For eleven years I co-signed everything Marcus built and told people he trusted no one, including me. Then I read page nine.
He came in at seven on the thirty-first of March with a manila envelope and put it on my desk and did not sit down.
“Keys are the bank, the shop, and the Champaign bins,” he said. “The bins one is the brass one. Everything on the H drive got moved to the shared folder in February, so the folder structure’s different, and I wrote you a page on that. Second sheet.”
“Marcus.”
“The Tuggle contract renews in October and you want to start on it in August, because he’ll say yes in August and he’ll say maybe in October.” He tapped the envelope twice with two fingers. “The rest is in the plan. Call Dot before you call me.”
He shook my hand. He has always shaken my hand like a man who has read that you shake hands. Then he went out through the shop and he did not stop and talk to anybody, and Junior Estrada was on the bagger and told me later he thought Marcus was going to lunch.
Twenty-six years. He built that company with me starting in the spring of 2000, out of a rented office over the old shoe store, and he walked out of it in eleven minutes with a manila envelope and a page about the folder structure.
Here’s what I said about Marcus Reifsteck for most of those twenty-six years, out loud, at dinners, to my husband, to anybody who asked me what he was like: Marcus trusts no one.
I could have given you a page on it. Nobody but Marcus ever had signature authority on the operating account, not me, not the controller we hired in 2012 who had run a bigger book than either of us. He never let one other person touch the breeding program, not for a season, not for a nursery, in twenty-six years. In 2004 Donny Pflum offered him a handshake on eight hundred bags and Marcus mailed him a fourteen-page agreement, and Donny called me laughing so hard he had to pull over. Marcus reconciled the seed inventory himself, at night, four times a year, for a decade after we could afford somebody to do it. And he never one time, not one, told me I was good at this. He told me our retention numbers. He is the only man I have ever known who could hand you the number and not the sentence.
I am sixty-three years old and I am running that company now, and there is a decision in November about whether we renew a licensing agreement or take an offer, and it is mine. And the third plan document is in my truck, on the passenger side, under the door pocket. Thirty-eight pages. He wrote it in 2021 and it runs to 2031, and I have read up to page nine, and I have been carrying it around since the last week of March.
The four letters came at us in 2009 and we all laughed at them.
The bank made us do a two-day management thing after the trouble in 2006 — a woman came from Peoria with a flip chart and a workbook and we all filled out a hundred and some questions, and on the second morning she read everybody’s letters out and said what they meant. Mine was something about energy in a room. Everybody clapped. Marcus’s came out and she read the description of it and Junior said, “Well, they got him,” and the room came apart, and it was funny, it was legitimately funny.
Somebody taped Marcus’s sheet inside the door of the shop refrigerator. Somebody else drew a mustache on it. That sheet is still in there. It has been in there since 2009, behind the milk, and I have opened that door probably four thousand times, and I did not look those four letters up until the second week of April of this year.
INTJ Traits: The Distance You Have to Keep
To breed corn you need isolation. If you have a block you are trying to learn something from, it has to be far enough from every other corn in the county that nothing gets into it — six hundred and sixty feet is the number people say, and Marcus used more than that, and he timed plantings so his blocks were shedding pollen when the neighbors’ weren’t. That is not caution and it is not paranoia. Without the distance you have a field of something, and you don’t know what, and everything you thought you learned that summer is worth nothing at all.
I used to say to people that Marcus lived his whole life at isolation distance. I meant it as a joke about the man. I want to be careful here, because I now think I was describing a method and calling it a personality.
The other thing about this trade is time. A line takes eight to ten years, and that is with a winter nursery, which means you fly a bag of seed to the southern hemisphere in November so you can get two generations out of one calendar year, and you do that again and again, and at the end of ten years you have a thing you can sell, or you have nothing, and you knew which one it was going to be somewhere around year four and had to keep going anyway. Everybody in this business is working on something the customer will not see for a decade. Most of us hate it. He was the only person I ever met who seemed to be standing in the year the thing arrived instead of the year he was in.
The fall of 2006 our parent seed increase failed. I will get into it. The relevant part for now is that in November of that year I asked Marcus for signature authority so I could commit on some contracted acres without waiting on him, because he was in Chile, and he said no over a satellite phone, and I got about eleven words out of him.
“Not this year, Char. Ask me again in ’08.”
