What's an INTJ?
The Myers-Briggs Personality
Type Indicator (MBTI)
divides human beings into 16 overlapping groups based on Jungian characteristics.
Each letter is one of a pair depending on which is dominant in your personality.
I'm an INTJ, the 'systems builder' or 'mastermind', which covers about
1% of the population. The
16 types are described here, with the
INTJ type here.
The first letter (i or e) stands for Introverted
or Extroverted attitude;
basically whether you draw your energy from your own thoughts and ideas
(inward) or other people and things (outward).
The second (S
or N) is the perceiving function of Sensing or Intuitive, and
riffs on how you prefer to receive information. Sensers prefer to look and listen;
Intuitive people prefer insight and work out relationships between things.
The third letter, for the 'judging' function (Thinking
or Feeling) denotes how you
judge things. Thinkers rely on If-then-not and true-false judgements, while Feelers see
shades of grey: more or less, better or worse.
Finally, Judging and Perceiving reveal
the attitudes of the 'functions' denoted by the middle two
letters. Judgers have
the strongest Judging function extroverted and Perceivers have the strongest
Perceiving function extroverted. So a J at the end means the Thinking or Feeling
function is dominant.
Associated with MBTI is David
Keirsey's Temperament Sorter, which stirs emotion into the mix by classing
the 16 MBTI types into areas of dominance: rational, idealist, artisan, or guardian.
Keirsey accounts for the different orthography used to write MBTI types (INTJ
is an MBTI; iNTj is
how Keirsey writes it, with upper and lower case.)
Nobody falls neatly into just one type; I'm about 95% INTJ, which means
I'm unusually adept at analysing problems and creating
solutions that work. To put me to work for you, contact
me.