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To go along with the Tickle Test Results, here is a description of me from the Chinese Zodiac, taken from a placemat at the chinese restaurant Jonna and I had dinner at last night.

You are very intelligent and are able to influence people. An enthusiastic achiever, you are easily discouraged and confused. Avoid Tigers. Seek a Dragon or a Rat.

Definitely an enthusaistic achiever, definitely easily discouraged. I take great umbrage at the confused comment, but I can’t figure out whether its true or not. Oh, whatever — I give up.

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I found a site called Tickle that has a slew of career oriented tests, many available for free after registration. I became curious so I decided I would take the time and take some of the tests, just for the hell of it. The first was the Right Job / Wrong Job test, which purports to tell you what kind of personality you have and therefore what type of position you would fit best in.

After taking the test, here are the results:

As an Analytical type, you don’t want to be limited by established rules and regulations. Your inquisitive nature demands that you sometimes question authority. Otherwise, you might not be able to find fresh approaches, or come up with new solutions to a problem. It’s not that you act without weighing the pros and cons of a situation — it’s more that you’re more willing than others to take justifiable risks if they’ll further your career success.

You’re smart enough to know when you need help and are confident enough in your abilities to ask for it. You understand that sometimes there are no clear right and wrong answers, and that’s just fine with you because you tolerate gray areas better than most. In fact, pondering potential outcomes can sometimes be more interesting than coming up with the definitive solution for you.

Your right job doesn’t have to be about self-expression, but it needs to be a job you can be proud of.

Is it accurate? I would say I agree with most of it, except that I don’t think I’m driven so much by furthering my career success as I am by knowing that I’m making a difference and creating positive results. I definitely feel that established rules and regulations limit the effect one can have in an organization, because in many instances the rules can’t be changed because they exist, no matter how much they don’t make sense in the current environment. In these instances I rarely have the patience to debate with someone who doesn’t recognize that the established rules and regulations go against common sense.

There’s a good leadership development opportunity for me …

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Many times I find it helpful to remember certain things that I have heard or read in order to keep things in perspective. I really like these quotes a lot and find them really useful from time to time.

1. “Anything worth doing is worth doing badly while you learn it.” - (friend) - Not sure if he actually coined it, but I got it from him. I really like this quote a lot because I am a very impatient learner. I want to master things right away and often get discouraged if I don’t catch on to things as quickly as I feel I should. Reminding myself of this is quite helpful in allowing me to slow down and enjoy the process of learning (and accept where I’m at at a given time) rather than thinking I’m not learning things quickly enough.
2. “If it works, it’s obsolete.” - I like this one a lot too, though I cannot for the life of me remember where I ran across it. This one hits the “Continuous Improvement” button for me. Each time I get too comfortable, I remind myself of this one, so that I can continue to push myself to improve.
3. A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at. - Bruce Lee
   This is also one of my favorites. Most of the books I have read on goals stress the importance of achievable or SMART goals. While these are definitely important, some goals should be set as an ideal to strive for and may never actually be achieved. However, if your moving towards it it is good enough. The best example I can think of in recent reading is the idea of the BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) in the book Built To Last by Jim Collins. Too many people do not do anything because they feel a goal isn’t achievable, rather than just doing their best to achieve some progress towards it.
4. Any technique, however worthy and desirable, becomes a disease when the mind is obsessed with it. - Bruce Lee
   Many times when we are learning something we get obsessed with learning the step by step “process” and lose focus on the thing we are trying to master. Obsession with the “step by step” stops us from trying new things and thereby limits our growth.
5. Absorb what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own. - Bruce Lee
   This, to me, relates to number 4. Too many times we get obsessed with doing things “right”, rather than making the things we are learning a part of us. I know I do. Many times we spend time doing things that worked at one time, even though they do not work anymore and do not want to change them because “that’s how we’ve always done it”. There should always be room to throw things out if they are not useful to you and to improve things with your own unique perspective of the situation.

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