How do I perform? For knowledge workers, How do I perform? may be an even more important question than What are my strengths?. A few common personality traits usually determine how a person performs: Am I a reader or a listener? How do I learn? Writing? Taking notes? Doing? Talking? Do I work well with people, or am I a loner? And if I do work well with people, in what relationship? Do I produce results as a decision maker or as an adviser? Do I perform well under stress, or do I need a highly structured and predictable environment? Do I work best in a big organization or a small one? Peter F. Drucker, Managing Oneself personality
What Le Corbusier got right about office space An Article by Tim Harford timharford.com In the 1960s, the designer Robert Propst worked with the Herman Miller company to produce “The Action Office”, a stylish system of open-plan office furniture that allowed workers to sit, stand, move around and configure the space as they wished. Propst then watched in horror as his ideas were corrupted into cheap modular dividers, and then to cubicle farms or, as Propst described them, “barren, rathole places”. Managers had squeezed the style and the space out of the action office, but above all they had squeezed the ability of workers to make choices about the place where they spent much of their waking lives. ...It should be easy for the office to provide a vastly superior working environment to the home, because it is designed and equipped with work in mind. Few people can afford the space for a well-designed, well-specified home office. Many are reduced to perching on a bed or coffee table. And yet at home, nobody will rearrange the posters on your wall, and nobody will sneer about your “dog pictures, or whatever”. That seems trivial, but it is not. workpersonalityownershipmodularitychoice
Downsides of the internet An Essay blog.royalsloth.eu The type of nitpicking behavior that I mentioned earlier, is especially problematic since it often causes the loss of writer’s authenticity. With time, these criticisms cause one of the following: The writer stops publishing their work. The writer stops reading comments and minds their own business. The writer learns their lesson and sands off their edges in order to fit better in the society du jour. The larger the writer’s audience, the more likely it is for the writer to pick the last option and tone down their voice. You can experience this first hand when reading the essays of prominent bloggers. Their early work is usually interesting and fun to read, which naturally brought a large audience to their doors. But the more the show goes on, the more they will waffle around the topic, since with a large enough audience every thought will be misunderstood and nitpicked mercilessly. writingwwwcritiquepersonality
Idiolect A Definition en.wikipedia.org Idiolect is an individual's unique use of language, including speech. This unique usage encompasses vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. An idiolect is the variety of language unique to an individual. This differs from a dialect, a common set of linguistic characteristics shared among a group of people. Things you didn't know you can be bad at languagepersonalityidentityexpressionspeech
The signature It has long been understood that striving for originality as an end in itself is the mark of an inferior artist. The personal style of a good artist is never something that has been deliberately cultivated and forced but something that has appeared unsought as inevitably as the personal style of a man's handwriting. But since artists of note are seen to have a distinct personal style, no artist can hope to make a reputation in a competitive society unless he too can show a distinctive style which easily differentiates his work from that of other artists and draws attention to it. Therefore artists of little capability or uncertain vocation will take great care to make their work look 'different', whereas those with any certainty in them will know that their work cannot help but look different from that of other people any more than signatures can. It is worth reflecting that the fact of the unmistakable individuality of each man's signature is one foundation of modern commerce everywhere. To establish the individuality of it one need not write it vertically up the page in letters two inches high. And yet there are only twenty six letters, and everyone else uses them too. David Pye, The Nature and Aesthetics of Design Over-imaginationA fresh focus of power style