Do you want to be happier?

You can buy a $100 framed "Live-Laugh-Love" poster and hang it on your living room wall. Or you can take a psychometric personality test backed by science that can actually help you be happier.

Everyone wants to be happy. There are many things we do to achieve it and most are effective, at least for a little while.

You can spend time with friends or loved ones, travel to new places, participate in a hobby, or even find a job that motivates and engages you.

Regardless of which activities make you feel happy, those that are most effective have one thing in common.

The tasks and endeavors that make you happiest are the ones that align with your core personality.

If you are a rational and analytical person, traditionally creative pursuits probably won't thrill you. They may feel intimidating or even frustrating at times.

If you are a highly creative person, hobbies or activities that involve a lot of [what you consider to be] tedious detail or effort may be so unpleasant they border on punishment.

We all have the ability to do something and then determine if it was enjoyable or not. You don't need a neuroscientist to tell you which ice cream flavor you like the most.

Choosing a hobby or leisure activity — or more importantly a career — that makes you happiest would be a lot simpler and more accurate if it didn't require a lot of tedious and time-consuming (and expensive) trial and error.

The Secret to Finding Your Happiness

To determine the job or career path or leisure activity that makes you happiest, you must first understand your own emotional foundation. How are you emotionally hardwired? Figure that out and you are well on your way toward learning what will make you happiest.

To put it another way...

It helps to know where you are today before deciding where you want to go tomorrow.

Let's get back to the ice cream metaphor.

Imagine for a moment that medical scientists invented a simple procedure that analyzes your taste buds and sense receptors in your brain to precisely and accurately determine what kind of foods you will find most enjoyable.

Revolutionary Scientific Method Predicts Your Favorite Flavor Of Ice Cream!

Assume this taste assessment is non-invasive, involves answering a few multiple-choice questions, and only takes about 8 minutes to complete. Easy, huh?

Now, to add further value to this taste assessment, scientific studies have proven that it has an accuracy and repeat reliability rating of 97.7%. This means if you take the taste assessment five or even twenty years apart, it will be so accurate and reliable that it will be able to predict the foods you enjoy most with less than a 3% difference every time you take it.

An assessment like that would have a bit of "Wow, that's cool!" factor. I'll admit that learning what foods you like before you taste them has only modest value to most people. Trying new dishes and exploring new flavors is half the fun, though, and this is just a metaphor, so let's discuss a more serious variation.

What if we were talking about assessing which education and career tracks would make you the happiest? Is trying new jobs and exploring new career tracks every other year really something you want to invest in through a tedious and expensive process of trial and error?

Probably not. Even if you were pursuing hobbies, trying each possibility and evaluating as you go would get expensive and time-consuming — and tedious — very quickly.

The trick is to get an accurate assessment of your personality and the way your brain works beforehand so you can accurately determine which activities will make you the happiest.

This personality assessment actually exists.

Similar to our fictional ice cream taste test, it works by asking you a simple set of questions (you choose two words from groups of four), it takes only 8 minutes to complete, and has a 97.7% repeat reliability rating as determined in longitudinal studies.

The personality test we're referring to is real and available today. It is called the Core Values Index psychometric assessment and you can take it at erep.com. It provides all the detail you need to know about your emotional hardwiring. The CVI gives you the information you need to efficiently and optimally pursue the personal and professional course that will make you happiest.

You might even find a hobby that perfectly suits you.

No trial and error required.