Please Understand Me II: Temperament, Character, Intelligence

If you do not want what I want, please try not to tell me that my want is wrong. Or if my beliefs are different from yours, at least pause before you set out to correct them. Or if my emotion seems less or more intense than yours, given the same circumstances, try not to ask me to feel other than I do. Or if I act, or fail to act, in the manner of your design for action, please let me be. I do not, for the moment at least, ask you to understand me. That will come only when you are willing to give up trying to change me into a copy of you.

You want to be the first to do something. You want to create something. You want to innovate something...I often think of Edison inventing the light bulb. That's what I want to do. I want to drive over the bridge coming out of New York there and look down on that sea of lights that is New Jersey and say, `Hey, I did that!'

Our attempts to reshape others may produce change, but the change is distortion rather than transformation.

Rationals demand so much achievement from themselves that they often have trouble measuring up to their own standards. NTs typically believe that what they do is not good enough, and are frequently haunted by a sense of teetering on the edge of failure. This time their achievement will not be adequate. This time their skill will not be great enough. This time, in all probability, failure is at hand. Making matters worse, Rationals tend to ratchet up their standards of achievement, setting the bar at the level of their greatest success, so that anything less than their best is judged as mediocre. The hard-won triumph becomes the new standard of what is merely acceptable, and ordinary achievements are now viewed as falling short of the mark. NTs never give themselves a break from this escalating level of achievement, and so constant self-doubt and a niggling sense of impending failure are their lot.

The abstract and the concrete side of operations are opposites, but you can't have one without the other, if, that is, you want get the job done well.

Since NTs are naturally disinterested in tradition and custom, it should be no surprise that they readily abandon the customary for the workable.

Status, prestige, authority, degree, licence, credential, badge of office, reputation, manners — all of these marks of social approval mean nothing to the NTs when the issue is the utility of goal-directed action.

time exists not as a continuous line, but as an interval, a segment confined to and defined by an event. Only events possess time, all else is timeless.

any of us, whatever our temperamental makeup, can be effective leaders, provided that we come to understand our own strengths and weaknesses as well as those of our followers, and provided that we show our appreciation whenever we note our followers contributing their intelligence to our mutual enterprise.

Artisans ought to be enjoyed for what they are instead of condemned for what they are not, something that can also be said of the other three temperaments.

We ascend, he said, from physical needs (food, clothing, shelter) to safety needs (security, protection, assurance), then on to social needs (love, friendship, belonging), and next to the need for self-esteem (valuing self, self-worth, pride).

Artisans prefer not to get too serious about things, and will try to keep everyone smiling — to keep the party going — as long as possible.

Theoretically, then, the motor of effective leadership consists in matching assistants' talents to tasks and in consistently expressing appreciation for their best efforts, thus encouraging them to be entrepreneurs contributing their talents to a shared enterprise. The major advantage of having a bevy of entrepreneurs working together is that each of them becomes committed to the success of the enterprise, and so not only applies all of his or her skills to the desired results, but also seeks to improve those skills by continuously learning on the job. Entrepreneurs will always outdo wage workers because entrepreneurs have their intelligence — their skill, their ability, their talent — engaged in the enterprise, while wage workers are merely punching the clock.

Many Rationals are obsessed with speculative enquiry, so their speech tends to be laced with assumptions and presuppositions, probabilities and possibilities, postulates and premises, hypotheses and theorems.

In the word 'technology,' however, the suffix, 'logy' modifies the stem 'techno' so as to make it an abstract word meaning "the logic of building.

Indeed, Artisan battle leaders are no different from Artisan painters, pilots, or point guards: they are always scanning for opportunities, always looking for the best angle of approach,

the root of the word 'art' means "to fit together," and Artisan artists even call their productions "works of art," all of which suggests that a thing must be useful to interest an Artisan, immediately useful, concretely useful, otherwise who needs it?

Ernest Hemingway, much like the Artisan hero in his novel, A Farewell to Arms, wanted to avoid figurative language (the language of inference and interpretation, of metaphor and symbol), trusting only descriptive words to present his perceptions as sensually and realistically as possible.