Why you’re more unique than you think

Given the variables, it probably goes without saying that it’s highly improbable for two people to score the exact same for all 11 Motivators. Indeed, for as long as anyone on Team Attuned can remember, we’ve been telling people—both internally and externally—that the total number of possible different combinations of motivators is a whopping 1.7 million. That means that when someone takes our Intrinsic Motivator test, the likelihood is that only around 4,600 other people on the entire planet have the exact same motivational profile as them—or so we thought.

But it turns out we were wrong. In fact, we weren’t even close.

What started as a deceptively simple question at a team meeting—“So how do we know there are 1.7 million combinations?”—set the ball rolling on a tortuous mathematical odyssey that turned our previously accepted wisdom on its head and expanded our conception of the uniqueness of each Motivator Report to mind-boggling proportions.

As the most mathematically minded member of our team, Head of Product Mattias Hallberg took it upon himself to answer what we assumed would be a fairly straightforward calculation, but which turned out to be anything but.

Starting with the premise that you can have six different answers for each of the 55 sets of questions in the motivation assessment, Mattias reasoned that the answer was roughly 6^55—which meant that there were more than 6.28E+42 different combinations in theory (that’s 628 followed by 40 zeros!), but there would be many different ways a person could reach the same score, so the real number would be smaller.

When Mattias mentioned on Slack that he would “start an R&D project to uncover the exact number” followed by a winking emoji, most of the team assumed that he was joking. As it turned out, he wasn’t, and we had merely glimpsed the tip of a numerical iceberg so big it could have sunk the Titanic.

If you’re having trouble picturing the size of this number, then let me put it in context: 7.5 quadrillion seconds is approximately 237.5 million years; 7.5 quadrillion kilometres is around 792 light years, or 188 times as far as Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to our solar system; 7.5 quadrillion US dollars is about 37,500 times Jeff Bezos’ net worth; and 7.5 quadrillion people is close to one million times the population of the Earth.

To put it another way, 7.5 quadrillion different combinations means the chances of two people on the planet having the exact same Motivator Report is around one in a million.