Tuesday, January 3, 2012

Philosophy on personality-types

The Worrier, The Warrior & The Strategist!!!

Each of these have their strengths and weaknesses. Lets summarize the Strengths and Weaknesses of these three personality-types:

The Worrier, one might say, has no strengths. However, its the worrier that usually survives more often than the non-worriers. All mammals have evolved to worry - stress is a nature's way of assuring survival. The worriers just have to be right one out of 1000 times and they still stand a higher chance of survival. The bold ones, non-worriers, may be ignorant and happy and live in the moment but they can get wiped out when that one in thousand fatal event comes along and catches them off guard. What is perceived as a weakness of this personality-type, can actually be a strength. It is good to worry sometimes when there are reasons and need for it. For example, Joe the plumber!!


The Warriors - they possess valor, courage and boldness to venture into unchartered territories. They believe in using their brood power to conquer and oblige their raw ambitions as evident in many instances in the entire history of mankind, across cultures and geographies. Their weakness is usually their own mind. Warriors can seldom leash their ambitions and often have found themselves at crossroads where they didn't plan on being. For example, Spartans!!


The Strategist - Strategy literally means "plan". So, these people are planners. Their strength is their ability to control their mind. They usually look at all of the available information and calmly dwell on it to identify the best possible next steps to achieve success in a given task. They are usually perceived as patient, calm-natured and possess the aura of a wise-man around them. In a nutshell, they are very good problem solvers overall. For example, Sun Tzu (ancient Chinese Military Strategist)

Each human has all three of these personality types hidden in them. These hidden personality types sometimes manifest themselves depending on a given impulse or a situation. When such manifestation of a personality-type occurs in a common man, having witnessed a new side in themselves, they might say, "I didn't know I had that (fill in the blank) in me".

The key is to understand that all of us have these traits in us - its which of these is dominating trait, normally or under a given impulse, leads to the 'normal' or 'resting' nature of the person. In other words, if a person naturally worries a lot, then the Worrier in him/her is dominating personality-type and hence such person is perceived to be timid/shy or weak overall. However, this same person, under provocation, can become a Warrior for a short while and display all Warrior-like traits. Another parallel example in physics is the electrons orbiting around nucleus - ground state vs. excited state. Electrons, with an external perturbation, generally by means of induced energy into the system, move into excited state and this leads to the manifestation of different properties by that system as compared to the properties exuded when the system was in ground state.

Hence, self-awareness, at any given moment and time, is critical. Ensure that the dominating personality-type matches best and is appropriate for any given situation. This optimal match of exuded personality-type and a given situation will yield superior outcome and build that person's image overall.