Show IH: From MBTI Confusion to Precision Language

How I Built AdjectivesToDescribeAPerson.com

The Opening Question

About a year ago, I was sitting at my desk, reviewing a job offer email. It came with a request I’d seen many times before: “Please complete an MBTI assessment to help us understand your working style.”

I’d done this before. Multiple times. Different companies, same request.

But this time, something felt off.

I pulled up my old test results. In the past four years, I’d taken MBTI five times. The results? INTJ, INTP, ENFP, INTJ, INTP.

I stared at those letters for a moment. If my personality type kept changing, which one was real? Should I put INTJ on my resume? INTP? And more importantly—which one was actually me?

Around the same time, I was polishing my resume for a new job search. I scrolled through the adjectives I’d used: “driven problem-solver,” “team player,” “disciplined and hardworking.” All true. All also completely forgettable. On LinkedIn and Indeed, five million other people use the exact same words.

So I opened ChatGPT. “Give me adjectives to describe a software engineer who thinks in both technical and philosophical terms.”

It spit out thirty-something options.

Every single one made sense. None of them felt completely right. I was drowning in vocabulary with no way to choose. Were these words actually describing me, or was I just picking whatever sounded impressive?

That’s when it hit me.

The problem wasn’t that I didn’t know myself. The problem was that I didn’t have the language to describe myself precisely.

Part One: The Real Problem

MBTI and the Illusion of Fixed Categories

Personality frameworks—MBTI, Big Five, Enneagram—they’re useful. They give us a shared vocabulary for talking about human behavior. I’m not anti-MBTI.

But here’s what they do: they reduce complexity into neat boxes.

I’m not a pure INTJ. Sometimes I’m ENFP. When I’m deep in analysis, I’m INTP. With people I love, I’m completely different. These shifts aren’t inconsistencies. They’re features of being human.

When MBTI tests give conflicting results—and research confirms they often do—people usually assume the test is unreliable. Maybe. But there’s another explanation: people aren’t static. We shift.

I discovered the framework that changed how I think about this: narrative identity theory, from psychologist Dan McAdams. His core idea is radical: we don’t discover our identity. We construct it.

We build identity through language. Through stories. Through the precise words we choose to describe ourselves.

If that’s true, then a fixed personality type is fundamentally incomplete. It’s a snapshot of a moving object.

The Power of Precision (And Why We Avoid It)

Most educated English speakers understand 20,000 to 35,000 words.

We actively use maybe 2,000 to 3,000.

That gap is enormous.

We know the words “thoughtful,” “considerate,” “conscientious.” But when describing ourselves, we say “nice.” We know “visionary,” “strategic,” “shrewd.” But we default to “ambitious.”

Why?

It’s cognitive burden. Pulling up a rare word in real-time requires mental effort. We gravitate toward high-frequency words because they require minimal processing. It’s economic.

But that efficiency has a cost. When we use generic vocabulary, we don’t just communicate poorly. We also start to see ourselves that way. Our self-concept becomes as generic as our vocabulary.

Three years ago, I stumbled onto research about emotional granularity—psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett’s term for the ability to distinguish between subtle emotional states. The finding: people who can distinguish between “anxious,” “worried,” “tense,” and “alert”—using different words for slightly different feelings—regulate those emotions better.

The implication is clear: finer language means better self-understanding and self-regulation.

If this works for emotions, why not personality? If I could distinguish between “disciplined,” “focused,” “resolute,” and “stubborn,” would I have a deeper understanding of myself?

I think yes.

Part Two: The Philosophy

Language Isn’t Neutral—It’s Constructive

This is the core belief behind AdjectivesToDescribeAPerson.com:

Words aren’t labels. They’re the building blocks we use to construct ourselves.

Imagine two people who might technically be classified as “shy.”

The first person internalizes it: “I’m shy. That’s just who I am.” They avoid social situations, expect to fail in interactions, and interpret everything through that lens.

The second person frames it differently: “I’m reserved with strangers, but animated with friends.” Not “shy”—too broad, too permanent, too totalizing. This person has already given themselves space to be something more complex. Something contextual.

Both might have identical neurobiology. Same childhood experiences. But the story they tell about themselves—and therefore what they become—is different.

This isn’t self-help pseudoscience. This is the application of linguistic relativity—work from researchers like Boroditsky Lera showing that the language we use to think actually shapes what we’re capable of thinking. If language affects how we perceive time and causality, it almost certainly affects how we understand ourselves.

Complexity Isn’t a Problem—It’s the Reality

Here’s what I want to say most clearly:

Complexity isn’t a problem to solve. It’s a reality to respect.

You’re contradictory. You’re logical and intuitive. You’re introverted and social. You’re ambitious and content. You’re one person at work, another with lovers, a third when you’re alone.

That’s not incoherence. That’s humanity.

When we compress someone into “INTJ” or “Type 3,” we gain clarity. We lose accuracy.

Personality types can be useful starting points. But if we treat them as final answers, we make a trade: we choose to be understood rather than to be accurately understood.

Adjectives offer something different. They let us hold complexity.

“I’m both disciplined and imaginative.” “I’m thoughtful but impulsive.” “I need independence and intimacy.”

None of these need to reduce to a single type. They can coexist. They should coexist.

Part Three: Why I Built This

The Moment It Became Real

In early 2025, I started thinking about how to solve my resume problem.

But as I dug deeper, I realized it was so much bigger than resumes.

I interviewed dozens of people. Every conversation told the same story:

• Job seekers wanted to express their strengths more powerfully in resumes and interviews, but felt trapped by corporate clichés.

