Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Introduction ................................................................................................................... 3
Growth Orientation ................................................................................................... 3
What Can This Book Do for You? ............................................................................. 4
Social Fulfillment ........................................................................................................... 6
Social Needs and Frustrations ................................................................................. 6
Turbulent Architect Sociability ................................................................................. 7
A Productive Social Portfolio .................................................................................... 9
Social Growth Prompt: Where Does Your Joy Come From? ................................ 11
Achievement ................................................................................................................ 13
Creative Flow ........................................................................................................... 13
Redefining Focus ..................................................................................................... 15
The Possibility Rabbit Hole ..................................................................................... 17
Achievement Growth Prompt: Rational Self-Talk ................................................. 19
Creating Happiness ..................................................................................................... 21
Information Is Joy .................................................................................................... 21
Creative Experimentation ....................................................................................... 22
Self-Awareness ........................................................................................................ 24
Happiness Growth Prompt: Tracing the Origins of Your Thoughts ................... 26
Conclusion: Flexing Your Superpowers .................................................................... 27
So… What’s Next? ........................................................................................................ 29
“Turbulent Architect Superpowers”
2
Introduction
Introduction
Growth Orientation
As a Turbulent Architect (INTJ-T), you probably already know what the letters INTJ
mean, and you’re here to learn more about the “-T” part, a.k.a. your Turbulent
Identity. That’s smart, because your Identity affects how you express your other
personality traits. Your Turbulent personality can present certain challenges in
life, but it also offers some wonderful benefits. The positive potentials of the
Turbulent Architect personality are quite amazing, and we can even call them
“superpowers.” Is that hyperbole? Perhaps. Perhaps not, as we’ll explain.
Your Turbulent personality is a reasonable predictor of certain struggles both
within yourself and with the world in general. For example, only about 35% of
Turbulent Architects say they effectively manage their stress, versus roughly 85%
of Assertive Architects (INTJ-A). So in some ways, you have more in common with
other Turbulent personality types than you do with Architects on the other end of
the Identity spectrum. But while some of the difficulties that Turbulent
personalities face may be similar, the solutions relate to your unique Architect
traits.
Turbulent Architects like you have powerful minds and wills, often limited merely
by your own perspective and willingness to act. Embracing a growth-oriented
mindset usually allows you to make excellent progress in life and inside yourself.
Note: “growth” is a term sometimes used to suggest that you should change who
you are according to external expectations or ideals. But here, we define growth
as developing your innate strengths to better achieve your personal
objectives. Your goals, your growth, your power, your terms.
“Turbulent Architect Superpowers”
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Introduction
What Can This Book Do for You?
Architects are famously critical thinkers, and the Turbulent trait tends to add
layers of doubt, sensitivity, and cynicism to that mindset. For a Turbulent Architect
like you, understanding problems brings a sense of satisfaction because it helps
you overcome them. You constantly assess risks in order to protect your
objectives – and yourself. However, focusing on negative potentials tends to
obscure positive ones. Too much negativity bias reduces your awareness of
beneficial opportunities and your motivation to engage with them. That limits
your creativity, optimism, happiness, and accomplishments.
Here, we’ll focus on the strengths of the Turbulent Architect personality type to
help you balance your perspective on yourself and your future. Drawing on our
research, we can highlight factors that are important to your success and
happiness, as well as ways in which Turbulent Architects like you grow and
progress. We’ll also point out some likely opportunities for improvement. Every
personality trait can be expressed in beneficial ways – it’s just a matter of context,
awareness, intent, and a little effort.
That’s where the concept of your personality superpowers is useful. Abilities don’t
need to be superhuman to be superpowers, but to be effective, they need to be
recognized in the first place. Research affirms that an optimistic bias toward belief
in oneself correlates to success and happiness. So our goal here is to help you see
yourself and your abilities positively, and the metaphor of superpowers is part of
that. Your Turbulent Architect personality can help you achieve great things.
So the real question isn’t what this book can do for you, but what you can do for
yourself. We can’t tell you what your ideal life looks like, but we’re certain that it
includes being happy and empowered to create your future. As a Turbulent
Architect, you know that achieving goals requires the right knowledge and skill,
“Turbulent Architect Superpowers”
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Introduction
which you hunger for. We’ll help you gain the insight that you need to find what
works best for you. Let’s start with an area of life that’s often problematic for
people with your personality type.
