Memorial Day Personality Tests

Seven of the eight children were home at my parents this weekend. Most of the spouses weren't there and 1/2 of the nieces and nephews weren't there, but I think it still qualified as a mini reunion. We were sending Brett off on his mission in style.

Since there is usually quite a bit of unplanned time wrapped up into these types of family visits, I decided to share the http://www.mypersonality.info site with everyone. Most everyone present took the test (Scot, you will have to take it now since you are the only sibling that hasn't participated) and here are the results:

• Dad - ENTP
• Mom - INFJ
• Rebecca - INTJ
• John - ISTJ
• RaeLyn - ISFJ
• Renaye - ENFJ
• RaeAnna - INFJ
• Chris - ENFP
• Jessica - ENFJ
• Craig - ISTJ
• Amber - ENFJ
• Scot -
• Brett - ENFP

Even one of the nephews (10 years old) wanted to take the test. I guess my grandfather had often talked about how young children should take personality tests and get them started in areas of interest at a young age. It sounds like an interesting idea - as long as it was combined with the freedom to switch to something else if the pursuit ended up in less interest. When you think about it, the education system is very successful at implementing the learning methods of an outdated society. Books like the World is Flat, Microtrends and Wikinomics have continued to interest me because they talk about this change from the industrial to the knowledge worker era, but I haven't figured out a good solution to help this change take place. I guess it's not all on me, but it would be a meaningful contribution to society.

As a side note, it's also good to have a background activity (like the personality test activity) going on while in the company of family members. It provides meaningful topics of conversation to turn to when hot topics arise, advice starts to run rampant and when an uncomfortable moment occurs.

Take yours at http://www.mypersonality.info

Books - buying, reading and selling

It's always great when you can take a pile of books that were good for one round of eye contact and put them on Amazon for someone else to peruse. That's what I'm doing right now. It's 11 books to be exact. All of them were purchased in the bookstore or already used on Amazon. I could go to libraries, but I find a certain joy in actually purchasing books. Part of it is the ambiance of the bookstore and I don't know what the other part is, but I'm allowing myself to keep this habit.

Some of them are:

• Discover Your Inner Economist by Tyler Cowen
• Blink by Malcolm Gladwell - interesting
• The Wisdom of Crowds by James Surowiecki - interesting
• Crucial Confrontations by a lot of people - good for dealing with people at work
• Crucial Conversations by a lot of people - good for dealing with people at work
• Guide to Investing by Robert T. Kiyosaki (the Rich Dad, Poor Dad author) - it was a bit much information for me. He makes investing too difficult.
• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini - excellent, but sad book.
• A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini - excellent book to read on Thanksgiving Eve. I stayed up most the night reading it and became very grateful for my life and very sad for many others.

I am not selling the "Microtrends" book. It's by Mark J. Penn. It has over 50 little chapters about microtrends taking hold in the United States/World like how there will be more left handers since it's no longer negative (I'm a lefty so this is what I remember), soccer mom votes swinging elections, immigrant religions swaying votes as well as economics, more really young online millionaires, pets gaining importance in society, etc. Very interesting to see the impact of little trends on politics and economics.

Hey, while I'm typing my first book was purchased!