A Letter
from Jon

Know Thy Type is a passion project. I built it because I believe most people walk through life with only a surface-level understanding of who they are, and I think we can do better than that.

My name is Jon. I am a student of history, psychology, and contemplative traditions. I have spent years reading the works of people who dedicated their lives to understanding the human condition, from the clinical researchers who mapped personality traits to the contemplatives who mapped the inner landscape of emotion and awareness. What I found is that these two worlds are describing the same thing from different angles.

Here is what I have come to understand: we are not just personality types floating in a vacuum. Every moment of every day, we are interacting with emotional energies. Fear, shame, resentment, grief, guilt. These are not occasional visitors. They are constant currents running beneath the surface of our behavior. They create patterns. Those patterns surface as averages over time. And those averages are what we call personality.

The MBTI tells you how you think. The Enneagram tells you why you do what you do. Attachment theory tells you how you connect. But none of them, on their own, tell you what is driving the whole system from underneath. That is where the emotional patterns live. That is where the real work begins.

I did not build this site to give people a label. I built it because I know from personal experience that understanding your patterns changes how you show up in the world. It changed how I show up for my family. It changed how I handle conflict, how I process grief, how I recognize the moments when fear is making my decisions for me. These are not abstract ideas. They are daily, practical tools for becoming a better person.

My aim with Know Thy Type is simple. I want to take everything I have learned from the researchers, the clinicians, and the contemplatives, and organize it in a way that is clear, honest, and genuinely useful. Not watered down. Not dressed up in jargon. Not hidden behind a paywall. Just the knowledge, presented with care, so that anyone who wants to understand themselves more deeply has a place to start.

If something on this site helps you see a pattern you did not see before, or gives you language for something you have always felt but could not name, then this project is doing what it was built to do.

Thank you for being here.

Jon
Founder, Know Thy Type