Roy Tang

It’s been a while since I took one of those internet quizzes that categorize you and try to describe your personality. I ran into this one called Sparketypes recently. Here’s my result:

Your Primary Sparketype reveals the essential nature or “driver” of the work you’re here to do (whether it’s the work you get paid to do, or not). When you do the work of your Primary Sparketype, you come alive with purpose and, fully-expressed in a healthy way, deepen into meaning, flow, connection and joy.

As a Maven, fascination is your call. You latch onto a topic, field or industry and devour everything you can know about it. Staying “surface level” just isn’t an option for you. It’s no fun. You are driven to learn, to discover, to ferret out information, wisdom, knowledge for no other purpose than the joy of learning and knowing something as fully and deeply as you can.

Your Maven’s fascination and yearning to learn might be expressed more generally, as a perpetual curiosity about everything and everyone. Or, it may be more focused on highly-specific topics or fields of interest that evolve over time, often because your ceaseless yearning to learn has largely exhausted what the topic has to offer. So, you find the next area of fascination to move on to.

For Maven’s it’s not necessarily about what you “do” with your rapidly-accumulating reservoir of wisdom. What you learn may be useful to the others, or not. When it is, you enjoy sharing it. It is a beautiful potential “by-product” that also is essential if you want to turn your Maven-ness into your living. But, when you’re really being honest, it’s not the essential reason you do it. The fact that is has value to others is more a measuring stick of the depth of your knowledge and ability to fully-express what you’ve learned than a true expression of your reason for being. Either way, the deeper driver is the quest to learn, to satisfy your perpetual, insatiable fascination.

Oh, there’s two results! I’m not sure I understand what the difference is. Here’s the second one:

Remember, your Primary Sparketype (above) represents the essential nature of the work you’re here to do. Your core driver of purpose, passion, expression and flow in work and life. Your Shadow Sparketype, on the other hand, is also a big part of you. Some may feel its call nearly as strongly. Your Shadow Sparketype most often reveals the work that you may well enjoy and have developed a high level of skill around, BUT it is also largely taken up in service of doing the work of your Primary Sparketype better.

Your Shadow Sparketype is The Scientist, which means you are driven by, and find a deep sense of satisfaction in the pursuit of an answer to a burning question, or the solution to a significant problem. But, for you, when you’re really being honest, that drive is almost always in service of doing the work of your Primary Sparketype at the higher possible level. It’s more a means than an end.

1. Many times quizzes like these are eerily accurate - which shouldn’t be a surprise since you’re the one providing the input, so the results will tend to reinforce what your own views are about yourself. I’m especially fond of the assessment of the Maven’s tendency to latch onto anything that fascinates him, since that happened to me just recently with learning Hugo and the site migration from Wordpress which I lost sleep over. I think this is one of things that makes me feel most alive - when I find a topic of interest and dive into it and lose sleep over it. Unfortunately, that happens fairly rarely nowadays and rarely lasts very long.
2. I’m slightly amused by how I’ve read so much about strategies for monetizing content on the internet that by now I can easily recognize when someone else is doing it. After sending me my Sparketype, there was also a link to a page upselling me on their “Mastery Program” which would allow me to make the most of this knowledge for $29.99. I guess it was a book or video of some sort. Exactly 24 hours after the initial results email, I got a 2nd email which was following-up and encouraging me to take a look at the program. I unsubscribed at this point, but I find it safe to assume I’m still in their database. I don’t even think I ever signed up. I’m not really the type of person who would pay for these things, so as long as I know what I’m getting into, I don’t mind tolerating the sleazy marketing for a bit.