I’ve just finished week 3 of my Myers-Briggs trials. This week focused on feeling.

I didn’t think this trial would be especially difficult, but it turned out to be the hardest one by far of the three I’ve done.

While I’m definitely a thinker overall, I answer some of the MBTI questions as a feeler would, so I didn’t think I was that one-sided. On the other hand, thinking is the dominant function of an INTP (also of an ISTP, ESTJ, and ENTJ), so maybe that’s why it was so hard to act differently.

I tried to practice empathy by looking at people and imagining how they felt. At one point I was even talking to some trees, saying that they probably don’t like having lights wrapped around them during the day when they’re not being used. I even apologized for not knowing their names and having to call each one of them “Mr. Tree.” This all felt a bit silly to me.

I had meant to re-read the oneness chapter from Personal Development for Smart People, but I didn’t get around to it. I had also meant to spend some time around art and focus on how it made me feel (a suggestion from RL David), but the art gallery near me must be under renovation or something, because there’s currently no art in it.

I guess it didn’t help that I’m working on a particular section of my next ebook that demands all the logic I can muster. However, I didn’t want to let this experiment be too disruptive, so I decided not to stop working on that.

I guess my main stumbling block is that I don’t have enough patience. I tried to slow down when reading feeling-oriented blog posts so I could absorb the feeling vibes, but I kept wanting to finish them quickly and move on to something else. I tried to listen to a feeling-oriented audio, but I kept having to switch over to Firefox and do something else because I couldn’t concentrate on the audio. I also got into an argument with someone because I wasn’t patient enough.

I think I might be able to work on this by practicing meditation. I’ve tried it a few times, and only once have I been able to make it through the full 20 minutes that I had planned. I keep thinking about things I have to do, and it becomes too hard to just sit there, so I sometimes can’t even make it 5 minutes before giving up. I figure that in addition to the usual benefits of meditation, I could also use it as a tool to measure my progress in developing enough patience to sit there for 20 minutes and feel instead of think.

Yet another week of realizing how attached I am to my personality. I think the worst must be over, but I’m looking forward to the end. That’s the good thing about your non-preferences: there are only four of them.

Image from The Matrix Reloaded (2003)

In one scene of Enter the Matrix, Trinity asks Ghost if he really believes that Neo will fulfill the prophesy of him ending between the war between the humans and the machines.

“Do you believe that Neo is going to end the war?”

“Yes. I do.”

“So do I. But I can’t explain how or why.”

“Kierkegaard reminds us that belief has nothing to do with how or why. Belief is beyond reason. I believe because it is absurd.”

“You think it’s crazy to believe it?”

“To believe what? That a single man can defeat an entire race of machines, and end a war that has endured for over a hundred years? Of course! It’s complete lunacy. And that’s why we must believe it will happen. Faith by its very nature must transcend logic.”

I believe in global warming. I believe that it exists, that it’s caused by humans, and that it’s a big problem. You might think that I’m crazy to believe something like that with absolutely no evidence. It’s not like I’ve been measuring air and ocean temperatures, or analyzing greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere.

Oh sure, there are supposedly some scientists who say the evidence is out there, but I’ve never seen it personally. I haven’t even met anyone who’s seen it. And in spite of that, I still choose to believe it.

Maybe global warming is too much of a stretch for you. Maybe you’d like to believe in something a little more certain, like gravity. But that’s a coward’s belief. You don’t believe in gravity, you know in gravity. If there’s no chance of being wrong, it’s not a belief, it’s a certainty.

A belief has to require a leap of faith in order to mean anything. And yes, that means you might be wrong. So put yourself out there and take a chance of being wrong. Don’t just sit on the sidelines playing it safe.

Image from The Matrix (1999)

In general, which is the greater mistake: believing something that turns out to be false, or not believing something that turns out to be true? People like to think that nothing is wrong with the second one, but aren’t they equally bad?

You can’t refrain from having an opinion, wait until incontrovertible proof arrives one day, and then decide to believe it and think you’re so smart for being sure not to be wrong. If you weren’t willing to go out on a limb one way or the other, you were wrong by default. We’re all going to be wrong a lot of the time no matter what, so you might as well hold beliefs that work for you.

I believe that I’ll ultimately make more money from this blog if I only promote products I like and present them fairly. Is that a sure thing? No, not at all. In fact, you kind of have to ignore logic a bit to believe it. But I think this belief serves me.

