Mark Manson

They wanted to understand why are some people just so cool and calm and functional in an air fight, and why do some people freak out or they're not able to maintain their composure or they're not able to last in such a demanding profession.

Yes.

Yeah.

Which makes sense.

I mean, the military, right?

You need the right people in the right spot.

Right.

If there's any profession that like really needs to objectively understand how good a person is or not, it's going to be the military, which interestingly, I believe the IQ test was created for the military as well.

Exactly.

Two men by the name of Ernest Toopes and Raymond Crystal independently landed on the Big Five.

And this, I believe this was like 1963.

Early 60s, yeah.

And they correctly identified what we today know is the five fundamental traits of human personality and the five traits that really define each of our uniqueness and who we are as an individual.

But the funny thing is, is that they...

They published it internally at the Air Force, and then it just got filed away with a bunch of other internal research and wasn't read for... Yeah, it was like a bulletin, basically.

And so it's funny because psychologists would take another 20 years to land on the Big Five.

And it was only later, I believe it was in the 90s, that they actually...

randomly discovered that these guys in the Air Force independently discovered the Big Five 20 years prior to psychologists.

So this brings us to the Big Five.

And everybody listening to this has probably taken a Big Five personality test at some point in their life, whether you realize it or not.