(And Why You Should Use It Anyway)

Let’s get something out of the way: you already have an opinion about Myers-Briggs.

Maybe you’re the person whose Hinge profile proudly declares “ENFP — don’t even try if you’re an ISTJ.” Maybe you’re the person who rolls their eyes at that Hinge profile and mutters “that’s basically astrology” while swiping left. Or maybe you’re the silent majority who took the test at a corporate retreat, got sorted into a type that sounded vaguely flattering, and never thought about it again.

Here’s the thing: all three of you are about to learn something.

The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) is, objectively, the most paradoxical personality instrument ever created. It’s used by 88% of Fortune 500 companies and dismissed by most academic psychologists. It has no formal peer-reviewed journal dedicated to it, yet generates $20 million a year in assessment fees. It was created by two women with zero formal psychology training, and it has shaped how millions of people understand themselves.

As a creativity tool? It’s secretly brilliant—if you know how to use it without getting weird about it.

Let’s dig in.

Imagine telling a modern psychology department that their most culturally influential personality framework was created by a mystery novelist and her homemaker mother, working from their living room, inspired by a Swiss psychiatrist they never met. They’d laugh you out of the building. Then they’d Google their own MBTI type on their phone under the table.

Katherine Cook Briggs was a brilliant, restless woman in early 20th-century America who became obsessed with human differences after noticing that her new son-in-law (Clarence Myers, who married her daughter Isabel) thought about the world in a fundamentally different way than her family did. This was the early 1900s, so her options for understanding this were: phrenology, Freudian analysis, or figuring it out herself.

She chose option three.

Katherine developed her own typology system, then discovered Carl Jung’s 1921 masterwork Psychological Types and had what we might now call a “mind blown” moment. Jung’s theory of cognitive functions—the idea that people have preferred ways of perceiving (Sensing vs. Intuition) and judging (Thinking vs. Feeling), combined with orientation (Extraversion vs. Introversion)—gave her existing ideas a theoretical backbone.

Her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers took the baton and ran. During World War II, Isabel became convinced that if people could understand their personality types, they’d find work that actually suited them, reducing misery and inefficiency. She spent twenty years developing the indicator, essentially teaching herself psychometrics from library books. She tested it on thousands of people. She refined it obsessively. She kept going when the academic establishment ignored her.

Isabel Myers was, in modern MBTI terms, almost certainly an INFP—which means she finished a massive, decades-long project driven by deep personal values despite constant external resistance. If that’s not proof the system has some explanatory power, I don’t know what is.

The MBTI sorts people along four dimensions, each represented as a binary preference. Think of them less as either/or categories and more like handedness—you can use both hands, but you naturally favor one.

Extraversion (E) vs. Introversion (I): Where You Get Your Energy

This is not about being “loud” or “quiet.” Barack Obama is an Introvert who commanded stadiums. Lady Gaga has described herself as fundamentally introverted despite, well, being Lady Gaga. This dimension is about where your battery recharges—around people (E) or in solitude (I).

For creatives: Extraverted creators tend to think out loud, brainstorm collaboratively, and need external stimulation to generate ideas. Introverted creators need processing time, often do their best work alone, and may find group brainstorms about as useful as a screen door on a submarine.

Sensing (S) vs. Intuition (N): How You Take In Information

Sensors trust what they can see, touch, measure, and verify. They’re the “show me the data” people. Intuitives trust patterns, possibilities, and the connections between things that don’t obviously connect. They’re the “I have a hunch” people.

The S/N divide is arguably the most significant one for creative work. About 73% of the general population prefers Sensing, but creative fields are disproportionately populated by Intuitives. This doesn’t mean Sensors aren’t creative—it means they’re creative differently. A Sensing photographer captures reality with breathtaking precision. An Intuitive photographer captures what reality means. Both are art.

Thinking (T) vs. Feeling (F): How You Make Decisions

Thinkers prioritize logical consistency and objective analysis. Feelers prioritize values alignment and human impact. Both are rational—they just weigh different factors.