You can believe that people are fundamentally good, or that they’re fundamentally bad. You can believe in God, or believe in no God. You can believe that this is the worst time in human history, or that this is the best time in human history. Any reasonable belief will be true enough to defend, but you have to always ask if your beliefs serve you, because some can be detrimental.

Don’t be afraid to have beliefs beyond reason. Most of us believe a few things that we’ll admit don’t even make sense. And when you’re laughing at someone who won’t buy a house because the street number is 13, they’re laughing at you for not opening umbrellas indoors.

But it’s all about what works for you. If a belief feels right to you and leads you in the right direction, go for it, even though you might be wrong. That’s OK, and that’s why they’re called beliefs and not certainties.

But you know what? Even so-called certainties can be wrong. I’ve met lots of people who believed there was no such thing as a one-sided piece of paper, until I made them a Möbius strip.

Photo by David Benbennick

“Why not go out on a limb? Isn’t that where the fruit is?”

- Frank Scully

Just when I thought there are no stupid questions, someone proved me wrong.

My friend was having lunch with someone yesterday. The waitress came over to take their order, and my friend ordered a Chinese Chicken Salad, with the dressing on the side. Her friend ordered a Turkey Club sandwich, with no cheese or mayo.

This is where the waitress should think, “These people are trying to make healthy food choices.”

Instead, she asked, “Would you like to start with our 4 layer, deep dish Macaroni and Cheese?”

After writing yesterday’s post, I remembered a teacher who said that the only stupid question is one you already know the answer to. If we modify that to say “one you should already know the answer to,” then this was a stupid question.

I’m sure the waitress was supposed to ask it because the 4 layer deep dish Macaroni and Cheese is a new appetizer the restaurant is featuring, and they want people to be aware of it. Fine, but tweak the question when you know it doesn’t make sense for the customer. “Would you like to start with an appetizer?” would have been much more reasonable.

If you sell cars, and someone wants to buy a Ford Taurus with anti-lock brakes and a baby car seat, it’s reasonable to ask, “Do you want side-impact airbags?” It’s not reasonable to ask, “Do you want neon underbody lighting and a direct port nitrous system?”

Asking inappropriate questions just shows that you’re not paying attention.

“There is no such thing as a stupid question. However, if there were such a thing, that would most certainly have been it.”

- Unknown

Is there such a thing as a stupid question? Tim Brownson doesn’t think so, and I’m leaning towards that myself. There might be annoying questions, like if you happen to be blessed with a 5-year-old who constantly asks things like “If oranges were blue, would we still call it orange juice?” But then you stop and think about it, and you realize that it’s a darn good question, probably better than any you’ve asked in a while.

The closest thing to a stupid question I can think of is when someone in my high school Spanish class asked “What does spoon mean?” But that wasn’t a stupid question, just a stupid way of phrasing the question that was supposed to be “How do you say spoon in Spanish?”

In Tim’s book Don’t Ask Stupid Questions - There Are No Stupid Questions, he says that our life is heavily influenced by the questions we ask, especially those we ask of ourselves. So what questions are you asking?

You have an inner voice, right? Does it ask questions? It probably screams at you and maybe tells you that you can’t do anything right, or nothing’s ever going to work out. But when it’s in a calmer mood, it’s asks questions, doesn’t it? If not, it really should, unless you already know everything. Sometimes the question is a lot more important than the answer.

In this book, Tim tones down his hilarious humor a bit and reveals more of the life coach side of him. OK, he also talks about ducks, whether curiosity did indeed kill the cat, and Mexican guys who can run 100 miles without stopping, but I mean the book has a lot more than just entertainment value. It’s very insightful, and each chapter ends with a great question to ask yourself. Don’t just read it–think about the questions!

It’s available as a $14.99 hardcover or a $9.99 ebook. I read the hardcover, and I was impressed that he managed to put out something that looks that nice. I just may have to kidnap his publisher to use for myself.

However, I’m still not 100% convinced that there are no stupid questions, so I’d like to ask everyone to leave the stupidest question you can think of in the comments. Then go check out Don’t Ask Stupid Questions - There Are No Stupid Questions.

In week 3 of my Myers-Briggs trials, I’ll be focusing on feeling. Thinking and feeling refer to the way we prefer to make decisions.

• Thinkers make decisions in an objective, detached way. They determine the right thing to do through logical reasoning.
• Feelers make decisions in a subjective, attached way. They determine the right thing to do by putting themselves in other people’s shoes, seeking to maintain harmony.

A good way to think of the difference is to consider justice versus mercy. Thinkers think justice is more important, while feelers think mercy is more important.

