I am a reluctant ISTJ. I did the Myers-Briggs personality test three times before I accepted that maybe, it was a fair description of my typical attitudes and preferences.
About 1 in 8 of us are ISTJs.
The problem is, everything about the ISTJ personality type seems so dull! I mean they are described as the librarian or logistician…
Read blog post here: My experience as an ISTJ | Educo
Myers-Briggs and the 16 Types are fun. And useful.
I highly recommend the book: Life Types, by Hirsch & Kummerow, which also has profiles of all 16 types in it. Another kewl thing about that book is: it follows each of the 16 types, as children, young adults, into retirement and talks about how each type acts in learning, leisure, career, relationships. Very informative.
As useful as the 16 Types are, I don’t feel that they’ve quite got all of the bugs worked out yet, because in reading the profiles, 3 and possibly 4 types seem to fit me about 75% but with any of them, there’s always 1 or 2 fairly-big things that seem waayy-off. Still, all of this is useful.
There are 2 things I see online–alot!–that I tend to reject:
1. All this mania of “All “functions”, all the time”. It’s overdone. Who even talks about the actual 4 letters anymore? These days, you can find loads of folks rambling on and on about: Introverted sensing, extroverted intuition, introverted thinking and on and on. IN MY OPINION, this was largely influenced by some guy on Youtube who went under the name of “Dave Superpowers”. This was some years ago when there alot fewer MBTI videos on Youtube. He made ” a ton” of them, talked kinda fast, and I think far too many folks just didn’t bother to question him and went along with it all. Is he certified? Has he written any book? Whatever happened to him? He was very big on “functions” (as if he somehow knew better). I prefer the books: Life Types, and also another book called Type Talk, bu Kroeger and Thuessen.
2. I notice that there are websites that give a “title” to each of the 16 types. Like this site: http://www.personalitypage.com/html/portraits.html I DO like the info in the profiles, but I wish each type didn’t have an “assigned name” or title, cuz people will want to be whatever has the coolest title. No offense to the ISTP’s, but who would want to be “the Mechanic”, when they might be “the Visionary” (ENTP) ? or David Kiersey who I believe called the INTJ’s “the Mastermind”. OOOOOHH! Another 3rd thing I’m not crazy about (for the same reason, people wanna be the kewl one) is websites that say each type is like this or that cartoon character or famous person. Far better in my opinion to examine how each type:
learns, talks, acts on the job, in a relationship, and in their hobbies & free time.
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