Personality and Personal Growth: ENTP Personality
If you fall into the ENTP category, spending a little time getting to know the type pays off. Understanding why you act the way you do makes it far simpler to set personal goals and sketch out the steps for reaching them. People with this type run on intellectual challenge. Hand them a knotty problem and they go looking for a fresh answer nobody has tried yet.
ENTPs are inventors at heart. Clever, endlessly curious, they want to figure out how things work, whether the thing in question is a machine, an organization, or a person. Convention doesn't hold much appeal for them, yet they stay open to almost any idea. Much of their drive comes from wanting to understand, analyze, and sway the people around them, which is part of why they often get labeled as visionaries across different areas of life.
Conversation is their laboratory. They talk things through with others to test ideas, pick up new information, and stumble onto solutions. Language tends to come easily to them, and they usually prefer to hold the upper hand in a discussion. A challenge energizes rather than tires them. Show an ENTP a puzzle everyone else gave up on and you've handed them a gift. New situations don't rattle them either; they assume they can adjust as they go, and they usually do.
This is one of the less common types. Looking at how it shows up in the population, roughly three percent of the general public falls here, with about four percent of men and two percent of women. (These figures track the type as reported in the standard personality surveys.)
Hobbies deserve a mention because what you enjoy in your downtime connects closely to your type. For an ENTP, the activities that fit best are the ones that give the restless, idea-hungry side of the personality room to run. The leisure choices that suit this type tend to reflect those same quirks.
A handful of facts round out the picture. Common descriptors include enterprising, resourceful, self-centered, friendly, headstrong, and independent. Of all the types, ENTPs are the least likely to report stress tied to health or family, and they usually have the resources on hand to cope with pressure when it does arrive. They also sit at the bottom of the list for high blood pressure and heart disease.
Creativity runs extremely high in this group. Type A behavior shows up more often than you'd expect from their share of the population, and during college years they rank among the types most likely to break alcohol rules. Career-wise, you find them in management, the arts, science, and technology. Their incomes land near the top of the range, though job satisfaction often lags behind the paycheck.
Plenty of well-known figures share the ENTP type, and reading about how they operate in both their work and their private lives can be a useful mirror for anyone trying to understand the pattern.
With all of this in hand, you can put the information to work: sharpening relationships, checking whether your career actually fits, or picking leisure activities that suit how you're wired. References: http://www.truity.com/view/types and http://www.mbtilist.com/