I expect that this trial will be a lot easier now than it would have been a few years ago. I used to not have much patience with people who did things wrong. But now I’m more forgiving of people who say “nucular” and “supposably” and “I could care less.” It still bugs me, but I’m much better at biting my tongue. Since criticizing rarely produces a desirable outcome, I try to pick my battles more carefully.

Beyond just being nice, I plan to make a point of thinking about how other people feel. Not just people I’m talking to, but everyone within range. A good role model for this would be the empath Deanna Troi from Star Trek. I only saw a few episodes, but I remember thinking it would be really creepy to be around her because of the mind reading thing. I guess non-telepathic empathy is fine though.

I can also re-read the section on oneness from Steve Pavlina’s book Personal Development for Smart People. This is all about feeling a connection with everyone and everything. It came across as a foreign concept to me, so I could definitely benefit from reading it again.

We’ll see how good a job I do at being nice. Go feelers!

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Because of your click-throughs, I received free admission to Michael Martine’s blog traffic seminar. Thanks!

It really wasn’t that I did such a great job, just that I was the only one of the seminar attendees who tried. I’ve won a fair number of contests only because there was no competition.

I’ve just finished week 2 of my Myers-Briggs trials. This week focused on sensing.

I was really surprised to see how hard this was. I didn’t think it would be nearly as tough as the extraversion trial, but it proved to be much harder. Fortunately though, I said I would judge myself on effort, not results.

Some psychologists consider the sensing/intuitive dichotomy to be the most important of the four. I can see how that could be true. I’m not particularly one-sided here according to my MBTI results, but I found it impossible to turn off my intuition (and remember that intuition here has nothing to do with mystical insight, which I don’t have at all).

Since I wasn’t able to stop using intuition, I tried to simply use more sensing. I tried to notice details by deliberately shouting out what I saw, heard, etc (some people must have thought I was crazy). While this felt kind of weird, it had the pleasant side effect of letting me realize that I had always walked right past this great smoothie place and never noticed it. Yogi Berra was right: “You can observe a lot just by watchin.”

I happened to have a dentist appointment, and of course it was easy to focus on what I was seeing, hearing, and feeling. It was just a cleaning, but if I had gotten the drill, it would have helped the experiment.

I thought the best part of sensing would be the whole “live for the moment” thing, so I tried to make every little thing seem special. When I ate an apple, I thought, “This apple is really sweet and crunchy. I can feel the vitamins and fiber coming into my body. I won’t always be able to eat apples, so for now, this apple is all that matters.” Yes, this got tiring very quickly, because it just didn’t come naturally.

One way to look at it is that sensors are grounded in reality while intuitives have their head in the clouds. But that’s where I want my head. Reality bores me.

Another interesting experiment, but I’m glad it’s over.

Barack Obama and John McCain are both left-handed introverts. The odds of this happening are about a thousand to one.

On the other hand, if this weren’t true, I’d just find something else they have in common. The odds are pretty much 100% that there would be some notable coincidence.

Hindsight will always find something interesting, but coincidences are only remarkable if you call them in advance. No fair picking your lottery number after they tell you the winner.

Statistics can be used to prove anything. Forfty percent of all people know that.

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Jamie Harrop has just released One Killer Interview With 10 Killer Bloggers - Analysis & Free ebook. It’s a compilation of interviews with ten bloggers: me, Jamie, Chris Garrett, Jeremy Schoemaker, Liz Strauss, Darren Rowse, Ben Barden, Al Carlton, Cath Lawson, and Erica Douglass. You can read any of the interviews from his post (click a name to expand the interview), or download them all as an 18 page ebook.

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Less than 24 hours to go until Michael Martine’s blog traffic seminar. It’s gonna be good!

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Ari Herzog told me about the Palin as President site. Very funny!

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I separated the funny quotes from my quote list into their own section. I had been meaning to create separate sections at some point, but Bruce Achterberg provided an incentive with his funny quote contest.

VS.

It’s hardly a fair fight.

