Category Archives: Famous personality

Tactical Humility

Taylor Swift took home three trophies at the 39th Annual American Music Awards including the top honor Artist of the Year.  I know, right?  What a bunch of idiots.  It was the second time in three years she had been given the AMA’s top honor, and the fourth year in a row she’s won Favorite Country Album.  Taylor emphasized the fact that she did not expect to win the Artist of the Year Award and I think it’s safe to say that nobody did.  There was obviously some sort of huge mix-up and they just rolled with it.  Nicki Minaj was also a big winner, while Katy Perry was honored with a special award for being the first woman in history to have five #1 singles from the same album (Teenage Dream).  David Hasselhoff brang his idiocy to the table with an appearance in the finale performance by LMFAO.  On winning Taylor commented “this is just crazy” and “I really can’t believe that it happened”.  Neither can we Taylor.  Neither can we.  The “award darling” went three for three at the AMA’s and is starting to be the target of criticism for continually acting overwhelmingly surprised during her acceptance speeches.  We get it Taylor.  You’re a good songwriter.  Get over it.  Joking aside Taylor Swift is a very talented and humble artist so let’s go ahead and take a look at T Swizzle a.k.a. Tay Tay fo Shay Shay.

Taylor Alison Swift was born on a christmas-tree farm in an obscure town in Pennsylvania, and since early childhood has showed an exceptional talent for poetry, music, and writing.  Her artistic talents blossomed quite early, as she won a national poetry contest in the fourth grade, and wrote a 350-page novel at the age of 12.  After learning to play the guitar, Taylor had found her passion and started devoting most of her time to singing and songwriting.  Taylor admittedly got picked on in school, and used songwriting to express her emotions as an outlet for the pain of not fitting in.  After her family moved to Nashville, Tennessee, Taylor was able to display her talents and quickly became recognized.  Her breakout single “Tim Mcgraw” was the first of many hits, while “Love Story” subsequently shoved her into the national spotlight.  Highly emotional, musically harmonic, adorably sensitive and gracefully timid Taylor Swift is undoubtedly a Composer Artisan.  Composers (like Taylor) “prefer to have their fingers on their compositional tools and through them feel the pulse of life”.  Indeed Taylor speaks almost exclusively through her music, as when Composers “find a medium of expression, some art form, then they will express their character quite eloquently via that medium”.

“Although Composers often put long, lonely hours into their compositions, we must not assume that they are working on their art in the sense of careful planning and dutiful execution.  On close observation, ISFPs prove to be just as impulsive as other Artisans.  Indeed, they covet their impulses and see them as the center of their lives.  They do not wait to act or to consider their moves, for to wait is to see their impulse wither and die; rather, they live intensely in the here and now, and as gracefully as possible, with little or no planning or preparation.  Submergence in their artistry is not preparation for something later, and neither is it artful play, such as Crafters engage in with their tools.  Composers are seized by the act of artistic composition, as if caught up in a whirlwind.  The act is their master, not the reverse, and, in a sense, the doing is elicited by the action itself.  ISFPs paint or sculpt, they dance or skate, they write melodies or recipes—or whatever—simply because they must.  They climb the mountain because it is there.”  Please Understand Me II, p. 73

Taylor‘s newest album Speak Now was released October 25th and is available on iTunes.

Quote1.png People haven’t always been there for me but music always has.Quote2.png

Taylor Swift

A Candle in the Wind

And it seems to me you lived your life
Like a candle in the wind.
Never knowing who to cling to
When the rain set in.
I´d have liked to have known you
But I was just a kid.
Your candle burned out long before
Your legend ever did.

Candle in the Wind,  Elton John & Bernie Taupin

She is an icon of modern culture.  A legend.

She had been in foster care most of her childhood.  She wasn’t wanted, her mother was too unreliable to take care of her.  She was convinced to marry young for that way her guardians could go to Florida without her.

“My marriage didn’t make me sad, but it didn’t make me happy either. My husband and I hardly spoke to each other. This wasn’t because we were angry. We had nothing to say. I was dying of boredom.”

Continue reading A Candle in the Wind

A Second Chance

He is grateful for a second chance. And he is doing well with it – at least for now.

Yes, he screwed up before – royally. He knew it. “I had burned bridges”

No, it wasn’t the addiction. No, that wasn’t it.

“It was the anger.”

“I had issues with anger. I wasn’t behaving professionally. I wasn’t accountable, no consequences, no rules.”

Continue reading A Second Chance

Reverence for Life

As a Viking traveler of books and people, I have occasioned to meet a person from a different place, a different time, and a different world, through the labyrinth of books.

Dr. Livingstone, I Presume

Presumably, this is what Henry Stanley said to Dr. David Livingstone, a missionary who had gone into the “wilds of Africa,” and Stanley was paid to find him which took about six months, a difficult and tortuous expedition.

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One in the Same

At last, every hero becomes a bore.
Ralph Waldo Emerson

He saw himself and the institution he built as one in the same.

