Which sentences are about you, and which are about everyone

Georges de La Tour's famous painting shows a young man having his fortune told. While the old woman talks, two women beside her quietly cut his purse. It was painted around 1630 and it still holds on one point: what stops people noticing what is actually happening is the feeling of being talked about.

The ten-second test

Take one sentence from your result and ask: is there anyone this would be wrong about? If you cannot picture the kind of person it would fail for, it has not said anything about you.

"You value honesty in your relationships" is wrong about nobody. "You tend to say the difficult thing earlier than other people do, and sometimes regret having said it so soon" could be wrong — plenty of people do the opposite. Only the second is worth reading twice.

Three kinds of sentence in any reading

• The universal nod: describes a general human need. Skip it.
• The two-sided: says you are both this and that, so it cannot be wrong. Skip it.
• The falsifiable: names a specific behaviour in a specific situation. Read this one carefully.

A good reading has many of the third kind. A weak one is almost entirely the first two — and it still feels accurate, because the first two are never wrong.

Run it backwards

A firmer check: read the description of a different result from the same test. If you also see yourself there, the test has not distinguished you from anyone else, however true it may be about you.

People often find that slightly deflating. But being deflated in the right place beats trusting in the wrong one, and the sentences that survive the test are usually the ones most worth sitting with.