Category: ALL Types (Page 1 of 4)

10 Years

Hi, I’m Calise, and after 10 years, I still love people.

For as wordy as I am, I feel ill-equipped to articulate this.  A “boring” decade would be hard for anyone to articulate in full, and the last ten definitely have not been that.  I don’t really want to say “the journey we started ten years ago today,” because it didn’t really start then.  Deciding “Hey, what if I MBTI typed people better than the internet, and had fun writing about it” was already five years into our marriage, which had been way too eventful already by April 2013.

Calise and Justin, Summer 2012

I know it probably seems silly and dramatic to the outside observer, treating what might look on the surface like just another “personality blog” like such a big deal.  Especially when we have no letters certifying expert training, we’ve always been abominably bad at posting consistently, making promises of posts we haven’t fulfilled in a decade, and our web developer and videography skills have always been laughably amateur.  We don’t advertise, we are hideous about replying to messages and emails.

And we haven’t posted a full post on this site since… I don’t even remember and can’t be bothered to go check.  Was it 2018, with INTJ – The Dragon, Stranger Things and the Subtypes post?  Probably.  (Edit: Apparently The Dragon was 2017 and Stranger Things and Subtypes were 2018.  Shows how much I remember, rofl.)  And then it’s just been a bunch of dramatic posts about checking out our other content, elsewhere.

We are kinda dramatic.  Going to get that out of the way right now.  But we’ve gotten so many reactions of people scratching their heads at this little amateurish website getting the reactions it does.

People have said this doofy little website (along with the others connected to it) has changed their lives??  They’ve overcome huge amounts of depression, anxiety, family abuse, and self-deprecation through the tools we’ve provided?  But not only have those internal circumstances been changed, but people have changed jobs, made and visited friends on the other side of the globe, and even moved across the country, and gotten married (or divorced, to my ongoing feels), as a result of relationships, with others and themselves, found through aLBoP.

I’m definitely not going to pretend it’s been all roses, no thorns.  We’ve seen a lot of falling outs amongst our ranks, in friendships, marriages, siblings, one prison sentence, and Justin and I have been called many unsavory things over a decade and more.  There are so many things we’d do differently, if we got another shot at it, although usually not the things people accuse us of doing badly.  The last thing I want to do is paint us over-pretty.

But outside people are always shocked at the impact, whether you think it’s a bad or good impact, that a website and its offshoots can create in people’s lives.  It’s a badly-organized, tangenting mess of bad grammar, too many hyperlinks, a lot of crossdressing references, which could be seen to take itself way too seriously and promises way past its station.  And dramatic, so dramatic!!  How the crap are people reacting this affected by it?

Well, I simultaneously am and am not just as shocked as they are.  Nobody knows better than I do what a silly, dramatic mess I am.  And I both did and didn’t intend for it to be a big thing.  I felt really good starting it, and Justin and I had already been trying (and mostly failing) to help people with the tools we’d gleaned.

What is Smart? – going back to the definitions in the Phase 2 Intro

Later “Phases” of aLBoP are mostly based around tools we had before cognition, that nobody wanted to hear, before.  We’d tried everything we could figure out to share patterns that were helping us grow, personally, and nobody gave a flying crap at that point.  We were humiliated and treated like we were dangerous.

Which, I guess is relatively fair, in a twisted way.  I both did and didn’t know, back then, what loaded topics selfness and growth are.  I both did and didn’t know the effect that people changing would have.

But I was just screwing around.  I had found patterns, writing in literal hair on my bathtub wall, and I wanted to share them because they worked.  I like hearing myself talk.  So typing Hercules was really just goofy.

And yet, we’d already sacrificed basically everything, in the pursuit of helping other people be happy.  You’re welcome to not believe that, but it’s true.  You’re also welcome to think we did it stupidly.  My house wouldn’t have many holes in the ceiling if we’d successfully done it for the money.  So, it’s not like we happened upon a gem; we didn’t.  It’s been 15+ years of much more of an upward battle than I can articulate.

But on April 6th, 2013, when I published the first post to alittlebitofpersonality.blogspot.com… I didn’t think it was going to work!  I was just being me!  It’s not like that had worked super well to-date by the time I was 23.5.  I mean, I like to think I’m charming, but it had motivated very few people to change in my lifetime.

Maybe that’s my conclusion today?  tbh I had no frickin’ clue when I started typing this, in the bathtub as usual.  (Severe skin condition, for anyone who doesn’t know by now.  I was going to say that I’d spend a lot less time naked if it wasn’t for psoriasis, but I don’t feel like I can actually promise that.)  Where was I going…  Oh, right!

I like to say that the most untapped resource on earth is human effort.  And, no, I don’t mean forcing your children to garden for you.  I mean that there is nothing more powerful in the world than a human being putting their own will behind intentionality, and causing something, creating something; changing something.

What stops that force?  Well, many things.  Lack of resources, sure, but as humans we’re all about overcoming things in our way.  Problem solving is one of the most bad-A abilities about humankind, in my opinion.  When properly motivated, we figure crap out.  We’re solution-finding beings.

