Tag Archives: keirsey

The Man for the Fall Season

He lost. They didn’t elect him.

“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me:
I lift my lamp beside the golden door.

 In fact, he lost partially because of his efforts in behalf the nation.  However, it hasn’t been widely recognized that the most impactful, beneficial, and long lasting effect of his decision, wasn’t the decision that he is known for, reviled for, and awarded for.

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“All that is gold does not glitter”

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What is the Presidency For?

“Then, what the hell is the presidency for!”
 “I have the power, now, and I intend to use it.”
— Lyndon Baines Johnson

HBO, All the way

Politics is War.

HBO premiered the movie “All the Way” on May 21. It is great film where Four Temperaments are clearly shown in action.

“November 22, 1963: John F. Kennedy was dead in Dallas, killed by an assassin. Jacqueline Kennedy, her clothes still spattered with her husband’s blood, stood beside Vice-President Lyndon Baines Johnson as Johnson took the presidential oath of office. Camelot was suddenly and shockingly gone. In the passage of a few jolting hours, King Arthur had been replaced by the crude, graceless, but equally energetic Lyndon Johnson, a professional politician from Texas.”  [Presidential Temperament]

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Transformation: Swimming Across the Universe

A corporation is a living organism; it has to continue to shed its skin. Methods have to change. Focus has to change. Values have to change. The sum total of those changes is transformation.”  — Andy Grove

In Memoriam: Andy Grove
2 September 1936 – 21 March 2016

Andy Grove was noted for making sure that important details were never missed.  Having a strategic vision helps in recognizing the important factors.

He had survived by getting things right in the long term and transforming himself.

“By the time I was twenty, I had lived through a Hungarian Fascist dictatorship, German military occupation, the Nazis’ “Final Solution,” the siege of Budapest by the Soviet Red Army, a period of chaotic democracy in the years immediately after the war, a variety of repressive Communist regimes, and a popular uprising that was put down at gunpoint. . . [where] many young people were killed; countless others were interned. Some two hundred thousand Hungarians escaped to the West. I was one of them.

Even though he arrived in the United States with little money and not knowing English, Grove retained a “passion for learning.”  He earned a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering from the City College of New York in 1960, followed by a Ph.D. in chemical engineering from the University of California, Berkeley in 1963.

“Probably no one person has had a greater influence in shaping Intel, Silicon Valley, and all we think about today in the technology world than Andy Grove.” — Pat Gelsinger, CEO of VMware

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Cultural Wind Jammer

I have the impression that some ways must be left behind, some mental habits must be abandoned, if we are not to clip the wings of progress. Even to science we must sometimes repeat Charon’s cry: By another way, by other ports, not here, you will find passage across the shore. In my role as teacher I hope to be able to show you other ways, if not other ports. — Giuseppe Vitali

“Most people never run far enough on their first wind to find out they’ve got a second.” — William James

Bill Thomas has been described as a Cultural Jammer: trying to change the American attitudes towards aging.

In 1991, Bill Thomas, having been an emergency room doctor, became the medical director of a nursing home in upstate New York. He found the place, as the Washington Post put it, “depressing, a repository for old people whose minds and bodies seemed dull and dispirited.”

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Simple Solutions to Complex Problems

Is not a good idea.

So says her, and she should know:  she has done the research.

It’s complicated, and there are no panaceas.

Real Complex.  It’s hard work.

Politicians, Lawyers, Journalists, and the Public at large love simple explanations and simple solutions: let the Government or the Market solve it.

Simple Solutions for Complex Problems: NOT A GOOD IDEA.  Many Simple Solutions are Fast Ideas.

Rather it’s communication: both cooperative and competitive.

Her ideas are slow ideas: complicated. And the world took awhile to recognize them.  She was awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics three years before her death.

“Lin Ostrom cautioned against single governmental units at global level to solve the collective action problem of coordinating work against environmental destruction. Partly, this is due to their complexity, and partly to the diversity of actors involved. Her proposal was that of a polycentric approach, where key management decisions should be made as close to the scene of events and the actors involved as possible.”

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Without Remorse

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Emmy Award winning Showtime modern family drama series Shameless premieres its 6th season tonight and you can watch the first episode for free here:

Both major premium-content networks HBO and Showtime now offer their subscription-based services purely online via Hulu, and HBONOW.  As more and more viewers are accessing their content online, streaming is becoming more and more of a mainstay in big-time entertainment.

