The Color Code is, hands down, the most life changing book I have ever read. At the time when I was introduced to this book, I was utterly lost regarding all things interpersonal and social. Not knowing what I now know about myself, I did not understand at all how people navigated social interactions and I was regularly confused, frustrated, angry, and frequently felt betrayed or misunderstood.
My ability to interact appropriately with other people at this time in my life was tragically limited, and I had a long history of lost relationships and failures to connect. Even when I most wanted to, I often struggled to maintain or build lasting connections with others.
When I read The Color Code, I felt I had come upon a religious text of sorts—a key to the mysteries of the world that were otherwise beyond me. It gave me something that no other personality profile or psychological theory had—a simple way to interpret the motives of others, and easily accessible tools for accommodating different approaches and styles. Unlike theories with 16 different profiles, or theories with only 2 types of people, there was a sweet spot accomplished by this theory that made it both true and simple.
On it’s face, this book posits a theory of personality that was developed by Taylor Hartman, a Ph. D in psychology, after combing through his records from clinical therapy and noticing patterns in individuals, and in connections they formed with others. After years of cataloguing these patterns, he put forth his theory of personality in his 1987 book The Color Code. The book was relatively popular during this time and is still in use in some workplace environments, but it has not saturated popular culture or become a household name in the way some other theories have (i.e. Myers-Briggs, DiSC, etc.). It is also sometimes confused with the Leadership Assestment True Colors, but it is not the same framework.
Dr. Taylor Hartman says The Color Code is “the most accurate, comprehensive and easy to use personality test available,” and I tend to agree with him, having spent the last decade taking as many personality tests as I could get my hands on, many of them multiple times across different eras of my life to test their accuracy. I have read dozens of books, had my charts read, and spent many countless hours in discussion with my psychologically-curious friends and at the end of the day—The Color Code takes the cake.
What makes this theory unique is that it seems, at first, quite simple. People are categorized into one of only four categories, based on their primary internal motivator.
Think of the answer to the question, “what drives you?”
Is it:
Close relationships and emotional intimacy?
Pleasure and fun?
Power and control?
Or what about peace and stability?
Which of these options best represents the thing that gets you up out of bed in the morning? You are either a Blue, a Yellow, a Red, or a White, respectively.
Blues are driven and perfectionistic, striving to build a more just society even when faced with unthinkable odds.
Yellows are playful and enthusiastic, bringing a light-heartedness to even the most difficult and trying parts of life.
Reds are leaders, innovators, and trailblazers that stop at nothing when they have their goal in mind.
Whites are the peacekeepers, mediators, and facilitators of society—they model patience and thoughtfulness in a busy world.
With a little bit of information about each of these personality profiles, you can detect with reasonable accuracy what the color profile might be of someone you are interacting with. That is to say—within a few moments of interacting with someone you can have a good sense for WHY they might be doing something. Guessing at someone’s reasons for an action becomes less necessary because if you know what drives them broadly, it is usually not hard to imagine what is driving them in a particular instance.
Of course not every situation is that straightforward, but imagine what it felt like to a 19-year-old, undiagnosed, socially struggling version of me, to have a tool that allowed me to move through social interactions in a way that was at least in part, predictable. It made me feel like life wasn’t just going to be a series of confusing and confounding attempts to relate to other humans, but instead could be understood and observed in patterns (something I am really good at!), and even predicted or understood deeply in moments of sudden change.
The book goes through each color thoroughly, explaining how Blues act as parents, as bosses, as friends, as lovers. It also explains the statistical occurrences of the colors (a plurality of people are Blue with 35% of the population falling into that category!). The author then thoughtfully writes chapters about how each of the colors relate to other colors—what does a partnership look like between a Red and a White? What are the specific challenges and the unique strengths of this pairing? While reading the book, it is possible to think of anyone in your life, asses their color (or ask them to take the test!) and then read about how that relationship looks in the context of The Color Code.
I mentioned earlier that it only seems simple, and this is what really takes The Color Code to the highest level for me. Every person is born with a Primary color—it is not genetic, and it does not change over your life time, instead it is simply your essence, it is YOU before anyone ever told you how to be.
If you are a Blue, you have always been a Blue and you will always be a Blue. However, as we move through our lives, we necessarily develop traits from other colors. Those traits might be healthy (like the healthy White trait of patience) or unhealthy (like the unhealthy Red trait of attempting to control others).
If you develop enough traits from a different color, you take on what is known as a Secondary color. In fact, you can even develop two, or three (that’s the goal!) Secondary colors, although most adults have only one strong Secondary color. It’s easy to see how this seemingly simple idea—four categories for all people—becomes slightly more complex when those people are adults with life experience.