I did not ask him again in ’08. I told that story for eighteen years. It is a good story. You can do the voice.
INTJ vs INFJ: Where Sure Comes From
Dot Brummel came to us in 2003 to answer the phone and by 2010 she was the reason we still had customers.
Somewhere around 2013 it got clear to two people in our building that we were dead in five years. The trait licensing terms out of the majors were tightening every renewal, and our whole lineup sat on licensed material, and the arithmetic went one direction. I did not see it. I was having a good three years. Our dealer count was up and I thought that meant something.
The two who saw it were Marcus and Dot, separately, and neither of them said a word to me for over a year.
What Marcus did was build the exit. He rebuilt a genetics base off expired and public material, which is nine years of work started in a year when nothing was wrong, and he wrote a cash model out to 2024 that I have since read and cannot fault anywhere, and he went and got food-grade contracts with two Japanese buyers and a mill in Cedar Rapids before he told anybody we were changing what we sold. In February of 2015 he put a written exit from three licensing agreements on the table at a Tuesday meeting, and I told him he was going to kill us, and I was wrong, and the model has run to about four percent of its own projections every year since. It is still running. He has been gone since March and it is still running.
What Dot did was keep forty growers.
Because here is what would have happened: Marcus would have mailed all of them the correct math. And half of them would have been gone by February, because a farmer does not change what he plants off a page. He changes it in his own kitchen, at his own table, in December, with his wife there, after a conversation that includes at least twenty minutes about something else. Dot knew which forty. She knew which two dealers were going to blow it up and she got to them before it went out. She knew that Verlyn Aupperle had to hear it from her at his place with nobody else there, and that Bud Tuggle had to hear it in front of his son, or Bud would spend two years telling people he’d been handled. Ask her what she said to Verlyn that night and you will get about nine words back, and I don’t think she is holding out on me.
I have had a long time with those two now. Underneath they are the same animal. Both of them had 2019 in hand in 2013, whole, with no receipt for it, and both have been right so often that neither one registers it as unusual anymore.
The difference is in the delivery. Marcus can only hand you a thing. A model, a contract, a genetics base, a signature page — and once it is a thing it holds without him in the building and it holds whether or not you can stand him, which is the entire reason he makes it a thing. Dot cannot hand you anything. What she has is forty people in an order, and it works, and the day she retires it evaporates.
Trade the two of them and we die twice over. Give Dot the licensing exit and there is no base, no model, and no exit, because there is nothing in her to build one out of. Give Marcus the forty growers and he is correct in writing by January and finished by March.
Our county seat had a hardware, two implement dealers, a hotel, and a Ben Franklin on the square when we started. It has a Dollar General a half mile out now, a very good Mexican restaurant in the old bank building, and eleven storefronts on the square with paper in four of the windows. The hotel is apartments. That has nothing to do with anything in here. It is in here because we drove around that square four thousand times and it is the place this happened in.
I said to Dot once, a couple of years ago, that Marcus had saved the company in 2015.
“He did,” she said. “Nobody was going to follow him out of the building, though.”
INTJ Behavior: Something Ferd Kuiper Said Like It Was Weather
Ferd Kuiper was our banker until he retired in 2014. He is seventy-seven and he still drives to the branch two mornings a week to have coffee in the lobby with whoever is there, which the branch tolerates and which I think is the most Ferd thing about Ferd.
The nineteenth of November last year I ran into him in the lot. We talked about his knee and about a boy of his in Bloomington, and then he asked how Marcus was, and I said something about Marcus being Marcus, and Ferd laughed.
“He still got that ground?”
“What ground.”
“The eighty and the home place.” Ferd was getting his door open. “Well — I shouldn’t say. It’s been twenty years. He put the eighty and the home place behind that note in ’06 and the note was written on your book, Char, your side of it, the contracted acres. He wouldn’t let us write it on the inventory. Wrote it on your book.” He got in and had to pull his coat in after him. “Told me if it was going on anything it was going on the part that was working.”
“On my—”
“Twenty years ago. Long time ago now.” He got the door shut and put the window down two inches. “Tell him I said hello.”
I stood in that lot until my hands got cold and then I went to the Casey’s and bought a coffee I did not want and sat in the truck with it.