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Social Fulfillment
Social Fulfillment
Social Needs and Frustrations
As a Turbulent Architect, you probably haven’t made the social world a main focus
in the way that many people do. That’s possibly because some of your efforts have
not yielded the results that you want and possibly because what you want is
uncommon. Few Turbulent Architects feel compatible with most people – or
believe that they should. Your individualism is at least as important to you as joyful
social relationships are. Some people may label you antisocial, but it’s more that
you rankle at the idea that you should hide who you are in order to fit in. In truth,
you love being able to be yourself around others.
Yet you may not always fully comprehend the social signals that you send or how
they affect people. Your direct way of communicating tends to prioritize facts over
tact and truth over feelings. You’re quick to argue for your opinions or deftly
dismantle any concepts that seem flawed or ignorant to you. Especially in your
younger years, your desire to express the sharpness of your mind can result in
pointed behavior too. That may or may not be a problem in your social life, but
for many other personality types, it can take some getting used to.
But what few people see until they get to know you is that your intellectual
intensity is matched by a desire for fulfilling connection. The inspiration, joy, and
support that you share among trusted companions and family are deeply sacred
to you, regardless of your relatively reserved social style. It’s because you do take
your social relationships seriously that you’re choosy about who you connect with.
You don’t cultivate, accept, or express emotional intimacy as readily as many other
personality types, so you want to make sure that it’s warranted when you do.
Externally, that often makes you socially hesitant. When meeting new people, you
like to find a reason to invest anything beyond cursory energy. As a Turbulent
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Social Fulfillment
Architect, you like your social relationships to be purposeful, whether the purpose
is lighthearted or practical. You value building rapport in work relationships, and
you revel in relaxing and having fun with your friends. You even enjoy deep
exchanges of thoughtful imagination. But you don’t like to waste your time and
energy on social connections that produce no benefit. As a Turbulent Architect,
you always have some outcome in mind.
Your personal set of rules and objectives don’t always match those that are typical
in the wider social realm, however. It really bothers you when others try to push
motivations or obligations onto you, because you strongly prefer to define your
own social trajectory. You don’t need to be told what’s fun or cool, and you aren’t
likely to agree with popular trends anyway. Even well-intentioned people and
interactions can sometimes feel oppressive or just plain tedious to you. In
questionable circumstances, feeling like an outsider is almost a point of pride,
even if you’d rather not be one most of the time.
Sometimes you feel better off by yourself, and there’s nothing wrong with that.
Your Turbulent personality makes your social stress all the more intense, and your
reaction is sometimes to simply avoid being around people. But that’s not
necessarily your goal – it’s more like a consequence of your difficulty with finding
truly compatible people you can connect with. You revel in creating the kind of
social relationships that you enjoy – and, on some level, need – it’s just a question
of finding the right ways to do so.
Turbulent Architect Sociability
In our research, Turbulent Architects rate their levels of sociability and charisma
far below their own ideal. As a personality who is intent on optimization, you
almost certainly envision a social life that includes an improved ability to connect
positively with others – when you want to. Such social growth is often easier when
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Social Fulfillment
you embrace your natural tendencies. You can form deep bonds when you
connect with others authentically, whether that involves sharing a heartfelt
personal interest or just a mutual goal. However, that does tend to require that
you meet people you respect and find interesting.
As a Turbulent Architect, you feel your joy and energy naturally rise when your
mind is stimulated, and sharing that brightness can appeal to others. As much as
your critical-thinking skills are a source of self-respect for you, they are also a
source of charisma when they’re expressed in optimistic, constructive ways. Your
ability to theorize and examine possibilities can spark enthralling conversations
that open the door to deeper connections with others. That’s especially true when
you punctuate exchanges with open-ended questions and listen to what others
have to say.
You love expressing your opinions, and your Turbulent trait pushes you to prove
how smart and informed you are. These are some of the ways that you earn
approval and achieve a valuable sense of belonging among others. Yet your
charisma and sociability stem from how you express approval as well as how you
seek it. Regardless of whether you see yourself as charismatic, your generosity of
spirit helps others see you that way, because it tempers the sharp side of your
intellect. But while feeling accepted is important to Turbulent Architects like you,
independence will always be among your highest values.
There’s a difference between enjoying the soul-sustaining rewards of good social
relationships and needing other people. Dependency in any form is not your ideal.
However, having close ties with others means that they often rely on you. That’s
not always comfortable for you, but you do find it affirming when others seek your
expertise, because you revel in the chance to solve problems. Using your
knowledge and abilities to help others is a Turbulent Architect social superpower.
“Turbulent Architect Superpowers”
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Social Fulfillment
It lets you show people that you care about them while also drawing a sense of
validation from being effective.
