On Do What You Are

Do What You Are is an enormously helpful book for anyone trying to work out which career to pursue based on their interests and disposition. The authors — primarily Paul D. Tieger and Barbara Barron, along with their daughter Kelly Tieger — use the Myers-Briggs typology to point readers toward possible paths.

The first two parts cover the dynamics of Myers-Briggs and why it matters for the career search. Each type is four letters, each letter a choice between two options:

• Extraverted (E) / Introverted (I)
• Sensing (S) / Intuiting (N)
• Thinking (T) / Feeling (F)
• Judging (J) / Perceiving (P)

On top of the sixteen types, there are four temperament clusters:

• Traditionalists (SJ)
• Experiencers (SP)
• Conceptualizers (NT)
• Idealists (NF)

I’m an INFJ, so my temperament is the idealist. Beyond the mechanics of type, the bulk of the book is chapter-length analyses of types in the workplace. Each chapter opens with three case studies of people of that type thriving in their jobs, lays out the career paths and why they fit the profile, and then offers a list of possibilities by category — mine ran to counseling and psychology, education, the religious professions, the humanities, and the arts, while other types get far more on sales, accounting, medicine, and so on. Each chapter closes on how a given type might best plot a career and the pitfalls it tends to fall into. The book ends with how different types have managed career changes, plus a brief summary.

I found it genuinely interesting, but it didn’t tell me much about my own path that I didn’t already know at eighteen. That’s the pitfall with these books: if you don’t know yourself well, or you don’t know much about the labor market, it can be incredibly helpful, but if you’re already self-aware about your strengths, weaknesses, and natural dispositions, what you find can seem laughably obvious. That’s no fault of the writers — it’s a powerful text for someone who really doesn’t know what they want, or who hasn’t considered options beyond the ones they already know.