I love TED videos because they make me rethink my view of the world. In the video, Harvard psychologist and happiness expert Dan Gilbert explains why we make bad decisions.

I’m going to explain how I think it applies to INFPs.

Since the video is long, here are the important parts:

1. Expected Value of Anything = (Odds of Gain) x (Value of Gain)
2. People make poor decisions because we make errors in estimating Odds of Gain and errors in estimating Value of Gain.
3. Using memory makes us prone to errors in Odds.
4. Shifting comparisons make us prone to errors in Value

In the video, Dan gives specific examples about how people commonly make mistakes estimating Odds of Gain and Value of Gain.

How an INFP Values Anything

INFPs value things ideally in order to get our ideal outcome.

The basic formula of Expected Value of Anything = (Odds of Gain) x (Value of Gain) becomes:

Ideal Expected Value of Anything = (Maximum Odds of Gain) x (Maximum Value of Gain).

In other words:

Perfection = (Being Almost Positive We’ll Get What We Want) x (What We Get Is Everything We Wanted)

What This Means In Real Life

When INFPs approach life in terms of the ideal, we expect that any endeavor we embark upon will give us the possibility of the best probable outcome.

Ideal New Friendship = (Best chances of becoming friends) x (Becoming best friends)

Ideal Career Path = (Best chance of getting that career) x (Complete career fulfillment)

If we can’t get something perfect, INFPs feel less motivated to do it. However, that Ideal isn’t a fixed point but a range. For example:

Maximum Odds of Gain – Best chances of becoming friends

• Best Case: everything clicks and we can talk easily with this new person like we’ve known them all our lives
• Worst Case We’ll Accept: It could be a challenge, as long as this new person doesn’t do this, this and this and we’ll be okay with it.

Maximum Value of Gain – Becoming best friends

• Best Case: They value us as much as we value them and they’ll do as we would do for them
• Worse Case We’ll Accept: They don’t have to drop everything every time I call just as long as I know that I’m at least in their top 5 or 10 or whatever.

The Worst Case We’ll Accept is different among INFPs. We know everything isn’t going to be absolutely Perfect and that nothing turns out as flawlessly as we imagine in our head. That range from Best Case to Worse Case We’ll Accept is our buffer zone. The closer the Odds of Gain or Value of Gain moves toward the Worse Case We’ll Accept, the less ideal that new friendship becomes.

Maybe that new person says they’ll call back but doesn’t or maybe we find it more difficult to talk to that person. Every time an incident occurs that doesn’t fit our preconceived image of the ideal, the Odds or Value starts dropping towards the Worse Case We’ll Accept. If this happens often enough, we discover that the Expected Value of Friendship was much less than we imagined. We get bored. It’s too difficult. It’s less than our range for perfect. So we stop trying to become friends with this person.

The Dunning–Kruger effect

When it comes to estimating our Odds of Gain, INFPs overestimate our ability to achieve that goal. For me, this was especially true when it came to college and career. At 20, I wanted to be a best selling author. I had wrote in high school and won a couple of contests. Since we estimate Odds of Gain from our past, I estimated that if I worked really hard in college, got enough critique to improve my writing, I was assured a spot on the Times Bestsellers List.

Also, all the comparison to past successes in my head made me extremely susceptible to a cognitive bias called the Dunning-Kruger effect. Basically, this effect occurs when people reach bad conclusions and make bad decisions but are unskilled to recognize they’ve made a bad decision. In other words, people who really don’t know what they’re doing assume that they’re doing it better than average and people who are really good at what they do think they’re worse at it than they actually are.

I estimated my writing ability to my subjective past successes and not to anything objective. I overestimated by Odds of Gain. The only way to become better at estimating your own ability and your Odds of Gain is to become better at what you’re doing. I joined small critique groups which made me a better writer and as I got better at writing, I realized that I wasn’t as good as I thought which dropped my estimate of Odds of Gain down to the point where it was below my Worse Case We’ll Accept.

