There's No Bucket. Just Me

Wrote on November 25, 2009

When I was younger, I struggled trying to put myself into one of the adjective buckets, hoping to belong to some categories: the extrovert or the introvert, the conservative or the liberal, the adventurous or the simple, the shy or the outgoing. There’s no adjective for someone that is both extrovert and introvert, someone that is both conservative and liberal, someone that is both adventurous and simple, and someone that is both shy and outgoing…someone as strange as me.

Not until I was in my early 30s working for a FORTUNE 500 company that I realized that I wasn’t the only one that could not decide which personality buckets I should be in. At one point, I had two bosses; one said I needed to be more aggressive; the other one said I was too aggressive (imagine when they discussed my career development). Then I started to hear people that were close to me said “You need too much adventure and life stimulation” and “That’s great that you enjoy simple things” and “You are very picky and particular” and “You are very easy going” and “You are reserved” and “ You are outgoing” and “You need a lot of personal space” and “You like to go out and be with people” and “You always stay home” and “You are a party girl”. The list continued. Does this sound like a confusing personality? To others, maybe. To me, no – not any more. I’ve heard people said women in their 30s are more attractive than in their 20s. They understand who they are and are comfortable being themselves – I couldn’t agree more.

Somewhere somehow, our society has trained people to label themselves and other people, from the adjectives like the introvert and extrovert to the letters like ESTJ or ISTJ of the well-known Myers-Briggs Type Indicator. At Kellogg, I recalled that my classmates randomly asked one another “I’m ENTJ. What are you?”. When I thought about it, it seemed a little too much that people need labels so badly that we need a scientific method for it. My third boss realized that my first two bosses labeled me with the opposite personality descriptions and figured that there was a much better way for him to understand his employee. So he asked me for my Myers-Briggs results. Yeah..gotta find a label somehow!

While I am comfortable with who I am these days, other people may not feel the same way. In general, having a label psychologically makes people feel comfortable, feel like they know who they are, feel like they know who another person is, feel like they belong to a certain group, and feel like another person is one of their kinds. And not being able to put someone into a bucket can cause frustration and misunderstanding to those that are used to labels and buckets.

With inveterate habit of labeling and bucketing, we seem to forget that each individual is too complex to be described by only a few adjectives or sets of letters. While bucketing people may, on the surface, seem to be an easy way to describe people, it might not result in accurate understanding of people. Inaccuracy inevitably creates misunderstanding and frustration. Luckily, there is a simple, alternative approach that doesn't distort the reality of human complexity. That is to just experience each individual without labeling and bucketing them. Just experience the true person behind it. It's that simple.