Q: Why does nothing ever seem to change? A: All you’re trying to change is nothing.

Posted on July 30, 2017 by Greg Swann

How do people know conservatives favor reptilian empathy?Image by: Derek Bridges

Trump can’t win. The GOP-majority Congress can’t win. The Tea Party can’t win. The amassed roar of redneck rage can’t win.

How is it that the majority can’t win anything?

I can name two reasons, one more comprehensive than the other.

First the easy part, pure salesmanship: You’re making the wrong pitch to the wrong prospects. Either of those is death to any sale, so it’s extra-zealous of you to double up on failure like that.

Sorry. That’s mean – and that’s the messaging problem. No one was ever scolded or scorned into better behavior, so all that lamenting and chastising and rending of garments may thrill the choir, but it sways no one else.

Still worse, all your persuasive efforts are aimed at adults – most of whom have zero plans to change their habits of mind. The only people you can persuade reliably and in bulk are Toddlers – which is why I’m focused on ThriversEd. Adult-outreach is all but entirely futile, except for socialization and choir-retention.

The only times adults rethink their basic predispositions is when they’re on the bubble: When they have to make a difficult choice. Accordingly, if you want to influence their future thinking, you need to be involved in their lives at those times.

I like marriage every which way, most especially because marriage makes adults out of adult-babies. If you want to catch an adult mind in a temporary state of renewed plasticity, the group you want to start will be devoted to pre-marital, marriage or post-marital counseling and support. People will be more likely to listen to your ideas then, and with deeper understanding, than at any other times in their lives.

I’m building tools to help with an effort like this, if you want to get something started. Helping people avoid or recover from pain – and pursue greater joy – is a mitzvah, regardless of any didactic, social or political benefits.

But that leads right to the more comprehensive problem:

You can’t fight unilateral empathy with unilateral empathy. Even assuming you were pitching to the right prospects, this (more…)

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Why was Ayn Rand’s marriage a living hell? And how can you make your own better?

Posted on July 29, 2017 by Greg Swann

And you may ask yourself
What is that beautiful house?
And you may ask yourself
Where does that highway go to?
And you may ask yourself
Am I right? Am I wrong?
And you may say to yourself yourself
My God! What have I done?!

My friend Teri Lussier was bragging on her husband, Jamie, yesterday – something great wives do with a spontaneous exuberance. I’ve been thinking a lot about marriage, of course – and not just lately. But the idea of DISCing marriages to four places is new for me, and it was fun for me to play with my new toys with people I know well.

So: I said:

D with S – mutual reciprocity. Y’all glow with it, so you know.

Jamie has a C-ish, introverted manner, but I liked him at Dsci when I met him in Orlando. I know you too-I-ishly, so that may crimson your hue in my mind: Sidc? I could swap the middle two for either one of you, and I would trust Cathleen more than me on the bubble. But if those two profiles are right, they make for a fun marriage: You would tend to enthrall and to ground each other perfectly, each when the other benefits from that most.

That sounds a little like astrology to me. It may seem even less plausible to you if you’ve never seen a happy marriage. But Jamie and Teri glow with happiness, and their us-before-everything bond is always in evidence.

That’s all there in their DISC profiles:

They are high-D and high-S, the way a happy couple should be. I cited mutual reciprocity, the opposite that attracts. We’ll see in due course why that matters. From first priorities to last, Jamie and Teri are opposite to each other in ways that inspire, excite, calm or comfort: Where he leads, she follows. When he’s feeling loving, she’s ready to dance. When he wants to protect them, she’s there to pitch in. And if he is ever at risk of flying off the planet – or off the handle – she’s there to ground him.

DISC is a map to a person’s character, and the (more…)

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DISC is biology? Politics? No. DISC is an easily-seen map to your – and everyone’s – priorities.

Posted on July 28, 2017 by Greg Swann

“You want to be seen? Dude! You can’t hide!” When someone is being his authentic, unaffected self, he will show you his DISC type by showing you his empathy strategy by showing you his social praxis by showing you his habits-of-mind by showing you his priorities.Translation: “We are what we habitually do.”Photo by: lee leblanc

I first ran into old-school DISC at a trade show in 2007. My wife took a half-hour breakout-session DISC course, and she persuaded me to take it the next time it was offered, later that day.

At the start of the session, they handed out a little questionnaire, a DISC quiz. I read all of the questions in a quick scan, then drew a single straight line through all of the D answers.

Just that much was a huge eye-opener for me, to discover I am and always have been Driven with a singularly perfect Driven display: Maximal results, minimal effort.