So what stops us from that motivation, from the hope requisite to find answers?  (No, Docs, I’m not going to change that to “required!”  It’s prettier and gets across my meaning better this way!)  What stops us from using our own manpower to achieve great things?

Blockages.  Emotional gunk.  Our messed up current culture makes it so everyone has baggage, literally everyone, to whatever degree.  And baggage weighs you down, so then you have no frickin’ clue who you are or what you’re capable of, let alone what you want to do with that capacity.  When everywhere you look, everyone is emotionally exhausted, and the culture has drilled into you your entire life that “you can’t do great things,” then how the eff are you supposed to stand up, all alone, and believe you can do anything more than that?

And so often people just can’t. …Not on their own anyway.  It’s hard to observe the Milky Way from inside it, and it’s hard to see the reality of you, on your own.  It’s hard to see your own worth and potential when you feel barraged on every side.

And that is all that every Phase, Stage, Ring, website, and forum of aLBoP has ever been about.  Literally, you want to know the purposes and goals for aLBoP that have managed to affect individuals so completely?

  1. Help people discover truth for themselves, with us giving them the tools to find it.
  2. Help people grow to become the best version of themselves, because people can only understand, enjoy, and be happy in reality, if they’re freed up to be themselves, and grow to a larger capacity for happiness.
  3. Use happy, strong, capable people, who are wise enough to make their own decisions, as a force to take over the world and make it suck less.

Kinda joking on that last one, but kinda not, lol.  The goal, since Justin and I were dating, was in fact to amass more resources to help people.  We were just really tiny then and didn’t realize all the ways we were expecting it to go smoother than it ever did.

But I’m not going to pretend that “world domination” wasn’t always on the agenda… except it’s like if an ancient civilization had tried to take over the world entirely through spreading literacy?  Like if someone’s method of taking over the world was by giving everyone in medieval Europe their own printing press?  Flipping over the status quo of human misery has always been the plan, as much as is possible within our capacity, we’ve just always wanted to do it by enabling people to ask questions, find answers, think for themselves, overcome their own weaknesses… and, y’know, generally don’t be a dick.

From The Four Types of Love, a definite favorite of mine.

I do think that one of the reasons aLBoP has been able to be as powerful in the lives of individuals as it has is because we never say “You’re perfect just the way you are.”  We do say “You are loved just the way you are,” but that’s not the same thing.  You’re working with a great foundation of self.  Now, get up and do better.  Believe you can be worth even more tomorrow, by getting rid of the toxic waste that is eating you inside out.  Find out who you are, love it, and then make it better.  I’ve never been here to tell you who to be, but I am here to help you find who you already are, and to help you figure out who you want to be next.

Individuality is a science.  You can’t just make it up, and there are physics to it, but if you find out how it ticks, you can use that to superpower yourself.  Most powerful force on earth, remember?

If you discover who you are and work out your blockages and weaknesses, nothing is a more powerful force.  Problem solving is in your DNA, but you have to choose to use it.

There’s a lot of opinions in the world about if “everyone is special,” and I think that’s a complicated question.  I believe everyone’s existence matters.  I believe everyone deserves to be loved.  Everyone.  But I also believe that being special is a choice, but not one based on the variety of things people try to base it on.

I believe specialness is earned, but not by currency, class, popularity or posturing.  (I totally wanted to alliterate, but I think that turned out well.)

I happen to believe that you are as special as your willingness to do hard things, as your willingness to grow and face your weaknesses, even when it’s the hardest thing you’ve ever done.  Even when your insides scream out “ENOUGH!”  Even when things seem dark and hopeless, but you push on anyway.  Special is a motive, and it doesn’t come cheap.  You can’t truly imitate it or hack it, as much as people try.  That is the trait I believe makes one truly exceptional.

I’m pretty satisfied, to date, with feeling like I’ve earned being special, but I didn’t start out as anything special.  I wasn’t smarter or anything, I just wanted to know what was real, and was willing to sacrifice to find it out.  That’s all it takes, seriously.

No magic pill.  Finding reality, even when it’s hard.  Being willing to work through your weaknesses even when it sucks, even when those very weaknesses make you bone-shatteringly uncomfortable, about yourself, or about your worldview, or your group, or your knowledge.  It’s not a complicated concept, it’s just really hard in practice.

Why don’t people change the world?  Because they don’t want to change themselves first.  That simple.

I’m not special in any way, except for my willingness to both love myself and want to upgrade who I was at any cost.  And that is the only reason why I’m able to change lives now.  All the tools I’ve discovered, writing I’ve grown practiced at, and problem solving I’ve gotten boss at, all come back to that single trait.  You can’t help people if you’re not willing to change and grow, and be wrong a heckuva lot.

So anyway.  I’m proud.  Has it been a total mess of ten years?  Absolutely.  Would I trade any of the pain, sadness, longing, heartbreak, and embarrassment that me and those who have chosen to come along on this journey have slogged and grown through?  While there’s a lot of things I would choose differently, that’s what growth is all about!  And I absolutely would not trade away a moment of pain, when the majority of my most precious relationships have been gleaned through this website.  And I feel frickin’ huge now, compared to ten years ago, holy crap!

I still can’t believe something worked.  I still can’t believe that little silly me was able to change lives, just by being herself and working to be a better version of that person, every day.

Justin and Calise on the same bridge, 15th Anniversary, January 2023

But you can too.  Changing lives is not an exclusive club.  Being special isn’t an exclusive club.  You just have to want reality, even when it’s hard.  You just have to love yourself enough to keep growing.  You just need the hope to be brave enough to use your human power to solve problems, inside and outside of you.

Is this the kind of thing you write for a ten year anniversary post?  Eh, who the crap knows.  I’m making this up as I go along, and when that doesn’t work, I try again.  Let’s face it, I’ve never lied to you and pretended to be a “professional.”  We don’t really have a motto at aLBoP, but if we did, a major candidate would be “Do what works.”

Desktop background of Gwen and Phil

Hey, if we have to MacGyver tools to save the world out of duct tape, paper clips, and a loofah, that is darn well what we’re going to do.

On that random note, here’s a Weezer song that has become the aLBoP anthem in my mind the past few months.  (I don’t have to disclaim that Weezer doesn’t endorse us and has no crap who we are, right?)  I’ve loved Weezer since early high school and only love them all the more now.  When I first heard this song on the radio, it was like I’d already heard it before?  You guys know what I mean, right?  And then I remembered it a bit later and was listening to it over and over because it’s just so great and catchy and hopeful.  I was planning on putting it in one of my stories, and might still, but I was just feeling so poked by it, like it goes with everything we work towards.  So I enthused about it to aLBoP friends over chat.

… Then, the next day, I was typing another thought about it to the same friends and started typing, “A Little Bit of–” for the song title and was like “my fingers know this motion way too well… 😯 it’s like A Little Bit of Personality!!” 

Yes, I’m that much of an oblivious dork, I didn’t notice the similarity to my own branding.  I’m a ditz, it’s fine.

But anyway, take a listen.  It’s really everything that I hope we represent, as the “aLBoP” meta project.

Lyrics

A little bit, a little bit of love
Goes a pretty long way
Take a look at where you started from
And where you are today
You climbed mountains, swam oceans
You got knocked down and kept goin’
In the end you know you’ve got to say
A little bit of love goes a pretty long way

All your wounds are healing fine
I’m so glad I got you in my life
Now the winter frost is gone
Now is our chance to live the life we want

A little bit, a little bit of love
Goes a pretty long way
Everybody, everybody’s lost
And that’s okay
Some show it, some hide it
But there’s a battle we’re all fighting
So if you’re looking for the words to say
A little bit of love goes a pretty long way

Holding onto the rabbit’s feet
Walking down the sunny side of the street
Shadows creeping at your back
You can forget ’em like an amnesiac

A little bit, a little bit of love
Goes a pretty long way
Love is really like a wonder drug
Let’s medicate
And say goodbye to the drama
It’s a beeline to Nirvana
If you’re looking for the words to say
A little bit of love goes a pretty long way

Hey, whoa, hey, whoa
Hey, whoa, hey, whoa

A little bit, a little bit of love
Goes a pretty long way
Take a look at where you started from
And where you are today
You climbed mountains, you swam oceans
You got knocked down and kept goin’
In the end, you know you’ve got to say
A little bit of love goes a pretty long way

Hey, whoa, hey, whoa
Hey, whoa, hey, whoa

A little bit of love goes a pretty long way 

It’s okay to feel lost.  We want to help.  Use the tools; love yourself both for who you are, and who you can become, and it is my hope and my experience that it can change your life and help you climb mountains too.  You don’t have to battle the scary culture keeping you down, by yourself.  A Little Bit of Personality, and all its many branches, are all about loving people, and everything they can be.  About celebrating people, in all their cognitive hues, and how no one can place a ceiling on the you that you can be.

Happy Ten Years, aLBoP!  Let’s keep on climbing.

Much love,

<3 Calise

aLBoCal, and a Post about Depression, Hope, and Foo Fighters

Hello my neglected, yet not-forgotten loves ❤️.  I’m not going to roll around in sackcloth and ashes about how long it’s been, nor am I going to make promises that I might not be able to fulfill.  I do however have a thing for you. It’s a post!

Most of you might not know that I started a personal site last year, A Little Bit of Calise (or aLBoCal, because “aLBoC” sounded dumb).  As my self-titled aLBoP spinoff, its purpose was never to replace aLBoP, by any means, but to be both a place I could blab about me-related, personal topics, and as an on-ramp to aLBoP, where people can get a taste of what we offer over here without feeling overwhelmed by jargon.  The hope is also that new people, who might not be interested in mainstream personality typing might find it, while Googling other topics.

But it’s still aLBoPy writing (because, hello, that’s still what I care about day-to-day, and let’s face it, it’s not like I don’t talk about myself plenty over here 😉).

