As an ENTJ you never walk away from a committed plan. And you grade everyone around you on the same standard, which they mostly fail.
But there’s another list of things you did walk away from. You keep it off the books by deciding it was just market research. Or it was a company you knew exactly how to build, but since you didn’t start, it didn’t fail. You know you won’t stop once you commit so you get stuck at the beginning over and over again. It’s like a serial dater, but you’re doing it with ideas.
I’ve noticed I fix other peoples’ things instead of starting my own. This is fun. Their mistakes are obvious and the solution is obvious. But I have nothing at stake, because if I did start caring I‘d just get frustrated that I can’t fix a bigger problem in the system.
Another workaround I’ve found for staying in the starting: become excellent at work that stops when I stop. The good news is that if it doesn’t scale, it doesn’t require commitment. The bad news is that it doesn’t scale.
Étienne-Louis Boullée designed some of the most extraordinary architecture of the eighteenth century: immense, rigorous, fantastically ambitious. On paper. There’s a kind of person who is fulfilled knowing they worked out the whole idea and the joy is in being elegant or being right. But it’s actually exhausting for ENTJs to stop there because building the idea is what gives us energy.
So I’m making a rule for myself that I don’t get to pretend that exploration is free. I can’t start learning something new unless I’m willing to spend enough time to become unusually good at it. I can’t experiment with a product unless I can identify the market from the beginning.
I used to think I needed to protect my energy from big commitments. Now I think I need to protect it from everything I do before committing.