What Was The Inspiration For 9takes?

I got married and my wife and I were fighting a lot.

Through counseling, we learned that we were different 🤯. And that it is normal to think differently and have a slew of baggage that you subconsciously expect the person to help you deal with…

The trick we learned was to listen to each other 🤯🤯. You can sort most if not all of your problems out if you slow down and actually listen to each other. Which ironically is the main thing therapists do.

They shut up and listen to you. Occasionally they will give you a tidbit that is usually so obvious, but only after patiently sitting and attentively listening to you ramble on about whatever issue.

People do crazy things when they don’t feel listened to, feel silenced, or feel like they don’t have a say. Everyone needs to be listened to, be heard, and have a say. I realize that is kinda bold because not everyone has nice or productive things to say. However people sort of soften up and the negative emotions of fear, anger, and shame somewhat go away after people are listened to. Fear gives way to learning, anger to peace, and shame to feeling good about yourself.

So with that I knew that people needed to be listened to. 👂

Then the next part was that my wife told me that I should take a personality test. I didn’t want to because I didn’t think I would get anything out of it. But I had nothing to lose and I was willing to give it a shot if it would help me understand the mystery that is my wife. And boiiii, I got something out of it! It was telling me things about myself that I felt but had never verbalized. It was making me think about myself in the third person from a bird’s eye view. I wanted to know more about myself and about other personalities. I was reading and learning more and just wanted to start conversations about this because every time I got to talk to someone who had gone through similar self-discovery, it felt like I was unlocking ancient hidden secrets about people. I am just saying, that is how it felt.

But there were those who were opposed to talking about personality and there were those who were straight-up hostile to it. There would be a back and forth, but I soon realized that nothing productive came from arguing. There is a place and time for arguing where it can be productive however this was not the time. We would both be arguing and I would be pointing to my experience and what I learned and they would be saying that it is fake.

So with that I learned to keep the conversation focused on our own experience. 👣

So the question that I learned to follow up was to ask them about what they had learned about themselves. They would say things that fell into 2 categories.

• One was that they thought that they were too unique and that no personality test could define them and their experience.
• Two was that they thought that everyone was more or less the same and that people’s differences are superficial.

Both arguments seem somewhat valid. They would either be pointing out that people are too similar or too different. But their conclusions were off.

• People are too similar, there is nothing to learn from a personality test
• People are too different, there is nothing to learn from a personality test

Their conclusion was that there is nothing to learn. But that is another way of saying they just are not curious. Have they ever met someone who was similar to them? Have they ever met someone who was different from them? What percentage differences or similarities would you put between two people? By what dimension would you say people are similar or different? Well, all these questions sound like the kind of questions that personality tests seek to answer.

So with that I learned that personality is just the similarity and differences between people. People just need to be curious enough to explore each other’s similarities and differences 🤔

So the next step was finding the place where people’s similarities and differences could be explored. There were a few places I explored but none of them facilitated exploratory conversation. So I decided I would build the platform to explore people’s similarities and differences. And I decided I would call it 9takes. “9” because there are 9 types of archetypes from the enneagram. And “Takes” because there are different takes on life.

Additionally I found some similarities between the philosophy and psychology that pointed towards the enneagram.

So that was the inspiration for 9takes. If you want to see what I am building sign up and join 9takes below ⬇️. Of course, you are free to decline, but there is much more to explore. 🚀