Should You Be An INTP Wage Slave or an INTPreneur?
Modern work is office work, and office work sucks for INTPs. One of the sixteen personality types in Myers-Briggs, INTP is your go-it-alone creative problem-solver; incisive and full of ideas; curious but bored with repetition and the details of implementation; loath to take instruction or follow standard methodologies; happiest with quiet and flexibility. This personality is, in short, the antithesis of most job ads. Because fundamentally, all office work is either document-pushing or management — yes, even in your hip start-up.
Document pushing is trivial on its face, yet challenge comes from volume. Success lies in the smooth coordination of projects — of milestones, timelines, to-dos, tasks in the task management software, and email reminders to colleagues. Details then, and details of implementation. Add in some meetings, one-on-ones, timesheets, and standard operating procedures and you get…well, death for an INTP. Even if there were interesting problems to solve when you arrived, those get taken care of in 6 months. Then what?
The escape hatch from office drudgery in an office is management. Then you get to manage other people’s projects, hold meetings, give feedback, and watch your budget. That is, generally act like a process-oriented extrovert.
Both of these options are tough. Not impossible, but the INTP must sublimate some aspects of himself, and play hard to whatever strengths he has that might orient most to the office world. Success depends on the particular brand of INTP we’re talking about, for there are many.
Out of Office
There are a few domains of life that are not like offices, but hold to their own rules. Generally they are traditional in character, high on conformity and process: the military, medicine, the clergy. An INTP who can rise up quickly inside one of these areas to have a degree of self-control may do alright: a monk who writes popular-press books; the military planner who gets materiel into place; the medical device specialist who designs instrument controls. But don’t become a dentist hoping for creative scope as an INTP.
Yet, speaking of dentists, I think there is a case for an INTP to hold very non-INTP jobs: those that are extremely routine and physical instead of cerebral. Then, none of the INTP’s creative energy is expended on the job — it’s all saved for nights writing by the fireside. The job must not be too stressful, have too long of hours, or too rigid a life. Filing books in the library, cleaning teeth, or hauling freight cross country may fit the bill — various novelists have squeezed books out of such arrangements. But finding a long-lasting career, with money for a family, is harder. Plumbing and electrical work are not impossible, if the INTP is physical enough and has the discipline to keep working on their own hobbies.
Academia
Academia is that other sphere of life that, like the military, is still separate from corporate office norms — though less so all the time. Internet message boards are also full of advice for INTPs to pursue academia. Does this hold up? On paper, scientific or scholarly life fits the INTP very well: learn about abstract ideas, identify problems and work on them independently, come up with ideas and then publish them before moving on to the next idea. Mix in a little teaching or lab work for variety. Every semester is different, and there’s always another goal on the horizon.
However, much is demanded of the INTP that does not suit him. Knowing who’s who in a field is every bit as critical as domain knowledge: each is a little social world with ins and outs, winners and losers, hangers-on and rising stars. There is much effort expended on grants, recommendations, and other paperwork. Intellectual curiosity is highly constrained by funding and, most of all, the narrowness of academic work: the tiniest minutiae within the most arcane sub-domain of a little-known discipline may occupy you for years. That’s not the wide-ranging curiosity I think of for INTPs.
The tenure-track road is also risky. It involves a lot of time, sacrifice, and uncertainty — and I do not think of INTPs as great risk-takers. Academia can also be harsh; a roller-coaster of rejection and egomania, perhaps not suited to the more sensitive (neurotic) souls among us, which INTPs usually are.
The INTP aspiring to academia should, I think, be relatively less wide-ranging in interests than other INTPs; more liable to settle down into the details of something and be happy there. (I myself get bored after two years doing anything.) INTPs are easily ambitious regarding their ideas, but the academic INTP must be unusually keyed in to the social landscape and to advancing himself in it. He should, above all, be persnickety about every detail. This is a rare INTP methinks.
Programming
Reading message boards online, you will find a lot of INTPs suggesting programming to each other. But this is a self-selecting group, full of people “on the spectrum” who describe terror at social situations and endless joy from mathematical rigor. Creativity and big ideas are not much discussed here. That should make us wary.
To be sure, programming has its satisfactions. There is great abstract problem-solving, and the ability to do something just once before sealing it away in a box and never looking at it ever again (implement things once, then reuse them). Programming can be about any other domain or topic. There is a short time between idea and execution. Potentially, there is remuneration for this work too. But programming is largely about details, and often less than innovative: as I can gather, real software development is a lot about reusing other people’s code; being efficient; about bug-fixing and documenting; about delegating and managing complex projects with many hands.
All INTPs should probably try their hand at coding at some point. I myself have enjoyed it well as a hobby, somewhat less in professional life (around data analysis). Coding is also a good skill to have. But I’m skeptical that it’s a good job for INTPs generally — more for those who are very anti-social, very theoretical, and somewhat less full of the creative impulse.
Ditching Work
The INTP’s stereotypical dream is to quit work to develop their own projects and ideas. Simultaneously surviving in a market-driven economy is the trick.
Freelancing is sometimes mentioned among INTPs. As a graphic designer, I’ve done some, and known full-time freelancers. You get variety and the freedom to pick your own hours. That’s not nothing. But you trade one boss for ten: there are more relationships to manage, plus contracts, billing, and advertising — worrying about your client base and the rotation of projects is normal. To my way of thinking, this cuts even more into the INTP’s personal project time, yet doesn’t fundamentally make his work his own. It’s a good choice for INTPs who are bit more extroverted, perhaps a bit less neurotic, and primarily just want to get out of a physical office.
Consulting appears similar, except fewer clients are traded for a greater need for extroversion. Working in a consulting firm, where someone else does much of the glad-handing, could work out well — but you’re often still in an office (just not the same one) during regular business hours (or more), with a boss (plus the client). The INTP’s best bet is starting a boutique agency with an agreeable, outgoing friend. Still, it’s not your own big, original ideas.
The INTPreneur
Every option so far ultimately involves selling your time — in set amounts or as billable hours. I think the goal for many INTPs will be to escape this, and to sell a product instead. It could be clay bowls, software, or cartoons. But the INTP then acts more as an inventor or artist, and lets the market decide his fate — not a single boss or company.
The great difficulty will be follow-through — not the INTP’s strength — because as Scott Adams says, the market rewards implementations, not ideas. Selecting a medium with a short gap between the two is key. An INTP should play to his strength as a curious generalist, gaining whatever skills are needed, and combining skills that pure specialists don’t typically have. (Specialization is hard for INTPs and anyway, as Scott Adams also points out, it’s very hard to compete as a pure specialist and win.)
The second difficulty is to also do the drudge work of marketing, setting up websites, attending conferences, etcetera. If the INTP can view these as games long enough to figure them out, and then automate the worst of them, he might survive.
Entrepreneurship is undoubtedly hard, and risky, and will not suit every INTP either. Perhaps it should be the last resort: an INTP who has tried fitting into the options society provides can judge if they can work for him. Those options are not very good for the INTP — another society might suit her better — but might be good enough. If an INTP lacks the right combination of traits to tolerate other work, desperation will be the driving force to try something harder, and truly be the master of their own life.
Please do comment with your own observations about work and entrepreneurship as an INTP.
