Creating and understanding systems & frameworks

Marinus · April 8, 2021

Intro

Once more I'll make a journal to help myself make progress. This journal will be a copy of my personal OneNote journal. The purpose of this journal is to write down everything in my mind to create a digital copy of my insights, wisdom, thinking process, lesson learned, etc. to have proof of progress for when I feel down, demotivated etc. Putting it out on display on actualized.org is a way to keep myself accountable, knowing that people read my journal. My insight and progress can also serve as inspiration for people that are into personal development as well. I will be honest in my posts and fully expose my inner world on this forum. How often I will post I don't know yet.

08-April-2020

Edited April 8, 2021 by Marinus

Marinus · April 9, 2021

Framework: strengths & weaknesses

To talk about my strengths & weaknesses I'll be creating a mindmap with MBTI as the basic framework. I score INTJ-T on the MBTI test, it used to be INFJ, but I'm sure that INTJ fits me way better. Down below is the collection of strengths & weaknesses. Some things might be in a different category. Honestly this was a fun exercise, I have way more traits written down now than I expected. In the future things might be added or changed.

Introverted intuition

The introverted intuition function is my most used function and, the one with the most strengths and least weaknesses. In summary my greatest strengths are creating visions, objective detachment, questioning, understanding abstract concepts and avoiding traps. My greatest weakness is detachment of reality

Extraverted thinking

In summary my greatest strengths are strategic thinking, understanding cause and effect, preparation and problem solving. My greatest weaknesses are overthinking, perfectionism and procrastination.

Introverted feeling

In summary my strengths are living according to principles, integrity and determination to achieve. My weaknesses are being very sensitive, being emotionally closed off, insecurity and not feeling worthy of love.

Extraverted sensing

My greatest strengths is my athleticism which I created myself without being gifted. All my physical powers and abilities are a strength which is a result from Ni, Te and Fi combined. My greatest weaknesses are visual stimulation like porn, lack of expression, sustaining a diet for fitness and postponing physical needs.

Edited April 10, 2021 by Marinus

Marinus · April 10, 2021

Framework: spiral dynamics

I did a test about what I value within an organization. It's very useful to know now that I'm in my last year of college. 3 years ago I learned about this framework and I thought to be fully in stage green, I looked down on orange and wasn't honest about that at that time. I was reluctant about being in stage yellow and I didn't thought to be in stage turquoise at all.

I take this test with a grain of salt though. What I think is interesting is that I'm more stage orange than green. The last 2 years I sought reason for why I was green and not orange, but in those following 2 years my wisdom increased and self honesty is now a daily practice. I notice that my awareness about how societal system work becomes better and better. It's now easy to see how complex the world is and how changing one thing has a butterfly effect on all else.

My beliefs about being vegan contain contradictions and I am aware that I choose to value animals above plant despite both beings being alive and desiring to be alive. It's not as simple to say that eating and killing animals is wrong, evil and a sins. I don't want to hurt animals and I know that hurting plants isn't any better, but I still choose this option, because there has to be a boundary for me to function healthy. To me it's all about the greater good, the world as a single organism is more important than I am, I'll serve this world with my lifestyle. So instead of a green perspective, it seems that I have a yellow or turquois perspective on this matter.

For a long time people have seen my as egotistic, because I like to talk about myself. People however are unaware that my intentions are helping them, but now I see that they aren't ready to hear what I have to say. Lately I'm paying more attention to what other people say instead of trying to teach them. To be honest I don't really care about individuals that aren't friends, family or people I regularly interact with. What I do care about is people on a larger scale. Trying to please everyone is impossible and not efficient. I don't like it when individuals start demanding things that benefit them, but not the planet and humanity as a whole. Again it seems that my perspective is higher than green.

So why am I still in stage orange? This is a simple question. Currently I am still a poor student with dept and my value as a cog in the societal system isn't established yet. I need to make a living, a home and professional identity before I'm able to transcend this stag completely. I realized that orange isn't something to despise. Orange is the stage that will bring me a lot of value at a young age, I'm okay with it now, I'm okay with orange for the years to come.

SamC · April 11, 2021

Broo, I love this. Amazing journal - thanks for sharing.

Marinus · April 11, 2021

@SamC Thank you . I have been absent from this forum for 2 years so I've got a lot to post in this journal.

Marinus · April 24, 2021

Insight: Extreme polarity Fi

Since starting personal development I noticed a pattern in my behaviour. I'm an all or nothing person. My mentality is black and white when it comes to how I approach life. I either am extremely driven, focused on something or a complete lazy ass. When I believe that I need to do a certain thing it usually will work for a period of 2 months. I appear to be confident to people around me and very intense. I often hear from others that I need to relax more and enjoy life. With enjoyment they mean that I need to do things like going out with friends, eat crap, watch tv, laugh and not taking things seriously.

I'm not entirely sure about why they say this. People might have the best interest for me, because they themselves aren't able to handle such pressure that I create for myself which results in projection. They might also try to bring me down to their level, because it's threatening that I'm trying to achieve something in life. What people don't understand is that if I do things like extremely it motivates me and I feel like I can take on the world. I have the tendency to share my experiences about my practices with people, but after years of trying this I now am very aware that my approach to life isn't common and it doesn't benefit me or someone else to talk about this unless they ask about it.

