Obama as All 9 Enneagram Types – in Cartoons

   As you may know, we have all nine Enneagram personality types within us, though we mainly express the viewpoint of one of them. So in 2008 when Obama was running for president I drew cartoons of him from all nine points of view. I believe Obama’s primary type is the Peace Seeker. We’ve seen that played out in his tendency to mediate and try to include all sides when promoting a program. Here’s a drawing of Obama and Michelle as Peace Seeker monks. The Dalai Lama is a Peace Seeker too. This represents their spiritual and humanitarian nature.

If you’d like to download these 9 cartoons to your web site or email, go to http://wagele.com/obama/index.html They come in 3 and 4 inch sizes.

Obama leans heavily on his Perfectionist wing (also called a “One”) for the ability to be organized, his skill speaking and writing, his self-discipline, and his idealism. I’m skeptical about the hand saying he’s on the left in this cartoon. He stayed with his conservative predecessor’s war policy and kept much of Bush’s economic staff. But he’s certainly to the left of Romney in most ways.

Obama as a Perfectionist

Obama as a Helper

The Helper image is portrayed by Michelle here, adoring her husband.

She’s playing the role of nurturer and lover.

I couldn’t put all the cartoons here because of problems spacing them on WordPress. My Obama Achiever cartoon has him looking in the mirror paying attention to how he’s dressed. Obama dresses well as do most Achievers. How they look and how others perceive them is important to them. They’re sometimes called Performers.

I don’t think Obama would be mistaken for the Romantic personality, the artistic type. Romantics tend toward depression or melancholy. Obama seems like a caring person, however, as are most Romantics. When Romantics use their Achiever wing they’re sometimes flamboyant, the way he’s dressed in my Romantic version of him.

Observers tend to be independent and are often nerdy. This could be the scholarly attorney part of Obama, the part that likes history and knows what’s going on in the world. Questioners are known for their loyalty and for watching out for what can go wrong. This is his protective side, trying to keep us safe.

Obama as Adventurer

This Adventurer woman would love to have Obama for president. She wants to elect an intelligent president. The Adventurer in Obama would be his good sense of humor.

He must use the Assertive part of himself to have made it to president. He has an Asserter wing and I’ve heard he can get very angry. If he’s elected again, I hope he uses more of his Asserter in dealing with Wall Street – to fix what’s wrong with the banking system. His administration hasn’t restructured it as promised three years ago.

 See my Psychology Today blog on the movie Carnage and wagele.com for Famous People’s types and more..

Tiger Woods, “Achiever” Type Golf Champion

Tiger Woods

Tiger Woods (born in 1975) has been a golf star almost all his life. He was number one in the world most of 1999 – 2010 and is now eighth. He’s won 16 World Golf Championships, 72 major tour events, and many other awards. He was introduced to golf before the age of two by his father and won the Under Age 10 section of the Drive, Pitch, and Putt competition when he was six. When he was eight he won the 9–10 boys’ event at the Junior World Golf Championships and the Junior World Championships six times.

Reading his own blogs, it’s clear that Tiger Woods works hard. He’s a good sport, polite, competitive. Wanting to do his best appears more important than wielding power over others. You’ll experience his extroversion and optimism, typical of Achievers in the Enneagram system.
4-11-12 Tiger Wood blog excerpts:
“One cool thing about winning was my kids got to watch on television. They were at home rooting and were so excited when I was able to show them the trophy the next day. They were excited for about three seconds and then it was on to the next thing.
One thing I would like to say about the Masters last week is that obviously I got frustrated at times and know some of my actions were wrong, especially at No. 16. The Masters means a lot to me, and I was trying as hard as I could. I’m out there competing. I grind every day, and my expectations are to do my best. It’s very disappointing when that doesn’t happen…
Oh man, it was such a great atmosphere to play. The people were so fantastic, nice and supportive. They were trying to get me to play well. Unfortunately, I just couldn’t quite get it done…
Congratulations to Bubba Watson for winning. We used to play a lot of practice rounds together. If you think about it, for a lefty, that shot on No. 10 didn’t sit up too badly for him…”
11-23-10 Tiger Wood blog excerpts:

“It’s nice to be home for the holidays after two weeks on the road…
The first stop on my trip was Japan, where I played in a nine-hole, made-for-television pro-am with Ryo Ishikawa… I’ve gotten to know Ryo pretty well… He’s just a great kid. He just won again recently, which I think was his ninth professional win. When I was his age, I was still playing college golf.
Then I went to Shanghai, China, to play in the WGC-HSBC Champions. I had two good bookend rounds but didn’t quite get it done in the middle rounds…
From there, I went to Thailand to play in the World Salutes King Bhumibol skins tournament at Amata Spring Country Club in Chonburi against Thongchai Jaidee, Camilo Villegas and Paul Casey. I only won one skin, but the fans were just so nice…
It just takes time to build. You just have to go piece by piece. Before, I couldn’t even do it on the driving range and now I can. Now, after working with Sean Foley, I can do it on the golf course sporadically, then it becomes more consistent. Eventually, it becomes a full 18 holes and beyond that, a full tournament…
Phil Mickelson and I were partners in Ping-Pong most of the time against anybody that wanted to take us on. We didn’t go undefeated, but we won every series…
..the people of Wales were extremely nice and very accommodating. The fans were incredible. They were partisan, obviously, but they were so respectful of both sides and great crowds to play in front of.
I recently hosted the Stanford men’s golf team for a barbecue at my house…
It’s good to see the next generation of players stepping up, because it’s great for the game…
Obviously, this has been a very difficult year for me and my family, on and off the golf course. I got through the year, and I’m in a much better place than I was a year ago and my life has balance. It was a lot more difficult than people could possibly imagine.
That’s all for now. I hope everyone has a great Thanksgiving and a wonderful holiday season.”

For more Famous Types, see my web site list and my blog on Psychology Today.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau – Introverted Controversial Questioner

In The Social Contract, Rousseau (1712 – 1778) wrote, “Man was born free, and he is everywhere in chains.” He believed we’re all good by nature but are corrupted by society. Our real teachers are experience and emotion; our institutions mess us up. On the other hand, he thought all citizens should be committed to the general good, even if it means acting against their private or personal interests. For example, we might support a political party that proposes to tax us heavily (if we have a large income!) because we can see the benefit this taxation can bring to all.

What kind of a guy was Rousseau? At the time, they said he was paranoid, a hypochondriac, and insane; he behaved erratically, had sudden changes of mood, oscillated, was disrespectful of others’ humanity, and falsely accused people. He often fell out with his friends and associates: Diderot, Hume, Voltaire, and others. His writings and behavior brought on vicious attacks by others. At the same time, the way his mind operated opened him up to creative ways of viewing the world.

What Enneagram type was Rousseau? His habit of oscillating, his suspicious nature, and that he didn’t like superiors suggest the Questioner type. He felt alienated and would stay to himself. He certainly marched to his own drummer so I would say he was a Questioner with an Observer wing. My second choice would be the Romantic.

When he was in disfavor, the Duke and Duchess of Luxembourg offered him and his partner, Thérèse, a house on their estate near Paris. Living there secluded, Rousseau produced three major works: The New Heloise, probably the most widely read novel of his day; The Social Contract, an influential book on political theory; and Émile, a classic book on education. Émile created problems with the Church in France and was burned in a number of places. Rousseau was forced to leave France for Switzerland, his birthplace, but his citizenship there was revoked as a result of the book. In 1766 he went to England where he fell out with David Hume, and returned to France under a false name.

In his last years, Rousseau completed his Confessions and returned to copying music to make a living, working in the morning and walking and “botanizing”in the afternoon. He loved nature.

I wonder if the following influenced The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle:

“But if there is a state where the soul can find a resting-place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of the passing of time, and no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than the simple feeling of existence, a feeling that fills our soul entirely, as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy, not with a poor, incomplete and relative happiness such as we find in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, complete and perfect happiness which leaves no emptiness to be filled in the soul. Such is the state which I often experienced on the Island Of Saint-Pierre in my solitary reveries, whether I lay in a boat and drifted where the water carried me, or sat by the shores of the stormy lake, or elsewhere, on the banks of a lovely river or a stream murmuring over the stones.”

