Mr. Darcy / Jane Eyre ?....................or the bibical Roman Paul?

[jz]

Here's  a thought for the  med students asking about choosing specialties. Are you a natural introvert? or extrovert?

The definition here is important.  An extrovert is a person who is energized by being around other people. An introvert  is energized by being alone.  This is not defined by social skills.  Some extroverts are pesky and  annoying in their need for constant people contact.  Introverts get crippled by overstimulation and need personal space to revitalize. They may have excellent social skills, but parties tire them. Extroverts talk to process their thoughts.

Where are you on a 1<------------>10 scale?

If you are a natural introvert,  seeing 30 dermatology pts. daily will burn you out.   Seeing 25 EM pts. daily will exhaust you. If you are a natural extrovert,  your radiology or pathology work will need outside balance to keep you energized.

I suspect the biblical Roman Paul had 2000 Facebook friends.  Mr. Darcy and Jane Eyre avoided Facebook.

 

[legobikes]

On the contrary I think many introverts use facebook precisely because they are introverts.

 

I also want to point out that as an a very introverted INTJ using the Myers-Briggs personality typing, I had a very difficult time in medical school and residency (forget patients, just dealing with your colleagues and all the myriad healthcare personnel was too much); for much of my training I assumed that by my very nature I was not fit for medicine. However I also found myself developing an ability to connect with people and to not have these interactions be as draining as they used to be, no matter if they were conversations about death or about the weather. In truth anyone who identifies with these traits or proclivities as static misses out on developing fully as a person; .

 

Edit: I would recommend that anyone who has not typed themselves try it out here: http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jtypes2.asp

Then read about their type specifically at personalityjunkie.com

While as limited as all else that is inherited from Jung, it nonetheless provides far better tools in terms of understanding one's patterns of behavior.

[Sneezy]

Why I think Myers-Briggs is stupid

The way your "personality" is presented you are either an introvert or an extrovert, implying that the population has a bimodal distribution so people can easily be put in one category or the other

Of course, this is not the case.  Introversion/extroversion (and the other scales) follow a roughly normal distribution with the majority near the center.

It would be much more useful if you placed along a spectrum from 1 to 10 or whatever (as in the original post)

Sorry, but for some reason this really irritates me

[legobikes]

Perhaps that's how it's been represented and popularized, but it's obvious that everything is on a spectrum and merely speaks to certain tendencies for taking in, processing, and expressing our thoughts and experiences. There are forms of the test that specifically talk about a scale, but nonetheless some sort of designation is necessary. I mean, I'm not an ESFP.

[Dr. Mom]

For those of you who find personality stuff interesting, read Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking.  Kitces had it on his recommended reading list for awhile which is where I found it.  I enjoy "finance" books that aren't always so obvious in their purpose.