What does it mean to be authentic? Answers vary based on individual values and needs. Our desire for authenticity reflects our desire to create something more in our lives.

For example, if someone values relationships but they can’t tell that friend they have a crush on how they really feel, then they’ll see their “real” selves as someone who can be open. They’ll define authenticity as openness and honesty. If someone values freedom, but feels stuck in their job or their life, then they’ll see their authentic self as someone who follows their dreams. This person will define authenticity as being true to themselves.

Definitions of authenticity have different inherent assumption. Some of these assumptions in real life make achieving authenticity almost impossible.

Definitions of Authenticity

Definition 1: Authenticity as being yourself

Assumption: That it’s possible not to be yourself

Example:
You’re a bit shy. You want to be more confident so you can talk to that cute girl or boy that you’ve been crushing on for months. You like the person you are. You consider yourself nice and considerate, but in some areas you wish you could be more the type of person who can go after what the want.

So what is the authentic you in this example? Is the real you the shy person or is it the more confident person you want to be?

If authenticity is defined as being who you are now, wouldn’t that mean just accepting yourself as the shy quiet person that wants to be notice even if this makes you unhappy? If authenticity is being the more confident person, then does that mean you’re not being yourself currently.

Being yourself is not an either or choice between who you are now and who you want to be. You are always you. Authenticity in this context is about acceptance. It’s accepting who you are and your wants.

The problem I find with this definition is that there’s no impetus for change. Accepting yourself and your wants doesn’t necessarily translate into achieving your wants. So if you’re unhappy with your situation now, being authentic in this context doesn’t mean require taking action.

Definition 2: Authenticity as being true to yourself

Assumption: A person doesn’t have conflicting values.

Example:
Say for example, honesty is one of your highest values. And another one of your highest values is harmony.

Someone close to you introduces you to their new significant other. You find this new other completely obnoxious. You see that person treats your close friend terribly but your friend doesn’t see that or your friend just dismisses it as something minor.

If authenticity is being true to yourself, would that mean you are honest and tell you friend that this person they’re seeing is bad for them or do you keep quiet and maintain harmony and be there for you friend when the relationship goes badly?

What if your highest values are friendship and treating yourself kindly? This new significant other not only treats your friend horribly but they’re pretty obnoxious to you. Your friend and their significant other are always together these days. Is authenticity spending time with your friend (friendship) or avoiding her to keep away from the obnoxious significant other (treating yourself kindly)?

We run into our situations daily where we have to choose between our highest values like staying at our job or school (security) or running off the another city or country (freedom). Whenever we have to make these choices between values we don’t feel more authentic, we just feel we made the best choice we could at the time.

The problem that I notice with authenticity defined as being true to yourself is that it doesn’t always make you a better person. Spouses have left long-term marriages in order to be true to themselves. Relationships tend to suffer when being true to yourself means choosing your wants first. At a certain point being true to yourself becomes selfish and you have to want to make selflessness a part of who you are.

Assumption: Your best self is a fixed state and doesn’t change.

Example:
When I was eight years old, I wanted to be an knight fighting. That’s who I saw my best self to be. Since I’m not a knight currently, does that mean I’m not being authentic?

Often times, being authentic means looking into yourself to find your purpose and letting it lead you. This assumes that you know your purpose and that it’s fixed. There’s a reason why so many college students change majors. They thought their purpose was one thing when the declared their major and realized that the profession they choose didn’t fit. So if you change your major were you not being authentic because you weren’t following your true purpose?

What if authenticity is being your best self at the time with what you currently know. So if you wanted to be a doctor and were studying it then you’re being authentic. If you changed your mind and took action and changed your major, you’re being authentic by changing your major.

In this context, authenticity is all about action. If something bugs you and you speak up, you’re being authentic. If you hate your job, being authentic means quitting. If you don’t care for societal conventions, you ignore them and live the way you want to live.

However, authenticity as action is limited by the practicality of taking that action. Not everyone can quit their job on a dime, so does that mean that putting up with work to pay your bills means you’re not being authentic? Authenticity precedes change. You have to be authentic first in order to make changes instead of you make changes and before you’re authentic. In order to have more you first have to be more. It’s almost impossible to do it the other way around.

The Purpose of Authenticity

The problem I find with authenticity is that there are so many concepts but very few methodologies defined to apply those concept. If you want to be that awesome, brilliant, better you, well how do you go about that and does that mean you’re living in-authentically until you are that better you? That’s seems disempowering to me.

It feels like we’re living in an age of authenticity where everyone wants to be more authentic as if authenticity is that missing key to everything that’s holding us back from greatness. Like so many things, we have concrete problems that we’re trying to resolve with this vague concept of authenticity.

Tony Robbins said that we only want to change two things: what we do and how we feel. If we’re not living to our full potential, we hope that wanting authenticity will motivate us to live life to its fullest. If we feel shy, we hope that wanting authenticity will help us be more confident. In other words, the action of wanting authenticity is supposed to lead to action. However I find that wanting something doesn’t necessarily lead to doing.

To me, authenticity is a state of connection to ourselves without the filters and projections that we use to protect ourselves. Authenticity shouldn’t be a goal but guide to reaching those things we desire.

Authenticity as Positive Emotion

I’ve started defining authenticity as existing in my positive emotional states. Curiosity, love, connection, boldness, empathy, etc. are just a small sampling of some of those emotional states. When I feel those things, I feel as if I’m being my real self.

This doesn’t mean I’m not allowed to feel sad or lonely or afraid or bored, but feeling those emotions and constantly existing in those conditions are completely different. Constantly feeling bored doesn’t make me feel authentic. If we’ve lived a long time in our disempowering emotional states, we begin to feel more and more disconnected to who we are. It’s only by reconnecting to our positive emotional states do we get back our power.

Here’s the methodology that works for me:

1. Write down all the positive emotional states that I want to feel each day.
2. Take an action that will make me feel that emotion.
3. Bask in that emotion for as long as it lasts whether it’s a minute or an hour.
4. Let go of trying to use that positive emotion to achieve something.

For example:
One of my positive emotions is boldness. Yesterday, my dayjob had a catered lunch from Noodles and we had 5 trays of left overs. So instead of worrying about what people would think of me, I packed enough for myself and took it home for dinner. During those 30 seconds, it took me to scoop some noodles into the Tupperware, I felt bold and myself instead of wondering if people will think that I’m greedy or not a team player. I don’t have to zipline or rock climb to be bold, both of which I’ve done in the last month. It’s the small things like asking a stranger to dance. Even if they politely decline, for those 10 seconds I felt bold.

It’s not about trying to feel good all the time because if someone rejects us, however politely, we’ll still feel bad. It’s not about avoiding feel bad because sadness during a grieving process is natural and positive. Sometimes connection with my wife means talking about hard issues that make us feel hurt or angry. The objective is to feel all our positive emotions each day. The purpose is to build up our emotional repertoire, to expand our choices in what makes us feel good and to be able to achieve those states easily because we’ve been practicing every day.

Eventually, as we take small action to feel positive emotions for brief periods, this leads to taking bigger actions to be in those positive emotion for longer periods. Most of the time, my actions to feel a certain emotion is spur of the moment without some goal attached to it. However, those actions tend to take me in the right direction and leads me a little closer to who I want to be.

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Read Part 1 – Intentional Separation (Us-vs-Them Mentality)

The three reasons I think INFPs are lonely are:

1. We separate ourselves.
2. We exclude ourselves.
3. We refuse to be compared to others.

Part One was about how we separate ourselves. Part Two is about exclusion.

In my early 20′s, I was looking for Us people who thought our problems were what made us individuals. What I attracted were depressed, angry and angsty people who blamed society for our woes. I saw myself in them and realized this wasn’t who I wanted to be. I felt more alienated and alone than ever.

My attitude changed when I started dancing. By some fluke, I was good and people would say hi. Over time it became easier to talk to people who I would have avoided before. In talking to Them, I realized that they weren’t that amorphous blob of shallow and compromise that I had invented Them to be. They were individuals going through their own problems and dealing the best they knew how.

That’s when I became “accepting” of other people or so I’d thought. I kept my eye out for potential friends. My friendship was an exclusive club and only the like-minded need apply.

Reason 2: Exclusivity (No-Compromise Syndrome)

The Problem with Exclusivity

I’ve never liked gated communities with their nitpicky rules. The Homeowner Association’s covenants are Russian novel thick and single spaced. The grass can only be so high. These are the only approved colors for your house. The rationale is that covenants keeps relationships orderly. Everyone has the same pages.

