I love your blog and think it is just fine the way it is. I’m sure any improvements you chose to make will be good ones. Your blog entries are insightful and inspiring. Sometimes I find myself giggling because you always point out all the little quirks. It’s nice to know I’m not the only one.

I am the same way with goals. I either accomplish them or I fail and make new ones. I often wish I could just enjoy what I have created for myself rather than always needing to find something new and better because I get bored easily.

In response to your previous post, I’m a left-handed INFP so I think I’m super special

INFPs want things that are completely incompatible with INFP behavior. There’s no way to get certain things we want if continue with that behavior. Either we compensate (I like the word better than rectify) for that behavior or we can continue blaming the world for not accepting us for who we are.

For example, INFPs like do things because we feel inspired. So should clients be more accepting of the excuse that I didn’t get your project done because I didn’t feel inspired. Would you like it if the guy you hired to fix your plumbing came over and told you after 5 minutes that he wasn’t really inspired and can’t do his best work right now. Clients hire people who are on time and will deliver work on time, which favors a J preference. Either the P learns to adopt certain J behaviors or Ps won’t be able to compete.

INFPs have goals like any other type whether is writing the next bestseller or finding the perfect girl. I haven’t found anyone who’s written any advice called “Procrastinate You Way To A Successful Writing Career”. In every piece of advice I’ve read from successful authors, there hasn’t been a single one that tells me to write whenever I feel like it. It’s very INFP to do things as we feel inspired or as things move us. Of course, someone who wants to be successful writer, can continue their INFP way of writing and wonder why they haven’t gotten as far as they liked. The other course is to follow the advice of successful writers that say you need to write every day whether you like it with a set goal of a specific number of words which is very J behavior.

Honestly, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with typical INFP behavior unless it stands in the way of getting what we want. Maybe there’s is an INFP way of doing things that will get us to our dream lives. I wrote an blog post called You Are What You Believe about the System, the system, the Games, the Rules, and the Rewards. Rules for the Games are discovered by the people who have gotten the Rewards. Those people tend to write books about the Rules they discovered to get those that Reward.

The “Become a successful novelist” Game has Rules as discovered by the previous successful writers. The Reward is having a published book that people will read and hopefully monetary compensation. I can either choose to follow the Rules to get the Reward. Or I can waste a lot of time trying to find the INFP method of Procrastinate You Way To A Successful Writing Career. Honestly, I prefer to have my Rewards sooner rather than later.

Don’t you think you are composing this blog as a kind of “rectifying” course to make left-handed people write with their right hand? Don’t you think it would be great to implement some “INFP-handed” tools/ways in the world the way there are left-handed ones?

But when we decide we must leave someone or something behind it can be with some ambivalence. Perhaps most of what we invest in is not without merit–it’s just that we have only a limited amount of energy and time, and investing in the “okay” keeps us from investing in the good or the great. So we might say that life demands of us periodic prunings, because she gives us only so much nourishment and sap, so much sunshine and air.

It may also help us to remember that even a project or a person we decide to leave behind may have served a good, even noble, purpose for a time in our lives (and, in the case of a person, perhaps we served a good purpose for him or her).

I live on a property with acreage that I’ve spent several years improving–renovating a large one-of-a-kind gambrel-roofed barn, putting in a lot of work on a big old farmhouse, clearing and improving fields, planting an orchard, etc., etc.–and now I’m getting ready to put in on the market. I will miss the place, but I keep in mind that all those hours working in the fields mowing, or cutting and clearing fallen trees, or hauling brush, or building or painting or supervising renovations to the structures…all those activities had a value for me at that time in my journey. Now I’m in a different “place” existentially, but then I needed to wrestle-dance with earth and tree and stone, and to confront various sensory realities and challenges. In short, though I won’t be staying on this property, I need not regret having invested my energies in it for a time. I have been influenced by the experience, learned from it, was deepened by it, in many ways.

Or at least that’s what I tell myself.

It’s really hard to let go though, especially with the people.

I’m glad your Zero Based Thinking leads you to the conclusion to keep writing your blog. I’ve only recently stumbled upon it, and I find your writings intelligent, informative, and with a (constructively) bracing quality (perhaps less than common among INFPs).

Happy 1st blog anniversary, and thanks for sharing your ideas and experiences with the rest of us.

Kheiron