Can you define what you mean by, "Authentic and motivated"?  What is "Authentic"?  By motivated, do you just need something about time management or do you have problems finishing tasks you need to finish even when you have time?

The latter is a more accurate description of me. Without getting too detailed, the "authenticity" portion I mean in the sense that I want to live more for myself and my desires or goals than caring as much about other people and their desires or goals, or what those other people feel my desires and goals should be. The problem is that I've been in this environment forever, and even though I'm more than capable of thinking rationally and developing my own opinions on religious and political topics, when it comes to people and interaction and my sense of self, I feel like a moron and can't give a reason for most things why I like them or don't like them other than "they were presented to me previously in that manner".

As for motivation, I find that, even when I am not feeling depressed, I would often prefer to just crawl into a hole rather than be around anyone in any situation just from feeling anxious about it. When I become isolated, it is then that I realize I have nothing to pursue - there's nothing I know of that I want to or feel confident enough to do for myself. It's a total cycle. This makes me appear lazy - I don't want to clean, I don't want to go to work, I don't want to pick up my unfinished crochet work or a video game or a book or anything unless someone else is wanting me to. As a matter of fact, I probably wouldn't be searching for literature of this nature unless I've been told for quite some time that there is concern for me and this lack of sense of self.

I don't mean for all of this to sound completely emo, I'm actually pretty successful for a 20 year old - incidentally, I actually work a full-time position with Amazon.com, was living in my own place but I met a really great guy about 6 months ago now and he recently moved in (so far it's working out amazing), I've got the prettiest, sweetest little cat, and if anything ever happens to me that's disastrous, I've got a great relationship with my father and step-mother who are local and would help me.

I just want to find the icing for my cake, so to speak.

I find the best personal development is in the discovery of who you are. Not just who you think yourself to be, but the person you really are, as others see you. And the best way I've found of this discovery is to write.

It doesn't take much -- a few minutes a day. Get a cheap spiral-bound notebook, and at the end of the day, write down one thing. Spend a few minutes fleshing it out. If it is an event, describe the action. If it is a thought, give it flesh. Write down your reactions and emotions. Don't worry about what you say, or whether you say it well. Don't concern yourself with proper grammar or correct spelling. Just write it down for you to remember later.

You'll find out more about you than you might expect.

At least, this works for me.

  I'm INTJ too.  I have taken the test a number of times over the years.  I started out as ENTJ - but the E was just over the center.  Now, the I is very strong.  So the test is not something that is permanent, but more how you feel at the time you take the test.  But you sound like you are pretty into the INTJ spectrum at the moment.

It took me years to accept that I don't want to be with other people particularly.  That I am not interested in socializing.  My friends say - let's go .... - and I'm thinking, what a drag.  So I politely refuse.  If you keep looking you can collect friends who are not offended and don't fuss at you.  Family is a lost cause - they never stop trying to make you something they want you to be.

I go through stages where I get obsessive about a topic.  I'll do the craft, read the books, collect the stuff.  And then I get interested in something else.  I am jealous of other people who have something they do for all their lives and they get really good at it.  I have learned that I will return to the obsession later.  It isn't a waste to hang onto stuff as I'll get back into that obsession.  It took me over 17 years to finish a knitted sweater for my husband.  16 of them the almost finished sweater was in a trunk!  I finally finished it a couple of years ago and my husband loves it and wears it.  I'm amazed how well it stretches to fit.

I can't think of a job I've had that I didn't come to be totally bored with and eventually hated.  I'm in IT and I'm fairly good at it.  I still hate it most days.  But I suck it up and pretend I like it for the sake of performance reviews and salary increases.

I can change things about me that I don't like.  But the changes are very limited and sometimes of short duration.  I suspect it is true for most people - some changes are easy and stick, some are difficult and don't seem to stay around for lunch.  So I have come to accept - or have given up on depending on your view point - those pieces of me that are uncomfortable for other people but not for me.  Other people can stuff it.

To sum up this ramble, be yourself, accept yourself.  Have fun on your quest.  Let others go hang if they don't like it.

I agree with CJ on this, and I have a similar personality type.

Honestly I solved my social issues by getting married and having a family.  Married life is a lot different from single life, you don't have much pressure to engage with those outside the family unless you go after it yourself.  But I've always been like that, even as a teenager I would have one or two people I latched on to and was never very interested (and often intimidated by the thought of) leaving that limited social circle.  My perfered environment is not being alone, it is being with a small, select group.  I raced to get married.

