Personality types

Often, it is great fun playing with those psychometric questionnaires that keep popping up in colorful tabloid style newspaper city supplements. The fun is not to really know how good (or what kind of) a lover/friend/pet-owner etc you are. but rather trying to fore guess the intention of the question and answering accordingly. (You know i was not good with college exam marks, so at least should get high scores somewhere.)

A few months back when i heard some very trustworthy people talking about personality types, not in my usual language and known set of adjectives (intelligent, nice, friendly etc), but codes like INTJ/INFP etc, i was left stumped. Since they are very knowledgeable and smart people, it did lead me to looking more in to these cipher like codes. (One of them reads this blog as well, so i have to be nice in describing these fellows). So it turns out, these personality type codes are central to Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) assessment.

I personally find hard to believe that entire mankind (including women!) can be easily classified to a fixed number of personality types. Surely, there can't be an exact number of shades of gray.

This test though is a bit different than usual (damn this one asks very direct realistic questions where there are no exactly right or wrong answers). It regards personality type as similar to left or right handedness: individuals develop certain preferred ways of thinking and acting. None of the types is actually better or worse.

The 16 different types are often referred to by an abbreviation of four letters, the initial letters of each of their four type preferences (except in the case of Intuition), for instance:

• ESTJ - Extraversion, Sensing, Thinking, Judging
• INFP - Introversion, iNtuition, Feeling, Perceiving

And so on for all 16 possible type combinations.

(Some of the above information has been taken from MBTI wikipedia article.)

To know your type, submit this (short) questionnaire:
http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/JTypes2.asp

The details of the types are here:
http://www.personalitypage.com/portraits.html

Well, i was labeled as ENTJ by the test and the above link has a vivid description for this type as well.
Salient points: (I have deliberately extracted more number of positive ones)

• ENTJs are natural born leaders.
• ENTJs are very career-focused, and fit into the corporate world quite naturally.
• There is not much room for error in the world of the ENTJ. They dislike to see mistakes repeated, and have no patience with inefficiency.
• ENTJs, like many types, have difficulty seeing things from outside their own perspective.
• ENTJs are very forceful, decisive individuals.
• Although ENTJs are not naturally tuned into other people's feelings, these individuals frequently have very strong sentimental streaks.
• ENTJs love to interact with people.

On the side of relationships, this is the assessment:

ENTJ Strengths
* Genuinely interested in people's ideas and thoughts
* Enthusiastic and energetic
* Take their commitments very seriously
* Fair-minded and interested in doing the Right Thing
* Very good with money
* Extremely direct and straightforward
* Verbally fluent
* Enhance and encourage knowledge and self-growth in all aspects of life
* Able to leave relationships without looking back
* Able to turn conflict situations into positive lessons
* Able to take constructive criticism well
* Extremely high standards and expectations (both a strength and a weakness)
* Usually have strong affections and sentimental streaks
* Able to dole out discipline


ENTJ Weaknesses
* Their enthusiasm for verbal debates can make them appear argumentative
* Tendency to be challenging and confrontational
* Tend to get involved in "win-lose" conversations
* Tendency to have difficulty listening to others
* Tendency to be critical of opinions and attitudes which don't match their own
* Extremely high standards and expectations (both a strength and a weakness)
* Not naturally in tune with people's feelings and reactions
* May have difficulty expressing love and affection, sometimes seeming awkward or inappropriate
* Can be overpowering and intimidating to others
* Tendency to want to always be in charge, rather than sharing responsibilities
* Can be very harsh and intolerant about messiness or inefficiency
* Tendency to be controlling
* May be slow to give praise or to realize another's need for praise
* If unhappy or underdeveloped, they may be very impersonal, dictatorial, or abrasive
* Tendency to make hasty decisions
* Make explode with terrible tempers when under extreme stress

Yes, i can relate to many of these points, but i still think these kind of tests should be taken with a pinch of salt. The not-so-good points can serve as a good reminder to keep working on them, but to extend them to find suitable jobs/partner(s)/friends is probably taking it a bit too far.

So, go and pass some of your time if you like, taking this test and knowing your personality type. It would be an ego boost for sure. (They write a whole lot of good stuff in type description. :-) )

p.s. The type might change if you repeat the test after a duration. (It did for me marginally). :-)