He was revered and reviled. He was founder and the builder of an United States Federal institution, that now has over thirty thousand employees and has a budget of eight billion. Once upon a time, famous, and respected, he was idolized by kids in the 1930s, for he was responsible for creating the good feelings about G men (government men), the prototypical hero of law and order, and justice, in an earlier age when government wasn’t as pervasive as it is today. Later, he was hated and reviled, on the top of list of the 1960s conspiracy theorist’s boogie men: he was viewed as a nexus for secrets, power, and repression of free speech.

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Of the Greatest Generation

He never wanted to talk about what he had seen.

He was typical of his generation, they just didn’t talk about it.

That is strange because he made a good living by talking. Or more accurately, reporting what he thought. He was a writer above all else. He was probably the most famous curmudgeon of all time.

He would complain. Like clockwork. For nigh thirty three years, every week, for a few minutes. Probably the best and funniest complainer on American TV.

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Risky Business

A Golden Boy of business and politics, until now. He was a darling of his political party, for he was generous with his money. He was a man of influence, until now. Now, I doubt the party wants to take his call.

Bold and daring at heart, and ever-optimistic that things will go their way, Promoters will take tremendous risks to get what they want, and seem exhilarated by walking close to the edge of disaster.” Please Understand Me II

He has taken risks all his life. Starting as a bond trader in Goldman Sachs, he rose through the ranks to become co-CEO. With his help the company went public, he became worth $400 million. Losing to Hank Paulson, for the CEO job of Goldman, he switched to politics. He wasn’t shy in using some of that money he gotten to get elected as first as a US Senator and then Governor of New Jersey. He spent over $62 million of his own money on his campaign, the most expensive Senate campaign in U.S. History.

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I’m over my head, but it sure feels nice.

They had this mega-watt attraction, they could be charming as hell, and cold as ice.

“You just wanted to be around them,” she said to Oprah.

But, she had been angry.  She had been pissed off, too many times.  So she ended it.  No more games.

The second time, she had seen enough.

She was tough: a Crafter Artisan, very observant but not very self-reflective, and she was over her head.  She left him, she cut him off.  She didn’t want to think about, she couldn’t without going crazy.  She finally moved on.  She forgot.

Continue reading I’m over my head, but it sure feels nice.

Be A Viking Bystander

“You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view – until you climb into his skin and walk around in it.” spoken by Atticus Finch, in To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee.

How do you “truly” climb into another’s skin and walk around?  It is a hard thing to do, well.  For that person may be a different kind of person from you, from a different time, and from a different place.

My avocation since I was a child was as a Viking bystander.  My vocation lately has been as a Viking reader of books and people.

One can try to “climb into another’s skin” through watching a movie or play, or reading a book.  This is something we can do as humans.   We can visit different lands and different tribes – the modern words for “lands” and “tribes” is countries and cultures.  We can also visit different “ages” – through movies and living in cultures that are “slower” than your “culture” – although there are limitations and there is a possibility to not really get the “gestalt” of that age and place.

Mostly, we don’t understand “truly” – the Temperament, the Tribe, the Age that is not like us

But we can try.

Here are some autobiographies of the various Temperaments, many from a different time and different place.  Climb into the person’s skin, and walk around in it – at least for awhile.

Rationals

Ben Franklin (Inventor)

Mark Twain (Inventor)

Margaret Thatcher (Fieldmarshal)

Ulysses S. Grant (Mastermind)

Charles Darwin (Architect)

Linus Torvalds (Architect)

Idealists

Jane Goodall (Counselor)

Mohandas Gandhi (Counselor)

Jane Fonda (Teacher)

Albert Schweitzer (Healer)

Karen Armstrong (Healer)

Joan Baez (Champion)

Artisans

Katherine Hepburn (Crafter)

Lance Armstrong (Crafter)

Donald Trump (Promoter)

Neil Simon (Composer)

Jim Cramer (Performer)

Bill Clinton (Performer)

Guardians

Barbara Walters (Provider)

Sam Walton (Provider)

Andrea Mitchell (Inspector)

Mike Wallace (Supervisor)

George H. W. Bush (Protector)

Two of Kind: On the Third Degree

They are two of kind; they are so… different.  They are same.  They are different.  He is the father, and she, the daughter.

Can they have a relationship?

They are alike in a fundamental way: they have the same Temperament and Type.  Different in other ways: male versus female, different generations, and different life experience.

Competitive.  Contending.

Two Crafter Artisans.

Co-stars in the hit movie, Paper Moon, the daughter, 10 years old at the time, Tatum O’Neal, won an Academy award for her performance, as a tough-kid in a father-daughter grifter team in the Depression.  She was the youngest actor to get an Oscar ever.  They were inseparable at the time, when Ryan O’Neal took care of her, because her mother and his ex-wife, Joanna Moore, was an alcoholic, and neglected to take care of  her.

“We were a team,” “we were very close; I was closer to her than any of my wives,”  Ryan O’Neal has said.

But then it all changed.

Continue reading Two of Kind: On the Third Degree