With the INFP gated community of friendship, we don’t pass out a rule book. Those rules are a set of expectations of how we feel we should be treated by a friend. Some rules are set in stone. Some we make up as we go along because we see that as being “flexible”. Friends have to call us back within X amount of time. Friends can only make plans without us under specific circumstances as defined in Appendix B subsection A of our mental manual of friendship. If anyone breaks the rules, we’ll keep a running tally until they go over some undefined limit and then we’ll stop talking to them without explanation.

When we start letting people into our gated community, we lavish attention on them since they’re one of the few. We go out of our way to make our newly minted friend feel special. But if we notice that they’re not returning our attention with the same amount of care, we feel taken for granted.

Next comes the small conversations like, I know you didn’t mean to do this on purpose, but you hurt my feelings doing these things and not doing these as stipulated in Addendum 1, 3, 4a and 666. Those small conversations become more frequent.

We feel better being so generous in our forgiveness of our friends’ little foibles, but our friends are wondering how many more Addendums there are. Friends start treading lightly so the don’t break another Rule that’s part of our value system. They can only be themselves as long it doesn’t break our rules. Is it any wonder our friends choose to move on to less restrictive relationships?

How Accepting Are We Really?

When INFPs say we’re open-minded and accepting of other peoples values, we’re talking about big ticket items like religion or politics. We hold up examples of how we’re friends with people of different world views. We hold up our live-and-let-live ideals. We say we don’t try to impose our values onto others. However, big tickets items don’t affect relationships in the day-to-day. What if the values of our friends affect us more personally? How easy going and accepting would we really be.

Here are 2 examples:

Example 1. You have Good Friend A who you consider a close friend that you spend much of your time with. You meet New Person B who you think might become a good friend eventually. So you introduce New Person B to Good Friend A, they really connect. Good Friend A and New Person B start spending all their time together. They begin leaving you out of activities.

Would you consider Good Friend A disloyal or would you live and let live? You would never exclude a good friend from activities. But that’s just it, that’s your value not theirs. Maybe with their friendship values, Good Friend A doesn’t feel obligated to include you in everything especially in the getting to know each other period. How easy going and accepting would you be?

Example 2. You are good friends with Friend A. Friend A is good friends with Person B whom you don’t care for. You’ve been having a bad patch and you’ve been a downer lately. You hear through the grapevine that Friend A has been telling person B that you’ve been a real bummer and it’s getting to the point where it’s starting to be a burden being around you.

Friend A’s decision to tell Person B this comes from two of Friend’s A values: 1. You go to good friends when you need support. 2. Don’t crap on someone when they’re down. And that’s why Friend A didn’t go to you about your current behavior.

Would you feel betrayed? Or would you think, what goes on between Friend A and Person B is none of my business? If you feel betrayed, how can you be mad at someone for sticking to their values?

Open-minded and accepting also means accepting of other peoples values on loyalty, friendship and interpersonal relationships.

Our Rules Make Us Lonely

Of course we don’t want to be treated badly, to feel taken for granted or taken advantaged of. However, we have to ask ourselves if those rules are really about protecting ourselves or expecting friendship to be fair. Since INFPs tend towards fewer friendships, we have more expectation on each friend to fill our emotional needs. Our ideals of friendships creates expectations of behavior and reciprocation. We only want what’s fair.

In our mind’s we see ourselves as forgiving of possible wrongs that might occur someday. If someday, our friend crashed our car or ruined our favorite piece of clothing we lent them, we would forgive. At the very least in the present, we should be able to expect that they call us back in a timely matter. That trade off mentality makes us constant watchdogs waiting for the HOA of our friendship to be broken.

Our friends aren’t gifted in reading our minds to know what’s really important to us even if we want them to be. So they tread lightly as not to hurt our feelings. Before they realize it, they’ve quit being themselves and have become this paranoid person who’s ever vigilant in getting on our bad side because they didn’t fuss over some gift that we spent weeks hand-making for their birthday. We feel our friend’s thoughtfulness should equal our efforts. That’s an expectation of fairness.

The quest of fairness always makes one person the rule enforcer and the other person the potential rule breaker. This attitude creates a barrier in relationships that keeps people from letting down their guard. It’s a reason why we feel disconnected and lonely because we can’t cross that barrier without lowering it and risking to be hurt.

I think the most important thing that I’ve learned about relationships is that when you enter into them from a place of giving, you receive in return but usually not from the person you’re giving to and not in the form that you expected.

My issue with seeking fairness is that we will only get back what we put in. But being giving and open with no expectation of reciprocation opens up the possibility that universe will give us more then we had hoped.

Simple Guidelines

My friendships have stopped being so exclusive and the guidelines have simplified.

1. Does knowing me help someone I know become a better person?
2. Am I becoming a better person knowing someone?

Here’s how I know a relationship is working. When I’m with that person, I am happy. I look forward to seeing that person. I’m not afraid that that person will hurt me intentionally. I’m not hesitant to speak up if I do feel hurt. Knowing that person, challenges me to grow. Being around that person gives me comfort when I feel sad. That person is someone I want to celebrate with when things are great.

I’ve let go of expecting people to behave a certain way or to treat me a certain way. However, I feel I’m more idealistic about my relationships than I’ve ever been. I want the most difficult thing you can ask a person and that is for them to be themselves, the good and the bad. I want authenticity where many find it hard to be authentic with themselves. It’s from our authentic selves where true connections are made.

It’s from those true connections where I finally feel understood.

A boy goes to his mom and says, “I’m bored.” The mom replies, “Then you should stop being boring.”

This lesson applies in different variations. If I’m lonely, then I stop being alone.

In my early 20′s, I thought loneliness stemmed from feeling disconnected, and that disconnection was caused by having no people in my life who really understood me. So fixing my loneliness was about fixing the disconnection. I spent years finding people who understood me. However, when I did find a handful of people who I felt really got me, I still felt lonely.

It took me a decade before I realized that we don’t feel lonely because we’re disconnected. We feel lonely because we’ve made a habit of being alone. We can stand alone amongst other people. However, standing alone keeps us from connecting to those around us.

I was trying to fix the wrong problem. I was working on the disconnection when I should have been working on what kept me alone.

How We Become Alone

Being alone comes from separating our Self from others. It’s not about taking alone time in order to recharge. It’s the difference between “I’m alone” vs “I need some time alone”.

Introverts can take alone time in a crowded bookstore full of strangers. Being alone comes from a state of emotional separation. It’s that wall we place between us and the external. We can do this while having the physical presence of another person or having people in our lives. People who have many friends can still feel alone.

The Miriam-Webster dictionary gives three definitions for alone.

1. separated from others : I want be alone
2. exclusive of anyone or anything else : she alone knows why
3. incomparable, unique : alone among their contemporaries in this respect

People who feel the most alone consistently hold attitudes and take actions that separate themselves, exclude themselves and hold themselves incomparable to others.

Part 1: Intentional Separation (Us-vs-Them Mentality)

A Basis for Friendship

To see how we separate, we first have to examine how we get together.

Friendships begin with interest. We talk to someone. They say something interesting and we have a conversation about it. However, common interests don’t create lasting bonds. Otherwise, we would become friends with everyone with whom we had a good conversation. Similar interests as a basis for friendship doesn’t explain why we become friends with people who have completely different interests than we do.

In time, we discover common values and ideals. However, friendship through common values and ideals doesn’t explain why atheists and those devout in their faith become friends. Vegans wouldn’t have non-vegan friends. In the real world, we see examples of friendships between people with diametrically opposed views. At the same time, we see cliques form in churches and small organizations dedicated to a particular cause, and it’s not uncommon to have cliques inside a particular belief system dislike each other.

So how do people bond if common interests and common values don’t seem to be the catalyst for lasting friendships?

I find that people build lasting connections through common problems and people grow apart when their problems no longer coincide. This is why couples especially those with children tend to lose their married friends. Their primary problems have become vastly different. The married person’s problems revolve around family and children. The single person’s problem revolves around relationships with others and themselves.

When the single person talks about their latest dating disaster, the married person is thinking I’ve already solved this problem. When the married person talks about finding good daycare, the single person is thinking how boring the problems of married life can be. Eventually marrieds and singles lose their connection because they don’t have common problems.

I look back at friends I had in junior high and high school. We didn’t become friends because of long nights playing D&D. That came later. We were all loners and outcasts in our own way. We had one shared problem that bound us together: how to make friends and relate to others while feeling so “different”. That was the problem that made us friends. Over the years as we found our own answers and went to different problems, we grew apart.

Stick two people with completely different values and belief systems on a deserted island where they have to cooperate to survive. Then stick two people with the same values and interests together at a party. Which pair do you think will form the stronger bond?

When I was 20, I was living on my own. I didn’t have many friends who were in college because I couldn’t relate to them. I was worrying about how to pay rent and trying to stretch my last few dollars for food at the end of the month. They were worried about term papers.