The gendered stereotyping here has been catastrophic. Society tells men they should be Thinkers and women should be Feelers, which means male Feelers and female Thinkers spend enormous energy fighting their natural wiring. If you’ve ever watched a male INFP try to perform corporate stoicism, you’ve witnessed a human being slowly dying inside.

Judging (J) vs. Perceiving (P): How You Organize Your Life

Worst. Names. Ever. “Judging” sounds like your verbally uninhibited aunt at Thanksgiving. “Perceiving” sounds like you’re on mushrooms.

What they actually mean: Judgers prefer structure, closure, and having things decided. Perceivers prefer flexibility, spontaneity, and keeping options open. Judgers make to-do lists. Perceivers lose to-do lists. Judgers plan vacations. Perceivers are the vacation.

For creative work, this dimension determines your entire project management style. If you’re a Judger who’s been told that creativity requires chaos, you’ve been lied to. If you’re a Perceiver who’s been told that real professionals follow outlines, you’ve been equally lied to.

Combine the four preferences and you get 16 types. Here’s each one, distilled to its creative essence with a famous example, served at the speed of a TikTok:

(Before anyone emails me: typing historical and public figures is speculative and meant for illustration, not gospel. Except for the INTJ one. We all know that’s right.)

Alright, let’s deal with the elephant in the room. And it’s a big elephant—like, ESTJ-sized.

The Test-Retest Problem

The single most damning criticism: when people retake the MBTI, up to 50% get a different result within five weeks. That’s not great for an instrument claiming to measure stable personality traits. Imagine if a compass told you due North was straight out your front door and to the left on Monday and then on Wednesday it suddenly said due North was actually out your front door and to the right. You’d throw that compass away.

The Forced Dichotomy Problem

Human personality exists on a spectrum. The MBTI forces continuous dimensions into binary categories. If you score 51% Thinking and 49% Feeling, you get sorted into “Thinker”—same as someone who scores 95% Thinking. This is like saying someone who’s 5’8” and someone who’s 6’5” are both just “tall” because they’re above 5’7”.

The Big Five model (which we covered in the third article in this series ) handles this better by giving you a score on a continuum. But continuums don’t fit on Instagram bios, so here we are.

The Barnum Effect Concern

Named after P.T. Barnum (“a sucker born every minute”), this is the tendency to accept vague, general personality descriptions as uniquely applicable to yourself. Read your MBTI type description and you think, “Wow, this is SO me!” Read a different type’s description and… you might also think, “Wow, this is also kind of me?”

The Academic Cold Shoulder

Most peer-reviewed personality research uses the Big Five, not the MBTI. In academic psychology, citing the MBTI in a research paper is a bit like citing Wikipedia in a doctoral thesis—technically it might contain useful information, but your committee will give you the look (and then possibly the boot).

If the MBTI is so scientifically sketchy, why hasn’t it died? Here’s the uncomfortable truth for critics: utility and validity are not the same thing.

It Gives People a Language

Before the MBTI, most people had no vocabulary for cognitive differences. Try explaining to your Sensing boss why you need to stare at the ceiling for an hour before you can write a report, without using the words “Intuition” and “perceiving function.” Good luck.

The MBTI gave the world a shared language for talking about how minds differ. When an INFJ says to an ESTP, “I need to process internally before I respond,” and the ESTP says, “Okay, but can you process faster because the meeting’s in ten minutes,” that’s not just a personality conflict—it’s a conversation that literally couldn’t happen without a framework to name the difference.

It Validates Difference

For every INFP who was told they’re “too sensitive,” for every ENTP who was told they “can’t focus,” for every INTJ who was told they’re “cold”—the MBTI says: That’s not a flaw. That’s a feature.

This validation effect is real and measurable, even if the mechanism isn’t scientifically pristine. When someone discovers they’re an Introverted Intuitive in a world designed for Extraverted Sensors, the relief can be genuinely life-changing. Susan Cain’s Quiet basically built a movement on this single insight.

