I took the “Career Exploration and Myers-Briggs Type Indicator” seminar yesterday. The test results and lecture confirmed what I already knew to be the case: I am almost the exact opposite of my average classmate.
For those who aren’t familiar, the Myers-Briggs type indicator is a scale used to slot people into one of sixteen basic personality types. It is the kind of test that I would hold in the same general regard that I have for astrology, except that it tends to produce uncannily accurate results.
You can find out your own personality type fairly easily using any number of online tools. You can also dig up type descriptions that range from the insightful to the absurd. For example, I am an ISTP. For information on how best to love me, look here. This same web site also helpfully suggests that I might consider a career as an animal trainer or lawn care specialist. Another web site reveals that I share a personality type with Charles Bronson, Keith Richards, Chuck Yeager, and Frank Zappa, which I want to think explains a lot about me.
It’s important not to take this stuff too far. For one thing, stripped of context, the types come across as a bit cartoonish. The descriptions of ISTPs portray them as adrenalin addicts who race around on motorcycles, jump out of planes, crave the open road, have the attention spans of barnacles, and are about as communicative as door knobs. I can see pieces of myself in that description, but mostly in a funhouse mirror sort of way.
Another caveat is that the sixteen personality types aren’t discrete. They lie on a continuum, and many people, myself included, are somewhat borderline.
A third is that Myers Briggs ignores some aspects of personality that I personally consider rather important, such as sense of humor.
All that said, MB is fun stuff, and does seem to hold some predictive value when it comes to matters of workplace satisfaction or interpersonal conflict. And because 95% of the people attending business school are deadset on not going back to whatever field they just left, interest in the Career Exploration seminar ran high.
The I in ISTP stands for Introvert, as opposed to E for Extrovert. Not surprisingly, business school types tend to be extroverted, although the split isn’t as pronounced as you might think. My Wharton class is only 58% extroverts, and I was surprised to learn that traditional CEOs are introverts, in the classic lonely-at-the-top mold. I am more accustomed to Silicon Valley CEOs, who tend to be a psychotically energetic, vision-spewing cheerleaders, a la Steve Jobs.
The S stands for Sensing as opposed to N for iNtuitive, and Wharton students are almost evenly split on this dimension. Think fact-oriented vs. possibility-oriented, analytical vs. big-picture. Both have their place.
The T is for Thinking as opposed to F for Feeling, and on this dimension the skew is enormous: 91% of Wharton students are Thinkers rather than Feelers, cold-blooded business machines dedicated to the power of reason and logic over the warm mush of human values and emotions. Put simply, we’re dicks.
The P is for Perceiving as opposed to J for Judging. As a P, I like to take in information more than I like to pass judgment. I am an observer, curious and open-minded, ruggedly handsome, playfully sexy. I made up those last two. Anyway, business school types are Judgers by a 2-to-1 margin. They like to decide, organize, plan, control, and just generally crush spontaneity beneath the heel of their freshly polished jackboots.
So the classic business school student is ENTJ: outgoing, aggressive, logical, highly organized. Note the lack of shared letters with ISTP. We disagree on every axis other than the T, and if you aren’t a T, then you’re probably not going to business school. You’d much rather be petting kittens or painting pictures of unicorns than suffering through accounting classes. (Kidding! Some of my best friends are Fs! I swear!)
The guy sitting next to me at the seminar was an ESTJ, another classic business school type, aggressive, analytical, quick to make judgments. True to his type, he leaned over me and insisted that I allow him to scrutinize the results of my profile. And true to my type, I crawled under the table and began sucking my thumb.
No! True to my type I slid him my papers, cringed as this simpleminded thug made wild assumptions about me based on the four letters on the page, and then smiled wanly as he immediately pronounced that I should be a psychologist. Thanks, jerkoff. You should be a high school guidance counselor.
The leader of the seminar walked us through the various axes of the personality matrix, and then singled out us ISs, comprising a full 20% of the class, for a special bashing. He portrayed us as detail-oriented grinds who act as spoilsports and wet blankets, either inundating our innovative, energetic classmates with irrelevant questions or withdrawing into autistic, noncommunicative shells, spending hours rocking silently back and forth in our chairs and dreaming of faraway Monkey Island. The best that can be said for us is that, if given a box of crayons and left quietly to our own devices, we will generally get the job done in a methodical and workmanlike fashion. Just like Keith Richards.
Having finished with the ISs, the lecturer next started in on the Ps. He himself was an ENFJ, and betrayed a distinct pro-J bias. Js, he claimed, are decisive and organized. Ps, by implication, are wishy-washy and scatterbrained.
I have a slightly different take on the matter. As an extreme P, my natural tendency is to observe rather than to judge, and therefore you can take me at my word when I assure you that Js are complete psychopaths.
Don’t believe me? The anecdote used by the lecturer to illustrate the difference between Ps and Js regarded travel habits, a topic that is dear to my heart. Ps, he said, maintain a loose, flexible attitude toward travel plans, preferring simply to buy a plane ticket and sort out the details when they arrive. In other words, Ps are enjoyable, easygoing, levelheaded people who embrace life’s natural caprice and spontaneity. Js, on the other hand, are the type who make all the reservations — including restaurant reservations, if you can believe that, those freaks — months in advance, and insist on rigorously sticking to a predetermined schedule. In other words, Js are completely joyless weirdos whose frail egos and brittle emotional needs compel them to script every detail of their bland, tortured existences.
So, anyway, I’ve decided to drop out of Wharton and start a motorcycle repair shop — or maybe a lawn care consultancy — somewhere in Nepal, or maybe Brazil. I’ll figure it out when I get there.