I see that happening when INFPs changing careers in college. They attend university thinking that they’ll be really in good in one career until long hours and grades sub par to their ideal make them realize that getting to their chosen career is taking much more effort than they thought. More effort means that they might never be as good as someone who’s in the same class and whizzing by with little effort. So to the INFP, their Odds of Gain diminishes with every mediocre outcome and their Ideal Expected Value of the career diminishes to the point where they switch majors to something more ideally suited for them.

For me, I dropped out of school instead of switching majors.

Why INFPs Drop Projects

INFPs drop projects because the Expected Value falls out of our ideal range. We discovered that our estimates were off so why do something if we know it’s not going to turn out within our range of perfect?

I think this is the biggest reason why INFPs get good at things but not great at things. We start a hobby, a sport, an activity. We work at it and improve our skills over the years until we get good enough to estimate that we’ll probably never be great (Value of Gain). Sometimes knowing that more time and effort won’t make us great at something drops our Value of Gain to below our Worse Case We’ll Accept. It’s at this point, we find a new interest and go to the next thing.

Estimating Better

It’s not as if as INFPs, we are blindly deluding ourselves when it comes to estimating Odds of Gain. However, we estimate our odds of getting something as if we were our Ideal Self and not as our current Becoming Self. If we were already our ideal, getting what we want (Odds of Gain) would be as we imagined it would be.

To become better, we need to estimate Odds of Gain based on the person we are now. This drops the Expected Value from that absolute Ideal to a more subjective “ideal for who we are”. Also, finding more about our Value of Gain by asking and researching those who have gotten what we wanted gives a us a more accurate estimate of Value of Gain instead of using our imagination to gives us our imagined Best Scenario. Doing these two things, gives an INFP a more realistic Expected Value in order to base our decision on whether to take on an endeavor.

Yes, we are lowering our expectations. However, doing this gives us something more valuable in return–the possibility of more. If we base our decisions on Ideal Expected Value then in the best possible scenario, we will only get what we expect. If we base our decisions on a more realistic Expected Value, we open the possibility of doing better than we expected.

It’s officially been one year since I launched my blog. I’d like to thank all my readers for reading my very long posts and for commenting. I appreciate it so much.

My favorite card in the Tarot major arcana is the Fool. I think The Fool is the INFP card. He represents wisdom without reason. He represents the beginning of a journey and journey’s end. Like INFPs, we are always starting our journey to our Ideal Self and that the same time, we are who we are.

In one hand, the Fool holds a flower that represents the appreciation for beauty. Over his shoulder is a stick representing wisdom which dangles a small bag with the few belongings he actually needs. At his foot, there’s a dog which represents reality or the real world always nipping at his heels. The Fool seems oblivious to the precipice that he’s about to step over. INFPs, like the Fool, live on the edge of reality always moments from falling over and being lost forever in our dream world.

The Fool is the card of infinite possibilities. It’s also the card of blind faith. When it appears in the spread, it can signal a restarting of your life and that great change is coming. I like the Fool card because it reminds me of my favorite quote by T.S. Eliot: “We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started… and know the place for the first time.”

That exploration is the INFP journey to find our Ideal Self. We will find it where we started but only have our travels are done. The Fool has always held special meaning for me.

However, that isn’t why I started my blog on April 1st. I just thought it was cute and ironic that I start on a day that people associate with joking. Attaching meaning to my blog with how the start date relates to the Fool and April first being the start of the 2nd quarter was something I did later. For me, meaning comes later. It works better that way.

As INFPs, we continually search for meaning. What does it all mean? What’s a meaningful job that I would like? We want meaning in our lives to find some order in a seemingly random and uncaring world. We imagine what we think would be the perfect job for us then we pursue it. We create this image of the perfect girl or guy for us and then we look to the outside to find someone to match that image. We start with a belief in an ideal and look outside to find that ideal.

