Mastermind

An INTJ (often called “The Architect”) is a person with Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, and Judging personality traits. They love to perfect every part of their life by using their creativity and rationality—two skills they have an abundance of. Most of the time, they live very private lives and don’t easily let others in.

The main reason for this is that INTJ is a very uncommon personality type, and since they love to interact with people similar to themselves, they struggle to find many like-minded people to connect with.

They question conventional thinking

INTJs love to question everything. They don’t like to just accept the status quo as fact and are always looking for ways to improve processes—in both their home and work lives.

While many other personality types base their decisions on conventional wisdom and the advice of experts, the Architect isn’t afraid to break rules or risk the scorn of others in their pursuit to find innovative solutions to problems that they encounter.

INTJs don’t just want to come up with ideas to solve problems, they want to invent solutions that actually work. This is because they’re incredibly driven to succeed in all aspects of their life and work very hard to achieve what they set out to do.

When faced with obstacles and rules they deem pointless, they become relentless in their drive to remove them so they can continue pursuing their efforts to solve problems.

People with the INTJ personality type can be very difficult to work with, which is why many INTJs prefer to work by themselves or lead small teams. They like working independently because they have total control over the direction of the project they’re working on and in their opinion, they don’t have to wait for other people to catch up to them.

Due to the INTJ’s strong views and desire to control situations, many people think they’re uncaring and insensitive. But they do feel bad internally when things go wrong or they have a conflict with other people. Their problem is they aren’t good at expressing their emotions to other people, but they do dwell on things internally.

They love learning

INTJs love to acquire knowledge and are dedicated to learning new things because they love to understand how things work and why they exist. A lot of their self-worth is derived from their ability to learn and their high level of intelligence. When young and attending school, most INTJs are the top-performing students in their class as they love learning new things and have a competitive personality streak to do better than others.

As INTJs get older, they start to learn things using their own methods, which they deem superior. For example, many INTJs can self-teach themselves how to code computers or engineer new products to solve a problem they have. This can cause conflict later in their education if they start to pay less attention to their teachers and professors and instead embrace their own independent learning methods.

They can struggle to socialize

People with the Architect personality type can come across to other people as uncaring and unkind. This is because they value rationality and success over-politeness as they view social etiquette as frivolous and unimportant. In general, they prefer to be successful over being popular.

When working in a team, they’re known to be very upfront when they feel like the direction of the project isn’t correct and when they believe another team member is wrong. This can come across as rude and disrespectful to other people if they don’t know the INTJ well. For the INTJ, they respond this way because they care deeply about the success of the team and its ability to find a solution to the problem they’re working on.

Due to the Architect’s abrasiveness, many people assume they don’t like to have social interaction at all. This is wrong. They just like to surround themselves with like-minded people who are also highly intelligent and enjoy discussing high-level concepts and ideas rather than talk about topics they deem as frivolous and unimportant.

A lot of people also assume that Architects don’t have a sense of humor and are serious all the time. While this is true for some, many INTJs have an irreverent wit and enjoy making humorless observations about the world around them.

They can be hard to understand

People with the INTJ personality type can be hard to get to know as they’re full of contradicting personality traits. For example, they can be very imaginative, yet they’re also decisive and use logic to make decisions. They’re also very ambitious, yet introverted.

To get to know an INTJ well, you have to get to know how their mind works and spend quite a bit of time with them. The unique workings of the INTJ mind can make it hard for them to make friends and form relationships, but when they do, those connections tend to last for a long time and are very meaningful.