That’s where I started to play. My theoretical grounding in old-school DISC was that class, but I was working with it as practical ontology, not something to be read about. I ignored all the nomenclature and the supposed distinguishing categories and simply focused on the correspondence of the model to reality.

Translation: I liked the predictive accuracy, but I didn’t trust any part of the validation. I glossed DISC without naming it in Chapter 10 of Man Alive, but I didn’t defend it until I could demonstrate it as ontology, in Nine empathies.

That much is cool, but it’s only necessary in order to establish the underlying causality of DISC-mediated behavior.

So we can talk about reptilian versus mammalian empathy strategies.

Or we can explore unilateral versus reciprocal social strategies.

Or we can simply focus on priorities, since this is what DISC is, at bottom: Your unique rank-ordering of life’s priorities.

Do you want the job done? Do you want be acknowledged for your efforts? Do you want to have fun with the other people doing it? Or do you want for it to be perfectly correspondent to the procedural plans and financial projections?

When you’re on the bubble – when you (more…)

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Since we know Ayn Rand was lying about her marriage, what else was she lying about?

Posted on July 27, 2017 by Greg Swann

When you say nothing, you say everything.

Yesterday we established to no objections that Ayn Rand and all her hired hands have lied unrelentingly and for decades about her marriage to Frank O’Connor.

It turns out she treated her ‘top value’ like shit, which really should come as no surprise: She treated everyone like shit, especially the people foolish enough to submit to her vituperative blasts of rage.

A Cautious or Incandescent temperament in power will always move toward Cautious tyranny – with amplifying compliance displays where escape is blocked. Pope Sneakoff, as one reprehensible example, desperately wanted to be The Big O’s Intellectual Error, so he took a daily bath in Sister Mary Elephant dung. None so deserving.

I take no end of grief from people because I tend to regard all testimony as being unreliable. Until I know from experience that your word is good, I assume it isn’t. Nothing personal, but you are naturally tendentious and poorly educated, the perfect recipe for over- and under-statements.

But mere unreliability is less misleading – and more easily corrected-for – than is overt, intentional deception, so it pays to have a lens for predicting another person’s probity – for judging the relative reliability of the testimony of people you don’t already know well.

Testimony about personal prowess or competence seems like a useful proxy. If you have occasion to judge someone, you have some basis for judgement. An inquiry as simple as, “Tell my why you think this is a good resume” can tell you everything you need to know.

Take a look at this matrix:

Whatever it is we’re talking about, are you any good at it? That’s the columns, evaluating your ability to account for your own efforts.

Whichever answer you gave, do I think your response was accurate? That’s the rows – and if I can’t judge your competence, more fool me.

If you’re good at the task and you know that, your testimony is highly-likely to be reliable.

You say you’re not so good and I concur? At least you’re capable of telling the truth.

You say you’re not good but I know you are? (more…)

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Ayn Rand’s 7 helpful tips for wrecking your marriage with a total, lifelong commitment.

Posted on July 26, 2017 by Greg Swann

That Robert Tracinski is a hard-working carney!Photo by: Paul Sableman

Robert Tracinski braced yet another cleansing ritual yesterday, seeking absolution from the goddess of his idolatry with his umpteenth mountain of cotton-candy praise. Kim Jong-un should have such an apple polisher.

Tl;dr, of course, but the gist is this:

Ayn Rand, who died nearly-penniless after having had most of her ‘investments’ devoured by currency inflation, was also the world’s greatest expert on business.

That’s just sad, particularly because it’s the only tune Tracinski ever plays:

Ayn Rand was the world’s greatest expert on everything – except for, you know, everything that matters in life.

So I thought I’d balance the scales with a quick look at how the world’s greatest expert on love, sex, marriage and family actually managed the actual motor of human civilization – marriage and family.

These are all matters of fact, so obsessively trying to ‘disprove’ them will give Rand’s harried Ci victims something to do. And while you may think it’s unfair for me to hold The Big O accountable for the wreckage of her marriage, it is beyond dispute that – unlike business or financial management – Ayn Rand was a world-class expert at wrecking marriages, her own and those of everyone who strayed near her for too long. The relative zeal of her inner circle can be quantified in divorces per decade of devotion to her. I wish I were making that up.

So: Herewith are the seven simple tactics Ayn Rand deployed with a methodical precision to assure that her marriage would be bleak, with both she and her husband miserable in it, that they would both die without issue, that she would destroy the marriage without permitting it to break, and that she and all her mincing minions would lie about all of this forever:

Ayn Rand’s 7 helpful tips for wrecking your marriage with a total, lifelong commitment.

