Originally posted on Medium in 2023 February
I’m sure that at one point in your life, you had difficulties understanding people’s actions around you. Why can’t they make decisions quicker? Why are they reluctant to defend their stance despite having a more thorough understanding? These kinds of questions are common throughout our everyday life, yet we rarely wonder why these differences in mindset exist. This book tries to fill up this space by laying out 4 common personality types, which are also known as DISC personalities.
The DISC model outlines 4 main behaviour types, which are represented by colors in the book. These color codings make the core ideas much more intuitive, but here are the pairings for completeness’ sake:
- D: Dominance = red,
- I: Influence = yellow,
- S: Steadiness = green,
- C: Conscientiousness = blue.
Each group has their own characteristics, but the easiest way to distinguish them is to see where they stand on the extroverted-introverted and the task-driven versus people-driven axes.
But before I get carried away, I don’t want to make this another review article, a couple has already been written about the book. Instead, I’ll describe who should read this book, the most exciting ideas and a couple of blind spots of the book that went unaddressed. By doing this, I hope you’ll be motivated to get started reading or provide enough information to make you remove this item from your reading list.
Who should read it?
If one of your core responsibilities is communicating with other people, this book is a must. You can be a manager, a leader of a small team or just a mentor for someone, this book will help you how to understand others and communicate effectively with them, even if your personalities have little in common.
Certain chapters should be read by everyone, as the reasoning behind your peers’ actions will be much easier for you to understand. Oftentimes just by understanding their personality on a deeper level, you can avoid a lot of conflicts and misunderstandings. Also, if they are going through a rough time you’ll have a decent guess on how to help them.
Stress patterns and driving people insane
Chapters 16 and 17 (”What makes us as mad as hell?: temperament can reveal everything about a person” and “Stress factors and energy thieves: what is stress?”) were hands-down my favourite reads. It’s hard to imagine how others are feeling and most often we can only see the world through our own eyes. These chapters provide a small description of the subtle and not-so-subtle things that are making different behaviour types mad. If you pay close attention, you can identify people’s common stress patterns. By understanding these, you can not only make sure that others are feeling safe and comfortable around you but also provide them with a helping hand when it’s needed.
Mitigating difficult pairings
If you look at the grid I showed in the beginning, the diagonal pairs are really tricky to handle. Usually, they have a hard time functioning together as they don’t share any single core value (represented by the axes). Opposites, one would say. Once you can differentiate the behaviour types, I’m pretty sure you will immediately think of at least 1–2 people from your life that are perfect examples of this.
Things I didn’t like
The book is far from perfect. It could be much shorter, I felt that after a certain point, the author was repeating himself or was telling stories that didn’t provide any new information. His arguments and finding were rarely backed by scientific evidence, which will make a lot of people hesitant to accept them in case their life experiences differ.
Also, the book doesn’t dive into how people with multiple personality types behave. Most of us have 2 strong “colors”, which makes you wonder why in certain scenarios we behave as one and in the next as the other. What are the peculiarities of the different combinations? I believe that the author missed a big opportunity by skipping these topics.
A demonstrative story
To illustrate how this book was helpful to me, here is a quick story. About a month ago, I was feeling stressed. Nothing unusual, nothing significant, but somehow I felt that I wasn’t quite able to cope with it as easily as I could in the previous times. I’m a mix of red and blue based on my best knowledge, and according to the book one of the best ways reds can relieve stress is by doing sports. As soon as winter hit, I started to exercise less and less, some weeks I didn’t even do a single demanding activity at all, which would’ve been unheard of before. Mixing together the book’s recommendation and my findings, I paid extra attention to force myself to it. And, by no surprise, my anxious feelings were gone and I’m (mostly) calm ever since.
Conclusion
I believe Surrounded by Idiots is a great read overall, certainly something many people can find a lot of value in. If talking to other people or managing others is an important aspect of your everyday life I can only recommend you get this book.