MBTI or Why I suck at socializing

Be warned. You are about to enter a MBTI black hole.

Sooner or later most of my friends will have had the "What's your Myers Briggs type?" conversation with me because I am ridiculously obsessed. At the beginning of this year I made a 2018 goal to master cognitive functions. Don't know what that is? I got you covered. What this means is I'm spending most of my free time reading books, watching videos, and listening to livestreams/podcasts describing how each function manifests in the types. Whether you believe knowing your MBTI is valuable or not is irrelevant. I want to know because it informs a hundred things about your preferences, values, decision making process, and information gathering skills without me having to agonize over small talk. And if we disagree on something, understanding your functional stack gives me some clues why we may disagree.

If you care to know, I'm an INTJ. Heidi's Thought Catalog Interview is a dead on description of how INTJs think, feel, and act. Another great resource based on cognitive function and development is from PersonalityJunkie. Some of my talents include avoidance of small talk, nearly annoying rationality, and honesty to a fault. I realize I'm not everyone's cup of tea, but I'm completely fine with that because I don't want to pretend around you in order for you to like me. I prefer my circle of friends small, loyal, and mutually beneficial. Once you're in, it's nearly impossible for me to kick you out unless you repeatably prove untrustworthy. The qualities that attract me to a partner include an ability to get me out of my head/comfort zone, sharp as fuck wit/humor, selflessness, and a sense of exploration. Relationship deal breakers include: dishonesty, close-mindedness, lack of ambition, and mind games. I'll be honest, being in relationships with INTJs takes patience, but if you stick around, we'll make it worth your while.

If you've made it this far, I'm sure you're burning to know why is it helpful to know your personality type? Or maybe wondering what your type is? Most people have taken one of those online quizzes, but I want to caution you that those results might be wrong. I know there's a lot of nay-sayers who spew ill-informed opinions on how MBTI is the astrology of personality theory because it's not objective. But you should know that someone has made a solid attempt at trying to make it objective. DaveSuperPowers has spent a long time honing his objective typing philosophy and his videos layout a great framework for explaining the cognitive functions in a more repeatable manner. If you really want to type yourself accurately learn the cognitive functions! Once you understand the functions, I recommend listening to Heidi Priebe's podcast The Intuitive Bias especially if you're an intuitive dominant.

What's most interesting is the statistics around personality type. Angsty teen emotions aside, I grew up most of my life feeling like a weirdo, an outsider. It never occurred to me that the reason I struggled to emotionally relate to others is because only 2-3% of the world thinks, feels, and acts like I do. From reading tons and tons of quora questions on MBTI, there was a proverbial lightbulb moment where I realized that people are not that fucking complicated. The pots of shit we all keep stirring for ourselves usually boil down to imbalance of function use and development. The reason these shit pots all don't have the same solution is because we're all different personality types, hence different function imbalances.

Sorry for the link diarrhea, I know this is a lot to take in. Look for more posts on MBTI in the future, but this starter post has been a long time coming!