o_19kdfsn0q18e31dfraas1esh19vta.pdf

place & lost it again & then retrieved it, till at length he not only kept his ground over him but continued
rising till he was the first in the school.
People assume that scholastic success must be easy for geniuses, but Newton didn't just pick up
great grades easily; he had to struggle and work for them. Thanks for ruining the curve, buddy.
Newton's academic woes were not over yet, but when he completed grammar school it seemed that
way. He came from a farming family, and it was expected that he would return home to take up the
life of a farmer as his forbearers had. However, farming is not an occupation that INTs take to with
shouts of glee. There are not enough novel challenges, and the repetitive, mundane nature of the
task—physically demanding but not mentally stimulating—bores them rapidly.
When Sir Isaac had been about 4 years at Grantham school his mother took him home to try if he would
follow country affairs & manage his own estate & for that purpose put him under the care & instruction
of a trusty & intelligent servant. there is a biass in Nature which determines men to follow that which
they are most capable of, That happy abundance of animal spirits which qualifies the soul to arrive at any
excellency, bends & directs all it's faculties to the pursuit of that perfection for which they are peculiarly
adapted, & it is no wonder a mind so vigorous & aspiring as Sir Isaac's was not to be kept under or
diverted from it's proper objects by so low an employment. When any business called him to Grantham he
would leaue the servant to manage what was to be done & slip away to his old lodging & entertain
himself there with a book till it was time to return home & instead of giving directions about any work
that was going forward in the farm he would sit under a tree with a book, or go to a running stream &
make wheels in imitation of over & undershot mills & many other Hydrostatical experiments...
The bias in nature here is Newton's type; he preferred to read, learn and do experiments rather than
attend to the tedium of watching the farm. His negligence must have driven his mother crazy. The
family's sheep and pigs escaped and devoured the neighbors' crops, resulting in fines.
Newton tried to allay the boredom by turning on the entertainment system that each INTJ has in
their head. This had the result of making him appear very abstracted. It was customary at the time
for people who could afford it to ride everywhere on horseback. On one particularly steep hill near
where Newton lived, riders would get off, lead the horse up the hill on foot so as not to exhaust their
mount, then remount and continue on their way. Newton arrived at the hill, dismounted, and began
leading his horse up. On the way to the top, he had an interesting thought and spaced out. The next
thing he knew, he was at home. He had walked the whole way on foot. 209 Modern INTJs will do
much the same thing in their cars; they will not realize until it is too late that they have passed their
destination.
Newton's lists of sins at this time included: “Peevishness with my mother,” “With my sister,”
“Punching my sister,” “Striking many,” “Falling out with the servants.” It seems Newton did not
take to his new life with good humor and cheer.
Being a slipshod, slacking, grouch soon paid off. Mr. Stokes, his old schoolmaster, had been
pressuring Newton's mother not to let the talents of the school's #1 pupil go to waste. He wished to
have said pupil return to the grammar school in order to prepare for the university, and, after being
plied with various inducements, Newton's mother finally gave in.
At last, Newton escaped. He went to Trinity College in Cambridge, and it was here that his
academic woes returned. INTJs, you see, will cut class...so that they can hang out at the library.
Newton happily studied unassigned mathematics books, but he didn't read the assigned material
because it had an outdated Aristotelian focus. He didn't particularly feel like studying for his exams
either, and he barely scraped by with a passing grade. As White (1997) observed of him, “passing
exams was merely a means to an end and was conducted with the minimum of effort.”
209 Westfall, 1980