Rousseau’s ideal was the independent farmer, free of superiors and self-governing. His critics/peers found this distasteful. They preferred the luxuries of a civilized existence. To make matters worse for them, every new work of Rousseau’s was a tremendous success, whether on politics, theater, education, religion, or love.

See my blog on How to Get Along with an Introvert, Part I on Psychology Today. Part II will be published April 3 in Psychology Today. Also, see my list of Famous Types.

Famous HAPPY INTROVERT: Napoleon Dynamite

Napoleon Dynamite by Elizabeth Wagele

It’s been 7 ½ years since the movie Napoleon Dynamite came out in 2004 and six years since I devoted the appendix of THE HAPPY INTROVERT to the Enneagram types of the movie’s characters. Now the writer and director of the movie, with help, have turned it into a Sunday night animated TV series. The original actors take the parts of the characters’ voices. Napoleon and his brother Kip still live in Idaho—with their grandmother. I haven’t seen the TV show, but from what I’ve read about it, it doesn’t capture the subtle qualities the movie does. It goes for definite jokes instead of the slow, nerdy humor more typical of introverts. The movie’s charm depends on being understated. It doesn’t sound like this series replicates that.

When I first watched the movie on DVD, I almost turned it off after twenty minutes because I was bored. But I came back and watched it again. And again. I started to love Napoleon and his veiled sweetness. He advises his friend in a quiet way, “Just listen to your heart – that’s what I do.” I believe he’s a Peace Seeker type in the Enneagram.

I love Napoleon because he isn’t swayed by what his high school crowd values. He knows who he is and he’s comfortable with himself. His life isn’t about being popular, but about doing his own thing. He’s strong, loyal, virtuous, and doesn’t beat himself up about being grumpy. In fact, for a Peace Seeker to allow himself to be grumpy is an achievement. Most Peace Seekers try to be pleasant most of the time, even when they don’t feel that way.

Napoleon plays a video over and over for many weeks in order to learn how to dance–only because he wants to. He has no reason to tell anyone about it. When he falls in love, he catches his girlfriend a delicious fish—it’s not the usual way to express love, but it’s his way. It comes from his heart.

Napoleon’s style of being in the world is understated. He’s true to himself and his friends. I like hearing him ask kids at school in a monotone voice, “You having a killer time?”

If you want to find out more about introversion or the Enneagram personalities of Napoleon Dynamite, his friend Pedro, his brother Kip, his girlfriend Deb, his uncle Rico, and the kids in his high school you can find out in:

The Happy Introvert, a Wild and Crazy Guide to Your True Self. By Elizabeth Wagele, published by Ulysses Press, Berkeley CA

More famous types can be found on this blog, on my Psychology Today blog, and on my web site.

Guest Blog on Jack Kerouac

Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg's friend, 1953.

Cara Cerino is a sophomore student at the University of California. She is my extern for two weeks and has her own blog on banned-book authors: http://examiner.com/banned-books-in-oakland/cara-cerino. When she found out I had a series on famous Enneagram types, she wrote the following piece about Kerouac as a Romantic. See my web site for a list of famous types. – Elizabeth.

Kerouac’s Romantic Ride

Jack Kerouac, the face of the Beat Generation, was no stranger to controversy. The backlash for his iconoclastic novel, On the Road, is unsurprising given the cloistered era of the 1950s. The coarse language, the misogynistic attitudes of the male characters and the immoral actions of the women all lead to this book’s banning. His novel’s frenetic style and breakneck pace, which wouldn’t suit everybody, has a lot to do with his personality. In the Enneagram personality system, where the digits one through nine each correspond with a personality type, I see Kerouac as a four, the Romantic.

As told by the Enneagram system, the four-Romantic is a dynamic type. At once, the Romantic is in love with life and embittered with others. They are usually introverted, but if they are under the influence of the three wing, the Achiever, they can be extroverted. Each number has two wings, the numbers directly in front of and behind the main personality type. For example, a Romantic has a three, the Achiever, and five, the Observer, wing; with one wing usually dominant over the other. I believe that Kerouac had a strong five wing, meaning that he was more introverted and cerebral than outgoing and goal-oriented. However, Kerouac’s gregarious nature in his younger years, seven years before On the Road  was published, emanated from his exuberance for the world’s offerings.

