I am an ENTJ – The FieldMarshall

Posted on by
Reply

After taking several Briggs-Myers and Keirsey temperament tests over the years, I have consistently identified as an ENTJ. I just took another official test with facilitators visiting my company and the more I read the analysis on my “type,” the more I have to agree. For those of you who know me well, you might find the below entertaining. No fair exploiting my many weaknesses! *laughs*

ENTJ Description
Hardly more than 2% of the total population, Field marshals are bound to lead others, and from an early age they can be observed taking command of groups. In some cases, they simply find themselves in charge of groups, and are mystified as to how this happened. But the reason is that they have a strong natural urge to give structure and direction wherever they are – to harness people in the field and to direct them to achieve distant goals.

They must build organizations, and must push to implement their goals. When in
charge of an organization, whether in the military, business, education, or government, Field marshals more than any other type desire (and generally have the ability) to visualize where the organization is going & they seem able to communicate that vision to others. Their organizational and coordinating skills tends to be highly developed, which means that they are likely to be good at systematizing, ordering priorities, generalizing, summarizing, marshaling evidence, and at demonstrating their ideas. Their ability to organize, however, may be more highly developed than their ability to analyze, and the Field marshal leader may need to turn to an Inventor or Architect to provide this kind of input.

Field marshals will usually rise to positions of responsibility and enjoy being executives. They are tireless in their devotion to their jobs and can easily block out other areas of life for the sake of their work. Superb administrators in any field – medicine, law, business, education, government, the military – Field marshals organize their units into smooth-functioning systems, planning in advance, keeping both short-term and long-range objectives well in mind. For the Field marshal, there must always be a goal-directed reason for doing anything, and people’s feelings usually are not sufficient reason. They prefer decisions to be based on impersonal data, want to work from well thought-out plans, like to use engineered operations – and they expect others to follow
suit. They are ever intent on reducing bureaucratic red tape, task redundancy & aimless confusion in the workplace, and they are willing to dismiss employees who cannot get with the program and increase their efficiency. Although Field marshals are tolerant of established procedures, they can and will abandon any procedure when it can be shown to be ineffective in accomplishing its goal. Field marshals root out and reject ineffectiveness and inefficiency, and are impatient with repetition of error.

Strengths
• A talent for creating great benefits through the addressing of social justice issues.
• A talent for showing others the way to get past difficulties in their outer life
• A broadening of their own ambitions which includes rather than excludes others
and the benefits which flow from that achievement.
• Genuinely interested in people’s ideas and thoughts
• Enthusiastic and energetic
• Take their commitments very seriously
• Fair-minded and interested in doing the Right Thing
• Very good with money
• Verbally fluent
• Enhance and encourage knowledge and self-growth in all aspects of life
• Able to turn conflict situations into positive lessons
• Able to take constructive criticism
• Extremely high standards and expectations (both a strength and a weakness)
• Usually have strong affections and sentimental streaks
• Able to dole out discipline

Weaknesses
• Their enthusiasm for verbal debates can make them appear argumentative
• Tendency to be challenging and confrontational
• Tendency to have difficulty listening to others
• Not naturally in tune with people’s feelings and reactions
• Have difficulty expressing love and affection, sometimes seeming awkward
or inappropriate
• Can be overpowering and intimidating to others
• Tendency to want to always be in charge, rather than sharing responsibilities
• Can be very harsh and intolerant about inefficiency
• May be slow to give praise or to realize another’s need for praise
• May be unable to understand other people’s needs where these differ from their own.
• May assume their ideas are the only right ones and should therefore be fully
implemented by others.
• May become childishly petulant or angered when confronted by situations which require
“feeling” judgments.
• May take every decision not made in agreement with their rational beliefs as a personal
rejection.
• May assume others are ever plotting against them.
• May believe only their own view of the world or a situation is correct, even to the point
that they make it into a kind of dogma which must be followed by those around them.

Cool Stuff From Iran

Posted on by
Reply

20120326-154617.jpg

20120326-154641.jpg

Our business analyst returned from Iran today with a bag full of loot!