The problem is that the world outside our head isn’t perfect. It’s messy and complicated and a Fool’s blind faith has never gotten us to the perfect picture we imagined. Trying to figure out meaning first and then trying to make the world prove that such meaning can exist is backwards. It’s like the scientist that has theory and then tries to find facts to prove that theory. The apple dropped on Newton’s head first and then he came up with his Laws of Motion, not the other way around.

Meaning is theory. Theory exists to explain facts. That’s how it’s always been done. Our ancestors looked into the sky and saw stars and the darkness between and then created their mythology to impose meaning onto the emptiness. INFPs want meaning to come first and wonder why re-inventing the wheel isn’t getting us as far in life as we had dreamed. Of course when things don’t work out, INFPs have no problem attaching meaning second.

If we never got the awesome job and we have debt, that must mean that money is evil. If we were never surrounded by the crowd of adoring friends, that must mean that we’re so special that only a few people will ever truly understand us. If all the relationships we’ve had ended badly, that much mean all women/men are generally jerks and we just have to be more careful the next time. INFPs attach meaning after the facts all the time, but usually only when bad things happen.

It’s more fun to attach meaning after good things happen. Whenever I go somewhere, if I find a convenient parking space right away then I know I was meant to be there. I always seem to find great parking so I’m always meant to be wherever I am.

INFPs think that finding meaning first will make things better. If we can figure out what would be a meaningful job then we’ll be happy when we finally get that job. What INFPs don’t seem to grasp is that meaning makes things bearable, it doesn’t make things better. Unless we love our job, a crappy job is still a crappy job even if it means something to us. Unless someone enjoys being in a war zone being shot at daily, the meaning that person finds in patriotism makes the job worthwhile, but it doesn’t make the job better. Unless someone enjoy the endless parade of other people’s problems, then any meaning they find in helping people isn’t going to make them like their psychiatry job more.

INFPs can have jobs we like and have those jobs be meaningful. However, we have to find something we like first and then figure out why it’s worthwhile to be doing the job later. It’s easy and natural for INFPs to do what we like. We act immediately to do the things we like. However when we try to find meaning first, we are always wondering if we can live with it if we find out we don’t like it later. Meaning is complicated. Attaching meaning first leaves us with this nagging feeling, as we pursue our wants, about whether or not we’re going to like what we wanted when we get it. That nagging feeling holds us back from fully committing to our endeavors which is why INFPs never succeed as well as we hoped.

So what does this blog mean to me in the long term? I don’t know yet. What I know now is that, I like writing it. That’s why I’m writing. Isn’t doing something because we like it worthwhile in itself?

On April 1st, this blog will be a year old. Yes, I chose that date on purpose.

So how do I feel I did? Okay, I guess.

That’s not a great answer. Unfortunately, this year that’s the best answer I have because I didn’t set clear goals when I started this blog. When I set clear goals for success, happiness is simple.

With clear, measurable goals, I get one of two results. Either I complete my goals and after having a success, I get a self-esteem boost which makes me happy. Or I don’t complete my goals and after having a failure event, I am unhappy. Those two states are productive states for me because I celebrate when I’m happy and I make new plans when I’m unhappy. I don’t mope when an action doesn’t get my desired results because I start thinking about all the possible new actions I should take next.

For this blog, I avoided measurable goals. I have a bad tendency not set goals when I’m in a low period because I don’t want to risk failing. It’s a vicious cycle. I start a new project to boost my self-esteem and to get myself out of my down cycle, but then I avoid setting goals. I feel great for a few weeks or months because the project is something new and exciting. However as my project continues, I feel less and less motivated because I haven’t set goals so I don’t know if I’m doing good or bad. Eventually, I’m just doing something new that’s become old and I forget why I bothered in the first place which puts me back in my down cycle.