A four-Romantic’s lust for life can be contagious. An example in On the Road, is his experience in the jazz club where he becomes enthralled with the music and he, along with his friends, arrive at an almost transcendent state. The intricate, beautiful melodies of the jazz improvisations could catch a four like Kerouac’s sense of wonder and imagination. Another characteristic of the Romantic is a sense of longing for things lost or things they never had in the first place. There is always something better just beyond their reach. This is delineated excellently in part one of the novel when Kerouac’s protagonist, Sal, says, “Somewhere along the line I knew there would be girls, visions, everything; somewhere along the line the pearl would be handed to me.” His Romantic characteristics are the driving force that keeps him on the road.

The unfortunate side of the four’s personality is the predilection to become melancholic and depressed. This is shown in On the Road, but more tragically in Kerouac’s life. In the beginning of part three in On the Road, Sal is feeling despondent and lonesome because none of his friends are around. Without that outside stimulation, Kerouac’s main character cannot find it within himself to be cheerful about existence. In Kerouac’s real life, although the book is very closely tied to it, one of his biographer’s called him, “truly (instead of fashionably) miserable[.] Kerouac expressed his unhappiness nakedly in his art and was not taken seriously.” His critics had trouble reconciling the role he played in his younger years, when he wrote many of his books, and the dejected personality that came later from fame and maturity. Wallowing in woe is a Romantic characteristic.

The book’s creation was a four-like process. The free-flowing style with which the original scroll was written, an attempt at conveying the improvisation of Kerouac’s contemporary jazz musicians, could only have come from a Romantic. They have a creative disposition and an emotional depth that one doesn’t find as readily in the other types. Stream of consciousness writing is probably mastered most adeptly by fours. Because of the content and style of this book, many more conservative critics didn’t react to On the Road favorably. Only someone with a deep longing for life and excitement as well as the creativity to display his thoughts in an innovative way could have come up with such a masterpiece. His authentic experiences needed to be recorded faithfully whether society approved or not, as was displayed by its ban.

 

Bishop Tutu, a Compassionate HELPER Type

Bishop Tutu hugging Nelson Mandela. By E. Wagele.

Desmond Tutu (born 1931) is a human rights activist who has campaigned for such causes as ending AIDS, tuberculosis, homophobia, poverty, and racism.

After teaching for three years, he studied to be a priest and eventually became the first black Anglican archbishop of Cape Town, South Africa. In 1978 he became the first black General Secretary of the South African Council of Churches. His demands for a democratic and just society without racial divisions included:

1. equal civil rights for all
2. the abolition of South Africa’s passport laws
3. a common system of education
4. the cessation of forced deportation from South Africa to the so-called “homelands”

Enneagram Helper types are interested in solving problems of their fellow humans. For this reason, Enneagram teachers often use Tutu as an example of this type, for example in the chapter on Helpers in The Career Within You.

Bishop Tutu was named a member of the United Nations advisory panel on genocide prevention in 2006. He has likened Israel’s treatment of Palestinians to the treatment of black South Africans under apartheid. Some of his other causes include climate change, poverty, and women’s rights.

Bishop Tutu rose to worldwide fame as an opponent of apartheid and was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984, the Gandhi Peace Prize in 2005, and the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2009, among other honors.  He chaired the Truth and Reconciliation Commission and still uses his high profile to campaign for the oppressed, even though he claims to be retired.

For more famous Enneagram types, see my web site and my blog on Psychology Today. On Tuesday 1-3-12 I’ll write about economist Jeffrey Sachs on my Psychology Today blog.

Richard Branson, Enneagram Adventurer, OWS Backer

Richard Branson

Sir Richard Branson (born 1950 in England), is the multi-billionaire, risk-taking entrepreneur of the Virgin Group (including Virgin Records, Virgin Airlines, and hundreds of other ventures). He’s an Adventurer in the Enneagram personality system: “My interest in life comes from setting myself huge, apparently unachievable challenges and trying to rise above them.”

