What You’re Not Understanding About ENTPs

…Well, maybe you’re understanding it. Sorry to accuse you like that. Here, maybe this title’s better?

What The Author (Me) Didn’t Understand About ENTPs, But Now Does, So He’s (Me’s) Telling You Now. You’re Welcome.

Alright, that’s less offensive and more technically accurate. But the first one is better clickbait, so it stays. That’s just the way of the ‘net. The world is vicious. Sometimes a man has to lie to his audience in order to survive. I’m taking a long drag of my cigar.

Let’s get to the point.

In order to understand what I’m going to say in this article, it’d help to have some background knowledge about the cognitive functions. While I’m going to be attempting to explain the “threshold concepts” that I got stuck on when I was learning about Jung’s function model, you might not get much out of this article so long as you’re still in Myers-Briggs land. If this is the first time you’ve heard of them, I’d recommend checking out additional sources to learn more. Wikisocion is a good starting point, or mbti-notes on Tumblr.

On a basic level, if we think of cognitive functions like lenses, the ENTP’s leading function (Ne) is one of two that fit onto the ExxP model of camera. IxxPs, ExxJs, and IxxJs all each have two respective lenses through which they can primarily view the world, as well. These lenses are powerful tools, but only for specific uses. Each can zoom in and focus on a specific thing better than any other lens in the market, but certain other things become blurry at its expense. Now imagine you’re a broke art student who can only afford one of these lenses. That’s your life. And you’ve been using this one lens for so long that at some point, you’ve stopped noticing the blur. And it’s not like you’re going to be able to afford another lens after you get that degree, either.

Extraverted Intuition (Ne), in a leading position, creates an unconscious obsession with abstract, conceptual connections, possibilities, or possibilities for forming new abstract connections. If you’re an Ne-lead, you might not even notice that your brain is obsessed with finding how concepts connect to each other, because your Ne is the foundation for everything else. Your compulsion to gather concepts isn’t in a linear way, like Ni, though— the lead Ne is like a spider creating a comprehensive web of the world in order to make sense of it. The lead Ne believes that this webbing is absolutely necessary before they’re allowed to use Si. Another way to say this would be that ENTP’s think their lead-Ne is more important than using Si, or Si becomes a last resort after Si responsibilities have piled up too high.

For the ENTP, doing Si is what will result in “breakthrough” moments, where shit actually starts to get done and they start feeling satisfied with their life or proud of themselves. Remember, the lead-Ne’s fear of Si will manifest in an inability to commit out of fear that something better may be around the corner, and they’ll miss it if they take the time to Si-decide and organize what they actually need to do to figure out whether they should pursue something or not. And when talking to the Ne, they want to get you addicted to their own crack — “I get what you’re saying, but did you consider it this way?”

So ENTP naturally interprets the sensory world in a introverted, personally meaningful way. They see their lives as a series of chapters and personal systems of the sensory. They’re addicted to collecting these chapters — they want to name them, pick them apart, and see how their story connects. They feel personal meaning in the construction of their unique, sensory narrative. The things that have happened to them are very personal. Their past constructs their identity. They can be prone to nostalgia.

The problem is that they want to collect these chapters without actually constructing them. They want to title all the chapters and organize the pages by number, but don’t want to write the book. They’re too scared to write the book. What if I start writing the book, then I don’t like what I wrote? What if there was a better way to organize the chapters? ENTPs obsess over the structure of the book, believing that if the Si-words will just appear if only they could understand the system. In their mind, it’s not their fault they haven’t written the book even though they’ve been telling everyone they’re going to write one for the past 12 years. No one told them the right way to write a book, okay?! You wouldn’t understand. You don’t know how HARD it is to write a book. Says the guy with ten untitled Google Docs spread across three different Google accounts, all with half-written drafts ranging anywhere between two sentences and a dozen pages. One document is just an outline. And he thinks there’s maybe even another PDF in his other Drive, but he forgot the password to that account. So, yeah.

Having low Si doesn’t mean you're unable to create a system. Don’t take what I’m saying to any extremes, here. If you’re an ENTP, even if you have Si last, you use Si. You’re probably even good at it. You just don’t do it in healthy doses. You put off a bunch of shit and tell yourself you’ll handle it “later.” Well, later comes three months from now, and now you dug yourself into a hole and you’re freaking out about your lack of Si-stability, so you’re making yourself sick spending five hours straight retroactively tracking your budget for the last six months.

If you are sitting on your ass on your computer every day collecting Youtube videos about the best setup for your hypothetical bullet journal that you're definitely gonna start and not abandon in a week, or you’re pinning shit on Pinterest to “inspire” you and “motivate you” towards your dream life, and that’s your idea of being PRODUCTIVE… Yeah… No. You have some weird shit going on with the intuition/sensory axis there.

Incorporating Si into your life is accepting the fact that you are not going to externally discover the “perfect” path you’re looking for. That path exists within you. Only you can see it. And you have to learn to trust your introspection enough to find it. It’s okay that you don’t know the perfect “way” right now. You have all this fear about doing things the “wrong” way, ignoring the fact that you already are doing things the wrong way, by doing things exactly how you are doing. By doing… pretty much nothing? By doing what? Pondering?

Your “way” can only be built over time, bit by bit. Imagine you’re a pilgrim or something and you just moved into the Rocky Mountains because Westard Expansion, bitch. You go out into the woods surrounding your house the first night you’re there. You bring a lantern with you, but you don’t know what to expect. That first night, you don’t get very far. You chose a direction that was particularly dense to walk in, and you spent most of your time trying to maneuver around branches and brush. Luckily for future you, this experience inspires you to scale around the woods the next day to find a less dense area to walk in. You get further that day. I think you see where I’m going with this. Rome wasn’t built in a day and all.

Oh, wait. What? Are you serious? Uh, okay. Sorry for the interruption, guys. My assistant just told me that I got that wrong. The quote is actually “Rome was built in 12 hours with no lunch breaks”…? Are we sure we got that right, Becky? Ah, alright then. Well, in that case, SPEND THE NEXT TEN HOURS STRAIGHT ORGANIZING THE OCEAN OF PHOTOS YOUVE MINDLESSLY SAVED TO YOUR DESKTOP OVER THE PAST NINE MONTHS SAYING THAT YOULL “SORT IT LATER”!!!!!!!! NOW!!!!!!!!!!!! URGENT!!! URGENT! HELP! HELP! 911!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!