I drove out to their place three weeks later, in December, when I had gotten myself into a state about it. Lorene let me in and went upstairs. Marcus was at the table with a seed catalog and he got up and got the coffee down and asked me did I want it black, which he has asked me four hundred times and has never once remembered the answer to.
I said I’d talked to Ferd Kuiper.
He said, “Ferd’s doing all right.”
And I said — and I am putting this in because I said it, and because I have thought about it every day since, and because a person who leaves this part out is writing an advertisement for herself — I said: “Twenty-six years and you couldn’t say one sentence to me. You bet your farm on me and you couldn’t say one sentence. What is wrong with you?”
He stood there with the coffee. And then he said, “It would have changed how you sold,” and he put the cup in front of me, and he sat down.
I did not touch the coffee. I said something about Aaron that is not going in here. Then I drove home.
INTJ Strengths and Weaknesses: Right on Schedule
Let me do the strength honestly, because I spent eighteen years shading it.
In 2011 Marcus wrote a document that said what this company would be in 2021, and in 2021 it was that, within a few points, including two things nobody in this state saw coming. He did that once before and once since. He picked the food-grade pivot four years before the terms that forced it. He was standing in 2024 in the year 2015 and the only reason it looks like luck is that he never once explained it in a way anybody could check, because he can’t. It doesn’t arrive as steps. It arrives finished. He would say the conclusion and you would ask why and he would say something so compressed it sounded rude.
And the same machinery is the whole problem, and I want to name it in the plainest way I can. When you can see the end of a thing that clearly, everybody standing between you and that end turns into a condition. Not a person, and not an enemy. A condition — a thing in the model with a value. He put his farm behind a note in 2006 because my book was the part that was working, and then he did not tell me, for twenty years, because telling me would have changed the number. He weighed my knowing against the outcome and the outcome won. That is not coldness. Coldness would be easier to be angry at. That is a man who cared enough about the thing to take me out of the deciding of it.
Which brings me to a night in Springfield in February of 2018.
State association dinner, two hundred people, and I was doing the twenty minutes they ask you to do. And I did the bit about Marcus, which I had by then done maybe forty times, the fourteen-page agreement and the satellite phone, and I finished it with a line I had been polishing for years: Marcus doesn’t trust anybody, which is fine, because the corn doesn’t either.
It kills. It killed that night. Two hundred people, and a man from a competitor came up afterward and used it back at me and I let him.
Marcus was not there. He was never there. But Dot was, and Bud Tuggle was, and this is a small business in a small state, and it took about nine days. He never said anything to me about it. What he did, and I only put this together this spring, is that in March of 2018 he stopped copying me on the licensing correspondence.
I told that joke twice more after that. I am not going to explain the two times. There isn’t a version of that where I come out all right and there is no reason there should be.
What Is the INTJ Personality Type: Page Nine
In April I sat down at the kitchen table with the third document and the laptop and I did both things at once, which took most of a Sunday.
Page nine is where the succession section starts. It is two and a half pages long. It says that effective at the end of the first quarter of 2026 the breeding program transfers to a contract arrangement with two named people, and that the selling and grower functions and the governing decisions consolidate under one person, and it names me, and there is a paragraph about the November licensing decision that lists four considerations in the order he would weigh them. It does not say why. It does not say anything about me except my name and what I will be responsible for.
He wrote that in 2021 and it happened on the day it said.
Then the letters. I fought two of them and gave up on two.
Introverted I fought, because the man sat in four hundred kitchens with me. Then I thought about how he was in the truck afterward, which was gray, and how he did every single one of those visits and then took the long way home alone, and I quit fighting it.
Intuitive is where I quit arguing, and there is nothing spooky in it. Feed him a terms sheet, a rumor about who is buying whom, and two sentences a buyer said at a show in Des Moines. What comes back out of him is the year 2024. Not those three things organized — the year. Whole, years early, with no ladder attached that anybody else could climb, which is why for twenty-six years he sounded like a man refusing to explain himself when he was a man who could not.
Thinking I had filed as cold and it isn’t. It means the scale he weighs on is impersonal on purpose. What does the system do. What does it do in the bad year. Who happens to be standing there is genuinely not on that scale, and he does not experience leaving them off as unkindness, because for him it is the same as leaving your own preferences off, and he does that too.
Judging means an open question is a cost he is paying every day it stays open, so he closes it, in writing, ten years early.