Adventurers are often idealists. Branson protested the Sudanese government expulsion of aid groups from the Darfur region. He joined the project Soldiers of Peace, a movie against all wars and for global peace. He’s a signatory of Global Zero, a non-profit international initiative to eliminate all nuclear weapons worldwide.

Branson pledged to invest the profits of Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Trains (about $3 billion) in research for environmentally friendly fuels.

Though he belongs to the wealthy 1%, he says he identifies with the 99%. He said, “A few greedy people in the banking community nearly brought down the world, and that’s made people angry. I think not just the banking community, but the whole of the business community needs to make sure that capitalism puts on a genuinely positive face and gets out there and helps change the world to an extent that the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators can feel they’ve done their jobs and go home. It’s up to every single person who works in business to play their part, even in a small way, to rectify the damage that’s been done. What they’re campaigning for is for businesses to become forces of good. If businesses can become forces of good and can grow hearts and get out there and not just be money-making machines, then, you know, I think that will be all for the better.”

Hmmm. That statement sounds a bit naïve to me. Adventurers are known for their optimism and sometimes their over-optimism. Given how entrenched the corporations and banks are with the government and the rest of the powerful, a superficial change of face isn’t relevant. As of now, capitalism has failed. A genuine change must take place deep down in the country’s gut. That’s one of the reasons we need a prolonged period of turning inward to percolate new solutions. They may include many of Branson’s ideals: non-violence, empathy, ecology; but a new way of managing our money is needed. I’m not going to hold MY breath waiting for businesses to turn kind so the demonstrators can go home satisfied. We need patience and time to think. We need to use our introversion: contemplation, planning, thinking things through. We need to do research and use our logic. We need to be in the streets talking and demonstrating, and at home (if we’re lucky enough to have a home) writing about these things. We’ll make our lists and demands and act on them later.

In 2006, Branson formed Virgin Comics and Virgin Animation, an entertainment company focused on creating new stories and characters for a global audience. The company was founded with author Deepak Chopra and others. Branson launched the Virgin Health Bank in 2007, offering parents-to-be the opportunity to store their baby’s umbilical cord blood stem cells in private and public stem cell banks.

In 2007, Branson also announced a new Global science and technology prize—The Virgin Earth Challenge—to encourage technological advancements for the good of mankind. It will award $25 million to the individual or group who can demonstrate a commercially viable design resulting in the net removal of anthropogenic, atmospheric greenhouse gases each year for ten years or more without harmful effects, contributing to the stability of the Earth’s climate. Branson will be joined in the adjudication of the Prize by Al Gore and others.

Adventurers are sometimes called Epicureans: Branson and the Natirar Resort development in New Jersey opened in 2009 with the Ninety Acres Culinary Center. It includes a restaurant run by chef David Felton, cooking school, wine school, working farm, luxury resort and spa.

Adventurers love fun and excitement: In 2010 Branson became patron of the UK’s Gordon Bennett  gas balloon race, which has 16 hydrogen balloons flying across Europe.In January 1991, he crossed the Pacific from Japan to Arctic Canada, 6,700 miles, in a balloon, breaking the record, with a speed of 245 miles per hour. In 2004, Branson set a record by travelling from Dover to Calais in a Gibbs Aquada in 1 hour, 40 minutes and 6 seconds, the fastest crossing of the English Channel in an amphibious vehicle. In 2010 he tried for the world record of putting a round of golf in the dark at the Black Light Mini Golf in The Docklands, Melbourne, Australia. scored 41 on the par 45 course.

Richard Branson lives the life of a 1 per center but he says he’s with the 99%. He’s contributing to make the world a better place on many levels. He’s a good example to other super wealthy people, who often think they’re above concerning themselves with the problems of the world.

See my website, Wagele.com and my blog on Psychology Today for more famous Enneagram types.

