Growing up introverted with the same group of D&D friends through middle school and high school doesn’t push you to learn better social skills. As always, I turned to books to find answers, but my real answers didn’t come until 11 years later.

The books were a great start, helping me type myself as INFP. They gave me an understanding of typical behaviors of other types and how to communicate with them. I special ordered a copy of Gifts Differing which had the medians and stats I wanted but what I didn’t have was practical knowledge.

Then came Yahoo! Groups in 2000. The INFP discussion board had a massive jump in popularity within months with thousands of posts so I was able to get first-hand accounts of how other INFPs experienced their lives. Friendster came in 2002 with an INFP group starting almost immediately. Then Tribe and MySpace in 2003. Often the stories and conversations from INFPs in their 40s and 50s were the same — loneliness, divorce, jobs they hated, financial debt and instability, no real friends and general unhappiness. The pattern I saw was not enough forward thinking about the consequences of choices they made earlier in life.

From my observations of INFPs over the years, their choices didn’t necessarily seem like bad choices, just INFP typical choices that usually don’t work out long term. I needed to make different choices if I didn’t want the same result.

Thirty years later, I’ve avoided most of the pitfalls that beset many INFPs. I credit escaping serious setbacks to understanding and developing all four of the INFP cognitive functions Fi-Ne-Si-Te. Using both thinking and feeling, both sensing and intuition to complement each other makes it much easier to create a life that aligns to my values. I never became the next Stephen King like I wanted in my early 20s, but I’m okay with that.

The Last 30 Years

Here’s what I think I did right over the last 30 years:

Money Is Important

The best things in life are free. The second best things, like traveling or health insurance, require money.

I don’t like what the monetary system has evolved into and the way the fractional reserve system keeps shrinking the middle class and widening the divide between the haves and have-nots. However, I grew up poor with seven people living in a two-bedroom 800 sq ft house so I remember what not having money was like.

Anything important, I spend time learning about. How does money work? What system should I use to manage personal finances? I read books. I attended seminars. I found a budgeting system that worked for me and followed it. I started investing in my late 20s.

If you make something important, the Reticular Activating System in your brain stops filtering out relevant information. It’s the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon where you start noticing the same car model you just bought. Now that you have the same car, that information is relevant and your brain stops ignoring it.

If money becomes important, then your brain stops ignoring important information about personal finances.

Your relationships with money is like any other relationship. Anything or anyone that you denigrate, ignore or hold contempt for will not stick around.

Become A Regular

When I didn’t know how to meet people, it was easier for people to meet me. Regulars feel safer to approach. I discovered I liked dancing at age 21. Actually, I love dancing so I went a lot.

If you show up anywhere weekly for 20+ years, people will talk to you even if you try to rush out as the lights come on. For the first six months, no one spoke to me, but I didn’t go to meet people. Then one night, someone intercepted me as I was making a beeline to the door at closing and complimented me on my dancing. She introduced me to her friends. A year later, there were a dozen of us that went out together.

Over the last 15 years, I’ve slowly met people who have become friends, not because I intended to make friends. They were people whose company I enjoyed and if you see and talk to people weekly for years and years, friendship happens.

Even now, I meet people because I’m a regular. I volunteer at a WordPress Meetup every 2nd Tuesday fixing broken web sites. I do photography at several monthly events. I’m don’t go to meet people.

Helping people who can’t afford to fix their websites makes me feel like I’m doing something worthwhile with my expertise. And I love photography, which I’ve done weekly for almost over a decade. Maybe over the next decade, some of the people I meet become friends.

Value-Oriented Personal Development

I had to move away from Result-Oriented Personal Development which is more geared for Te inclined personalities. Result oriented methodology starts with you write down your goals and then figuring out a step-by-step plan to achieve them. As Fi-dominant, goals that felt right in my 20s weren’t what I wanted anymore when I was in my 30s with kids.

Those goals in my 20s didn’t feel right anymore as my circumstances shift. However, my highest values — growth, freedom, connection, creative self-expression — were still the same.

Resulted-Oriented focuses on What and then figuring out How to get What. Value-Oriented Personal Development starts with How in order to clarify What.

Examples of Resulted-oriented goals:

What career should I have that I’m passionate about?
What relationship do I want to have?
What should I do to make myself happy?

Examples of Value-Oriented Personal Development:

If growth is a top-value, how do I continue to learn and grow so I don’t become bored with work or with anything I do?

If connection is a top-value, how do I create connection with anyone, not just people I’ve known for years who have busy lives that I don’t see as often as I like?

If freedom is top-value, how do I create more choices for myself in an economic system that requires a job?

Value-oriented personal development is about taking those things that I do in my life and figuring out how to align them with my values. It’s about a journey worth having, not a specific destination.

The Next Decade

The MBTI is one of my favorite personal development tools out of the many that I use. What I like is that Jung’s theory gives me an idea what to do next.

For the first part of life, relying heavily on the main INFP functions Fi-Ne and exploring different ways of using them gives INFPs the most progress. However as INFPs get older, Fi-Ne will only take us so far and we have to give more attention to Si-Te to get a different way of observing and interacting with the world in order to progress.

After 30 years, I think I’m at the limit of what I can learn about how Fi-Ne works within myself.

Si tells me that I don’t have the unlimited time that I felt I had in my 20s. Te tells me maybe it is time to make a list of the most meaningful things and focus on those finally.

Like writing.

1. Growth is about going from one set of problems to a better set of problems.

There will always be some issue in your life that you want to resolve. No one ever reaches a point where their life is problem free. The only way to understand if your life is actually moving is if the problems that you’re dealing with now are different than the ones you were dealing with before.

Einstein is quoted for saying, “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

Until you solve the problem, then you’re the same person using the same thinking. If you currently have the same problems you did four years ago then you know you’re stuck and whatever you were doing, however you are living isn’t working. Do something else.

