Early Retirement Extreme Forums

I'd be interesting to find the lowest common multiplier character trait we prioritize the highest.

Do we look for these same qualities when we look at other people, or do we look for something that will complement or counter-balance them?

Go through these words and reply with those that trigger you, I suppose.

Efficiency, honesty, trustworthy, integrity, ideas, things, people, aesthetics, proficient, justice, sharing, mercy, compassion, equality, utility, agreeableness, conscientious, freedom, liberty, duty, responsibility, obligation, duty, happiness, family, resilience, tranquility.

This list is not comprehensive, so please add those I missed out on, even if you don't think they are a higher ideal to strive for.

I'm not asking to get a personality profile of you or anything like that. But I find it mildly intriguing, that although we can be disagreeable/differing about/in mostly everything, from music preference to political views; there is essentially a philosophy we share in the form of ERE that we all agree with.

Could this preference be reduced to values all of us believe in?

Freedom , Liberty and Happiness. Freedom is the strongest.

Economical, personal and ultimate freedom , which I invision as eternal peace with myself, life and universe.

You're gonna get a personality profile anyway

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... sTypes.png

Most people will tend to value what/who they are. Typical INTJ values are competence, efficiency, and independence. If you want an even better trigger mechanism, list the antonyms and ask what pisses people off: incompetence, waste, and dependency.

I like me because I am creative, inventive and emotionally resilient. Sometimes I value other traits in other people, such as the discipline required in order to do 500 push-ups every day, and the level of consideration displayed if somebody brings coffee and ginger cookies when they pick me up for a car ride.

integrity Efficiency freedom liberty happiness

+1 for Freedom, competence and efficiency. For me, they are the key to happiness, the ultimate life goal.

A lot of things come to mind when thinking about what I value, but many revolve around similar dimensions. For freedom, I might as well have said independence, self-reliance, mindfulness or courage, even though they really are subsets of freedom. For competence, I might as well have said growth, mindful self-improvement, learning and knowledge, but reading Jacob's post, I think competence is better and covers them all.

As for efficiency, I really live by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's "Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away". I find elegance and beauty in a bicycle's high energy-efficiency, in a simple code achieving a lot, in a writer expressing much in few words (hence my love of aphorisms), and in photographs showing many things with very little (Michael Kenna, Josef Hoflehner).

It would be interesting to do a factor analysis and find a specific set of values that embodies them all, although it has probably been done already.

In contrast, what values do most (western) people actually live by? Materialism, consumerism, fitting in? It's difficult for me to summarize.

Hedonism.

• Self-Reliance
• Integrity
• Intelligence
• Wisdom
• Sympathy
• Accountability
• Laughter

I put down laughter instead of happiness because you can't have one without the other - and laughter is the ultimate benefit of happiness in my opinion.

Probably Kindness (or maybe Humor) if I had to pick one. I favor the ones that are relational and that you can fulfill most every day over the ones that are situational (e.g., bravery). More bang for your buck.

Jacob beat me to it. I'm such a cliché....

Competence comes first, if you can't even master one field, you just aren't going to be worth my time.

And the older I get, the less forgiving I am of wasting my time.

Followed by efficiency and independence. But really, competence is the dividing line.

Independence, health, truth

Ditto Dragline.

#1 is probably whether someone's stated ideals and their actions are in sync... that type of integrity. Or put another way: apart from just straight up evil, hypocrisy is the biggest turnoff. It's like intellectual body odor to me. I don't tolerate it in myself, and I cannot look past it in others.

People's external achievements don't interest me except to the extent that they make good campfire stories or cautionary tales. But intellectual development, curiosity, kindness, and a good sense of humor I would call internal achievements, and they matter a great deal.

Honesty.

Spend awhile without it and you will question everything. You'll start living like a chess player frozen by analysis paralysis.

jacob wrote: ↑

Fri Jun 23, 2017 10:16 am

You're gonna get a personality profile anyway

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ ... sTypes.png

Most people will tend to value what/who they are. Typical INTJ values are competence, efficiency, and independence. If you want an even better trigger mechanism, list the antonyms and ask what pisses people off: incompetence, waste, and dependency.

Man I really am an S, and not an N.

If you say you are going to do something, do it. And yes, do it competently.