Famous Perfectionist: Ex-Senator and Basketball Star Bill Bradley

Bill Bradley (born July 28, 1943) is an idealist and a hard worker, two prime characteristics of Enneagram Perfectionist types. He was an American hall of fame basketball player, Rhodes scholar, and three-term Democratic U.S. Senator from New Jersey. He ran unsuccessfully for the Democratic Party’s nomination for President in the 2000 election, beloved especially by many college students who admired his stance on anti-materialism. He was an Eagle Scout, played all-county and all-state basketball in high school, and was offered 75 college scholarships. At Princeton University he earned a gold medal as a member of the 1964 Olympic basketball team and was the NCAA Player of the Year in 1965. He attended Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship.

Bradley spent his ten-year professional basketball career playing for the Knicks, winning two championship titles. Retiring in 1977, he ran for a seat in the United States Senate and was re-elected in 1984 and 1990.

Bradley is the author of six non-fiction books, including The New American Story, and hosts a weekly radio show, American Voices, on Sirius Satellite Radio.

On Meet the Press he said he believes people are searching for some meaning in their life that is deeper than the material. Being only interested in material things is a reaction to the hollowness of life, he said. “To these young people who believe that America can be just, I say, never give up and never sell out. You don’t have to give up your idealism to be successful in America. You don’t have to become complacent. To the contrary, you should be angry with the state of our democracy, the conditions of poverty, the absence of universal health care, the continuation of racism; and if you get angry enough and are smart enough and work hard enough, you can change things. You don’t have to give up what you truly believe so as not to offend power, for real power lies within each of you-the power to mobilize an army of citizens who want to change the world. … you can triumph over ignorance and spitefulness, corruption and greed. You can take the high road and succeed, if enough of you take it together.” -The Journey From Here by Bill Bradley

This is also typical of a Perfectionist: During his high school years, Bradley maintained a rigorous practice schedule, which he carried through college. He would work on the court for “three and a half hours every day after school, nine to five on Saturday, one-thirty to five on Sunday, and, in the summer, about three hours a day. He put ten pounds of lead slivers in his sneakers, set up chairs as opponents and dribbled in a slalom fashion around them, and wore eyeglass frames that had a piece of cardboard taped to them so that he could not see the floor, for a good dribbler never looks at the ball.” Another sign of the Perfectionist is that he felt uncomfortable using his celebrity status to earn extra money endorsing products as other players did.

My last blog was on Robert Reich, who spoke eloquently at a University of California rally on the Occupation movement. Bill Bradley makes a good spokesman for the ideals of the 99% as well.

See more Famous People Enneagram examples on my Psychology Today blogs, my web site, and in each chapter of The Career Within You and Are You My Type, Am I Yours?

Robert Reich, Spokesman for Equality

Robert Reich (born June 24, 1946) has much to offer the Occupy movement as it is finding its way: “I have dedicated my life to ensuring that the economy works for everyone. A central tenet of my writings and the policies I put into place as labor secretary is that our ability to thrive as a nation depends on the capacities of our people who work productively together – both as participants in an economy and as members of a society.”

He spoke to the students who were both protesting fee hikes and supporting Occupy Wall Street on November 15 on the steps of Sproul Hall at Cal in Berkeley:

“I urge you to be patient with yourself because with regard to every social movement in the last half-century or more, it started with a sense of moral outrage. Things were wrong and the actual coalescence of that moral outrage into specific demands came later.

Some people say we cannot afford education any longer, we cannot as a nation provide social services to the poor… Well how can that be true if we are now richer than we have ever been before? Over the last three decades this economy has doubled in size but most Americans have not seen much gain.

The problem with concentrated income and wealth…is an education system that’s no longer available to so many young people… We are losing equal opportunity in America. We are losing the moral foundation stone on which this country and our democracy were founded.

All of you understand intuitively that if we allowed America to go in the direction it was going, with the wealth and the income and the power and the political potential for corruption that all of that represents, that the bullies would be in charge.”

Reich served in the administrations of Presidents Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter and was Secretary of Labor under President Bill Clinton. He is currently Chancellor’s Professor of Public Policy at the Goldman School of Public Policy at the University of California, Berkeley. He was formerly a professor at Harvard University’s John F. Kennedy School of Government and the Heller School for Social Policy and Management of Brandeis University. He was also chairman, founding editor, and contributing editor of The New Republic, and contributing editor of The American Prospect, Harvard Business Review, The Atlantic, New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal.