• ESL learners wanted to understand how native speakers actually describe personality—not textbook examples, but real usage.

• Writers and screenwriters wanted to capture authentic character nuance.

• People seeking self-understanding wanted to move beyond personality tests to something more real.

The common thread: How do you find language precise enough to capture human complexity?

That’s where AdjectivesToDescribeAPerson.com came from.

The Vision

I wanted to build something that:

1. Respects complexity instead of erasing it. Not personality types and broad categories. Just 400+ nuanced adjectives, each with context.

2. Uses science without pretending people are quantifiable. Grounded in psychology and linguistics, but never claiming personality is something you can reduce to a score.

3. Serves real use cases. Resume optimization. Self-discovery. ESL learning. Creative writing. Not just an interesting thought experiment.

4. Preserves your agency. The tool suggests and guides. It never tells you who you are. You decide. You build. You become.

Part Four: What I’ve Learned

The Design Challenge

Building a tool about describing personality sounds simple.

It’s actually complex.

I initially considered a categorical system. Then I realized: if I just replace personality types with categories, I’m recreating the same problem.

So I changed direction. Instead of asking “Which category?” I asked “In what contexts does this adjective actually work? Which other words does it pair with? When do people really use it?”

This led to a completely different architecture:

• Organized by meaning and sentiment, not type or category

• Multiple context examples for each adjective—resume examples, creative writing examples, dating profile examples

• An AI recommendation engine, but one with a critical constraint: focused on understanding your specific situation, not generating generic lists

The insight: precision comes from context, not categorization.

Scientific Honesty

When I started digging into research on adjectives and personality psychology, I found something I didn’t expect: we don’t know as much as we think we do.

The reliability of MBTI? Experts disagree. How language shapes self-perception? We have good research on how it affects time and space cognition, but direct evidence on personality is thinner.

This was a tempting moment. I could fill the gaps. I could claim more than the evidence supports.

Instead, I chose transparency.

Every scientific claim on the site links to a DOI. I explicitly say I’m a software engineer, not a psychologist. I invite criticism.

This honesty—about what I know and what I don’t—turns out to be more powerful than bold claims.

The Philosophy of Design

As the product evolved, one principle became crystal clear:

This tool should respect user agency.

It shouldn’t tell you what you are. It should give you language to tell yourself.

This changed everything.

It means:

• No “results” or scores

• No final answers

• No implied “you should be this”

• Complete freedom to explore, experiment, change your mind

It seems like a limitation on what the tool can do. But it’s actually more powerful. A tool that respects your discovery process helps more than one that hands you answers.

Part Five: Why This Matters

What This Year Has Taught Me

Building AdjectivesToDescribeAPerson.com over the past year taught me something profound about creating meaningful tools.

First: simplicity is a trap.

Creating a personality test is easy. Building an app that gives you a number and a label is easy. Creating something that honors complexity while refusing to oversimplify—that’s hard.

But hard is usually better.

Second: honesty is a competitive advantage.

When I make clear that I’m an engineer, not a psychologist. When I invite criticism. When I show my sources. Some people leave. Others become deeply invested. The second group is the one worth having.

Third: the best tools empower. They don’t replace.

Tools should extend what you can do. They shouldn’t override your judgment. A tool that tells you what you are weakens you. A tool that helps you express yourself strengthens you.

The Deeper Point

I won’t pretend AdjectivesToDescribeAPerson.com is a world-changing project.

But it matters, and here’s why:

We’re surrounded by systems designed to make us computable, categorizable, quantifiable. Algorithms rank us. Data points define us. Profiles reduce us.

In that context, insisting on language—rich, precise, personalized language—is a small but real act of resistance.

It’s saying: “I can’t be compressed into four letters.” “I can’t fit into a score.” “I’m too complex for your categories.”

It doesn’t change the systems. But it changes how you move through them.

Where We Are Now

When I sat down a year ago wrestling with conflicting MBTI results, I didn’t know where this would go.

Now, with nearly a year of building, I have a tool that 600+ people use monthly. I get emails from people describing how finding one precise adjective shifted their entire self-narrative.

One woman told me that discovering the word “meticulous” completely reframed how she understood herself. A man said understanding the distinction between “meticulous” and “perfectionist” changed his relationship with his mental health. A job seeker said replacing “driven” with “strategic” led to three interview offers.

These stories fuel me.

There’s much more work ahead. I want to add more adjectives. Better learning pathways. Stronger AI for ESL learners. I want to explore how this intersects with creative writing, therapy, corporate culture.

But even without all that, I’m proud of what’s built.

A tool that, with complete transparency, respects human complexity.

Maybe that’s exactly what we need now.

Take Action

Try the tool → Visit adjectivestodescribeaperson.com and experiment with the AI adjective finder.

Read the deeper research → My blog explores the science and philosophy behind this. Especially:

• The Psychology of Adjectives and Self-Discovery 

• Adjectives to Describe a Person: Beyond Personality Types

Follow the journey → Follow me on X/Twitter or subscribe for updates and upcoming features.

Share your story → If this helped you, I’d love to hear about it. What adjective changed how you see yourself?

The Final Thing

In a world where we’re pushed into neat categories and reduced to data points, insisting on precise, personalized, self-directed language is a form of freedom.

That’s what’s at the heart of AdjectivesToDescribeAPerson.com.

I hope you find the right words to describe yourself.

And when you do, I hope you realize what’s true: you’re too complex to capture in any single label.

And that’s exactly the point.