Archetypes

Finding your natural archetype and using it to find the most efficient and seamless path for your life

Archetypes have always inspired me, even as a youth. And there is a ton of info out there on the subject. The problem is that despite having all that data you’re rarely given a stat sheet on who you might be or how it may benefit you. Well. Luckily for you, the Raw Manifesto provides. And today, I’m happy to introduce a very knowledgeable and inquisitive operator that some of you may already know. His twitter goes by @Thzer0r. I can go on for a while explaining who this man is and why you should listen up — namely being his depth of insight on archetypes and his experience in the field, but instead I’ll let the man speak and entice you with his knowledge and magical wisdom. Takes notes. And follow him on twitter for hidden gems, too.

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Thzer0r:

Why does the study of archetypal personalities interest me?

Curiosity is my biggest single motivator. I have always been driven to find out the answers and how things fit together in the world. I’ve also been blessed with living a very varied and interesting life and consequently have observed extreme behaviour.

I have spent significant time with people you would cross the street to avoid, whose lives are defined by serious problems; drugs, homelessness, mental health problems, prison. I’ve also met British Royals, F500 CEOs, some of the UKs wealthiest hedge fund managers and others at the other extreme end of the spectrum of social and financial success. Of course, as you should be acutely aware already, the vast majority of people fall between these two extremes. The conclusion of all this time spent with these individuals and these observations of them driven by my innate curiosity, is that fundamentally there are only a finite number of archetypes. This is not a revolutionary thought. People far smarter than I have conceptualised this and developed this further than I ever will: Hippocrates, Jung, Myers-Briggs, Friedman & Rosenman to name a few.

There are two distinct reasons why establishing a taxonomy of archetypes is important.

• Having a solid taxonomy of archetypal personalities allows you to quickly read and categorise people, predict their motives and the outcomes of their behavior, both intentional and unintentional.

• Understanding your own archetype allows you to identify your own strengths, weaknesses, natural inclinations and proclivities. Your archetype essentially determines your source of motivation in the absence of external pressures.

This piece will primarily focus on the latter of the two reasons.

Why does this matter in the context of self actualization and achieving one's desired outcomes?

Most people who are ambitious will see other people doing things and go after them too because they understand that the status game is the most logical funnel for ambitious drive. They’ll fail to realise that by stepping into another mans marketing funnel or envisioning themselves as the next Jeff Bezos or Alex Hormozi, or doing anything else which is at odds with their natural archetypal personality they are essentially stealing their future and their own gifts from themselves. 

The best analogy for trying to live in incongruence with your archetype is like bungee jumping. You may travel extremely quickly towards the goal but will reach a point where the force of gravity or in the case of archetypes, your ambition cannot move you any further. You are essentially tethered and at a standstill because you are working at such odds against your natural personality .

For example, I have met several startup founders who envisioned themselves as Steve Jobs-like and had you asked any of them to describe themselves, they would certainly use the term visionary. I watched them repeatedly fail to bring products to market that did not meet any of the criteria of a true visionary, products that were at best Silicon Valley-fied attempts at reinventing the wheel. Had they taken an approach more in line with their archetypes they would have had much more success.

What are the archetypal personalities according to Th0r?

One of my fundamental beliefs is that you should never wholly subscribe to another man’s philosophy and doing so is mental cuckoldry. Use others thoughts to influence your own thinking and I strongly encourage you to test these but to also build your own mental models of archetypes. In developing my own thoughts on this I primarily used the Jungian model as a base for this. My thinking of this has evolved significantly and in a year's time I will probably have some differing views to what I have documented today. As long as there is benefit to myself, this isn’t an issue. 

It would be difficult to document every single archetype I’ve encountered. There are some types that I am only now fleshing out in my head after 15 years of ruminating on this. I think both Jung and Myers-Briggs are incomplete and attempt to compress the scope of archetypal personalities for ease of use.

