Today I got a question from my friend on the topic of analysis. And this kind of analysis is usually very interesting for anyone who at least once in his life tried to understand himself. This kind of analysis usually called "self-analysis". "Self-analysis" means understanding your own behavior, the reasons behind your certain thoughts, actions and reactions on a particular activity, your opinion about particular global or local events, etc.

Initially, this discussion started as a request from a friend of mine to get through a questionnaire. The questionnaire had to figure out what kind of person I am at the end of it. I had no chance to clarify the background information of the questionnaire. One of my first actions was to ask my friend, but he was a bit busy to answer my requests, so I left alone with my questions. However, in his first message, he committed that he wants to investigate his own behavior, try to understand himself, do some "self-analysis". So, it was enough for me to jump into that multiple-choice quiz, which promised to easily figure out who am I and that I suppose to do in this world.

Somewhere in the middle of the quiz, I realized that it's yet another typical and easy human psychology related questionnaire without any complicated methodology behind. Maybe it got some methodology behind, I'm not so sure in it. However, I had a reason to call it typical and easy. The reason is the following - it's really straight forward to trace correlations between final results and asked questions. And when the correlation between your answer and the final result is straight forward it means that you can manipulate final results in any direction. The results of such test apriori won't be objective, rather than only subjective.

After getting through the rest of the test and reading the results I got back to the chat-conversation with my friend and started to argue with him. My main intention was to express that such kind of tests are not feasible to consider as a resource, base on which, ideas about your own behavior should be derived. On the other side, when something is rejected, and even reasons are given for the rejection, the alternative solution should be offered.

My own simplest possible guideline to understand myself consists of two simple activities. And both of them well know and well described in a lot of literature, articles, blogs, forums etc. To be concrete, I'm primarily focusing on two following activities: (a) before getting into sleep try to remember all your day and understand most of your actions; (b) create a diary and write your experience in it, while writing you will automatically analyze your actions.

That's it. The long story and the short recipe under a long and promising title are done.