I don't care that I don't have lots of 'friends' now, because I have what I really want, rather than what I *thought* I wanted...and I got the idea of what I thought I wanted by observing people around me, rather than examining what actually made me happy.

On the task completion side, I don't know what to tell you.  I'm interested in a problem or task right up to the point where I figure it out, then I lose interest in actually doing the work of implementation.  I love solving problems and learning new hobbies but I don't usually take it past the initial 'learn and discover' stage.  I often wish I could actually get to the point where I'm good at a specific thing, but either it isn't in my nature or I have never found the specific thing I like enough to devote myself to.  For example, I love to learn about writing and when the muse strikes me I am pretty good at fiction, but I don't enjoy the *process* of writing enough to sit down and do it very often.

The reason I enjoy being an IT administrator for a growing company is that I get to learn new things all the time.  If I have a month where everything is settled down, no new projects are on the horizon and everything is working well I start to get depressed about my job.  I often think I would enjoy being a research scientist or a psychologist, because the list of problems are basically endless at this point.  I don't know how I'll remain content in IT/IS in the long term.

Now, I'm not recommending you go get hitched to a random person and become a biologist, I'm just relating my life experience.

If you are really bad at task management they make drugs for things like ADHD that very often help people to be more focused.  To a layperson like myself there seems to be a rather vague line between ADHD and just being unfocused and lazy.

Dude, I read that book for about 3 hours when I got home last night.

I even signed the stupid thing on my Kindle...

Surprisingly enough, it really is evoking some pretty crazy memories from me. Things I hate thinking about. It's actually going to take a lot of motivation to finish this book, but I wanted a challenge. Thanks a lot, man!

I also talked to my mom (who is a theist, but also a mostly good person simultaneously whom I love) and she suggested Larry Winget for acquiring that "shit or get off the pot" attitude. I'm checking him out, too, though from what I can see of his latest rant on his site, he's kind of a prick.

Sigh, and the ironic bit is IT is expected to assist ........... people.  Day in and day out.  Stupid people who can't RTFM or the screen.  And they hire people for this kind of position who have to really work at being polite to other people.  I'm unemployed at the moment, but when working, my husband can hardly drag me out the door to see a movie or buy dinner.  <shudders>

R'amen to that, sister. At any rate, I think I'm going to see a counselor. I spent two years in Psychology as an independent study in high school and apparently learned NOTHING! So I think some CBT will do me good. Maybe some lithium, too. *grins* I'm getting a lot of support from my family, and I'm on quite a high right now, so I'm pretty sure this'll end well.

Wasn't adolescence supposed to end a while ago!?

 My Life, by Leon Trotsky. 

Most important self-development & self actualizing book I've ever read. 

Wow. Just... wow.

I am a new person. I have been (to coin a phrase) born again, in the light and grace of perseverance and not taking no for an answer. Especially from squares of plywood.

Hello! INFP here.
I am a self-development expert, born and raised in family of self-development experts. When a person has problem, he goes to psychologist. When psychologist has a problem, he goes to my dad.
I'm not kidding. (yeah, we do have some professional psychologists among clients) We have a registered civil association that unites people interested in self-development in this region. We help those that get to us and want to change themselves.

That is my luck, because I need personal development like salt. My personality is the weirdest I know, still being potentially likable and useful for life. But it requires strong personalities to appreciate me. I'm not shy, I'm just more than most of people can handle.
I've done a lot of work by alternative methods, all that I could alone. Now I need to perform therapy on myself through socializing. Which is diffcult to do, because there is no institution that performs pub therapy for the neurally hypertrophic. Gotcha science, you can't do everything!

Our club has theory and methods that work with Evolutionary Human Component. Our plentiful friends and customers often saw in practice our success on their own friends and relatives, whom traditional psychology couldn't help. Therefore, we get our word spreading depending on if it works, which it does. The downside is, that people aren't likely to try an EHC-based method, unless they saw it on their relative or got recommended from a trustworthy person. We don't have government support to enforce our stuff through laws.
The secret of our success is in work with what we call evolutionary human component. Knowledge of EHC is what is missing from contemporary science and most of alternative therapies that would make them really effective.

I happen to have been evaluated as INTJ by a friend of mine some time ago. We are both software engineers and this personality stuff came to us through team organization at work. I think he recently changed the I to E because of my acquired art of argumentation/bullshitting, but he was right the first time - I am not a fan of crowds.

