In response...

Okay, so this is in response to my sis-in-law Ticia's personality test results. I think it is fairly accurate, though they seem to have left out the interpersonal aspects of my life. What do you think?

Ever since you were a child you questioned those in authority, not explicitly trusting teachers or other leaders to really be qualified enough to deliver the instruction they were delivering. You were open to their thoughts, but quick to identify biases or knowledge gaps in those in authority positions.

In fact, skepticism is one of your defining traits. You don’t trust titular authority, appearances, beliefs, traditions, customs, reputation, degrees, or credentials awarded by any agency or school. This is not conspiracy thinking or suspicion of bad intent, but an honest impersonal belief that no one holds anyone or anything to the high, accurate, objective standard that you do. You will be the judge of someone’s competence and no prior ratings by anyone else will sway your impartial evaluation.

You define time by the event, rather than the opposite. You are certainly capable of making and keeping appointments by clock time (although you’re often a few minutes late) but in your mind you are living in a time interval based on a concept, activity or stage which you can clearly define. For you, a time period ends when a certain activity ceases, when a goal is reached, or when your attention naturally shifts rather than when a certain clock alignment occurs.

You see connections between concepts that others do not, and must sometimes stop to check in with your audience to see if you’ve made intuitive leaps that left them far behind. This talent for connecting what, to others, seem like totally unrelated ideas gives you a flair for invention. When you see a problem, you naturally apply technique or theory from an entirely different system and are the most likely type to make a conceptual, inventive breakthrough. People still tour the home of one of the most famous of your type, Thomas Jefferson, to marvel at all the contraptions (automatic double doors, mechanized copies of handwritten letters, revolving bookstand, etc) which he created nearly 200 years ago.

You quickly brush aside prejudice, convention, custom and tradition for what works and produces results.

You are particularly concerned with the proper definition and usage of individual words. For example, you are likely to notice the error if someone describes something as “very unique.” If something is “unique” then it is incomparable to anything else. It can therefore not be qualified with the word “very,” because that word is necessarily used for comparison. You economize with language, using the fewest words, each highly defined, to get a point across assuming that others will feel bored or insulted if you over-explain something.

You are prone to understatement. You will always err on the side of saying slightly too little, estimating slightly more problems or more cost in terms of time or money, slightly less exciting or beneficial results. This is done completely logically and you could go into more specific estimations if you thought the receiver would take such predictions logically, realistically and unemotionally.

Your special talent is understanding and optimizing complex systems. You can quickly explain how you personally fit into macro and micro social and economic machinery.

You are objective and when your friends come to you they know they can count on you to deliver the blunt truth. You recover quickly, if flinching at all, when someone puts you down or criticizes you personally. You realize that either the critique was deserved and you intend to correct it, or the person delivering it was incorrectly biased or misinformed and therefore the criticism was inaccurate and inapplicable. When you criticize yourself it is usually merciless and totally out of proportion to the issue needing correction.

You are known for your impatience with ignorance, incompetence, small talk, fake people, or too much time given to a small matter. You bring total involvement and attention to each moment in life.

As a parent you encourage individuality in your child. You particularly enjoy debating topics with your child. You encourage your children to be original, think actively, and take action on their own.

You face each activity with self-improvement in mind. While others think of games, work, even social events as a mere passage of time, you engage each activity as an opportunity to further develop your mastery of the skills involved. For you, even relaxation is done with a sense of duty to optimize the rejuvenating effects.

Plato said that the function of your type is to study nature and figure out ways to tame it. You are an intellectual and enjoy logical investigation and theory building. You are honored when someone asks you to explain the rationale behind your latest project, but often find the audience uninterested in nearly the level of detail with which you are capable of discussing.

You respect yourself to the degree that you act independent of the impositions of other people. You would never just “go with the flow.” Your mind is always in motion and every action you take is by conscious choice.

Your type becomes most obvious in traumatic, stressful situations. While the rest of the world goes insane, you are the one who remains calm and collected, mainly because you realize that this is the best mindset for understanding and resolving whatever issues are at hand.

You are a true utilitarian. Your hallmark is your nearly empty refrigerator, containing exactly enough food for your next food interval and nothing more.

You have a wide variety of hobbies which get sporadic attention. Others may become frustrated with the fact that you start many projects but finish few.

You always scored well on standardized tests, partially because they are most often created by people who are a lot like you.