What does it take to truly love your work? The answer to that can be highly personal, depending on your unique dreams and interests. But for people with the Logician (INTP) personality, certain elements in your work (or workplace) can make it more or less likely that you’ll find a deep, satisfying connection to your professional life.
Of course, that may not be necessary – your personal life may provide enough joyful fulfillment, and work may be more about earning practical benefits. But it’s intriguing to consider what might lead you to enjoy your work as much as your personal pursuits – or what might stand in the way. Your personality traits likely play a part in that, so let’s explore why.
Critical Elements for Logician Work Happiness
Your Intuitive personality trait indicates a strong, active imagination. It’s almost automatic that you consider all kinds of possibilities, as everyday observations touch off a storm of wondering. Your Thinking personality trait often guides that exploration into technical and intellectual realms, in terms of both subject and methodology. You love to explore the mechanics of what you observe – and how those mechanics might be modified. And that brings us to Prospecting, which can have a big effect on your work happiness.
The Prospecting trait is associated with curiosity and a desire for novelty. That means that your preferred style of exploration and accomplishment likely includes a relatively unstructured approach and a lot of experimentation. The modern working world doesn’t always make room for that, typically imposing guidelines and limits to try to boost efficiency toward a specific goal. For Logician personalities, that can cut off a lot of inspiration and even make creative solutions harder to implement.
A “focus on one idea” mindset doesn’t always enable people with your personality type to fully access their potential in work or in life. For one thing, Logicians love to consider many angles by conducting internal thought experiments long before (or separate from) acting. And when they do act, what they learn as they go plays an important part in their decisions and direction. That means that the freedom to experiment isn’t just critical to how you execute plans and ideas – it’s part of how you create them.
When that process is hampered by too much linear thinking and too many preconceptions, your creative impulses may accordingly feel constrained, and that can be a problem. As a Logician, you feel joyful mental stimulation when you’re able to freely follow your inspiration, and that in turn energizes your mind, leading to more productive creativity. You’re at your happiest when your work includes that positive feedback loop, and you’re unlikely to find a deep connection with work that doesn’t allow for enough creative experimentation.
Getting What You Need at Work
If your working environment doesn’t give you enough opportunities to experiment, it may be for specific reasons. Often, management prefers to be the source of ideas and plans, and they merely task employees with carrying them out. On the other hand, a healthy workplace values innovation that benefits the goals of the company. If you can make a compelling argument for trying something different, your idea may gain traction.
Whether or not your voice will be welcomed depends on your workplace culture. But testing the waters to increase the creative experimentation in your work can be approached as an experiment in itself. One way to start is by trying to identify the goals and needs of the business or those in authority. If you can direct your creative energies toward those ends, your ideas might be more appealing to the people who can enable them.
You may also be able to see things that can be improved in your workplace that others haven’t considered, in many cases because they’re stuck in conventional thinking. It may be hard to convince people to step out of their mental comfort zones and try a new approach to existing goals (or entirely new goals), but the key is often the lure of benefit. If you can dangle a big enough beneficial possibility, you might be able to get people to reconsider their perspective.
Scale may also be a factor when you’re trying to gain more freedom to experiment in your work. You can start small and let the results be your ally. Keep in mind that other people might feel a different sense of risk to reward than you do, and being sensitive to that can work in your favor. Overcoming other people’s concerns is best done gently, respectfully, and with hard evidence.
Conclusion: Making It Work
Logician personality types can have a pragmatic side, often setting aside their fertile imaginations and need for novelty to attend to everyday responsibilities – including work that doesn’t fire their soul. There’s literally nothing wrong with that. You can excel at something that you’re not passionate about, and there’s a certain satisfaction in succeeding at anything. Yet there’s also something to be said for pushing the boundaries of your own abilities, and it’s unlikely that you’ll really find out what you’re capable of unless the goal does fire your soul on a deep level.
So it’s not a bad idea to keep an eye out for opportunities to find a more joyful, fulfilling professional path. Part of that means investigating what’s needed to truly love your work. We’ve scratched the surface here, but it may take a long time – and much experimentation – to find that deeper, soul-satisfying connection. And, being a Logician personality type, you might find that the ongoing process of discovery itself is what you truly love – a journey of joyful experience with no particular destination.