A lot of my meatspace and Facebook friends have been subjected to my recent interest in personality type, but I make no apologies. Personality type can tell you a great deal about a person, and knowing yours can improve your life immensely.
To begin, every person has four different indicators, running in a spectrum. You are either introverted or extroverted, sensing or intuiting, thinking or feeling, and judging or perceiving. From these, you get a four-letter code. An extroverted, sensing, feeling, perceiving person would be an ESFP. An introverted, intuiting, thinking, judging person (such as myself) would be an INTJ.
You can find plenty of tests floating around the Internet to test your personality type, and learn more about the results. I won't bother you with much in the way of analysis, I trust that you can do that on your own (or are just another bot, in which case you hardly matter). The important thing is that you do it--it could save you life, it will definitely improve it.
The vital part of my argument, however, is that personality type can be visualized as a tesseract (a 4th dimensional cube, for the poor souls out there). Similar to a Nolan Chart--an entirely different topic--each edge represents one of the indicators. If we assume the cube has an corner at the origin, the x-axis runs out 200 units from extroversion to introversion, the y-axis from sensing to intuiting, the z-axis from feeling to thinking, and the w-axis (the one we have trouble visualizing, being 3D creatures) from perceiving to judging.
In this notation, a "perfect" ENFP would be at the corner (0, 200, 0, 0), for example. However, a very small percentage of the population has a "perfect" score on any one indicator, let alone all four. I'm an exception: the last time I took the Humanmetrics test, I score 100% Introversion. Altogether, I'm I(100%) N(75%) T(88%) J(22%). As you can see, I'm a strong INT, just slightly J--an this is the highest I've ever scored on J. Using our notation, I would be at (200, 175, 188, 122).
Notice, of course, that I've tipped the mathematical scales in my favor. For fairness, I'll do another example: E(45%) S(67%) T (14%) P (73%). They would be (55, 33, 114, 27).
Very few people are near a corner. This is the big takeaway. Most people people are near an edge, but not on it. Some are in the center, or only close to two edges. If this is true for you, read up on both side of that indicator. I found that everything I wasn't as an INTJ I was as an INTP, and the converse.
So, you visual-learners out there, and even you non-visual ones: think about it. Every person is somewhere in that 4D cube, and it can tell you a lot about them. Where are you?
