Temperament File No. 1 - If You Want to Improve
A Stoic philosopher, a rom-com, and what an Idealist still has to learn about looking foolish.
There is a quote by Epictetus sitting on a shelf in my bookcase. Framed. It has been there long enough that I sometimes stop seeing it. But I always know it's there, sitting next to a stack of books with a bronze horse statue resting atop them. Beneath the statue is David Keirsey's Please Understand Me II.
The quote reads: "If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid."
I didn't find it in a philosophy class. I found it in a rom-com. Serendipity. Which is, honestly, the most on-brand origin story I could possibly have.
In The Temperament Files, I use Keirsey as one useful lens — not destiny, diagnosis, or a complete explanation of the person, but a language for recognizing patterns that might otherwise remain unnamed. The purpose is not merely to identify those patterns, but to ask what maturity requires us to do with them.
In Keirsey's framework, I am an unrepentant sappy romantic, an ENFP to my core — an Idealist-Champion who has idealized people, possibilities, and more than a few decisions that, from the outside, looked like textbook foolishness. Keirsey describes the Idealist as abstract, compassionate, and oriented almost constitutionally toward human potential, meaning, and the dogged belief that people can become more than they currently are.
Which, as it turns out, includes me.
Contemporary trait psychology would describe these tendencies dimensionally rather than placing people into a separate Idealist category. Openness to experience, optimism, tolerance for ambiguity, lived experience, and professional role may all contribute to the pattern I am describing. The Big Five gives us the stronger empirical map. Keirsey gives me a useful language for recognizing how that pattern has operated in my life.
I was going through a divorce when that quote hit me pretty hard, right upside my head. My life was mid-collapse, people around me had opinions about my choices, and a Stoic philosopher dead for two thousand years said the quiet part out loud. If you want to get better — actually better, not comfortable — you have to be willing to look like an idiot in the process.
His challenge was not merely to tolerate looking foolish, but to care more about becoming than about being correctly understood while doing it.
So I put it in a frame. Not as decoration. As a reminder.
I didn't have the language for it then. That came later — through Keirsey, through temperament theory, through years of teaching this material to management students who were mostly just trying to figure out why their coworkers drove them insane. Somewhere in there, I got certified. More importantly, I recognized myself.
At first, I thought Epictetus was not prescribing anything for me. He was describing me.
I have some evidence.
Twenty years in telecommunications management. Good career. Real benefits. The kind of 401(k) and stock options that make financial advisors smile and nod approvingly. I walked away from it all to go teach at the university level. The room had opinions about that.
I have collected degrees and certifications the way some people collect regrets — deliberately, and with full knowledge that each one would cost me something. I moved a hundred miles from everyone I knew to pursue work that mattered more than proximity to the familiar. I bought a house alone, as a single man, after two marriages spanning thirty-five years of my adult life. I have jumped off into the deep end more times than I can count.
And every single time, someone in the room thought I was foolish.
They weren't entirely wrong. But they weren't entirely right either.
For the Idealist-Champion, possibility often speaks before caution has finished making its case. By the time the room begins explaining why something is unrealistic, I have usually imagined what it might become — and, occasionally, already begun moving toward it. The opinion of the room arrives after the leap has already been imagined. In my case, more than once after it had already been taken. Yeah. I'm a leaper.
The list doesn't always smell like triumph when I read it back. There is a voice — and I suspect you have one too — that looks at every jump, every departure, every deep end I dove into, and starts cataloging what it cost instead of what it built. That voice is persistent. It is also, I have learned, a liar with excellent timing and a selective memory.
It never mentions what staying would have cost me.
That was only half right.
Because here is what Epictetus was also saying, and what I am still learning to hear.
Not every leap is courage. Idealists can give restlessness a noble vocabulary. We can call departure growth, intensity conviction, and the next possibility destiny — before reality has finished making its case. But possibility is not automatically hope. Hope needs more than an imagined future; it needs a meaningful direction and some workable path toward it. Without those, possibility can become little more than a beautifully worded exit.
Temperament may help explain why the edge attracts me. It cannot certify the leap.
Living with this pattern does not make me fearless. It does not silence the critics inside or outside the room. But the older I get, the more I understand that growth is not proven by movement alone. Some edges ask for courage. Others ask for restraint. Temperament may explain why I am drawn toward the leap. Character must decide whether the leap deserves me.
Epictetus didn't promise it would be comfortable. He just said to be content with how it looks to everyone else.
The diplomas are on the wall. The certifications, too. But much of what came before them is explained by a single framed quotation from a Stoic philosopher dead for two thousand years—found, improbably, in a rom-com.
It still sits beside Keirsey’s book, quietly asking whether the man who framed it was brave, restless, or some untidy combination of the two.
Keirsey helped me recognize the pattern. Epictetus continues asking whether I am mature enough to use it well.
The Purposeful Pause: What have you avoided because you feared looking foolish — and what have you called courage simply because standing still made you uncomfortable?
Gary L. Keck is an Associate Professor of Management, Marketing, and Psychology, a Keirsey Temperament Certified Professional, and the author of Everyone Has Their Own Pile of S#!t: How to Turn Life’s Mess Into Psychological Strength. His work explores temperament, Psychological Capital, applied positive psychology, and how people become more than their current stories.