2. You are what you create.

Identity is much more fluid than we want to believe. We tie our identity to our values and our beliefs and think that those are stable cornerstones. Who you are in your head is imaginary. It’s only real to you. Unless you can bring into reality the person you have in your head, you’ll feel more disconnected with yourself each year. This requires #3.

3. Learn to compromise.

The most successful people (and I don’t mean financially) are the biggest compromisers in the world. They want to be effective and not right. Everyone wants things their way and if everyone refused to move forward unless they got their way then relationships would never work.

We use the excuse that we’re just being true to ourselves. At a certain point, being true to yourself is inherently selfish and you have to want to make selflessness a part of who you are. Learning to compromise also means knowing when you have to stand your ground.

4. Your significant other, soul mate, life partner is not there to make you happy or fulfilled.

No one is ever going to understand you because when you think about it, you barely understand yourself sometimes. Happiness is something you practice and not something that’s given or something you find. What a new person can do during the butterfly stage is to make you forget that you’re unhappy, but eventually you’ll remember again. It’s your job to practice happiness, the same way you practice yoga or authenticity. No one else can give you a skill.

5. You’re either going to be very happy in your 40’s or very unhappy.

The ones who believe that happiness is a learned skill, start practicing in their 20’s and start getting good in their 30’s and by their 40’s, they get really good. The ones who believe that happiness is out there in that significant other or that great job get disillusioned in their 30’s when they realize that getting everything they want isn’t as perfect as they imagined. They become largely unhappy in their 40’s as they continue to search for that next thing that will make them happy.

6. Significance comes from what makes you different. Connection comes from what makes you the same.

If you think you’re different than everyone else and that no one out there thinks like you and the world doesn’t understand, then that’s what’s going to keep you disconnected to everyone else. There’s no middle ground. There’s no special person who’s ever going to get you because you’ve based your entire sense of self-worth on being different.

Connection only happens when you realize that no matter what personality type, everyone is trying to make it through just like everyone else. The human condition is what everyone has in common. It’s only when you focus on what makes people alike instead of trying to be different, will you understand the skills it takes to connect to other people.

7. Keep a journal.

Because you’ll forget how good you had it. And how bad you had it. Journals let you appreciate your journey.

8. Perfection is about subtraction not addition.

The common advice is to let go of perfection. We tend to see perfection as addition. If we can do more, become more than we’ll be perfect. This project will be perfect if we keep messing with it. This view of perfection is unachievable.

Perfection happens not when nothing more can be added, but when nothing more can be taken away.

Trying to become more is never-ending and therefore something we use an excuse to stay where we are. It works far better if you try to get rid of everything in your life that isn’t you.

Trust me, what’s left will be perfect.

Happiness derives from the influence we have in directing our lives towards a desired outcome. If you want to be a famous writer but feel that luck is how you  find an agent and that your sales bend to the whims of market forces, then that feeling of powerlessness to make things better will leave you unhappy. On the other hand, if you feel that you have the power to build a loyal fan base that will stand behind your work then that sense of control over your destiny makes you happy.

Meaning is a feeling of connection you have to what you do. If you want to be a famous writer, what would make all those hours in front of the blank page worth it? If you never got published, would the time spent still be meaningful?

Two Psychological Approaches to Meaning

When I look back at the events in my life, my mind organizes all the random happenings and circumstances into a cohesive narrative that becomes story of my life. That takes past sufferings and triumphs and creates a narrative about how I got from there to here.  That story takes a hopeful interpretation of present circumstances to compel me into my imagined future.

Somewhere in that story, using my Ne (Extroverted Intuition), a pattern emerges. Theme of the story is meaning. This is the narrative psychology approach to meaning introduced by psychologist Theodore Sarbin.

Another approach to meaning comes from neurologist and psychologist Viktor Frankl, who wrote the famous book Man’s Search for Meaning, detailing his years in the concentration camps. His premise was that finding meaning is the primary driving force of our lives. Frankl wrote, “We can discover this meaning in life in three different ways: (1) by creating a work or doing a deed; (2) by experiencing something or encountering someone; and (3) by the attitude we take toward unavoidable suffering.” He developed Logotherapy as a means of helping patients find meaning to the suffering they have with their current circumstances.

Finding Meaning Without Looking

Two years ago, I was watching a YouTube video of Simon Sinek’s discussion on millennials in the workplace.  He caught my interest so I watched dozens of his lectures and presentations. Somewhere in those videos, he briefly mentioned what he thought were three worthwhile things we could do with our time.

Something clicked.  In life, I think meaning can be found in three things:

1. Emotions you want to feel
2. Challenges you want to accept
3. Experiences that engage you

Emotions You Want to Feel

Having positive emotion is different than avoiding negative ones. Feeling connected is different than not feeling lonely. You can go out with friends to feel less lonely, but that’s not the same as creating connection.  Emotions you want to feel is moving towards positive emotion, not avoiding negative ones.

Challenges You Want To Accept

Doing anything requires doing it poorly at first. The challenge is to get better. Talking to that person you like will be awkward the first time. Hopefully the next time, you feel less uncomfortable. Maybe you want to travel the world, but you have bills and debt. The challenge could be figuring out how to save money and finding deals while still paying your bills.

Whatever it is that excites you, is that a challenge you currently want to accept for your life?

Experiences That Engage You

Studies show that experiences provide more happiness than things. Engaging experiences are events or occurrences that capture our attention and imagination. That concert that you barely remember because you posted it to social media probably wasn’t that engaging.  Experience that engage are the ones that bring you of past regrets and future hopes into the present.

Not Knowing Your Purpose

Most self-help books tell you to find your passion or purpose, followed by detailing methodologies to help set and achieve goals.