And almost all the posts up to now (which isn’t many) involve the Four Sides of Calise, which are a silly, ongoing thought experiment, helping me to explore myself.  And if that’s not cognition related, I don’t know what is.

The Data geek, the people-loving Obs glitter-pop princess, the Paradoxitype Greek goddess, and the oh-so-edge succubus– QUEEN OF MEGAMIND COMPLEX! 😈 *Ahem*

But really why I’m talking about it now, is because I just posted a post over there called Learn to Fly: My Thoughts on Depression, Hope, and Silliness, through Enjoying Foo Fighters (because apparently I hate writing titles that search engine optimization want anything to do with).  But it’s basically a half-step between aLBoP and aLBoCal.  It started as a silly post talking about music I was getting rapidly obsessed with, and ended up being a reflection on rising from the ashes of our lives, by looking at how the band Foo Fighters rose from the ashes of Nirvana.  There’s bits here and there about cognitive types and how they affected people’s choices, like cognitive cameos, if you will.

But it’s about my exploration of where hope comes from, if silliness is disrespectful when people are hurting, and why fakery hurts people.  It’s about people doing people things 🤷.  So if that’s what you come here for in the first place, then I think you’ll love aLBoCal, and this post.

…there’s also a lot of cross dressing.  Do you have any clue how often the Foo Fighters cross dress?  Omigosh it’s so often guys!

So please give it a try.  It took a whole lotta love.  If you’re an aLBoPer, I think you’ll love it.

<3 Much love,
Calise

Here’s a taste of Learn to Fly: My Thoughts on Depression, Hope, and Silliness, through Enjoying Foo Fighters…

When I started writing this post, I was really struggling with why this was worth talking about.  You may have clicked on this post because of the serious topics mentioned in the header, but that’s not why I started writing this.  Like most things in my life, this little project started as a result of me enjoying people to a silly degree.  There’s a lot of silly stuff in this post; there’s stick figures, there’s looking at how the Four Sides of Calise enjoy music (from my angsty gothic succubus side to my lollipop-glitter princess side), there’s a lot of me going googly over how much I love men (in and out of women’s clothing), there’s a lot of 90s/00s nostalgia, and me watching music/concert videos way too closely.

And I started writing all that silly, basically because it wouldn’t leave me alone; my passion rarely will.  But I was seriously just screwing around.  I pictured the brief stick figure comic at the end of this post and thought I’d just preface it by how much I’ve come to love this music lately.  Honestly I was just having fun talking.  But as I was trying to quick-finish this post over a weekend (pfffft, when am I going to learn that I suck at brevity?!?) I was just struggling on repeat with why the &@%$= writing this mattered.

Like seriously, why the zombie (we’re making that an expletive now, roll with it) should anyone care that someone named Calise likes certain types of rock music, or gets really excited about the facial expressions someone makes while playing the drums??  And even more than that, why would anyone want to read something blissfully dancing around in silliness while the world just sucks right now?

Most of the people I know are having a “hard year.”  I literally cannot enumerate the number of people I care about who have or are currently struggling with heavy bouts of depression or anxiety.  And the number of times this year alone I’ve heard phrases akin to “I thought we’d be together forever,” as I’ve seen relationships come to an abrupt and heart-wrenching end.  People are in serious stomach-plunging freefall right now.

So who am I to be happy??

Read the full post here

aLBoP is not MBTI

Hey, it’s Justin!  So…this post has words in it.  It’s written with words.  I’m typing words right now, with the strange expectation that words can communicate thoughts and ideas.  It’s odd, and it hasn’t seemed to work very well so far.  Yet maybe, there’s a faint chance that typing a few more words might be able to communicate something to somebody.

A Little Bit of Personality is not Myers-Briggs Type Indicator.  We say so right there in the intro video…and in lots of posts on here, posts with words.  We started there, as we’ve said before, because we were just having fun and we, like so many, presumed that MBTI was a reliable, scientific system.  Yet as we’ve said before, we gradually came to see more and more ways in which MBTI is inconsistent, in which it does not work, in which it encourages and even relies on stereotypes and superficial simplifications of people.  And what was worse, we started to see that many, many people apparently wanted those stereotypes and simplifications.

We started to see how much “personality typing” was used as a petty weapon in infantile campaigns to put down anyone whose mind worked differently.  We cringed more and more whenever we saw four-by-four grids that listed insultingly shallow sets of qualities for each of the sixteen types, and which portrayed some types as clearly better, smarter, more reliable, more successful, more creative, more visionary, more concrete, more compassionate, more practical, or simply of greater worth and value than the others.  Personality typing had become a shallow and subjective mudfight through which people tried to compensate for their own unresolved personal insecurities by putting down others who made them feel inadequate.  Apparently, there are a lot of second-graders online who are quite skilled at writing up passive-aggressive four-by-four grids.

So we went back to the beginning, because we knew there was so much good here!  We, like so many of you guys, had gotten excited about personality typing for a reason.  It was exciting to see how our minds worked, and how others’ minds did too.  It was so cool to try to figure out the personality types of fictional characters, or of historical figures or celebrities we liked.  But now that we had seen how personality typing had become such a putrid and subjective cesspool, we had to go back to the basics to figure out what was good and what was brain-damaging.

