Personality tests classify us as The Visionaries. We also go by The Campaigner – we move people to action, we love to organise and be in charge. We see the ‘bigger picture’, we see life as a big, complex puzzle where everything and everyone is connected. Above all we want to be original. We like to take risks and we see opportunity where others omit it. We are said to be independent, energetic and compassionate and above all we want other people to have fun and to reach their potential.
The trouble is – we often don’t know how to reach our own.
We struggle with being persistent and keep pushing despite not seeing results right away. We are the Change Junkies. If we don’t get the stimuli fast, we may talk ourselves out of the idea and go, search for an another BIG one – hoping that it will kick off faster.
But the real world doesn’t work like this. You get good at something by making a habit out of doing/learning it day after day. You build a great company and start seeing results only after few years of painful sacrifices filled with mixture of adventurous and mundane tasks. Overnight successes don’t exist and even if we ENFP types perfectly know it, we still find it hard to go through the ‘boring’ part. The follow-up process. The consistency of our actions. Swallowing the fact that nobody cares about what ‘grand vision’ you have for the world if you can’t demonstrate minimum tangible value. We like to omit the obvious (as it’s for us) and we try to skip few steps without having built a solid ground for something bigger. We want bigger now.
So we loop ourselves in this Wrong Circle getting so high on this new big thing, only to drop burned after few months when things don’t go our way. And it’s hard to escape this circle cycle if you don’t have someone who can grab, bring you to earth and help you to divide this grand vision into small, actionable and achievable steps.
Conceptualisation is exciting, its daily implementation – not so much.
But we’re not useless (despite what my topic suggests). Complex, often crazy ideas and unrelated aspects are our specialty. We can be a great polymath once we do manage to escape the Wrong Circle.
“Study the science of art. Study the art of science. Develop your senses — especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.”
— Leonardo Da Vinci