Conscientiousness, second best predictor of Success after IQ
Jordan Peterson's guide for Conscientiousness.
Conscientious people are conscientious versus negligent, careful versus careless, reliable versus undependable, well-organized versus disorganized, self-disciplined versus weak-willed, persevering versus quitting.
To some degree, conscientiousness suffers from the same problem as agreeableness. It’s pretty obvious why it would be good if you’re conscientious, but it’s not so obvious why it would be good if you weren’t conscientious.
If you report on your own personality, then that will predict certain elements of your behavior reliably into the future, but if other people report on you using a Big Five framework, that also predicts, and you can take the self-reports and the other reports and put them together, and you get better prediction from the combination than you do with either separately.
You know some things about yourself that are accurate and not some other things, and some other people know some things about you that are accurate that you don’t know. So, that’s interesting to know, and with conscientiousness, you can get decent self-reporting. You can get decent reports from other people as well. So, it’s reliable, and it predicts like mad.
Conscientiousness can be broken down into two aspects, industriousness and orderliness.
Carry out my plans; waste my time, reversed. Find it difficult to get down to work, reversed. Mess things up, reversed. Finish what I start; don’t put my mind on the task at hand, reversed. Get things done quickly, always know what I’m doing; postpone decisions, reversed. Am easily distracted, reversed. They value duty, diligence, and focus. That’s industriousness.
The first is one is pretty interesting, carry out my plans. It’s kind of an interesting differentiator because it’s not plan things. It’s carry out my plans, and those actually turn out to be importantly different.
Orderliness. Leave my belongings around, reversed. Like order, well that one seems rather obvious. Keep things tidy, follow a schedule; am not bothered by messy people, reversed. That’s an interesting one, too, the bothered part because that implies a certain amount of judgment to be bothered by messy people. Want everything to be just right; am not bothered by disorder, reversed. Dislike routine, reversed. See that rules are observed, want every detail taken care of. they value organizational ability, concentration on detail, insistence on borders and boundaries.
Reference: Summary of Discovering Personality by Jordan Peterson (Lecture 6).