What do INTJs Wish Others Knew About Their Type?

Kevin Price, Editor at Large for USA Business Radio and Host of the Price of Business Show, has recently become hooked on Quora.  In addition to daily hosting the Price of Business, Kevin has numerous writing obligations on this and other sites for which he serves as an editor and with his syndicated column, so we decided that if he’s going to write at Quora, he is going to share that content on this website.  If you are on Quora, make sure to follow Kevin.  You can check out his page here.

Kevin’s hot topics on Quora are history, free market economics, philosophy, and Myers Briggs typology, and many others.  The following is one of his recent answers to the question in the title.

It depends so much on how healthy the INTJ is. If he’s immature, he typically does not care what people understand and they often walk around with an attitude of superiority. As an INTJ, this was my default posture for years.

Assuming an INTJ is on the road to maturity and healthiness, he or she:

• Wants to understand more about others, but find it difficult to do so (this is why INTJs tend to love MBTI because it helps them understand the various personality types).
• We are not robots, computers or other forms of AI, we are humans that simply think very different than most of the types out there.
• We don’t understand emotions well at all. In fact, they say the greatest fear of an INTJ is being vulnerable. If perspectives is the INTJ driver, and systems the co-pilot, the 10 year old is emotions. A healthy INTJ will work through emotions, but it is incredibly slow. But be patient. Everything must go through the INTJ’s head before one can discuss it.
• We have the same compulsion and obsession issues as everyone else. In fact, more so. The 3 year old for the INTJ is sensing. So INTJs can struggle with excessive amounts of food, alcohol, sex, gambling, etc. Furthermore, since we struggle with emotions too (see point above) we often lack the tools to healthily process things emotionally and find the playground of sensing a fun (if not dangerous) alternative.
• The three biggest challenges of an INTJ are career, money, and relationships. INTJs are often very capable to do many different things professionally. As they pursue one, they often long for the others they are missing out on, thus work is often a challenge for them. Money is very daunting. An immature INTJ can struggle with feeling like they are not making “enough,” but the reality is, they do not feel like enough and it gets lost in their perception of money. Finally, relationships (because they depend so much on emotion) are incredibly exhausting to an INTJ. That is among the reason they have so few friends and they and their spouses find going through the issues that come with commitment very difficult to navigate.
• INTJs know what they know. You can doubt it, but they are usually as right as they appear to think they are. INTJs do not like being wrong, so they won’t stick their necks out unless they are… (read more, while there FOLLOW Kevin and check out more of his work)