I’ve included my thoughts below on the most common I’ve observed and some of the less common, yet more interesting ones I’ve observed.

• The Commander - Natural leader, executor, gets shit done, highly ambitious. Most successful leaders within business (big and small) fall into this camp.

• The Imitator - Master executor as they relentlessly copy. Incapable of original thought but could have 10 careers in 20 years and be very good at all of them. Many people in this corner of the Internet are Imitators; they’re naturally drawn to environments and skills which are repeatable and inimitable. NB: this is not an inherently bad thing.

• The Explorer - Driven by relentless curiosity, this is really the motor. When the task is ‘find something out’ in either the literal or abstract sense, they are unstoppable.

• The Rebel - Always seeking to be a contrarian, to rebel against societies order and systems. One of the archetypes that is most apparent at an early age. 

• The Jester - Constantly seeks to entertain and gain validation through being the funniest or the loudest in the room. Incredibly easy to spot and will turn on you in any attempt to steal their thunder.

• The Provocateur - Similarly to the rebel, a contrarian but always seeking to provoke a response from others. Naturally deeply suited to any high profile role as they feed off attention.

• The Artist - The transformer, they thrive on bringing things into existence and the world. We tend to think of artists as painters or authors, but more often not these are engineers. Unstoppably focused when they get going.

• The Everyman - the closest archetypal personality to the idea of the NPC. Wants to conform at all costs and represses any individuality to them at all costs. Inoffensive and meek. Unsurprisingly, the most common of all the archetypes. 

There are a number of less common archetypes I have also observed.

• The Visionary - probably the rarest archetype of them all. These are the people that truly envision an alternative future, radically different to the reality we live in today.

• The Chosen One - They burn bright when young, have 20 years of charisma and energy, but fades away. This person is the guy or girl everyone was obsessed with in high school but now works stacking shelves in a supermarket.

• The 27 Club - Burns increasingly bright, courts attention through escalating acts of outrageousness and often art. The ending is often in catastrophe either death or something slightly less serious. Rare, but much more common that you would think it is and most of them do not end up as famous artists or musicians. 

• Munchausen's Hero - Always seeking a disaster in which they can act the hero. I named this after Munchausen’s by proxy, which is probably the most malignant expression of this. You’ll find these individuals literally bouncing from one disaster to another. They will keep extraordinarily toxic people in their lives who manufacture chaos on their behalf. Avoid at all costs. 

• The Deviant - This archetype would fit nicely into the DSM. Manipulative and destructive. You’ll hear all sorts of whispers of their toxicity but you’ll ignore them as you’re too infatuated with their charm until they’ve stung you too.

• The Mother - Exclusively a female archetype and ironically usually is childless but is deeply caring and nurturing towards others. Unable to ever play with their own best interests at heart because they’re always seeking to please others.

How do you identify your archetype?

My experience in talking deeply with people about this topic and my own experience is that most of us will falsely identify with an archetype when presented with a list of possibilities. Most people’s biases and false self concepts make this highly likely and almost unavoidable. To be clear, the aim is to identify your actual archetypal personality and not to adopt one.

Most people are highly unlikely to be able to identify their natural archetype at 18 and probably most likely until their mid-late twenties. By 21, I’d probably racked up as much life experience as many people in their mid thirties and I had no idea what archetype I truly was (If you’d asked me I probably would have said Commander). Diversity of experience is definitely helpful but some archetypes also don’t encourage this. Identifying your archetypal personality fundamentally comes down to how well you know yourself and how honest you are with yourself. By your late twenties you should know and fundamentally understand your key traits and proclivities which is why I think you won’t be able to identify your archetype until then.

There are some archetypes which are very apparent by 18-21. Deviants, provocateurs, rebels and a few others are very apparent by this age but unless you fit into this camp, you may be asking what is your archetype?