• There is only one Steve Pavlina, but there are six ThunderCats (counting WilyKat and WilyKit but not Jaga or Snarf).
• Steve doesn’t believe in harming animals or consuming animal products. The ThunderCats are natural predators.
• Steve carries no weapons. The ThunderCats carry a sword, bolas, nunchakus, a staff, and an assortment of devious mystery capsules.
• Steve has a spirit guide who helps him win at blackjack. The ThunderCats have the spirit of Jaga the Wise.
• Steve drives a normal family car (I assume). The ThunderCats have the ThunderTank, Feliner, ThunderClaw, ThunderStrike, and HoverCat.
• Steve is colorblind. The Sword of Omens gives Lion-O sight beyond sight.
• Steve has lucid dreams and astral travel. Tygra can project completely realistic illusions into other people’s minds.
• Steve is a decent marathon runner. Cheetara runs a 30 second mile.
• Steve does weight training. Panthro can lift a tank.
• And so on, and so on.

Do we really need to witness this massacre? Wait, don’t avert your gaze just yet. This isn’t going to be a real fight. We’re just going to compare their principles of personal development.

In Steve’s new book, Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth, he describes his seven core principles. The three primary principles are truth, love, and power, from which we can derive the secondary principles of oneness, authority, courage, and intelligence. I’ve previously written about this book (before I read it) in my posts Pre-order Personal Development For Smart People and Personal Development For Smart People: Free Sample Chapter, so I’ll try not to repeat myself too much.

The ThunderCats live by the Code of Thundera: truth, honor, loyalty, and justice.

Truth, love, and power vs. truth, honor, loyalty, and justice. Which is better?

Everyone has their own set of principles:

• Virginia Tech’s motto is Ut Prosim (That I May Serve).
• Harvard’s motto is Veritas (Truth).
• Yale’s is Lux Et Veritas (Light and Truth).
• The school in Kindergarten Cop uses the 3 Cs: caring, courtesy, and courage.

(These schools will all fight on the side of the ThunderCats.)

There are endless combinations of principles out there, but which is best? And does it really matter?

What Steve wanted to do with his book was to write about the roots of personal development, instead of writing about the branches like he and everyone else had done before. He wanted to uncover the common pattern behind all successful growth efforts and come up with a set of principles that was universal, complete, irreducible, congruent, and practical.

I was looking for more information about how he came up with these particular principles and decided that they were the principles of personal growth and not just some principles. I have an upcoming interview with him where he’ll shed some light on that. For now, we can at least accept that these can potentially be the fundamental building blocks of personal growth.

Consider the ThunderCats’ principles of truth, honor, loyalty, and justice. How do they differ from Steve’s principles of truth, love, and power?

First of all, they both have truth in common. But then the ThunderCats get a little redundant. Honor, loyalty, and justice are similar to truth, so the Code of Thundera is more complicated than it has to be. Steve only wanted to include the most basic principles, with no overlap between them. I bet a lot of kids would have found truth a lot easier to memorize and understand than truth, honor, loyalty, and justice.

Also, while honor and loyalty touch on love, not all aspects of love are covered. And while justice touches on power, power is largely missing from the code. Therefore, the Code of Thundera can’t serve as a complete set of personal growth principles.

Now let’s go back to those schools I mentioned before:

• Virginia Tech’s Ut Prosim (That I May Serve) touches on love and truth, but misses power.
• Harvard’s Veritas (Truth) is missing love and power.
• Yale’s Lux Et Veritas (Light and Truth) is missing power. I don’t really know what light is, but I guess it’s truth and love.
• The kindergarten’s caring, courtesy, and courage are heavy on love, but a little light on power and completely missing truth.

Does that make these bad mottos? Not at all, and I’m sure Steve doesn’t want everyone to change their motto to truth, love, and power. But we need to realize two things:

1. Any set of principles that omits truth, love, or power (and doesn’t allow them to be derived) is not a complete model for conscious living. But not everything is meant to be, and that’s perfectly fine. I’m sure Harvard doesn’t think that truth is everything, just that it’s what they strive for at that institution. And the ThunderCats embraced power even though it wasn’t in their code, so maybe their code was designed to temper their power (after all, it’s what separates them from the power-hungry Mumm-Ra and the mutants).

2. Any set of principles that conflicts with truth, love, or power conflicts with conscious living. You might not be convinced that truth, love, and power can be used to derive all essential principles, but you probably agree that none of them should be violated. Without truth, you’re living in lies and denial. Without love, you’re alone and empty. Without power, you’re a weak victim. None of this is good.

These are not restrictive principles, and there’s plenty of room for variation. Your truth can be different from my truth. Steve points out that the principles don’t dictate any particular spiritual philosophy, as long as your choice doesn’t conflict with truth, love, or power.