We’ve talked about this before, in several posts that use words.  We’ve described how a clarification of basic definitions is one of the first indispensable steps in any effort to replace subjectivity with objectivity.  We’ve talked about how we didn’t have to throw out the baby with the poisonous bathwater, and so we were able to use the brilliant original work done by Carl Jung and by Katharine Cook Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers (all of whom died long before the internet), without the simplified dangers of modern MBTI.  On aLBoP Phase 2, we go into far greater depth about our scientific process, how we were able to clarify definitions that made Cognitive Typing into a reliable and repeatable hard science, rather than a subjective and dubious soft-science.  But all those posts use words, words that invite you guys to see “Hey wait, this is different. This isn’t what I thought I already knew.”

A Little Bit of Personality is part of a larger endeavor, which we call our “Twenty-Five Year Plan,” a plan to simply help make life better for as many people as we can.  As I’m writing today, we’re a bit more than eleven years in, on the fourth of eight stages.  This is all stuff that’s explained in depth on the full Phase 2 site.  It’s really exciting to us, and though we did not initially expect to use Cognitive Typing or anything like it as a tool in this plan, aLBoP has become a powerful way for us to reach and help so many awesome people!  Yet originally, we didn’t plan to have Phase 2 be a separate website; we were just going to put all the information right here on one site, for all the internet to see.  We’re very glad now that we didn’t.

There is nothing secret on any of our sites, and all the information on all three of our sites (Phase 1 here, Phase 2 Intro, and full Phase 2) is all completely free of charge.  But we realized that we had to separate our content into multiple sites when we saw the bizarre and aggressively cruel reactions of so many people to even the comparatively basic concepts of Cognitive Typing.  I’m not referring to insightful and engaging questions; for instance, a lot of cool people have asked very good questions, like “How do you have a large enough sample size to make sure your conclusions are accurate?” “Why don’t you submit to scientific journals?” “What exactly is your experimental process?” etc.  Those sorts of thoughtful questions are the sort of thing that we’ve had to save for the later websites, because we realized that even the introductory information here on Phase 1 seems to be far too much for some people to read.  Too many words.

We wanted an engaging and active forum where we could talk back and forth with people, instead of only posting articles on a website, but it soon became clear that if we went ahead and put a forum here on Phase 1, open to the internet, then any potential discussion would be buried under arrogant assertions and bitter argument.  In fact, when we started a forum on Phase 2, it was astonishing how rapidly that happened, how quickly it became a toxic atmosphere where thoughtful, intelligent people grew ever more wary to post anything.  If we didn’t do something, our forum was going to become yet another place on the internet where the discourse was dominated by the bone-headedly obnoxious.

As I’m writing this, I have an online game open in the background, where one of my characters is happily crafting food for me.  But I usually play most games with the general chat channels turned off, because while there are a lot of sweet and helpful people in a lot of games, the general chat channels tend to get dominated by the least common denominator.  When we first started our Phase 2 forum, some people were convinced that it couldn’t possibly be any different from anywhere else on the internet, calling us naive for trying to create a place online where people could feel safe to freely share ideas, where the thoughtful majority didn’t have to remain silent or risk setting off the irrational blowhards.  Yet now, on the full Phase 2 site, we have an awesome and active realtime chat forum where everyone feels safe to think, to work through problems, to discuss ideas, to share their lives and make precious friendships.  I’m actually making them wait right now while I write this, but Calise and I thought that this little post was worth taking the time for.  Yet that forum would have been impossible if we hadn’t first created a safe place insulated from the wild, aggressively-asserted opinions and jaw-dropping simplifications on the internet.

We wanted to put all of it on one website, and perhaps we could have, were it not for the apparent fact that the current culture of the internet trains us not to read.  Trains us not to think.  Not to stop and digest.  Not to sit back and make sure we understand things before moving on.  And it certainly seems to train people to post comments before, you know, reading.  We wanted to do videos as well as posts, and we did make a few before moving them away to Phase 2.  We wanted to do podcasts, which are a ton of fun but we only do them for Phase 2.  This is not meant to be an advertisement for Phase 2 (especially because we are very, very, very behind on responding to Phase 2 invites, really sorry about that!), but rather a challenge to read what’s here on Phase 1.  If people can’t do that, then how could they possibly read more anyway?

It’s gotten to the point that I wasn’t sure I should even take the time to write this, because I wondered who would read it?  Not that we don’t have plenty of traffic, but I wondered how many people would do more than skim.  One of our closest friends, whom we met through aLBoP, told us that when he first stumbled across Phase 1, it was a real shock to him because he had to slow down to really understand it all.  He told us that he had grown accustomed to being able to skim most things online, that most articles were fairly simple ideas expressed in way too many words, so he’d gotten used to skimming.  But with aLBoP, he had to seriously re-adjust his expectations; he had to take time and think about the content.  Another of our friends, upon reading the first Super Simple Series post, said “That’s not simple at all!”  We’ve done our best, heh, and we hope that it really is pretty simple and straightforward, but it is also new stuff, not just the same old familiar repetition, so it can’t be simply skimmed.

