David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

We like to think we’re complex, but personality gurus pegged me

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Am I really this predictable? Or are they reading my mind?

A couple of months ago, a friend told me about a daily “EnneaThought for the Day” which I could sign up to receive from the Enneagram Institute. You know how much I’ve come to appreciate the insights of the Enneagram personality typing system over the past four or five years, so it was a no-brainer for me to sign up to get the free thought of the day about the Type 1.

But I didn’t expect it to feel as though somebody had been reading my thoughts. These people had me pegged. I appreciate it — and the recognition makes me laugh — but it also makes me a bit uncomfortable.

Am I really this easy to predict?

“A major feature of your personality is the tendency to see disorder all around you and feel personally obliged to do something about it. Watch for this in yourself today.”

I inhaled sharply when I read that one. I laughed at myself nervously. How could they possibly know this? How did they know that I feel as though the world is falling apart and that it will collapse if I don’t fix everything?

Surely that was just a fluke.

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VIDEO: Dangerous ideas are the ones that change world for good

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Two days ago, I started out to make a video about something which I needed to talk with you about, but I struggled with it. I eventually realized that I had too much to say — and then I realized that I needed to lay a foundation for where I was going.

Because of that, nothing in this video is what I started out to say. (That will come in another video very soon.) This one might seem dry to some people, but if you’re going to understand where I’m going — and why I’m about to do what I’m going to do — you have to understand the ideass which motivate my actions.

If you’ve been reading me for very long, you will recognize every one of these eight “dangerous ideas” — and you might understand why I think these things are important enough to cause me to rethink some of my plans for the future.

I had far too much to say, so I couldn’t cover these ideas in the depth I do when I write. As a result, I had to edit this down to something far more brief than it should have been.

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I’m losing need to explain myself to those who misunderstand me

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For most of my life, I lived with a fear of not being understood.

When people misunderstood me in some way — my intentions, my ideas, my motivations — I rushed to explain myself. The more I grew and changed, the more my ideas and thinking diverged from that of the mainstream culture around me, so the more I felt alienated. The more I felt misunderstood. And the more I felt a slight panic that I would be “in trouble.”

This took me a long time to figure out.

When I was a child, I constantly had to explain myself. My father could launch into one of his verbal assaults any time the mood struck him. If I said the most casual of things which he misunderstood — as “disrespectful” or wrong in some way — I could be under assault without warning. And once he started, he never backed down.

I learned to go to insane lengths to be clear to him, but I still worried about the inevitable misunderstanding — and I grew up to take that same fear of being misunderstood into all of my life.

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