By Guilherme Varela with additions by Ryan Smith
When assessing someone’s type we must be vigilant not to mistake the contents of their psychic functions for the psychic functions themselves. That is probably the number one mistake that is made by people who attempt to type by the functions. They view them as behavioral traits, rather than as ways of structuring information in the psyche.
When assessing the types of successful businesspeople we should be careful not to believe in embellished press articles, as these almost always have a habit of making anyone who beat the market into the stock figure of “lone visionary with long term plans.” With regards to large organizations, no man is an island. For Jobs to spend one day as CEO of Apple, thousands of people would have to interact with each other, and thousands of people would be placed in a position where they could share their ideas with him.
Steve Jobs was a business leader and an artist, a technological pioneer, a fierce promoter of products, a rebel, a self-described pirate, an eagle-eyed visionary, a detail-oriented maniac obsessed with perfection, and an emotional jerk. The list of Jobs’ accomplishments is awesome: Co-founder of the company that defined personal computing, the only man to be CEO of two S&P500 companies at the same time (Apple and Pixar), and he repeatedly beat the market by pushing for relentless innovation. He knew exactly how to harness emerging technologies and turn them into profitable products. Unlike Bill Gates, Jobs always had an ability to “un-know what he knew” – to stop thinking like the CEO of a technology company and to start thinking like the consumer in the street – what would he want? Unlike Bill Gates, Jobs didn’t think about what it would be “rational” for the consumer to want; he thought about what the consumer actually would want and he did so successfully.
Jobs changed the music industry. He championed physical Apple megastores even when similar initiatives had failed for other tech companies. He has been called the Leonardo da Vinci of our time. What other type could he be than an ENTP, right? Or at least, he must be an NT… Right?
1. Sensation(al) Pioneering
In the modern use of Jungian typology there is a monumental bias against sensation. S types are commonly thought to be boring, dumb, shallow, and unthoughtful as a matter of course. Yet from a true Jungian perspective, that is not true at all. Perhaps this quote has said it best:
“Jung attaches great importance to the creative activity … in his opinion it cannot be subordinated to any of the four basic functions, but partakes of them all. He rejects the usual notion that artistic inspiration is limited to the intuitive type.” – Jolande Jacobi: The Psychology of C.G. Jung, Yale University Press 1951 ed., p. 24
Simply by looking at the four SP types, it soon becomes clear that this temperament has repeatedly been innovative in fields such as music (Miles Davis, Michael Jackson, and Madonna), in warfare (Musashi, Roosevelt, and Patton), and in business (Richard Branson, Dana White, and Peter Schiff). So before we go any further, it is important to get the bias against sensation out of the way.
2. Jobs the Adapter
Before we can proceed with an analysis of Jobs’ cognitive functions, we must provide some examples of his mindset:
“The Apple raid on Xerox PARC is sometimes described as one of the biggest heists in the chronicles of industry. Jobs occasionally endorsed that view, with pride. As once he said: Picasso had a saying – ‘good artists copy, great artists steal’- and we have always been shameless about stealing good ideas.” – Walter Isaacson: Steve Jobs, Simon & Schuster 2013 ed., p. 98
“Fadell took away a lesson: ‘Steve prefers to be in the moment, talking things through. He once told me, ‘If you need slides, it shows you don’t know what you’re talking about.’ Instead Jobs liked to be shown physical objects that he could feel, inspect and fondle.” – Walter Isaacson: Steve Jobs, Simon & Schuster 2013 ed., p. 387
As is clear from Isaacson, several of Steve Jobs’ most pioneering projects were not the fruit of deliberate, long-term visions, such as the popular media image would have you believe, but were rather opportunistic adaptations and adoptions of emerging technologies. Like Madonna, Jobs saw the emerging new technologies while they were relatively bland and unappealing innovations on a drawing board, seized upon them, amplified them, and made them appealing to the man on the street like no other “rational engineer” was able to.
In a nutshell, we could describe Se versus Ne:
- Se is about magnifying and making the most of the current object. Se is therefore grounded, singular and intense.
- Ne is about multiple parallel paths that reality could take from here. Where Se is grounded, Ne is flighty. Where Se is singular, Ne is about multiple possible futures. Where Se is intense, Ne is fickle.
While Se and Ne have many similarities, they are nevertheless radically different from each other in terms of the singular/multiple dichotomy. So while it could be argued that Ne could also be an adaptive innovation pirate the way Steve Jobs was, it would be much harder to argue that Jobs was not grounded, singular, and intense about his visions, whereas, for example, Leonardo da Vinci and Benjamin Franklin were much more flighty than intense, each starting on a multitude of radical innovations with most of them ending up being used for nothing. This argument is probably the strongest singular argument for why Steve Jobs is not ENTP.
Like Bill Clinton, Jobs never let his intelligence or status as CEO sever his bond to the man in the street, and he had little patience with the big shots in the tech industry who thought they knew better than the wisdom of the consumer. Unlike Bill Gates and a host of other tech CEOs, Jobs was always able to maintain a bond with the man in the street so that he would successfully anticipate what the customer would want.
3. Steve Jobs’ Ni
Ni is about recognizing the contribution of this singular object in the validity of a primordial and ideal image. When Ne goes from the one to the many, always broadening the view, becoming more and more inclusive, Ni goes from the many to the one, simplifying complexity into a compelling and singular vision. ISTPs have tertiary Ni, a function which was very highly developed in Steve Jobs’ case. His fourth and repressed function (and therefore the primitive aspect of his psyche) was Fe. This is one reason for his infamous interpersonal abrasiveness.
On CelebrityTypes, we have talked a lot about the inferior function. But we have not talked much about the tertiary function, which is probably the most poorly understood of the four function-slots. What Jung said about it was that it was “puerile” and “archaic”.
By “puerile”, Jung meant that the usage of the tertiary function is childish, or corresponds to that of an adolescent. For example, an ISTP can use Ni to grasp a problem holistically and unite the different factors relating to that problem into a one-shot solution or object. But compared to an INJ, the ISTP’s use of Ni is like that of a child.
However, this is not a derogatory difference. From an INJ’s perspective, when ISPs use Ni, they do so in unorthodox and unexpected ways, much like a child setting out to do something for the first time. As the famous Zen slogan goes: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind there are few.” From an INJ’s perspective, an ISP’s use of Ni often seems blissfully oblivious to what should be impossible, much like a wonder child, precociously ahead of his years.
Historiographical Note on Steve Jobs’ Type
The assessment of Steve Jobs as an ISTP type was introduced into the community by CelebrityTypes in 2009. The standard assessment of Steve Jobs prior to that date was ENTP, and it probably still is. Insofar as the claim is wrong, the blame belongs on our shoulders, and insofar as the assessment of Jobs as an ISTP will go on to win increased acceptance, the credit should go to us, and to the people who saw our assessment and starting thinking differently about Steve Job’s type.