Given how entanglement-averse you are, you’re occasionally surprised by how
certain people make you want to be close with them. It may be a rare treat, but
that sense of connection drives you to be sociable beyond what’s necessary to get
along in life. Sometimes it even renews your faith in humanity. You enjoy having
your cynicism defied and being able to delight in the company of those who
impress you. It’s as if a special part of your mind is activated by discovering
something deeper than mundane social interactions.
That’s when the social world is really exciting for you – when you find people who
can not only handle your honesty but also evolve your perspective. The act of
understanding itself brings you joy, including seeing how your individualism
meshes with other ways of thinking and being. You don’t want to be like other
people, but even an accomplished soloist loves to be part of a symphony at times.
Or perhaps a duet with someone who holds a high place in your life for special
reasons. For Turbulent Architects like you, the basic human need for love and
acceptance is part of your social drive, but the ways in which others can open the
door to your exploration of life also drives you.
A Productive Social Portfolio
As a Turbulent Architect, you tend to take a relatively rationalistic approach to
socializing. Objectively weighing social costs and benefits is an affirmation of
sincerity in the Turbulent Architect style. You try to ensure that your social
investments result in something meaningful as a way to respect yourself and
others. (It’s also sensible Introvert energy management.) However, any highly riskaverse approach tends to yield limited returns. Bold social engagement often
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Social Fulfillment
benefits you more than you initially expect, as you’ve probably experienced at
times.
Social diversification also tends to pay off for you. The social world runs on many
currencies – compatibility, empathy, validation, and affection being chief among
them. Turbulent Architects like you also thrive on exchanges of practical support,
humor, and intellectual stimulation. You may find social variety freeing and
valuable, because how you achieve a sense of social fulfillment is unique.
Investing in different kinds of social relationships is part of how you satisfy
different parts of yourself.
That makes social diversification a priority for your growth and happiness.
Deliberate experimentation is a Turbulent Architect superpower that can be
applied socially. As you move through life, you try out whatever social
opportunities expand your world in ways that you like. For you, intellectual
engagement is just as important as emotional intimacy. Specific kinds of social
relationships can fulfill you partially (even substantially), but ultimately, your
happiness requires maintaining a more complete social portfolio.
It’s also important to note that Turbulent Architects like you have the capacity to
thrive in solitude. Relieving stress or insecurity isn’t the only reason why people
with your personality type avoid social contact. Sometimes you simply feel happy
pursuing fulfilling activities on your own, and that’s just as important for you as
being sociable. Attending to your own needs helps ensure that you have the
strength and energy to do whatever else you must to create your best life.
For you, solitude can be healing, especially when it’s an opportunity to pursue an
idea, recreational interest, or hobby. Everyone needs passive rest now and then,
but long before your energy builds enough for major social engagement, your
mind seeks stimulation. One of your happiest social modes is as half of a pair –
“Turbulent Architect Superpowers”
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Social Fulfillment
spending focused time with someone you trust and feel comfortable with. Such
individuals don’t feel like a drain, compared to larger groups, and give you the
joyful opportunity to share your favorite pastimes in a way that’s often more
fulfilling than being alone.
If you have a romantic partner, chances are the two of you spend a lot of time
together, and if not, you may have a close friend you like to share adventures with.
Turbulent Architects like you tend to have few deep social relationships, and as a
result, you rely on them heavily when you want company. Your one-on-one time
with good friends and loved ones is possibly the most precious form of human
contact in your life. It’s worth contemplating each of these relationships from time
to time, both to appreciate their value to you and to consider further investment
in them.
It’s true that as a Turbulent Architect, you likely see your sociability and charisma
as less than ideal. However, that might depend on how you measure your social
success. The most fundamental way to do so is to assess whether your social life
brings you enough joy, and only you can know if that’s true. But given your
personality traits, it’s likely that the best way to measure your social life is by
quality over quantity. You may never be a vibrant social hub, although you can
certainly learn to be, if you want. More likely, you are satisfied to have a few deep
connections as you go through life.
Social Growth Prompt: Where Does Your Joy
Come From?
For a Turbulent Architect, the answer to the question posed in the above title
might not always be obvious, but finding it is essential to a happy social life. No
personality type has a more complicated system of imaginative ideals, firm beliefs,
and exacting standards. Viewing the social world through such filters can
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Social Fulfillment
sometimes obscure the positive side of things, so consciously recognizing the
positives is a good way to balance your perspective. (Not to mention that the
benefits of practicing reasoned optimism are overwhelmingly well-documented.)
Of course, your Turbulent Architect skills still apply, even when conducting a
mindfulness practice.