1. Latch onto the first guy who can’t escape your clutches, even though you and he are temperamentally unsuited from day one.

2. Don’t let him have any children. When one of his brave warriors surmounts every obstacle set before (more…)

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If the very best fathers are Dsci, what would be the ideal DISC strategy for a Dutch Uncle to deploy?

Posted on July 25, 2017 by Greg Swann

There is no Ideal Man, but there is an ideal Dutch Uncle DISC profile: Dsci.

Photo by: Kaaren Perry

Hard to come up with a question more obtuse than that. But answering it repays effort, I think.

If you are an actual Dutch Uncle in an actual Dutch Uncle game – you cannot induce the pantomimes of loyalty with bribes or threats – what should you do to earn maximal loyalty from your team while incurring minimal mutiny?

That’s the way you should lead all the time, regardless of any arbitrary incentives.

And from all of this, it is easy to see that Ds is the ideal leadership strategy in every context. There is no Ideal Man, but there is an ideal Dutch Uncle DISC profile: Dsci.

Cautious ‘leadership’ – whether techo- or theocratic – must always amplify its compliance displays to tyranny, to starved bodies and stultified minds.

Only Driven leadership is actual leadership, and only Driven-Sociable leadership moves people always toward loyalty and away from mutiny.

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Sacrificing Diana: Prometheus was fed to the vultures. His captors warm their hands by the fire.

Posted on July 24, 2017 by Greg Swann

What’s better than an ideal? An idol. All belief, no follow-through. What’s even better than that? An icon. If you’ve got a pocket, you’ve got redemption. Now how hard was that?Image by: jay pangan 3

The hagiography of Princes Di is due for a twenty-year upgrade. This is me, from September 18, 1997, on her pitiable public sacrifice and on the ugly nature of human sacrifice generally. Where else can you go for stuff like this? —GSS
 

For god so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life. (John 3:16)

Here’s a little story, a tragedy in three acts in the briefest kind of synopsis:

Act I. A mysterious stranger comes to a troubled town. Act II. He stands down received wisdom and makes a few fast friends and a vast horde of stout enemies. Matters come to a head and in the final confrontation he wins by losing. Act III. After the stranger is gone the town is on its way to being healed. The end.

You’ve heard that story before, haven’t you? Maybe it was a western. Maybe it was a few dozen westerns. Perhaps a detective story or a space opera or a swashbuckler. Maybe a tale about knights errant besting tyrants or slaying dragons. A scientist who wins over a dubious public with a miracle cure. A scholar who proves an idea thought to be heretical. Columbus, for goodness sake, along with dozens of other great names of history we were taught to remember back when schools taught children to remember.

It’s the story of Socrates, of course, who drank the hemlock rather than renounce his truth. And it’s the story of Prometheus, who was chained to the rock and tormented by vultures for delivering unto humankind the fire of the gods.

And it’s the story of the messiah, Jesus of Nazareth, Rex Judaeorum.

And it’s because of the Nazarene that the story matters to us. There are two significant parts to the story, Acts II and III. In Act II, the stranger – the rebel, (more…)

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What’s the secret to raising generation after generation of great families? The right map.

Posted on July 24, 2017 by Greg Swann

Us against the world?This is how it’s done.

The only families who reliably raise great families – good kids who grow up to raise good kids – are what I call Testudo families: Dad has persuaded everyone in the family to progress in a metaphorical Testudo formation – everyone marches together with their shields held together overhead so each person is shielded from outside attack by all the others. They are defended not from poisoned arrows but poisonous ideas. A Testudo family is explicitly – and obviously – a distinct polis, a well-defended Hoplite redoubt.

Can’t spot ’em? Look for matching outfits from Dad to newborn, often home-made. Listen for uncommon first names, especially names sharing a theme. The easiest tell, though, is how they are organized: Dad is in charge, but everyone contributes, and everyone shares in the responsibility for maintaining, sustaining and defending the family.

How do you spot that? It’s in the way they walk together in public, for one easy tell. But they do everything that way, everyone fully-committed to Dad’s leadership.

The DISC of the Testudo family is simple:

Dad will be Dsci in that order – Mister Married. Mom will be Sdic or Sdci – with the the former being reliably more prolific, I would bet. They will be hugely committed to each other – astonished by adultery in others – and together they will raise their children in their combined pursuit of Dad’s peculiar social-repulsion strategy – the Testudo displays they invoke to declare their shared identity and to separate themselves from every alien influence.