Behind the letters the framework runs four habits, ranked, and the ranking is the whole thing. In this one, the finished picture comes first and the impersonal machinery second, which is a man who sees the ending and then builds the apparatus that gets everyone there, and who will let you be angry at him the entire way if the apparatus is sound.
Some arithmetic, because it bears on what happens to these people. Call it two in a hundred, and roughly three of every four of those are men. The skew is large and it is doing work in this story, and what it costs a woman carrying this versus a man carrying it are two separate articles neither of which is this one. Treat any other figure you run into carefully: the tables floating around were mostly filled out by people who went looking, or whose employer bought them a seat, and a sample that assembles itself is a portrait of the assemblers.
One line on what the apparatus is worth, and then back to work. The four scales underneath do measure something, and they measure it again next year, which is the test that counts. The step after — cutting four scales into sixteen named boxes — is a filing decision, and the evidence has never covered the bill on it. Useful map. Invented legend. And every word of it describes an average of strangers, so if you came here to be explained, watch for the place the description quits on you. That place is the only thing on this page that is yours.
Since 2007, in the first week of August, Marcus has driven out to a quarter section on the Piatt County line, parked on the road, and sat there about an hour. We never had a plot on it. Lorene doesn’t know either. He has never said one word about it to anybody and I have asked twice.
INTJ Cognitive Functions: The One Thing He Never Modeled
The second habit is the machinery, and it faces out, and it is the reason there is a document at all. On paper the stack reads introverted intuition, extraverted thinking, introverted feeling, extraverted sensing, first to last, and for once the paper and the driveway agree.
Whatever he arrives at has to become a structure or it doesn’t count: a model, a contract, a written exit, a page about the folder system. And structures have a property he needs, which is that they run without him and they run whether or not the room is on his side. That is why he could put a written exit on a Tuesday table with two of us against it and not adjust one line. He was not being stubborn. He had already conceded that we would be against it — that was in there, that was a value in the model — and the model still came out the same way, so the meeting was a formality he sat through politely.
Under that there is a third habit, and it is private, and it is the one I had completely wrong.
It runs alone and it runs on worth. Not correctness — worth. What is actually worth protecting, decided somewhere he never showed anybody, argued with nobody, and never once put in a document. Twenty-six years of paper out of that man and there is not one sentence anywhere about what any of it was for. And underneath the structures, the answer was: this, the thing we built, and my part in it, valued high enough in 2006 to put his ground behind it. He never said it because saying it was never how it was going to get said. It got said in a note at a bank, in a form only Ferd Kuiper ever read.
Which is where I have to put my own hand up. I had twenty-six years of evidence and I built the wrong thing out of it, and my evidence was good. The withholding was real. What I got wrong is what the withholding was made of.
And the fourth habit is the one he was issued almost no equipment for: the minute he is actually standing in. The room. A hand on a doorframe. A woman in his kitchen crying at him. He has never in my knowledge been able to do a present tense. That is why the last day went the way it went — eleven minutes, an envelope, and a handshake he has read about. He wasn’t leaving coldly. He was doing the only thing he has ever been able to do with a moment, which is convert it into an item and hand it to you.
Aaron told me at the Casey’s in June that his dad never once pushed him about the business and that he went into veterinary because he wanted to, and that everybody assumes otherwise, and he seemed tired of it. He said it plainly and he looked right at me.
I don’t believe him. I never have, and that is where I have left it.
INTJ Under Stress: The Weekend of the Driveway
The weekend after the increase failed in 2006, Marcus regraded his driveway.
It is four hundred feet of gravel. He rented a box blade and he was out there Friday evening and all day Saturday and Sunday until dark, and Lorene said he came in for meals and did not talk and went back out. He crowned it and cut the ditch on both sides and hauled in eleven ton of rock and set the culvert. It is, and I have driven on it for twenty years, the best driveway in that township.
He also had not slept since Wednesday and had a thing on the operating line due on Monday morning that he had not started.
That is what this type does when it gets pushed past its equipment. It does not fall apart in an interesting way. It goes down into the one thing in front of it that can be finished, physically, today, and it finishes that thing to a standard nobody asked for, while the actual problem sits on the desk. There is no plan on a box blade. There is just the next twelve feet, and I understand now that for a man who lives in 2031, twelve feet you can see the end of would feel like a vacation.