A couple weeks ago, someone walked up to me and declared that I was an INFP.  I tried to be diplomatic and inviting, telling him that I’d be interested to hear what made him say so, and I asked what definitions of the letters he was using.  He seemed confused and a bit bothered by the question, and said he was just using MBTI.  I still don’t know what made him think that he could so confidently assert someone else’s type like that.  Of course, on aLBoP we do quite confidently assert the Cognitive Types of both real and fictional people, but we can only do so as a result of using concrete, clear definitions that leave no subjective wiggle-room.  There’s no uncertainty about whether someone is a Cognitive Introvert or Extravert; the definitions are very clear, they leave no room for fudging or gray areas, yet they are also not the same soft and elastic definitions of current MBTI.  We have said so, over and over, using words.  And yet we still get comments by people unilaterally asserting “Nope, you typed that character wrong,” based on definitions that we are not using, definitions we cannot use for reasons that we have explained repeatedly.

The problem is in the assertiveness, the astounding certainty with which people treat their own points of view as objective fact.  There’s nothing wrong with asking questions, with re-examining and re-questioning over and over, with constantly re-checking and revisiting even the things that seem the most well established.  Sometimes you might find a mistake, like the time on the Phase 2 Typing Library, when I accidentally put ESTP(ep) Usain Bolt on the library pages for two different Cognitive Types because his picture had somehow got copied over into the wrong folder.  Just this morning, someone pointed out a typo where I had said “our” when I meant “or.”  And we get so many sweet comments where people ask questions rather than assert opinions as fact.  “Why did you type Gandalf as an F instead of a T?” shows a mind that wants to think, to understand, to hear feedback and decide whether or not it makes sense.  Yet when someone flippantly comments “No, Gandalf is INTJ like me,” then that shows such a closed unwillingness to question or examine one’s own point of view.  No wonder current politics are such a nasty echo-chamber.

So when people assertively tell us “I’m an ENTJ,” “I’m a Ne dom,” etc, it makes us wonder if they’ve really read much of anything before commenting.  We do not use the simplistic “dom” system because it turned out to be tremendously subjective, with apparent “dominance” depending far too much on potentially cherry-picked factors that are all too easily used to weigh the result toward a preferred conclusion.  As someone once said to us, and as we’ve quoted before, “Personality typing is just horoscopes for people who think they’re too smart for horoscopes.”  In other words, it’s all subjective fluff that can be applied equally well to anyone, of any type, as long as people are eager to adolescently define themselves in a way that parodies the real work of finding oneself.

But then, as soon as we mention that, we get sincere comments telling us that astrology is real too.  Perhaps it is, perhaps it is not; personally, I have seen many, many reasons to believe it is not accurate or reliable in any fashion, while I have not yet seen anything to suggest the contrary, so far.  Yet I have to wonder: what makes someone feel equipped to say that astrology definitively does work, or does not?  As soon as we start treating our own personal experiences as universal truths, as soon as we start treating our own opinions as objective facts, and as soon as we make the incredibly self-centered error of saying “I have no experience of such-and-such, therefore it’s crap,” then we shut off our ability to think, to learn, to approach anything in any sort of rational manner.  That quote about personality typing being mere horoscopes in disguise, displays its own form of narrow and lazy thinking, by asserting that all “personality typing” is this way, painting life with such a broad brush.  It’s this sort of simplistic thinking that leads to racism, sexism, or any other form of prejudice, that says “I’ve seen dumb religions, therefore all religions are dumb,” “I’ve known vile men, therefore all men are vile,” “I only hang around with dishonest people…and I am one myself…therefore nobody is honest,” etc.  It’s a lazy and anecdotal simplification of the complexities of people’s lives, hearts, and hopes.  It’s mean.

But just because the internet trains us to make everything simplistic and skimmable, just because the current online culture trains us to view our own personal opinions as objective fact, that doesn’t make it our fault.  We can learn to see outside our own points of view.  We can learn to recognize the powerful lenses of emotion, pain, and desire which skew and distort how we see every experience that happens to us.  We can explore just how not objective we are, and then learn to grow past that subjective isolation.

This is why Calise and I have had to de-prioritize Phase 1 for a long time, though.  We’ve been working feverishly, constantly, but most of it has not been here on Phase 1.  We did put eight months of work into The People of Stranger Things post, we put so much thought and feeling into it, so much care and planning, for a total of more than fifty thousand words.  There’s a lot of great stuff in there, but it has produced hardly any results.  How can we justify prioritizing the addition of more information here on Phase 1, when people repeatedly show us how little they’ve read of what we’ve already written?

