Should I Stay or Should I Go? The Gift and Cost of An ENTJ’s Relentless Forward Motion

I remember sitting in a park with my friends when I was about seventeen, looking around and feeling strangely disconnected. Is this it? I thought. Is this all there is to life? It was a funny question to ask at that age, but everyone around me seemed so content with the life laid out in front of them. Graduate, get a job, get married, build a home. The sequence felt right to them, and they didn’t question it. But to me, it all felt frighteningly final. Didn’t I get a say in what my life would look like? 

Not long after, I went to study in another city while most of my friends stayed in our hometown. Twenty years later, they still live in that hometown, and they still meet regularly. I went the opposite way. I've lived in Indonesia, India, Belgium, Luxembourg and Ukraine. I’ve worked in an embassy, in corporate sales, in UX design, in surf coaching, in writing. 

From the outside, those poles-apart countries and career paths may seem random, but it never felt that way to me. Behind each decision, there was usually some idea of where it might lead. I’m not saying that every choice was part of some brilliant master plan. Far from it. Some plans failed, and some choices took me places I didn’t necessarily want to be. But even when the route changed, I was still moving towards the kind of life I wanted—one with more autonomy, meaning and control than I could see at age 17.

In Myers-Briggs terms, I’m an ENTJ, and forward motion is my cognitive function stack at work. Cognitive functions are the basic building blocks we all use to take in information from the world and make decisions. As an ENTJ, my dominant (most used) function is Extraverted Thinking (Te) and it’s supported by Introverted Intuition (Ni). Te-Nis like me are extremely driven. Ni shows us a possible future, and Te aggressively starts making a to-do list to achieve it. With Te-Ni in charge, you get a person who creates a massive master plan and will not stop until it becomes reality. 

This explains why, before I even know and can explain it, I’m headfirst into moving countries and learning a new language. Why I’m always writing another job application or another business plan. Waiting to see what happens has never been my strong suit. If I can see a way forward, I want to get moving, like, yesterday. 

And for a long time, I saw that relentless forward motion only as a blessing.

The Gift of Relentless Motion

The gift of Te-Ni isn’t that every plan miraculously works out. Actually, it’s the opposite—it lies in what happens when they don’t.

ENTJs recover quickly when a plan fails

When I was a child, I wanted to become an ambassador, which is a slightly unusual dream for a kid, but being an ambassador seemed incredibly cool to me. They traveled, met interesting people, negotiated on behalf of entire countries, and appeared to be in charge of Very Serious Things. It was the perfect mix of adventure, influence and responsibility—very ENTJ, in retrospect.

I studied international relations because of that dream. Then, at 21, I visited Brussels and fell in love with the city. I remember looking at the enormous buildings of the European institutions and thinking: this is where important decisions are made. Working there seemed like the perfect use of my need to fix… I mean, change the world for the better. So I doubled down on learning French and started looking for internships at the European Union. 

Unfortunately, nothing went my way and the Brussels route got blocked for reasons I won’t bore you with. Te-Ni gave me a useful response to that pickle: as a student, I’d worked in an Indonesian restaurant for some fast cash, so why not go to Indonesia and gain international experience at an embassy there? So, I found an internship and went. 

We turn a detour into a new route

Once in Indonesia, I discovered that I hated the embassy work. Hated it. Instead of having influence and making a difference, I felt restricted and powerless. So, what did Milena do? She pivoted. 

I wasn’t ready to give up and go home, and luckily, a friend was leaving her job at an HR consultancy and recommended me as her replacement. It wasn’t what I’d planned, but it allowed me to stay in Indonesia, my bigger goal at the time, so I took it. When the boss met me, he immediately said I should work in sales, which was clearly a better career fit than the compliance-heavy, bureaucracy-bound environment of HR. That experience eventually led me into IT sales and helped me land a job with a tech company… in Brussels. I reached the city I’d been aiming for, just through a route I could never have predicted.

This is how Te–Ni can make ENTJs unusually resilient. We may become intensely attached to a vision, but we are not attached to one method of achieving it—at least, I’m not. Results matter most, and any route that reaches that goal is valid as far as I’m concerned. I just ask what each curveball could offer me.

