Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type
Most people see only the side introverts present to the outer world, which is mostly their auxiliary process, their second best. (View Highlight)
Dislike intensely any and every occupation that necessitates sustained concentration on sensing, and are willing to sacrifice the present to a large extent since they neither live in it nor particularly enjoy it. (View Highlight)
Prefer the joy of enterprise and achievement and pay little or no attention to the art of living in the present. (View Highlight)
The TF preference is the only one that shows a marked sex difference. The proportion of feeling types appears to be substantially higher among women than among men. This difference in the frequencies of the types for men and women has led to much generalization about the sexes. Women have been assumed to be less logical, more tenderhearted, more tactful, more social, less analytical, and more inclined to take things personally. All these are feeling traits. Feeling types (of either sex) will tend to have them. Thinking types (of either sex) will not. The generalization tends to pass over the women with thinking and the men with feeling, partly because types that do not fit the stereotypes have often learned the art of protective coloration. (View Highlight)
THE JUDGING TYPES believe that life should be willed and decided, while the perceptive types regard life as something to be experienced and understood. Thus, judging types like to settle things, or at least to have things settled, whereas perceptive types prefer to keep their plans and opinions as open as possible so that no valuable experience or enlightenment will be missed. The contrast in their lives is quite evident. (View Highlight)
Curiosity. One of the liveliest gifts of the perceptive types is the expectation that what they do not yet know will be interesting. Curiosity leads them into many byways of knowledge and experience and into amassing astonishing stores of information. It also wards off boredom, as it finds something of interest in almost any situation. (View Highlight)
Are analytical and impersonal
Are driven by their inner vision of the possibilities
INTJs are the most independent of all the sixteen types and take more or less conscious pride in that independence.
With technical interests, they tend to be research scientists, inventors, and design engineers. They are likely to be very good at mathematics, especially problems, but not quite as adept at pure mathematical theory as INTPs. INTJs are fine at thinking things up, and definitely better at working things out than the INTPs. They can get things done, but they will be interested only when the problems involved are complicated enough to be challenging. Routine production would waste the intuition, and a purely theoretical research job would waste the extraverted thinking, which has a craving for practical applications of ideas. (View Highlight)
The least-developed process of the introverted thinkers inevitably is extraverted feeling. They are not apt to know, unless told, what matters emotionally to another person, but they can and should act on the principle that people do care about having their merits appreciated and their point of view respectfully considered. Both the working life and the personal life of the introverted thinkers will go better if they take the trouble to do two simple things: Say an appreciative word when praise is honestly due, and mention the points on which they agree with another person before they bring up the points on which they disagree. (View Highlight)
INTPs make scholars, theorists, and abstract thinkers in fields such as science, mathematics, economics, and philosophy. INTPs are perhaps the most intellectually profound of all the types. Intuition brings a deeper insight than is granted to thinking alone. It gives its possessors intellectual curiosity, quickness of understanding, ingenuity and fertility of ideas in dealing with problems, and an extra glimpse of possibilities that logic has not yet had time to reach. On the debit side, intuition makes routine harder, though an intuitive may, in the course of a lifetime, achieve a sufficient adaptation to it.
INTP executives are probably rare outside scientific or academic circles. The good executives will be those who have acquired a very definite facility at extraversion sufficient to keep them in touch with the situations they must handle. Exercising their authority in a perceptive manner, such INTPs will use ingenuity and understanding to find ways of achieving the desired ends. But they will test every proposed measure by the exacting yardstick of their principles, so that whatever they direct will embody their own integrity. (View Highlight)