As I learn more and more about personality and how it affects interactions between people I often read various advice about how a person with one personality type can better get along with people of an different personality type. Generally I find this advice to be pretty much worthless. All people ever really suggest is making a conscious effort to be like someone of the different personality type. That is kind of silly and not a long-term solution. All it will do is wear a person out. I think there are much better solutions.
What I am finding out is that people of the same or in the non-ideal case very similar personality types are the best people to give a person advice. A person of the same personality type really seems to be a person's best confidant, mentor, etc. Conventional wisdom says you should have someone of a different type to get a different point of view. Conventional wisdom is often wrong however. All that will end up happening in many cases is that you will get advice that is better suited to someone else. I am finding that much of the best advice I get these days is coming from older ENTJs, ESTJs, ENTPs, INTJs and one INFJ.
Let me give an example of a highly successful ENTJ-ENTJ partnership. Margret and Denis Thatcher. Denis Thatcher was a well off guy and he went on to provide finacial support to Margret so she could become a barrister. Later he helped finance her political career. This video below is a very fascinating reflection on Denis Thatcher. Both Margret and Denis Thatcher are almost certainly ENTJs. Denis was Margret's confidant and supporter. She attributes alot of her success to Denis. It is very interesting at the end when it discusses how people perceived Denis Thatcher's marriage to Margret. As an ENTJ I can totally relate to what they are saying. I cannot imagine a better relationship, although most people would probably despise this kind of thing. These two both had their demons but they faced them head on and helped each other out. They were in some sense both equipped to deal with mutual challenges. Like I said you should know yourself so you can lead a life that is right for you. What is right for an ENTJ is not right for ~98% of the population. Actually it would probably be a walk through hell for the other 98% of the population, but we ENTJs doing with a smile on our faces :-).
That being said it is very worthwhile getting the viewpoints of people with other personality types. I want to make a suggestion for my ENTJ brothers and sisters who may be interested. ENTJ to ENTJ ;-). I will start by spelling out the problem I had (which I am guessing many of you also have,) and then I will let you know what happened to help fix it.
A little background on myself. I have spent alot of time over the years learning about fabrication. My Dad is a carpenter and so I saw all the carpentry tools growing up. In high school I took formal instruction at the community college in machining and welding for a couple of years. I worked in a commercial machine shop for a summer, and then I worked for a number of years in the machine shop of the mechnical engineering department where I went to college. I spent countless hours building things, making mistakes, and figuring out new ways to build things. I spent almost every saturday for 4 years in a machine shop building car parts. I got pretty good at it too. By the time I was a sophomore in college the seniors thought I was a graduate student they should come to for advice. Much to my suprise there were even machinist with decades of experience who would come to me for advice. If nothing else I was pretty competent. I tend to be a somewhat ambitious person and I often dreamed of making some great device or system or something great. I knew I had the skills to do it, but there was just one problem. A big problem... I did not have any ideas that I thought were interesting or creative or exciting. Sure I had ideas that were probably at some level good, but they were boring and unoriginal. They were just plans to get things done. They were not excitng and not worth the effort to implement. I felt a little saddened by my lack of creativity.
I went on to graduate school which was alot of fun. I got to learn about various subjects in much more depth, and I got to meet alot of new people. There was one person I met who really stood out. This was a guy who I shared the lab with. He was extremely creative and full of totally crazy ideas. Ideas that in many cases were totally beyond all implementation. Talk of "The game of life," or "fractals," or "finite autonomata," were the norm. I had never even heard of many of these things till this time. We would spend extended periods of time discussing these ideas. I knew they were never going to go anywhere, but they were odd and totally out of left field. Unfortunately they were not going to get my graduate work done any sooner, and I relegated these ideas to a form of procrastination and entertainment. I did not take it too seriously at the time.
Fast forward a few years, I was finishing my PhD and I still really did not know what was next. I just had no good ideas. To make a long story short I went to work for a small company. I had a role in helping write proposals. This is when I started to realize I really needed to deal with the idea problem. After a little while everyone was laid-off for various reasons so I had alot of time to think about the future and what I thought made sense for the next step and where I wanted to go. I was reminded of my friend from graduate school. He was so full of ideas. I questioned why I didn't have any ideas. I worked hard but I had no ideas. I realized one thing that kept me from having ideas was my compulsion to have to make the ideas real. My hard work was in some ways actually holding me back. This was a big problem. If I felt responsible for making my ideas real I would naturally scale back my ambitions and dream boring dreams. If I wanted to move forward in life this was not going to work anymore. So I started not worrying about implementation. I think this is a major element of what helped my friend come up with his ideas. He did not seem to worry much about implementation and so as a result his idea generating process had much lower intertia and was much higher performance. I would start to try and think this way, and it actually worked. It was very exciting and very productive. I started coming up with more ideas that were actually interesting and exciting. I also started a much wider variety of source material for inspiration. One presentation I came across that helped with the generation of creative ideas was this discusison on type A and type B personalities. I could see alot of the points this person was making. I took it to heart.
I think in some ways this presentation helped open my mind to new view points and prepare me for the day when I was introduced to personality types about a year later. Jungian cognitive functions seem much more descriptive and predictive than type A or type B personalities. Sometimes it just takes time to understand things though and we have to go in steps. When I first looked at personalities I was most interested in the judger-perciever dicotomy. This is where I saw the tradeoff more starkly. Being a Judger I was very decisive and able to get things done, but I did this at the expense of creativity. Percievers on the other hand tend to be more creative but they often do not have the follow through to make things happen. What I realized was that in my line of work it was imperative that I learn to develop the P. Basically I needed to have and extroverted percieving function as needed. Alternatively I could have a P friend and just ask them for ideas. Either way could work, but I do like making my own ideas. I have been practicing this for the last year. I no longer have trouble thinking of ideas. I have more ideas than I can handle. Or as my friend says, "You are an idea factory."
It turns out my friend was INTP. I think for an ENTJ this is the best person to help them come up with creative ideas and grow better as a person at least in terms of creativity. ENTP is just too similiar and if a person does not realize what can go wrong in terms of expectation, the ENTP and ENTJ relationship can end in big fights. I could talk about this for awhile. With the INTP though there are enough differences that this does not seem to happen.
I think the INTP wants to work with the ENTJ as well. I think both are better off for it. I recently had a conversation with someone who I am guessing is INTP. This person is very philosophical. I told them, I needed more theory to do the things we wanted to accomplish. He told me not to worry about that theory stuff, just build things and make the theory real. I think we both realized we could help each other out.
Alot of people theorize the ENTJ-INTP relationship is in some sense an ideal match. I think this is not necessarily right. There are alot of differences here, but I do think the two can help each other alot. The reason being the ENTJ has Extroverted Thinking and the INTP has Extroverted iINtution. These two things manifest themselves in similiar ways, but are really doing very different things. They can interface quite nicely thought and can lead to some very interesting brainstorming sessions. I have to admit looking back that I find it quite amusing that some random conversations I had with my friend were actually probably one of the most valuable aspects of my graduate school experience. At the time it seemed like we were just procrastinating and wasting time, but really it was one of the most valuable things we could have done. Sometimes you need to take the time to smell the roses in some sense.
I would also like to thow out there that I think the following relationships will have similiar benefits for analagous reasons:
INTJ-ENTP
ENFJ-INFP
INFJ-ENFP
Also, if you are in the medical field and an ENTJ you migh consider meeting INFP doctors and being friends with them. Then you might get for of the compassionate side for bedside manner reasons.
Take what I suggest with a grain of salt. It worked for me maybe it will work for you. I hope the discussion stimulated some thought.
No comments:
Post a Comment