Their objective is to live only Dad’s way, whether that idea is informed by some external doctrine or is self-adduced, and the relative success of the Testudo praxis – Testudo families for their children’s children – can be measured by the commitment of Mom and the kids to Dad’s ideal.

No mutiny? Not even a hint? Wonderful kids and grandkids, and an enduringly inspiring marriage.

Got mutiny? Dad is Disc or Dcsi – or even less reliably Sociable.

Every Dutch Uncle game is a family because every family is a Dutch Uncle game: Dad (more…)

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Oliver Stone’s “Talk Radio” is the most Ibsen-like, Greek-like drama ever committed to film.

Posted on July 22, 2017 by Greg Swann

We watched Talk Radio tonight, as a kind of rom-com palate-cleanser. It’s one of my all-time favorite films, but it is every bit a maledy, and I’ve been avoiding maledies.

Still. Wow. Always. The second act is weak, but the third act kills and kills and kills. Eric Bogosian has never done better. Oliver Stone has never done better. Even Alec Baldwin puts in a great performance. Every small choice in this film is perfect, all the way down to the titles’ typography.

I first saw it on HBO, soon after it was made. I taped it off the television to watch again and again, later acquiring it on VHS tape, later still at least twice on DVD. I have a copy of Bogosian’s original playscript. And, doubt me nothing, “I could name you every duck in Turtle Creek!” The movie is Greek like nothing written today is Greek:

This is me writing about Talk Radio on the order of twenty years ago:

I like brutal art – no mercy, no quarter. I like any sort of brutality on the part of the artist, by which I mean the refusal to temporize or euphemize or in any other way permit the audience to gloss over or ignore reality. Understand, I don’t seek a gratuitous squalor, but rather an unforgiving acknowledgment that reality is what it is. This is what I love so much in the plays of Henrik Ibsen, who gives me ambiguous or tragic endings and teaches me more about real life than a dozen treatises.

All that is by way of introduction to a recommendation: The film Talk Radio by Oliver Stone and Eric Bogosian. It’s the most amazingly brutal film I’ve ever seen, absolutely no let-up from start to finish. I have Bogosian’s original playscript, but the film screenplay is substantially richer. Moreover, Stone’s camera tricks are superb; the film plays huge implication games with reflections, focus-shifting, facial reactions, etc. Similarly, Stewart Copeland (of The Police) provides a deeply disturbing score. Finally, the actors – especially Bogosian as radio talk show host Barry Champlain – are outstanding.

The film is “based on a true (more…)

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Habituating reliability: The curse of the unreliable Dutch Uncle – and how to cure it.

Posted on July 21, 2017 by Greg Swann

Mutiny is the reliable proxy signal of unreliable leadership.Photo by: Javonni Christopher

There is a category of cinema we might as well call the dutch uncle movie.

(Yes, it is taxing to talk to me, since the same terms come up in different contexts. You’ll manage.)

A dutch uncle movie marries the bad dad yarn to the magic negro trope:

An underfathered single-mom slowly learns to appreciate the micro-doses of the until-then-disdained masculinity her son is covertly imbibing from the filthy old creep next door.

That’s how Hollywood praises fatherhood – by faint damnation. The story isn’t about the kid, nor even about the smelly curmudgeon. They’re decoys. The theme is this: Single-motherhood rules, because, if kids needs dads, they don’t need ’em very much. Accordingly, the character who is most changed by the end is whom? Abre los ojos.

I don’t like dutch uncles or magic negros in film – and not just because they turn Hollywood’s favorite deus ex machina, the magic wand, into a dirty joke. I despise the idea of magic as such – since it could not possibly be more anti-human-efficacy. And I am in lifelong rebellion against the entire class of notions that virtue is somehow injected into a person from the outside. And, obviously, anything that portrays an underfathered upbringing as anything but a (surmountable) handicap is a vicious lie – propaganda.

But the worst thing about dutch uncle movies is that they’re all actually, inadvertently about adult reliability – and they all get it wrong.

Mom is not just hugely unreliable at home, at work and in her cultivation of her son, she is unreliable everywhere – and not just now but all along, hence her divorce. She married the wrong guy? Duh! Femininity in cinema is unreliability all the way down.

And the curmudgeon is not wrong everywhere except where the script says he’s right. His process is mocked as being eccentric, but he pursues it scrupulously. Uniquely among the players we meet in Act I, he is unashamedly himself.