Use your rational objectivity to notice when you are happiest and what makes that
so. What best allows you to relax, express yourself, and have lighthearted, positive
reactions to your environment and events? What people, settings, activities, or
subtler aspects bring you the most joy? Which precursors to social happiness do
you control internally and which come from outside yourself? Identifying various
elements that correlate to your happiness can show you where to invest your
energy, practice your social skills, and seek growth.
“Turbulent Architect Superpowers”
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Achievement
Achievement
Creative Flow
The social world may not always be a main focus for Turbulent Architects like you,
but the realm of personal achievement is. For you, everything is an achievement,
not necessarily because you struggle to accomplish what you desire but because
your standards tend to be strict. Whether it’s your career or how you chop veggies,
you usually have an extremely detailed vision for how things should be. That
creates a lot of opportunities for success, but it also comes with a lot of pressure
that’s not always easy to handle.
Your Turbulent Identity includes a lot of self-doubt and worrying, and your
accomplishments help you fight those feelings and build self-esteem. Nothing
makes a Turbulent Architect prouder than achieving a goal through personal
knowledge and skill. You see anything from organizing your kitchen cabinets to
innovating a process at work as a chance to pursue excellence. (Which is not to
say that you don’t also rationalize some procrastination and sloppiness, when
you’re not truly invested in an outcome.)
But success is far from guaranteed in life, and your Turbulent trait tends to
generate strong negative reactions to setbacks, failures, or missed opportunities.
As a Turbulent Architect, you feel astounding frustration when you’re caught
between your intense desire to achieve your vision and any limits that you face.
Learning to moderate your own Turbulent responses in such moments is one of
the most important forms of personal growth that you can undertake. Regardless
of where they’re directed, frustration and blame tend to undermine your creative
energy and motivation, slowing your progress toward your goals.
On the positive side, what tends to best support your achievements could be
described as a state of creative flow. Turbulent Architects like you usually achieve
“Turbulent Architect Superpowers”
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Achievement
their greatest performance and success by balancing inspiration with thoughtful
action. You love to dream up inspired ideas, forming complex plans and “if-then”
scenarios in your head. Likewise, you can become extremely focused on tasks,
delving into the details of your activities in the pursuit of perfection. Both of those
states are essential to your achievements in life, but each can also become
problematic if taken too far.
Too much imagination can prevent you from acting, often because you’re trying
to predict all the possibilities in advance. Your Turbulence can seem to demand
infinite preparation. Conversely, getting too focused on carrying out any plan can
blind you to the need for necessary changes, limiting your success. You
occasionally swing too far in either direction, and you tend to be most productive
when you’re somewhere in the middle.
Like the string of an instrument, your mind sings under the right amount of
focused tension, and accordingly, that requires occasional adjustments. Your
mind is best in tune when you act with inspired focus while also remaining
attentive to the signals of circumstance. That’s your balanced achievement sweet
spot, and maintaining it is a Turbulent Architect superpower.
Such a state of creative flow can be self-induced and self-sustaining but also
benefits from including others. Sometimes outside perspectives can helpfully
dislodge you from extremes of imaginative thought or obsessed action. Your
greatest achievements in life usually stem from your own inspiration and effort,
facilitated by outside support. Some of your most satisfying moments of
innovation occur while brainstorming with other worthy thinkers, and it’s
important not to underestimate how significantly such interactions can advance
your own ideas, skills, goals, and accomplishments.
“Turbulent Architect Superpowers”
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Achievement
Chances are you have a cluster of wise, talented people you like to bounce your
ideas off of before you act. Their background, character, and experiences may
vary, allowing you to gain the benefit of different perspectives in different
circumstances. If you don’t have such people in your life, finding them is a top
priority on your path to success. For Turbulent Architects like you, “help” can
sometimes mean other minds provoking your own to its fullest potential more
than it means lending direct assistance (which they also do). The joy of
accomplishing things on your own includes using whatever resources you need to
succeed.
Redefining Focus
When it comes to achievement, one of your most useful Turbulent Architect
resources is your focus. According to our research, people with your personality
type crave to be more focused, yet you’re one of the most focused personality
types. That likely indicates how much you value focus more than it does any lack
of focus. Distractions are a fact of life (especially with your creative imagination),
and defining focus merely as concentration could make you think you’re not
focused enough. However, for you, focus represents much more, including your
sense of direction, dedication, willpower, and desire.
As a superpower (and it is), your Turbulent Architect focus is about envisioning
productive courses from start to finish. So, it means “conceive a plan,” “visualize
your goal,” and “stay aware” at least as much as it means “concentrate on a task.”
For you, the priority is whatever serves your end goal, and that doesn’t always
mean narrowing your attention to any given milestone or metric. Sometimes
achievements require keeping your eye on many factors and potentials.
