Ah~ The infamous phrase of an INTJ, “I know what I know and more importantly, I know what I don’t know”.

This here, gives us clarity about our knowledge for when we are helping others or for when we are socializing with others; because fact of the matter is, if we know something or don’t know something then we will just tell you.

You can be sure that we will not waste anyone’s time.

Although it’s great that we can be so forward with ourselves, more often than not, we can be seen as arrogant, patronizing, single-minded and stubborn. Yes, our unquenchable knowledge paired with our high self-confidence makes for a disastrous combination – therefore, it is not surprising when INTJs have learned to be reserved.

Nonetheless,  times when someone is telling us something and we just simply cut them off to reply with, “I knew that already” or “I know”; we end up quickly being labelled as arrogant in the eyes of that person. So, that person would now assume that we do not want to ‘learn’ or cooperate by listening to them; which eventually leads them to proceed to say that it would, “do you good to re-hear what you know again” or to read more about what we know already.

Fair enough, what you just said is validated and I understand what you are saying.

HOWEVER, the thing is though, we, as INTJs, when interested in something, we research the hell out of that topic – to the extent where we need to find contentment in our findings and our knowledge. People should know that, it is not easy to satisfy our thirst for knowledge and so when we are happy about what we know – that means we know enough to stop (finally). So when we say, “I know”, it is not just a simple, ‘I know a bit of the topic at hand’ – it is more of a, ‘I know the depths of this topic at hand and so the more you tell me, the more we retreat into our “know-it-all shell”. Yes, you potentially can repulse us and we furthermore look like single-minded fools to you – which reinforces your judgment of us.

One thing you should also know is that, on our ‘journey to contentment’, we will research (like crazy) for hours on end; we do not need to eat, drink or sleep and sometimes we question if we were even breathing throughout the entire process/ research.

Furthermore, we instantly say, “I know”, because we have already jumped to the conclusion whereby your conversation was built upon. We already got your point, so when people vomits excessive information before getting to the “moral of the story”, we already look like a stubborn idiot whereby we either have a certain irritated expression of exasperation on our face or our hands are motioning for that person to hurry up (personally, I use the phrase “fast forward”, a lot).

On the other hand, as for when we do not know some things, we will either tell you or just stay quiet – some topics do not pique our interest nor do we feel that we are comfortable enough to have an opinion on it. We sometimes do not feel ‘qualified’ to speak about the topic at hand – yes, we are VERY aware of what we do not know and we acknowledge this. The problem is whether the topic makes us interested enough to commence a research afterwards.

Sometimes, we act like we do not know when in fact we do, why? because we either want to confirm whether what we already knew was correct OR you are probably just not ‘worthy’ of our guidance and time.

Anyways, if we are not researching, we subconsciously pick up information around us – this is just our ‘introverted intuition’ working. Needless to say, we have a lot of circumstances whereby we have no idea how we know what we know.

The annoying thing about being certain about our knowledge is that, we are seen as not open-minded – this is such a misconstrued assumption. Open minded people acknowledge their faults and questions everything and themselves. Even if we know what we know, that does not mean that we do not plan on expanding our knowledge; it just so happens that the topic may not have piqued our interest yet and so it is not our priorities at the moment.

Fun fact; we INTJs like to think the unthinkable; needless to say, if something “impossible” were to happen, we really would not be alarmed.

 

So instead of jumping to the conclusion that we are arrogant, patronizing, stubborn etc – how about actually acknowledging that we actually know what we know and even more so, what we don’t know.

You will repulse us less and we might just actually open up to you by explaining ourselves or listening to you more out of mutual respect.

 

Geomeun Goyangi

P.s guys, I’ve started a new INTJ series, happy watching!

 

***Please note that these blogs should NOT influence you to generalize that all INTJs, as a niche group, are all the same – because we are not; a lot of other factors shapes and individualizes a person.***