Mark Manson

And so if you go through the dictionary and you identify all of the words that could be used to identify a person or a person's behavior, that should give you a nice, well-rounded look at

how do how do you define a person and you can probably find all sorts of commonalities among those words and start grouping them in certain ways allport decided to take this on and he did it with one of his phd students they found the biggest dictionary they could possibly find and they started going word by word and singling out every word that could be possibly used to identify a human or a human behavior

And they initially pulled out 17,953 words.

This took them multiple years.

They're just flipping through a dictionary.

Can you imagine?

Like, can you imagine?

Like, first of all, you were a PhD student.

Like, can you imagine somebody asking you like, oh, what's your PhD work on?

And you're like, I'm reading the dictionary.

To understand human behavior.

See, it could be worse, guys.

It could be worse.

It could be worse.

They narrowed this list down to 4,500 distinct descriptions or characteristics.

And then once they got down to 4,500, they just published the list and left it for other people to deal with.

And the reason for that primarily was because they simply did not have the technology or the means to like statistically analyze these words at the time.

Computers had not been invented yet.

And so you would have to literally calculate all 4,500 of these words, how prevalent they are, how much they occur in human language and do all sorts of combinatorial factoring and all this stuff.

Yeah.