Consider an example like a required class for work or school. Focusing on the
study materials helps you learn what you need to pass a test or get certified, so
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Achievement
you rely on your focus to study hard. But studying to the point of exhaustion
reduces your comprehension and retention, even if you stay on task. (The brain
has limits.) Alternatively, resting restores your mind, helping you absorb more
knowledge and ace the test. A broad focus on objectives and consequences
reveals that resting, not focusing harder, is the best way to achieve the goal at
hand.
Your Turbulent Architect focus is an achievement superpower when it’s holistic,
maintaining an awareness beyond whatever is in front of your face at the
moment. That includes understanding and accepting certain factors that you’d
rather ignore (“But I can study all night with enough energy drinks…”). For you,
focus is ideally a long-term strategy that includes recalculating the value and effect
of choices in the moment. Sticking to any subcomponent of methodology is
usually less important than accomplishing your overall goal, and getting too
caught up in details is very often where Turbulent Architects sabotage their own
success.
Another Turbulent Architect focus factor that can be a double-edged sword is your
innate preference for serializing, versus parallelizing, your efforts. In other words,
you usually like to finish one thing before starting another. That’s because your
Turbulent trait makes you restless until something is completed, at which point
you get a big hit of satisfaction. Setting one thing aside to work on something else
can interfere with that cycle. You’d much rather follow a process or project
through to the satisfying end than juggle many things at once.
In most cases, that kind of focus serves you very well. Becoming absorbed in what
you’re doing leads you to deeper understanding and innovation, helping you
master skills very effectively. People tend to see that as conscientious dedication,
which is indeed a Turbulent Architect achievement superpower. But your
tendency to focus on completing one thing before starting another can also be a
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Achievement
bit of an Achilles’ heel, because doing so is not always an option. The world
(inconsiderate as it is) quite often thrusts priorities at you suddenly – it doesn’t
politely wait for you to finish what was important a moment ago.
Mastering the use of your Turbulent Architect focus includes being flexible when
you must. Your primary method of achievement will likely always be dedicated,
serial progression, but your full potential includes being able to consciously,
calmly, and quickly shift your focus when needed. That’s probably a more
important growth area for you than learning to focus “harder” when it comes to
functioning effectively and being successful. Your ability to focus is greater than
you think, so your development may be a matter of reconsidering your
assumptions about what’s most important to focus on.
The Possibility Rabbit Hole
Of course, sometimes your focus redirects itself, and that’s not always helpful.
One curse of being a highly creative personality type is that keeping your mind on
reality all the time is completely impossible. As a Turbulent Architect, you cannot
help but visualize possibilities branching off of every little thing that you perceive.
Your mind constantly produces ideas, reactions, worries, and fantasy scenarios.
It’s a wellspring of amazing inspiration that empowers your life, from work to play.
But sometimes it overflows (and not always with grandness).
Just because a thought is interesting and appealing doesn’t mean that it serves
your goals. Your imagination sometimes distracts you from what’s important,
whether it’s learning information or executing a task or process. Sometimes that’s
just your mind trying to compensate when you’re doing something mundane –
your excess mental capacity doesn’t idle well, thanks to your Turbulent trait. The
old saying about coming up with your best ideas in the shower is a good example
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Achievement
– the Turbulent Architect mind ranges afar when not given a stimulating enough
activity to focus on.
That’s mainly a problem when you’re trying to accomplish something boring but
important, which happens quite often in life. Whether it’s completing a valuable
but routine work assignment or driving safely in chaotic traffic, you sometimes
force yourself to clamp down on your mind chatter. That’s likely a skill that you
practice often, and doing so might make you think you lack focus – but the very
fact that you do it says otherwise. The situational obligation to be responsible with
your imagination is one of the struggles of being a Turbulent Architect.
Sometimes, you just can’t allow yourself to chase those metaphorical rabbits.
Unfortunately, one of the most dangerous forms of imagination that people with
your personality type experience can be harder to resist than mere distraction.
The word “worry” doesn’t carry enough weight to convey the depths of negatively
biased fantasy that your mind is capable of – as you know quite well. Your ability
to perceive risk is excellent, and while that’s not always bad, keeping your negative
perceptions at a healthy level is one of your greatest personal-growth challenges
in life.
That wouldn’t be so hard if the consequences of too much negativity bias were
just anxiety, self-doubt, and cynical disaffection. You’re familiar with those
feelings, but you don’t exactly like them. No, the reason why your negativity bias
is so tough to control is that it has proven so useful to you. Anticipating problems
is the first step to preventing them, as your mind tells you quite truthfully at times.
