Someone at work mentioned that they had done a Myers-Briggs and been pronounced an ISTJ. They weren't sure they really liked it, but from what I know of them it was as accurate as any of these things can be. This made me look again and I decided I'm almost the opposite: an ESFP. That means I get energy from dealing with people or other stimuli, focus on details and facts, put personal and social criteria above "objective" ones, and prefer not to commit to an early decision but leave my options open for as long as possible.
How does this square with the fact that sometimes I will be very glad when a meeting gets cancelled so I can concentrate on some piece of programming or analysis? Isn't that very introverted? Extroversion, in the psychological sense, isn't about people, it's about your need for external stimulation (which back when these psychologists were getting going and there was no TV, You Tube or iPods, pretty much meant people). An introvert is scared of being overwhelmed, an extrovert is scared of being bored. Anyway, we can't like everyone and some people or situations with people in them are just not simpatico, so it's not about people, it's about the kind of people. If most people aren't your kind of people, you're not going to be seen around people much - but that doesn't mean you're not an extravert. It just means you are in a minority.
As for the details bit, well, that's me. Life is not a big picture, it's a mass of details, but of course what I know with experience is that implementation without strategy is blind, but strategy without implementation is empty. Where I work, we have neither.
As for the criteria, yes, I put personal factors first (is this what we want to be doing? how does it make me look? what are the other people we don't want to be confused with doing? how will it be taken?) but only because, again, experience tells me that you have to do the numbers first. The numbers tell me what to reject - too expensive, not profitable enough, takes too long, won't fit through the door, insurance is impossible - but not what to accept. It's the personal stuff that tells me what to accept after all the duff stuff has been rejected.
As for not committing? Put that down to the influence of the Rat in my Chinese horoscope. We Rats have to have an escape plan - and anyone with an out before they go in is not committing. My main decision criterion is: how much will this cost to reverse / undo / paint over / do another way? If the answer is, not much, then I'll go ahead with a decision. If the answer is, a whole lot, I will usually decide we have to do it another way, one that we can back out from. Anything with low entry barriers and huge exit costs is going to get a very wide berth from me - hence my never even thinking of marriage. I could no more consider marriage than a sailor could spit into the wind. So I leave as much undecided as possible, partly to give Fate and Lady Luck as many opportunities as possible, and partly because I prefer the process the French call engragement - whereby one eventually does something without ever actually having decided to do it. (I'm sure that word exists - I read it somewhere, but I've never seen it since.)
However, I bet that if I actually answered the questions (which I just did here) I would need to pay attention to the words. One of the questions is: after prolonged socialising, do I feel the need to get away for some peace? You might say yes if you've seen me on occasion, but you would be missing the fact that I was "socialising" with people or in a situation I didn't want to be with or in right from the start: I was being dutiful. Under those circumstances anyone would want to get away asap - and if I had somewhere with people to go afterwards, I would, but I don't, so it looks like I'm getting some peace and quiet.
I might be an ESPF but I very often live the life of an ISTJ. There's nothing that says the way you're living is how you want to be living, and looking at how you do live may be no guide to who you are. It's just a guide to the compromises you made.
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