It’s Actionable (Unlike Its Scientific Betters)

Here’s the dirty secret of personality psychology: the Big Five is more scientifically valid, but the MBTI is more practically useful for most people. Telling someone they’re “high in Openness and low in Conscientiousness” is accurate. Telling them they’re an ENFP who leads with Extraverted Intuition and struggles with Introverted Sensing gives them a story—a narrative about how their mind works, what their strengths are, and where their blind spots hide.

Humans don’t live by data points. We live by stories. The MBTI tells a damn good story.

Here’s where the MBTI gets genuinely interesting for creative work, and where most people’s understanding stops embarrassingly short.

Beyond the four-letter code, Jung’s original theory—and the deeper MBTI tradition—describes eight cognitive functions: mental processes that determine how you perceive and judge reality. Every type has a specific “function stack”—a hierarchy of these processes from most conscious to least developed.

This matters enormously for creativity because your creative genius lives in your dominant function, but your creative growth lives in your inferior function—the one you’re worst at. The tension between these two is where breakthrough work happens.

The Eight Functions and Their Creative Gifts

Extraverted Intuition (Ne) — The Brainstorm Machine. Sees possibilities everywhere. Generates twenty ideas before breakfast. Creative danger: starting everything, finishing nothing. Think: Robin Williams improvising, generating connections between unrelated things at superhuman speed.

Introverted Intuition (Ni) — The Visionary. Sees the deep pattern beneath surface chaos. Works toward a singular, crystallized vision. Creative danger: waiting for the perfect insight before starting. Think: Christopher Nolan constructing Inception’s nested dream architecture—one vision, meticulously realized.

Extraverted Sensing (Se) — The Experiential Artist. Lives in the vivid, textured present. Creates from direct physical engagement with the world. Creative danger: chasing stimulation over substance. Think: Beyoncé’s stage performances—every visual, sound, and movement calibrated for maximum real-time impact.

Introverted Sensing (Si) — The Master Craftsperson. Honors tradition, refines technique, and builds on what has worked. Creative danger: resisting innovation. Think: Wes Anderson’s meticulous visual style, each film building on and refining a deeply personal aesthetic vocabulary.

Extraverted Thinking (Te) — The Systems Builder. Organizes creative output into efficient, scalable structures. Creative danger: optimizing the soul out of the work. Think: Shonda Rhimes managing multiple hit television shows simultaneously through sheer organizational force.

Introverted Thinking (Ti) — The Analytical Artist. Deconstructs creative problems to their logical core. Creates precise, internally consistent work. Creative danger: analysis paralysis. Think: Radiohead deconstructing rock music into its component atoms and reassembling it into something entirely new.

Extraverted Feeling (Fe) — The Emotional Conductor. Reads the room, creates for connection, orchestrates shared experience. Creative danger: people-pleasing at the expense of authentic voice. Think: Adele’s ability to make an arena of 20,000 people feel like she’s singing directly to each of them.

Introverted Feeling (Fi) — The Authentic Voice. Creates from deeply held personal values and emotional truth. Creative danger: work so personal it becomes inaccessible. Think: Hayao Miyazaki pouring his very specific, idiosyncratic moral vision into every frame of every film.

The Creative Growth Edge: Your Inferior Function

Here’s the magic: your most transformative creative work often happens when you engage your least developed function. The ENFP (dominant Ne) who slows down to honor Si—refining and completing one vision instead of generating fifty—creates their masterpiece. The ISTJ (dominant Si) who allows Ne to introduce unexpected possibilities into their disciplined process creates something that surprises even them.

This is why “just do what comes naturally” is incomplete creative advice. Your natural strengths get you started. Your willingness to stretch into uncomfortable cognitive territory gets you to greatness.