In my life now, the people I spend the most time with have kids, have careers, are thinking about retirement and are figuring out their changing roles and values as they get older. These are problems that I relate to. We solve them in different ways because our values though compatible aren’t similar. I feel connected hearing about how they’ve chosen to solve those issues in a way that works for them.

Problems Make Us Feel Alone

It seems that often we create problems that isolate us. Here a few common ones:

1. I’m feel strongly about my values and don’t ever want to compromise them to make my life easier.
   
   Translation: Other people compromise easily and therefore don’t understand my problems of trying to live a life that matches my values.
2. I can’t understand how people can ignore the suffering around the world.
   
   Translation: Other people are callous or oblivious and can’t understand my problems because of how deeply I feel about the inequalities in the world.
3. Society is so materialistic and I can’t relate to that.
   
   Translation: Being poor is more spiritually evolved and since I’m more spiritually evolved, other people can’t understand my problems.

These were my views in my early 20′s and kept me separate from those around me. Those views were all about making myself feel significant by bringing other people down. I thought having special problems made me special. Problems don’t make people special. Solving them does.

My views created an Us-vs-Them perspective of the world. Solving my problem required finding more Us people and to avoid Them. I wanted a special club of Us people. The problem was that all the Us people I found thought that their problems were more unique than the other Us people. We never bonded. We were still separating ourselves by one-upping each other about the uniqueness of our problems.

The Downside Us-Vs-Them

The upside to Us-Vs-Them is that we feel special being Us. Unfortunately feeling special doesn’t outweigh the significant downside.

There will always be more Us than Them

There has to be. Otherwise, the exclusively club of Us wouldn’t be exclusive. So to maintain the exclusivity, we make more rules in our head to keep others out. We become more dependent on less people and are devastated when those people don’t reciprocate by valuing our friendship with the same mindfulness.

Finding more people to connect with seems beyond our control because we automatically put everyone in the Them column and wait for people to work their way into the Us column. The problem is no one wants to have to prove themselves in order to become friends. We end up waiting and waiting.

Us-vs-Them limits opportunities

The most successful people in the world get along with the widest range of people. It doesn’t necessarily mean they like everyone, but they get along with everyone.

It’s incredibly hard to get along with people if we view them as our inferior. That’s what an Us-vs-Them mentality cultivates. We tend to ignore Them and sometimes openly dislike Them.

However, it’s from Them that most opportunities arise. Since we run in the same circle as our Us people, any opportunities they know, we know about. Any new opportunities come from Them. That dream job you’ve always wanted, that book agent you wanted to meet will most likely be an acquaintance of Them.

It takes longer to solve problems

If we view our problems as completely unique then we can’t try what others have tried. We feel their solutions can’t be applied. Unfortunately, all the Us people we know seem to be stuck with the same problem. An Us-Vs-Them mentality forces us to solve our problems by trial and error. Trial and error is time consuming.

Being Them

I’ve been one of Them for decades now. Being Them is a state of mind. It didn’t happen all at once and the process occurred over many years.

Here’s the main tenets of being Them.

1. Everyone is trying to get by the best they can.

No one wants to compromise their values. No one wants to work at a job they don’t like in order to pay rent. Everyone feels a bit isolated in their own way. Everyone does what they can to get by while avoiding doing things that make them feel bad about themselves in the morning.

2. My way of being happy is just my way of being happy.

I’m not a toy person. I like playing with toys but I find the maintenance of toys inconvenient. I have friends who love their toys. And I’m grateful they share their toys when I’m around them. I get all the benefits and none of the downside. They’re very happy acquiring more toys. I’m very happy playing with their toys. I’m not in any position to judge which way is better.

There’s no right way to be happy. There’s no such thing as a more meaningful happiness. Just because someone is doing something that would make us unhappy and unfulfilled doesn’t mean they’re unhappy or unfulfilled.

People play the society-is-too-whatever card (too materialistic, too apathetic, too whatever) too often. I have a favorite quote by Rabbi Israel Salanter, “Most men worry about their own bellies, and other people’s souls, when we all ought to be worried about our own souls, and other people’s bellies.”

3. Everyone is special.

The object of meeting people is finding out what makes each person special. For me, everyone is a Cracker Jack box with a toy surprise at the bottom. The fun is digging for the prize.

Connecting

These beliefs keep me connected to others. They keep me from being alone. They keep my problems ordinary. Raising kids, too much work, not enough fun, car making funny noises, boring yard work are ordinary problems. They’re the same problems as others in my life have. We don’t get together and talk about problems because that’s not the point of relationships. Other people aren’t there to solve our problems.

We get together to enjoy the company of people who share and understand our day-to-day issues and want to get away from them for a bit. The company of friends is our reward for trying to solve our problems. We talk movies or books. We reminisce. We talk about relationships and goals. But in the end, we realize that we all have to go back to those same day-to-day issues. When we part, I silently wish each of them all the best and hope to see them soon.

This is how I feel connected.

Throughout our lives, we have periods when we don’t know where we’re going with our lives or what we should be doing. A bad breakup, loss of job or loved one or a change of heart can make once immutable goals seem no longer relevant.

We become a bit lost but that lost feeling seems oddly right for the moment. We’re in downtime. Downtime is a period where we regroup, conserve energy and figure things out. If downtime extends too long we get antsy and feel that we should be doing something more.

However, after having no direction for so long, it’s hard to figure out what we should be moving towards. The more we try to get ourselves moving, the less appealing our choices become. Nothing we do feels right.

Be The Right Person

In Good To Great, Jim Collins explains the idea of the Hedgehog Concept which helps in figuring out what to do.

The step before the Hedgehog Concept for a company is to find the right people. Collins says that the right people as part of the company will do the right thing even if the company doesn’t have a clear direction. The right people don’t need to be managed. When the company does find it’s Hedgehog Concept, it’s the right people who will have the skills, attitude and motivation to move the company onto that new path.

Applied to an individual, “find the right people” equates to be the right person. If you’re the right person than you don’t need to manage yourself. You won’t need to manage self-defeating behavior or limiting beliefs. If we don’t know our Hedgehog Concept yet, being the right person keeps us growing until we do figure out what we should be doing.

For example, if you see yourself as an artist or a writer and want to make a living at your craft, being the right person means being someone who practices their craft every day. Writers who make a living at writing learn to overcome procrastination. They write a certain number of words daily even when they aren’t inspired. They know how to compose query letters and approach publishers. If you want to work as a writer, you need to have habits and the knowledge first.

Figuring Out Who We Want To Be

We are not one thing. Like a company, our lives are complex network of relationships. A company is not just the CEO. Similarly, no person is just a writer or just a parent.

An exercise I learned from E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber, is how to create an organization chart. Gerber’s book is about why businesses fail and what to do about it.

Gerber says that before anyone starts a business, they should write down the organization chart of the entire company from CEO all the way down. In each position in the organization chart, they write down specific responsibilities and tasks that will make that position successful. This way no responsibilities gets missed. At first, the small business owner writes his name in each of the position and must do all the tasks. As the company grows, the owner hires people to replace their name on the org chart.

I’ve applied this concept to my life my creating a Role Chart. Any life requires a set of Roles that need to be played. Those roles demand certain responsibilities and require tasks in order to be successful. For example, if parent is one of the Roles in our lives then one of the required tasks is spend time with our children. If we spend zero time with them then being successful in that Role is unlikely.

My main roles are husband, parent, son, brother, income generator, writer, life long learner, contributor, self-caretaker

Those roles have sub-roles. For me, friend falls under the category of contributor. I see that sub-role as being someone who improves the lives of the people in my life. World traveler and computer geek falls under life long learner. Cook and maid falls under husband and parent.

Although our Roles are not our Identity, the sum of our Roles equates to the life that we live. Anything that I want to be doing with my life falls under one of those Roles. For example, I like to play video games when I get the chance. It gives me the chance to unwind. That falls under the Role of self-caretaker. I like to travel which falls under the Role of life long learner.

What if what we want is more abstract like to be more outgoing or to be better at relationships? Being requires doing. We can’t be more outgoing without doing the things that make us more outgoing. We can’t be more outgoing, unless we do something besides stand in the corner. We can’t be better at relationships if we don’t do something like improve communication skills.

Also actions needed differ between Roles. Improving our relationships as a parent requires different actions than than improving our relationships as a income generator.

The Purpose of Roles

Roles fill needs. I wrote about Tony Robbins six critical needs: Certainty, Uncertainty, Growth, Critical Significance, Love and Connection, and Contribution.

My Role as father meets my needs of Uncertainty, Love and Connection, and Growth. My Role as income earner meets my needs of Certainty and Growth.

