Telltale Signs that You are a Ni-dom User

Submitted by e-mail

A constant, intense focus on how decisions today will influence outcomes tomorrow.

Your mind is going on hyper drive figuring out and mapping out how everything you do and say today will do to future you. There isn’t a single moment in time that you can comfortably leave that arena of contemplation and leave things “to chance.” Ambiguity about the future is fine as long as you are still thinking about the future. If there are any doubts about what you want or can get, you do everything in your power today to eliminate that possibility. Everything is about a moment in time that is yet to happen but will, whether it’s something as small as tomorrow’s dinner or as big as winning the Nobel Prize. At your best, you have absolute conviction that what you want is what you can get because it’s “real” to you. Despite of all the things other people say, you trust your gut instincts. Failure is there and mistakes are made but they are not things you’re afraid of because you can and will figure it out. You will make the correct decision because you know it will be right, for everyone around you, for better or for worse. You will listen and you will behave accordingly because instinctively you know it’s important for survival in this version of civilization. The past should only exist in the present if it keeps order and balance via tradition but you fear the ways of the old because it might somehow limit the full truth and potential of the future.

The idea of seeing other people’s future as your own never really occurs to you because the factors and atmosphere of the time of success is different and so replicating someone’s approach as your own just does not guarantee anything. Self-assurance and absolutes are pillars of your philosophy in taking on what life throws at you and wavering at the signs of crisis is not an option. Reinvention or its lesser twin, renovation, are just part of what is necessary because the world is always changing and you must be part of the change in order to be ahead. Possibility is a common word you utter but so is choice. By the time you’ve said either, you have thought of all the options and made your decision. Conversation most of the time will only reaffirm your “predictions.“



Ability to innately extrapolate and digest a project/directions/input without much outside direction.

You see someone cut a mango professionally once on TV and the next day you learn that you are doing the same in a surprise home economics class at school. Sure, you can’t promise a 100% guarantee that everyone will be perfect without practice but you immediately can understand the weight you need to apply to a knife to cut the mango in a certain shape and peel its skin off. Maybe you mess up once but the next time you go at it won’t be the same. To everyone else, it seems as if you naturally just understand the job but to you it’s just a process of observation. What they don’t know is that you watched the cooking program the previous day with purpose, figuring that you probably might need some of this information in the future. You use your tactical memory/logic from the time you’ve had to cut something (even something as unrelated as cutting paper with scissors) and you come to live, for a moment, inside the television show, and feel and see as the host does. What you focus on are the results, not the process. As the school instructor in front talks more and more into detail on what everyone should do, you’ve caught up on the present and you’re already leaping into what he will do next. And what’s worse, you do it. By the time everyone else is set and ready with their mangoes, you’ve already gone to the bathroom.

Anything that can and needs to come with directions all have patterns and that’s what you can handle. For some, it’s reading a table of strangers at a dinner. For others, it’s figuring out chess. Mistakes due to lack of information is going to happen but it won’t happen again. You promise yourself that and you don’t doubt it. Meticulous reads of every line in manuals/how-to books are for the things you can’t figure out yourself at all - a last resort. You will want a starter kit or assistance but it’s never because you don’t have a clue on how to proceed when there isn’t any help. You do it because your learning will be faster and easier and asking questions is what you’re best at. Sometimes, it’s good to hear yourself talk but, most importantly, you listen when no one else thinks of listening.

A constant, conspicuous urge to prove something/someone of your skills/competence/care.

With Ni comes Se and you go through a period of denial when you think you’re above showing off because that can’t be you right? You relish in hiding and keeping to yourself but you gravitate towards opportunity like iron and magnet. If there’s a point in keeping a down-low for protection or for your holy future goal, you’ll keep your behavior in check like stilled water. But where water runs there are leaks and you can’t help but give flashes of insight or action. You need to prove the world that your way is a good way, maybe even the ONLY way. Making your ideas real is important and your way of doing it will cause impact because you only will implement the big, world-changing ones. You have to get it out of you because the future belongs to you. The rules are not yet hinged and so you can make it anything you want before everyone else gets there. Here the words like "domineering”, “stubborn”, “reckless”, and “insane” earn their evidence because you are compelled and cannot resist chances to make the outside world fit your vision. Only then will everyone realize what you said and what you think is true because they need proof and nothing beats that legal game than having reality as your witness.



A paranoia about the reality of outside forces that you cannot anticipate.

Alas, mistakes are tough. You are certain of your point of view but there could always be information you didn’t take into account because you didn’t value it when it was right in front of you. Yes, in theory, you would put your keys inside your pocket but you forgot that when you pull your seat back in the car and so the keys fall out. The only reason why you recover from that is because you hear the sounds of keys landing on the seat and that alerts you. Learning how to drive a car is nerve-wrecking because the reality of driving is that it’s a moment-to-moment activity and you don’t move or react fast enough to do everything the “best” way. You do it and that can be it. It’s all about the reflexes and winging it and you SUCK at that. You see all the problems and all the reasons why there are about 18,000 car accidents in the United States each year but you still have to go into this freak death machine because you need to go to work. By the time you sit inside, you’re kinda over life - ah well, so the roads might be iced and there will be a road rager behind me probs. You’ve lived long enough.

In rare moments when you are awesome at something active, you’re in a trance. Your brain shuts down and all of its activity just stops. You are now just a pure ball of instinct and sympathetic systems and, for the period that you’re under, you don’t care. Noise become signals and the world are just cue cards on your awesome performance. You got this, you see it, you nail it. But then you wake up because free-flow without controls is not your natural order and you freak out. Reason banishes the beast. You’re wondering how anyone can live with so much chaos.

Nature is not a cuddly teddy bear; it’s the hurricane knocking down skyscrapers and hope outside. Sometimes it gives you sun-kissed daisies and flour for linguine but too much is deceitful and distracting. The world currently is still in peril and all the stimuli in the world can’t make you ignore that. For you, Outside World OD is a real thing.

