Chris from HR Buoy posted some­thing I thought was really cool, Hello. My Name Is Chris And I Am An ENTJ…. Mike from The Human Race Horses posted his a few years ago too.

Their trans­parency and dis­clo­sure is surely a sign of their com­fort with who they are. But then, they are both “E” types, mean­ing they like to spend time in the outer world of peo­ple and things (Extra­ver­sion), ver­sus the inner world of ideas and images (Introversion).

Uhhh.… like me.

Last week there was a Twit­ter con­ver­sa­tion float­ing around with @animal, @CincyRecruiter about intro­verts. Jen­nifer sug­gested we wran­gle a Recruit­ing Ani­mal Show away from Michael to debunk some com­mon intro­vert myths. We haven’t heard from him yet (Hel­looooo) so in the mean­time I’m going to pick up the con­ver­sa­tion here.

This isn’t the first time I am pub­licly reveal­ing my per­son­al­ity type but this is first time I am pro­vid­ing the win­dow to who I am, how I think, why I respond the way I do, why I have chal­lenges with time –> why I very often feel oth­ers “don’t get me” but I read them as eas­ily as a Snap­ple fact.

Keirsey defines the INTP per­son­al­ity type as Ratio­nal Archi­tect and the rarest of the 16 MBTI clas­si­fi­ca­tions. Sta­tis­tics say that per­haps 1% of the pop­u­la­tion is INTP and the very vast major­ity are male. Inter­est­ingly, I per­son­ally know only one other INTP woman. She was the first hire I ever recruited through Twitter.

I have always said I would retire early and I have a plan to do that by age 55. I found that INTP is one of the 3 “retire early” types and that is very com­fort­ing and reaf­firm­ing to me that there is sup­port­ing evi­dence I will achieve that. Word to the wise, “I” types take the top 3 retire early spots… I guess extro­verts have a hard time giv­ing it up.

When I say retire I don’t mean veg­e­tate I mean live a dif­fer­ent lifestyle. Per­haps it will be that Spe­cial Agent com­mune I keep talk­ing about.

Dr. David Keirsey him­self, along with C.G. Jung (I love rebels), william Har­vey and our pre­de­ces­sors, Socrates, Rene Descartes, Blaise Pas­cal, Sir Isaac New­ton, Albert Ein­stein, James Madi­son, Tomas Jef­fer­son and Charles Dar­win were all INTP’s or Ratio­nal Archi­tects. So, while I don’t presently have a lot of com­pany here on Earth, I belong to a tribe of amaz­ing change agents. I’m a par­tic­u­lar fan of Ein­stein and Darwin.

A con­cise sim­pli­fied descrip­tion from the Mey­ers & Briggs Foun­da­tion of the INTP per­son­al­ity is:

Seek to develop log­i­cal expla­na­tions for every­thing that inter­ests them. The­o­ret­i­cal and abstract, inter­ested more in ideas than in social inter­ac­tion. Quiet, con­tained, flex­i­ble, and adapt­able. Have unusual abil­ity to focus in depth to solve prob­lems in their area of inter­est. Skep­ti­cal, some­times crit­i­cal, always analytical.

I have spent sig­nif­i­cant time read­ing all the var­i­ous inter­pre­ta­tions and appre­ci­ate Keirsey’s analy­sis the most. Taken from the Keirsey analy­sis I find the fol­low­ing to be most rel­e­vant to me:

• For Archi­tects, the world exists pri­mar­ily to be ana­lyzed, under­stood, explained — and re-designed.
• They tend to see dis­tinc­tions and incon­sis­ten­cies instan­ta­neously, and can detect con­tra­dic­tions no mat­ter when or where they were made. It is dif­fi­cult for an Archi­tect to lis­ten to non­sense, even in a casual con­ver­sa­tion, with­out point­ing out the speaker’s error. And in any seri­ous dis­cus­sion or debate Archi­tects are dev­as­tat­ing, their skill in fram­ing argu­ments giv­ing them an enor­mous advan­tage. Archi­tects regard all dis­cus­sions as a search for under­stand­ing, and believe their func­tion is to elim­i­nate incon­sis­ten­cies, which can make com­mu­ni­ca­tion with them an uncom­fort­able expe­ri­ence for many.
• Author­ity derived from office, cre­den­tial, or celebrity does not impress them. Archi­tects are inter­ested only in what make sense, and thus only state­ments that are con­sis­tent and coher­ent carry any weight with them.
• Archi­tects prize intel­li­gence, and with their grand desire to grasp the struc­ture of the uni­verse, they can seem arro­gant and may show impa­tience with oth­ers who have less abil­ity, or who are less driven.

One com­mon kind of quirky INTP detail I fre­quently deal with inter­nally is not lik­ing to get involved with minu­tia or even real­iz­ing my own ideas. I often have a great idea and men­tally bring it to fruition. Because it was fin­ished in my mind suc­cess­fully I feel like I reached the objec­tive and I’m super sat­is­fied. I can be just as sat­is­fied with men­tal accom­plish­ments as phys­i­cal ones and view them as equally impor­tant. Usu­ally I’m per­fectly fine with it. I guess it’s a good thing I am moti­vated by other things besides money (hey, it doesn’t hurt but it isn’t my pri­mary moti­va­tor) because so far I haven’t sold any of my ideas..

It also means I spend a lot of time alone, very still and quiet and just work­ing in my head. I can’t remem­ber ever being bored. The down side here is I’m often unaware of time pass­ing by and my house doesn’t get clean, laun­dry doesn’t get washed and gro­cery shop­ping doesn’t get done, often enough. Though I feel like I accom­plish a lot it’s not appar­ent to oth­ers. I think it can make me appear “lazy” but I don’t feel that I am. Quite to the con­trary, I feel like I work 24/7 includ­ing in my dreams sometimes.

It’s a good thing I like what I do… Actu­ally on the phys­i­cal plane I do get quite a bit accom­plished. If you check out my about page you’ll see some of the things I’m up to that aren’t just in my head.

Do you know what your MBTI per­son­al­ity type is? Are you an extro­vert or an introvert?

You still with me here?