Please Understand Me Two by David Keirsey

For many years, people have always questioned each other's motives. People have always questioned why certain people do certain things or why certain people act a certain way. We have always wondered what makes other people tick; people besides ourselves. Watching another person perform daily tasks can raise many questions. Questions such as " Why didn't he do that the other way?" or " How can someone bungee jump?" Temperament, Character, and Personality have mystified human beings so much, Plato, himself, wrote about four kinds of character. By understanding each other, humankind may get a better sense of who everyone is. Stereotypes as the outcast will be better understood for what they do and why they do it. By understanding character, people will appreciate differences instead of trying to mold other people into molds of themselves.

The book Please Understand Me II, by David Keirsey, is based on the questionnaire, devised by Kathryn Briggs called the "The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator."(Keirsey, 1998) Myers labeled her sixteen personality types with four pairs of letters. E or I, P or J, N or S, or, F or T. E means extraverted, I means introverted, P means perceiving, J means judging, N means intuitive, S means sensory, F means feeling, and T means thinking.

…by "extraverted" Myers meant having an "expressive" and outgoing social attitude; by "introverted" she meant having a "reserved" and seclusive social attitude. By "sensory" Myers meant being highly "observant" of things in the immediate environment; by "intuitive", she meant being "tough-minded" or objective and impersonal with others; by "feeling" she meant "friendly," or sympathetic and personal with others. By "judging" she meant given to making and keeping "schedules"; while, in the case of "perceiving" Myers…went her own way and opposed "perceiving" to "judging." (Keirsey, 1998)

Myers came up with four different temperaments. She came up with the Artisans, the Guardians, the Idealists, and the Rationals.

Artisans can be seen as the most exciting temperament out of the four classifications. They live their lives to the fullest, and they try to do everything th...

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...farseeing, and flexible" (Keirsey, 1998). The role variants of the Rationals are divided up into Fieldmarshals, the Masterminds, the Inventors, and the Architects. Fieldmarshals often take the job of commander. They use resources very well in a hierarchal setup. Masterminds arrange things in intricate plans. They can anticipate everything and set up a proper plan of events based on intuition alone. Inventors are highly skilled in making models. Functionality is their main concern and this can be seen in their job of choice, which is engineering. Architects are preoccupied with design and naturally make plans, models, and blueprints. For Architects, the consistency of what they do is what matters the most to them.

Personality is something that everyone ponders about. Even though people often think others are to different to them, it can be seen with a little understanding people have a similar set of beliefs we just have different ways of going about our normal lives.

References

Keirsey, D. (1998). Please Understand Me II. Prometheus Nemesis Book Company