Why Barack Obama's Thinking Seems A Bit Peculiar: The Next American President's Way of Seeing the World Really Is a New Twist on Things.

Prior to moving to Gainesville, Florida, last summer, my family and I lived for 13 years in a northern suburb of Dallas, Texas. Plano, the place is called. This gave us a ringside seat to the rise of a political phenomenon some have nicknamed Dubya. No part of America, save for the ultra-wealthy "Park Cities" of Dallas County, put more dollars in the early campaign coffers of George W. Bush than the occupants of the McMansions and corporate towers of Plano.

So while many Americans seemed to have been caught unwares, we political junkies at ground zero in Texas pretty much knew what this country was getting as its 43rd President. During the campaign of 2000, I wrote several op-ed pieces arguing that Dubya was the real McCoy: a rather reckless Texas oilman with a cowboy's quick-trigger mien and a Lonesome Dove worldview.

And so it has come to pass.

This time, I'm watching the meteoric rise of young Barack Obama from a serene, university-professor-filled neighborhood in Alachua County, Florida. No oil, no cowboys, no eccentric Gus McCrae in sight. But one more time, I think I have a pretty firm grasp on what we are getting in the man we've just elected President. This is because those of us in my line of work have sensed for some time that something new was stirring in how people (or at least some people) think.

For a living, I track—and interpret—aspects of personality. Thinking skills. Ways of valuing things. How people see the world, and the kinds of world they wish to see. And the "smart is cool" package of rich nuances and capabilities visible in Mr. Obama's personality and skill set is a combination we "thinkologists" have been watching develop as a recognizable category in people for at least three decades now.

So to us, the surprise is not in how Barack Obama thinks. But that someone commanding his audacious combination of personal thinking qualities has surfaced this soon as President of the United States. Just as Mrs. Bush was amazed that it was son George instead of son Jeb who first ended up sitting there in the Oval Office, we can all be amazed that someone with Barack Obama's cutting-edge thinking skills has already achieved a similar triumph.

Looking ahead, what else can we expect of what is arguably a new kind of mind, as Presidential minds go, soon to be sitting in the driver's seat of the U.S. of A.?

Our next President already has us buzzing over his WD-40 approach to multi-tasking—juggling multiple activities at the same time. His amenable porousness to a wide variety of views. And his constant, confident "hope-timism" that we can find good results if we'll just make good choices and stay the course.

I think we can expect to see—quite often—a high tolerance for complexity and sorting through conflicting evidence to find the right stuff. People who think like Mr. Obama, our studies are showing, seem like they have been inoculated against being spooked by ambiguity, paradox and the unexpected like the rest of us have been inoculated against tetanus or the flu.

Anyone who wins the Presidency has to have an outrageous ego. But we are seeing in Mr. Obama that there are egos and then there are egos. Our next President seems to shrug off challenges to his ego as if the main thing that matters to him is what he can do to help you keep your ego intact.

As he is already counseling us on the economy, we can expect our next President to remind us more than once that frustration often precedes breakthrough. And that a lot of people who win don't deserve it, and many who lose didn't have it coming. He may even quote writer Dennis Wholey: "Expecting the world to treat you fairly because you are good is like expecting the bull not to charge because you are a vegetarian."

Observing him like most of us will be observing him—from a distance—it appears to me that Barack Obama has come to terms with the reality that he isn't like everyone else. In fact, he isn't really like very many others at all. I think that he senses that he is prefiguring a new kind of thinking elite.

Elites aren't rare, of course. Human nature is a natural builder of hierarchies. But the elite to which Mr. Obama belongs seems to be tilted in the direction of high ethical and meaningful performance rather than winner-take-all wealth, status or control.

All this may sound too good to be true. We'll know a lot more in four years. But for now, for those of us who have spent our professional careers studying potential new human thinking capabilities, Mr. Obama is one of our most fascinating "lab specimens" thus far. Because it looks like the exceptional "do more with more" way his brain is wired is the real deal. And a real breakthrough in leadership circles at the highest level.*
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*Some of my readers may realize that they have read some of the descriptive passages above in my book, The Mother of All Minds: Leaping Free of an Outdated Human Nature.

Posted by Dudley on January 17, 2009

The Perturbating Has Been Going On for Some Time. Only Recently Has It Really Gotten Our Attention.

Why Barack Obama's Thinking Seems A Bit Peculiar: The Next American President's Way of Seeing the World Really Is a New Twist on Things.