Artisan examples

Tom Cruise (ESTP) – He is the epitome of an action hero, an Extraverted version of Evel Knievel (E + ISTP = ESTP). Tom admired daring stunts since he was a boy. When he was four or five years old, he climbed to the tops of trees on windy days and dangled from branches. Describing another memory from childhood, he said: “I saw Evel Knievel jumping off a canyon and I lived on a steep hill, so I set up boards and trash cans to copy him. I was about eight years old and my sisters begged me not to do it, as I had been to the hospital a few times by this point.”

He became a household name in Risky Business (1983) when he slid across the living room floor in his socks and underwear. That was his idea. He asked for permission to create his own choreography for “That Old Time Rock and Roll” and his instincts paid off. He is credited with transforming a minor scene into a landmark of movie history.

Tom’s “need for speed” was made clear in the movie Top Gun (1986). Although he was initially reluctant to do the movie, he changed his mind when the Navy gave him a demo flight in an F-14 accelerating to 5g and doing barrel rolls. The actor threw up, but as soon as they landed, he ran to a pay phone to accept the job: “I’m in. I’m doing the movie. I love it. This is great.”

Tom got the idea for Days of Thunder (1990) when he and Paul Newman were allowed to test a race car. Tom’s first lap was more than 180 miles per hour. He started performing his own stunts in the movie, Mission: Impossible (1996). When asked why he risked doing his own stunts, Tom replied that he has always enjoyed testing his physical limits.

Cruise surpassed all expectations while filming Mission: Impossible II (2000). Confident in his ability to adapt to any situation, Tom climbed a cliff of Dead Horse Point in Utah and then leaped fifteen feet to his right, landing on a slanted ledge below before sliding down and catching the lip by his fingertips. Then he performed another daring move, holding on with only one hand and swinging into an iron cross position with his back to the cliff. His hair is standing up in the photo because a helicopter filming the action was dangerously close to the actor. Tom craved excitement and loved every minute: “That was the most fun that I’ve had probably on the entire picture—and I had a lot of fun making this movie.”

Bruce Lee (ISTP) – He became a pop icon by adapting what was useful, rejecting what was useless, and adding what was uniquely his own. Bruce began his life as an actor, appearing in twenty films and winning the Hong Kong Cha-Cha Dance Contest by the time he was 18 years old.

After he moved to the United States, he concentrated his efforts on practicing the martial arts. By the time he was 23, he was skilled in the Wing Chun martial art and had been teaching other people for five years. At a highly controversial private match, he realized that two things had worked against him:

Elvis Presley (ESFP) – The “King of Rock and Roll” started a musical revolution by modernizing traditional blues, country, and bluegrass styles. His energized interpretations of songs and sexually provocative performance style made him both popular and controversial.

Charlie Chaplin (ISFP) – He helped turn an industry into an art form. Given a special trophy at the first Academy Awards ceremony “For versatility and genius,” he also received an Honorary Academy Award 43 years later for “the incalculable effect he has had in making motion pictures the art form of this century.” He received a 12-minute standing ovation when he accepted that award. Four of his movies are still ranked as some of the greatest films of all time.

Tom is well-known for his optimism and can-do attitude. Emily Blunt described an extremely uncomfortable day of wearing an 85-pound battle suit while making Edge of Tomorrow (2014): “Tom, and that insatiable positivity—I can just see it just starting to unravel. And he was pouring with sweat. I remember looking at him, and he was like ‘Guys, please, please roll. Please roll.’ And I just looked at him and said, ‘This sucks.’ And he looked at me and he goes, ‘It’s a challenge.’”

Even in his fifties, he enjoyed playtime, inviting friends over to play hide and seek at his 7,000 square-foot house on three acres of secluded land. When one of the guests said she couldn’t play because she was wearing five-inch heels, Tom told her she was “it,” tagged her, and ran away to hide.

• He let the fight go on too long (he got winded).

When he was 25, he resumed his acting career and landed the part of “Kato” on The Green Hornet television show. He acted in other Hollywood roles over the next five years, but his real acting career began when he returned to Hong Kong.

His first movie brought instant stardom, and his second film, Fist of Fury (1972), did even better. In his third film, Way of the Dragon (1972), he was given complete control as writer, producer, director, star, and choreographer of the fight scenes. The fight between Chuck Norris and Bruce Lee at the Roman Colosseum is considered one of the classics of martial arts film history.

Hollywood lured him away from filming Game of Death (1972–78) to make the movie Enter the Dragon (1973). Tragically, it was the last movie he completed. Bruce Lee suffered from seizures and headaches on May 10 and died in a related incident on July 20, 1973. He was only 32 years old.

While friends and family described Bruce as playful and a bit of a prankster, his public demeanor was as serious as his dedication to martial arts. He wrote in one of his training journals: “Turn your sparring into play—but play seriously.”

Bruce studied philosophy in college and created many statements to live by:

Inventing what he called “the style of no style,” he combined a variety of martial art techniques from the East and the West, eliminating the limits imposed by traditional martial arts. His new system had no fixed positions or set movements; it emphasized practicality, flexibility, speed, and efficiency.

He changed the way he had been training and added weights to build strength, running to build endurance, stretching to build flexibility, and a variety of ever-evolving workout methods like fencing and boxing. His students said that he was a teacher of life, emphasizing the importance of self-reliance and adaptability.

• “The moment is freedom. I couldn’t live by a rigid schedule. I try to live freely from moment to moment, letting things happen and adjusting to them.”