We love our Personalized Typing service, we love seeing people’s faces and hearing about their lives, we love connecting with them, and it’s a great way to find thoughtful, good, decent people.  And yet, over and over, it’s an uphill battle to remind people who order typings that we are not MBTI, that we do not use those definitions, as we’ve said so many times in so many posts.  Whenever we send out a typing, we always caution people that if they look up their Cognitive Type online, then they are going to find things that are very different, and likely demeaning and limiting.  And yet we still get replies of people saying “No I can’t be this type, because here’s what MBTI says about it, and that’s not me.”  The Cognitive Orientation Guidebooks, which we package with each typing, spend a fair amount of time explaining and reiterating precisely how each Cognitive Type is different from the popular stereotypes. We really hoped words would get that across.

Yet we know what the internet culture is like, and we know that sometimes we all need to be reminded that it’s okay to slow down and process thoughts instead of living life through reactions.  Sometimes I find it intriguing to hop between news networks as they cover the same story, to see how differently each network portrays the very same events.  Which bits of video do they show, which do they edit out, and which do they repeat endlessly?  Which adjectives and adverbs do they use, to influence viewers’ conclusions?  What information do they focus on, what information do they downplay, and what information do they conveniently fail to mention entirely?  Like the proverbial blind men and the elephant, the same event and the same data can be interpreted in wildly different ways even when people have the most honest of intentions.  So when people are less honest, when people have an agenda, a worldview, an ideology or attitude that they want to push, how much more careful do we have to be before we draw any sort of confident conclusions?

It’s our hope that, by taking a few hours away from other work to write this, maybe this might help nudge aLBoP Phase 1 toward being a site where we can post more information, more Type Heroes, more character spotlights, and just more fun articles.  I’ve been wanting to do an article about Winston Churchill for years now, titled “How an ENFP Saved the World,” because he really did, and yes he was unequivocally an ENFP(ip), but how can I justify taking the time to write that, time I could be giving to other people, when so many readers here on Phase 1 won’t, well, read?  I worry that so many internet skimmers wouldn’t get past the title before firing off comments authoritatively declaring “He wasn’t ENFP!! He was [roll the dice and insert any number of different types here]!”  We owe Gwen and Phil 20 bucks, since someone did indeed leave a comment (one of the many that we decided to leave unapproved) assertively stating that, because Lord Shen has a grand vision, he is therefore INTJ.  Wow.  So that’s how we’re defining these complex variables of human thought and desire, now?  And so none of the other fifteen Cognitive approaches to life can have a grand vision?  Seriously?  Sorry Elon Musk, no ENFJ(ij) for you, you gotta be INTJ I guess.  The all-knowing internet decrees it thus.

We really hoped, and I still do hope, that by bringing the subject of Subtypes here to Phase 1, it would be a quick way to immediately show people “Hey look, see those two little letters in parentheses?  Then maybe, just perhaps, this is something a little bit different from what you’re already used to.”  We hoped that would help the Personalized Typing service more easily show people “Hey this isn’t just MBTI, see?  We’re giving you six letters, not just four.”  There are actually more than six letters, more than eight; it seems to be a magnificently reiterating fractal of complexity, with each new layer of sub-typing adding ever more clearly definable nuance to the intricacy of consciousness, but we figured that the basic idea of Subtypes was plenty enough for Phase 1 right now.  I worry that even by dangling that little hint of more information, it might lead people to leap to conclusions and simplifications.  Fair enough, but I also hope that this can encourage more of you to read a little more carefully, to ponder a little more than you already do, to consider, to question, to dig deep, to see outside your own point of view and become a voice for understanding instead of adding to the cacophonous chorus of cartoony, rigid simplifications.

TL;DR: aLBoP is not MBTI.  But more accurately, if you really want a “Too Long, Didn’t Read,” then why are you even here?  There are plenty of skimmable websites that will be more than happy to let you simplify people into shallow little subjective boxes.  This is not a blog, though it did start as one over on blogspot, but pretty quickly we realized how much aLBoP could help us find and help cool people, honest and thoughtful people, people who are willing to expend the labor of time and energy to earn what they learn.  That’s the sort of person we love to meet.  That’s the kind of person we love to learn from, exchange ideas with, and see how we can help them add to the world in their own way, in their own life.  That’s what we’re all about.

A Little Bit of Subtypes

Alright!  This is Justin again.  So we’re gonna try to keep this huge, ginormo, super in-depth topic really short here (edit: ha!), because this is just sort of a preview.  But we’re still pretty excited to get to talk about subtypes here on “Phase 1!”

See, the full post about subtypes is on aLBoP Phase 2, and even that post is just the intro to the topic.  Phase 2 goes into far more depth about, well, everything!  But as you might expect, it kinda requires and presumes that you’ve already gotten familiar with everything here on the starter site.

Which, right, before I go on…  If you haven’t checked out at least the basic information here on aLBoP, I’m afraid you really should go read that before diving into this.  Watch the intro video if you haven’t already, and then get your bearings with the Super Simple Series.  Remember, aLBoP is not MBTI, so it’s probably best to go back to the start so you can get a handle on everything.

