An egomaniacal social experiment
Wednesday, May 5, 2010 at 8:37PM The results are in. A few weeks ago, while working on a Master’s program application, I had a revelation. After having just finished answering an essay question pertaining to my perceived best and worst qualities, I realized that the material I had produced was severely lacking. How could I be satisfied with my own highly biased and subjective view of my own best and worst qualities? I needed objective data!
So I made a list of the 30 people I believe to know me best in a professional context. I then proceeded to create an anonymous survey using Google Docs, prompting these 30 individuals to list my three best and two worst qualities as they saw them. In exchange I promised to not only reveal and submit the results of the survey in the aforementioned application, but also to publicly post the unfiltered results right here on my blog.
So here they are... the unfiltered results. 16 people were graceful enough to respond. The ones who didn’t respond have likely changed their minds as to my sanity. Please feel free to view the Google Spreadsheet.
I also took the liberty to somewhat subjectively group the answers into “categories” for the purposes of plotting them. Here are some pretty charts (click images to enlarge):
;)
My Best Qualities
;)
My Worst Qualities
I was vas very happy and surprised to see that the results strongly coincided with the qualities I had listed about myself before I initialized this egomaniacal experiment.
Thank you to all who indulged me by participating.
UPDATE: I want to emphasize that the questions were completely open-ended. Check out the spreadsheet to see exactly what participants wrote.
Reader Comments (7)
Cool!
Seems to be something one should do in the future. Thanks for the tip! Hate the question "what is you three best/worst qualities" at job interviews...
As one of those who answered, it's nice to see the results! Especially considering they perhaps helped you to a successful application :)
It probably did help me to a successful application, but I think the real value was for my own self reflection. Thanks for participating :)
I admire your approach to this subject. An courageous of you to post it for everyone to see. Though I suess that if you go public with your strengths and weaknesses you have to think even more about them, right?
Thank you! So kind of you to say so!
I guess I'm just comfortable enough with myself at this point to take a hard, realistic look at myself with little or no sugarcoating involved. Going public with this information does not feel like a big deal since I'm already going public with these qualities just by openly and honestly interacting with people every day. All I'm doing with this survey is making the information visible to me as well, so that I may continue in the right direction with my personal development.
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