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.

Capitalism: Does Planning on Infinite Growth Make Sense?

        

Infinity by E. Wagele

    Capitalism is: a system in which private capital is used in the production or distribution of goods. – Oxford Dictionary.

Capitalism has made Europe and the United States wealthy. It has also led to huge debts, exploitation, oppression, unemployment, poverty and ever-increasing waste. Is the main problem the materialism, greed, and selfishness capitalism creates? Or could capitalism work if most people under capitalism had good characters, that is, a sense of equality, fairness, and the desire to do the right thing? Could capitalism be stable—not have to depend on constant growth or inflation?

            Long ago I told my parents, “People buy bigger and bigger houses so they need to make more and more money. They need their companies to produce more and more so they need more and more people to buy their products. Pretty soon there will be too much of everything, including too many people for the earth to support. How can we and our leaders endorse an economy based on infinite growing?”

What does infinity mean?

            When I was 7-9 years old, every few months, I would hear a flute-like sound in my head. Then a voice of authority would order me to hear this tone rise to infinity. I would try to obey.

I would imagine the tone going higher and higher, and when it got as high as I could imagine it, I would try to imagine it going even higher. I would suffer because I couldn’t obey the authority. When I tried to hear the tone go even higher, I might be able to stretch it a bit more, and maybe a tiny bit more than that. I knew it was far away from infinity and had to admit defeat.

At that point I would feel so stressed and frustrated. I would shake my head and arms to make the whole thing go away.

I didn’t tell a soul. I didn’t want anyone to think I was crazy. Nobody else seemed to hear rising flute-like tones in their heads and authoritarian voices demanding things of them. Never mind that the authority was asking for the impossible.

A few years ago someone introduced me to the idea that I could have said No to the authority and the tone. I liked that thought.

60-something years later, I realize that trying to push a musical tone to infinity is something like an economy built on infinite growing. They’re both illogical. At some point, it’s bound to crash and people will be shaking their heads.

Just like my rising tone had an end, so do the resources of the earth. We need to slow down our population and take better care of our planet or it will become too crowded and too polluted. And the economy… what about it?

But how will we get from here to there? Someone who understands economics and governments better than I do might explain how to achieve an equal distribution of wealth and resources. And how to convince Americans it would be positive to have a saving attitude instead of consuming way beyond their need. The propaganda from banks and advertisers for decades has been to spend and borrow frivolously.

I’m taking time out from my Famous Personality Types series to write about something that’s been bothering me for a long time. It feels like The Emperor’s Clothes—something obvious that people don’t talk about. I’ve gotten it off my chest. Thanks for listening.

My last blog on Famous People, Psychology Today, 10-18-1. Tony Bennett.

See All Nine Posts on Elements Types Look for in Jobs

The series on elements the 9 Enneagram types look for in jobs is finished. There’s no new blog today.

This SERIES is based on the book, The Career Within You by Wagele and Stabb. You can read them all on my two blogs below.

See my Psychology Today blog of 5/17/11 for Perfectionists,  http://www.psychologytoday.com/

my WordPress blog of 6-14-11 for Helpers, http://ewagele.wordpress.com/

my Psychology Today blog of 6-21-11 for Achievers,

my WordPress blog of 6-28-11 for Romantics,

my Psychology Today blog of 7-5-11 for Observers,

my WordPress blog of 7-12-11 for Questioners,

my Psychology Today blog of 7/19/11 for Adventurers,

my Psychology Today blog of 8/2/11 for Asserters, and

my Psychology Today blog of 8/16/11 for Peace Seekers.

To buy: The Career Within You

To buy: The Career Within You e-book

Elizabeth Wagele

Stuck Sisters

Stuck by Elizabeth Wagele

The cover of the New York Times Magazine Sunday (5-29-11) is a poignant photograph of two smiling four-year old girls joined at the scalp. They share a thalamus so there’s no possibility of their being separated. Amazingly, it seems that what one sees or tastes is transmitted to the senses of the other. In some ways, they’re separate identical twins and in some ways they’re one person.

I saw this cover just before my birthday, today, when I turn the same age my father was when he died.

When I saw the photo of the twins in their twisted position, I immediately thought of my relationship to my sister, my only sibling, who’s three and a half years older than I am. I think of this scene often: our little beige bodies taking a bath together when I was 2 and she was 5, seen from a corner near the ceiling. I remember having argued about which of us got the faucet end of the bathtub, my mother scrubbing us and pulling us out to dry us off, and sweet soap smells. That scene must represent to me the innocent days of how I felt about her.

