This post is about the INTJ personality in the MBTI system. If you don’t know your type, consider taking an online, free MBTI personality test.

1. These types have good reason to feel different from others.
2. INTJs appreciate the security of a committed relationship.
3. Where technical and intellectual competence are concerned, INTJs have a kind of inner compass, and they prefer a situation in which they don’t have to coordinate their work with or report to someone else.
4. When Extroverted Thinking isn’t working well enough, INTJs merely rationalize to support their worst tendencies.
5. INTJs cannot accept new information until they relate it to their inner world.
6. Many INTJs find that their career ambitions push them into developing a serviceable repertoire of behaviors that convey goodwill and put people at ease. This is learned behavior, however, and not genuine socialization.
7. INTJs may be intellectually precocious but emotionally immature, exercising their dominant function by distancing themselves from others, engaging in ironic comments and somewhat juvenile sarcasm.
8. INTJs will use what works in the service of their ideas; and they will quickly discard or change what doesn’t.
9. INTJs explore information largely by rejecting its influence – examining it from other perspectives and determining its limitations.
10. INTJs need a fair amount of time alone.
11. Romantically, they’re likely to settle at their first opportunity, so that they may reassert their primary relationship to their inner world.
12. INTJs are much less confident in a purely social situation.
13. INTJs can also be lonely behind their reserve, not knowing how to fit in even when they want to be included.
14. The need of the average INTJ for external structure usually goes unrecognized.
15. It is no exaggeration to say that their primary relationship is to their inner world, and they will nurture that relationship at the considerable expense of social abilities and the art of compromise.
16. INTJs can develop the destructive habit of formulating their identity in terms of their ability to see a situation’s limits, needing to find the flaws that will allow them to become spectators rather than performers.
17. INTJs need to find a good way of expressing themselves to avoid conveying disagreement or negativity – as though the speaker’s ideas have been judged and found wanting.
18. Real relationships are unpredictable, and real people resist the categories which the INTJ attempts to apply.
19. Many INTJs become articulate quite early, and they use their verbal abilities to fend off involvement in anything they don’t understand or don’t wish to understand.
20. It should be granted, however, that Sensation and Feeling, the INTJ’s weakest functions, cannot be avoided wholesale in the course of a normal human life.
21. For INTJs, knowledge is not information, but a way of looking at things.
22. INTJs always want to know which category they’re dealing with before they get involved.
23. They worry that their intellectual life will never get back on track until the relationship becomes more ordinary and settled.
24. In fact, sexual attraction and romantic infatuation usually catch these types by surprise.
25. Because they regard most events as arbitrary arrangements of elements, to be dismantled and reassembled at their will, they may find it difficult to gauge the duration of another’s affection or interest in them.
26. For an INTJ, the communion of like minds is a kind of cerebral analog to falling in love.
27. They may find it hard to sustain the kind of extroverted interaction with their partner that is commonly expected.
28. INTJs are rarely committed to the general assumptions about rules, laws, and hierarchy in society, and they may have an acerbic sense of humor about such things.
29. Although they enjoy the distinct pleasures of sensuality, they also tend to have a hard time controlling it. As such they may over-indulge in ice cream, alcohol, sugar and drugs.