Path of LivingThe sixteen types
Theme

The Lone Ascent

Challenger Self-sufficient Self Process

Think of someone who studies harder math each year for twenty-five years and shows no one.

One of the sixteen types a reading can name. Begin the reading

The shape

This shape stays inside one hard discipline for years and keeps taking on harder work in it where nobody is watching. The practice has no final level; each step up mostly shows where the next difficulty lies.

In ordinary life

Lives with this shape

None of these people took the reading. The record of each shows the shape.

Bernard Moitessier (1925 to 1994)

In 1969 the French sailor Bernard Moitessier, the likely winner of the fastest-voyage prize in the Golden Globe, a solo nonstop race around the world, turned away from the finish in England and sailed on alone to Tahiti, arriving on 21 June. Leaving a prize within reach to keep sailing alone shows the shape from outside.

Source: en.wikipedia.org

Vivian Maier (1926 to 2009)

Vivian Maier, a nanny near Chicago for about forty years, left more than 100,000 negatives, some from a 1959 trip through Europe, the Middle East and Asia, and never showed her photographs to anyone. A demanding craft practiced for decades, with rolls of film piling up undeveloped and no viewer, shows the shape from outside.

Sources: vivianmaier.com, en.wikipedia.org

Closest neighbor

The Gardener shares three of these sides and differs on risk: it keeps a settled, chosen life in good order, while this shape keeps pushing into work harder than the last.

One side away

Each shares three sides with this shape. On the right is the side it has instead.

Begin the reading