At that age, I idolized her. She and my parents were my whole world. But she was like a twin, one of me; they weren’t. I thought I knew her well, maybe like these joined twins know each other. We were made out of exactly the same stuff and our parents weren’t. Maybe it was narcissism on my part, but I preferred her. She did kid things and played with toys and they lived in the world of grownups, which I didn’t relate to at that age.

It began to slowly dawn on me in the next year or two that revering her as a wonderful sister, who could do everything I hoped I’d learn how to do, wasn’t anything like the way she felt about me. And after I finally accepted that she actually disliked me, I began to dislike her back. So we limped and crashed our ways through our childhoods and our adulthoods and after our parents died that was the end of it. Our twisted relationship ended in a kind of death.

The little joined girls, who sometimes refer to themselves as stuck, have an accepting family. The article about them said they’re closest to their positive and loving grandmother, who lives with them. They have supportive parents, other relatives, and a medical system as well.

I wish I knew what really happened in my family and what might have happened had my parents sought professional help for us. Was our sisterhood doomed before it began? Could it have been saved?

I’m happy that my two daughters grew up being fond of each other. All four of my children have good feelings about one another.

So today on my birthday I’m thinking of all of my family, all of my friends, and two little girls I don’t know. To the birthday messages waiting for me, I want to say Happy Birthday back.

My Glorious Annoyances

by EWagele

There’s a book going around about annoyances. I haven’t read it. But an annoyance happened to me this morning. Actually, some things really annoy me and some things that annoy other people don’t annoy me. I think the Observer type, me, is good at handling many things other people are annoyed by because we can look at life in a relatively objective way.

1. For example, when I had lunch at a restaurant in San Francisco with an Asserter friend of mine, she didn’t like the way the waiter treated her and she didn’t like the ingredients of the drink she was served. Being an Asserter, she wanted to teach the restaurant a lesson. Being an Observer, I had the attitude that nothing we did would change this old financial district restaurant that was used to catering to businessmen and had been making drinks the same way for forty years. I thought, what difference would reforming this place make in the large scheme of things? And to me, the service was just fine. So I was annoyed that my friend was annoyed, but on the other hand, I got to observe this bizarre interaction between server and served.

2. At 5:30 a.m. this morning my phone rang. I was completely asleep and I didn’t hear it.

Then I did. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Ring. Then it stopped. After that I couldn’t get back to sleep. Was it my daughter calling from Vienna, the way she did on 9-11-01 when she saw what was happening in New York on TV and called to tell us about it? A family emergency? Someone soliciting? No. Nothing like those.

I got up around 6:30, about an hour earlier than usual.

The phone message was a steady rhythm, maybe a washing machine, with a faint voice in the background, maybe a child. Okay, this has happened before. Probably a kid got hold of the parent’s cell phone and pressed a button that dialed our number. Maybe my friend’s kid in Hong Kong or a grandchild.

3. Presidential campaigns that last two years. I hate the money they cost and I hate the unintelligent way they’re done. They could accomplish just as much in three weeks.

4. I am annoyed by people who have TV or loud music going all the time and expect you to hold a conversation at the same time.

5. The head of the Japanese utilities company resigned in disgrace after withholding information about the earthquake and tsunami. It annoys me that those in the U.S. responsible for the financial mess we’re in have not voluntarily committed hari kari. I wonder what the regulators and bankers who messed up the real estate in our country think about what they did? Do they have any moral standards? Or do they say to themselves, “What can I get away with next?” Wouldn’t it make us all happy to see them resign in disgrace?

6. It annoys me that we aren’t marching in the streets to protest the increasing gulf between the rich and the poor. Unions are discouraged, minimum wages are discouraged, college students are going deeper in debt. This stuff is crazy, annoying, and then some. But the biggest annoyance is how complacent we all are. I liked it when we marched in the streets for our beliefs. Now we’re letting people get away with stuff. That’s scary.

2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 5,600 times in 2010. That’s about 13 full 747s.

 

In 2010, there were 30 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 44 posts. There were 65 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 26mb. That’s about a picture per week.

The busiest day of the year was April 1st with 52 views. The most popular post that day was Cultivating Mindfulness.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, psychologytoday.com, twitter.com, wagele.com, and mail.yahoo.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for introvert, mbti cartoons, the career within you, tired of my job, and myers briggs cartoons.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

Cultivating Mindfulness November 2009

2

I’m So Tired of My Job January 2010

3

Speaking Schedule 2010 January 2010

4

Famous People’s Types October 2010

5

What Does My Cartoon Say About You? November 2009

Some Music and an Enneagram Intro

Here is a beautiful Song for you to listen to, “Star of Wonder”:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFbE9ZStums

And here is a blog I posted on Psychology Today a few months ago.  It’s an introduction to the Enneagram.