But Turbulent Architects often fall into the trap of allowing their perceptions to
default to the negative, misapplying that “better safe than sorry” mindset to just
about everything.
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Achievement
More often than you’d care to admit, the slightest hint of risk or some undesired
element dissuades you from engaging in life’s potentials. (Even harder to
recognize and admit is when that hint is self-created.) And when you decline direct
experience, the existence of the negative thing (whatever it is) is never disproven,
which ends up feeling like a justification for your avoidance. That cycle is among
the greatest threats to your achievement (and happiness) as a Turbulent Architect.
Assumption-driven avoidance limits your understanding, reinforcing your biases
and a tendency to undervalue important potentials merely because they’re
unfamiliar. You’ve probably experienced that and, at times, talked yourself past it
into doing something surprisingly rewarding. You felt your universe grow a little
and never regretted taking the risk in the first place. When you’re motivated,
you’re very capable of seizing opportunities, regardless of the negatives. Using
your own objectivity to talk yourself through negative bias and into new
experiences is a Turbulent Architect superpower. Some risk is the inevitable price
of growth, advancement, and achievement itself.
Achievement Growth Prompt: Rational Self-Talk
Overcoming negativity bias that holds you back in life is easier said than done.
Acknowledging negativity bias is the first step to freeing your perspective, but
what if it didn’t have to feel like a battle? Sometimes negativity dissolves when you
decide to view things differently. As a Turbulent Architect, you have a powerful
mind and a compelling internal voice. You can convince yourself of almost
anything with enough wisdom, self-awareness, and quality information.
Having a mental dialogue between the pros and cons of any perception is a
common habit for Turbulent Architects like you. You have the rare ability to hold
both sides of an argument. You can’t help but want to rationally assess what’s at
stake, as well as what you hope can be gained. That imaginative process can be a
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Achievement
helpful tool for processing information that is relevant to a goal. Allowing yourself
time to let that happen is a wise way to leverage your personality for success.
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20
Creating Happiness
Creating Happiness
Information Is Joy
Lots of things can bring happiness, and as a Turbulent Architect, you probably
have your own unique list of joys in life. Your pursuit of happiness isn’t limited to
typical life goals and also comes from less tangible things like mental states,
thoughts, and practices. One of these subtle but powerful sources of Turbulent
Architect joy is information. You have a relationship to facts like no other
personality type – half of you revels in exploring theories and knowledge for their
own sake, and the other half prizes useful information that serves a specific
purpose. Learning itself is one of your greatest joys in life.
That facet of yourself may explain various times in your life when you’ve felt the
most alive. You can’t be truly happy when your mind is stagnant, and various
forms of fun can grow hollow when your mind isn’t challenged. For example, you
might be relaxing on vacation, but it won’t be long before you have the urge to
explore the area and learn its secrets, anything from historical events to
unobvious entertainment opportunities to simply wanting to understand the
mechanics behind what you see. You’re someone who’s just as excited to learn
about the tides as you are to lay on the beach.
Some people see it as odd to be so fact-obsessed, and chances are even your
most-loved ones roll their eyes a bit when you pontificate about some system that
you’ve dissected. But the sheer joy that you feel when you’re seeking and soaking
up information is something that you can embrace about yourself. You accept that
the deeper and more esoteric you go, the less company you may have, but that
doesn’t stop you from reaping the rewards of using your mind. You may notice
that situations or periods where you must restrain that urge likely correlate to
feeling “down” or even a bit hopeless. That awareness gives you options.
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Creating Happiness
Few things crush a Turbulent Architect’s spirits worse than feeling as though
there’s nothing interesting on their horizon. Accordingly, the process of healing
yourself when you’re experiencing negative emotional states often begins with
finding something to look forward to. Dreaming, researching, and planning can
be a surprising tonic for your mind and heart, even when you have valid reasons
to feel bad. You may benefit from periods of contemplation to process your
darker feelings, but finding some hopeful mental engagement is one way that you
return to joy, when you’re ready.
A quirk of your personality is that you can get almost as much joy from thought
as from action, which is why learning information is so essential to your
happiness. You can be thrilled by reading a book on a craft or skill without having
to practice it. And you’ll tell all your friends about this cool new thing you’ve
discovered – even if you decide not to try it out in real life. Part of the joy that you
take in learning is spotting opportunities to do new things, but some of it is just
the immense gratification of knowing things. Yes! Collecting knowledge is a
Turbulent Architect superpower. It’s not only useful in life – it also feels amazing
to your mind, like a key fitting a lock with a satisfying “click.”