So how do you use a scientifically imperfect but practically powerful tool without either dismissing it entirely or turning it into a religion? Here’s the protocol:

1. Treat It as a Starting Point, Not a Destination

Your four-letter type is a rough sketch, not a photograph. It’s useful the way a map of Denver is useful when you’re visiting—it orients you, but it doesn’t tell you which coffee shop has the best oat milk latte. Use it to understand your general cognitive landscape, then do the deeper work of discovering your specific creative terrain.

2. Go Beyond the Letters to the Functions

The four-letter code is MBTI’s greatest marketing success and its greatest intellectual failure. The real richness is in the cognitive function stack. An INFP (Fi-Ne-Si-Te) and an ISFP (Fi-Se-Ni-Te) share dominant Introverted Feeling but perceive the world completely differently. If you only know the letters, you’re reading the movie poster instead of watching the film.

3. Hold Your Type Loosely

If you find yourself saying “I can’t do that—I’m an INFJ” or “Of course they’re difficult, they’re an ESTJ,” you’ve crossed from insight into limitation. Your type describes your preferences, not your prison. Michael Jordan didn’t stop practicing because his type said he was already talented enough.

4. Use It as a Creative Diagnostic

When you’re creatively blocked, your type can help you identify why. A Te-dominant creator who’s blocked might need to reconnect with Fi values (“Why does this project matter to me?”). An Ne-dominant who can’t finish might need Si structures (routines, checklists, physical completion rituals). Your type doesn’t cause the block—but it can illuminate the exit route.

5. Never Use It to Sort People Into “Creative” and “Not Creative”

Every type creates. Every. Single. One. The ESTJ who builds an elegant organizational system is creating. The ISFJ who crafts a family tradition is creating. The ENTJ who architects a business is creating. If your understanding of the MBTI only recognizes NF types as “creative,” your understanding is broken, not the framework.

Here’s a fun fact that will haunt you: a significant number of people who “know their type” are wrong about it.

This happens for several reasons. Online tests are notoriously unreliable—especially the free ones that take five minutes. People answer based on who they want to be rather than who they are. Cultural conditioning is powerful: a naturally Feeling man might test as a Thinker because society rewarded him for suppressing that preference. An Introverted woman in a sales job might test Extraverted because she’s been performing extraversion so long she’s confused the costume for the person.

The best way to find your actual type isn’t a test—it’s a process:

Study the cognitive functions. Read about each function and notice which descriptions make you think “that’s not just something I do—that’s how my mind works.”

Look at what drains you, not just what energizes you. Your inferior function is the activity that exhausts you the fastest. If organizing details makes you want to scream, you might be a dominant Ne user, not the ISTJ the test told you you were.

Ask the people who know you best. Not “What type do you think I am?” but “What do I do that drives you absolutely crazy?” Your shadows are more diagnostic than your strengths.

Give it time. Type discovery is a journey, not a BuzzFeed quiz result. Sit with a type for a few weeks. Try it on. See if it fits when you’re stressed, not just when you’re presenting your best self.

So is the MBTI scientifically valid? Mostly not, at least by the standards academic psychology demands.

Is it useful? For millions of people, profoundly yes.

Can both things be true simultaneously? Welcome to being human.

The Myers-Briggs paradox is actually a perfect mirror for the creative life itself. Creativity doesn’t care about scientific validation. It cares about whether a tool helps you make the thing. A paintbrush isn’t “valid” or “invalid”—it’s useful or it isn’t. The MBTI is a paintbrush. A somewhat inconsistent, occasionally mislabeled paintbrush that happens to produce surprisingly good work in the right hands.

Katherine Briggs and Isabel Myers were creatively blocked women who invented a tool to understand human difference during an era that didn’t take them seriously. That the tool they built—imperfect, controversial, endlessly debated—went on to become the most widely used personality instrument in history is not a story about science. It’s a story about two women who made the thing anyway.

Which, if you think about it, is exactly the creative advice you needed to hear today.

Next In The Series: Article 7: 16Personalities — The MBTI for the Internet Age

What happens when you take a 60-year-old personality framework, add a fifth dimension, make it free, and let the internet run with it? Chaos, identity, and 800 million tests taken.

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