Having no set goals means I can’t fail. Not failing is very comfortable place to exist. Not failing helps me avoid being unhappy. Unfortunately, being not unhappy is not the same thing as being happy. Not failing isn’t the same as having a success. Any measure of discomfort that I avoid from not failing is outweighed by the gradual loss of self-esteem by not succeeding over long periods of time.

Without clear goals and more importantly, written goals, I neither succeeded nor failed. With this blog, some things went better than I thought and others didn’t even come close. So what I’m left with is this in-between state where happiness is fuzzier. What I dislike about this in-between state is the time I waste trying to figure out how I feel about a project. I would feel stuck which would turn into procrastination. What I was really doing was attempting to make up my mind whether to quit or to continue.

Don’t worry, I’m not quitting this blog. If this would have been 10 years ago, you wouldn’t be seeing new posts for a month while I was making up my mind. Nowadays, it takes an hour. I do my Wrong-Right-Zero Base process.

Wrong: What did I do wrong with the blog?
Right: What did I do right with the blog?
Zero Base: Knowing what I know now, would I have started this blog in the first place last year?

What I did wrong

I started two blogs

I started INFP Blog and my personal blog around the same time I joined Twitter. I wanted to use Twitter to drive traffic to both, but I couldn’t do both effectively. I stopped writing on INFP Blog for 5 months because I was busy redesigning, networking and writing for my personal blog. I shouldn’t have done both.

I didn’t set up FeedBurner

I should have set up FeedBurner sooner. My blog is information. Having a news feed gives readers the option to subscribe to that information. Giving people more choices is never a bad thing. WordPress has it’s own news feed, but using FeedBurner lets me count my number of subscribers.

What I did right

Naming my blog “INFP Blog”

I considered a more artsy, esoteric name for my blog, but after 14 years in web development, I knew the name “INFP Blog” would be better for SEO (search engine optimization). I estimated that I’d get 20% of my traffic from Google. I was wrong. Google brings me 50-55% of my site traffic.

Social networking on the forums

Originally, I planned to drive traffic solely from Twitter. Then I remembered how much dialogue occurred on Tribe and MySpace INFP groups. Globalchatter, the biggest INFP forum at the time, had recently shut down. INFPs have always grouped online so I knew the Globalchatter community would move elsewhere. I tracked down the most active forums and started commenting. I get around 20% of my traffic from commenting on forums.

Waited on my site redesign

After redesigning my personal blog and getting zero traffic. I decided to focus on INFP Blog. Instead of spending a lot of initial time and effort on the design, I concentrated on writing and networking. I knew I didn’t have energy for both. Focusing on the networking and writing attracted readers and comments which motivated me to keep writing. Otherwise, I think I would have been burned out trying to redesign and build traffic.

Zero Based Thinking

Zero Based Thinking is letting go of all the time and energy I invested in any given endeavor and asking myself one simple question: if I knew then what I know now, would I have started this in the first place?

If the answer is no, I immediately try to end whatever I’m doing. If it’s a bad project I got suckered into because I was too nice, I’ll see if I can find someone else who’s more eager and I enlist the help of the person who suckered me into it in the first place. If it’s a person that’s bad for my life, I just stop calling them. If it’s a personal project, I’ll put it away and call it done.

Knowing what I know now, I definitely would have started writing INFP Blog.

Now comes the fun part, figuring out what’s next. That’s the next post.

I’m special. The Myers-Briggs Type Indicator told me so. As an INFP, I’m 1-5% of the total population. On the days I want to be more special, I quote the 1% number from Keirsey’s Please Understand Me instead of the 5% number from CAPT.org. Luckily, I don’t believe everything I read.

Being 1-5% just makes me different not special. I haven’t done anything particularly special. As an INFP, I’m aware of our need to feel special in a world that just recognizes us as different. However, instead of doing things that make me feel special, I waste time telling people I’m special in various subtle ways like quoting Myers-Briggs stats. It’s like being the guy who tells you he’s going to be famous and then has to move back in with parents because he couldn’t find a job that wasn’t beneath his sense of specialness.