Lives with the most stability have those needs supported across many Roles. When we put all our needs into a single basket like the Role of significant other, our lives fall apart should something happen to that relationships. If that single basket is dropped, all our needs are now completely unmet.

Sometimes, we have Roles in our life that meet none of those needs. Those Roles then have to be re-evaluated. Roles have actions and if those actions don’t fill a need then we are doing things that don’t contribute to our lives.

Idealism and Roles

There are no ideal Roles, only ideal ways to play that Role. Those ideal ways are different for everyone. For some, world famous movie star or successful entrepreneur is a better way to play the Role of income earner than McJob employee.

This is where conflicts with “reality” arises. We want to play a Role one way, but we’ve either repeatedly failed or don’t know how so we do something else, something less ideal for that Role in order to fill our needs. This is especially true with careers and relationships.

Being Better at Your Roles

Being better at a Role does not mean creating a Bucket List and going from one accomplishment to another. Roles are continuous because the critical needs are continuous. Roles don’t stop when we cross off an item. If taking the kids to Disney World is on our list, our role as parent doesn’t end at Disney World. We don’t tell our kids, I’m sorry you’re getting picked on at school, but I took you to Disney World and therefore have met my Love and Connection needs so you kids need to figure this one out for yourselves.

Accomplishing a Bucket List doesn’t make you better at your Roles, being better at your Roles lets you accomplish your Bucket List. Being better means being better at the basics.

Each Role has basics. Our basics are habits like listening attentively or exercising regularly. If our Bucket List has running a marathon, the habit of exercising daily under the Role of self-caretaker is going to give us the ability to accomplish that item.

Being better at a Role means doing little things each day that improve our habits in that Role. Taking our kids to one big trip doesn’t make up for long periods of inattentiveness. We often focus on significant goals as a way to distract ourselves from having to face the day-to-day repetition required to be better at the basics.

Being Aimless

Being aimless doesn’t mean doing nothing. We are always doing something. The question is whether that something contributes to our ideal life.

Being aimless means that we pause from crossing off goals on a list. Goals are only good if they’re the right goals for us. Sometimes that changes. Our values change. Our priorities change. Items on the list we made five or ten years ago, may no longer make sense. When climbing the ladder of our own personal success, that ladder needs to lean against the right wall.

Sometimes we don’t know if it’s the right wall anymore. At those times, it’s better to stop climbing, take a break to decide whether we should keep moving or climb down and start again on a different wall.

By focusing on being better at each Role, we improve our lives without measuring ourselves by crossing off an item on our list that may prove to be meaningless later. Being better at a Roles means continually improving habits and skills while keeping an eye out for opportunities to improve the way we do that Role. Doing this leads to new things we never considered before. It’s the right new things that gets us moving again.

I’m currently trying to figure out my Hedgehog Concept.

The Hedgehog Concept comes from Jim Collins’ book Good To Great. His book explains how good businesses become great businesses. However, his idea is exactly what INFPs need to achieve personal success.

The Hedgehog Concept

Our Hedgehog Concept is what we should be doing.

In the parable of the fox and hedgehog, the fox goes from one thing to another, trying new ways to try to catch the hedgehog. He attempts to catch the hedgehog with different tricks without success. Meanwhile, the hedgehog does the one thing that it excels at. It curls up into a ball, pointing all its quills outward. The hedgehog knows what it’s good at and sticks with it.

INFPs behave like foxes. We go from one shiny thing to the next. If we don’t succeed on our first try, we find another passion. We never become as successful as those who stick to their Hedgehog Concept.

Our Hedgehog Concept must meet three requirements:

1. something we’re passionate about
2. something that we can be great at
3. something that drives our happiness engine

Why passion alone isn’t enough

General career advice says we should do what we’re passionate about. This advice assumes that what we are currently passionate about today will continue to be what we’ll be passionate about tomorrow.

Life shows this to be untrue. INFPs change majors frequently. We graduate only to go back to school. We lose our passion after working in our field. We become disillusioned, disinterested or just bored and our passion wanes until we latch onto our next passion.

I’ve spent large parts of my life changing my mind. I latch onto a passion and set goals. At first, the goals are new and exciting. It’s all I think about. I forget to eat regularly. I fall asleep thinking about reaching my next goal. After a few months, I develop a comfortable routine. Then as I move closer, I start realizing that reaching my goals will not be as perfect as I imagined. That’s when I lose interest and begin looking for a new passion.

What it means to be great at something

To be great as something requires 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, a book about success, cites a study by psychologist Ander Ericsson that concludes that it requires 10,000 hours to become an expert in any field. 10,000 hours is an average of 2-3 hours a day for 10 years.

The Beatles became experts playing in Hamburg. Where most bands got an hour or two of stage time periodically, the Beatles played 5-6 hour sets almost every night for 2 years. When the British Invasion came, they were the experts having performed 1200 times in front of a live audience.

Bill Gates had access to a terminal that connected to the local university computer at his school in the 60′s. He had daily access to program where most university professors didn’t have that type of access. Between the 8th grade and high school, Gates was programming 20-30 hours a week. So when the first personal computer arrived in 1975, he was an expert that could write an operating system for a personal computer.

The 10,000 Hour Rule has three important ingredients:

1. Ability

I’m never going to be a doctor. My brain doesn’t have the capacity to process and retain the sheer amount of information required for medical degree. We can’t all become Olympic athletes with just practice. There’s a level of genetics that determines athleticism and recovery time needed for Olympic level training.

However, most endeavors requires hard work over aptitude. Aptitude makes learning easier, but not having the aptitude doesn’t mean not having ability.

2. Opportunity

The Beatles had the opportunity to play in Hamburg when other bands did not. Bill Gates went to an exclusive school that had access to a computer. As children, Olympic athletes usually resided around training centers and schools run by former Olympians.

We need the opportunity to put in 10,000 hours and sometimes that’s not possible. It’s hard to become a concert pianist if you don’t have regular access to a piano. However, just because we don’t see opportunity currently in our life doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. Opportunities are found if you know how to look.

3. Deliberate Practice

Deliberate means practicing to reach a goal, to purposely become better by the end than we were at the beginning of practice.

Our natural tendencies keep INFPs from systematically practicing out art. We write, paint or play music when we feel like it, when we have an inspiration. Inspiration rarely overcomes expertise.

John Scalzi, a bestselling author and Hugo winner, wrote two novels before he was published. Brandon Sanderson, another bestselling fantasy author, wrote 5 novels before he wrote the one that became his debut novel.

Inspiration doesn’t overcome the perspiration needed to become an expert.

The Happiness Engine

What drives our happiness engine is the single factor that fuels our happiness. Examples of things that drive our happiness engines are:

• helping others
• recognition
• learning
• peak experiences
• building relationships

My happiness engine runs on learning. Even when I’m learning something that I don’t like, don’t care to know and probably will never use again, I’m still happy during the process of learning it.

I like helping others, but sometimes I want a thank you. If helping others drove my happiness engine then never getting thanked wouldn’t matter. Learning is why I’ve been in computers for so long. The industry changes so quickly that there’s always more to learn.

Finding our happiness engine is difficult because lots of things make us happy. We have to comb through our happy experiences to deduce the common factor in those activities. My suggestion is to start by examining experiences where everything went wrong. Nothing happened as you expected, but you were still extremely happy in the end.

All or nothing

If what we do fits into one or two categories, that activity will not be sustainable.

If an endeavor has our passion and drives our happiness engine but we’re not good at it, we’ll stick with it until we decide that we want recognition. Recognition requires expertise which requires 10,000 hours.

When we do work in a passion that that we’re good at, we get recognition in terms of monetary compensation. The top 20% in any given field make 80% of the money in that field. However, if that work isn’t part of our happiness engine than despite the high income, we end up feeling that we should be doing something else.

The Hedgehog Concept buffers us against failure. Failure is not getting a desired outcome.

Passion and expertise at doing something that drives our happiness moves our happiness to the process instead of the outcome. When we fail, we can try again more quickly. Our expertise tells us what we did wrong. Our passion will make us try again harder. Knowing that this endeavor is part of what drives our happiness engine gives us a sense that we are doing the right thing which keeps our passion from waning.

The bad news

Finding your Hedgehog concept may take years. In Good To Great, Collins says that the great companies took 2-5 years to figure out their Hedgehog Concept.

In personal development, finding our Hedgehog Concept could take longer. It takes time to know what we can be good at. It takes time to obtain enough education to understand the money, resources, activities and ability needed for those 10,000 hours.

10,000 hours isn’t easy for an INFP. I have 2000-5000 hours in many different things because I never stuck to one thing long enough.

In my 20′s, I thought natural aptitude would somehow circumvent the need for 10,000 hours. So I became a dilettante never deliberate practicing. I never became good enough to understand what it meant to be great. At 40, the 10,000 hours becomes a hurdle because I’ve already built a lifestyle that may not allow me to start over with a new brand new endeavor that I have no hours invested.

The Hedgehog Concept and INFPs

Using the Hedgehog Concepts solves two INFPs issues:

1. Too many possibilities
2. We never seem to get great at anything

INFPs live in possibilities. We tell ourselves that we can do this and this and this, and if we have time left we’ll do this too. What we discover as we try to do everything is that we don’t have time. We have to pick and choose, but we don’t know where to start. Our Hedgehog concept can help us narrow what we focus on.

INFPs tend not to stick with things when it stops feeling right. The Hedgehog Concept keeps us on things that drive our happiness engine. Our happiness engine is where we get the sense that were doing the right thing.

As long as I’m learning something that I can be good at then I will stick with it. This could be writing or computer programming. I’ve been doing both for years. Unfortunately, I’m not sure if I’m passionate about either. I just have a ton of hours into both.

I’ve been analyzing those activities that I’ve gained large amount expertise hours to see if any fit my Hedgehog concept. The difficulty is that I might not see monetary compensation (i.e. I won’t be able to do it for a living) until I’ve put in 10,000 hours. In the meantime, I need to maintain a job, care for family and meet other obligations before I can deliberately practice each day.

Knowing the Hedgehog Concept helps. I stopped wondering why sometimes I like what I’m doing and sometimes I don’t. It’s because some things I do I have part of my concept but not all. The Hedgehog Concept is the starting point for moving a life from good to great.

Almost every Friday for the last 13 years, I’ve gone dancing at the same dance club. Last Friday, I met Ryan. I wouldn’t have noticed him if my friend Rebecca hadn’t pointed him out as someone she considered cute. I asked her why she didn’t go over and say hi, but she’s a shy ENFJ. It’s hard to put yourself out there when you’re single and a corner mouse. I was that shy in my early 20′s. Since I wasn’t anymore, I decided that by the end of that night, I’d meet him and introduce him to her.

I told Ryan how Rebecca and I noticed that he was a good dancer. I asked him how often he went to this club. He said he’d been dancing for years, but he kept to himself. I proceeded to introduce him to all the regulars who are hubs (i.e. people that others flocked around). Ryan does SCA (Society for Creative Anachronism), graduated from one of the top engineering colleges in the country (School of Mines) and plays D&D. I use to go swing dancing with a guy who did SCA so I know little about it. My sister went to School of Mines and I use to play D&D. So I kept my small talk to those three topics.

This is how I met Rebecca 3 years ago. She was a dance club regular, sitting in the corner. I said hi and introduced her to all the hubs. I discovered she was a teacher and we ended up talking about teaching and school districts. Three years later, she’s one of my strong ties.

I wrote in my first post on friendship about how I decided to stop having friends. Because of that I have more people in my life now than I did before.

Before I stopped having friends

INFPs have a tendency to call friends just those people who are strong ties, people who we feel connected to. Everyone else is an acquaintance.

The problems with the friend/acquaintance model are:

1. INFPs become too dependent on a small group of friends to fill all their emotional needs.

My friends are busy. They have lives outside of their friendship with me. When we heavily depend on a small group of people to fills our need for connectedness and those people are not available, we feel hurt that they’re not making their time with us more important.

2. INFPs become needy and desperate when we feel we’re losing a friend we’ve invested so much energy into.

When our friends are too busy to see us we interpret it as a sign that we aren’t important in their lives. We set time out of our schedule to accommodate them. We make that extra effort to align our schedule with theirs to have time together. However when our friends don’t do the same in return and cancel on us, INFPs grow resentful.

3. INFPs develop expectations of their friends based on their INFP ideal of friendship

We assume that if we put extra effort into a friendship then our friends should do the same. INFPs have this ideal for friendship that we want others to adhere to. INFPs become demanding in our passive-aggressive way because we only want what we think is “fair” which only serves to drive our friends away.

4. INFPs get stuck in their friendships

We tell ourselves that those people weren’t really our friends and we somehow just misinterpreted our feelings. We seek out new people to become close friends. And with those new close friends, we rehash the same thoughts and ideas. We start the cycle all over and wonder why we haven’t grown emotionally in our friendships.

Strong ties and Weak ties

I finally got exasperated with myself and gave up trying to seek out friends. I meet people to see if I find them interesting.

For me, people fall into two categories: people I like spending time with and people I avoid. The people that I enjoy spending time with fall into two categories: strong ties and weak ties.

Strong ties are the people I feel connected to in some aspect of my personality. Weak ties are people who’s company I enjoy but don’t feel any sort of deep connection towards. My “friends” fall into both categories. Most of the people I see out dancing are weak ties. Basically we have similar interests but I don’t feel any strong connection towards. My strong ties and I have similar problems, but only a two or three have similar interests.

I treat my weak ties and strong ties equally. I won’t cancel lunch with a weak tie because a strong tie calls up and wants to do something. If a strong tie is late, I won’t wait any longer than I would with a weak tie. The difference between strong ties and weak ties is that I go to my strong ties to bounce thoughts and ideas off of when I have problems.

INFPs want all their friends to be strong ties, however people change. We can’t make the assumption that a person who’s a strong tie will always be a strong tie. People go on to a different set a problems that we can no longer relate to and that’s the big reason why strong ties grow apart. We can see this when we get married and have kids. Our single friends can’t relate to our problems of diapers and picking the right school. We’ve already gone through the single-life drama of someone we like not calling us back.

The biggest issue with only having strong ties is that we get stuck. I known my strong ties for years so I know what they think about life, religion, free will, World of Warcraft and what movies they’re looking forward to seeing next year. I know what we agree on and what we disagree on. No new ideas get introduced.

Weak ties are where new ideas and inspirations come from. Also, it’s weak ties where we find new opportunities. We run in most of the same circles as our strong ties so all the opportunities that they know about, we know about. It’s from my weak ties that I’ve found all my jobs. It’s my weak ties that I get recommendations for people and services I need in my life. It’s also weak ties that challenge us to grow our relationship skills because we don’t sync with them as well as we do with strong ties.

Now vs Then

Having strong and weak ties has made all the difference in my life. Here are the biggest:

1. I’m not possessive of my friends anymore.

I’m more than willing to introduce new people to other people in my life. Mostly, it’s just a nice thing to do especially for introverts who have problems meeting new people. This new person might end up being a life love of someone I’ve introduced them to. This new person could end up helping a friend in someone way that I couldn’t. This new person might make a friend’s life better.

2. I no longer wait for people.

If someone is suppose to show up to lunch and they don’t. Oh well. I’ll catch them the next time. I always have a book with me. I don’t view it as someone not showing up. I view as much needed time away from the kids with a good book.

When I have many people in my life that I can have a good conversation over lunch, missing out on one isn’t that big of a deal. I don’t end up giving off that needy vibe which in turns attracts more people into my life. People want friendships that are easy and not full of expectation and pressure.

3. I’m more generous, but I say no more often.

I use to stress myself out trying to help out my close friends. I would ignore helping out acquaintances unless I could see some advantage to it. That wasn’t the type person I wanted to be.

This weekend I gave away an old Christmas tree to a weak tie. It will be her first Christmas tree with her boyfriend that just moved in. Last week, I fixed a laptop for a strong tie. This week I’m helping my brother design a logo for his new company. I’m always doing something for someone. However, it’s all stuff I want to do.

I don’t feel guilty turning down requests for help. If someone gets mad and stops talking to me (which has never happened), I have other people in my life.

4. I’m less emotionally demanding.

I have more people to pick and choose from when I feel social. Sometimes I want to talk nerd. Sometimes I want to talk about raising kids. I have different people that I go to for each. I don’t have one or two people that I have many things in common with. I have one or two things in common with many different people. It’s easier on the people in my lives. They know they can turn me down without having to feel guilty.

The Distributed Model of Friendship

The downside is that I don’t have one best friend. The upside is that I don’t have one best friend.

Single dependencies leave much out of our control and can drastically affect our life if that dependency is no longer there. If a best friend is busy, we have to wait. If we have a falling out with a best friend, they have a lot of ammunition to negatively impact our lives.

If I have many different people that I share different parts of my life and different aspects of my personality then I only need to compensate for that part if something goes awry. If a regular poker group moves away, I find other poker players. If one group is overloaded with their day-to-day, I go to a different group.

No one person knows everything about me. I don’t think a single person ever could. However, many people know important parts about me. The parts I think they’ll get.

With Ryan, I now have another person to speak nerd with or if I ever have any questions about materials engineering or SCA. Perhaps, we become “good friends” but that’s not the point. I don’t form weak ties in order to build them into strong ties.

I build weak ties because that’s another person who could make my life more interesting.

As human beings we are ingrained to make certain types of choices. However, our choice often seems to make us unhappy even though we are sure we made the right decision. It’s not understanding the nature of choosing that causes unhappiness.

Our three basic choices:

More vs Less

If given the choice between more of a good thing or less of good thing, most people would choose more. If we asked fifty people whether they would rather receive $20 or $10. Most would choose $20. This choice doesn’t mean that people are greedy. It means that we’re inherently designed for choosing abundance over lack.

Sooner vs Later

If we asked those same people if they would rather have the $20 now or next month. Most would choose to have the $20 now. This choice doesn’t mean we can’t delay gratification. It means that if all things are equal, we prefer the certainty of now over some unknown future where we may not be around to receive the $20.

Better vs Worse

Finally, if we asked those people, if they would prefer to have the $20 in cash or as a cashier’s check. Most people would choose cash because cash is more convenient to spend and therefore subjectively better. This choice doesn’t mean that we all want things easier. It means we prefer choosing the options that improves our lives the most.

The Rule of Two

The rule of two is this: More, Sooner, Better. Pick Two.

The rule of two can be best illustrated using the examples of happiness, relationships and money.

More and Sooner

We can have more and we can have it sooner, but the quality suffers.

Having more money sooner can be done with debt. Debt is form of money. We can buy things on credit, refinance our homes and we can have money in a relatively short amount of time. However the quality of the money from debt isn’t has high as money from savings because debt requires repayment and accrues interest.

In relationships, the entire concept of social networks is built around more and sooner. We collect lots of “friends” on Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, but the quality of those friendship don’t improve until we’ve spent time developing relationships with those people.

Happiness has a qualitative scale. Some things make us happier than others. Good relationships usually make people happier than a good lunch or a nice walk. How to have more happiness sooner is explained in the “power of now” philosophies which teaches about happiness through living in the present. For some, taking happiness in the day-to-day is equal in quality to the happiness from accomplishing a long-term goal like running a marathon or getting married. However, getting to that point where happiness in the now becomes all encompassing takes time and doesn’t happen right away.

More and Better

Most understand that more and better takes longer. Having lots of really good friends takes a great deal to time invested into building relationships.

Having more money and of a better quality of money (passive income vs earned income) takes time. It takes time to create systems where your money makes money when you’re not working.

Lasting happiness takes time to learn and to obtain. Sometimes we get great results from our lives but that happiness never lasts and it takes time before we learn the what, why and how of our happiness. It’s in learning about ourselves where we learn how to be more happy more often and in a way that permeates our lives. That learning takes time.

Better and Sooner

For INFPs, this is the choice we often take. We choose better and sooner, just less of it.

We focus our time and energy on a few close friends and any remaining effort is divided among those other people. We find something we like, such as a camera or a trip to an exotic country. We work really hard to earn the money, buy the camera or take the trip and then it’s gone again. We spend time on those activities that make us happy whether it’s reading, writing, video games, creating art or whatever makes us passionate, but then we get interrupted by going to work, doing dishes and the busy-ness of the day-to-day.

We have moments where we’re intensely happy, but those moments don’t seem to last.

There’s no right choice

It’s the nature of the choosing the causes unhappiness and not the choices themselves. We want life to allow us More, Better and Sooner so we do things like get rich quick schemes and fad diets and wonder why those things never work out. Our attempts to find a way around the Rule of Two lead to failure and more unhappiness.

However, none of the three choices in themselves are better or worse.

At first, more and sooner seems to be a bad choice. However, this isn’t always the case. I own a house. In order to own the house now instead of after saving the all the money upfront, I have a mortgage. So in order to have more and sooner, I choose to sacrifice better (taking on debt). For some this is unacceptable and they pay everything in cash including houses. More and sooner doesn’t reflect a poor choice. It’s just a choice like any other choice with consequences that are either acceptable or unacceptable.

More and better seems to be the best choice in all things. I thought I could have a better quality of life across more areas of my life if I expended more effort and time. However, this often lead to the I’ll-be-happy-after syndrome. I’ll be happy after I meet the love of my life. I’ll be happy after I get published. The path of more and better leads to higher self-esteem and self-worth from mastering skills and developing better habits. However, this doesn’t always translate to being happier.

Most of my life, I’ve lived in the choice of better and sooner. I concentrated all my focus on energy on developing a few friendships. However, people changed and we grew apart and I had to do it all over again. I concentrated single-mindedly on one thing giving up balance. When I was lonely, I concentrated on relationships without realizing that my job wasn’t making me happy. So then I would focus on career, work ridiculous hours and then wonder why I was getting sick more often. So then I’d focus on health and personal development and then my friends would wonder why I didn’t spend time with them anymore.

The right choice for you

All choices have consequences. In making the choice, we have to accept responsibility for the consequences.

For example, our car breaks down. We’ve been living paycheck to paycheck and we’ll be fired if you miss work again. We can choose to repair our car and pay by credit. We gain convenience (more) in having a car that let’s us get to work (sooner) by worsening our financial situation. Or we can choose to ride the bus (less convenience) to get us to work until we save enough enough money.

Whichever choice is better depends on our values. Each choice has consequences. If we pay by credit card, we accrue interest. If we’re living paycheck to paycheck, our credit rating will suffer if we miss payments. If we choose to ride the bus, our work life and our social life will have to be arranged around bus schedules. The acceptability of those consequences is different for each person.

The Rule of Two give us three choices: more/sooner, more/better or sooner/better. In all areas of our life, those three choices show up in different ways from finding a job to figuring out what we want for dinner. It’s in figuring out which choice best fits with each area and accepting the consequences from that choice that leads to happiness.

Our OCD comes from over-thinking

INFPs think too much. We’re information gatherers. The strength of our Perception score determines how far into overdrive our secondary cognitive function of External Intution (Ne) runs. INFPs with high Perception scores get stuck in the “what if”.

When we get stuck, the external doesn’t get processed by our Introverted Feeling (Fi) so we don’t move on. We lose touch with our Ideal and our Ideal Self. We start losing track of those things that we have built towards that ideal life we wanted. We start getting anxious that our tenuous grasp on our ideal life is slipping further away so we fall into OCD behavior.

For example, when I was in my early 20′s before I had a girlfriend and learned how to have balanced relationships, I would over-think situations meeting girls. Was this person a potential girlfriend and not just a friend? Was that an I-think-you’re-cool-smile or was that an I-wish-you-would-ask-me-out smile? What action I took depended on how I interpreted body language, word choice and all the minute details of my interactions. A brief phone call or a passing hello turned into hours of analysis later.

Ideally, I wanted girlfriend who loved and understood me. My over-thinking was causing that ideal to slip away. If she was the one, shouldn’t this entire process be natural and I shouldn’t be obsessing? The more I obsessed, the more un-ideal the situation was becoming. To lessen my anxiety, to stop thinking so much, I attempted to control my external environment by imposing order. I would be obsessive about washing dishes or putting books a certain way. A myriad of little quirks sprung out of nowhere all because I was over-thinking a relationship that didn’t even exist yet.

Obsessive compulsion is caused by anxiety. INFP develop that anxiety because when we get stuck in thoughts that we feel are moving us away from our Ideal. It’s much like being stuck in traffic when we have to be somewhere. Where we have to be is our Ideal. Being stuck in our heads is analyzing the traffic. Are the cars starting to move? Maybe we won’t be that late. Maybe we’ll give it just a couple of minutes. We look for more information instead of deciding we have enough information to move on.

If we had decided that we’re stuck, we could have made new plans, called and rescheduled. Instead INFPs hold onto this Ideal destination whether it’s the perfect person or the perfect job or the perfect life. We think we can still have that perfection if we can impose some order through repetition of sometimes quirky behavior.

OCD behavior is exhibited in many different ways among INFPs. Usually, the OCD behavior has minimal impact to our lives during our over-thinking phases. Eventually INFPs let go of whatever is taking so much energy. However, if that over-thinking phase persists too long, INFPs have a tendency to shut down.

The Signs:

1. Refusal of the new. INFPs love experiences especially new ones in areas we enjoy. If an INFP loves trying new restaurants and turns down the opportunity to do so then it’s a sign that the INFP is over-thinking. We turn down new experiences we love because our brain is too busy to enjoy the new experience. If we try something new when were in an over-thinking phase, we’ll miss out because we’re only partly present.

2. Control of environment. For me, it’s massive cleaning. For others, it could be organizing of the trivial. INFPs will try to compel order onto things of little consequence. The reason why we act upon things of little consequence is because we know that if we make a mistake, it won’t matter.