She knows I’m a history buff so she brought back some replica artifacts for me. I plan on displaying them on my desk at work for a while.

We’re happy to have her back. She indicated Iran is still a very different place from America. She was amazed by the lack of freedoms for women that her mother and cousins have to cope with. It was interesting hearing from someone who, for a few weeks, lived the life of a female Iranian and not just a story on the news.

Politics and history happen every day, but so often it’s reduced to a clip of television, a Yahoo article or a quip by John Stewart. We’re very insulated by our economy and our military from the realities that much of the world must face. I’m proud to be an American, but my co-worker’s stories just prove how ignorant about the world I really am… how ignorant, really, most Americans are.

-M

Elite Plastic

Posted on by
Reply

Anybody with a credit score of 600 and above is often inundated with offers for credit cards via snail mail.  Most of these envelopes are promptly trashed, but sometimes a sweet offer might before your way.  Before you let VISA, MasterCard or Amex schmooze their way into your wallet or purse, it’s important to do some research and pick the card that works best for you.

My quest for elite plastic began in late 2011 when I got tired of dealing with the low 1% rewards rate offered by my Bank of America credit card.  With my friends toting around their Costco True Earnings Amexs with 3% back on gas and their Chase Freedoms with  5% back on useful but rotating categories, it was clear my BofA card was a biplane in the age of jet-powered elite plastic rewards.  While I could certainly apply for all of those cards and more, there are a few key considerations:

1) Your Credit Score:
I won’t go into great detail here, but suffice it to say Credit Cards have a huge impact on your credit worthiness according to the 3 major credit agencies (Experian, Trans Union and Equifax).  Opening a new card has positive and negative affects on your credit score.  The graph below shows the major components of your credit score.

History of credit includes both the length of time that any given account has been open, and the length of time since that account was last used.  By opening a new card, you lower the average age of your credit.  The mathematical formulas that drive this are proprietary, so if you had only one card with 10 years of history, opening a new one in 2012 won’t suddenly take you down to 5 years.  The credit bureaus are a little more lenient than that.  How lenient?  We don’t know.  As for length of time since the account was last used… don’t buy a card you’ll use once a year.  It doesn’t look good.  You should use all of your credit cards at least once per quarter to ensure they have activity to be rated.
Amount owed is a big piece of the pie, and it breaks down into the following:
-Number of accounts with a balance
-How much you owe total
-Credit Utilization Rate (CUR)


The key point we want to discuss is CUR.  Your CUR is determined by how much debt you have divided by how much credit you have available to you.  This is specific to each account.  Thus, if you have a credit limit of $2000 on a card and a $400 balance on the card, your CUR is 20%.  In general, you want to keep your CUR as low as possible without letting the card go unused.  At max, you want to use 40% of any given account’s available credit.  Another important point about CUR, it can be measured at any time, even between balance payments.  Thus, charging $1,500 to a $2,000 card on a consistent basis is unadvisable, as your CUR for that card would jump to 75% that month, even if you paid it all off in full.


The value of opening a new card is that it increases your overall available credit.  The more credit you have that you aren’t utilizing, the better your CUR will be all around.


2) Inconvenience:
Having multiple credit cards means you have to pay multiple bills every month.  While everything is online these days and certainly easier, do you really want to log onto 4 or 5 online portals throughout the month to issue your payments?  This is why you need to only add members of the elite plastic family to your credit options.


3) The David Wang Rule:
There are two kinds of guys out there:  The ones with the giant tri-fold wallet that has everything and I mean EVERYTHING in it.  Because who knows when you might need a receipt from Dave N’ Busters from 3 years ago?  How about the photo of your high school friends?  And who can forget the always-useful library card that hasn’t seen the light of day since the 90′s.  Then there’s the guys like David.  They don’t like carrying a lot around in their pockets, so they prefer to stick to a slimmer wallet with just the bare necessities: license, debit card, insurance card, cash, and one or two credit cards.  If you’ve got the tri-fold brick, you can apply for quite a few credit cards (after all, if the wallet has 16 slots, what’s preventing you from filling them all, right?)  However, if you’ve got the slim wallet, you need to ensure your cards are of the elite plastic variety.