I’m probably in the minority in that I didn’t find his book as enjoyable to read as his blog. I think that’s because he toned down his voice considerably to make the book more universally accepted. To see what I mean, compare his attitude of complete religious tolerance in his book to his highly controversial post 10 Reasons You Should Never Have a Religion. Of course, for that same reason, some people will like the book better.

I like how the book is not simply a collection of blog posts, but a brand new framework of personal development that he hadn’t talked about before. This really had to be a book and not a series of blog posts. I also like how he takes several areas of our lives (habits, career, money, health, relationships, spirituality), and treats them all the same, showing how the seven core principles apply to each of them.

I don’t know what effect this will have on my life. He includes a lot of exercises to increase your ability to use the seven principles, and I’ll have to read it again because I skipped over the exercises the first time. I realize that love and oneness are by far my weakest areas, so I’ll have to pay special attention to them. In fact, many people will find oneness to be pretty wacky. Steve’s sense of oneness now has him befriending spiders, while I’m still trying to accept spammers as human beings.

The verdict: Steve would be helpless in combat against the ThunderCats, but his book Personal Development for Smart People would have been highly appreciated on Thundera.

In week 2 of my Myers-Briggs trials, I’ll be focusing on sensing. Sensing and intuition refer to the way we prefer to take in information.

• Sensors rely on what their five senses tell them. They’re detail-oriented and well grounded in reality and practicality.
• Intuitives pay less attention to the raw data coming from their five senses, and more attention to their interpretation of it. They look at the big picture, patterns, connections, and future possibilities. (While the word intuition is often used to refer to psychic flashes, that’s not what we’re talking about here.)

I thought this would be an easy trial, because I’m not too far on the intuitive side. I don’t consider myself to be impractical or adverse to detail at all.

For years, I did my taxes with pen and paper, not even using a calculator because I liked adding and subtracting by hand. I also did my taxes twice each time: once by rounding amounts off to the nearest dollar (which the IRS encouraged) and once without rounding (which the IRS allowed), to see if it made a difference. That’s about as far to the sensing side as you can get. (I eventually started using a calculator, and then TurboTax as my situation got more complicated.)

I’ve done one day of my sensing trial, and I’m finding it very hard to turn off my intuition. What you see when you look at a sunset is supposed to tell you whether you prefer sensing or intuition. Today I saw a sunset, and I tried to see it like a sensor by thinking about what color the sun was, what time it was, how the days are getting shorter, etc. But whenever I see a sunset, I always hear Will Smith’s watch beeping in I Am Legend, telling him to hide because the monsters are coming out soon. I hear that every single time.

I was working on the sensing vs. intuition section of The Personality Puzzle when I read Brip Blap’s post big picture, little picture. He said:

“One of the most apt criticisms you could make of the writing I do on brip blap would be that I’m awfully big picture. I like to think in terms of grand goals (’achieve perfect work/life integration, have a perfect lifestyle, achieve financial independence’) without attention to the detail to support that (’fix your credit score, maximize your tax credits’, etc.).”

When I read that, I realized that his focus on the big picture is exactly why I like his blog. I’m interested in finance, but I had a hard time finding finance blogs I like because so many of them like to overload you with details, most of which I’ve already known for years. Of course, many people like that kind of stuff, and sensors are in fact the majority.

Since I’m on this topic, let me give you a quick list of the best finance blogs for people who prefer intuition over sensing:

(In alphabetical order)

1. brip blap - personal finance, wealthbuilding and the journey to financial freedom. Not purely about finance, but it’s all good. Steve has written about many interesting things, such as how he lost 100 pounds (meaning weight loss, not a drop in his British stocks).

2. erica.biz - Erica Douglass shows you how to make millions! She’s a number cruncher, but she also has huge aspirations for herself and the world. Selling her web hosting business for $1.1 million was just a start.

3. Sentient Money - Financial intelligence for an ever changing world. Chad is very heavy on details, but he’s really good at seeing what the data means. He’s also an INTP like me, so you know he must be cool.

Jon Morrow’s magnificent blog OnMoneymaking.com would have been on this list, until he sold it.

What was I talking about? Oh yeah. I’m going to approach this trial by thinking about what new things I should do, not what things I should stop doing. So for example, I’m not going to change the posts I write, because that wouldn’t be good for anyone. I’ll just be adding some sensing on top of my normal activities.

I don’t mean to come off as all anti-sensing, because there are definitely some great sensing role models, such as Tim Ferriss (a pretty clear ISTP in my opinion) and Darren Rowse (probably an ISFJ). I’m just having a hard time keeping the upside of sensing in mind. However, there are plenty of overly intuitive freaks who have absolutely no connection to reality. Still, I find imagination so much more interesting than facts.

