apparently I am part of the 1% :)
Not the famous 1% of 2012 fame. The 1% most people probably find a little strange 😉
I’ve embraced the fact that I was a weirdo from a young age. Some people get concerned when I say this and hurriedly assure me that I am NOT weird!
But I am… and I’m OK with that. I just didn’t used to understand my inner weirdo in an analytical way. And INTJs LOVE analytical explanations!!!
What the hell is an INTJ you are likely asking? A valid question 🙂 And, unless you have done a Myers Briggs questionnaire recently, the initials will look like ancient Greek. And it was the Greeks – or maybe the Egyptians – who came up with the first analysis of personality traits.
Katharine Briggs and Isabel Myers were devotees of Carl Jung. Much like economists, it seems psychologists don’t agree – and their subject matter is so subjective it’s easy to look right… but Myers and Briggs seem to have been more focused on the cash grab personality theory might yield.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myers-Briggs_Type_Indicator
This all began a couple of months ago when I was trying to encourage my niece to pick a career over a job. In my 20s I knew almost nothing about the world and would definitely have chosen a different career path had I approached the endeavour more systematically. So I am hoping to use my experience – and mistakes – to help her find a more rewarding path.
My altruism has had funny rewards as it’s got me talking about Myers Briggs – and how to deal with the world if you are a weirdo…
I thought of Myers Briggs because many years ago I had an argument with the HR Manager at the company I worked for because he thought I wasn’t insanely rational. He told me I would be an “F” in Myers Briggs, not a “T”. (For the uninitiated, “F” is for “feeling” and “T” is for “thinking”.)
I took the test to prove him wrong – and quelle surprise – I was right 🙂 But what I remembered being cool about the experience was that I read the notes about my personality type and saw myself reflected back in a way I had never experienced before.
I couldn’t remember what my type had been so I went on-line to see if I could find a test. Of course, they want to upsell you so they tell you it’s not REALLY a PROPER Myers Briggs test but it was close enough and I was definitely an INTJ. So figured I could send it to my niece to get some insight that might help her career planning.
The only letter we share is “I” (introversion vs. extroversion) so it is very valuable to know that she and I should likely have completely different careers.
What was most entertaining to me though was the discovery that I AM indeed a weirdo. Somewhere along the line I came across some statistics as to how the personality types split across the general population (there are 16 possible personality types).
Apparently INTJs make up about 1-2% of the general population – and female INTJs are about as rare as unicorns! So it makes total sense that I have frequently felt misunderstood…
and have had to work on faking acting like a “normal person.” A lot of human behaviour mystifies me. I use my observational and analytical skills to try and figure out how to act more “normal” and not freak people out.
The line in my personality profile that made me laugh out loud was “perhaps the most fundamental problem that INTJs face in relationships is that they really want people to make sense 🙂 The INTJ will expect inexhaustible reasonability and directness.
Like I said, weirdo 😉 But I have learned to accept and embrace my oddness. Feeling misunderstood by the world has made me more compassionate. And I use my analytical skills to try and fake it at being a real person – and I’ve become quite adept at it 😉
What really turns INTJs on is finding simple solutions to complex problems and making stuff HAPPEN! NOTHING makes me happier. A little sad maybe… But, as is likely obvious by now, I am using this blog to sort out the world and plan my next half.
Reading my personality was illuminating. I really want do something to make the world a better place before I die. I always thought it had to be big and flashy. But my new goal is to be “the great facilitator”. Like all INTJs, I prefer to work behind the scenes. I love to synthesize gigantic quantities of information, make sense of it and put a nice, clean action plan in play – that I monitor because I only really get excited when I tick stuff off the “to do list”. So, solving all the world’s problems? What could be more enticing? 😉
It’s kind of dull being normal, right? … 😉
life on planetm 
money for mouse shoes
Money gets a bad rap. Being poor is honourable – especially if you aren’t poor 🙂 Being rich is vulgar. But being sort of financially secure is just boring. The lot of accountants and financial planners. But some of those boring people know how to use money as a bullet to happiness rather than despair.
That is my goal in life. Yesterday I used my ability to buy a pair of designer shoes to great effect. While there is certainly virtue to knowing how to save money, the real hidden secrets of life are in learning how to spend it!
We’ve done a lot of talking about my dad lately but I learned some good stuff from my mom as well. My mom is likely a little too generous. But it’s one of those faults that is tough to find fault with. There are certainly worse negative traits 🙂
No matter how many times I tell her ONE present is enough, I know it will never happen. Something else will catch her eye that you just have to have. Long ago she gave up trying to cram all the goodies into conventional Christmas stockings so we all know the plastic bag with our name on it sitting under the tree IS a Christmas stocking – you just need to use your imagination 😉
But the most memorable gift I ever saw her purchase was on a Christmas Eve many years ago. The store was almost closing down around us but we had to get some more toys. She was quite insistent about it. I thought, “oh my god, she has gone bonkers. There is NO way we don’t already have so many gifts you can barely see the tree!” But this was not part of the usual Christmas bounty. Instead we pulled up at some mysterious address and left the toys on the doorstep like some anonymous Santa a little off his schedule. As we drove away, she explained. The family was going through tough times and the kids might not have any toys for Christmas. But it was a small town where everybody knows everybody’s business and people have a lot of pride so we had to make it look like Santa was just a wee bit early.
My mom has always taken great pleasure in doing nice things for other people. She doesn’t do it for the thanks or the adoration but just because it gives her pleasure. It’s one of my greatest life lessons. And it’s really heart-warming to see my niece taking up the torch.
Ask not what the world can do for you but, rather, what you can do for the world. Give it a whirl. You may be surprised how great it feels to do something nice for someone else. And the best news. You can spend less than $5! The price is totally NOT the point. It’s how much thought you put into finding just the right thing to do.
What really turns people on is being noticed. I used to send my friend Yvonne chocolate covered peanut butter eggs every Easter – cause it was our thing and you could only get them at Easter.
Through the beauty of the internet I confirmed her mailing address, send the invoice to her mom in case she needed to do an exchange and organized for Fedex to deliver a pair of size 8 1/2 gold glitter Marc Jacobs mouse shoes to her front door in Toronto via the Brown’s Shoes website. I could track the whole process via my computer in Vancouver so sent her a note yesterday afternoon to look for a package when she got home. And then I got the email. The shoes had been safely delivered… Some of the best money I have ever spent!
So, Morgan, I was wowed by your effusive thanks. But you should also thank my mom. Without her wonderful example, there would have been no mouse shoes for you 🙂 Given her obsession with everything Disney and the concept that Mickey is more or less one of her children, what could be a more perfect tribute than mouse shoes…
Category:
life philosophy, shining examples, social commentary
Tagged with: