Please! Be FASCINATED with the REAL ME.
“To become more successful, don’t change who you are.
Become more of who you are.”
— — Sally Hogshead
From early childhood, I am always an odd kid who was always acting deviate from the norm. I spend more time digging things I love than regular coursework, pursuing things valuable to me than doing the right things. But looking back on my short 24 years of life, the result of choosing something I love doesn’t all turn to good results. Instead, there are more failures than successes. Inevitably, I’ve started to doubt my choices.
“Maybe I’ve always been on the wrong track; perhaps I should choose the way like normal people. ” These thoughts haunted me for years. I’ve got entangled in the choice of becoming the Real Me I like or a perfect person in other people’s eyes. I started to hesitant about my future and become more and more anxious… until I’ve found the answer from Sally Hogshead’s the Fascinate Test.
THE CATALYST! Am I?
The Fascinate Test is a simple assessment with 28 questions and helps you know how the world sees you with 49 personalities.
My test result shows that my archetype is the Catalyst, with the primary trigger — passion and secondary trigger — innovation. When I first saw this result, I doubted it. Passion and innovation, social and energizing, these words seem too upbeat for me. I’ve done the 16 Personality Test before, and it turned out I’m an introverted and quiet INFP Type, which is more appropriate to describe my personality. These two results seemingly conflicted with each other. I told my confusion to Professor Joanne in class, and she reminded me again that the Fascinate Test is not about how you perceive yourself, but how the world sees you and discover your value from other people’s perspectives. Yes, marketing is always customer-oriented; It is about how your target audience sees you! As a marketer, why I always ignore this principle in my real life?
To verify this result, I’ve asked several of my friends to describe how they perceive me; what’s the value of me fascinating them? To my surprise, it’s so aligned with the Catalyst. “Creativity and interesting, always thinking outside of the box,” “always have passion about the things you love,” “intuitively understand the feelings of others.” WOW! Although I’ve always had conversations with my friends, I haven’t discussed how they perceive me before; I haven’t known that I am actually so passionate and innovative in their eyes. This result really impressed me!
Moreover, this result boosts my confidence to interact with others. I’ve struggled with Social Anxiety for a long time since I am always worried about offending other people and having negative impressions. However, after knowing how the world sees me, the result seems not as awful as I imagined. On the other hand, it’s pretty good! This experience reminds me of Dove’s campaign, “Real Beauty Sketches.” We always have low self-esteem about ourselves and ignore that the world may perceive us in another way. Knowing this made me more optimistic about myself and the world.
With these inspiring thoughts, I am so motivated to expose more of the Real Me to this world.
“Enthusiastic Creator” may be a great tagline of Real Me.
Learning more about myself is excellent, but the more interesting is how to exploit my advantages to my future career.
I am so glad my archetype's top features are creative and enthusiastic, extremely suitable for my dream career, advertising. So the question comes to how to build my personal brand with these advantages to “fascinate” my employers and clients.
As Sally has mentioned in her TED show, it’s hard to grab one’s attention in this digital age. How can we stand out from the crowd in “9 seconds”? The solution she provides is creating your tagline with your top adjectives. I’ve chosen “Enthusiastic Creator” as my tagline, always enthusiastic about my job and using my creativity to solve the potential challenges. I will also use my advantages to connect and inspire my teammates or partners to realize our goals and objectives together.
Wow, that really sounds great and fascinating! I am too impatient to add value to my future job and the world.
The Conclusion
As I have mentioned in my welcome blog, Martin Scorsese quotes that “the most personal is the most creative.” Your value is always the things you are different from others; That’s your competitive advantage. Although I’ve doubted myself before, I now believe that “To become more successful, don’t change who you are. Become more of who you are.”
Being myself is a long and challenging journey to go, but I haven’t been so confident about who I am ever, and please, be fascinated with the Real Me!
Try the Fascinate Test, and see you down the road!
