You, at Your Most Powerful

• Your power comes from making sense of things.

• When you look at the world, you can’t help but see beneath the surface to the patterns underneath. You are intrigued by patterns. Patterns help you explain (to yourself, as much as to anyone else) what is going on.

• This is why you like concepts. Concepts are the best explanation for most events. Your world is full of concepts that you’ve derived from your observations of the world.

• You take great pride in your ideas. You are protective of them. They are the best expression of you.

• Your world is thrown off when you don’t understand what is going on. When presented with an unfamiliar situation you need time—time to process, to observe, to ask your questions, to think things through. “Don’t ask me to make snap judgments,” you protest. “Let me gather my thoughts.”

• You don’t like surprises. You don’t like making things up as you go along. When you make things—and you do like to make things—you do it only after you’ve had time to percolate and process.

• You certainly are creative, but you don’t conjure things out of thin air. You break things down into their component elements and this enables you to reconfigure them in new and different ways. Thus you are always watching and observing so that you can identify these elements.

• You aren’t bothered by ambiguity, by gaps in the “data.” Instead you instinctively create theories out of the facts you do have at your disposal, and then you allow your theory to fill in the gaps in the facts. As such, your thinking is inferential rather than deductive.

• You are prone to flashes of insight into a better way of doing things or presenting things. Reflecting back, it’s hard for you to explain quite where these flashes came from, but once you’ve seen them, you cannot get them out of your mind. The need to make them real propels you forward. (Once you’ve seen this flash, you will need a partner to help you work backward to the step-by-step sequence required to make the “flash” real.)

• You are relentless. Though at the outset you will not be rushed, as you think on it and think on it, the patterns emerge, these patterns create theories, the theories spark new insights, and all of a sudden you are being borne along by these pictures in your mind. You take a while to get going, but once you are off and running, you are hard to stop.