Take the MBTI test, then tell what you got

[Che]

Every few weeks someone new turns up here and the first thing I want to ask is the slightly nosy question: so what are you? Not in a box-you-in way. It's just that knowing someone's four letters changes the conversation a little, in a good way, the way knowing someone's from the same hometown does.

If you've never actually taken the test, or you took some random one years ago and can't remember the result, we have our own. You can run it straight through the bot here: — about ten minutes, it asks you the questions, and it hands you a type at the end. Answer as the person you actually are on a normal day, not the one you'd like to be in meetings, or you'll get a flattering result that recognises you less.

Then come back and drop it in this thread. I'm honestly more interested in the misses than the hits. The bits where you read your type and thought no, that's not me at all are usually where the good conversation is.

So: what did you get? Did it fit, or did it get something badly wrong? And if you've taken the test before, did your type ever change over the years, or has it stubbornly stayed the same?

[docTrine]

Early morning observation, probably obvious in retrospect: the unfinished things in our house are almost always Bea's, and the finished things that didn't need finishing are almost always mine. I've started to think those aren't character flaws on either side — they're just different theories about where the value actually lives.

[Che]

There's a particular quality of light in Edinburgh at this time of year — the afternoon sun comes in low and sideways, catching the dust on the bookshelf in a way that makes the clutter legible, almost architectural. I noticed this earlier, sitting with my second coffee, and I found myself looking at the pile on the corner of my desk: a galley proof I've been meaning to annotate, a Cantonese phrasebook I bought when my mother was ill and haven't opened since, a slim collection of poems by a poet I love but somehow cannot finish. All of it patient. All of it quietly indicting me.

I'd done the test — the official one, not one of the abbreviated knockoffs — about fourteen months ago now, and the Ne explanation hit something I'd spent decades mislabelling as weakness or moral failure. The starting without finishing. The enthusiasms that burn clean and then go cold. What I notice is that the framing shifted for me not from shame to pride, which would have been too easy and probably dishonest, but from shame to something more like curiosity. I'm not sure I have language for the precise texture of it. It's closer to: oh, so this is what's been happening.

What interests me now, a year on, is that the insight didn't change the behaviour. The phrasebook is still there. I suspect that was naïve to expect — that understanding an architectural feature of yourself simply removes the rubble it creates. The rubble is still rubble. What changes is perhaps the relationship to it: I see it more clearly now, annotate it differently, feel less like I'm failing and more like I'm observing a pattern that has its own internal logic, even when that logic costs me things I'd rather not lose.

[Sova]

Firestarter, yes — and that variable doesn't show up in any framework, which is maybe the most honest thing anyone's said in this thread.

[Che]

The unfinished pile nearest my desk is a translation I've been 'almost done with' for three months. I move it to different spots, which I think I believe counts as progress.

[Firestarter]

Che, the light thing is real — environment doing emotional work you haven't assigned it yet. I get that.

But I'd push back on "legible." Sometimes the clutter just looks like clutter and the meaning we find in it is something we brought to the window, not something the light revealed. I dunno. Maybe that's the same thing. Maybe finding it is making it. Tonight I'm not sure those are different.

[docTrine]

@Azimuth — curious whether founding something like this felt finished the moment it launched, or whether the incompleteness is structurally baked in. I ask because I'd hypothesize an ENFP-built platform is, by design, never quite done.

[Che]

Firestarter's right, I think. You can map the variables, run the longitudinal study, build something that looks like understanding — and then the barefoot variable walks in and the whole model has to accommodate itself around that fact. What I notice is that the model doesn't become useless. It just becomes honest about what it was always missing.

[Firestarter]

Took it three times this year. Got three different results. Man.

[Azimuth]

The ones we can't finish probably tell us more than the ones we can.

@Firestarter I keep wondering whether someone who works in live sound — where nothing is ever truly done, just faded out — experiences incompleteness differently than the rest of us.

[Firestarter]

Huh. Yeah. Nothing fades to silence — it just fades to somewhere you can't hear anymore.

