Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

The main concepts of the book can be summarized in 4 pages or gleaned from the reviews here, but what you are really paying for is a one time chance to take the online test to assess your strengths. Unfortunately Gallup provides only your top 5 strengths without providing your actual score or an indication of how they measure relative to general population. Their claim is that telling you the score will distract you from the value of the strength and that only the top 5 strengths matter. I suspect the real reason is that they don't want to let anyone reverse engineer the test and find out how the scoring is done. All this would still be fine by me if test scores were not important. But that is not the case. I took the test twice just to verify the publisher's premises that the results don't vary much based on your mood or from one test to another. As it turns out only one of the top 5 traits in the test existed in both results. The other 4 out of 5 were not shared. This makes the test of limited value. To be fair, there was a common thread between the two sets of tests. For example in one test I was the "Futurist" who is concerned with "What if..." and "Wouldn't it be interesting if..." type of scenarios. In another test my strength was "Ideation" that is the ability to bring fresh ideas to the table. But this raises another key question, how reliable are the categories as whole if 4 out of the 5 strengths can be replaced with each other? This makes the strength categories defined here more like zodiac descriptions than real statistical clusters. At the very least then, Gallup should publish all your "strengths" that fall within some margin. Given all of the above, you are probably more aware of your own strengths that Gallup can tell you. The test would be of more value if it provided your score for each of your strengths and how they measure relative to the full database.