Recently, my capable virtual assistant, Emily Morgan (founder of Delegate Virtual Business Solutions and savior of my mental health) asked for book recommendations on the general topics of organizing, setting priorities, time management – the basic getting-it-together topics. I gave her several recommendations but secretly thought that, as an ISFJ, she'd most like a book called "Coach Yourself to Success" by Talane Miedaner.
The subtitle of the book includes the phrase "101 Tips" and most SJ's are all about the practical tips. As it turns out, Emily loves the book and has been in a state of kindle-euphoria for several days.
Our willingness to read and enjoy books, and self-help books in particular, seems to have a lot to do with our type. For example, though my S friends tend to love practical books that give useful tips, your basic NF (intuitive feeler) type is less excited about such things. Getting organized and making to-do lists don't feed the soul or promise the paroxysms of joy that we NF's like. We also place a high value on how language is used. Metaphors we like; standard business-speak we don't. (It's unlikely that an NF would find anything of interest in an airport bookstore.) The definitional book for NF's is Julia Cameron's zillion-copy masterwork, "The Artist's Way."
NFs are also into identity. We spend a good part of our conscious life wondering what we are truly meant to do, and what we should be doing about that today. A more career-focused book in this vein is by former HBS professor Herminia Ibarra, "Working Identity."
NTs (intuitive thinkers) are interested in big-picture ideas, but they are less interested in identity and more interested in theories and how the puzzle fits together. They prefer straightforward, compact language. They like Ibarra's book, but tend to find it repetitive, and you won't find a lot of them doing the Morning Pages prescribed by Julia Cameron.
NTs like books that make solid arguments, ideally defining a coherent system. At the same time, they seem quite skeptical by nature and are distrustful that anyone's new conceptualization of how human beings operate will be true. So you get an odd cleavage between the NTs who find MBTI and the Enneagram immensely powerful, and those who find them to be over-general and unprovable abstractions that are not really worthy of serious thought. (It took me 10 years to persuade my partner, an INTJ, to actually take the Myers-Briggs assessment.)
If you're interested in the Enneagram, the best overall book on the subject is "The Wisdom of the Enneagram," by Russ Hudson
If that 400 page book is too big a pill to swallow, try Elizabeth Wagele's cartoon-filled, checklist-y "The Enneagram Made Easy"
I read the first part of this and thought: of course type makes a difference in effective, meaningful recommendations (and how can I more consciously incorporate that into mine?). And then kept reading and thought OMG that description I just read is so me! So I felt that I should leave reader-mode and say "good work."
Good Work.
Posted by: Bill | January 31, 2012 at 07:09 PM