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Seeking courageous, imaginative, practical, intensely dissatisfied optimists.

Qualifications:

  1. Courage: will attempt the radically new; will sail over an unmapped horizon; embraces anxiety; prefers a possibility to a guarantee.
  2. Imagination: capable of conceiving and believing in the unprecedented; “strives for the forbidden” in thought and consequent deed.
  3. Practicality: wants real, concrete things to happen; lives out one’s thoughts.
  4. Intense dissatisfaction: authentic and persistent urgency; prefers pain to numbness.
  5. Optimism: believes effort is worthwhile and change is possible.

Disqualifications:

  1. Timidity: wants the safety of the familiar; sails only as far as maps are drawn; allergic to anxiety; demands guarantees.
  2. “Realism”: submissive to how things are; works and thinks inside acceptable bounds.
  3. “Inwardness”: content with fantasy; lively but sterile “inner-life” never escapes bounds of one’s skull; private notions are consolations for inauthentic public performances.
  4. Tepid complacence: more or less okay with merely tolerable circumstances; what is not okay can be anesthetized with bromides of various kinds.
  5. Pessimism: believes effort is ultimately futile.

 

 

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