ENTP

The Broken Brow

Wants to flip every claim over and look underneath

Your first response to an assertion is to hunt for the counterexample. That isn't contrarianism, it's how you think — an idea that hasn't been attacked hasn't been shown to hold. You keep seven or eight threads open at once and switch between them fast, which makes you lethal in a brainstorm and miserable when something needs three straight months of the same work. You love reanimating a stuck discussion. You're less fond of clearing up afterwards.

Where you move easily

• Where everyone sees a dead end, you produce a third option — and it's often genuinely workable.
• You'll put the problem on the table at the cost of the room's comfort. Plenty of teams' polite fictions got lifted by you.
• New fields have no threshold for you. You get to seventy percent quickly and can hold a real conversation with specialists.

What it tends to cost

• You've won more arguments without solving the problem than you think. People going quiet usually means they're done with you, not persuaded.
• You open far more than you close, so people learn not to take your new ideas seriously — including the ones worth doing.
• You treat boredom as intolerable, so you'll manufacture change just as something finally gets on track.

At work

You belong at the front end: setting direction, finding the route, arguing the impossible into the possible. Handing long execution and maintenance to someone else isn't laziness, it's correct division of labour. You need somewhere that permits experiments and doesn't treat changing your mind as a character flaw — and a partner who will pin you down and make you finish the last thing.

In relationships

You're interesting; beginnings cost you almost nothing. Later is harder — your appetite for novelty reads as having lost interest in the person. In a fight your instinct is to win, and in intimacy every win is charged to the relationship's account. What you need to practise is swallowing the rebuttal you've already composed while the other person is still speaking.

Worth trying

• Cap what you have running at three things. Write the rest down and seal it.
• In an argument, restate their position first and confirm you got it right.
• Take something half-done that's no longer new, and finish it.