He came in Monday, wrote the thing, and it was fine.
I am going to stop and say something straight, because I sat on this for ten years and told myself it was his business. A stretch like that which ends is a stretch. When it doesn’t end — when the sleeping never comes back, when a man is still finishing something at two in the morning in April and the thing on the desk is still on the desk — no partner and no page like this one is the right tool for it. That is what doctors are for, and licensed counselors. I would rather be the one who says so than the one who kept it collegial.
The next week he was back on the ’07 book and he never mentioned the driveway and neither did I, for twenty years, and it is a very good driveway.
INTJ Relationships and Compatibility: Outside the Room
Here is the shape of it. You will be provided for, thoroughly, four years in advance, by a man who has run the numbers on what you are going to need and has not mentioned that he ran them. You will not be consulted. You will find out in a bank lot from a seventy-seven-year-old who assumed you knew.
Call that the opposite of neglect, and then notice that from the inside the opposite of neglect and neglect arrive looking identical, which is a hell of a thing to be married to or partnered with or born to. The damage has nothing to do with being cared about. You were. What you never got was a vote. He weighed my knowing against my not knowing in 2006, he weighed it correctly, and I was not in the room where it got weighed.
Being married into this, as opposed to incorporated with it, is another set of rooms entirely and I was never in them. And handing two people the identical arrangement does not get you the same two people back.
I was out of the business for most of two winters, in 2016 and 2017, driving my mother to Decatur three days a week for dialysis. Four hours each time counting the sitting. She would not let me bring a book because she thought it was rude. So we listened to a country station out of Springfield that played the same nine songs, and my mother, who never in her life said a personal word to me, told me about a man she almost married in 1959, in pieces, over about eleven weeks, always on the way home and never on the way there. She died in April of 2018. That is not about Marcus and I am leaving it in.
Marcus covered my calls those two winters and never said anything about it and I found out this spring, from the file, that he had built it into the ’11 document as a contingency in the section on key-person risk, six years before it happened, because he had met my mother.
INTJ Careers: What They Put on the Nameplate
Every organization I have ever seen do this puts a person like Marcus somewhere technical, calls him brilliant, and routes every human being on the payroll around him.
Which is efficient, and it is also how you end up with the most accurate long-range instrument in the building filing reports to somebody who is managing the quarter. We did not do that to him, because it was our building and there was nobody to do it to him. I have watched three companies in this state do it to somebody, and in all three the person left, and in two of the three what they had said would happen happened, on about their schedule.
Who gets promoted for this, and what a career’s worth of that call adds up to on a pay stub, is a question for somebody who has run a compensation review, and I never have in my life. And an identical set of habits does not come through the same door twice: a two-in-a-hundred trait running four to one in one direction gets read one way on one person and another way on the next, which is its own article and not this one.
INTJ Personal Growth: The Third Document
There is a whole shelf of advice for this type about opening up and letting people in, and I would like to know who they think is reading it.
Here is the only growth in this I can actually vouch for, because I watched it. In 2006 that man had one thing he was not willing to model, and instead of writing it down where it belonged he took it to a bank and put his ground behind it and never mentioned it again. It was in him the whole time. What it needed in order to come out was a night when everything was gone, a banker willing to write a note on a receivables book, and a form with a place on it for the thing he could not say.
He got one of those in twenty-six years. He can do it. What almost never occurs is the conditions, and nobody who loves one of these people can manufacture them, and I have quit trying.
I still think he arranged for Ferd Kuiper to tell me. I know how that sounds. I have run it four ways and there is nothing behind it except that the alternative is that it simply never occurred to him to mention it in twenty years, and I would rather he was cruel on purpose than absent by design.
The November decision is mine. He has not called and I have not called him, and Dot has talked to him twice and will not tell me about what.
I bought a spiral notebook at the Dollar General in July and I sat with it at the kitchen table with the third document beside me and I wrote 2026–2036 across the top of the first page, the way he does it. Then I sat there about forty minutes. What I finally wrote down was Verlyn Aupperle, and how old his boy is, and that the boy’s wife works in Champaign; and Bud Tuggle, and that Bud will be seventy-nine in the fall and has not said one word about who takes it over; and two more like that.
That is four names and no numbers, and it is the wrong document, and it is the only one I know how to write.
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.