Okay!  Got that covered?  At least a bit?  Cool, so like I was saying, we go into much more depth and detail about subtypes, what they are, why they are, and how they work, on the Phase 2 site.  However, we really really want to talk about subtypes on our upcoming Stranger Things post!  Also, it’s nice to be able to put people’s subtypes after their main cognitive types, partly because it immediately shows “Hey, look!  This is something different, so maybe drop your assumptions about typing at the door.”  And then, hopefully, maybe, if wishes were horses, we might get fewer people strolling in, glancing at a few pictures, and leaving a “nope that’s wrong” comment without, you know, reading stuff.  We can dream.

So on then with the subtypes crash course!  To start with, putting it simply, subtypes are kinda just what they sound like: a subset, a personal focus within each cognitive type.  Continue reading

What is Personality?? New Intro Video

Hi there!  After over a year of anticipation, we finally have a new intro video!  Huzzah!  If you’re new here, this should help you know what aLBoP is all about and what makes us different than other personality systems and sites.  And if you already know and love aLBoP, we hope you’ll share this video with your friends!

Hoping to do the entire Super Simple Series in this whiteboard format eventually, so subscribe to the aLBoP YouTube channel so you see when we post more!  Oh, and because I know there will be confusion (which makes sense as I am the stick figure maven), but while I (Calise) am doing the voiceover for this video, it’s Justin doing the drawing.

Much love, as always! <3

Calise and Justin

The Four Types of Love

“What is love?” is a question that has been asked throughout the ages, by philosophers, poets, and Haddaway–insert obligatory head tip here.  While that is a perfectly valid question, and you guys know how heart-eyes we are for proper definitions around here, I think instead today we’ll ask the ever so aLBoP question, “How can we use double-dichotomies and the Four Types of Information to better understand love?”  Because dichotomies are sexy, dontcha know? 😉

Conveniently, the Greeks had four main words for love.  Now, my intent is to use the Four Types of Information to help us break down love into component parts, to both understand it more fully, define it more accurately, and help us apply these four sides of love to our own lives and relationships in order to see where our relationships are succeeding, and where they might stand to improve.  As such, I might have to alter the definitions of the Greek terms somewhat from their originals.

The Four Types of Information are fundamentally equal, whereas it wasn’t the Greeks’ intent to make their four kinds of love equal, so it stands to me to fudge a bit.  But hopefully I can still do justice to what Plato, Aristotle, etc. meant by their terms.

Continue reading

Cognition – The Super Simple Series! | Part 5: Assembling the Cognition Process

Hello again! 🙂  Welcome back for the pivotal climax to understanding the cognition process!  Now we can finally put together all the pieces we’ve accumulated over the course of the past four posts (1, 2, 3, 4).  We’re going to complete the cognition processes! :O  Let’s do it!

And as I always say, *don’t* start here!  You’re going to be so ridiculously confused if you do!  Are you one of those people that flips to the end of the book?!  Well, you can’t do that with this! 😛

Cognition – The Super Simple Series! | Part 4: Function-Combinations

Hey!  Welcome back!  How was your between-posts intermission?  Did you get everything you need?  Hydration?  Nourishment?  Bladder relief?  Well then, let’s move on. 🙂

Oh and of course, if you haven’t read Parts 1, 2 and 3 yet, then I love you but you really shouldn’t be here yet.  Go read those first and then come back.  Don’t worry, I’m patient. 😉

Alrighty, I’m really excited for this part too because there’s a lot about why Functions function the way that they do that I really haven’t gotten the opportunity to explain to the whole class, and they are really pretty frickn’ awesome!
Continue reading

Cognition – The Super Simple Series! | Part 3: Cognition Steps and the Anatomy of the Cognition Process

 Yay!  We’ve made it to what might be my favorite part of all cognition: the anatomy of the cognition process itself!  Well, my favorite until we get into what makes every cognition special, and the inner hidden sides of ourselves and… okay I have a lot of favorite parts of cognition.  But this post really centers on the core of it all: demonstrating that the paths our minds take make sense, how no thought just appears out of thin air, and how perfectly and elegantly balanced each and every type of thought process is, no matter how diverse.  It gives me happy tingles!  😀

I’ve explained the ins and outs of cognition order in a much more complicated way in the past, but today I really want to break it down into simple reasons *why* cognition does what it does.  Because the mind doesn’t do anything without a reason.

Continue reading

Cognition – The Super Simple Series! | Part 2: The Four Functions

Hello again!  Welcome back to Cognition – The Super Simple Series!  If you missed Part 1: Cognition and the Four Types of Information, go check it out now. 🙂  Otherwise you’re going to be super lost instead and no one likes that!

I’m very excited for this post as there is sooo much confusion and stereotyping about what functions really are.  In this post we’re looking at just how simple and straightforward cognitive functions are, and yet how they’re complex in application and, when understood correctly, should help us understand our complexity as humans more, not limit us into boxes.  But I’m getting ahead of myself, as usual. 😉

 

If we define “Cognition,” as we did in Part 1, as the action of your mind acquiring and processing information, “Functions” are the tools our minds use to acquire and process that information. 

Continue reading

« Older posts