What if you don’t know your passion or purpose? Our minds are subject to dynamic inconsistency where our preference at one point in time is inconsistent with our preference at another point in time. For example:

(a) Which do you prefer, to be given 500 dollars today or 505 dollars tomorrow?
(b) Which do you prefer, to be given 500 dollars 365 days from now or 505 dollars 366 days from now?

Logically, the difference between $500 and $505 is waiting one extra day. However, most people choose $500 today and $505 in 366 days. We give more value to “now”. That money that we were going to put into savings is worth more now because of the concert tickets we want so we’ll start that savings plan next month. That dessert in front of us is worth then those future cheesecakes we tell ourselves that we won’t eat tomorrow.  This temporal discounting makes it difficult to want to plan for tomorrow.

For INFPs, our Ne shows us so many possibilities and Fi (Introverted Feeling) inspires us to do whatever feels right at that moment.  This makes finding purpose a messy process of trial-and-error.  We lose interest and with every false start that moves us into the next thing, we wonder if the thing that captivates us now will be meaningful a few years from now.  Focusing on the three essentials to meaning can help guide us to a lasting purpose.

The Essentials in Practice

As INFPs, doing things and sticking with it requires using our Fi cognitive function.   Fi is value focused so that’s always the starting point.

1. Start with values

Clarifying values requires both Ne and Si.  Ne (Extroverted Sensing) is idealistic.  It’s pattern seeking so it compares our current lives with an ideal future and says, these are the values to get me there.  However, if the INFP continually loses interest and moves to the next thing, they start to question if those were really their values if they can’t stick to anything.

Si (Introverted Sensing) balances out Ne.   Ne makes interested in lots of things can cause for lack of focus.   Si looks at the past and says, here’s what we’ve done in the past that that’s been personally fulfilling.  Ask yourself, is there anything that I’ve always done because it feels as part of who I am?  It’s the common values behind those activities that have always been with us, that help define our top 4 values.   For me, they are:

1. Growth
2. Freedom
3. Connection
4. Creative Self-Expression

2. Have 3 Go-To Activities that’s independent of other people

Those activities have to align with your values.   Those values move your forward even when you don’t see immediate results.

My current 3 are:

– Nutrition and fitness (growth, freedom)
– Writing and developing my blog (growth, connection, creative self-expression)
– Studying the MBTI (growth, freedom, connection, creative self-expression)

The activities should have low Initiation Energy.  They quick to start immediately.  If you have to think about doing something, you end up making excuses and losing motivation after five seconds.

My dumbbells, exercise bands and bench are two feet away. I don’t have to motivate myself to get dressed and drive anywhere. My current blog research and post is on my desktop so I don’t go looking for them and get distracted. My MBTI Manual and notes are on my desk in front of me, bookmarked to the last place so I don’t to figure out what I was doing before.

Overcoming high Initiation Energy requires willpower.   Willpower is finite and can be exhausted like a muscle.  If I had to motivate myself to get dressed and drive to the gym every day, I probably wouldn’t be exercising. When I have everything I need in front of me, I don’t have to think about it before I do it.  Eventually those things become habits.

These activities should be independent of other people. I don’t need a ride anywhere to work out. I don’t need approval from someone in order to write.  Happiness is about your level of influence in shaping your life.  Start with those things that you have full control over.

These activities should be challenges you want to accept.  For me nutrition and fitness isn’t about losing some weight.   It’s the challenge of understand how my body works and figuring out how to live a healthy lifestyle that doesn’t fall back into bad habits.  Growing a blog challenges me to share my pragmatic approaches to living in a meaningful way.

These things should be part of how you want to express your life the world.

3. Pick one daily no excuses activity

Self-esteem is built one completion at a time.  We like people who are true to their word.   We like ourselves if we do what we say we’ll do.

It has to be the same activity every day.   Out of those three, I chose nutrition and fitness because it’s the easiest to do daily.  Sometimes I’m tired from the day and my brain doesn’t have the capacity to write or study. However, I can exercise for 20 minutes. That’s 3 sets of 3 exercises. Sometimes it’s body weight exercises. Sometimes it’s a yoga video on YouTube.

When someone keeps their word, it reflects a level of caring and value that this other person has for you.  Each day, I complete my exercise is just one way I show myself that I do care about my life and myself.

4. Focus on regularity not routine

Regularity is consistency at predictable intervals. It’s not creating an inflexible schedule. I research my articles once every two weeks and writing takes two to three days.  If I focus on routinely publishing exactly every two weeks, it can feel too constricting when there’s already so me that we have to do in our lives.  Routines can turn into ruts.  Instead, I want regularity – posting twice a month.

Use Ne (Extroverted Intuition) to find ways to introduce new elements.  I change up my exercises every few weeks.  I mixing reading and studying MBTI related books and practicing one-on-one interpretation with other people.

5. Look for a meaningful way

Having Go-To Activities is a starting point.  The object is find a meaningful way for the every day things that take up  large portion of our lives.   This could be anything from that spring cleaning that hasn’t been done in years to daily homework that you don’t feel enthused about.

What emotions do I want to feel?

I’m currently clearing and purging my house.  I have things I no longer use or need that take up physical and mental space.  I figure out the the positive emotions from this project.

A feeling of peace – I feel calmer when my space doesn’t feel crowded by things.

Convenience – It’s frustrating when I have piles and I can’t find things I need at that moment.

What’s the challenge I want?

Cleaning up and putting stuff away isn’t meaningful. Charging with my Te (Extroverted Thinking ) and grinding away at the disorder would be a challenge but it’s not a meaningful challenge.   Entropy happens and things get messy again.

If you can’t figure out why you should do something, you start at your top four values.    For me, it was framing the cleaning and purging with my value of Creative Self-Expression? I believe in simplicity and pragmatism. If I were to express that in my life, what would I need to throw out and what would I re-arrange in order to express those ideals through the space I inhabit? That’s much more interesting.

How can this experience be engaging?