3. Withdrawal and isolation. INFPs ignoring important relationships is the biggest sign of trouble. INFPs do need alone time, but if we feel more tired after the alone time then our thoughts are too preoccupied to let us recharge.

The Solution:

The only way INFPs can break out of the over-thinking/OCD cycle is to make a decision. We need our Fi to kick in to determine if something feels right or wrong. You can’t make that decision for us but you can make it easier for a decision to be made.

1. Impose order for us. Do the laundry, wash the dishes, take over the trivial or better yet get them done when we’re not looking. If an INFP can’t get caught up in OCD busy-work, we’re forced back into our heads where we’ll have to confront our issues.

2. Bring perspective. You bring perspective by living your life not ours. I like hearing about how other people live and approach their life. People that are passionate about how they deal with problems and how they embrace successes, give me something solid that I can relate my life against. Seeing someone living their life in front of me creates a sharp contrast to living in my head that’s causing the disruptive OCD behavior.

3. Make us a better offer. Offer us a distraction. When the INFPs that I know are in over-thinking mode, I get them out. We do stuff like hiking, dancing, going to a bookstore to get them out of their head and into their bodies. Offering distractions isn’t difficult because we don’t want to be alone in our heads during these phases.

It’s only when INFPs over-think for extended periods that cause disruptive OCD behavior. Most of the time, our OCD comes across as mild quirks. Those quirks don’t go away. You’re just stuck with them so enjoy.

The Care and Feeding of INFPs

Part 1 – INFPs need alone time
Part 2 – Speaking INFP

The most important thing I learned from Robert Kiyosaki about real estate investment was that a house isn’t an asset. It’s a liability. I don’t own it. The bank does. It costs me utilities, maintenance, insurance, taxes and interest each month. Over a 30-year loan, I will have paid over 80% in interest. I would then need to sell my house for at least three times it’s current value in order to break even.

A house is a liability because I’m still responsible for it even though I don’t own it yet. If I don’t make a payment, the bank takes the house away along with all the money I’ve put into so far. If the house burns down and I have no insurance, I still owe the bank the money I borrowed.

Don’t get me wrong. I love being a homeowner. Owning a house fits my lifestyle, but I have no illusion that owning a house that I live in will make me a financial profit. People buy houses thinking they’re making an investment when in reality they’re taking on debt.

This is how I feel about dreams. INFPs think following a dream is an investment for future happiness, but sometimes it ends up costing us more than we realize.

Our Dreams as Investment

All dreams have a payoff, a Return on Investment (ROI). That ROI on achieving our dream is usually in the form of happiness and fulfillment. No one dreams great dreams that will leave them feeling unfulfilled and unhappy.

One of my dreams is to climb Kilimanjaro. In order to do that, I’ll have to invest time and energy getting into shape, research and taking the time away from family. I have to invest resources by buying gear, plane ticket and a guide. In return, I hope to get a sense of fulfillment by crossing an item off my To Do List. I hope to get happiness in the form of a new experience. I hope to learn something that I can share with others. My ROI in the form of happiness, fulfillment and growth will be worth more to me than the investment of time, effort and money.

Everyone has dreams with payoffs in excess of the investment we put in. Whether it’s the 10,000 hours to become an expert at writing or running our own business, whether it’s the scrimping and saving to buy our first house, we invest in our dreams because we think we will feel better and happier after accomplishing those dreams.

However, INFPs do two things that give us poor returns on our dreams. INFPs sacrifice the now for the eventually. We hold jobs we don’t like or put up with people we don’t want in our lives if we see it as a means to achieving our dreams. On the other side, INFPs with our terrible grasp of delayed gratification, sacrifice tomorrow for today. We put stuff on credit card. We blow off our commitments. We take it easy now and hope that the future will work itself out on its own. We have to invest better.

Dreams in Changing Market Conditions

The problem chasing a dream for a future payoff is that the dream may not pay off later. Sometimes bad things happen. I could trip and break my leg the day before the flight to Kilimanjaro. Luckily, catastrophic luck is uncommon. What’s more common for INFPs is achieving a dream we no longer want.

The ROI in achieving a dream is usually happiness, fulfillment and growth. When we stop wanting what we’ve worked for then we don’t feel happy or fulfilled in achieving our dream . We end up feeling wishy-washy, regretting the wasted time and effort.

One example is students who change majors. As they learn more about their profession, they become less enchanted with the prospect of doing that profession day-to-day. Even worse, an INFP gets a job they dreamed about and it turns out to be less than ideal, but they’re stuck at that job to pay off student loans and establish a life beyond school.

Not wanting what we’ve worked for happens because of changing market conditions. That market is you.

In the early 2000′s, people invested in real estate because they heard others were making money in real estate. Housing prices had been rising for decades so many made the assumption that housing growth would continue. They invested heavily leveraging themselves beyond their means. When the housing market crashed in 2005, those investors were left with more debt than the value of their house. Getting rid of their investments produced negative ROI, but they couldn’t afford to continue paying.

INFPs make the same basic assumption. Just because a dream makes us happy today, doesn’t mean that it will continue to make us happy tomorrow. Our dreams make us happy in today’s market i.e. how we are today. However, we change. Our values change. Because those values change, we make different decisions including the decision of which dreams will make us happy. INFPs leave jobs we once considered dream jobs and leave relationships with that person we once thought was “the one” because those things no longer make us happy.

As we grow, we can’t guarantee ourselves that dreams that make us feel happy and fulfilled now will continue to do so.

Happiness on Happiness Return

In real estate, a different way to view ROI is Cash on Cash Return (CCR). CCR is the percentage return based on the actual cash invested. If we put $20,000 down on a house and we rent the house for $200 over the cost of mortgage and expenses, then our CCR would be 12% annually ($200 x 12mo / $20,000). If the market takes a dive and we lower rent to only net $85/month, we still make a 5% return which is better than sticking $20K in a bank to collect interest.

Happiness on happiness return is the amount of happiness that we get now in doing those things to achieve our payoff later.

We achieve a high rate of happiness on happiness return by investing in our happiness now in order to achieve our dreams. It’s finding happiness in journey, in the tasks we need to do today so we can make our dreams happen tomorrow. This way, even if our dreams change, we don’t regret our time and effort invested because what we were doing made us happy.

Making a Better Investment

Our dreams give us our individuality. It propels our growth. The moment we stop investing in our dreams is when apathy and entropy take over our lives. The object is to invest more wisely.

1. Get out of bad investments

We tend to hold onto a bad investment in hopes that it will turn the corner. We stay in bad relationships. We continue doing work that makes us unhappy. We don’t want to take a loss because it means we failed.

Zero-based thinking
The quickest way to know if your dream has become a bad investment is to ask: knowing what I know now, would I have gotten into this in the first place? If the answer is no. It’s time to get out.

The 80/20 Rule
Getting out isn’t easy. If it’s a job you don’t like but you need to pay rent, you often times can’t quit outright. Simplify things you want to get out of by applying the 80/20 rule which states 80% of results comes from 20% of efforts. Figure out the 20% that achieves your current results and do only those tasks. That way you do less, freeing up energy to be used for transitioning to the next dream.

2. Educate yourself

Investing requires a modicum of financial literacy to avoid simple mistakes that could become potentially disastrous. Investing in dreams requires basic emotional literacy to avoid mistakes. You have to know yourself before you can be true to yourself.

Figure out values
If your doctor told you that you had a month to live, what you spend that month doing? Whatever you answer is your highest value. If you answered that you’d spend time with my family instead of finishing up that project at work, family is a higher value than work. Dreams that don’t align with values are discarded and we lose our investment of time.

Figure out needs
When we no longer want a dream, it doesn’t mean the need that dream was going to meet has gone away. We have six critical needs. Maybe the job we wanted would have made us feel special (Critical Importance need) but then we realized that we’d never be very good at it so we quit our schooling for that job. This doesn’t mean our need for Critical Importance is gone and we still need to find something to meet that need.

3. Find leverage

Investing $20K in shares of stock only gets a return on $20K. Putting $20K down on property can get a house costing over $200,000. That is leverage. Finding the right lever for your dreams can help you move mountains.

Write down goals
This doesn’t have to be a list. It can be a journal. It could be a blog. Once goals are written, it solidifies from the ether of INFP wishful thinking into a practical lever that keeps us accountable to our integrity.

Don’t reinvent the wheel
Someone has that job we want or that relationships we’ve dream of. Find the people that started where we started and are currently where we want to go and learn how they did it. We don’t need to spend the thousands of hours of trial and error like they did. Our task is to use those hours to figure out a way to do what they did in a way that will keep us interested, engaged and happy now.

