Monday, September 9: Take this short personality test and respond to your results.
I'm not particularly impressed with being called an ENTJ, for two reasons - first, if I recall correctly this is a pretty condensed, simplified version of the Myers-Briggs test, so I don't know that it's particularly accurate. Second, all of my indicators were very slight on each axis - less than ten percent tendency toward any of the factors, so the very strongly worded, concrete description of my personality from the above link seems particularly off.
I suppose on a more profound level, I always get a twinge of skepticism when a new personality profile system makes its way around the internet. The above test seems to be gaining popularity, and Myers-Briggs in some form crops up every few years, but the two big self-diagnosis things that really got old for me fast lately were introversion and the autism spectrum.
I don't discount the comfort that it brings to many people who read up on it and know nothing is wrong with them. But all too often, I encounter people who hide behind these descriptions to excuse something as innocuous as occasional social awkwardness, and that strikes me as both incredibly self-limiting and somewhat disrespectful to people for whom these things are a genuine issue (and something to overcome, rather than something to rationalize one's behavior with).
Each one of us has our extroverted and introverted moments, and we may tend toward one or the other, but I've always felt like that could be influenced by so many different factors - as could any of the factors in these various personality profiles. We're humans, not personality profiles. We're fluid and we adapt and change to the circumstances that surround us, and while some things may stay the same, not everything can, so let's not let an online personality inventory force us into one way of thinking - about ourselves, about others, about anything.
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