Creative Experimentation
Sometimes learning isn’t enough, and your happiness comes from engaging in
life’s opportunities. Your Turbulent personality trait means that you often worry
too much about failing, being embarrassed, or wasting your time or resources.
But that’s only in certain situations, because when you feel motivated,
experimenting with your creativity is a great source of joy for you. As much as you
love raw knowledge and imagining possibilities, the urges of your mind can
sometimes only be quenched through hands-on experience. And you love to
create things of value, whether aesthetic or functional.
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Creating Happiness
If artistic talent is at one end of your spectrum of creative expression, handiness
is at the other. You might find equal joy in creating art to hang on your walls and
in learning to paint those walls like a professional. (There’s a special level of
satisfaction when Turbulent Architect creativity aligns with self-reliance.) For you,
problem-solving is as beautiful as any sculpture, so you’re at your happiest when
you embrace a wide range of creative impulses. It’s also a chance for you to
express your sentimentality, which can run as deep as anyone’s yet can often be
restrained on the surface. Whether it’s trying to express a feeling or just craft a
useful item, creativity is one of the ways that you uncover hidden parts of yourself.
But a conflict sometimes rears its head as you explore your creative expression:
depth versus breadth. You have a natural compulsion toward mastery – in other
words, getting really good at something. You may not even feel like you’ve fully
tried something unless you can reach a benchmark of skill that is great enough to
feel some pride. But that takes time. You may find yourself deeply invested in
pursuing a skill or hobby to the exclusion of others that beckon.
On one hand, you want to accomplish something well enough to not feel like you
gave up before you set it aside to try something else. But on the other hand, those
“something elses” beckon you mightily. As a Turbulent Architect, you may
sometimes stick with things more out of a sense of obligation than genuine desire.
That’s not a bad thing, but when the goal is enjoyment, self-created rules about
completion can interfere with that. Sometimes you are your happiest when you
give yourself permission to break those rules. Creativity is a Turbulent Architect
superpower when it’s backed by enthusiasm.
And chances are you’ve allowed that power to run free at times when your
enthusiasm shifted to a new idea or project. There may be a pile of half-completed
inspirations lurking in your background, and that probably bothers you a little,
whether the decision to move on was yours or was foisted upon you by
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Creating Happiness
circumstance. But when it comes to creating happiness, there are no points
awarded for continuing with a personal goal that has become unrewarding. You
do well when you revel in the joy of a creative process as something distinct from
the joy of completing it. Sometimes you get both, but if not, the investment can
still be worth it.
Self-Awareness
As a Turbulent Architect, you prize rational thought as highly as anything, and you
default to it when your happiness is threatened. Trying to rise above your
emotional responses by logically assessing what’s happening is part of how you
maintain clarity, stability, and positivity. You usually approach problems by
figuring out what you can do about them, and you often prefer to keep your
feelings distant from that thought process. It’s as if you have internal meetings to
which some aspects of yourself are invited, while others are left outside to knock
on the door.
The fact that Turbulent Architects like you want to practice emotional self-control
can be a good thing, but it’s not without risks. It’s easy to underestimate the
influence of emotion on your decision-making, even when you think you’re being
rational (especially under stress). But emotion itself isn’t necessarily the threat to
your self-control that you should be concerned with – it’s more the unconscious
behavior. As a Turbulent Architect, you deeply value self-determination, but that’s
limited to what you’re aware of. That makes emotional awareness the foundation
of rational self-control and, thus, a Turbulent Architect superpower.
As you’ve matured, you’ve probably realized that shutting your feelings out of your
conscious decision-making tends to result in them sneaking in unconsciously –
and sometimes disruptively. Marginalizing any core aspect of yourself interferes
with your happiness, because part of you ends up suppressed, and the other part
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Creating Happiness
gets exhausted from trying to maintain that suppression. So you’ve learned not to
ignore your feelings, even when they’re inconvenient or challenging. And the fact
that emotion guides many of your joyful actions proves how well you can blend
all aspects of yourself into a happy whole.
For example, consider moments where you’ve been kind and selfless or acted silly
and lighthearted with friends. You likely don’t question the logic of such behavior,
because letting your positive emotional urges take over is an obvious source of
joy. You just accept that and reap the rewards. But while you’re right to be
cautious of your darker emotions, it’s important to understand how they, too, can
be accepted, processed, or even expressed in ways that ultimately support your
happiness.
The truest form of rationality is objective awareness of one’s thoughts, feelings,
and actions – seeing yourself as you really are. Giving your emotional responses
the time and permission to happen helps you prevent them from exerting
subconscious influence. That aids your quest for self-control and happiness. As a
Turbulent Architect, you spend a lot of energy deciding things. Exercising your
superpower of self-awareness simply means ensuring that every part of yourself
is heard in that process, rather than shut out.
