Do What You Are Book Summary

Book Summary

15 min

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Brief Summary

"Do What You Are" by Paul Tieger helps readers understand their personality type and use that knowledge to make informed career choices, leading to greater satisfaction and success. The book explores the sixteen MBTI personality types, offering insights into strengths, weaknesses, and work preferences. It provides practical advice on leveraging strengths, overcoming challenges, and finding fulfilling career paths that align with one's personality type.

About the Author

Paul D. Tieger is an expert in Personality Types. He is the Founder and first Director of The New England Type Institute. Mr. Tieger has trained thousands of managers, team leaders, HR professionals, career consultants, psychologists, attorneys, and educators in his career.

Topics

Career & Success

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Key Insights

Do What You Are discusses the different personality types and their temperament groups, along with their respective preferences, blind spots, strengths, and weaknesses. Using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator can help identify which of the 16 personality types are your dominant traits. Knowing your personality type will facilitate choosing the career path that will give the best chance for success because work can be easy and enjoyable when it fits with your personality, innate temperaments, and primary functions.

Personality Type Identification

The notion of personality types goes back as far as ancient Greece and was refined in 1929 by Carl Jung. Katherine Briggs and her daughter Isabel Briggs Myers developed the concept further. After many years of research and testing, they created what is now called the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI). It relies on four preference scales and identifies 16 distinct personality types.

The value of this self-test is how it helps you identify the way you interact with the world and assists you to pick a career that brings satisfaction. If you are in the wrong career, it can feel like writing using the non-dominant hand. With enough practice, you can accomplish the task, but it may be lower quality, more difficult, tedious, and less fulfilling.

On the other hand, work that suits your personality type can actually be something you look forward to doing, and which gives you energy.

When piecing together the various personality types that are revealed by taking the MBTI, don’t believe the notion that one personality type is more prone to success than another. It can be common for our culture to value an extroverted personality above the introvert, but that is nonsense. When you are doing the work that best suits you, your success will be much easier than going against your natural grain.

Four Basic Temperaments of the Personality Types

While there are 16 distinct personality types in the MBTI, they can be divided into four temperaments.

Traditionalists thrive on stability, order, and consistency. These people will follow through with whatever task they are given. A weakness is that they don’t adapt well and avoid long-term thinking. Around 50% of police officers are traditionalists, which is a high percentage from one career field. It can be understood, though, as traditionalists prefer strong organizational structures and clear procedures, expectations, and chains of command.

Experiencers are adventurous, outgoing, and impulsive. Their strengths are courage, innovation, and adaptability. They tend to be good at using tools. Weaknesses include impulsiveness that can result in irresponsibility and they don’t recognize patterns and connections very well. Many Experiencers are in law enforcement, but different than Traditionalists, they are there for the thrill, the variety and the unpredictability of the work.

Idealists are about personal growth, knowledge acquisition, integrity, and authenticity. They gravitate toward meaningful work which tends to reflect spirituality and philosophy. Strengths include being open to people and bringing out the best in others. They are highly creative. The downside of Idealists is that they lean toward moodiness, impracticality, being overly emotional, and are poor at handling...