SolitaryWalker
Tenured roisterer
- Joined
- Apr 23, 2007
- Messages
- 3,504
- MBTI Type
- INTP
- Enneagram
- 5w6
- Instinctual Variant
- so/sx
Thank you for a thorough and a thought provoking response.
The question that you seem to have in mind is the following; would a person who is competent at solving complex problems who is also athletically gifted would choose an intellectually stimulating career or one devoted to sports? That is a matter for psychologists and sociologists to investigate. Certain questions of applied typology may arise on such grounds, such as for instance, how would an INTP under a certain set of circumstances behave with regard to the problem of career choice that you have in mind?
Well I've brought up a point that can't be answered for certain, but I think we can come to some likely conclusions. For example, let's say there is an INTP who is incredibly gifted athletically. Even if he can make money playing in the NBA, I don't think he'll ever be recorded as the greatest player the game has ever seen. Even if he has talent, he won't have the passion to make him be the best among the best. He'll see basketball as his day job, but then he'll dream of being a scientist or philopher or something. Or maybe he'll retire early and write a bunch of books about the theory behind basketball. What he won't do is spend hours and hours of his free time shooting freethrows or doing things that would help his game..
So now apply a similar argument to Karl Marx. He had some of the most influential ideas of the modern world. A heavy focus on ideas before action is a halmark of all of the N types. This is not to suggest S's are stupid or can't think abstractly. Rather their preference is to spell out the idea after they've had some first hand experience. If Marx started a worker revolution and then wrote the Communist Manifesto, then I might actually believe that he's an S. His focus on ideas rather than action tells me he's an N.
Bruce Lee was a philosopher commonly typed as ISTP, although I think he could also have been ISFP or INTX.
I think Carl Jung himself may have been an ISTP. Also, I think that Bruce Lee was pretty damn philosophical and he was ISTP as well.
Why was Carl Jung ISTP? He was into some really arcane topics and engaged in lots of odd magical thinking. If he was ISTP, it would be a complete redefinition of the type, meaning lots of INTPs are ISTPs!