I’ve always been lucky. It started when my family had to flee my native country and start all over dirt-poor. My dad was forty and I was five. I was even luckier when the first company to employ my dad closed. I ended up moving away from my only friend at 10 years old. The luckiest thing to happen to me occurred at age 22. After months of working up the nerve to ask this girl I liked out on a date, she stood me up.

Immigrating to America allowed me an education. Had we stayed, I would be doing back-breaking labor in a country where the average annual salary is $3000 US/year. My dad getting laid off forced us to move to a city with activities that held my interest, activities unavailable in a town of 2000 people. So instead of drinking at the lake on weekends during my high school years, I was competing in fencing at the local university. Moving to a big city kept me out of trouble and out of jail.

Because the girl didn’t show, I decided to dance for the first time. I was too disappointed to be self-conscious. So that night, I discovered my love for dancing. Four years later, my future wife noticed me on the dance floor at a club. We started taking ballroom, swing and tango classes together. Those dance lessons taught us to work together to excel in a cooperative activity. They taught us about our differing learning styles and the ways we dealt with frustration and conflict. I attribute part of the success of our marriage to what we learned about each other in those early dance lessons.

The Nature of Luck

Psychologist Richard Wiseman did a ten year study into the nature of luck. In 2003, Wisemen published a book called The Luck Factor. His site contains a brief article about his study.

In one experiment, Wiseman placed an advert asking for people who intended to buy lottery tickets. Out of 700 people, Wiseman discovered, not surprisingly, that the lucky ones didn’t win more than the unlucky ones. Our perception of our own luck doesn’t affect pure chance.

What about activities that aren’t pure chance? Wiseman asked a group of participants to count the number of photographs in a sample newspaper. The unlucky people averaged two minutes to count the photos. The lucky people took seconds. The second page held a message that took up half the page. The message read, “Stop counting — There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.”

What Wiseman concluded was that people who perceive themselves to be lucky generate their own good fortune. That luck consisted of four principles.

Four Principles of Luck and INFPs

1. Creating and noticing chance opportunities

Noticing opportunities requires overcoming selective attention. Watch the video below.

When I first saw this video on Techdirt, I didn’t see the gorilla. For INFPs, counting the ball being passed is our focus on our idealized version of how our lives should be. The gorilla is opportunities we miss because we so doggedly focus on creating this singular vision of our lives.

INFPs agonize over finding that job that makes us feel fulfilled. We struggle finding that right person to share our lives. All the while, that perfect person or perfect job could have already passed us by. Those ideals make INFPs specifically focused instead of generally focused. Everything gets filtered by our ideals. If we don’t see the situation as ideal then it’s no good to us so we dismiss it.

INFPs need to account for change. Situations and people who may not be ideal now could be ideal later.

Perfection is easy to find, but hard to recognize.

2. Following our Intuition

Opportunities rarely hold up signs saying, I’m an opportunity. It’s a friend a who wants you to meet someone. It’s a feeling that nudges us to do something we otherwise wouldn’t do.

About a decade ago, an college crush came back into my life briefly through a few emails. She recommended some books by Robert Kiyosaki. I rarely read non-fiction, but something told me to read these. Kiyosaki’s books changed my views about work and money. I recommended those books to my ENTJ brother who runs with ideas that compel him. He’s five years younger than I am, but because of those books, he got into real estate and is now less than a decade from retiring.

Although INFPs have a good intuition, that intution can lead us into trouble when we project. We make more of an opportunity than it really is. This becomes apparent in our interactions with others. INFPs don’t often meet people with whom we strongly connect. With new people we like, we have a tendency to project our values onto them. We try to explain to ourselves why we like them by making stuff up in our head based on how we feel. Then we feel betrayed when their actions don’t match up to values we projected on them.

After enough let downs, we think our intuition is suspect but it’s really our interpretation of our intuition that’s faulty.

3. Having Positive Expectation

Lucky people expect good things to happen to them. It’s the Reticular Activation System (RAS) part of our brain not wishful thinking. What car do you drive? How often do you notice other people driving that same car?

Among the RAS’s functions is its “ability to consciously focus attention on something. In addition, the RAS acts as a filter, dampening down the effect of repeated stimuli such as loud noises, helping to prevent the senses from being overloaded.” Our RAS controls what we pay attention to and what we filter out.

Lucky people don’t filter out opportunities because they have the positive expectation that good things will happen to them. It’s self-fulling prophecy. Because they expect good things to happen, they are more open to notice the opportunities to make good things happen in their lives.

Positive expectation requires INFPs to be open which isn’t something we learn naturally. Over years of being hurt from misunderstanding, we don’t let ourselves out, but instead we let people in. INFPs develop an us versus them mentality. We put people through exhaustive hoop-jumping before we let them into our inner world. Keeping the world at arms length keeps us from opportunity.

4. Seeing the Good from the Bad

A zen proverb states, “Pain is inevitable, but suffering is optional.”

If we get hit by a car and lose the use of our legs, that is pain. Pain is random and beyond your control. Whether we decided to to mope or play Murderball (quad rugby) is entirely up to us.

Interpretation controls attitude. Attitude affects how we act. When bad things happen, attitude determines how quickly we move on and try again. Lucky people are glass-half-full people. A glass half-empty is also half-full so either view is right. But which is more useful? People who see lack operate from an attitude of lack. People who see abundance act from a place of abundance. Like attracts like.

Interpretation stems from belief and INFPs hold onto beliefs dearly. However, multiple beliefs about the same situation may be valid. INFPs adopt beliefs that feel most right without ever questioning which beliefs are the most useful.

For example, say an INFP gets dumped. We can interpret it two ways. Our ex was either right or wrong in dumping us. If we believe they were wrong then we start looking for signs we missed of why our ex was a bad person. On the other hand, if we believe our ex was right then we look to ourselves to figure out how to not make the same mistakes. Which belief is more useful?

Practical Luck

Luck is nothing more than increasing the probability of a desired outcome. We do that by increasing the odds of finding opportunities that help us and making the most of out opportunities we notice.

Let say I blindfolded and stuck you twice as far a normal from a dart board. If you threw enough darts, you’ll eventually hit the bulls-eye by pure chance. Now, I take off the blindfold. I send you back to the right starting position. I give you a darts expert to teach you proper technique and to make corrections. You’re chances of hitting the bulls-eye have greatly improved.

Lucky people unconsciously use the principles of luck to increase their probability. What lucky people do unconsciously, anyone can learn to do consciously.

Go out.

Sitting at home isn’t increasing our odds of good things happening.

Wiseman’s study found that lucky people are more social. Lucky people are pleasant so more people like them. Because others like them, they will do things for them. Those things can include recommending people for jobs that haven’t been advertised yet, introducing people who would later become friends or significant others.

By ourselves, we can’t notice everything and be everywhere. A strong social network gives us more eyes and ears that are looking out for us.

Do something different.

Different opportunities originate from different places.

Drive down a different street on the way home. Go to a different grocery store. Any activity that varies from our routine increases probability. The new is uncomfortable but being uncomfortable makes us more aware. That heightened awareness leads to the recognizing opportunities that we otherwise would have missed.

Also, opportunities are not infinite from a single source. Your friends will run out of potential relationship material to introduce you to. After time, your current activities will give you fewer chances to grow.

Be ready.

Imagine you’ve met someone who could be the one. If you’re thirty, living in your parent’s basement without a job, that’s a huge turn off to overcome. How would afford to go on dates? You’re not ready to date even though you may want to.

Everyone has that vision of their perfect job. All jobs have minimum qualifications to even be considered. If a friend says, hey I have a job that fits everything you ever wanted, would you even qualify? What good is an opportunity if you aren’t ready to do anything about it?

Being ready means focusing on personal growth. To have more, we first have to be more. To have a perfect job, we need to be someone that qualifies for that perfect job. To have good relationships, we ned to become someone worth knowing.

Act immediately.

Opportunities have a short window in which to act. The world is full of people that could use that opportunity also. Even though we see it first doesn’t mean someone else won’t see it moments later.

What if we’re wrong and that opportunity turns out badly? Then we’re wrong. Admit we made a mistake and do something else instead of continuing to do the wrong thing. Find the good from the bad and move on.

I never wait for parking space because I park at the first one I see even if it’s a farther walk. People spend two years of their lives waiting in line which includes parking. If parking can’t be found and I don’t have to be there, I’ll leave. It’s the glass-half-full mentality. I believe the universe is telling me that I have better things to do.

The most interesting thing that came from Wiseman’s study is the results from the standardized “life satisfaction” scale. Participants ranked themselves on how satisfied they felt with family and personal life, finances, health and career. The people who believed themselves lucky rated themselves far happier then those who felt unlucky.

Maybe the universe doesn’t say anything and I’m only fooling myself. Does it matter if I’m fooling myself into being happier?