I cannot tell you what archetype you are, but I can share my experience in understanding my own archetypal personality. I started by deeply questioning what it is that motivates me. What is the single constant? When there is something that latches onto my curiosity I am unstoppable. I can work for 16 hours straight by looking for answers to questions. 

Then I looked back on my life: I have done many things, dipped my toes into lots of things and gone full throttle into others. I spoke with other people with similar stories to mine. I reflected on my behaviors from childhood to adulthood, the patterns and attempted to match these to archetypes I thought existed.

Describing the process above, it would seem that this was a quick process. I would advise taking some real time to reflect on this, this was thinking and reflection spread across months if not years. I would also suggest disconnecting and not trying to do this in a day but taking some real time to think, come back to your thoughts and interrogate them.

If I was doing this for the first time, I would ask these questions and answer them as honestly as possible.

• What truly speaks to you? 

  • What excites you?

  • What captivated your interest as a child?

  • Who was the 17 year old you? (Homage Virgil Abloh)

• What are you naturally good at?

  • What do you excel at that feels easy? (We’re not talking business models, moreso behaviors)

  • What behaviours do you find yourself consistently repeating even when the consequences are clearly negative?

  • When you enter a ‘flow state’ what is pushing you through this?

• What do you struggle with?

  • What do you consistently fail at which isn’t through lack of effort?

  • What do you struggle with and fundamentally not enjoy?

• What are your patterns of engagement?

  • Are you naturally deeply focused?

  • Are you phasically interested in things?

• Complete a Myers-Briggs personality test

  • These are more useful and helpful than most people would probably want to admit in terms of highlighting aspects of your personality that you might not recognise or be consciously aware of

Turning the jets on

Once you have established your archetype, you will likely be faced with several distinct realisation:.

• There are probably some things you are doing now that are not suited to your talents and are a waste of time for you to do based on the ROI

• There are probably some things you want to so that will be very difficult for you to achieve in the conventional way 

• There are probably things you are not doing that you absolutely should because they are easy for you an carry a high ROI

The dense amongst us reading this might jump to the conclusion that I am saying not to do things and to rule yourself out of the race or give up on your dreams because of your personality. What I am saying is more nuanced. Find out what part of the jigsaw you fit into and then use your archetype as a form of leverage and then other people if needed.

If a Commander wishes to start a software company, it is likely they will not be very good at coding. Therefore rather than trying to write the code, the best bet would be to find a subservient artist to produce something that matches their vision whilst they play at their strengths; execution, organisation and leadership.

Explorers on the other hand struggle at sticking at something once the curiosity is spent, but the curiosity comes in waves and bursts. Therefore if building something they should build intensely whilst they are curious about a certain aspect of the business. Once it's spent it will be difficult to work on that project but they will be keen to explore something else so they can rinse and repeat this extremely effectively. This curiosity also lends itself to getting reasonably proficient at skills in a short period of time. 

(NB: I could write out many more examples but once you become attuned to this you’ll start to notice the patterns. You can also study the lives of others and through meeting people of various archetypes you will start to build out this mental model yourself.)

Once you begin to work in a way that is more aligned with your archetype you may still find things difficult. This approach is intended to make work easier for you, not remove all hard work itself. The question then becomes, is what I am doing hard because it is hard or because I am working fundamentally against my archetype?

To really work in alignment with your archetype, you must also reprogramme how you think about working towards success. Once you understand your archetype and how to work best with it, you have to double down and kill all the noise. People will tell you their approach is the only way to achieve something, but if it is not the way of your archetype you have to keep the blinders on and ignore them. You must critically evaluate your actions and fundamentally ask yourself if you are acting in alignment. This must be a daily task until you feel that you’re operating fully from the place you should be.

I hope this goes some way to answering the numerous requests I’ve had in DMs and in replies asking me to expand on this topic at length. As I alluded to earlier, this is something I am still grappling with myself, but it has allowed me to make enormous strides forwards personally and in business. Enjoy getting to grips with this yourself and once you’ve identified your archetype, turn the jets on.

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