Personality
EN

ENTP

Sparks Fly

You made a throwaway comment twenty minutes ago and now the whole table is debating it, which was the plan. Someone tries to end the argument and you have already found the hole in their closing point.

You are at your best when an idea nobody else would have said out loud turns out to be the right one.

You come undone when the same conversation happens for the fifth time and nothing new gets said.

  • Plays devil's advocate
  • Starts three projects
  • Enjoys a good roast
  • Bored by the obvious answer
  • Changes its mind loudly

What you are good at

You can argue any position, including the one you disagree with, well enough to change somebody's mind, and it is genuinely useful when it is pointed at a real problem. A room with you in it finds the hole in a plan two months earlier than a room without.

You are quick and you are funny, and both are doing more work than people realise. Half of what looks like showing off is you keeping a difficult conversation loose enough that people will stay in it.

And you are not attached to being right, which is unusual in someone who argues this much. Show you a better idea and you will adopt it on the spot and start arguing for it as though it were always yours, which it now is.

What gets in your way

You start beautifully and you leave at eighty per cent, when the interesting problems are solved and only the work is left. The graveyard behind you is full of genuinely good ideas that needed six more boring weeks.

You will pick the fight for the pleasure of it. There is a version of you that pokes the sore point because the conversation had gone flat, and the person on the other end of that does not experience it as play.

And you are bored, often, in ways you treat as an emergency. Boredom sends you looking for a new project, a new argument, a new anything, and it has cost you things that were only boring because they were nearly finished.

Close up

You are a magnificent beginning. Nobody makes the first three months more fun than you, and people fall for you fast and hard because being the focus of your attention is genuinely a lovely place to be.

The test comes later, at the ordinary part, where nothing is being discovered and somebody has to book the dentist. That is where you have to decide whether you are actually in this, and you can go a long time avoiding deciding.

What you need is somebody who is not intimidated and does not fold. If your partner cannot push back, you will push until they do, and then be disappointed by the result you engineered.

At work

You want variety, a problem nobody has solved and permission to be a little unreasonable. In the right job you are worth several people. In the wrong one you are an ongoing management issue and you know it.

You are excellent at the start of things and unhappy at the middle of them. Build that in rather than pretending otherwise: get in, break the assumption, hand it over to somebody who likes the middle.

The habit worth building is finishing one thing a year that you were bored of. Not for the thing. For the evidence, because right now you do not have much of it, and it is quietly eating your confidence.

The one thing

Say the boring yes.

Somebody is asking for the unglamorous version of a commitment: the recurring Tuesday, the second year, the follow-up nobody will thank you for. Your instinct is to keep the option open. Close it, once, deliberately, and stay.

You already know you can start anything. That question is answered. The one still open is whether you can stay, and it is the only one anybody who loves you is actually asking.

Often typed this way

  • Robert Downey Jr.
  • Mark Twain
  • Sacha Baron Cohen
  • Leonardo da Vinci
  • Thomas Edison

These are guesses, and we would rather say so. Not one of these people has sat the official test and published the result. Every celebrity list on the internet, ours included, is fans voting on strangers. Enjoy it as that.

Not sure this is you?