Be Slightly Evil

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.

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.

you need to keep your people connected enough to reality to be effective, but not so connected that they are demotivated and demoralized.

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.

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).

Here’s a curious paradox: the more you insist on sticking to a straight-and-narrow path defined by your own evolving principles, rather than the expedient one defined by current situation, the more you’ll have to twist and turn in the real world. The straight path in your head turns into spaghetti in the real world. On the other hand, the more your

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...

Myers-Briggs

Naive pragmatists are people who choose to act only when there is a realistic chance of being effective. This often makes them the most unrealistic people around, since they forgo all the fascinating possibilities of symbolic creative failure and its social rewards.