If someone asked you write a 500-word autobiography, what would you say? Would you write about your volunteer work at the hospital or the winning goal you scored in double-overtime to win the championship? Would you write about your involvement in the astronomy club or your collection of classic vinyl? I guess it would depend on who was asking.
If it’s part of a university application, for example, you might talk about grades and your stint on student council. If it’s for a job application to a Fortune 500 company, you might want to mention your computer skills and the team skills you learned playing football. If it’s for a personal ad, you might want to focus more on the beach house and your great sense of humour.
The gap between humility and bragging isn’t all that wide, so you always have to be careful to keep the exercise real – don’t write anything about yourself that you can’t back up.
How smart are you?
They say I.Q. tests are not a fair and accurate assessment of intelligence, but try telling that to a member of Mensa with a 186 on the books. If you have a poor I.Q., it doesn’t necessarily mean that you’re stupid. On the other hand, if you have a good I.Q. it does mean you are smart. Yeah, you can cheat a little by training yourself to take the test, getting better and better at the answers as you go, but isn’t this also a measure of intelligence? Nobody is born smart – we just get that way by reading and practising the academic arts over and over, using and training our brains until we can honestly say that we’re smarter than the average bear.
Take the test and see for yourself. If you do well you can tell people that you’re a certified genius. If you do poorly, you can tell people that you don’t believe in standardized testing and punch up your creative side. I won’t tell you what I got, but how are you enjoying this original feature so far?
Warning: they will try to sell you a collection of 180 different tests designed to increase your brainpower and build a complete intelligence profile, but for $9.95 it could almost be worth it. You even get a couple of other free tests to help make up your mind – How Do I Mean? What Have I Chosen? and Singing Your Self.
How funny are you?
http://shadow.ieor.berkeley.edu/humor/
There’s an ongoing debate in the scientific community as to whether humour is genetic or determined by upbringing, or a combination of the two – just as people can be diagnosed as clinically depressed, people can be diagnosed as clinically funny. According to one study, however, most people aren’t nearly as funny as they think they are.
The only real measure of your sense of humour is your reaction to funny stimuli compared to the reactions of others, and the reaction of your audience to your own humour. The problem is that humour is a uniquely personal trait – some people find Ziggy funny, while others laugh at car crashes. To each his own.
A group of students at Berkeley University devised a system to analyze your sense of humour. After listening to and rating 15 distinctly different jokes they create a profile of your sense of humour. When you have completed the test, they can feed you joke after joke to fit your profile.
More amazing than the concept is the fact it really works. I laughed out loud at about three of the test questions, and at every joke they fed me after the test was completed.
How funny are you? Try the jokes out on your friends and see if they share the same sense of humour.
While this is hardly a way to qualify your sense of humour, you might want to look at the humour question another way – stress and humour are proven opposites of the emotional spectrum, and seriously stressed out people don’t laugh a lot. Take the stress test at
www.prcn.org/next/stress.html – if you’re stressed, chances are you’re not very funny.How Hot Are You?
www.ratemypicture.com
We look at the same face in the mirror every day of our lives and have lost the objectivity to determine whether we are hot or not. We only know if people tell us, and that doesn’t come up all that often. If you were going to describe yourself as good looking in a personal ad, what would you base that on? What a girlfriend/boyfriend told you? The encouragement of friends? The reassurances of your mother?
Rate My Picture could be the way to settle this question once and for all. Post your picture to this Web site and watch the ratings and comments pour in – in this world where we comb our hair before we go out to buy a newspaper, the honest opinions of anonymous strangers obviously do count for something.
If you don’t think you’re very good looking, I’d probably avoid posting to this site – anonymous people can be as cruel and they can be appreciative. If you think you’re alright to look at and want to know if you’re hot, then submit away.
