Myers Briggs test results

[bjarvis]

tdjohnsn mentioned the Myers Briggs test in a recent posting. I've heard about it for years but never actually taken it until now.

It seems I'm an INTJ:
Introverted: 56%
Intuitive: 38%
Thinking: 62%
Judging: 89%

Strong-willed, decisive, detail-oriented, pragmatic, unsentimental, perfectionist, efficiency-obsessed and goal-driven, occasionally to a ruthless degree. Yup, sounds about right: a project planner with an eye for covering every conceivable contingency, no matter how unlikely, with little patience for people, rules or events which might impede progress to a goal.

Which, all in all, sounds rather unlikable. Wearing tight jeans must be making up for a lot more than I originally suspected. :-^

Comments

[apparentparadox]

I'm also an INTJ, but I bet I'm more introverted than you based on what I've seen :-)

Mark's an ESFJ which makes us almost complete opposites, but it seems to work out for us. When we leverage each of our strengths, we're able to compensate for the other's weaknesses and be a strong partnership.

[bearfuz.livejournal.com]

It's your good judgment that makes the whole thing hang together, I think. ;-)

[bjarvis.livejournal.com]

As I was mulling over your note, I tried to think of examples of how you two work together and realized I have practically none. While I've frequently seen both of you, it's mostly been one at a time; even when you're attending the same event/venue, I almost never see you both in the same room at the same time. And as I write this, it occurs to me that this too may be one path (of many possibilities) to partnership success.

[apparentparadox]

Well, this doesn't all have to do with the INTJ vs ESFJ differences, but here are some things that outsiders probably never see:

• I'm more impulsive than Mark. I make decisions quickly, mostly trusting my intuition with only a small amount of research. Mark, on the other, would research things to death. By working together, we move faster than he would, but make better decisions than either of us would alone.


• I leverage Mark's extroversion to get me out to meet people in a way that is still safe for me. When we first started square dancing, for example, I wouldn't dance with anyone but Mark for the first 6-8 months. If Mark were an introvert, too, we never would have started square dancing.


• I'm much better at visualizing things from quick verbal descriptions. Mark generally needs to it in "real life" before he can really grok it. We've learned over the years that I can weed out stuff that wouldn't work at all pretty quickly, and then decide how to proceed such that he can get what he needs to make a decisions.

I think also one of the things that really works for us is the level of trust we have -- that even if I'm doing one of the things that is a weak point for me (and a strength for Mark), that I'll know enough not to make a really bad decision without going over things with him first -- and vice versa.