L'Optimisme

My favorite reading tends toward dystopian novels and dark fictional stories like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Never Let Me Go,The Poisonwood Bible, and Song of Solomon. Yet, I'm by no means put down by these types of stories. Theoretically speaking, I could go on and on after reading a book entitled Empathy and the Novel about all of the reasons that what we read has nearly zero impact on how we think or behave, it merely has the potential to enrich our perspective. But that's not the path I'm going down today.

Today, I'm interested in the synchronicity that I am experiencing with the word optimism lately, which has piqued my interest even more because I completed the official Myers Briggs Type Indicator and found out that my personality type is ENFP, which is called the most optimistic personality and is characterized by "giving life an extra squeeze." My first thought was actually, "oh shit, Candide warned me against this."

So, now that I've been mulling over this characterization, I've been seeing the promising aspects of optimism rather than seeing my life go down a long series of unfortunate events in which I respond "all is for the best in this best of all possible worlds." And admittedly, most of these opinions are coming my way through the New York Times or the New Yorker...so, something tells me that perhaps NYC is in search of the ENFP.

One of these was a recent article entitled "Really? Optimism Reduces the Risk of Heart Disease," which shows some correlation between optimism and physical health. Another one a month later, "A Richer Life by Seeing the Glass Half Full," talks about the benefits of optimism and definitely sounded familiar to the way that I think and approach situations. Anyway, this is all good news for me, especially since I had no idea that I was an optimist before the Myers Briggs thing. I definitely thought that I had a positive perspective, but I didn't realize that in the scheme of their 16 personality groupings, mine is the most optimistic.

Of course, this has made me slightly obsessive about where my friends rank on this scale. I think I have a lot of other ENFP's in my life...and a lot of ESTJ's and ISFP's.... I'm not sure how helpful the Myers Briggs test has been for me in general, but I will say that in the workplace it has been super duper helpful. My employee feels she knows me better and "gets" me better as does my supervisor. So, I'd say it has been really helpful in that specific situation, but I would hate to be labelled like this in general...because after all, the ENFP type hates labels!

I just took this test online to see if it would give me the same answer as the official test, and it did, so take the quiz here if you are interested in finding out your type: http://www.humanmetrics.com/cgi-win/jtypes2.asp

In conclusion, I feel the need at this moment to point out at that my partner has the following poster on a wall in the apartment that we share, and we make an excellent pair: