or present data. I’ve called it the Excel-Word-PowerPoint-Visio matrix. If you understand what format people prefer to process data in you can be more effective in communicating with them. There was a boss who was 100% an Excel person. By contrast, my daughter, hated Excel since she was 10 years old. She painted all the doors in the house with dragons, flowers, and whales, and told me to “never, ever, ever make her use this program,” when I asked her to do some copy and paste with excel.
Take as many of these tests as possible. Understand how you behave, how you work, what motivates you. Just as important it is to learn what you are not and what irritates you in other people who may be the same or different than you. By going through these personality types, you will have the language to speak about yourself and others.
We recommend doing several tests; often one is not sufficient to understand the whole person. Just like a room, the more windows you have the brighter it is inside.