So now that we have that out of the way… what exactly constitutes “elite plastic?”  Well, there’s a wide Internet out there ladies and gents, but I’ll include some links at the bottom of this post to my favorite sites.


So what’s the current #1 card in my wallet?  Drum Roll Please…
Say hello to the American Express Blue Cash Preferred.


The lowdown:
6% cash back on Groceries
3% cash back on Gas
3% cash back on Department Stores
1% everywhere else
$75 annual fee


On top of that, if you spend $500 in the first 2 months, you get $100 cash back.


Other amazing stuff:
-There is no limit on your rewards.  Other cards (Chase Freedom, Costco TrueEarnings, etc) have limits on how much you can spend in certain categories.  For example, you only get 5% cash back on the first $1,500 you spend on Chase Freedom’s rotating categories each quarter.  With Blue, you can buy groceries, gas, and stuff from department stores till’ the cows come home and you’ll get the advertised % back every time.


-The cash-back comes as a statement credit that you can take at ANY TIME.  No more waiting a year for your voucher, you just log into the site and apply that money to your AMEX account immediately.  The only restriction: you can only take it off in $25 increments at minimum.


So you might say, “But it has a fee of $75, this is crazy talk.”  Well… do you go to the grocery store?  Do you spend at least $150 there every month?  At 6% back… that’s $108 cash back, more than offsetting the annual fee.  Most single people spend more like $300 on groceries a month (depending on how much you eat at restaurants).


I’m very happy with my AMEX Blue Cash Preferred Card.  It could easily be one of the two credit cards in my wallet (because, face it, you have to have a Visa since AMEX isn’t accepted everywhere).


The one last point to be made is most grocery stores sell gift cards. I can confirm that I got 6% cash back on my gift card purchases this Christmas.  Across the Interwebs it sounds like this practice is allowed by AMEX as long as it isn’t abused.  However, if you suddenly start spending thousands of dollars on gift cards at your local grocery store, be forewarned that AMEX has the right to close your Blue Cash Preferred account down.
I look forward to sharing with you my quest to collect the few hidden elite plastic gems out there.  In my next post on the subject, I’ll talk about the PenFed Platinum Card and how you can unlock its secrets to nearly unlimited 5% back on gas!


Suggested elite plastic Links:

Lose It: Part I

Posted on by
1

There are hundreds of “Health and Lifestyle” books on the New York Time’s Best Seller List.  Practically every magazine on the shelf has at least “10 hot tips to a new, healthier, sexier you.”  You don’t need those magazines and you don’t need those books, everything you want to know about living a healthier lifestyle is available, for free, on the Internet.

Controlling your weight is really just basic math.

  • The more food you take in, the more energy it provides your body as you digest it.  If your body does not burn up that energy, it is stored as fat.
  • If you only eat enough food to meet your daily energy needs, your body will maintain its current form and not attempt to store more fat.
  • If you eat less than your daily energy needs, your body will tap any stores energy and your body will lose mass.

It’s called a “Caloric Deficit” and, yes, it really is that simple.  You can create your own with this Calorie Calculator

Let’s look at me for example:

I’m a 27 year old male just over 5′ 9″ and I was 190 pounds.  I live a sedentary lifestyle where I work out of an office 9-11 hours a day, commute sitting in a car 30 minutes each way and come home and sit in a computer chair for the rest of the day.  Aside from my 2-3 workouts a week, this really is the definition of a very sedentary person.  However, your body burns calories all day just by existing.  It needs energy to make your heart pump, your lungs breathe, and your legs move for when you  get up to grab another cup of coffee.  Thus, even I needed about 2,600 calories a day to keep my body in its current shape.

To establish a caloric deficit, one must eat between 500 and 1,000 calories less per day.  I personally chose to cut out 1,000 calories and stick with a new daily diet of only 1,600 calories.  Two very distinct problems come up when you attempt to run a caloric deficit:

1) How the heck do I keep track of my calories?  My answer to this question: Lose It!

