Daniel Bryan's Response To WWE Test Saying He Has No Ambition, Two Chapters Of Bryan's Book Released
WWE's website has published the first two chapters from Daniel Bryan's new autobiography, "Yes!: My Improbable Journey to the Main Event of WrestleMania." The book comes out on July 21st and can be pre-ordered now through Barnes and Noble to get a signed edition.
Chapter 1 starts off like this:
WWE recently asked many of their successful Superstars to take a personality inventory. In theory, these tests are able to assess personal qualities, such as sociability, prudence, and interpersonal sensitivity. The idea is that different professions require different personal characteristics, but these sorts of analytics had never been done with professional wrestlers. If WWE could find out the personality traits of their most successful Superstars, perhaps when they were recruiting, it would give them more information about the likelihood of a new signee being successful. I was one of the many people chosen to take the test.
The test involved reading many different statements and then indicating if the statement was true or false. For example, one statement would be: "I would want to be a professional race car driver." My answer: "False. I would not want to be a professional race car driver." Another example: "I rarely lose my temper." My answer: "True." Stuff like that. You respond to hundreds of those types of statements and voila?! Therein are your personality traits. In theory.
I actually enjoyed taking the test and was interested to hear the results. The next day I met with a woman to talk about them. Everything was done on a percentile basis, and as we went over the results, she became more and more baffled. In all the primary markers except one (learning approach, for which I was in the eighty-fourth percentile), I scored low. And I mean very low. For interpersonal sensitivity, I was in the bottom eleventh percentile. For the adjustment category, the bottom ninth percentile. Sociability, bottom third. But the one that really puzzled her was my score for ambition, which was the lowest she had ever seen in her history of administering this kind of testing and data. I was in the bottom one percentile.
She asked me how I had managed to be so successful given that I seem to have no drive, few social skills, and an inherent apathy toward most of the ideas our modern business culture seems to find so important.
"I have no idea," I said. "I just love to wrestle. The success has come mostly by luck."