Be like a tree in pursuit of your cause. Stand firm, grip hard, thrust upward. Bend to the winds of heaven. And learn tranquility. —Memorial Dedication to Richard St. Barbe Baker
Be like a tree in pursuit of your cause. Stand firm, grip hard, thrust upward. Bend to the winds of heaven. And learn tranquility. —Memorial Dedication to Richard St. Barbe Baker
Alexandra Schwartz, “Sheila Heti Wrestles with a Big Decision in ‘Motherhood,'” The New Yorker, May 7, 2018 (On the one hand, the joy of children. On the other hand, the misery of them. On the one hand, the freedom of not having children. On the other hand, the loss of never having had them—but what is there to lose? The love, the child, and all those motherly feelings that the mothers speak about in such an enticing way, as though a child is something to have, not something to do. The doing is what seems hard. The having seems marvelous….In the “Confessions,” Augustine puzzles over a phrase from the first chapter of Genesis: “Be fruitful and multiply.”… “Fruitful,” when applied to humanity, doesn’t mean only physical reproduction; it refers “to the process of mental conception,” the power of human beings to learn and reason, and so to create more knowledge.)
Louis Menand, “What Personality Tests Really Deliver: They’re a two-billion-dollar industry. But are assessments like the Myers-Briggs more self-help than science?” The New Yorker, September 10, 2018 (“There are more than two thousand personality tests on the market, many of them blatant knockoffs of the MBTI, but Myers-Briggs is No. 1…The key to the MBTI’s success is her insight that you can waste a lot of energy and bring on a lot of psychic pain if you think of these differences as incompatibilities that have to be ironed out…In the workplace, this means assigning tasks to people based on their personality types, which is one of the things that the MBTI is supposed to help companies do….[However] “there is scant evidence that MBTI results are useful in determining managerial effectiveness, helping to build teams, providing career counseling, enhancing insight into self or others, or any other of the myriad uses for which it is promoted.” And it’s not easy to see how the different types correlate with different tasks…In life, it means recognizing that we are naturally more likely to get along with some people than with others, and that when people aren’t communicating it can simply be because they are broadcasting on different frequencies. We need to get used to it..”)