How do I make this more than cleaning up some rooms? Again, focus on values. Growth works in my situation. I must be holding onto stuff for a reason. Is it because of Sunk Cost Fallacy? Is there some meaning I’ve attached that no longer resonates? What does that say about me and how does this affect my life? Making this a process of better understanding myself is engaging.

A Meaningful Life

Brene Brown, a researcher on connection and vulnerability wrote:

“We seem to measure the value of people’s contributions (and sometimes their entire lives) by their level of public recognition. In other words, worth is measured by fame and fortune. Our culture is quick to dismiss quiet, ordinary, hardworking men and women. In many instances, we equate ordinary with boring or, even more dangerous, ordinary has become synonymous with meaningless.”

I think this attitude leads to unhappiness where everyone hopes that their life could be as exciting as the one they present on social media.

Lives consist of ordinary moments in aggregate. Meaning is a practice of small moments.  A million small moments add up to a life less ordinary when we look back at the story of our lives.

Everything we do has opportunity costs. The time, energy and resources that we commit into one area can’t be used towards other opportunities unless we quit. Quitting dead ends and lost causes allows us to refocus and re-allocate our efforts into other opportunities that improve our lives.

If we re-frame quitting, not as something we do, but instead as a tool to be used, then learning how to use quitting correctly gives us another skill that can help us with our lives.

Incorrect usage of quitting are:

1. Not quitting at all
2. Quitting at the wrong time
3. Quitting when you should keep going

Starting Is Easy

Whether it’s joining a gym for the New Year, quitting smoking or changing your Facebook status to “In A Relationship”, society rewards starting. Your announcement gets rewarded by Likes. Your brain releases a flood of dopamine making you feel really good about your decision. This is New Thing Energy.

When you first learn guitar or something you’ve always wanted to do, or when that person you like asks you out, not knowing the outcome brings a sense of excitement. Will you suck at guitar or end up a YouTube star? Will your date turn out to be the love of your life? Not knowing is exciting but it’s also a stressor. The brain releases the stress hormone cortisol. When cortisol rises, serotonin depletes which causes you to obsess. This New Thing is all you can think about.

Biology and sociology reward starting. Quoting the band Nine Inch Nails, “there’s nothing quite like the feel of something new.”

Seth Godin and The Dip

Quitting is also easy, but quitting correctly is hard.

Seth would be disappointed with me. His bestselling book, The Dip, advises on the right to quit. With INFPBlog, I did it all wrong.

The book’s premise is that on our way to mastery, we go through The Dip, a phase where our efforts aren’t producing tangible results. Only by getting past it will we ever become our best.

Walking the Right Path

Wanting to be good at something — a business, a relationship, a new skill — start us down one of three paths. It’s difficult to tell which path we’re on until we go further. Only one leads to mastery.

Path 1: The Cliff

INFPBlog wasn’t headed towards The Cliff. It wasn’t another shiny penny.

The Cliff happens when the dopamine drops. New Thing activity releases dopamine in our brain. The problem with dopamine is your brain needs more each time to get the same high. Over time, you don’t feel that same excitement — getting up to go the gym every morning, first arguments in that new relationship, hours of boring practice. New Thing Energy dissipates. People “fall out of love”. That obsessive interest wanes because cortisol and serotonin leveled off.

INFP Extroverted Intuition (Ne) often leads us to chasing that next New Thing until The Cliff becomes a familiar friend. Why would this blog be any different than the other things I started and became bored doing. Having a developed tertiary Introverted Sensing (Si) function provides balance.

From my experiences in the past (Si), I knew I would have phases where I wouldn’t “feel inspired” to sit down, research and write more articles.

To avoid the Cliff, I set long-term goals before I started, with milestones that I wanted reach (Te). INFPBlog wasn’t something I did for fun just to see how it would go. I made a plan to follow.

Giving something a try for the fun of it (Fi) to break up the daily monotony often leads to The Cliff.

Path 2: The Cul-de-Sac (Dead End)

I knew within the first month that INFP Blog wasn’t in a Cul-de-Sac. My traffic numbers kept growing with every article.

The Cul-de-Sac path leads to a Dead End. Growing a blog takes time. I visited popular high traffic blogs that I enjoy and looked at their first year posts (Te). Most of them had almost no comments. It wasn’t until year 2 or 3 before those blog became active. I prepared for this.

Ne keeps INFPs down the Cul-de-Sac too long. Maybe, he/she will change and the relationship will get better. I’ll try this and this and maybe the business will pick up. Ne keeps us throwing ideas at the wall and hoping something sticks. Ne is ever hopeful so bad relationships and bad situations drag on.

Quitting early helps avoid enormous sunk costs and losing years of our lives in the Cul-de-Sac. For that to happen, quitting needs inferior Te to balance out the dominant Fi decision making. Quitting makes us feel bad. It feels like we’ve failed. It feels like we just didn’t give it enough time. It feels like something better will never come around.

To balance this heavy Fi, you have to decide the conditions of quitting before you start. Te helps create a plan for quitting. What are the conditions that need to be met? How many years of avoiding conversations about commitment is enough before you move on? For INFPBlog, my conditions was I would quit if I didn’t see steady rise of in traffic after a year.

INFPBlog got that steady rise in traffic and comments after the first few weeks.

Path 3: Mastery

The first time I quit was September 2011. By that time I had been writing the blog for over 2 years.

Most people quit just as their moving out of The Dip. I hadn’t even started into the Dip when I stopped writing. INFPBlog averaged 1600 users, 2500 sessions and 8000 page views each month with session times of over 5 minutes.

I was prepared for The Dip. But Introverted Feeling (Fi) kicked in really hard. Something didn’t feel right with my blog and I couldn’t shake it. If something felt wrong on this side of The Dip when everything was going great, it would certainly still be wrong on the other side. Why go through all that hardship for something that felt fundamentally broken?