The theory expands from just four personality types to at least 12 distinct iterations of personality:
Blue/Red - Primary Blue, Secondary Red
Blue/Yellow - Primary Blue, Secondary Yellow
Blue/White - Primary Blue, Secondary White
Red/Blue - Primary Red, Secondary Blue
Red/Yellow - Primary Red, Secondary Yellow
Red/White - Primary Red, Secondary White
Yellow/Blue - Primary Yellow, Secondary Blue
Yellow/Red - Primary Yellow, Secondary Red
Yellow/White - Primary Yellow, Secondary White
White/Blue - Primary White, Secondary Blue
White/Red - Primary White, Secondary Red
White/Yellow - Primary White, Secondary Yellow
Each of the above 12 combinations represents a pattern of behavior that is both logically correlated with motivation, and on some basic level, indicative of a range of likely responses to stimuli. The immediately accessible and wildly helpful information of “what is this person’s primary motivator?” is both simple and accessible up front; but underneath the simple and accessible surface is a true wealth of information about the personal and social drives of individuals.
At this point, every person who comes into my life in any kind of meaningful way knows about The Color Code. Frankly, they know about it whether they wanted to or not, because it is a permanent and irreducible part of my framework. I can only talk about Yellows so many times before a new friend says, “wait, what does it mean to be a Yellow?!” and a new curiosity is born. It has become a way for the people I connect with to know me better (deepening the kinds of conversations I can have with them) and a tool for them to learn more about themselves and their connections.
Put as succinctly as I can—my favorite thing about The Color Code is that a shared knowledge of the framework provides a shorthand for discussing complex concepts related to personality and interpersonal connection. With the lengthy explanations out of the way, conversations can penetrate deeper more quickly, and ultimately end in more complex and satisfying ways. Here is a quick example:
I might say to someone who does not know about The Color Code:
It sounds like that person really hurt you with their action. Sometimes, people who highly value the approval of others might make choices that seem counterintuitive—either because they cause that person harm, or because they seem ethically questionable—in order to maintain an image that they believe other people have of them. These choices, while they may hurt other people, are not ultimately personal. Someone whose drive to be seen as like-able is higher than their drive to live their values can often finds themselves in compromising situations.
To someone who knew about The Color Code, I would say this instead:
It sounds like that person really hurt you with their action. Young or unhealthy Yellows can be untrustworthy because of their persistent need to be liked. Their drive to uphold that image makes them sometimes hurt others, and it is coming from a really deep need to affirm their worthiness. It’s hard to imagine as a Blue, because you would always take someone else’s feelings into consideration before you acted, and that is a fundamental difference between Yellows and Blues. A Yellow is likely to repeat this kind of action again until they (hopefully) learn a new way to meet that need, so it may be important to set strong boundaries if you want to avoid getting hurt by them in the same way again.
In roughly the same amount of words I have been able to get much more substance across. The ideas contained in the first paragraph are effectively summarized by “Yellow” and “Blue” in a way that frees up energy to delve deeper into the issue at hand.
I imagine I will be writing about this book, and this theory, for as long as I live. I truly imagine that it is part of my life’s work to get as many people as possible to understand this framework so that this shared language can take our discussions about how people interact to deeper levels. And while I acknowledge that The Color Code is not the only way to accomplish this, it is my preferred way (and by my assessment has attributes that make it the best way).
So, welcome to the world of The Color Code. I hope you’ll stick around.
If you’re interested in taking an online quiz, you can get your Primary Color for free by signing up with your email address at ColorCode.com.
Please do not pay for their “full personality profile,” because a test is NOT the best way to determine your Secondary Color. The best way to determine your Secondary Color is to read the descriptions of the colors and choose the one that seems to describe you best (which is not your Primary).
Here is a link I found to Taylor Hartman himself giving a TEDx Talk in 2015 (he is still alive!). Hartman also has a handful of very charming videos on his small YouTube channel where he talks about what The Color Code is, and what it means to be a Blue, a Red, a White, and a Yellow.
In case you are curious, Taylor Hartman himself is a Yellow (and so am I).
If you have questions or want to discuss The Color Code, please do feel free to comment here or even to send me an email at contact@awylde.com. This is one of the few things in the world I will happily discuss with anyone truly interested.
Also, please for the love of all that is sacred, do not buy this book from Amazon. When I need a copy (to gift to someone special in my life <3) I can usually find one by calling around to my local used book stores; once I even found a signed copy at a bookstore on Higgins in downtown Missoula!
I’ve also had some luck checking on thriftbooks.com. The Color Code was re-printed in 2007 with the new title “The People Code,” in a worst case that edition might be easier to find since it was printed more recently.
Enjoy <3