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How to Start Typing (or Ego Death for Beginners)
The Day I Died
I still remember the day objective typing scared the crap out of me.
It was at the end of 2020. I was innocently trying to type Mark Zuckerberg. For the first time, I would get someone’s 512 type exactly right.
I was listening to Mark’s conversation with the historian and author Yuval Noah Harari. They were discussing the dangers of AI.
In the beginning, I was curious. I wanted to know what they had to say. What are the opportunities that AI presents? What dangers does it bring?
In the middle of the podcast, their discussion started to sound like a bizarre ping-pong match. There was no real content anymore. It was entirely meaningless.
I had recognised their patterns. Yuval was scared of AI and how it might be abused to control people. Mark, on the other hand, didn’t see AI itself as the problem. For him, it came down to the people working on AI and the values they brought into it.
It’s about observations. No, it’s about values. No, observations. Back and forth they went.
It wasn’t like they were speaking utter nonsense. But why were they more convinced by their own opinion than the other’s? They’d probably claim it has to do with logic. It’s not though, it’s about fear. They were merely playing out unconscious patterns.
Both had no idea this was the case, of course. Both of them were serious about everything they said.
How do you know they’re actually driven by fear and not logic? Because wherever you look, you find the same consistent pattern.
Mark Zuckerberg’s full type is FF-Ti/Ne-CS/B(P).
At that moment, I knew he was a Decider because I could predict what he would say next. Open up any random interview with Mark and you’ll see that his bottom line is people and decisions. It’s the only story he can tell.
But what does that say about me? What does it say about people in general?
Have I been having meaningless conversations all my life? Have I been trapped in a prison I can’t see? Who even am I?
It’s Not Fast, Fun, and Easy
Most people expect personality typing to be fast, fun, and easy. You watch a couple of videos of a celebrity, you get to know them a wee bit, and whatever type you think it is will be the correct one.
You naturally trust yourself to recognise the patterns that explain their behaviour. Why wouldn’t you?
It’s the same with the myriad of tests on the internet. You go to a website like 16Personalities.com and fill out their little questionnaire. Do you enjoy parties? Are you an assertive person? It’s quick and painless and only takes a few minutes.
In the end, you know yourself best. You’re the only one living with yourself at all times.
It’s not like you can’t get anything useful out of those tests. The questions help you self-reflect and reading those profiles gives you a clearer idea of how people can be different, how they can clash and complement each other.
But those self-reports do not get to the root of the problem. They stay on the surface and ultimately coddle you.
The main problem with questionnaires is a missing external point of reference—on more than one level.
Your mind is split into a conscious and an unconscious part. This means you’re not actually able to consciously track what you do and why you do it. Most of your behaviour is driven by unconscious emotions.
While your self-perception is an important piece of the puzzle, you cannot solely rely on it to know yourself. An external point of reference is the missing piece. You’re not just the shout, you’re also the echo.
An external reference point can tell you about the consistent patterns of behaviour you’re not tracking because they’re so automatic and unconscious.
Furthermore, whoever created the test never took the unconscious mind into account in the first place. These self-reports simply never got validated scientifically. They have no predictive power.
But self-reports aren’t the only way to assess personality. There is a more objective way that takes external reference points and the unconscious mind into account.
Let It Go
As the name suggests, the Objective Personality System aims at something more—well—objective. It seeks alignment with reality for effective action and peace of mind. In the end, it’s about freedom from anxiety—anxiety that you created for yourself in the first place.
OPS follows a different approach to personality typing. Its objective typing method uses two independent operators to make predictions based on falsifiable statements.
A second operator creates an external reference point that pulls you out of your subjective perspective. If you can predict each other’s guesses correctly with high probability, it indicates you’re tracking something that is actually there. Without an independent partner, you will stay trapped without realising it.
Practising objective typing forces you to align yourself more closely with reality. But what is the objective reality we’re tracking? How does it take the unconscious mind into account?