I wrote another blog post in May 2013. I felt inspired to write, but something still felt off (Fi). It’s taken me 5 years to understand what caused that feeling.

I didn’t really officially quit. I didn’t take the site down. I just stopped writing. Quitting the things that have emotional attachment requires a process of letting go in order to move to the next New Thing. I never did.

Quitting vs Letting Go

Seth’s book doesn’t talk about what happens after we quit.

Just because we quit doesn’t mean we’re going to start dating the next day or start planning our new business. The loss of anything we’ve emotionally invested into triggers a grieving process. Until we experience that grieving process, we’re never going to feel like moving on.

Letting go, especially for INFPs, means figuring out which parts of the experience have lasting significant meaning (Fi) and keeping those. Si needs to be used to revisit old losses in order to realize that the unimportant stuff fades over time. Te creates coping mechanisms to help us adjust to this new environment where this piece is now missing. Ne finds an enduring connection to part that’s no longer there while helping us see the possibilities of a new life ahead.

I never went through the letting go process. Something felt off with my blog, but giving up on it altogether definitely didn’t feel right.

More Than One Dip

That feeling something was wrong with INFPBlog happened because I was in more than one Dip.

Seth’s book talks about The Dip in terms of business. His ideas are applicable to personal mastery.

Everything we want to get better at will experience a Dip. I love photography but currently I’m experiencing a Dip. It’s not an area I want to invest resources into at this time, but I’m okay with just being okay at photography. I’m on the other side of the Dip with parenting. I’m in a Dip professionally.

When we travel multiple paths of mastery in our personal lives, we experience Dips in each of those areas. Problems occur when you enter multiple Dips at the same time. The issues and challenges of all those Dips jumble together. We push through the challenges of one Dip thinking that were solving issues with another Dip. We end up solving the wrong problems. This is what happened with INFPBlog.

The two paths I was traveling were:

1. Creating and growing INFPBlog
2. Getting better at the MBTI

I had been in a massive Dip on my path to MBTI mastery, but didn’t realize it. Talking to other INFPs helped me see various differences in INFP personalities and mindsets, but I didn’t have the Type Theory grounding to understand why.

INFPBlog wasn’t helping. It made it worse. I love the MBTI as a model to explain the development of personality. It’s elegant. I connect more to this model than other equally valid models like DISC theory or the Five Factor Model. I like the science of personality development.

My unease with INFPBlog stemmed from lack of good grounding in Type Theory. Everything I wrote came from personal experience and extrapolation but without the science. When that happens, you start moving Type from science into feel good horoscope territory. That was the feeling that I couldn’t figure out.

When to Quit

Strategic quitting is sometimes the best option. If you realize that your path is a dead end then your resources would be better used in a different opportunity. Quitting becomes your smartest choice. Quitting isn’t failing. Failing is giving up, having no other options or running out of time and resources.

The three questions of quitting are:

1. Am I panicking?

I just saw him/her out with another person that looked like a date. Our business is taking a loss for the 3rd month. Maybe that other person is a relative. In the business plan, what was the timeline before the business showed profit?

Quitting during panic creates problems. Good quitters decide in advance. If you decide in advance that cheating is a quitting condition then make sure that condition has happened and follow through, instead of letting Ne getting out of control and making up the worse possible scenario.

INFPBlog was doing well. I had no reason to panic.

2. Who am I trying to influence?

If it’s one person who isn’t changing their mind, then it may be time to quit. You want to get married, but after two years, that other person isn’t ready to commit. Quitting keeps two years from becoming five years or decades.

If moving forward means influencing an entire personality type, then there’s plenty of people to reach.

I knew INFPBlog wasn’t going to speak to all INFPs, but at 4-6% of the population, that’s 19 million INFPs in the US.

3. What sort of measurable progress am I making?

Am I moving forward, falling behind or not moving? Falling behind or not moving requires re-evaluation of purpose and goals.

INFPBlog didn’t fit the criteria for quitting so I didn’t quit. But it didn’t feel right so I stopped. Sometimes putting something aside, especially if it’s important but not urgent makes more sense than throwing resources at it.

The Opposite of Quitting is Rededication

Rededication isn’t doing the same thing and expecting a different result. It’s finding a new approach and applying it.

My new approach to INFPBlog is to ground the articles in the cognitive functions. We use all our functions all the time. How does each function play a part in my experiences, like quitting or starting again?

Last month, I got my MBTI Step I and Step II certification from CPP, the company that Isabel Meyers turned the MBTI over to in 1975. Certification is like getting your first driver’s license. It doesn’t mean I’m any good at it yet.

After years, I felt stuck in my MBTI learning. Ne presented various options — books, videos, etc. — but which ones were the right books. Out of those options Si pointed out that in the past when I’m stuck at something that I’ve been working at for years, the best solution has been to go back to the beginning, the basics. Fi chose getting my MBTI certification as the option that felt most right. I used Te to research which companies offered certification and chose one that came to Denver once a year.

After the class, I had enough grounding to continue my learning process. I ordered books that I considered grounded in the science (Te) and history of MBTI. I’ve been studying those every day. After a month, Fi felt it was time to restart INFPBlog.

I’ve been using Te for the last 2 weeks to redesign the site on schedule. Fi decided I needed a new logo. Si used my prior knowledge of mobile usage statistics to insist that the site be responsive and mobile-friendly. Ne came up with ideas for a possible first article. Fi decided that the first article for my blog re-launch should be about quitting because it would be hilarious and ironic.

That’s because we measure growth with 3 different measuring sticks and when you apply the wrong measuring stick to the endeavor in which you’re trying to grow, you feel stuck.

3 Ways We Measure Growth

More. Sooner. Easier.

If you ask most people whether they want more of the good things in their lives or less. They would choose more. Who wouldn’t want more close friends or a raise or more time to do things they enjoy? If you ask whether someone would want those things now or five years from now, most would choose now. If you ask them if whether they could get everything they wanted by working either 2 hours a day or 12 hours a day, most would choose the easier two hours a day. We are ingrained to want more over less, sooner rather than later and easier instead of harder.