We build a new life before leaving the old one

From the outside, Te-Ni can look impulsive, like we’re making a massive, sudden life pivot on a whim. The truth is that ENTJs almost always secure the next stage of their life before leaving the old one. Ni is inherently risk-averse regarding the future, and that drives us to run on “parallel tracks” where we start building our next venture while still employed at the old one. Exits only happen once the new life is fully locked in.

Years later, this exact pattern appeared again for me when I started surfing and fell completely in love with the sport. Surfing gave me something my corporate life did not: immediacy, a high-octane physical challenge, and the rare experience of being unable to control the situation! 

When I filed the resignation letter, people thought I was quitting my cozy corporate job on impulse to “become a surfer” a.k.a dropping out. What they couldn’t know is that I’d worked hard to become good enough at surfing to teach it. From there, I could build a business helping women learn to surf. And that—that!—was exactly the life I’d wanted from age 17.

This is the gift of my relentless motion. It helped me build a life that feels meaningful and fulfilling, helping women develop a healthier relationship with themselves and their bodies, with absolute autonomy and control over how I do it. And I’ve enjoyed the journey from there to here, though I never once stopped to ask what I might be leaving behind. 

That is where the ENTJ drive becomes … complicated.

The Price of Achieving the Dream

You know that feeling just before you open your eyes, when for a split second you have this safe, comfortable sense of being home? You might have spent the night on a Greek island, but before your brain catches up, you believe you’re in your own bed. I have that feeling too. But the strange thing is that it isn’t connected to any particular bed anymore. It’s a little freaky, if I’m honest, because it means I’m no longer sure where home is.

For years I treated that as a reasonable price to pay for always pursuing the better version of my life. Te users excel at putting feelings in a box. I could dismiss the homesickness, the loneliness, the lost friendships as a necessary trade-off. My plans accounted for being the cool auntie who travels the world; they did not account for how difficult it is to be the cool auntie who can’t remember how many kids her cousins have, let alone their names! 

But as I’ve grown older, and, rather inconveniently, more introspective, I’ve begun to realize the value of continuity, of shared history and being part of other people’s everyday lives. 

I’m pretty sure this is a sign of Fi development. Introverted Feeling (Fi) is the ENTJ’s least-preferred function and it represents our softer, more vulnerable side. It’s the part of us that’s less concerned less with what works or where life is going, and more with what something means to us, what we value and what we need emotionally. 

Just recently, I missed my best friends’ wedding in Gibraltar. I missed the flight—let's not go into the details—and ended up watching them say ‘I do’ on my phone. Then one of my other friends who was there sent me a message: “We wished you were here.” And I completely broke down. 

I wasn’t crying over one missed wedding. I was crying about all the birthdays, Sunday lunches, unplanned visits and ordinary afternoons I had missed while always chasing the “better” thing. It’s like a new question appeared: “I won, but at what cost?”

The Learning

To be clear, I don’t regret the choices I've made. Te–Ni gave me the courage to imagine a different life and then build it, and I’m proud of what I’ve achieved. 

But there was a price, in the thousands of ordinary moments I missed and my relationships changing shape.

My Fi is developing now, like some logic-piercing mid-life awakening. It’s forcing me to consider a less familiar question: not only where I want to go next, but what matters enough to stay for. Once I count the friendships, routines and sense of belonging I would have to rebuild, is the next option genuinely better? Or is it simply new? And I’m not saying I’m going to stop moving (I won’t) or that I want to climb into the TARDIS and return to the life I left at 17. It’s simply that Fi gets a bigger say while Te–Ni is building the next plan.

Funnily enough, even while writing this essay, I was deciding where to go in the fall. Fuerteventura? Northern Spain? Costa Caparica? I’ve never been there! But then I looked at the friends I already have here and decided to stay. For the first time in years, I will remain in Ireland for the dark months. Not that I’ve suddenly become a fan of the kind of gothic gloom Edgar Allan Poe would have called cosy, but I pictured evenings drinking hot chocolate with my friends and watching terrible Christmas movies, and realized that this had become more valuable to me than lying on a distant beach surrounded by strangers.

I will probably always chase a better version of my life. But my idea of “better” now includes the people and routines I already have, not only whatever might be waiting somewhere else. The grass under my feet is finally green enough, and that is its own freedom.