I've written about this a lot on my blog (profile) but for example:

I took a number of personality tests, enough to give me some things to confirm about myself--OK, this is easy, I know these vague things I'm good at, great. This part wasn't as impressive.

Aside: I later became certified in personality assessment and you quickly learn that it doesn't impress people to learn things they "already know" because they don't realize it's the iceberg principle and there are hidden power law implications at work.

I'll give an example of the specifics with one test: four-letter type. Mainly since it's familiar to lots of people. (Some call it MBTI, but that's really like referring to any random car as a Ford.)

I showed my coach the results I got and he said, "well you know with a strength in the area of this N here, the theory is that you shouldn't be doing its opposite, S, for more than around 20% of your workday."

This was a ??? for me. Inverse power law? That's something useful to know. So I did a lot of research on this. I did not want to be relying on my weaknesses for my day job.

I learned that my specific N gifts were things like contingency planning, probabilistic intuiting, mental process organization, big-picture thinking, etc. But I was only using this maybe 10% of my day, max.

The rest of my time was spent on S stuff: Little-picture code debugging, getting lost in the details of huge processes, remembering tons of little to-do items, being productive on an hourly and daily basis, improvising much of the time by accepting & working on the long-form development of new things I hadn't done before.

It quickly became obvious that these S items had become the foundation of my workaholism. So you could say that the unreliable results were due to building on my weaknesses.

So, over time I decided to reverse the whole thing (big hand-waves here, this is a multi-year journey).

These days, I spend lots more work on the big picture. I don't start work on a project before I have the big-picture processes completely in place, and also connected to the little-picture work (the transitional gift is one that can be developed).

When little-picture work threatens to take over, I don't mess around. I back out of the workday, get another big-picture view. How would I describe the process? What's gone wrong with the process/system? Then I ask what a big-picture solution is.

This automatically created what I call a "cat life" pattern, where the S-type work is concerned. What it looks like is, I am observably more lazy maybe. I wait, think, plan (documented, but still it doesn't get tangled in details). But I'm in the mental/air domain. Then, when the gifts click, I know how to dive in, where to dive in, and I know I'm being efficient. I try to get in and get out fast, I keep a log, then I give the N side more space again while reviewing logs.

OK--I hope that's enough to get you an idea. This is just one area and it goes quite deep.

There are thousands of interesting models from personality tests to art analysis to technical performance analysis, and I've given them all as much of a chance as I could, being open to new ideas but watching the results.

The power law really applies to some of these in a very special way. And it's very individualized--I wouldn't recommend my own specific journey to anybody, and I learned that it can cause huge problems to do this. My power-method is another person's inverse.