Christian Laurent; Personal

I have always loved the water. I swam competitively until University, but there I decided waterpolo was more fun. ..but if the weather is good, I'd rather be diving.

I am a PADI IDC Staff Instructor, and Emergency First Response Instructor with 11 specialty ratings:

Dry Suit Instructor
Underwater Naturalist Instructor
Underwater Photographer Instructor
Night Diver Instructor
Drift Instructor
Deep Instructor
Enriched air (Nitrox) Instructor
Peak Performance Buoyancy Instructor
Project AWARE Instructor
AWARE Coral Reef Conservation Instructor
Care for Children with AED Instructor

I am also rebreather CCR Tec 40 qualified on the Hollis Prism 2, SCR qualified on the Hollis Explorer and and TEC45 qualified on Open Circuit. I intend to crossover to BSAC as well sometime this year and to start enjoying some more English diving.

Reading

I'm currently reading:
Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics by Richard Thaler
You can find a selection of books that I have read and intend to read below. Click to expand the lists!

+ Books I have read

Stories of the law and how it's broken by The Secret Barrister
Climbs and Punishment by Douglas Murray
The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way, by Bill Bryson
Stories of the Law and How It's Broken by The Secret Barrister
The Gulag Archipelago, by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The God Delusion, by Richard Dawkins
21 lessons for the 21st Century, by Yuval Harrari
Rules for Life, by Jordan Peterson
Flashboys, by Michael Lewis
Social Engineering, by Chris Hadagny
How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Harari
A Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley
Homo Deus, by Yuval Harari
Why Things Break, by Jonathan Taplin
Freakonomics, by Dubner and Levitt
Superfreakonomics, Ibid
A Short History of Nearly Everything, by Bill Bryson
The Bookseller of Kabul, by Åsne Seierstad
The Alchemist, by Paolo Coehlo
The Fifth Mountain, by Paolo Coehlo
The Machine, by EM Forster
Style: Lessons in Clarity and Grace, by Williams and Bizup
How to get a PhD, by Estelle Philipps
Thinking Fast and Slow, by Daniel Kahneman
It's Not About the Bike by Lance Armstrong
Rough ride, by Paul Kimmage
Lolita, by Vladimir Nabokov
Seventy Two Virgins, by Boris Johnson
The Kite Runner, by Khaled Housseini
Introduction to Type, by Isabel Briggs-Myers
A Random Walk Down Wall Street, by Burton Malkiel
Quiet, The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking by Susan Cain
The Pilgrimage, by Paulo Coehlo
Veronica Decides to Die, by Paulo Coehlo

+ Books I intend to read

This is going to hurt: Secret Diaries of a Junior Doctor by Adam Kaye
Escape From the Ivory Tower, by Nancy Baron
How to Talk Like TED , by Carmine Gallo
How Bad Are Bananas, by Mike Berners-Lee
Algorithms to Live by, by Brian Christian
Unshakable: Your Guide to Financial Freedom, by Tony Robbins
Data and Goliath, by Bruce Schneier
Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell
Irrational Exuberance, by Robert Shiller
Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
The Man Who Loved Only Numbers by Paul Hoffman
I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream, by Harlan Ellison
Crimes Against Logic by Jamie Whyte
A Brief History of Time, by Stephen Hawking
Climbing Mount Improbable, by Richard Dawkins
Murder on the Orient Express, by Agatha Christie
By his bootstraps, by Robert Heinline
Black Box Thinking, by Matthew Syed
Stranger in a Strange Land, by Robert Heinline
A Perfect Day for Bananafish, by J.D Salinger
Moneyball,
and Liars poker,
and The fifth risk, all by Michael Lewis

Personality

In 1921, the famous Swiss psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Carl G. Jung published Psychological Types.In the book he categorized people into primary types of psychological function.

Isabel Briggs Myers developed this theory into a written survey, the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, in 1962. It has since become the one of the most widely used tools for understanding differences in personality, and is taken more than two million times each year (officially).

The instrument sorts a personality into one of sixteen types, based on adapted Jungian dichotomies. You can take a (free / unofficial) version of the test here and I urge you to do so: you will learn something about yourself you didn't know yesterday, and it might just help you at home or at work.

The result will report your preference for each of the four pairs, and maybe a number which would indicate the strength of your preference:

Extroversion or Introversion E or I
Sensing or Intuition S or N
Thinking or Feeling T of F
Judging or Perceiving J or P

n.b. The dichotomies have specific meanings within their context i.e. it is not true that someone who has a judging type is judgmental, so care needs to be taken in considering an MBTI type, more information can be found here. or in the book Introduction to Type.

My personality:

INTP (Although I have only a slight preference for introversion).

(T_i | N_E | S | F_E)

They are "independent problem-solvers who excel at providing a detached, concise analysis of an idea or situation".
"Their incisive evaluations and summaries can assist a group in getting to the core of complex problems."

- you can find more in depth descriptions on 16 Personalities, Personality Junkies or Wikipedia.

Summary of characteristics

Only 3% on the population are INTP: they are

Logical, analytical and objectively critical
Detached and contemplative
Mentally quick, insightful and ingenious
Intensely curious about ideas, theories and what makes things work

Famous INTPs include Bill Gates, Albert Einstein, Rene Descartes, Isaac Newton and Blaise Pascal!

Areas for growth

If an INTP is not supported or appreciated they might

Become cynical
Struggle with empathy

Personal