There's a very well-known psychological inventory called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. It's used a lot. At The Bank they like the "colours" questionnaire, which is a simplified Myers-Briggs. Myers-Briggs is based on the ideas in Carl Jung's book Psychological Types. People therefore think Myers-Briggs is very profound.
I've just finished reading a book called 137: Jung, Pauli, and the Pursuit of a Scientific Obsession by Arthur Miller, which is about the professional relationship between the physicist Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung. Pauli went to Jung for analysis, stopping but continuing a correspondence with Jung about his dreams between 1932 and his death in 1958. This reminded me that Jung was a Viennese in the early twentieth-century. His psychological types were not based on studies of thousands of regular Joes and Joannas like you and me. Psychologists didn't do that then. Jung based his thinking on the people he hung out with and saw in his therapy sessions. Now here's the thing: Carl Jung wasn't an academic psychologist based in Manchester. He hung out with some of the best minds of the twentieth century, and that means some of the best minds ever, anywhere. People came from America to be cured. When he and Freud traveled to the USA, their visit was on the front page of the newspapers. You needed to have serious money to do therapy with Dr Jung - or be seriously well-connected in the intellectual and cultural world. So when he talked about overly intellectual people, he wasn't talking about the data-bashers in the basement, he was talking about some of the greatest physicists who ever lived. He was thinking about people at the far upper extremes of the Bell Curve (he never saw people at the lower end of the Curve).
Those profiles aren't about and don't apply to you and me. We're smack in the middle of the Bell Curve. We may do some things better than we do others, but we don't do anything really, really well, and we don't screw up really, really badly. (Well, you didn't anyway.) But trainers, psychologists and recruiters use the Myers-Briggs test and solemnly tell some people that they are ISTJ's and others that they are ESPN's.
Whereas what they really are is people who did better at Maths or Fine Art than they did at football or cooking. Let me put this into perspective. You ran faster than the Fat Guys and the Nerds in the class, and you made it into the school team, which won the regional finals. That makes you a better runner, and possibly gave you more practice in self-discipline, than the Fat Guy. But you're not a contender for the British Olympic team. They're the guys with the talent and self-discipline that's so extreme it does speak to something in their psychological make-up. When you go out into the world of work, some of that self-discipline and ability to practice and defer instant gratification will help you on your way - but it isn't going to distort your life. Or try this: perhaps you drank more than some of the other guys at university, but you didn't drink like I did and you didn't go on with it into your late thirties, so that your breath smelled of last night's whisky the next morning on the train. Every weekday. That's how you know you're not a screw-up either, and I am. The odd hangover doesn't speak of your character, but years of morning whisky-breath do. Most of the differences between ordinary Joes and Joannas aren't about their psychology, but about the long-term effects of small differences in their skills, when magnified by the distorting mirrors of job market and economy.
The kind of qualitative questions that psychological profiles are based on work best when dealing with extremes (well, duh!) and that's what Jung was doing. Try to apply it to regular folk and the meanings get blurry because the differences are smaller. We're all a little bit this and a little bit more that. Jung was looking at people who were a whole lot this and very little that.
It doesn't help that stereotypes get in the way. That Seven Dials, he crunches numbers and writes code, he must be a rational decision-maker and fact-based and non-intuitive. Whereas I'm almost the exact opposite. The most coldly calculating people I've run across are innumerate. Artists must be intuitive and mathematicians rational - whereas both are creative. And creativity is not what the un-creative think it is - it's mostly hard work and lots of background reading and research. Nobody just has great ideas in a vacuum - but people who never have ideas think that's how it must happen. In other words, a lot of the time, the people doing an inventory-type profile don't even really understand the words. It's even entirely possible that the people who put it together don't either.
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