Because these three things are so ingrained in our nature, it’s also how we unconsciously measure growth.

For example, when you first started learning to read, it was difficult. As you read more, reading became easier. Easier is how we measure growth when we learn skills. Playing guitar becomes easier. Your new job gets easier after that initial learning curve. If something got easier to do, we feel like we’re growing because we got better at it.

We also are ingrained to measure by having more of something. You exercise and lose more weight or you are able to run for more time or more speed. You learn social skills and get more friends or you get a better job and make more money. Or you quit your job and move to foreign beach so you have more time. When we get more in the areas of our highest value, we feel our lives are growing.

Sooner is how we measure growth in the areas we don’t enjoy. If you think you have an anger issue or a depression issue, you feel like your growing if you’ve learned methodologies that get you out of those negative states faster. If your job is boring or housework is monotonous then growth happens when you develop a system that lets you get it done sooner without the quality being affected to the point it would bring about negative consequences.

Why Better Isn’t a Good Measurement

What about quality? Quality is value-based and subjective and changes as our values change. You can objectively measure more, sooner and easier. Quality gets derived from some combination of those three. Some people spend more money to achieve quality, buy a bigger house or take a more expensive vacation. Some people consider something is of higher value if it saves them time and makes their life easier.

However, quality is much harder to apply to intangibles. If someone said, you can have a million dollars two ways. Here’s the winning numbers to this weeks lotto or here’s the business plan to turn your passion into a million dollars. Most would choose the lotto numbers. Yes, the maybe the quality of the million dollars would be better if you earned it yourself. However, most people would just choose the Easier and Sooner lotto numbers and then do their passion for fun.

Using the Right Measurements

Using the wrong measurement gets us stuck. That often happens with careers and finances. We make more money, but it seems like were stuck in a rat race. It seems like we’re growing because we’re making more now then we were 5 years ago. Or we get more responsibility and that makes us feel important because more people need us. However, some people reach a certain point where they plateau, where they can’t take on any more without feeling like their life will fall apart. They burn out. They stop growing in that area.

However, if you decide to use Easier or Sooner rather than More as the measurement for finances. What if I can make the same amount now, but working only part-time instead of full time? What if I can feel just as fulfilled but doing some type of work that’s easier and less stressful? Using those measurements leads us to a different way of thinking and growing.

In relationships, we often use More and Easier as our measurement which sometimes leads to unintended consequences. You meet someone. You click. Everything seems so easy, the conversation, the connection, as if you had always known each other. Then the honeymoon phase is over. Life intrudes. The new person get busier or you have a value conflict. Schedules become harder to sync. You don’t feel like your friendship is growing because you don’t see them as often. Certain measurements will plateau in certain areas and using those measurements as your basis stall the area you want to grow in. In relationships, the other person only has so much time so at a certain point, you can’t get more time. There’s will always be value conflicts so it’s not always going to be easy.

But what if you focus on Sooner. What if you learn ways to get connected as soon as you see each? What if you find ways to resolve difference and challenges sooner?

The Right Measurement at the Right Time

Another way we get stuck is using the wrong measurement at the wrong time. Sometimes how we started measuring something needs to change after we’ve been doing it for a while.

If you are recently unemployed, growth is often measured by Easier. Finding a job that is close to what you do you did before would make your life easier. Finding a job that pays close to what you made before is would make living easier. However, when the unemployment runs out, you have to make the switch from Easier to More. Anything more than zero dollars is better, at least for the time being.

Maybe, you started out trying to lose weight and your measurement is More. More weight loss equals growth to you. However, you will eventually plateau. After a certain point, you won’t be dropping body fat as fast as you were. If you keep using More as your measurement, then you become less motivated because you see less results. However, if you switch your measurement to Sooner–how quickly you can get that endorphin rush from running, or Easier–how much more effortlessly you can run a mile or climb a mountain, you continue seeing growth.

Over the years, I’ve often had to change the way I started measuring. I started out as an introvert with five friends. Then they went to college and moved away. Growth was learning how to make more friends and having an easier time getting invited to activities. Now I’m in my forties. My friends have children and lives and less disposable time. When I see them, it about finding how to reconnect faster and start talking about the important part of our lives sooner and sometimes that’s not easy. That’s why I’ve been studying so much of Brene Brown’s research.

In my career, my initial measurement was more. If I made more money and enjoyed my work more than I did 5 years ago, then I was growing. But then I realized that what I enjoyed more than work is time with my family. So growth for me now in the area of finance is Easier. How do I make what I’m making now working half my hours or a quarter my hours? So for a decade I’ve been slowly transitioning from the E-Quadrant (Employment) to the I-Quadrant (Investment). For me, growth is measured by working less for the same income level and not more.

From Measurement to Results

When you change your method of measurement you change your focus. When you change your focus, you change your actions. Different actions will produce different results.

For example, I currently work a day job as a programmer. If I wanted to make more money, I’d ask my company to pay for my certifications. I would look for a higher paying job. However, I want Easier money. This means studying investments so my money is working when I’m not working. I’m reading Seth Godin instead of programming books. I’m taking completely different actions because I’m measuring differently.

The areas where I feel I’m stuck are where I’m trying to switch my measurements. Parenting is one of them. I’ve been measuring by Easier. If my kids got their room clean or if they did well with classes or friends. That only works if they don’t question what you tell them. I don’t want to raise kids that don’t question authority which means I can measure by Easier.

Now I’m trying to switch to More, more time with them, more new experiences. So it means re-arranging my schedule, spending time with them even when I’m tired. I’m looking for activities to do with them that are new and challenging. It’s not going to be More forever because they’ll be teenagers eventually and they’ll have other people they would rather spend time with. When that happens, I’ll switch to a different measurement which will shift my focus which lead me to take different actions.

