MBTI as eight independent skills
MBTI is a popular way to categorize personality. Some consider it as a pseudoscience, but I think such criticism misses the point. It is useful simply as a vocabulary to discuss the different ways people approach the world. Under MBTI, you evaluate your approach to the worldalong four axes:
| Introversion. You need alone time after interacting with others. | vs. | Extraversion. You need time with people to feel at ease with yourself. |
| INtuition. You live in a rich inner world of ideas and possibilities. | vs. | Sensing. You focus on the tangible realities in front of you. |
| Thinking. You solve problems with logic and reason. | vs. | Feeling. You approach the world with care and empathy. |
| Judging. You are disciplined, organized, and have a strong sense of how things ought to be. | vs. | Perceiving. You are spontaneous, flexible, and adaptable as things change. |
- Introversion (I) versus extraversion (E). Do you recover energy by being around others, or by being alone?
- S, sensing: You live firmly in the physical world as it really exists
N, intuitive: You live in an internal world of ideals and possibilities - T, thinking: You find your way through the world using logic and reason
F, feeling: You find your way through the world by empathizing and engaging with other people - J, judging: You have a firm idea of how things ought to be
P, perceiving: You are more flexible and go-with-the-flow
By taking all combinations of these four pairs, you come up with an MBTI type. For example, my own type is INTP.
There's a more insidious thing these tests can do, which is self-reinforce. If you take a test and are told that you are an INTP, you might start to identify strongly with that type. You'll read personality profiles, nod aggressively along with everything that fits you, and think "oh maybe I should behave that way" with things that don't.
So recently I've started thinking of each MBTI axis not as a scale, where being better at one thing necessarily makes you worse off at the opposite.
Rather, you can imagine there being a skill bar extending from the center in both directions.
Take thinking vs. feeling. Nothing prevents a person from being able to use logic and empathy in dealing with the world. It's natural to have tendency towards one or the other. But they are both useful skills in different contexts, and a well balanced person can employ both.
So it goes with all four letters.