You can learn a lot about yourself from some surprising sources.
No, I’m not asking what it says about you that the most-frequently visited place in your browser history is a My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic bulletin board and fan fiction website.
Still, the internet does make available a plethora of tools you dudes can use to learn a bit about yourself. For instance, I was reading an article about introverts and extroverts and how to tell the difference between the two, which is a bit more difficult in some cases than others, and I realized that I do display a tremendous amount of signs that point to my being an introvert. Especially when it comes to interacting with people in person. It’s exhausting.
Personally, that’s something I think is the defining characteristic difference between the two. Interacting with people is exhilarating for an extrovert and exhausting for an introvert.
I also had occasion recently to do a little research into diagnosing for attention deficit disorder, or ADD. Most assuredly, this is something that should be left for the professionals. However, I find these sorts of tests to be useful in helping you to assess whether a behavior or suite of behaviors is something that needs to be brought to a professional.
The good folks at ADDitude Magazine, a magazine for people living with ADD and for people caring for those people, posted a link to a pretty good screening test for ADD.
This questionnaire was adapted from the ASRS Screener developed by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Workgroup on Adult ADHD. It is intended for people ages 18 and older. If you answer yes to a significant number of these questions, consult a licensed mental health practitioner. An accurate diagnosis can only be made through clinical evaluation.
Yeah, what they said.
I realize there could be quite a bit of observational bias here. (That is, you dudes see what you’re looking for. AKA the Odyssey Effect. I never saw a Honda Odyssey on the road until I purchased one and then saw them everywhere.) Still, I found that I was answering yes to a lot of these questions. Well, I was answering yes to a lot of the questions when I wasn’t flipping over to other pages, or getting up to get a few other things done while I waited impatiently for the next question to load.
“I often have trouble wrapping up the final details to a project when all the interesting stuff has already been done.”
That’s a big yes.
Whether or not we can depend on these sorts of tests, whether or not the insights gleaned from them are anything more than the gross overgeneralizations you’d get from a lot of the stuff you get on the internet, at least they can give you a place to start.
