Personalities - Three Types

This may be the one of the many times that I will be iterating that every individual is different. One more factor that certainly embellishes this fact is the way we tackle problems in life. Right since birth we encounter various problems in life and we try to find a solution of those problems either with the help of people who are closely related to us or alone. In Erik Erikson’s (a neo-freudian psychologist) words, these problems are termed as ‘conflicts’. His idea of categorizing one’s development into stages also incorporates the significant role of conflict. Every stage, in his view, comprises conflicts which ideally need to be successfully accomplished. How well a person tackles them determines how his personality would be shaped up and also how well his other stages would be confronted. Anyways I don’t intend to discuss Erikson here. My idea of writing is to zero upon some of the ways I have seen people tackling their problems which says a lot about their personality.

I generally categorize people into 3 broad categories on the basis of how they confront a particular problem. We all know that socialization is something that has a great impact on one’s personality though heredity shouldn’t also be ignored. Now the first set of people when they come out of a particular problem sit with themselves and think about what all went wrong. Was there something lacking from their side that they could not handle the situation? What were the things that they lacked? What steps should they have taken to effectively handle it so that if it confronts them again they are all ready for it? Or was the situation something that they could never have handled or what steps should be taken so that it can be avoided if they come across the same problem in future? And finally they would end up doing a kind of SWOT analysis every time this happens to them. And these are the people who know themselves well because you can contemplate only when you know your strengths and weaknesses. This category, I would term, is the best of all because they don’t live their life in deception and also emerge as successful creatures in whatever they do.

The second category is one that doesn’t know anything about itself. They are total frauds as I would term them. They continue to deceive themselves all through their life and also end up deceiving others. They come across problems but since they have zero or near zero self awareness, it is highly likely that they don’t waste time on their failure (quite positive!) but they continue to face the same problems and hence commit the same mistakes. Since they are ‘lost in their own world’, they are the distanced very far from the word ‘Success’. They are poorly adapted to their environment and luck, if any, plays a very important role in their success.

The third category is one that can be really said to be ‘lost in its own world’. They do face problems and are very much aware of the things that go wrong but they consciously or unconsciously fail to act upon their failure. May be they are too lazy or too arrogant that they refuse to change. They may feel that they are right in their own way and there is no need to change and it was the problem’s nature that it can’t be solved and nobody could have solved it they way it came. They also live their life in deception (as seen from an objective perspective) but ‘their’ perception doesn’t term it as deception. This category may consider everyone else useless and itself to be of superior breed. And probably that is the reason that they don’t even try to change or act upon the problem so that it doesn’t bother them again. They are comparatively better adjusted than the second category because they find themselves comfortable only in the company of people who are similar to them in most of the ways.

Finally, if seen from a holistic picture the first category may appear to be an ideal one but it is hard to find oneself in one category all the time. I do agree that sometimes it happens that we jump onto other categories because human nature is hardly static but the major proportion of which category the person lies in ultimately decides what kind of person he is and a lot can be predicted about how he would be in the years to come. Anyways neither am I here to pinpoint anyone nor to tell that I lie in ‘x’ or ‘y’category. Its just that I wanted to give a concreteness to my observation.