Both mom and the dutch uncle neighbor are unavoidably all-the-way role models, but mom is in mutiny against (more…)

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When Kate became Nora: “Calm down, get married, have kids, cultivate joy.”

Posted on July 21, 2017 by Greg Swann

A woman’s place is in the home –as CEO of a staff of dozens.

What would be Act IV of Kate and Leopold? Act I of A Doll’s House. And when Nora Helmer finally gets everything she’s been shaling for – there she is listening to Moon River from Kate McKay’s Lower Manhattan fire escape.

I’m in love with all of this, so it’s all fine with me.

Start with Meg Ryan, because that’s what set me spinning:

Sleepless in Seattle last night. Holds up well. The plot? Sam (Sd->Ds) meets Annie (Sc->Sd). Jonah’s underfathered mutiny is fun throughout.

That’s just hypnotizing chickens, DISC-summarizing cinema in the length of a Tweet. But that led me to this notion:

Is Meg Ryan’s entire career Sc->Sd?

Girl-next-door, cute and plucky but risk-averse, learns to let down her (gorgeous) hair, trust her gut and fall in love at last.

How strong is she that she could make a story that weak work so well again and again?

That’s a hasty generalization, to be sure – but still…

People call Helen Hunt the back-up Meg Ryan, but in fact Ryan has done excellently well at picking only Sc->Sd roles in her star turns, sticking Hunt and others with characters who would have hurt her bankability.

Now I want to know how much of this she understands…

We’re doing Kate and Leopold tonight: A woman’s place is in the home – as CEO of a staff of dozens.

And that’s what we did, so here is Kate and Leopold in DISC:

Leopold, a Di fop with Dc yearnings learns to be Ds while pursuing Kate, who only ‘takes the leap’ from Sc to Sd in the penultimate scene.

But I knew even before I started that that would be too simple an analysis. The argument of the story is explicitly anti-feminist: The problems of Sleepless in Seattle’s woman-of-a-certain-age are best solved in the past, when a woman’s place was not only in the home but in the kitchen or the nursery. Accordingly, it seems obvious to me that Kate would be Nora in no time.

But I saw even more in the film tonight than I have before. (more…)

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In a world stripped of its striving by sneering hiveminds, will porn become a classic art form?

Posted on July 20, 2017 by Greg Swann

If you dare to play in public, among strangers, you can easily tell if the sounds you’re making are actually music: If Toddlers, at a minimum, dance to it – you hit the target.Photo by: jabradshaw10

When I write too much, I sleep too little. The notion that I might “write too much” almost never comes to me, but I no it when I sea it, if you can hear where the problem comes from.

That’s housekeeping. Here’s what’s interesting to me:

When I work all through the dead of the night, the music I like listening to best is my own – my own guitar. I have a little amplifier under my desk. With Cherry Bomb, my strat clone, on my lap, I play until I know what I want to say, then I reach over the guitar to type.

It’s just so much bicycle riding for me, I know that: Big ideas often come home with me when I ride my bike. I play the guitar badly, to the ears of anyone who would pay to hear music, and yet I play magnificently well for my own purpose: To fidget while I think.

And as well as anyone else might play, no one else can make the music I most need to hear, because the purpose is me. Not the musician. Not the music or its composer. Not anyone else who might hear. Me. It is art I make with me, by me and for me, with zero other people involved or even aware that there is a sporadic concert going on every day, pre-dawn, in my office.

Like most everything we watch on television, music is an activity we deny to ourselves. Children sing and hum, and everyone has guts enough to sing in the shower – some even when they’re all alone in the car. But almost no one makes his own music for his own enjoyment, with fewer still daring to make music where it can be heard by other people.

How sad is that? We’ve taken one of those precious gifts that make us uniquely human and ossified (more…)

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Greg Swann, Di: Indomitable? Always. Exuberant? Usually. Insufferable? Never to me. YMMV.

Posted on July 15, 2017 by Greg Swann

I grow regardless.

I feel like humanity’s most-wasted resource. Nobody talks to me, even though I believe I have more of moment to say than anyone. (Yes, I know that’s hubris. My take: If I haven’t earned it, how did I get so much of it?) But I am as Columbus, the first to see something new, the first to see the thing whole and round, and it’s amazing to me how little curiosity I incite.

