He’s off chasing the next bright idea before the last one’s even landed. The freedom he’s really after, it turns out, lives on the far side of finishing something.
THE RESTLESS Optimist sees the future as exciting and full of promise. He always believes things will get better, that somehow it will all work out. He expresses this in business by forever having some fantastic new idea, or chasing the next big opportunity. In both his business and his personal life, he tends to avoid dealing with issues, because — he tells himself, and everyone else — “It’ll be fine.” Sometimes he’s right; often, he’s not. To picture him, think of the fast-talking salesman, the internet start-up frontman (the pitch guy, not the programming geek), and the “rah-rah” motivational speaker. Men in those roles aren’t all this type, and this type isn’t confined to those roles — but at the very least, he’ll be a fast talker who wants to lift everybody’s spirits and shine a positive light onto every situation.
At a deep level, what he’s really hoping for is to escape the current reality, with its boring routine and its rules and restrictions. That’s the real reason his eyes are fixed on a bright future: he believes the future will liberate him. At a low level of maturity, he can be scattered, erratic, and never quite get things done. At a high level of maturity, he becomes a visionary who forges new pathways for the world. The paragons here are Richard Branson, and McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc — men who turned relentless optimism into something the world could actually use.
How people see you
You’re hard to miss. Your enthusiasm announces you the moment you walk into the room, and you naturally draw a lot of attention. People watch, half in envy, as you sparkle and bristle with restless energy and exciting ideas. You’re bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at all hours, a fast talker — and others feel they can get a booster shot of optimism just by standing near you.
But if anyone can’t keep up — and most people can’t — they’ll soon see the back of you. You can’t bear “boring,” “negative” or “heavy” for long, and “long,” for you, is a very short time. The moment you sense any of it brewing, you’re already scanning for something more exciting: the next party, the next idea, the next job — sometimes even the next relationship.
Especially while you’re young, your friends will see you as the one least likely to commit — to a job, a career, a steady partner, even to plans that reach beyond today. Some people, though, will want in on the excitement. A few come along for the thrill; others relish the challenge of being the one to tame you. Guess which one you’ll prefer to be with?
In business, it’s much the same: you arrive with a new idea, a new lead, a new prospect. Whatever your qualification, you’ll gravitate to a forward-looking, strategic or sales-oriented role, harnessing your gift for spotting opportunities and inspiring the “suits” to buy in. And again, your colleagues will often see the back of you as you leave to chase the next deal — finding, in your wake, that the paperwork got rushed, if it got done at all.
How you see the world
The world is one giant adventure, full of exciting possibility. There’s always something new just over the horizon, and your eyes are keenly set that way. When it comes — even as a faint twinkle of a sign — you’ll be the first to see it, and the first to know what it means. Most people are slow to catch on, so you’ll have to do some talking to bring them along.
With all that possibility out there, you never know when something better might come along, so you keep your options open. You call it living in the moment. Of course, “better” usually means more fun — it’s the newness that beckons, for its own sake, not the money or the fame. And where life turns dull, or heavy, that’s a place you’ll want to escape. Hey, this place is boring, there’s a new spot in town, let’s go!
For you, rules are not the barriers they are for some, but mere obstacles to be navigated.
In business, you see rules not as fixed barriers but as obstacles to be navigated around — and if someone tells you that you can’t do something, they’ve just handed you an incentive to do it. Think of the Uber app, which sidestepped taxi law all over the world by calling itself “ride-sharing.” That’s exactly the kind of move an The Restless Optimist loves.
Which is why the white stage of maturity — the one that asks you to comply, to take on management and fatherhood, to be “tied down” — may be harder for you than for any other type of man. That very phrase kills you. You’re at the lowest level of solidity, furthest from the ground. Deny you adventure at work or at home, and you’ll find it elsewhere — surf-ski paddling, paragliding, motor-racing, flying a helicopter. You’re the man least likely to die wondering.
Why people like you
More than anything, people need hope — and hope hangs on the belief that tomorrow will be better than today. You are its flagbearer; you believe it from the bottom of your soul. You’re the hero who leaves the village in search of a boon and won’t return without one. Except you don’t just go once. You go every single day.
