Stop Taking Personality Quizzes: Discover the Science-Backed Test That Reveals ‘Your Hidden Genius’
Co-author of a groundbreaking new book, Betsy Wills is on a mission to help you unlock "your hidden genius" — what you're best at! Betsy shows people of ALL AGES how identifying our aptitudes can completely change our lives. Image: iStock
Experts have long criticized standard personality tests like Disk and Myers Briggs, noting their shortcomings in helping us choose or change career paths. They show our interests, but interests change. Our aptitudes, however, do not. People are leaving opportunities unexplored, which often means leaving money (or joy!) on the table. Enter the new book Your Hidden Genius by Betsy Wills and Alex Ellison.
We sat down with Betsy Wills, co-founder of YouScience — a psychometric assessment service that institutions use nationwide — to hear about the new book that shows ANYONE how to unlock their “hidden genius.” You’ll want to add this book to your cart ASAP!
This groundbreaking (and FUN) assessment is so much more than a personality test.
The experience of taking the brain games was exhilarating, in a word. And nostalgic, humbling, and challenging to add a few more. Without giving too much away (everyone should get this book and take the assessment!), you’ll take a 90-ish-minute-long series of timed tests that evaluate many aptitudes:
How well can you 3D visualize? How do you describe an abstract shape? How much did you retain about fractions? And how quickly can you decide if two numbers are the same or different?
Of the 52 different aptitudes that can be assessed, Betsy chose the 14 most impactful ones for career navigation. “We couldn’t give this assessment all day!” she laughs. The cool thing is you cannot “game” this system. There’s only a little bit of self-reporting.
Most other standard tests out there are “like a boomerang,” Betsy explains. “You do get to the right answer because they ask you the same question 50 different times. But they have nothing to do with your aptitudes. They point you to, maybe, how you’re going to relate to people at work, but they don’t actually point you to a job.”
Aptitude testing has worked wonders in the government for decades.
Aptitude testing has been around since the 1920s, and by the 1940s, the US government was using it to put a million people to work in the military. “They needed to figure out who would learn the fastest how to jump out of the plane, fly the plane, and even guide the plane onto the aircraft carrier. These are very different abilities,” Betsy explains. “And remember, aptitudes are the seeds of your skills, not the skills themselves, so it was like a sorting hat.”
Psychometrics has well-researched this, but until about 10 years ago, these assessments were only delivered one-on-one or in a classroom with someone timing them. And it was expensive to get the testing in schools, organizations, and workplaces. Betsy’s company seeks to change this.
Now, schools and people like you and me have aptitude testing at our fingertips.
High schools have been limited to using the interest survey because it maps to a vast database of jobs called O*NET. “But if you only sort for interest, you’re only getting a rough cut,” Betsy says. “When you use aptitudes, you’ll get a really fine sift. That’s why we’ve been skeptical of high school and college guidance counseling. They’ve been using such a rough tool.”
Betsy’s company fuels this magically intricate aptitude testing, reporting, and resource-giving machine. The test is now used in 25% of all US high schools and growing. “I think of it as career management 3.0. It’s like leeches were in medicine. And now we’ve got the MRI machine,” she says.
Aptitudes don’t change; interests do.
Betsy explains that after puberty, your aptitudes don’t change. “If you see your two-year-old lining up Cheerios evenly across the countertop, that’s an early spatial ability coming out. Some kids are building the Taj Mahal out of Legos by age nine. But things like inductive reasoning and sequential reasoning tend to come out later,” she says.
Betsy is a regular guest lecturer at Vanderbilt University and New York University Stern School of Business and has been a featured speaker for TEDx Women. It’s a great idea to watch her TEDx talk, which offers a hilarious anecdote about nurturing an assumed and untested aptitude in her daughter from a young age:
Think of planting a seed. If you don’t water it with learning and practice, it won’t grow. Some people have certain seeds that are more likely to get big and strong than others that will need a lot more care and nurturing to get there. “It’s nurture helping nature. We have favored nurture for so long in this country. Grit. The ‘You can do anything’ mindset we instill in our kids. I think that’s the wrong approach,” Betsy says.
What I uncovered after the brain games
Once I took the tests, the results and access to the portal were available almost immediately. Betsy first walked me through the job search tool. I saw overall fit, interest fit, and aptitude fit. Overall fit is a combination of interests and aptitudes — a new way to explore careers. There were some I’d never thought of, like a curator.
“This doesn’t just have to be in a museum,” Betsy explains as I click through all the different types of curators. I saw dozens of possible jobs within this genre that I didn’t even know about. “Think of these career matches as guidance or areas to explore. I’m not saying you’re in the wrong job. You can have all the aptitude in the world to be a curator but no interest. It’s all about exploration,” she adds.
Not only can you see the best-matched jobs, but it shows related job titles, descriptions of each job, a “day in the life” scenario, salary range, how much school is involved, the aptitudes involved, the best certifications to have, the majors to take … just SO much information. You can also see where in the country most of the jobs exist. I couldn’t stop tinkering with this tool, and I have no desire for a new job. It made me think about volunteer opportunities, hobbies I could take up, and boards I could join.
You obtain a language with which to describe yourself
You also get a Discussion Guide that can help with cover letters, interview prep, LinkedIn bios, and cold emails to potential employees. “We wrote lots of first-person sentences about you, and yours will look different than mine,” Betsy says. She suggests picking the six sentences that really ring true, loading them into ChatGPT, and asking it to write a narrative about you.
You’re happy in your job, so what would you even do with this info? (A LOT!)
Betsy doesn’t care where you are in your career; there’s no downside to knowing these things. This isn’t just a tool for finding the right job. “It affects your relationships, parenting, job, everything to have this language. If your work does not nurture your aptitudes, find an outlet for them,” Betsy suggests.
“This is something so important to me, our society, and everybody,” she says. “If I had a nickel for every time I’ve heard, ‘I wish I’d had this when I was in school …”
To sum it up, Betsy says it’s all about empathy and love.”It’s about not seeing other people as flawed versions of us,” she says. “When you have this information, your capacity to manage yourself better and bring out the best in other people is really enhanced, and that’s why I do it.”
You can find out more about Betsy and Alex’s new book here.
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Zoe Yarborough
Zoe is a StyleBlueprint staff writer, Charlotte native, Washington & Lee graduate, and Nashville transplant of eleven years. She teaches Pilates, helps manage recording artists, and likes to "research" Germantown's food scene.