I’m not exactly sure what to do in this trial, but today I made a point of describing what my senses were telling me. Just talking to myself and saying “Those leaves are red” or “This apple is crunchy.” Yeah, that’s pretty obvious, but it’s just to get into the habit. By being more grounded in the physical world, I hope to develop more of a “live for the moment” attitude and not think so much about the future.

Today I read two ebooks about SEO, which I’m sure tends to be much more interesting to sensors because of how much it relies on keyword data. One of these ebooks was Fast Track for Blog Success by Kathy Hendershot-Hurd. It was available for free for a short while, and I got it just in time, but unfortunately not in time to tell you about it while it was still free. It’s now $24.95, and it explores the keyword usage of two blogs, showing why one was sold for a much higher price because of its SEO.

The other ebook was the second incarnation of Naomi Dunford’s Ninja SEO School. I had previously read the first version, but not the new one. To be fair, this was no help at all in my sensing trial because Naomi is a super intuitive. However, that’s what makes her ebook so refreshingly entertaining as well as informative.

As before with my extraversion trial, my goal is not to switch completely to sensing, but just to make an honest effort to use far more sensing than usual. Obviously it has its benefits, so I just want to try to experience them. Go sensors!

I’ve just finished week 1 of my Myers-Briggs trials. This week focused on extraversion.

The timing of this experiment helped me tremendously. Since I’m on a mini-retirement, I have a lot more free time. That made it much easier to spend more time with other people, because I still had plenty of time to myself. If I was still working, it would have been ten times harder.

Even so, it’s a good thing I decided to judge myself by effort instead of results. Despite my efforts to talk more than any reasonable person should, I still had someone ask me, “Why are you so quiet?” Oh well, I tried. My main difficulty is that I find it so hard to talk when I have nothing to say. I just can’t get random words to come out of my mouth.

While I confirmed that I like introversion a whole lot better (as I expected), there’s one particular aspect of extraversion that I think is worthy of consideration by introverts. Introverts tend to be slow to speak, and then later be mad at themselves for not saying anything. Extraverts tend to be quick to speak, and then later be mad at themselves for saying something they shouldn’t have. Of course, both extremes are bad, but maybe it’s worth trying to err a bit on the other side for a change.

I found it funny that some people didn’t want to let me be an extravert. One night I was having dinner in a bar, and the bartender wouldn’t stay and talk to me, even though he wasn’t busy. I was thinking, “Come back here! I need to make small talk to get extraversion credit!” But I didn’t force it.

Some people say that eating in front of other people makes them nervous. I don’t feel that myself, but I do prefer not to talk much when eating, because it’s just too much going on. Besides, you’re not supposed to talk with your mouth full, right?

I also don’t like loud places. I just don’t get how people can be energized from being around noise. I managed to avoid the peak times at the bars, but one place was still pretty loud. It didn’t kill me, but it’s sure not my preference. I don’t like smoky places either, but fortunately I didn’t find any.

Twitter is a great socialization tool for introverts. Even though it’s online, I think tweeting can be considered extraverted because it’s all about shallow conversations with lots of people. The reason it’s great for introverts is because you only have to follow who you want to follow, you only have to reply when you want to, and you can turn it off whenever you want. In the last week, I spent much more time on Twitter, and tweeted a lot more by relaxing my standards of what was tweet-worthy. I didn’t find this hard at all, but it came with a huge downside of taking up lots of time because of the constant interruptions.

I spent a lot of time on the phone, which was kind of hard to do. I like face-to-face conversations a lot more than phone conversations. I’m not sure why, but they feel completely different. Spending time with someone means something, but a phone call always seems like an interruption to me. Sometimes it’s a necessary interruption, but then I feel like I have to say what I have to say, and then get back to what I was doing. Even when I like the call, I always think that seeing them in person would be a much better use of my time.

One extraverted ritual that I decided not to partake in is the phone face-off. I was talking to someone when another call came through, and I pushed the “ignore” button. I told the person I was talking to that for some reason, my new cell phone keeps beeping even after you push “ignore.” When they heard I had another call, they said it was fine if I wanted to take it. But it never occured to me for a second to do a phone face-off. I think you should just talk to who you’re talking to, and let the other person leave a message. There could be exceptions, but I didn’t even know who the other person was.

Well, extraversion isn’t for me, but your results may differ. I’m glad I did this experiment, but I’m looking forward to returning to normal.