Lose it! is an application for both iOs and Android that makes keeping track of calories very quick and easy.  The app keeps a daily log of what you’ve had to eat and let’s you set a program to determine an appropriate caloric deficit. The daily log has a line that lets you know when you’re getting close to your budget for that day’s calories.  Adding food is very simple, you just type in the name of the food, “Chocolate Milk” or “Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich” and it gives you an approximate calorie count.  If your food product has a bar code, you can even use the camera to scan it and have the ingredients and calorie count automatically uploaded.  If  the food you’re enjoying isn’t in the database, you can add your own custom foods.

So far, I’ve been using Lose It! for over two weeks, and have kept fairly close to my deficit. My weakness, by far, is on the weekend when I tend to eat a lot with my friends.  Overall, it hasn’t been that difficult to maintain my updates, you just have to force yourself to get into the habit of adding your food as you eat it.

 

2) I Am Hungry!
A lot of people, (guys especially) think eating less is crazy.  How can you only get by with 1,600 calories in a day?  Well, if you want more food… then you need to exercise!  You can eat as much as you want while running a caloric deficit, as long as the energy you expend exercising is more than the calories you ate/plan on eating.  In fact, on days where I hit the gym or play soccer I usually eat an additional 400-800 calories.  So you can eat all you want, provided you put in the time and effort to burn the calories.

Additional Notes
1) Your body will attempt to pull energy from everything, both fat and muscle tissue.  While fat is the more natural storage medium for unspent calories, when searching for fuel your body doesn’t discriminate from “good muscle” and “bad fat.”  Therefore, I highly recommend you spend some time each week lifting weights and building your muscle mass.  Repairing your muscles takes a massive amount of energy both during the workout and afterwords.  Thus, not only are you increasing your strength, but also burning even more calories.

2) Do not run a caloric deficit of more than 1,000 calories.  There is a point at which your body will enter “Starvation mode.”  This is where your metabolism shuts down in an effort to keep you alive longer.  Your mind and body will become very sluggish and you won’t burn nearly as many calories as you normally would because your body is holding onto every calorie for dear life.  This is why, on days where you exercise, it’s important to take that into account and eat enough calories to fuel your body and the repairs it will be making over the next few days.

3) There are other factors that affect your health that don’t involve calories.  As alway, you want to keep everything in moderation.  If you keep a caloric deficit, but eat large amounts of sugar, saturated fat, sodium, and their substitutes, you’ll be in poor shape.

I will continue this article with more on how I use, “Lose It!” to maintain my caloric deficit, as well as a few other tricks I’ve come across on the path to living healthier…

 

HCC19

Posted on by
Reply

Also known to the US Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services as Hierarchical Condition Category 18, Diabetes without Complication.  The rest of us jokingly refer to it with our best Wilford Brimley accent as, “Diabeetus Meleetus.”  Unfortunately, this disease affects over 8% of the US population.  Additionally:

  • Diabetes is the leading cause of kidney failure, nontraumatic lower-limb amputations, and new cases of blindness among adults in the United States.
  • Diabetes is a major cause of heart disease and stroke.
  • Diabetes is the seventh leading cause of death in the United States.

Source: National Diabetes Information Clearinghouse

Diabetes is very common in my family, as is being overweight.  Through most of high school and college, I was skinny enough to pass for a cancer patient, so I wasn’t very concerned.  However, as the years have passed and my metabolism slowed I eventually reached a body mass index of 28.1.   That put my mass in the “overweight category” and just a stones throw away from “clinical obese.”  If you’re curious what your BMI is, visit this site: BMI Calculator

Once I was convinced that I needed to take my health more seriously, I decided to make a number of changes in my lifestyle, diet, and habits.  Part of this blog will be dedicated to what I’ve learned, what worked well, and what hasn’t.  Hopefully I can share a few nuggets of useful information here and there for you all to improve your own physical fitness and avoid having HCC19 in your future.