By: Cameron MacKenzie
I heard something the other day about Elon Musk sleeping on the floor of his factory and how that behavior, so typical of start-up founders, is evidence of a classic A-type personality.
I hate that stuff.
I don’t hate that Musk sleeps on the floor of the factory. God knows why he does that. Does he have to? Does it lead to better results? Maybe so, maybe not. Either way, Elon Musk is a unique personality, and to slap an artificial label on his behavior is just lazy.
I think that if we’re trying to understand Musk—if we really care to—the strict parameters of the A-type personality are going to lead us away from the truth of who he is. If we buy into this A-type, B-type stuff—like the media is always dying to do, like popular culture already has, like stacks of books insist upon every year—it’s going to skew our ability to really understand human behavior. And if we take that nonsense to heart, it’s going to get in the way of us being honest about ourselves.
These “types”—everything from A and B to extrovert and introvert, feeling and judging, intuitive and intellectual, tortoise and hare, however we want to slice it—it’s not based on science, it’s incredibly reductive, and it’s dangerous to promote.
For example, when I was a kid in grade school I got tested for subject area aptitude. I scored off the charts for language and below average for math. Once I heard that (facts that my father never wanted me to know) I knew which side my bread was buttered, and I doubled down on reading and writing. I read and wrote constantly, and cared so little about division and percentages and equations that, by the time the SAT rolled around, I scored highest in the school in the verbal section and (of course) was shockingly bad at math. My mother, appalled, put me in a math tutoring program and (of course) my math grade was worse the second time around.
Screw math, I thought. Who needs it? And screw the nerds that love it. And screw the black and white thinking it promotes. Etc. Etc.
Oh boy.
Because by turning my back on math, I turned my back on chemistry, biology, physics, astronomy, engineering, architecture, economics (just to name a few), not to mention nearly anything to do with a computer. That was dumb. A dumb life move, a dumb career move, a big dumb stupid kid move.
And why did I make that dumb move?
Because I was told, as a very young child, that I wasn’t, innately, good at math. I heard that label, took that label (and children are desperate for labels, for explanations, for reasons) and I let it define me. It was a relief to be told what I was and what I should do, but by accepting that label I ended up losing out on a world of possibility, AND I was completely unprepared when that world came to call, as it inevitably does.
This is why I’m so suspicious of personality tests. These labels get thrown around like they mean something, and they do, but only within the narrow confines of the situation they inaugurate. It’s about as helpful as astrology, and the big difference between astrology and astronomy is...lots and lots of math.
But people take these classifications seriously. Governments take them seriously. Corporations take them seriously. And the more we believe these words and frameworks are true, the greater the payback down the road when the hard facts of reality come to call, because reality is infinitely bigger and more complex than a silly string of Myers-Briggs letters. People need to be able to deal with multiple situations, and deal with them well, not just the ones that fit neatly into the categories. I’m not talking about job performance, I’m talking about love, heartbreak, marriage, kids, happiness.
What does Elon Musk sleeping on the floor tell us about Tesla? Nothing. I’d love to see how many CEOs slept on the floor and then drove their company into bankruptcy. But you don’t hear about those guys, because that’s closer to real life than the neat story we love to hear about the manic commitment of the CEO.
And I’ll tell you why my father never wanted me to know the results of that first aptitude test—because he was afraid my knowledge of the results would skew my behavior. He was an engineer, and he was right.
Opinions expressed here are those of the author and not necessarily those of SagePoint Financial, Inc.