This is what building a company taught me about the four colors personality model and why people don’t fit it.
A few years ago a book fell into my hands. The title was “Surrounded by Idiots.”
It was the perfect moment. I genuinely felt surrounded by idiots.
I took it home, sat down, and opened it with real excitement. Finally, someone was going to explain what I had been living.
The first sentence stopped me completely.
“If you think you are surrounded by idiots, you are actually the idiot.”
I was annoyed. Wouldn’t it be much nicer if the problem was them and not me?
But I kept reading.
The colors that explained everything and nothing
The book divided people into colors. Red people focus on results. Yellow people focus on relationships. Each color sees the world through a completely different lens. Two people talking about the same thing and living in completely separate realities.
It made sense. For a while.
Then I started noticing someone who seemed yellow one day and red the next and blue the week after. It got complicated. I couldn’t figure out where the problem was.
So I went back to my original idea. Maybe some people just don’t have a stable color. Maybe some people really are the unstable, unpredictable version of all of them.
In other words, maybe some people really are idiots.
That’s where I stayed. Until I started Teracrowd.
What building it actually taught me
I started Teracrowd to help people understand who they are and who they are talking to. The idea was simple: if people understood each other better, they would work better together.
What I found was that it was much deeper than four colors.
Not four types. Not even forty. Thousands of factors. Billions of nuances. No two people in our data are the same. If colors were real human types, the world would have almost no matching pairs at all.
At first that scared me. The pressure to understand people grew. The frustration of never quite knowing who I was really dealing with should have grown with it.
But something else happened instead.
The unexpected peace of not understanding
The more people interact with Teracrowd, the more I see that human nature is not a simple process. People are not static. They grow. They gain experience. They change their minds. The person I am talking to today is not exactly the person I talked to six months ago.
I accepted that I will never fully understand anyone. And I will never be able to predict anyone completely.
That acceptance did something I did not expect. It made me relax. It made me curious instead of frustrated. It made me enjoy people more, sometimes even the confusing parts, even the moments that used to make me think the wrong things about them.
What I understand now is that almost everyone, at their core, is good. And when I approach people with that assumption and with genuine curiosity, something contagious happens. The interaction becomes something different.
The only thing left for me to do is give my best in every human interaction I have. Without pretending to fully understand. Without needing to.
I am not surrounded by idiots.
I am surrounded by complex people with a hidden beauty that takes patience to find.
The book was right from the first sentence. It just took me building a company to finally believe it.
Four Colors Personality: FAQ
Q1. Is the four colors personality model accurate? It’s a useful simplification — and just that. The four-color model (based on DISC) sorts people into red, yellow, green, and blue, but real people rarely hold a single stable color. Analyzing conversations at scale to understand people, we found not four types or even forty, but thousands of factors and billions of nuances — no two people the same.
Q2. Why do personality color tests feel true but still fall short? Because a model that seems to explain everything often explains nothing precise. A color gives you a comforting label, but two people who “share” a color can live in completely different realities. The framework can start a conversation about differences; it can’t capture the actual person in front of you.
Q3. If people can’t be reduced to types, how do you understand them? By paying attention to the whole person over time instead of assigning a category. The surprising part is that you don’t have to fully “solve” someone to work well with them — you can respect the complexity without pretending to have it mapped. That shift is what changed how the author sees the people around him.
