The Birthright of Every Human Being
An odyssey of discovery in ten chapters covers the story in ‘Designed for Life’ each chapter dealing with issues critical to resolving the underlying dispute about the nature of the person. Here is a road map that summarizes where I hope to take you.
1. The Great Question: Our Identity Crisis
Chapter 1 highlights the confusion and resulting despair of people unable to find meaningful careers, purposeful lives and a relevant faith in God. Under attack from Darwinians, human-kind is assaulted by claims it is a mindless result of evolutionary forces without purpose or passion except for successful procreation. Deserted by psychology’s failure to define or explain their nature, people struggle to make sense out of their meaningless existence.
2. Life As A Blank Slate
Chapter 2 describes the pervasive but unfounded belief regnant in the worlds of education, work and religion that people are born into the world with little or no innate nature, essentially possessing a blank slate. Whatever nature they have or acquire is as ‘silly putty’ because it is perceived as infinitely malleable. This common belief that people can be shaped to serve the interests and requirements of others has no foundation in fact. Not only is there an absence of supporting research or even compelling evidence for this ubiquitous belief, but the failure to understand the nature of the person guarantees tragic life and career outcomes for the great majority in every generation.
3. The Becoming Culture – A Strategy For Losers
Chapter 3 traces the results of a Becoming Culture committed to impersonal educational, business, and religious systems where people are seen as in-process, raw material to serve the interests of those in charge. ‘Becoming’ is a losing strategy that doesn’t work. Most students get little of enduring value from a fifth of their lifespan. Most employees spend their life trying to get ahead, performing work for which they neither have the abilities or the motivation. Most people of faith never find out how to live a life of faith, uncertain that God is interested in what they do for a living.
4. Birthright! Hardwired Giftedness
Chapter 4 provides clear and convincing evidence of the underlying phenomena we have relied on that when people do things they love to do, and believe they do well, they repeat some or all of the same behavioral elements, and always seek to achieve one particular outcome or purpose. The power to do what they do comes from giftedness as the exclusive source of accomplishments in human affairs. The term giftedness is used to recognize that the person’s strengths are innate and not the result of any process of learning and development. Examples are given illustrating how achievement experiences expressed over time reveal recurring elements of giftedness.
5. Empowered and Purposed Patterns
Chapter 5 shows how themes of giftedness recurring in a person’s achievement experiences form a Pattern. I describe how we organize that Pattern into five distinct parts of Abilities, Subject Matter, Circumstances, Relationships, and Motivated Thrust or Payoff. These Motivational Patterns of Giftedness are illustrated in cases from our files.
6. The Nature of The Person
In chapter 6, I describe some of the more significant characteristics of a Motivational Pattern; how they translate into the nature and behavior of the individual, and some of the implications involved. Most readers will be surprised that so much in the experience of living reflects one’s Pattern; how our thinking and our actions and feelings and joy and depression and boredom and anger are all traceable to the same source. Having said that, it is crucial that what isn’t included be mentioned here. Patterns are amoral, so we cannot predict whether a people will use their giftedness to purvey drugs or sell phamaceuticals, to cook the books or design understandable methods of cost accounting. We cannot predict the integrity or character of people, their morals or ethics, their courage or cowardice, their habituations or neuroses.
7. The Science Of Persons
Expanding on a representation that our process is a science, in Chapter 7 I substantiate the scientific authenticity and credibility of the SIMA® process through four avenues of reasoning and evidence: (1) the power of SIMA and its product, Motivational Patterns of Giftedness, to define human nature and to accurately and systematically describe, explain and predict the behavior of the individual person is inherently a scientific process; (2) evidence that the process and Patterns obtained meet American Psychological Association standards using a psychometric methodology; (3) evidence that the SIMA process satisfies a number of criteria suggested by various authorities as necessary to establish the credibility of a theory about personality; and (4) proof that SIMA satisfies demanding and rigorous rules for establishing being or essence.
Finally, I legislate 16 Laws of Human Nature which emerge from our science of persons.
8. Darwin – The End Of The Trail?
In Chapter 8, I accept Darwinism according to its own terms and contemporary interpretations, assuming we could perhaps find in it an explanation for the source of Patterns of Giftedness. I have never had any difficulty believing in some form of evolutionary mechanism as a possible explanation for giftedness; but the deeper I proceeded in exploring what various authorities had to say about how it all worked, the more it seemed that the Darwinian option is untenable.
9. The Meaning of Life
In Chapter 9, having exhausted any other explanation for the source of endowed giftedness, we turn to God as the most plausible explanation. I examine the large number of choices each person makes in the course of ‘doing’ an achievement, and realize that a lifetime of consistent choices done instinctively or as if programmed, clearly reveals that each of us has been designed to function in particular ways and accomplish particular things. From this foundation, the obvious question to be asked and answered is, “What is God asking us to do?” The Chapter attempts to deal with some of the implications of that response.
10. Stewardship – The Path To Life
Building and living a life centered in the cultivation and use of one’s Pattern of Giftedness is the meaning of life for any person. Engaging the Pattern is the only means for loving others, for producing excellence, and for fully realizing that for which one is designed. Chapter 10 deals with some of the attitudinal adjustments required of people and their institutions if we are to do business with God and His designated plan for each life. I try to give some ground rules for individuals in pursuing their Pattern, dissipate some erroneous attitudes, weaken some walls that inhibit God’s expressed intention, and point to what life might be gloriously like if we could get with God’s program for redeeming this world we live in.
And because there is so little understanding, and so much misunderstanding about what it means to live as a person of faith, I have tried also in this final chapter to focus on the issue of Patterns of Giftedness in the light that God has designed each person to pursue a career and life based on that design. Basic operating philosophy, ground rules, results desired, and accountability are clearly established by God, and need to dominate any discussion about a life of faith. Nonetheless, the freedom God has given us to manifest His grace in us anywhere in the world, in countless vocations, is exhilarating.