The more you practice conscious self-awareness, the stronger your decisions will
be, because you’re basing them on more complete knowledge. Ultimately, your
greatest happiness can only happen when you work to understand and integrate
all the various mental and emotional aspects of yourself. The Turbulent stress that
you often feel is partly due to internal conflict between your rational and
emotional facets, and the more you consciously bring them into harmony, the
happier your life will become.
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Creating Happiness
Happiness Growth Prompt: Tracing the Origins of
Your Thoughts
There are reasons behind your every thought, reaction, and choice, but they may
be complex. A wonderful way to develop self-awareness is to work backward from
a given thought or action to uncover the influences that shaped it. Chances are
you’ll find a host of both rational and emotional constituents, underscoring the
value of including the many aspects of your being into your conscious thought
processes.
Exploring the many factors that influence your thoughts and actions is an
enlightening opportunity. It helps you review your inner motivations and habits,
increasing your harmony (and happiness) by either accepting them or changing
them. Something as mercurial as joy is still subject to your Turbulent Architect
superpowers, and you can consciously create it just as you can achieve any other
goal in life.
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Conclusion: Flexing Your Superpowers
Conclusion: Flexing Your Superpowers
Sometimes being a Turbulent Architect feels like trying to put an infinite number
of pieces together into a cohesive picture of your own future. You might have a
vision of what you want – it’s just a matter of figuring out how to make that vision
happen.
Whether it’s achievement in the academic or professional world or just in a
personal endeavor, you care very much about meeting your definition of success.
For a Turbulent Architect, that means using your mind and skills to shape your life
and the world around you. The true joy of ability is using it, and actively flexing
your potential helps you positively rewrite your self-perception and build
confidence, self-esteem, and even an occasional sense of contentment.
But as much as “flexing” applies to you as an active verb meaning to demonstrate
your abilities, it’s not the only meaning. If there’s a holy grail of Turbulent Architect
success and happiness, it might be practicing cheerful flexibility. But that can be a
surprisingly difficult thing. So many of your wonderful superpowers revolve
around being consciously specific in your thoughts and actions. So much of your
sense of self-worth and security is tied to trying to control the factors that govern
your life. And it’s likely that some of your proudest accomplishments have
involved standing up against circumstances to enact a very particular vision.
Given all of that, the idea that your best course of action is sometimes to adapt to
what’s happening could seem antithetical to the core of your personality. Yet
you’ve almost certainly experienced the truth of that need for flexibility. You’ve
caught yourself railing against inevitability, struggling to change your course, or
worse – staying on course until you crash. Hindsight has taught you that knowing
when to jump ship is often critical in life, though rarely pleasant. However, your
mind has a lot of control over that.
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Conclusion: Flexing Your Superpowers
When something doesn’t go your way, the lost investment of time, energy, and
hope can be painful. But your mind is quite capable of discovering positive
potentials, even amid what feels like devastating or frightening change. There may
be a shipwreck behind you, but you know that the smart move is to look ahead to
where you might go. Being flexible means handling some strain because it
prevents breakage. The durability that you cultivate by resetting yourself on a
productive course is one of your most important strengths and one that you can
use even before problems occur.
Sometimes flexing is more like boarding an alternate vessel than jumping ship. All
your focus and creativity tend to lead you to idealistic conclusions, and you like to
be certain before making a choice. But even though you’re so intent on identifying
the best course of action, you’re wise to never fully discount the other possibilities
that you’ve considered. Keeping a few worthy alternatives in mind – just in case –
is a Turbulent Architect superpower. Having options makes practicing flexibility
easier.
For you, happiness, security, and accomplishment come from believing in your
perspective without being so rigid that you’re vulnerable to fate’s inevitable
intrusions. It’s a tough balance to master but an important part of your personal
growth as a Turbulent Architect. You’ve a long road ahead, and though your
journey will be wonderful, it’s unlikely to go exactly as expected. When it comes to
creating the future that you want for yourself, remember this simple mantra: trust
yourself, relax, act. Your Turbulent Architect superpowers will help you handle life’s
complexities and come out on top.
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So… What’s Next?
So… What’s Next?
You’ve just read part of the story of your personality. Are you ready for more? With
our Architect Premium Profile, you’ll learn about your personal growth path, your
romantic potential, the attitudes that shape your career, and so much more.
And look at how much we can tell you from taking just one test! Think what our
other 25+ Specialized Tests can reveal about your personality – a garden of
detailed, insightful knowledge awaits. Take the next step now.
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