What Can Be Measured Can Be Managed

Sometime life gets away from us. We get a bit lost. Maybe, you’re graduating high school and you don’t know what to study. Maybe you’re sick of the job you’ve been working at for the last 10 years but feel like you’re stuck. Maybe, you’re relationship isn’t what it once was and you don’t talk as much or the kids make you tired all the time. Measuring gives us a tangible starting point.

If you don’t know what you want to study as a career at university, start by determining how you measured your career success as a student. If you measure it by More like more fulfillment, you have to figure out what’s fulfilling you now. What do you do that makes you feel fulfilled? What is it about that activity that makes you feel fulfilled? What jobs exist that will pay you to do something that has the qualities of the activity that currently makes you feel fulfilled?

Measurement allows us an objective view of our progress. It gets us out of our heads into the real world where we have tangible proof that we are creating. Saying you want to write a book doesn’t get you anywhere without measurement. If you measure with More, then maybe yesterday, you wrote 100 words to your novel and today you have 500 words. That’s tangle proof that you created 400 more words that didn’t exist yesterday. If you measure with Sooner, maybe yesterday you had to stare at the blank sheet of paper for an hour before you could type anything. Then you read a book that told you to just start typing anything. So you did and today you started typing right away. Even if you could only use a paragraph of what you wrote, you became a writer an hour sooner than you were the day before.

Unless you measure what it is you’re trying to achieve, you can’t tell if you’re progressing.

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 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 person completely obnoxious. You see that person treats your close friend terribly but your friend doesn’t see that or your friend dismisses it as 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 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’ve notice with authenticity defined as being true to yourself is that it doesn’t always make you a better person. 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.

Definition 3: Being your best self.

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 dragons. 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 chose 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 making changes so you can be 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 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 authenticity will motivate us to live life to its fullest. If we feel shy, we hope that authenticity will lead to confidence. 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 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 day job catered lunch from Noodles and we had 5 trays of left overs that end up sitting in our fridge a few days and then thrown away. This has happened for years,.  People have a little more the next day but we waste so much food.  So instead of worrying about what people would think, I packed enough for myself and my family so we wouldn’t have to cook dinner that night.

As I was packing the leftovers into the Tupperware, I felt bold for not wondering if co-workers thought I was 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 feeling 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 emotions 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.

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 when realized that 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 a good dancer 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 this amorphous blob of shallow compromise that I had projected on to Them. They were individuals going through their own struggles 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 easygoing 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 difficult 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 horse-trading 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. 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 to 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 risk being 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.

This lesson applies in different variations. If I’m lonely, then I should 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 among 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 single 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 of 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 Them than Us

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. 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 are 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 that other people have. We don’t get together and talk about problems all the time 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.

We become a bit lost but that lost feeling seems oddly right for the moment. We’re in downtime. Downtime is a period of regrouping, conserving energy and figuring 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 to help companies figure 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.

This requires figuring out who we are now.

Who Are We Are Now

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 an employee 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 to be completed in order to be successful. For example, if Parent is one of the roles 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, Family Member, Provider, Writer, Lifelong Learner and Contributor

Everything I enjoy in life fits under one of these roles. Friend falls under the role of Contributor. I see Contributor as being someone who improves the lives of others. World traveler and computer geek falls under Life Long Learner. Cook falls under Husband and Parent.

Although our roles are not our Identity, the sum of our roles defines the life we live. Even if I don’t know what I should be doing with my life in a general sense, I know have chosen roles that are important with tasks that require doing to be successful.

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 improving those things are role specific. Being more outgoing as a Parent requires different actions than being more outgoing as a Provider.

The Purpose of Roles

Roles fill personal needs. I write often about Tony Robbins’ 6 Human Needs: Certainty and Uncertainty, Significance and Connection, Growth and Contribution.

My role as Father meets my needs of Uncertainty, Significance, Connection, and Growth. My role as Provider meets my needs of Certainty and Growth.

Lives with the most stability have those needs met across many roles. When we put all our needs into a single basket like the role of Spouse or Parent, our lives fall apart should something happen to that role. If that single basket is dropped, all our needs are now completely unmet.

As we grow and our lives evolve, we have roles that no longer meet any of needs. Provider might have met the need of Significance before the kids graduated college and got high-paying jobs. Roles that don’t meet needs have to be re-evaluated so we can stop doing tasks which no longer contribute to our lives.

Idealism and Roles

Ideal roles don’t exist because even the best roles like Parent often suck in the day-to-day reality. Although ideal roles don’t exist, there are ideal ways to play a 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 Provider than as a McJob employee.

Often “reality” doesn’t accommodate us. We want to play a role one way, but we’ve either repeatedly failed or don’t know how. Instead we do something else, something less ideal for that role to meet our needs. This is especially true with careers and relationships. We stick with bad relationships and terrible jobs.

Improving our situation requires identifying which needs those roles are meeting and figuring out if those needs can be filled by another role. For example, maybe you’re in a terrible relationships, but your role of Spouse is providing Certainty of a home and regular meals. If you end the relationship then Certainty no longer gets met, unless another role can provide it. Maybe your role as Son/Daughter can provide Certainty by asking your parents for help as you transition out of the role of Spouse.

Being Better at Your Roles

Being better at a role doesn’t mean creating a checklist to cross off. Yes, roles have responsibilities with tasks associated. However, a checklist of To-Dos for that role focuses on the tasks and not the intent of the role.

If taking the kids to Disney World is on the checklist in your role as Parent, the intent is not to cross off an item and then move onto the next item. Maybe you have a Bucket List for your Role as parent – this year Disney World, next year the Yellowstone, etc. Crossing more items off the bucket list doesn’t make you better at your roles.

