Welcome to the Wakefield Doctrine (the theory of clarks, scotts and rogers)

A quick review of the Wakefield Doctrine:

• You live in one of the three worldviews. (On the level of personal reality, the world you encounter this morning will be: the life of the Outsider (yeah, guess which you are), the reality of the Predator (not bad, kinda fun actually, if it weren’t for that occasional self-doubt that pops up at the most inopportune of times, usually when you are about to give someone who’s totally deserving, a good whupping) or the life of the Herd Member
• Your ‘personality type’ is the collection of social skills, coping strategies, tricks, shortcuts, reminders-of-who-you-accept-you-realy-are-but-know-better-than-to-let-anyone-else-know and things you enjoy doing  just for the hell of it
• You might have a secondary and a tertiary aspect (but you are not required to). that being said, if you’re still reading this, chances are there is a clarklike aspect in there somewhere
• hey! I just remembered!  you want to hear the most annoying, disappointing, ‘no-really!-I-can’t?!!?’, coolest and most sophisticated, thing about the Wakefield Doctrine?
• … the Wakefield Doctrine ‘is for you, not them’
• yep! you read that correctly, unlike many of the other personality theory systems, the Wakefield Doctrine is not a ‘mirror-coated club’  sorry*

Since you’re all  comfortable with the ‘everything Rule’, lets take a quick look at how the Doctrine deals with jobs, careers, talents, aptitudes, tendencies and all the things that make us good at what we do.

Medical World:  your GP/Internist finds something wrong and you end up with an Oncologist, who recommends surgery (as part of what turns out to be a totally successful treatment). If you could pick one of the three personality types for each of these very important medical people, which would you have be a roger or a clark or a scott?

Legal World: You know you were at home the entire evening that your place of business burns to the ground, nevertheless, the Fire Fighter explains that they found some kind of accelerant and the police at the scene suggests that you come and visit him in the morning. (This is a trick question, of course…. but you still have to pick one of the three worldviews for each of the key people in this scenario. who’s the clark and who’s the roger and who would you think is the scott?)

The point of our little exercise is to remind us that, sure, there are cops who are clarks and, of course, a roger can be a gas station attendant and among the ranks of the career bureaucrats at your local DMV or maybe the Vice Principle at the Elementary School… (a scott? er…. no that’s way unlikely! that new Vice Principle, the one that dresses so well, and is smiling all the time and just seems to be so organized?… yeah, you guessed it gimme an ‘r’ gimme an ‘o’). The ‘everything Rule’ is critical to the use of the Wakefield Doctrine as a tool to help us better understand the people in our lives, in the same way that we insist that ‘personality type’ is not just labeling of your favorite likes and least favorite dislikes, but rather it (your personality type) is simply the characteristic way that ‘you relate yourself to the world around you’.

So forget about there being a job that only scotts do or that there are rogerian careers. Nope and no.  But…. but!  there are jobs that  a clark (or a scott or a roger) is more likely to be successful at than would be a roger (or a scott or a clark).

job: chase people and capture them, drive really fast and make a lot of noise in the process… hang out with other people who like to do the same…legally allowed to shot off guns, tell total strangers what to do and sometimes…. sometimes they want you to put people in handcuffs!

job: put books on shelves, put books away (on the shelfs), push carts (full of book) that have very quiet wheels down aisles of shelves of books, if fortunate, push carts full of books out of an elevator, across a small section of vinyl flooring onto a carpeted section (of shelves of books), speak in whispers, have the authority to require others to speak in whispers, eat lunch while reading without undo fear that someone in will sit down across from you (while turning their chair around wrong ways) and say in a voice against the rules, ‘hey! watcha readin?’

job: write popular (and therefore, commercially successful) books, present stories to a vast number of Readers (while genuinely not being concerned with the numbers of said readers), tell stories that represent the elements of life that you feel that, though you have not ‘seen it all’, you do feel that you know the characters that appear in your books in a way that you are simultaneously proud and embarrassed have come out from within your mind, seek to see, among the people and the fans who come to book signings, someone who knows what you really do, but knows enough not to try and tell you… and not that one, she clearly is misinformed and misguided and you may have to tell her so, but there is still too much to do, to write, to get to that last story.

The Answers to the Quiz?  Well, I couldn’t have any of the clarks or scotts scroll down and get the Answers, now could I? So click here for the Answers

* no, really… it’s one of our first and most favoritist little examples that we came up with when we started writing this blog. “…for most people, when they come across a ‘personality test’ or a quiz/assessment in a magazine**, the second thing they are heard saying is, “honey!  come here!! you need to read this, they so have you down to a ‘T’!!”

** a kindle/facebook that does not require batteries, a display screen, passwords or sign-ons