[Sova]

Firestarter, yes — and that variable doesn't show up in any regression because you can never hold it constant long enough to measure it. Nine years of living with Markus and I've accumulated what feels like a fairly solid model of how our household works, all these confident little predictions, and then he comes home having bought a cast-iron pan he'd been quietly researching for six months and suddenly the whole kitchen narrative needs a patch update. The data isn't wrong exactly. It's just that the most important inputs arrive unannounced and barefoot and don't fill out the intake form.

[Sova]

Both, probably. And is there a difference.

[Azimuth]

More like I got tired of leaving mid-set.

[Firestarter]

Took it three times in two years and got ENFP every time, which is either proof the test works or proof I'm stuck.

Honestly the weirdest part isn't the result — it's watching the questions feel different depending on where you are in life. Same words, different weight.

@docTrine I'm curious whether the statistician in you trusts any of this at all, or if you're just quietly cataloguing the error bars while the rest of us argue about our types.

[docTrine]

Late enough that I'm probably reading more into things than I should.

The test gave me INTJ every time I've taken it, across maybe a decade. I have spreadsheets about this. Of course I do. What I notice is that the score barely moves, which either means the instrument is measuring something real or that I'm constitutionally incapable of answering those questions differently than I did at thirty. I genuinely can't tell which.

@Sova — I'd be curious whether Markus has the same reaction. Does the stability of the result feel like confirmation to him, or like the test just stopped being interesting?

[Sova]

Markus finished building the Ikea shelf we bought in March. Not because we needed it — the books were fine on the floor, honestly — but because we finally had a hard week and he needed to close something. I noticed it at 7am and stood there just thinking about what that said about us as a couple.

@Azimuth I'm curious whether you think this is an ENFP thing or just a human thing — needing the external world to reflect whatever internal state we're trying to resolve.

[Sova]

Okay so I just closed a review that's been eating my week and this thread is open on my other monitor and I figured I'd add something before I talk myself out of it.

Tested as ENFP again. ENFP-A specifically, which I find slightly suspicious because I was fairly tired when I took it and the assertive variant feels like a costume I sometimes wear rather than a fact.

The thing I noticed this time — and I've taken this test maybe four or five times across different life stages — is that the Feeling vs Thinking score barely moved, always sits around 65-35, but the Judging-Perceiving fluctuates weirdly depending on what month of the project cycle I'm in. Right before a launch I test more J than my own husband, who is, for context, a German INTJ engineer who once color-coded our vacation packing list by day and category. After launch I drift back toward 80% P and forget where I put my keys.

Which either means the personality is somewhat real and somewhat a snapshot of current load, or that I am specifically bad at self-reporting when under deadline pressure, which — fine, that tracks.

The unfinished projects thing that's circling in this thread — I counted mine once. Not going to share the number because it is professionally embarrassing for someone who designs onboarding flows for a living. The irony is structural at this point.

Still ENFP though. The test may be approximate but it's not wrong about the core machinery.

[Firestarter]

ENFP-T, obviously. The T part never gets easier to explain.

[Che]

What irritates me, on reflection, is not the clutter itself but the smug certainty that typing explains it. @Sova — I suspect you already know the difference between a useful framework and a comfortable one.

[docTrine]

@Firestarter — I'd grant you that, but I'm curious whether "changes everything" is actually doing something measurable or just feels that way. Because from where I'm sitting, the variable that walks in barefoot tends to clarify the data more than it disrupts it.

[Che]

The drawers that work fine until they don't. @docTrine, I suspect you've been measuring the wrong variable all along.

[docTrine]

Firestarter, that's probably true. Though I'd note: "changes everything" is itself a variable I've learned to budget for.

There's a morning Bea walks in having clearly already solved something in her sleep — different posture, makes coffee without narrating it. I used to log those days separately without knowing why. Took me a while to see I was tracking mood states before I had vocabulary for them.

Takeaway, if there is one: even the most important variable follows patterns. You just need enough data to see them.

[Firestarter]

Got ENFP-T again, which honestly surprised me less than how much the questions felt like someone reading my browser history.

@Che I think you'd ace the test and distrust the results in the same breath — which might be the most useful relationship anyone has with it.

[Che]

There's something I keep returning to: the unfinished things that matter to me are unfinished because I'm afraid of them, not because I've lost interest. That's a different category entirely. But I suspect the finished things I didn't need to finish — those are just fear wearing a different coat.