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Native Province

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Eight time Emmy-award winning Showtime series Homeland concludes its 5th season tonight as it continues to tackle current real world issues, like ISIS’ proclamation of a world-wide caliphate that aims to “redraw the map” in the Middle-East, and ISIS’ attack on an innocent European city in the name if Jihad.

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Observant

She was very observant.
She was very determined.

“I never gave up and I never let anyone or anything get in my way.”

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“It was very difficult when we came to New York because I spoke no English. We moved to a neighborhood with many other German and Jewish immigrants but I mostly befriended Americans since that was the easiest and quickest way to learn the culture, language, and customs of my new homeland.”

“She seems to be able of growing enormous by sheer force of will,”

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Of a Strange and Distant Time

Strangers in Strange Lands

A gypsy of a strange and distant time
Travelling in panic all direction blind
Aching for the warmth of a burning sun
Freezing in the emptiness of where he’d come from

Left without a hope of coming home.
Gypsy — Moody Blues

He didn’t want to be a gypsy, he wasn’t really a gypsy by nature, but he left without a hope of coming home.

The world and himself made him a gypsy, an exile: a stranger in strange lands.

But he did push for the burning sun.  It technically is called RADIATION.  Order AND Disorder.

Lichtquant — Albert Einstein
A Photon — a light quantum

And every one, except one of his mentors, his older fellow exiles, including Einstein, eventually disagreed with Teller Ede, making him an exile three times: a stranger in strange lands, all his life.

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It’s Over

It ain’t over, until it’s over.

In Memoriam

Yogi Berra [May 12, 1925 – September 22, 2015]

They call them Yogi-isms.

1. “When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

2. “You can observe a lot by just watching.”

3. “It gets late early out here.”

4. “It’s like déjà vu all over again.”

Lawrence PeterYogiBerra, Performer Artisan, (May 12, 1925 – September 22, 2015) was an American professional baseball catcher, manager, and coach who played 19 seasons in Major League Baseball (MLB) (1946–63, 1965), all but the last for the New York Yankees. An 18-time All-Star and 10-time World Series champion as a player, Berra had a career batting average of .285, while compiling 358 home runs and 1,430 runs batted in. He is one of only five players to win the American League Most Valuable Player Award three times. Widely regarded as one of the greatest catchers in baseball history, he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972.

5. “No one goes there nowadays, it’s too crowded.”

6. “Baseball is 90% mental and the other half is physical.”

7. “A nickel ain’t worth a dime anymore.”

Berra was also well known for his pithy comments, malapropisms, and witticisms, known as Yogi-isms. Yogi-isms very often take the form of either an apparently obvious tautology or a paradoxical contradiction.

8. “Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t come to yours.”

9. “We made too many wrong mistakes.”

10. “Congratulations. I knew the record would stand until it was broken.”

Much of everyday Artisan speech is far more lively, more filled with vivid, unorthodox terms, though not much more abstract. Artisans like to use colorful phrases and current slang in their speech, and they pick up hip phrases quickly (“I’m outta here,” “no way,” “ya know what I’m saying?”). When they reach for images, they tend to use quick, sensory adjectives (“slick,” “cool,” “sharp”), or they say what things are like, using rather striking similes, “drunk as a skunk,” “like taking candy from a baby,” “goes like a bunny.”

Performers are smooth, talkative, and witty; they always seem to know the latest jokes and stories, and are quick with wisecracks and wordplay-nothing is so serious or sacred that it can’t be made fun of. [Please Understand Me II]

11. “You better cut the pizza in four pieces because I’m not hungry enough to eat six.”

12. “You wouldn’t have won if we’d beaten you.”

13. “I usually take a two-hour nap from one to four.”

14. “Never answer an anonymous letter.”

15. “Slump? I ain’t in no slump… I just ain’t hitting.”

16. “How can you think and hit at the same time?”

17. “The future ain’t what it used to be.”

18. “I tell the kids, somebody’s gotta win, somebody’s gotta lose. Just don’t fight about it. Just try to get better.”

19. “If the people don’t want to come out to the ballpark, nobody’s going to stop them.”

20. “We have deep depth.”

21. “Pair up in threes.”

22. “Why buy good luggage, you only use it when you travel.”

23. “You’ve got to be very careful if you don’t know where you are going, because you might not get there.”

24. “All pitchers are liars or crybabies.”

Other Performer Artisans include: Robin WilliamsMickey RooneySid CaesarSteve MartinBrittney GrinerJanis JoplinGene KrupaLouis ArmstrongAlex KarrasKim Jong UnPhyllis DillerJim CramerMagic JohnsonJosephine BakerWhitney HoustonMarilyn MonroeMichael Jackson and Elvis Presley.