Earlier this year I had a little bout of Myers-Briggs fever after a friend sent me the link to this test. I rarely take personality tests seriously (hard to when they're telling you which SATC character you are), but my Myers-Briggs profile was so accurate that I felt the author must have somehow hacked into my brain and stolen all my thoughts and beliefs in order to have written it. Sufficiently impressed and intrigued, I decided to read up a little more on the test and my type, and then the types of all my friends.
And there is a wealth of information out there - much of it based on academic research (of varying quality of course). It would be very easy to get caught up in it all, to allow it to influence your life, to let your personality profile be an excuse for your shortcomings, justification of your bad decisions, or a false validation of your strengths; or to forget that you are an individual and at times you will deviate from the stereotype. At the height of my own fever I was even attempting to understand actual relationships in my life by reading an MBTI forum.
Fortunately I'm no stranger to the dangers of models: intransparency, probabilistic assumptions, testing contraints and, most notably, the blind trust & reliance they can encourage. In fact no one could survive my career path so far without developing a severe distrust of all models. I studied Maths and then went to work in Finance just as the industry was entering a crisis, which means that I went from being enveloped in a world of perfection where anything, even the square root of -1, is possible, to a world of constraints - a world where things break so frequently that we need reporting, analysis, even entire divisions of staff to work on the breakages. The contrast would have been drastic enough without the fact that it was all observed at a time when companies literally rose and fell on the strength of their risk models.
But models exist for a reason - to simplify the complexities of this world, so that we may analyse them despite our limitations and contraints. And what could be more complex than the human mind? Heaven knows I have enough trouble understanding my own thoughts (that's my F talking). A little help is not necessarily a bad thing. The corporate world, ever obsessed with efficiency, knows this; the same test link is on the intranet page of my new company. It also features in most Management and MBA courses.
In my case, the timing was also fortunate. The test and my subsequent fever arrived shortly after I'd had a few realisations - that I wanted to quit my job, that I was more interested in journalism and development than in banking, etc. so what I ultimately got out of all this self-discovery was affirmation. My type, 'The Champion' or 'ENFP' takes naturally to journalism for example. We ENFPs can be good at Maths, we like the bigger picture, we're not so good at legwork, we LOVE people, we're good communicators, we're terribly emotional, we don't need too much structure and we like our freedom. Oh and we're idealists - definitely didn't need to be told about that one.
So at a time when I have a lot of thinking to do about my personal qualities, and how they're going to drive my career, I have a handy little tool to help me. Guessing other people's types is also quite fun, especially if you do it with a group of friends, and it does provide an easy and widely accepted categorisation. I now frequently refer to people's characteristics using the relevant letter(s) in their MB type ("that's such an NT thing to do!").
I'd recommend that anyone take the test, accompanied by the advisory pinch of salt, and enjoy whatever they get out of it - be it a little affirmation, a few home truths, a better understanding of themselves, an affinity with a celebrity of the same type, or just a bit of fun.
And there is a wealth of information out there - much of it based on academic research (of varying quality of course). It would be very easy to get caught up in it all, to allow it to influence your life, to let your personality profile be an excuse for your shortcomings, justification of your bad decisions, or a false validation of your strengths; or to forget that you are an individual and at times you will deviate from the stereotype. At the height of my own fever I was even attempting to understand actual relationships in my life by reading an MBTI forum.
Fortunately I'm no stranger to the dangers of models: intransparency, probabilistic assumptions, testing contraints and, most notably, the blind trust & reliance they can encourage. In fact no one could survive my career path so far without developing a severe distrust of all models. I studied Maths and then went to work in Finance just as the industry was entering a crisis, which means that I went from being enveloped in a world of perfection where anything, even the square root of -1, is possible, to a world of constraints - a world where things break so frequently that we need reporting, analysis, even entire divisions of staff to work on the breakages. The contrast would have been drastic enough without the fact that it was all observed at a time when companies literally rose and fell on the strength of their risk models.
But models exist for a reason - to simplify the complexities of this world, so that we may analyse them despite our limitations and contraints. And what could be more complex than the human mind? Heaven knows I have enough trouble understanding my own thoughts (that's my F talking). A little help is not necessarily a bad thing. The corporate world, ever obsessed with efficiency, knows this; the same test link is on the intranet page of my new company. It also features in most Management and MBA courses.
In my case, the timing was also fortunate. The test and my subsequent fever arrived shortly after I'd had a few realisations - that I wanted to quit my job, that I was more interested in journalism and development than in banking, etc. so what I ultimately got out of all this self-discovery was affirmation. My type, 'The Champion' or 'ENFP' takes naturally to journalism for example. We ENFPs can be good at Maths, we like the bigger picture, we're not so good at legwork, we LOVE people, we're good communicators, we're terribly emotional, we don't need too much structure and we like our freedom. Oh and we're idealists - definitely didn't need to be told about that one.
So at a time when I have a lot of thinking to do about my personal qualities, and how they're going to drive my career, I have a handy little tool to help me. Guessing other people's types is also quite fun, especially if you do it with a group of friends, and it does provide an easy and widely accepted categorisation. I now frequently refer to people's characteristics using the relevant letter(s) in their MB type ("that's such an NT thing to do!").
I'd recommend that anyone take the test, accompanied by the advisory pinch of salt, and enjoy whatever they get out of it - be it a little affirmation, a few home truths, a better understanding of themselves, an affinity with a celebrity of the same type, or just a bit of fun.
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