Who are You? -3: Perfect Melancholy Personality

Analyst, meticulous planner, thinker and loner are some of the attributes that define a perfect melancholy personality.  He would set up a schedule and follow it. He wants things in perfect order, chaos and mess are not his favorite words. He would most certainly not appreciate guests coming to his house unannounced and without pre-scheduling their visit. He would hate it, if his routine is disrupted for any reason. Do you know anyone who has these characteristics? if you do, then you know Mr. Perfect Melancholy.

Perfect melancholies are the thinkers. They are the people who are serious of purpose, dedicated to order and organization, and appreciative of beauty and intelligence. They don’t dash off in search of excitement but analyse the best plan for their lives. Melancholies of the world are responsible for giving us poetry, art, literature, philosophy and symphonies. They have culture, refinement, taste and talent very deeply ingrained in their nature.

Where popular sanguine is an extrovert, perfect melancholy is an introvert. Where popular sanguine loves to talk and throw everything out in the open, perfect melancholy is deep, quiet, and thoughtful. Where popular sanguine vies life through rose-colored glasses, perfect melancholy is born with a pessimistic nature, and foresees problems before they happen and counts the cost before building.  Perfect melancholy always wants to get to the heart of the matter. Perfect Melancholy doesn’t take things at face value but digs into the inner truths. They are also experts at keeping track of details.

I remember an instance which would illustrate the meticulousness and seriousness of a Melancholy. I was doing a project for my organization, and before starting the project I was discussing the details about the costs, expenses and profits that we might earn from that project with my boss. While explaining the details and how the expenses would happen and in what heads, I was jotting down the details on a piece of paper, after our discussion, he approved the project and while I was leaving, would you mind if I keep this paper you jotted the details on. I said ok.

From next day I started working on the project, with one of the programmer / website designers. It was a project for a government organization, after a year, when we completed almost 90% of the project, and received almost 80% of payments, the government changed, and new government decided to call off the project, so we were left with no option but to  wind up the project.  Later, my boss called a meeting to discuss the project, I went there ready with my report and other information, which suggested that we ended up making some profit, though not to the magnitude which we expected. When the meeting started, I was amazed to see my boss taking out that small piece of paper on which I jotted down the detail when we met about a year ago. Perfection is the second nature of a melancholy person.

Perfect Melancholies are serious people who set long-range goals and want to do only what has eternal purpose. While popular sanguine can function in a messy workplace or work on a cluttered desk, but perfect melancholies must have things organized, or they can’t function. Perfect Melancholies are quick learners, they are interested in detail and give very patient hearing to the technical presentation of a salesperson. They would quietly jot down the points, get clarification from the sales person on their doubts, and update their mental database. When the next salesperson of the same product comes to them, they would use information from this updated database and question new salesmen based on their prior information, and this new salesman would further add to their knowledge database.  This quality makes them mostly very knowledgeable in most of the fields that they work in or have a chance to be associated.

Perfect Melancholy’s motto in life is if it’s worth doing, its worth doing right. But sometimes they tend to overdo it, one of my consultancy client is a big industrialist in carpet industry, once I was managing an event for him, for a social organization he was president of. It was its 50^th anniversary, the guests were expected from all over the country, they were to be given accommodation in various hotels and lodges across the town, based on their budget, I designed the registration form, where their information and preference could be recorded. I designed it in about half an hour, as I knew what all information is needed for administration purposes and which will help us provide them the facilities that they need. But when he saw the format, he suggested certain modification regarding sequence colors of the boxes size of the boxes the font and formatting and it took us about a month to finalize that format, which never needed this much time in designing and resulted in waste of a very valuable resource called time.

Because perfect melancholies have high standards they do everything to perfection, but when they impose their standards on others, this trait becomes weakness. The melancholies would do well if they manage this weakness in their temperament.