Q & A 2017 07 July

Hello everyone! Great you can see me! Daniel says loud and clear, so excellent. Okay, well thanks guys for tuning in and, uh, again for offering support for the continued operation of my YouTube channel. So, um, let's get going. It's good to see all of you!

I've got a set of questions here. I can see the live stream as well, the live chat, so that's great. All right, let's try this one. What's an effective way to figure out how to match your career with your temperament? How can you determine if a job is a good fit or a terrible mistake?

Let's start with the first one: what's a good way of—oh, what's an effective way to figure out how to match your career with your temperament? Well, the first thing you do, obviously, that you have to do is to understand your temperament to some degree.

The best way to deal with that is to get yourself assessed using a good Big Five instrument. There are many of them online. We're going to be setting up a website within the next month that will enable people to use a tool that my student of mine, Colin De Young, who's now a professor at the University of Minnesota, and I, and some other co-authors developed back in, I think it was 2007, called the Big Five Aspect Scale.

It breaks the Big Five down into 10 aspects, and we'll have a version of that online, I hope, by the end of July. That's the plan that will enable people to get a read of their temperament that will tell them how extroverted they are, how high they are in negative emotion or neuroticism, how agreeable, how conscientious, and how open.

But it'll break each of those traits down into two aspects. So, extraversion breaks into enthusiasm and assertiveness; neuroticism breaks into withdrawal and volatility; agreeableness breaks down into politeness and compassion; conscientiousness into orderliness and industriousness; and openness into openness proper, which is something like creativity and interesting ideas.

So, the first thing you have to know is what your temperament is. The second thing you should probably know—and we'll probably only add this functionality to the system at some point—is what your intelligence level is, what your IQ is. Because the higher your IQ, the better suited you are for jobs whose demands change rapidly.

Most complex jobs require a combination of intelligence and conscientiousness. However, the other temperamental factors play a moderating role. For example, extroverted people tend to be entertainer types and are highly social. So, if you're interested, for example, in being extroverted, then a career in sales is something that you might consider—a career that involves a lot of public communication and interaction with groups.

Whereas if you're an introvert, you're going to want to work a lot more, um, you're going to be suited to work in a solitary manner a lot more. If you're agreeable, you're going to be suited for taking care of people. If you're disagreeable, then you're a tough bargainer and a hard negotiator.

Litigators, for example, lawyers, are often low in agreeableness. So, if you're conscientious, well, that tends to be a very good trait for any kind of managerial and administrative job, as well as for simpler jobs. It's a great predictor of military prowess, for example.

If you're high in openness, then you're going to want a creative career, and that might make you an entrepreneur or a musician or an artist or something like that. That's often very, very difficult to monetize.

But, um, one of the funny things about openness is that if you're high in openness, it's not that helpful at the bottom of hierarchies because you're basically expected at the bottom of most hierarchies to act more or less like a functionary. But it becomes of cr...