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.
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.
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.
The founder of Apple Inc. and CEO of the decade Steve Jobs has tragically died today as he lost his battle with pancreatic cancer. Jobs was an imaginative genius and innovative business icon, and his death is certainly heartbreaking and unfortunate news. Rather than dwell on the negative the best thing to do is honor the legacy of arguably the greatest and most influential Inventor Rational of all time. Indeed Steve Jobs is the quintessential Inventor, with his name on over 230 patents. Most notably the iPod (304 million sold as of 2011) iPhone (100 million sold as of March 2011) and iPad (15 million sold as of march 2011) Jobs inventions have undoubtedly changed the world. Jobs is largely known as the heart and soul of a company that was briefly the most valuable in America. Steve’s visionary leadership and innovative genius have revolutionized the way we think about technology, and the world will certainly not be the same without him. Visionary, rebel, and icon, Steve Jobs is the American Dream at its greatest and will be sorely missed.
Kim Kardashian’s ‘Fairytale Wedding’ to largely unknown basketball player and general idiot Kris Humphries airs this weekend and I think it goes without saying that nobody cares. Such shameless promotion however does seem to get results, as the Kardashian family cleared $65 million in revenue last year. Family Martriarch Promoter Artisan Kris Jenner is of course the enterprising brains behind it all, and without a doubt brainstorms a good deal of the ‘drama’ that the family goes through on television. Indeed: it was recently discovered that the popular E! Network supposed ‘reality’ show Keeping Up With the Kardashians is in fact scripted, or at least some events had been. At Kim Kardashian’s recent wedding to Chris Humphries, TMZ ascertained audio of producers essentially prepping a scene and even giving lines to Kourtney Kardashian and boyfriend Scott Disick. Given this evidence, I think it’s entirely appropriate to go ahead and say that the show is a huge croc of sh*t and these people are a bunch of liars. All kidding aside, though some of this stuff seems like it could have in fact been pre-meditated: Kris Jenner is a smart woman and does a good job of bringing solid, wholesome, realistic, family-oriented messages to the table. In the interest of pop-culture and Keirsey Temperament Theory, we will now type the four Kardashian Kids. Kim Kardashian is a classic and ruthless Promoter Artisan, and the protege/puppet of ‘momager’ Kris Jenner. Khloe Karadashian Odom is a delightfully entertaining Performer Artisan, and by far the most genuinely interesting one. Kourtney Kardashian is a painfully boring Inspector Guardian. Finally the young and thus far unemployed Rob Kardashian seems to be a flaky yet sweet-hearted Counselor Idealist. Kim Kardashian’s ‘Fairytale Wedding’ airs on the E! network this Sunday October 9 at 8/7 Central and Monday October 10 at 9/8 central. Be sure to tune in!
“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)
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.
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.
If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. – Issac Newton
Isaac Newton was a reasonable man as long as he didn’t have to suffer fools. This attitude made him appear as both an arrogant man and a humble man at the same time. This is not surprising, for he is one of the iconic examples of the personality temperament, called Rational, in particular a Mastermind. Masterminds are not concerned with ideas, for their own sake, as much as the Architects, but rather are interested in ideas for their use and utility in reality. And Newton had no use for useless or wrong ideas, and for those people who could not see what was obvious to him. However, Newton saw far — farther than anybody else in his age. But he did make a mistake, a brilliant mistake in a form of simplification, and with that, he, and notably his followers, opened up the world to reason and the scientific revolution.
As I wrote in yesterday’s entry, we surveyed more than 1800 people last over the past weekend who had completed the KTS-II to find out how the different temperaments sort out when it comes it current politics. We focused on the current budget debt ceiling impasse between President Obama and Congressional Republicans. One thing stood out strongly: President Obama, and anyone thinking of retiring some day, should wish for more Idealists.
Continue reading Politics and Temperament: Why President Obama Should Love Idealists
Number 137. Was this the key to understanding the Universe? Or was it an impossible Dream?
It was a kind of Dream Team. One was awarded a Nobel Prize in Physics. The other was an internationally famous psychiatrist. They both were interested in Dreams. Other than that, they are an odd pair. So was their relationship.
He had felt like a Dr. Jekyll and Mr Hyde. He didn’t know what to do about it. He was a Rational. He was a scientist, and the leading scientific skeptic: the gadfly of quantum mechanics. He had the ear of Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg – the supreme Rationals of the day. They put up with his caustic wit for he was good at finding problems with their theories: the Mephistopheles of Physics. Successful professionally, but his private life was a mess. What was he do?
By the day he was about Science, at night he had frequented the bars of the red-light district of Hamburg: he knew his relationships with females was out of control. His Mister Hyde — he hid this from his colleagues – he was embarrassed. He felt he was in crisis. He decided to consult with that famous psychoanalyst, Carl Jung – secretly.
Carl Jung was interested in the “mind.” He viewed himself as an intrepid explorer of psyche. He had adopted Freud’s interest in analyzing dreams, but he had his own unique, and lucrative techniques. Those rich female European ladies of Vienna and Zurich had money to burn and all the time to talk, and maybe other things. “Archetypes” was his word, and the “collective unconscious” was his game. What did all those dreams mean? Symbols, myths, intuition, ESP — what was the truth? The Idealist, Carl Jung was eager explore and analyze The Rational, Wolfgang Pauli’s, dreams.