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Row Models |
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This week I continue my trip into the world of human strengths. I received as a present the book “Discover your Strengths”, by Buckingham and Clifton, where the principles used by Gallup to assess personalities are described. This book has on me a “fatal attraction”, all the time these ideas occupy my mind. I take different situations, both present or past, or from books and I try to imagine how they could be translated into human strengths. This made me really ponder about different types of “heroes” of humanity, individuals that meant something for the world and how much relevance they could have for me as a raw model. The visionaries have the perception of things that will happen in 50-100 or even several hundreds of years after they give birth to their ideas. They sense some vibes, some distortion and tension in the delicate fabric of human society and propose solutions that seem absurd and inappropriate for the majority of their contemporaries. Jesus proposed totally different human relations in the society, love and understanding, in a time when mercy was regarded as a serious despicable weakness. Even in our modern time we still have some difficulty in applying his teaching. Mohamed felt things that no one else of his time could express, like the deadly danger of the total control of the Persian Empire over the trade routes from Asia to the Mediterranean Sea. His militant, aggressive creed united lost in the dessert tribes that were totally powerless separately, and led to a significant civilization and religion of the world. Buddha, Confucius, and only less than a dozen others changed completely the human history. They are people that you can venerate, cite, discuss about, consider as raw model to copy, aspire to get close to them, but never to imagine to be like them. The military geniuses attract me a lot as personalities. I like to see how they ascended to power, how they fought their battles and the strategies they used on the battlefield. But I wouldn’t like to be like them. You have to have a certain structure to accept and not care about the death of so many of your own people. They had a much higher degree of selfishness than I have. Napoleon considered that is quite normal to leave some of his soldiers behind in Spain, to quickly advance the rest of his troops on the English; the fate of the ones left was doomed, they killed themselves to avoid being savagely tortured to death by the Spaniards. Alexander the Great, Cesar, Byzantine general Belisarius and many others are great men, but I would have huge difficulties to make plans where hundreds of thousands or even millions of people play the role of expendable commodities. In the last years I discovered a different type of personality that fascinate me, the “talents’ scout”, the person that discovers what the strengths of the people around him, casts them into the right roles and brings happiness into the real world. Search of happiness is a constant basic theme of every religion and philosophy. Religions usually guarantee it in the afterlife, Walhalla, Paradise or the Muslim heaven. The concept is so important that the Declaration of Independence considered the “Pursue of Happiness” a basic human right. Communism promised it on this earth “to everyone according to his / her needs”, and it was a total failure, it turned into a long period of dire sufferance for all the subjects of this social experiment. With all the pressing general interest on the subject, we are still far away from what we all dream about. Leaders that have the faculty to be talents’ scouts make it really happen, create islands of real enjoyable life, and this is probably the most we can hope on this Earth. It brings happiness to anyone involved, because you are able to do something that you do the best, work ceased to be hard labor and turns into pleasure, and your group and the society benefits the most out of your efforts. This is something that I'd like to be. I know what I cannot be. Fortunately in the books I read there are many people that I dream I could be. For a long while the top of my list was my beloved Benjamin Franklin, the man that lived an existence based on hard work and the desire to serve the community, in the same time respecting rather strict ethical rules. He will continue to be to me a shining example of how someone could take his fate into his hands and successfully better one’s self. During my adolescence I admired scientists like Edison and others that had the power to dig deep behind the surface of commonly accepted reality, bring to life new ideas and create new concepts. After 1990 I discovered how spellbinding the economy could be, what an infinitely more complex game than chess it is and how much an open, creative and organized mind can achieve. Each one of us is looking for raw models. My first overwhelming living model that still towers above anything else was my father, with his honesty and his firmness of moral principles, kindness to anyone, hard work, intelligence, desire to achieve and succeed and love for the family. He was a leader all his life, in all the jobs he had and he knew how to combine strict discipline needed for doing a job with a kind, helping and compassionate attitude. He had to be strict, he was a road building engineer, and until the age of 32 he was mostly alone in the mountains with hundreds of people, a tough bunch of guys that sometimes used axes and knives to settle their conflicts. Still, because of his desire to help, all his life his subordinates called him “papa”, the father, and this nickname stuck to him. This is something that I aspired to copy and achieve from my teenager years. The first other real example of such a personality that I met in my life was an American, Terry Cornelison and I strove hard to copy his methods. Looking backwards, I believe that working with people is much more important than solving technical problems. I think I have an average capacity to spot peoples’ qualities, but it is sure that an improvement effort would help me a lot. Studying the Gallup methods seems to me a good path to follow. It is interesting for me how tortuous my life path was. I started with a passion for technical things, I continued with the same passion for economy and I switch now partially into humanities. Am I becoming a wiser person? Dorel Jurcovan March 27th, 2004 |