As it turns out, the thing you can objectively track is a person’s fear.
We don’t track what people say and we don’t exactly track what they do because everybody can say anything. We track the underlying emotional patterns for why they do what they do.
The OPS operators agree on how someone is off from reality, how their fear clouds their perception of things, and how they tell the same story again and again.
No one can escape their patterns and everything you track in others reflects back on you. When I recognised that Mark was Decider, I began finding things I didn’t look for.
The unconscious mind is much more powerful than we think and want to believe. You think you know yourself. You assume you can understand yourself by thinking about yourself. But your conscious mind can only scratch the surface.
You don’t observe reality as it is and interpret it with neutrality. You start with a pre-programmed story in your head and make reality fit.
I started to see that in others, so it must be true for myself. This shocked me like nothing else I ever experienced.
I am not who I thought I was. People are not who I thought they were. We’re not evolved. We’re not reasonable. We’re hardly ever conscious.
I had to let go of these beliefs since they do not align with reality. They’re a comforting lie. It was shocking and painful. I’m not sure I’m completely over it three years later.
Some part of me had to die for the rest to move forward. It was a kind of ego death. I had to let go of who and what I thought I was. I don’t think I fully have yet.
Knowing your type doesn’t stop you from acting out your type. You are still governed by the same patterns. The story you tell yourself never stops.
However, while you can’t stop being your type, this doesn’t mean you can’t change anything. Just because your genes never change, doesn’t mean you can’t act differently.
The more your beliefs are aligned with reality, the more you can change. You understand better what’s going on in your head. You might not like these insights at first, but they bring you peace in the end.
You know your patterns, you understand what’s going on. You gain agency and peace and you’re able to change. You’re not stuck because you know there’s a way out.
While it’s painful, you want your ego to die because there is alignment and peace on the other side.
How to Start Typing Objectively
Aligning yourself closer with reality through setting and striving for objective goals is the way to growth. OPS typing is one possible option—among many—to do that.
Learning to type objectively is a long-term endeavour. I’ve been practising for more than 3 years and while my stats have improved tremendously, I still make mistakes and have a lot to learn.
It might be the hardest thing I ever tried mastering.
How do you start? The two most important aspects are an external point of reference and tracking your results.
You cannot type completely on your own. You need an independent partner. The easiest way to get a partner—kind of—is by joining Shan and Dave’s weekly celebrity typing class at ObjectivePersonality.com. They’re the founders of the system and the most accurate typing operators out there. Comparing your guess to theirs and trying to align over time is your best bet at making progress.
For additional practice, you can join our newsletter at PracticalPersonality.net. Every month or so, we publish a 20-minute celebrity typing class on YouTube on someone typed by Holly and me and whose type has been confirmed by Shan and Dave.
Alternatively, you can find a partner online or offline. Choose a person together, type them independently without influencing each other, compare the results coin-by-coin and repeat. The goal is to predict each other’s guesses with increasing probability over time.
To ensure that your predictions get better, you need to track your results. For every type that you guess, capture the result coin by coin in a spreadsheet and compare it to your partner’s. Analyse your numbers, see where you go wrong, and find out why.
Knowing your type is another important piece of the puzzle. You constantly filter reality through your subjective lens. You can’t get out of it but you can become aware of it.
Objective typing means recognising someone else’s subjective lens. Knowing your own biases reminds you to look at someone relative to where you’re coming from. They might not be the one freaking out about the Decider drama they’re talking about, it could be just you. Learn to see others for who they are and not for who you want them to be.
Lastly, give it time. You’re probably not gonna pick up typing in a few weeks or months. It’s going to take years and many, many iterations before you get it right consistently.
You’ll have to learn to master your mind and control your emotions to see someone else’s emotional patterns for real. You’ll also have to let go of any beliefs that stand in the way of this. Beliefs that might be long-held and dear to you. You’re not who you think you are and neither are others.
This will be painful but there’s peace on the other side.