Roles meet needs. So what need does that role satisfy? Maybe Parent provides Uncertainty, Significance, Connection and Growth. Being better at those roles means doing actions that will meet those needs in a meaningful way.

Say you plan the Disney trip the last detail. You made a checklist, did the checklist, you got the Fast Pass and the time schedule, you got to the rides on time, no one had to wait, you rode all the rides and the plan goes flawlessly and everyone has a great time. Your kids thank you get Significance, what about the other needs.

How could you have more Uncertainty? Maybe you give up trying to get to every ride. You give your youngest who always wants to be in charge the map and say, get us to this place, we’ll follow. Maybe your youngest gets you there on time and maybe they won’t. You get your Uncertainty but you also get Connection. The kid might not remember all the rides but maybe they’ll remember that story about how you we’re trying to get to the roller coaster but you ended up finding that really cool giant Lego statue. Maybe your kid loses their favorite stuffed toy and you have to spend time looking for it. This could be where Connection and Growth comes into your role as Parent when you have to comfort your child and help them work through this process of possibly never finding their toy.

As a Parent, sometimes I have no clue what I’m supposed to be doing. I feel that way in my other roles as well. However, if I focus on the intent – what needs does this role meet — then I have a guide to figuring out what tasks need to done.

Being Aimless

At 20, I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing with my life. I wanted to be published writer but who knew if that would ever happen. Meanwhile, I served popcorn at a movie theater and hung out with friends.

So how can someone have no direction and still improve their life?

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

1. Put your goals on pause.

Our values change so our priorities change. Maybe making that first million was really important until you held your newborn for the first time. Items put on a list 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.

2. Define and improve your skills in your current Roles

My roles at 20 were Writer, Employee and Friend.

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. Being better at the role of Writer meant I had to learn the habits of writers who actually made a living at it. I studied the Writer’s Handbook. I read what I could on the business of writing.

By focusing at being a little bit better at each Role every month, we improve our lives without focusing on goals that we currently are unsure of and may turn out to be meaningless later.

Being aimless and moving our lives forward, means improving habits and skills while keeping an eye out for opportunities to improve the way we do that Role. Doing this leads to possibilities we never considered before. It’s those new possibilities that often spark an idea or inspiration helps us find our passions and purpose.

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Revised: May 22, 2018

Reasoning: Because the original version sucked. It was one of the worse articles I’ve written. The last two sections meandered and had no point. The sections, Being Better at Your Roles and Being Aimless, were revised to contain actionable content.

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

According to Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, a book about success, a study by psychologist Ander Ericsson that concludes that it requires an average of 10,000 hours to become an expert in any field. 10,000 hours is roughly 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 in a way that stretches your skill, to purposely become better by the end than we were at the beginning of the practice.

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

Stephen King wrote Rage and Blaze before Carrie, his 3rd novel written became his first novel published. Brandon Sanderson, a bestselling fantasy author, wrote 5 novels before he wrote the one that became his debut novel.

Inspiration doesn’t overcome the perspiration needed to master a skill.

An Update to 10,000 Hours

10,000 hours is an average.  Erickson’s research showed variations between much less than 10,000 hours to over 25,000 hours depending on the skill and the inborn aptitudes and advantages of the learner.

Deliberate practice doesn’t encompass smart practice.  Smart practice can greatly shorten the path to proficiency and mastery.  One of the methods of smart practice is adaptive learning.

Adaptive learning requires that you adjust your practice based on feedback from other in your field.  Most skills can be broken down to smaller subsets.  In the skill of photography, those subset skills are things like lighting, composition, posing your subject, etc.   You may have natural aptitude at some of those subset skills and not others.  Feedback from those with experience can help you focus on specific areas to practice.

Smart practice requires learning about skill hacking, ways to shorten and improve the ways the process of learning skills.  For example, the average retention rate from reading is about 10%.  You remember 10%, usually the big ideas and general overview of the book.  Practice averages 75% retention.  Teaching Others has an average retention rate of around 90%.    When I read a book with the intent of write a blog post about it, I take notes and try to figure out a way to simplify the ideas being presented.  Learn as if you have to teach it the next day is just one of many methods of skill hacking.

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 past happy experiences (Si) to deduce the common factor (Ne) 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 only one or two categories, that activity will not be sustainable.

Passion and  Happiness Engine:   If we’re not good at it, we’ll stick with it until we decide that we want recognition. Recognition requires expertise which requires getting good at what you do.

Passion and Expertise:  This give us recognition in terms of monetary compensation. Passion gives us that competitive drive to be our best.  The top 20% in any given field make 80% of the money in that field. However, without the happiness engine then despite the high income, we end up feeling that we should be doing something else.

Happiness Engine and Expertise:  Without the passion, then we lose a sense of connection to what we do.  Being happy about what we do doesn’t mean we’re excited about what we do.  That’s when we start asking, is this all there is?

The Hedgehog Concept buffers us against failure. Failure is giving up on achieving a desired outcome.

Passion and expertise at doing something that drives our happiness makes us focus process instead of the outcome.  It’s the doing that makes us happy more than the result.   A good result is just the added bonus.

With all three, 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.  The 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 to be an expert.

10,000 deliberate hours of smart learning isn’t easy for an INFP. I have 2000-5000 hours in many different things because I never stuck to one thing long enough.  I’m okay at lots of things but people aren’t going to pay me to do okay work for them.

In my 20’s, I thought natural aptitude would somehow circumvent the need for 10,000 hours. So I became a dilettante never deliberately practicing but only practicing on inspiration. 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 (Ne)
2. We never seem to get great at anything (lack of Te development)

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 helps 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 aligns with our values and 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 the skills 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 become an expert. 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 in some things I only have one or two parts and not all three. The Hedgehog Concept is the starting point for moving a life from good to great.

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Revised: May 23, 2018

Reasoning: New research into 10,000K hours. Added the section: An Update to 10,000 Hours