THE FUNCTIONAL PSYCHOPATH

The book "The Wisdom of Psychopaths" by Kevin Dutton is a great tool to understand how successful people thrive in their careers - they have important qualities in common with sociopaths and criminal psychopaths whose personality features make them the dominants in day to day situations.

People who have psychopathic tendencies and yet don't commit crimes are mostly labelled as "sociopaths", they manage to scale the success ladder because of their lack of emotional engagement, their ruthlessness, focus and tenacity.

I believe some people could benefit with such study and this is why I selected the book's best ideas on how to translate a popularly known psychopathy into a "functional psychopathy":

-The triumvirate of personality traits: The stratospheric self-esteem of narcissists, the fearless, ruthless, impulsive and thrill-seeking, the deceitful can all actually do pretty well for themselves.

-Narcissism is associated with self-promotion and ostentatious displays of success and machiavellianism, with being socially manipulative.

-Creativity - which brings good strategic thinking and excellent communication skills.

-The problem with a lot of people is that what they think is a virtue is actually a vice in disguise. It’s much easier to convince yourself that you’re reasonable and civilised, than soft and weak, isn’t it?

-Ninety-nine percent of things people worry about never happen. So what’s the point? “I think the problem is that people spend so much time worrying about what might happen, what might go wrong, that they completely lose sight of the present. They completely overlook the fact that, actually, right now, everything’s perfectly fine.”

-Next time you’re in a situation where you’re scared, just think: “Imagine I didn’t feel this way, What would I do then?” And then just do it anyway (good advice, if you’ve got the balls to take it!).

-You cannot allow any members of your brain’s emotional executive committee to knock on the door of the decision-making boardroom, let alone take the seat at the table. Ruthlessly, remorselessly, relentlessly, you have to stay in the present. You can't let what happened yesterday affect what happens today. If you do, you'll go under in no time.

-Focus on the job in hand and when that job is finished, just walk away and forget it ever happened.

-Psychopaths never procrastinate