The Myers Briggs Type indicator (mbti) is a professional personality sorter which is used by many psychologists, companies and schools to better understand there clients or staff. When you master it you can spot personality types within minutes, so you know the best way to get along with the person you are dealing with. The sorter will show you how they see the world, what is important to them and it can really help you respect other people. And of course it will help you understand yourself better. I really think the purpose of mbti is to change your one perspective of the world into 16 different perspectives.

The Myers Briggs Type indicator began with the theories of the famous psychologist Carl Jung, who identified different personality preferences in 1921. During the Second World War, a mother daughter team expanded this theory into the Myers Briggs Type indicator. From then on many academic papers and bestselling books were written about the system. Today it’s the most popular personality test, used by most of the major universities and fortune 500 companies.

I believe the best way to find your type is by learning about the system. That way you can acquire both the useful skills to read other people and create a good image of your own Myers Briggs type.

Another thing which the Myers Briggs Type Indicator will teach is to just pay more attention to people and their personality. When you try to read a person you are paying close attention to them, you're trying to fit every action into the mbti theory by considering the "why" behind the action. This will really improve your awareness of personality. I can remember I was asked to say something bad and something great about all my friends a couple of years ago, and I just was unable to do that. Nowadays I can make whole lists of strengths and weaknesses of the people I know. I think I know their value's and how they use them. I think I know their identity and views of life. I'm sometimes wrong, but at least I'm aware and trying. In other words I went from people blind to a human behavior analyzer all thanks to the awareness Myers Briggs gave me.

The danger of stereotyping
People are far too unique to be forced in just one of 16 boxes. Therefore it is better to see the Myers Briggs system as a four dimension field, and each person is a slightly moving dot somewhere in this field. Eventhough this gives infinite personality types, it's still imperfect because it's limited too only four very abstract dimensions. And there is no way to prove that these four dimensions are the right ones too judge people by. Therefore Myers Briggs is just an art, a tool and not a science or an attempt to find the truth. You should always consider this when you make judgments based on the MBTI tool.

I like to look at mbti as a road map, it just shows roads, it's not the real area. It often helps you to move from point a too b, but if a road is blocked, then for some reason, than the map still doesn't work. That's like mbti, it's just a usefull tool, nothing more. So be careful that you don't start to mistake mbti for the real thing, just like you also won't mistake your town for just roads and names when you look at the map. Every person is far more than his or her type and therefore really keep making sure that you don't stereotype. Because the system isn't stereotyping it's just a tool, you are the one stereotyping when you use the tool wrong.

What is the best type?
One of the orginal books about Myers Briggs was called Gift differing, in other words each type has different strengths and different weaknesses and no type is the best type. I agree with that, even though when you read the different personality types you will probably find one type far better than the other. Yet someone with that type that you think of as inferior, might find your type inferior because they judge by different value's. So whenever your type description is an insult too you, it's likely that your mbti assessment was wrong.

Research has shown that qualities like IQ and creativity are on average better in some types than in others. For example, ENTPs came out to be the most creative type in a test, and indeed all ENTPs I know are very creative. But this doesn't mean that a particular ENTP will always be more creative than a particular ISFJ in any case. In most cases they are more creative indeed, but mbti is an art and not a science so any rule can be broken.