You are 20 - slow down with the contemporary personal development courses. You don't have enough experience to have built up a substantial bullshit filter. I have two suggestions that are much better suited to your age and personality type. Here they are:

1. StoryCorps.org - let me tell you about the StoryCorps project a bit. They are not a corporation, or a pro-profit organization, not tied to any philosophy, religion or anything like that. What they are is a national historical project for preservation of memories. They collect conversations between people who decide that they have something to talk about. Why would you want to listen to these conversations? Listening to ordinary people's memories, understanding the depth of philosophical wisdom of an ordinary blue collar worker or even just a child, the strength of their bond to one another and the significance of being alive together and at the same time with these people has not only taught me the depth of what it means to be human, but also helped me relate to the world around me much more productively and without fear of anything really. I find myself wishing that this project started 2000 years ago - I simply know that my understanding of the world through these kinds of conversations would beat any schooling I could ever get.

2. The Classics of Litterature - these are my conversations with people who lived before. These are my personal StoryCorps of the past centuries. They contain the knowledge that the thoughts, doubts, ideas and dilemmas you are having right now other people have had before you - smart, diligent and honest people who bothered to tell you about their experiences, conclusions and stories through works of art. I will tell you a little trick I use that will make reading them much more personal: every time I pick up a book, say Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, I note down the dates - when did Fyodor begin writing the book, how long did it take, when was it published the first time. Then I try to piece together Fyodor's own life in that period - how did he live, with whom, what was the world like then and how was he received by pears and the public, things like that. I never know beforehand what will catch my eye, so it's not like a mission to know everything about Fyodor, but more of my own pleasure of discovery. I try to find pictures to create some mental images and imagine what his life might have been like as he wrote the book. Then I go back to the book and look through the names of the chapters, first just the listing, then I turn the pages. That's where the first questions pop up - why is this chapter so thick, Fyodor? why do the names have this sound to them rather than some other? That's when I start reading. The questions never stop and his answers are truly amazing. By the time I am done with the first read, the questions unanswered compel me to have another chat with the man.

Well, this should keep you busy for the next 50 years or so. If you want just some meaningful news sources that will not fill you with white noise of corporate media, information about the world around you, people and other animals in it, I suggest checking out:

1. Democracy Now - in my opinion unparalleled information and context source. They have an archive going back 12+ years of news and stories and are on the beat with the context-based covering of most important global issues, activism and decision-making process. 1 hour of news every day, available as video online or downloadable as MP3.

2. NOW - a link to an archive of videos/MP3s from a crew that covered US issues for the past 8 years and sent their last show last month - a huge loss for the public broadcasting. The wole archive is there for the viewing/listening, a model for what investigative journalism should look like. These guys were in their best element as the boots on the ground, talking to ordinary people, gathering information on the level that is as close to the happening as possible and largely rejecting the cult of persona premise of the corporate media. All the major issues are there: from the wars, over healthcare, banking inustry, student loans, worker/women/civil rights, gun control to the agricultural monpolies and environmental situation world wide.

3. Bill Moyers Journal - that's a link to an archive of a show hosted by Bill Moyers at the non-profit Public Broadcasting Service. Moyers was a Press Secretary in the Johnson administration, has been a well respected journalist for decades and the interviews, essays and pieces in that archive are nothing short of spectacular - a true exception to the rule when it comes to republicans formerly tied to the White House. Especially his participation and coverage of media/net neutrality, the economic system, healthcare and war issues is worth your time. Unfortunately, Bill retired a few weeks ago to concentrate on his family in his late years, but his spot at Public Broadcasting is now filled by my fourth suggestion:

4. Need to Know - having to fill humongous shoes of Bill Moyers and the crew from Now, these guys have been doing an acceptable job for the past couple of weeks. The verdict is still out, but I will surely follow them closely.

Now that we are through with my suggestions, I can tell you that I picked them with one more thing in mind: all of them offer a wealth of references, venues of research and more questions than answers. Your experience will therefore be your own and will contribute to building your own integrity, which is what I suppose you meant by the word "authentic". Have fun.

Normal people aren't very interesting. Stop trying to be not very interesting.

How did you manage to focus on the most boring and insignificant sentence in that otherwise long-ass post full of exhilarating stuff? I had to look for it for 20 seconds - and I wrote the stuff.

I would heartily recommend anything by Dr. Haha Lung.

He has a great way of combining Machiavelli, Sun Tzu, taoism and other Eastern philosophies and makes it fun.

Please don't judge a writer by his name: http://www.hahalung.com/All_DrLungs.html

When you take a break from 'improving' have a gander at Terry Pratchett's fine tomes.

Oh, and welcome to the forum.

And thanks for the forum welcomes, though I've been silently running about this place for a couple of years now.