People admire Olympic athletes and entrepreneurs for a reason. People don’t admire the natural inborn talent. We’ve all heard stories about the valedictorian that ends up working at a bookstore or the kooky genius that never made it out of his parent’s house. We admire Olympic athletes and entrepreneurs because they’ve proved it. They dedicated years to athletic training or risked everything to invest in their company. These people become recognized as special because they’ve done something special.

INFPs sometimes confuse different with special. Mensa estimates that 2% of the population has a genius level IQ. Being born with a genius level IQ makes you different. Doing something special is what differentiates a patent clerk who gave us the Theory of Relativity from Chris Langan, a bouncer in Long Island with a 210 IQ. Einstein managed to do something with his genius.

Unfortunately, I wasted so much time trying to convince people that different meant special. I became very subtle at telling people I was special. I was vocal about disliking the popular. I derided the mundane. I mean, if I didn’t like what everyone else liked then that must make me special.

On top of the list of things I disliked was small talk. Everyone talks about the weather, and I wanted to be above that. Kin Hubbard, an early 1900′s cartoonist once said, “Don’t knock the weather. If it didn’t change once in a while, nine out of ten people couldn’t start a conversation.” I was that nine out of ten people. I wondered why people didn’t like me. Apparently, people like people who take action and talk to them instead of being in some corner.

My other subtle way of telling people I was special was by showing off my esoterica. Usually, this took the form of slipping specialized knowledge into conversations. Unfortunately, it’s difficult to slip anything from my encyclopedic recall of Dungeons & Dragons into a conversation with people talking about the weather. As I grew older, my esoterica became more sophisticated. I discovered it was just as hard slipping Rimbaud, Objectivism, Joel-Peter Witkin or whatever I learned that I thought was cool into a conversation about weather.

After years of being different, I embraced my differences as a badge to prove that I was special. Other people didn’t think like me so I must be special. I thought I had higher standards than other people so I must be special. I thought I had some deeper understanding of the universe that no one else could see so I must be special. I convinced myself that I so special that only other special people would be able to recognize my specialness. I started an exclusive club called “my good friends” and we didn’t talk about the weather.

What I couldn’t get was that people didn’t want to join my club. People are attracted to the special, so why weren’t people seeking to be my friend. I was always the one wanting to be friends with someone else. Even worse was that my good friends would leave my club for no reason. With a club based on exclusivity, if others don’t envy that exclusivity, you’re just a bunch a nerds hanging around not talking about the weather. What didn’t I realized was that I wasn’t doing anything special. I was just being different.

Maybe the world is just screwed up for not valuing the different. It’s them not me. Hundreds of thousands of years of biology have shown that different gets you killed. The black wolf stands out against the snow and scares off game. Basically, being different is inherently selfish. Being different doesn’t benefit anyone until you do something special.

So how is winning an Olympic medal not a selfish endeavor? Because in doing so, the athletes remind us that everyone has the potential to do great things and that inborn talent isn’t the only factor. I’m never going to be an Olympic athlete, but being reminded that if I get off my ass I might do something great makes me feel special. It’s not disempowering because it reminds me that I control my destiny. On the other hand, someone telling me I’m sheep for liking what everyone else likes and thinking what everyone else thinks , doesn’t benefit me, doesn’t make me feel special.

INFPs seem to forget that being special requires other people to acknowledge it. People recognize actions. They recognize me when I do something, not when I am something. Unless I do something special, the world has no reason to recognize that I am special. Maybe the answer is some zen approach where I just have to accept myself as special separate from the outside world. However, I always end up with a bunch of INFPs telling me how they’ve managed to do it and wanting to be acknowledge for letting go of the need to be acknowledged.