• “A goal is not always meant to be reached, it often serves simply as something to aim at.”

• “Be like water making its way through cracks. Do not be assertive, but adjust to the object, and you shall find a way round or through it. If nothing within you stays rigid, outward things will disclose themselves. Empty your mind, be formless. Shapeless, like water. If you put water into a cup, it becomes the cup. You put water into a bottle and it becomes the bottle. You put it in a teapot, it becomes the teapot. Now, water can flow or it can crash. Be water, my friend.”

The gyrating hips and shaking legs that became his trademark were natural to Elvis from the beginning of his career. His drummer explained: “He was always moving around—I don’t think he could have stood still if you paid him to stand still.”

Elvis himself explained that he would go crazy trying to stand still while playing rock and roll.

In 1958, Elvis learned some new steps from the U.S. Army, including some karate moves. He studied and practiced the martial arts for years, earning black belts in karate and tae kwon do.

In 1973, some men rushed onto the stage while Elvis was performing. His security team quickly came to his defense, but Elvis’ karate instincts “kicked in” and he ejected one of the invaders from the stage himself.

As for living for today instead of saving for tomorrow, Elvis was one of the most generous celebrities that ever lived. From the very beginning of his career, he donated his time, talent, money, and even his possessions to charitable causes. His contributions are too long to list, but here are some examples:

• In 1956 and 1957, he campaigned for the March of Dimes, helping raise money to prevent polio. He even appeared live on national television while being inoculated with an early version of the polio vaccine, raising the immunization rate of Americans from 0.6% to 80% in the next 6 months.

• He helped Danny Thomas raise the money needed to start St. Jude Hospital and spent much of his free time visiting terminally-ill children in hospitals.

• If a story touched him when going through his fan mail, he would immediately take steps to help, including paying off a debt or mortgage, or buying someone a home, car, or wheel chair.

• Every year he donated at least $1,000 each to 50 different charities.

He was an artist in many ways, first and foremost by creating his signature look as the lovable tramp seen in silent movies.

For most of his films, he wrote the scripts, acted, directed, produced, edited the film, and composed the music.

He also co-founded United Artists with silent movie legends Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and D.W. Griffith.

Although he wrote the scripts, they were rarely complete before he began filming. Many of his early films were nothing more than a vague plot until he met with his crew to improvise gags and suggest ideas.

The Tramp (1915) was the first movie to include moments of drama and sorrow. The film ends with the lonely tramp sadly walking down the road, but then squaring his shoulders optimistically as he headed toward his next adventure. The likeable Tramp made a habit of defying authority figures, making him one of the first anti-establishment heroes in the movies.

Once Chaplin built his own movie studio and had complete freedom in making pictures, his efforts to improve story construction paid off. A Dog’s Life (1918) was described as “cinema’s first total work of art.”

Charlie Chaplin has been making people laugh at his antics since 1914. His sense of play dominated his life, even though he lived his first years in poverty, was sent to a workhouse when he was seven years old, taken from his alcoholic father when he was nine, dropped out of school at age thirteen, and lost his mother to mental illness when he was sixteen. Years later, he made The Kid (1921), and seemed to heal his own inner child when the kind-hearted Tramp became caretaker to a young boy. Dealing with issues of poverty and parent-child separation, it reflected Chaplin’s own childhood.

He trusted his impulses when he wrote the script for The Gold Rush (1925). Turning a grim subject matter into comedy, he promised himself: “This next film must be an epic! The Greatest!” After 15 months of hard work, his prediction came true: it was the best film he had made up to that point, and included some of his most famous comedy bits, such as the “Dance of the Rolls” and the Tramp dining on his own leather shoe.

While other movie-makers were creating “talkies” by 1930, Chaplin resisted. “I was determined to continue making silent films. . . . I was a pantomimist and in that medium I was unique and, without false modesty, a master.” But sticking with traditional methods went against his Artisan temperament and he remained anxious about his decision. Still convinced that sound would not work in his films, he was “obsessed by a depressing fear of being old-fashioned.” So after the success of City Lights (1931), he went on a 16-month holiday to avoid the issue and eventually got around to making Modern Times (1936), his last silent film.

He was extremely daring when he made The Great Dictator (1940), a satire on Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. He clearly condemned anti-Semitism and fascism and portrayed the two dictators as egotistical fools at a time when the United States was still formally at peace with Nazi Germany. At the end of the movie, he spoke for five minutes as himself, pleading with the audience to end war and fascism.

Decades earlier, when friends warned him against making a comedy about the world war they were engaged in, Chaplin made Shoulder Arms (1918) anyway. He later recalled: “Dangerous or not, the idea excited me.”

Chaplin’s athletic skills were often overshadowed by his comedic talents. He demonstrated his roller skating ability in The Rink (1916) and Modern Times (1936). The Adventurer (1917) showcased his diving and swimming skills while The Circus (1928) showed him walking a tightrope. His friends were impressed with his running endurance and prowess on tennis courts.

But more than anything else, Chaplin had great comedic timing, whether it was dancing his way through a boxing match, being thrown into a river, or working on an assembly line while walking on top of a conveyer belt. His work as an actor/stuntman was described as a mix of agile physical comedy and graceful dancing.

Although he could be funny while standing still, movement was at the heart of his comedy. He was elegant and skilled even while taking off his hat.

• The traditional fighting techniques he had been taught were too rigid and formal to be practical.