If you are driven by your own principles, you’ll generally search desperately for a calling, and when you find one, it will consume your life.

The answer is a decision that Boyd challenged each of his acolytes to make: in life you eventually have to decide whether to be somebody, or do something. Whistle-blowing is one of those situational decisions that can precipitate this bigger existential decision. But everybody eventually comes to their own personal be somebody/do something fork in

I found a great answer in Robert Coram’s fascinating book, Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War, which has now bumped Robert Greene’s 48 Laws of Power to the #2 spot in my Be Slightly Evil reading list. You should also check out Chet Richards’ Certain to Win, an application of Boyd’s ideas to business.

This is not blatant stereotyping, it is blatant archetyping. A subtly different (and morally more defensible) approach to typecasting people. Sure you’ll go wrong sometimes, but you’ll be right more often. Drawing conclusions from people’s reading (or TV watching) tastes is one of the most robust ways to read people.

Turns out, for some people, life is so messed up that constantly validating an “I suck” life position, and enjoying moments of perverse vindication, is easier than doing something about it.

There are four status patterns: feeling low, playing low (LL), feeling low, playing high (LH), feeling high, playing low (HL), feeling high, playing high (HH).

Myers-Briggs

Of all organization men, the true executive is the one who remains most suspicious of The Organization. If there is one thing that characterizes him, it is a fierce desire to control his own destiny and, deep down, he resents yielding that control to The Organization, no matter how velvety its grip he wants to dominate, not be dominated...

Now here is the paradox: idealism believes in change and creates unchanging human beings. Tragedism (to coin a word) believes humans cannot change their fundamental natures, yet believing in it actually transforms humans far more radically than the idealist view.