Reich is a political commentator on Hardball with Chris Matthews, This Week with George Stephanopoulos, CNBC’s Kudlow & Company, and APM’s Marketplace and other programs. In 2008, Time Magazine named him one of the Ten Best Cabinet Members of the century, and The Wall Street Journal placed him sixth on its list of the “Most Influential Business Thinkers.” He was a member of President-elect Barack Obama’s economic transition advisory board.

His 13 books, include best-sellers, The Work of Nations, Reason, Supercapitalism, and Aftershock: The Next Economy and America’s Future. He is chairman of Common Cause and writes a blog about the political economy.

Regarding a fair and sustainable income and wealth distribution, he recommends, “Expand the Earned Income Tax Credit — a wage supplement for lower-income people, and finance it with a higher marginal income tax on the top five percent. For the longer term, invest in education for lower income communities, starting with early-childhood education and extending to better access to post-secondary education.”

With little information about his personal life, I’m sticking my neck out and calling him an Enneagram Peace Seeker who makes good use of his Achiever and Questioner arrows. Please let me know if you know him well and know the Enneagram well and you have a more accurate guess.

See more about famous types on my Psychology Today blog and my web site.

Dept of Labor photo.

Thomas Jefferson, Famous Pursuiter of Happiness

Drawing by Elizabeth Wagele

Thomas Jefferson was the imaginative and productive founding father responsible for the phrase “pursuit of happiness” in the Preamble to the Declaration of Independence. He was an Epicurian (“I consider the genuine doctrines of Epicurus as containing everything rational in moral philosophy of which Greece and Rome have left us.” – Letter to William Short, October 31, 1819.) I believe he was an Adventurer in the Enneagram system of personalities. Adventurers typically engage in many interests and activities:

According to Wikipedia, “Jefferson had a love for reading. By 1815, his library included 6,487 books, which he sold to the Library of Congress to replace the smaller collection destroyed in the War of 1812. He was an accomplished architect who helped popularize the Neo-Palladian style in the United States. He was interested in birds and wine, and was a noted gourmet. Jefferson was a prolific writer. He learned Gaelic to translate Ossian, and sent to James Macpherson for the originals. Jefferson invented many small practical devices and improved contemporary inventions. These include the design for a revolving book-stand to hold five volumes at once… Another was the “Great Clock,” powered by the Earth’s gravitational pull on Revolutionary War cannonballs. Jefferson invented a 15 cm long coded wooden cypher wheel, mounted on a metal spindle, to keep secure State Department messages while he was Secretary of State. The messages were scrambled and unscrambled by 26 alphabet letters on each circular segment of the wheel. He improved the moldboard plow and the polygraph, in collaboration with Charles Willson Peale. As Minister to France, Jefferson was impressed by France’s military standardization program known as the Système Gribeauval and later as President initiated a program at the Federal Armories to develop interchangeable parts for firearms.”

Stephen Greenblatt wrote The Swerve: How the World Became Modern, on how Lucretius’ epic poem, “On the Nature of Things” (first century BC), shaped the thought of Galileo, Freud, Darwin, and Einstein and influenced writers such as Montaigne and Shakespeare. He says Jefferson owned five copies of the poem. Lucretius believed the Universe was made of units or atoms and was not created by a miracle. He believed in avoiding pain and tried to convince people not to have a fear of death. Presumably Jefferson agreed with him that neither the mind nor spirit can survive independent of the body. So fear of death is a projection of terrors experienced in life, a fear of pain that only a living mind can feel.

Lucretius also says  people who fear the prospect of eternal non-existence after death should think back to the eternity of non-existence before their birth, which they probably do not fear.  Adventurers should find this idea appealing because they look for ways to not be afraid. Certain other types would not be as attracted to such a carefree thought (leaving views handed down by their religion aside, that is).

Adventurers, including Thomas Jefferson, try to fill their lives with positive activities, thoughts, attitudes, and options. When something doesn’t go well for them, they usually get over it rather quickly.

For more Famous People, see my website: http://www.wagele.com/Famous.html

and my Psychology Today blog: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-career-within-you