I’m too busy to create an original blog this week.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-career-within-you/200912/framework-matching-career-type-true-self

- Elizabeth

From Business Executive to Dream Job – Guest Blog

Read more about Ginger on pages 72 and 283

My type is “Achiever” and I am an Assistant Professor at the University of California – Berkeley. Being an Achiever has certainly helped my career, mostly in the sense that it helped me change careers. I used to be a business executive, a job that was challenging and rewarding in many ways, including financially, but not satisfying to me personally. I had always thought I would be a great university professor but it seemed so crazy to leave such a great job, and one that I enjoyed, in order to chase after a dream job that would definitely be very hard to get. Becoming a university professor in my field meant going to graduate school for five or six years to earn my Ph.D., and then competing with literally *hundreds* of other Ph.D.s for a scant handful of tenure-track faculty positions. I knew that the odds were against me – they were against my getting into a top Ph.D. program (which are extremely competitive), and even if I managed to get into a great graduate school and do well, the odds were very much against my getting to be an Assistant Professor at a top research university. Hardly *anyone* in my field gets a faculty job of any kind, let alone a tenure-track professorship at an R1 institution.

But being an Achiever, I decided something. I decided that even if only five people ever got the kind of job I wanted in the field I wanted, *I* could be one of those five people. In other words, my fundamental assumption changed from “I can never get one of those jobs!” to “I can definitely be one of the very few people that can get one of those jobs.” After all, I had a strong track record of achieving goals that many people had thought impossible (getting into the college of my choice, winning prizes there that were only awarded to a select few students, turning a low-paying job into a high-paying one, getting all of the promotions and opportunities that I wanted in my career). So why couldn’t I achieve what I felt was my greatest dream for my working life, which was to get into a fabulous doctoral program and then get a terrific job at a top college?

My mindset helped me do what I needed to make my career dreams come true.  I look around me and see so many people discouraged from even trying to get the kinds of jobs they really want, and know they can be really great at. I feel like the biggest difference between the people who don’t try to get their ideal jobs and me (as an example of someone who went after my career dream and who succeeded) was my fundamental knowledge that I can achieve what I want to achieve. That certainty is just a part of me – a part of my personality. I think that’s what the enneagram is about – it gives people a way of articulating basic, elemental aspects of their personality that other kinds of articulations (like horoscope signs or something like that) don’t really get at. In my case, being an Achiever, I know that I can go after what I want and, as long as I work hard at it and keep my focus, I can get it. Nothing else explains that part of me as well as the enneagram. Being an Achiever just seems to be written into the fabric of my being.

- By Ginger

The Truth About Dreaming

My Asserter Friend

Yesterday I attended a dream workshop given by Victoria Rabinowe and Naomi Epel. The dream I presented featured an Asserter type friend of mine who creates fireworks wherever she goes. Another character was a sulky woman who may have represented a part of myself (I’m an Observer type) that wants more attention and feels misunderstood. Is the message of the dream: 1) to pay attention to my behavior when I feel ignored? Or 2) to be more assertive and tell people what I’m thinking so they can’t misunderstand me? I choose #2.  I can go out and interact more in the world if I need more attention, like my friend in the dream does—instead of passively accepting being ignored. The Truth is that I can create my own kind of positive fireworks. My dreams will probably remind me if I forget. Now I have this assertive friend to guide me in my dreams. She’s been in several lately but I didn’t know why. I’ll go back and check them out.

Yesterday we were expecting a small rainstorm and the wind was blowing. This unusual weather for this time of year inspired me to think about things… like what is the Truth? My son had phoned me a little while before about an article he was writing about our criminal justice system and how it doesn’t compensates the victim. In his plan the criminal would work to pay the victim back. That would both help restore what he took and teach him what havoc he had created by his behavior.

It’s the same principle as having your kids work to pay for the window they break and help install a new one, for example. If they fix the damage, they’ll be more careful next time. It will help them be honest about what can happen when they throw rocks or play with balls too close to the house.

Bernie Madoff’s clients should have suspected his Ponzi scheme when he promised them such huge profits, way out of line compared to everyone else’s. Greed can turn our heads away from seeing the Truth of the investments we make.

When the subject of dreams comes up, it surprises me how many people dismiss them as having no meaning. My own experience of writing down and drawing over 1750 dreams tells me this is not true. I have also seen the intelligence behind the dreams presented by other people in hundreds of dream classes and groups I’ve attended, the best way I’ve found to work on dreams. Sometimes dreams give us models to follow or tell us to pay attention to something important. When people dismiss the validity of dreams, I feel they’re ignoring a potentially important part of their lives.

Among other gifts, my nighttime dreams were directly responsible for creating a new career for me 15 years ago.

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http://careerwithinyou.com
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