I am apt to say “Oh, well” or “Dang.” I’ve know forever that the only reader I can count on is me. I can diagram world history or solve everyday personnel problems (optimal OTR truck driver? Sc, which practically unpacks to “reasonable and prudent”), but I can’t even manage to stir up a “How’d you do that?” along the way. That would be sad for me if I cared more, but it’s very sad for you, regardless: I ain’t lost.

I’ve covered a lot of ground in the last three weeks. I can’t even imagine the word count, but it’s a lot. I did all that in my spare time – but I don’t sleep much to begin with, even less when I’m burning up from the inside out. I know most of this will have been obvious only to me – you almost never see what you’re not already looking for, and no one told you I was knocking down every last outhouse in philosophy – but we rolled up everything along the way:

I showed why Plato and Aristotle were both in error in Man Alive, but now all of that is fixed, as is is-ought and the wedges it drives. I can demonstrate why Ds is the optimal cultural strategy, and why the two major alternative strategies, Ci and Dc, are sub-optimal even disregarding their progressively-less-sustainable inferiority in fecundity and human capital. Even better, I invented a praxis to restore Ds civilization, with built-in protections to make it less-fragile this time. And I fixed education – so far mostly just in theory.

That’s not three weeks of my life, nor even just the (more…)

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Battle of the Ideal Men! Jesus vs Mohammed vs Marx vs Rand: Whose PEAK score is the one to beat?

Posted on July 14, 2017 by Greg Swann

Why is the idea of an ‘ideal man’ so self-destructive? You ain’t him, so you will in due course either reject your ideal or you will affect to be him in your behavior.That’s anegoism – selflessness – either way.The man you want to be is the man you have always wanted to be. Be that man –be yourself, but better. Be yourself better now.

So I ranked on the idea of the ‘ideal man’ last week, demonstrating how our insane perfectionismism shunts virtually every child away from the pursuit of a truly fulfilling and humanizing education.

What’s perfectionismism? A passive-aggressive Inverse-Tiger-Momism-by-Proxy: We don’t want to be perfect – nor even simply better, for that matter – we just want to rhapsodize perfection in anyone else, especially anyone other than our own loved ones.

Anything they do is to be held up to the ideal – and is always to be found wanting: Either ‘truthfully,’ with an ‘honest’ comparison of tree-houses to skyscrapers, or in the form of treacly lies that cheat all ambition with counterfeit praise.

Want to know what’s worse? The ‘elite’ don’t believe in themselves, either. They live in terror of being compared to something they cannot themselves attain. They live in a binary world – where !1 = 0, and if you’re not Dutch, you’re not much – so if you’re not the ideal, per your own insane perfectionismism, you’re nothing.

“What would Jesus do?” Heads up, kiddos. He’d hang from a cross. Why aren’t you doing that? You ain’t him – and we’re all of us lucky for that.

“What would Mohammed do?” Oy! Don’t get me started!

And, of course, we’ll never know what any real life Howard Roark might do, because, per the doctrine, his mammy had him killed.

But that’s hardly incendiary enough, so I decided to do those three moral ‘ideals’ what I had already done to myself: I PEAK scored their DISC profiles.

I know I’m nobody’s moral lodestone. I am odd-beyond-odd as a matter of odds, just to begin with, plus I am a full-on Di – a prick boss – by my own steady admission. I’m working to burr down my prickliness, (more…)

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PEAK is built for peak performance, so why don’t you PEAK yourself? How? By PEAKing your DISC profile.

Posted on July 13, 2017 by Greg Swann

You say, “Self-improvement?”
I say, “Go PEAK yourself!”

Sindre Paulsen said something that made me realize my biggest failure to be clear about ThriversEd:

PEAK is DISC, weighted. We’re going to teach DISC to kids, practically from birth. They will grow into their humanity already knowing how to see and understand everyone else, even as they are already all well-practiced in the arts of human striving.

What kind of world will THEY make?

This is what I said to Sindre:

Imagine a world of kids who can see each other this well. Imagine them grown up, raising sons who will raise ever-better sons.

Seriously: Why not?

If you’ve seen me present, you know I strive to bring the goods in all four PEAK categories. In real life, though, not so much.

I am Di – which means hard work, good show, rough edges – and poor accounting. 😉

PEAK me live and I’ll send you home with dinner plates for eyes, but when you PEAK my LIFE, I’m the guy on the left in the chart – a D+ at best.

The guy on the right is who I am working to be – and that man’s a solid B.

I’m never going to have a day-to-day interest in Cautious pursuits, but by gaining strength where I have been weak, I can make myself a better man over time.

You can, too. So can everyone else. PEAK will make the process easier.

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