I think that the Te and Fi functions are the cause of my behaviour. The thinking and feeling functions are the functions that are about decision making. Te is about applying my knowledge to real work practical applications and Fi is about what drives me. My Fi is the black & white thinking. When something is in line with my values I take action on it. One value of mine is learning about myself and building myself to fit in this world, basically personal development. My beliefs about personal development when it is about myself subjectively speaking are childlike. I believe that I have to be like this and no other way. The benefit of this is that there is a clear motivations, it's simple. A child likes to eat candy, because it's tasty, nothing more or less. It's the same with my beliefs. The magic happens when I made this decision and use Te to strengthening is with logic. When I do something there are always multiple reason for it. This is Te in action. When I have a belief it's easy to back it up with multiple beneficial reasons. The reasons for personal development are vast. The more reasons the easier is becomes to pursuit a value. It's rare that I can't answer to why I persuit a certain goal. This makes me appear very confident in the eyes of others and also a little bit crazy

The video talks about how functions combined mimic other functions. I was surprised, because my Ni discovered this weeks ago before I saw this video, so I'm glad I found it. In my case Te and Fi combined result in my mimicking Fe when I talk with people. When I talk about my Te accomplishments based on Fi values it looks like I try to be accepted in a group. Logically speaking what I do doesn't work, because Fe is about what communities value and to be honest I don't really care about communities, because they have many flaws. It's just that I try to lift people up, but again this is projection. How I approach life is not common as I said, because the INTJ type is rare, people don't fit in this mold. People rather don't want anything to do with me. One of my friends said he gets stressed out when I'm around him and our friend group. Honestly I feel kind of lonely. Many people simple don't want to live like how I live which makes it difficult to make a connection. Personal development wise my life approach is quite good, but when trying to build relationships it simple doesn't work the way I try it right now. My Fe mimicking appraoch in the eyes of others is: someone driven, confident, intense, slightly insane and very controlling.

My Fi black and white thinking does have a huge downside which is that I can easily break. When I have a routine it falls apart when there is a disturbance like taking a day off for example. It also creates a lot of doubt and uncertainty about my abilities. The lack of Si feeds this, because I almost never look back and smile at my accomplishments. After 5 years of personal development I still feel like a beginner that doesn't really know shit although I act like if I do. Objectively speaking I think I do pretty well, but my child like feelings sabotage my self-reflection.

Marinus · May 2, 2021

Ni & Se pleasure plan sabotaging

Ni is al about perception. Perceiving live in my comfort zone while living it is a challenge. Ni pleasure is about feeding my mind with interesting ideas, fantasies and fiction. When Ni pleasure takes over I procrastinate and I don't make conscious decisions which I do with Te and/or Fi. Besides Ni pleasure there is also Se pleasure which in my case is unhealthy food and porn. These pleasures are reality based. Currently my routine is once again destroyed thanks to my perceiving functions. I expected this. After 5 years of personal development I'm very sure that my mind gives resistance after 1 month to 2 months of consistent behaviours that are based on Te and Fi decisions. My hypothesis is that my mind get's bored after a month. Homeostasis is also at play here. To truly use this in my advantage I have to look at my greatest achievement.

My greatest achievement is in the realm of calisthenics training. After a year I still feel motivated to work out which is an abnormal occurrence for me. What is the secret to my success of still being able to workout? I can divide it in three parts. Part 1 is: the theme/subject and part 2 is change within the theme. The theme of training is physical training/sport. The change within training is the selection of exercises. The last part is vision. I have a vision for the next year about how I workout and what I want to achieve concretely.

In order to apply my learned lessons I need to give up on my old routine and adjust my routine to make it new, but not entirely different just like my physical training. Being adaptable is key, because if I try to stick to one thing it's not going to be motivating. I'm not sure if I'm able to do the same thing forever which in mastery is key. However I don't need to follow the traditional path of mastery. I'm just not someone who want's to commit to something specific. I rather commit to an idea which feels way more natural to an N person. Sticking to what always worked it the strength of a S MBTI dominant person and this is my weakest function. My mind needs change within the idea. The idea it self doesn't has to change, it just needs to change to a brighter or darker shade to give enough challenge for my mind.

I don't know how other people feel about this, but I think this is what an INTJ can help since our main function is Ni. Te comes second and does what Ni desires. If Te is in control I simply will fail. Ni is the true master of my mind and my true power. It's okay for me to let go of the traditional idea of mastery. Instead I'll use what I call NEO mastery. Fighting against what how I function takes away energy, but guiding my thinking to follow the path of least resistance is what will give me the most energy. Simple typing this is helping me to digest this idea and simultaneously feed my Ni to create ideas and a new vision. At this moment I drink alcohol which is considered unhealthy (which isn't true it isn't black and white) Alcohol makes me more numb and I hypothesize that my weaker function suffer the most which results in Ni being the most capable function to remain and blocking out every other function that tries to fight against Ni like Fi for example. My feeling don't influence my thinking at this very moment.

That Aside I want to create a new plan. The routine of waking and sleeping won't change. Instead I plan to change the structure within the routine. This is the end of this post. Now I will structurize my ideas that I gathered this day to create a new plan which isn't very different from the original. I don't really have to do anything except typing it out.

Marinus · May 2, 2021

Plan internship 2.0