The problem with telling people you’re special no matter how subtly is that you are telling yourself at the same time. When someone tells us that they’re special, we’d like them to prove it by doing something we recognize as special. When tell ourselves that were special, eventually we’re going to have to prove it or else we feel like a fraud. As INFPs, we tell ourselves most our lives that we’re special, but we never seem to get around to doing anything to prove it. Each day, we don’t prove what we tell ourselves, our self-esteem sinks a little lower.

INFPs have a greater need feel special than other MBTI types. That’s not a bad thing. It’s our nature. Fighting our nature just causes unhappiness. However, INFPs focus on the wrong thing. INFPs want to BE special when what we need is to FEEL special. Being special and feeling special are two completely different things.

INFPs instinctively understand this need to feel special and that’s why we’re desperate to connect to another person. INFPs feel that life would be better if we had that special someone because it only takes one other person to make us feel special. Unfortunately, we forget that feeling special doesn’t actually require us to move to the world. We just have to connect to another person. So all the people I use to exclude for talking about the weather was one less person who could have connected with me.

Accepting that I needed people was a risky prospect because I had been so invested in that me vs them mindset. For the longest time, I protected myself with reciprocal relationships. I call you. You call me back. I don’t cancel at the last minute. You don’t cancel at the last minute. I’ve never known a healthy relationship built on the expectation of reciprocation. That’s probably why those relationships never went anywhere.

I think INFPs would be happier if we focused on feeling special instead to trying to prove to ourselves that we are special by virtue of being different. I discovered a motivational speaker named Brian Tracy who introduced to me to concept of indirect effort. If you want to be admired, then admire someone. If you want to be feel special, make someone feel special. What’s great about making someone feel special is that we’re doing something that benefits someone other than just ourselves.

Sometimes, making another person feel special can be as simple as telling them they’re special. It’s easy, but not many people do it. And the best thing about telling someone they’re special is that they rarely ask you to prove it.

As an INFP, I have external space that’s a physical reflection of my internal space. For some INFPs, that external space might be their writing table or a reading nook. It could be as small as a shoebox of memories to sort or as large as their entire house. For me, that external space is my home office.

Since I only get things organized to a certain point inside my head, my office has never been completely organized. I have piles. Stuff gets put away to a certain point but I’ve always had orphaned piles that have no place to go. Much like the thoughts in my head.

In my internal space, my current projects are those piles in need of organization. At any given time, I’m migrating between multiple projects, but as I go from working on one to another, they never quite get put away in my head. So as I’m working on one project, I might get an idea for something else. Those projects are like separate piles occupying my brain and sometimes the piles fall onto each other.

There’s a max limit of things that can occupy internal focus. I can shift focus between four or five current projects. Any more than that and there’s external bleed over. That’s when I can’t get all the thoughts and to do’s for each project organized in my head, and my external space starts getting messier and messier. At a certain point of physical disarray in my home office environment, I realize that I need to step back and clean my office. Somehow the act of sitting in the midst of my piles, I start to clear my head as I put piles in the trashcan, the give-away box or in their place.

I’ve been thinking about this phenomena lately and whether it derives from being an INFP or if it’s just a personal quirk. As an INFP, I don’t prioritize personal projects because they’re all important to me or I wouldn’t be doing them. They’re all what I consider “growth” project because some aspect doing the project helps me grow into my Ideal Self.

I have no problem prioritizing non-personal projects like house maintenance or my dayjob projects. So why don’t I finish my personal projects one at a time? It’s like weight training. No one goes to the gym and works out just their arms for a month until they can curl a set weight before going to the next body part.

As I get older, I’ve learned to set a time limit on how long I spend to complete milestones in a project. If I haven’t hit my targets, I go back and re-evaluate in order to figure out what results I’m really trying to achieve. If I’m not getting a project done and my office is getting messier then it’s mostly likely that even though I may be getting what I thought I wanted, I’m not getting what I really wanted so I delay and procrastinate. That re-evaluation process is where I decide if there’s a better way or a better project to get what I want.

Usually this happens after I clean my room. I guess my mom was right.