My brother was born a hard worker. As young as 7, he was out shoveling snow, cutting grass, recycling cans, etc for money. The summer after his Junior year of high school, he built a fort in the back yard. Not just any fort, it was a hole in the ground about 8-10 feet square, and about 6 or 7 feet deep. As far as I know, he dug the hole all by himself. He then put in these boards (Don't know exactly what they were, but they were about 6 inches thick) into the hole, to build a decent-sized room, and built a wooden cover on the top. He was studying carpentry at the school where I would get my electronics degree.
Point was though, what kind of an attribute is this? A strong work ethic, and desire to finish was you start. Thanks.
(Doing Therapy)
And being the exact opposite of procrastination lol
Considering Ahmetia's point....High Willpower. I'm going to say 2@3.
My brother and I, when we were older, did something similar, but much less extensive, and I'd say we were fairly unusual in that, at least. So taking that up several notches to where your brother did his project...to say 1 in a thousand, and you get 2@3.
It's the sort of thing which in itself is not a ratable attribute. I certainly agree with Eric that someone who does that has a high will power, but that does not mean that someone who has a high will power does that--in the same way that most people who have skill at boxing have above average strength, but above average strength does not automatically give you skill at boxing.
What you're describing is a personality factor, and personality factors are inherently non-ratable. If you fall into the water, I can rate how likely it is you are going to be able to swim, but I can't rate how likely it is that you would try to save the person who fell into the water next to you. Similarly, this inner drive to be doing something cannot be reduced to a game statistic as such, but rather has to be done in much the same way.
Of course, if I'm running a non-player character who has this characteristic, and you try to stop him from doing something, then it will become a contest of will powers, and so his will power is probably strong (it already overcame any other obstacles). So again, the will power is there.
--M. J. Young
I would say there are two categories of things when dealing with doing something of a difficult nature.
One is high willpower in which you are able to choose to do something hard.
The other is a mixed bag of mental traits. It can be the man without much imagination who cannot see himself stopping, or the young guy who thinks he is immortal so he charges a thug. It can be the man who has a habit of working every day so he does...until he falls over dead in his garden in his nineties. It can be the obsessive compulsive who counts every step on his walk home from the market so as to make sure he reaches his house on an even number of steps. Lack of imagination, habit, obsession...these do not make for high willpower, but they do enable the production of sometimes amazing feats.
Yeah, Howard Hughes had obsessive compulsive disorder really bad. That's why the planes he designed were so cutting edge and so high tech for their time. He wouldn't stop working on one until it was perfect in his mind. So yeah, sometimes mental illnesses are useful.
(Laughing whilst I type)
My neighbor said the other day that the apartment people were "being psychotic" about enforcing the rule that you keep your apartment clean.
I keep wanting to tell her, "No, psychotics want the world around us to be in as much chaos as we are. If the apartment people were "being psychotic" they would insist that you keep the apartment trashed. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is the one where you need everything to be perfect....."
It's just really funny to me.
(Doing Therapy)
I can see the humor from your perspective, but "psychotic" has both a technical and a general meaning. In the general meaning, it means "more focused on the unreal than a neurotic".
It's like the old joke:
- Neurotics build castles in the clouds.
Psychotics live in them.
Psychiatrists collect the rent.
--M. J. Young
MJ, I'm not sensitive about this, and I'm not upset at all. I just wanted to make a point.
You suffer from Clinical Depression. What if Clinical Depression were the general term people used for insanity? It wasn't "A psychotic killer on the loose" it was "A Clinically Depressed killer on the loose." Would you still find it such a laughable notion? I tell people I'm psychotic, and they sometimes back away from me like they're expecting me to pull an AK-47 out of thin air and waste everyone in the room.
John, most of the words used as technical names for psychiatric diagnoses also have common use meanings, and none of us can escape that.
Someone recently wrote to ask me about whether it was true that the word "homosexual" did not appear in English translations of the Bible until the 1950s. I double-checked, and let her know that quite simply it was not an English word until the beginning of the twentieth century, when it was coined as a translation of a technical term used in a German text on psychiatric abnormalities. Its transition into common use took a couple decades, and there were no major English translations of the Bible between the American Standard Version (c.1909?) and the Revised Standard Version (c.1958?), so it's not at all surprising that a word which had not existed at the time was not used in earlier translations. The point, though, is that "homosexual" still exists as a technical term in psychiatry despite also having a popular general meaning, and the two are not entirely synonymous.
I am depressed. Sometimes I laugh; sometimes I tell jokes. Depression is an undercurrent condition that is always there and has been for decades. Other people speak of being depressed when they mean no more than that at the moment they are sad. They don't really get the difference without some kind of explanation.
So I understand that you don't like the fact that the name for your particular clinical condition has a common meaning that evokes people going postal (a phrase which I'm sure the average postman finds very distressing), but you're not going to escape that by wishing everyone understood the difference between the technical and the general meaning. You might try telling people that you're "clinically psychotic" or that you "suffer from psychosis", which might be different enough when said that it causes them to ask what you mean by that instead of assuming they know. But saying "I'm psychotic" in the vernacular is a concise way of saying "I'm a violent and dangerous nutcase", so if you don't want that image, change what you say.
--M. J. Young
The mentally ill are one of the few remaining groups of people who are still acceptable targets of open discrimination.
(Doing Therapy)
All minorities think that of themselves.
--M. J. Young
Except in this case it's true. Call a black man a nigger, even white people would be up in arms about it. However, no one would think twice about calling me a psycho.
Now I'm laughing.
There's a moment in the first episode of Red Dwarf where the first officer is talking to Rimmer, the second lowest ranking member of the crew, about the complaint he filed about Lister, his only inferior. The first officer says, "It says here that he insulted a superior officer."
"That's right, sir," Rimmer responds. "He called me a 'smeghead'."
The officer smiles and with a bit of a chuckle says, "Rimmer! You are a smeghead."
So it might not be their discrimination showing....
--M. J. Young
Yeah, but how many people are using "psycho" in its correct context?
Legion, in the Bible. He had screaming fits, he cut himself, he showed signs of augmented strength, and he had violent tendencies. He was said to be demon possessed. Whether he was in fact demon possessed is beside the point right now. All of those are also symptoms of extreme schizophrenia. Which means, 2,000 years ago, I likely would have been thought to be demon possessed and burned at the stake. Legion could very well have been schizophrenic.
Legion was not burned at the stake. Actually, people were more afraid of him after he was delivered than they were when he acted crazy.
--M. J. Young
Point remains though, he could have been simply a schizophrenic. The augmented strength, affectionately called "Crazy Strength" surges of adrenaline run unchecked through the body. Rob (big blond guy you met in Columbus) is a paramedic. He said the worst beating he ever took from a patient was from a little old lady with Alzheimer's disease. She had the "Crazy Strength".
I still would have been thought to be demon possessed, at any point up to about the last 100 years or so. In fact, I thought I was demon possessed for a long time, and I asked my pastor if he could perform an exorcism on me. Mental illness is still largely misunderstood, and probably will be, for the remainder of my lifetime.
Two Posts
Just an interesting side note. To show how badly mental illness is misunderstood. It was believed for centuries that sleeping outside under a full moon is what caused insanity. Hence, the word Luna-tic.
Lots-O-Posts
It is said that after Richard Pryor got famous as a comedian, you had to ask his permission to use the word "nigger" even if you were black. I want to be the guy from whom you ask permission to use the word "psycho" even if you're a doctor.