In real-world terms, you’re the first to spot an opportunity and the least afraid to try something untested. Put you in charge of vision and strategy, and people had better fasten their seatbelts. In sales, you’re the hunter, and everyone — bosses included — struggles to keep up. Your role models: the smiling patron saint of entrepreneurship, Richard Branson; the irrepressible Robin Williams as Adrian Cronauer in Good Morning, Vietnam; the ever-mirthful Tyrion Lannister; the modern Silicon Valley visionary.
On a personal front, there’s seldom a dull moment when you’re around. People might get frustrated trying to contain you, but the one thing they’ll never suffer is boredom. You sparkle like champagne, always hunting for something new to do. For anyone keen to suck the marrow out of life, you offer exactly that. C’mon, let’s take a ride! Others just watch and wonder.
And your optimism is infectious. You’re the man most likely to find the silver lining, to see how even a disaster might become an opportunity — or, failing that, a reason to celebrate. Roll your car in the desert and, where another man despairs, you’ll find the whisky and toast the fact that you’re still alive. At your best, you offer the world hope, a better tomorrow, and you get everyone pointed in the right direction — forward.
Why you drive people crazy
You never sit still for long. You’re the restless spirit, always after the next thrill — and even people who love that in small doses find it exhausting in bulk. Worse, you won’t notice when you’re tired — Sleep when you’re dead is your motto — let alone when others are tired of you. Which is why your body sometimes stages its own intervention: a sudden, stress-related illness that knocks you flat, because it’s the only language you’ll listen to.
Always seeing the bright side, you’ll tend to talk a problem away rather than deal with it. “Ah, it’ll be fine. It’s not as bad as you’re making out.” So you’ll stay in a bad relationship — business or personal — far longer than is good for you, or refuse to chase money you’re owed because you’re sure you’ll make it back some other way. Called by its right name, that can look a lot like irresponsibility — especially once your family or business starts to feel it.
People also struggle to hold a long or serious conversation with you — you’ll escape those at all costs. Same with paperwork, admin, filing, chores. Things fall through the cracks: the insurance, the tax return. And they catch up with you at the worst moment — the accident you swore you’d never have, or the deal you can’t close because your papers aren’t in order.
At the ungrounded extreme, this man turns genuinely reckless — the type whose plan for a money problem is to buy a lottery ticket, certain he’ll win the jackpot. That was Travers Goff, father of Mary Poppins author P.L. Travers, whose tragic story is told in Saving Mr Banks, with Colin Farrell in the role. Like Goff, he bounces from one opportunity to the next, always sure that this one — this one — is finally the one. Which, in the end, drives everyone around him quietly mad.
Your core fear
For all the hope you hand out, an honest, hard look at the evidence forces an awkward admission: things haven’t always worked out as brightly as you envisioned. And yet you still insist on rehearsing only the best possible outcome. You have to ask yourself why.
You’ll say your approach works for you. But others will tell you a cautious one works better, because it’s more realistic — and statistically, you’re both only half right. So why keep running your approach almost to the exclusion of the other, instead of blending the two, weighing reality as much as possibility? Is it “just your personality,” as you like to believe? Maybe. And what if there’s more to it?
The future is the ultimate place to escape to: it’s all made up.
Because although you say you live in the moment, you don’t, really. You live in the future — and the future is entirely made up. It’s pure imagination, the Peter Pan place “where dreams are born, and time is never planned.” Whatever you picture there is always better than dull, constricting real life, where you can’t have everything your way, where you must make choices and show up in the same place day after day, among all those rules. Doesn’t that scare the hell out of you?
You won’t say it scares you, of course — only that it bores you to death. But isn’t it true that you fear boredom and being tied down about as much as you fear death itself? That you’d almost risk your life rather than be pinned in place? Remember the tortoise and the hare — there’s a reason the tortoise wins in the end, and a reason that story gets told to children. Your core fear, stripped bare, is being tied down: made to walk the plane of the earth, with no crazy future left to escape into.
Your journey through the four stages of maturity
The journey to maturity, for every man, runs through the building of the ego and its inevitable dark side — the shadow — and then, if he’s fortunate, the slow work of integrating it. A man’s shadow holds the data belonging to the one part of life he’s spent his energy avoiding. For you, that part is all of it — the rules, the constraints, the limits that society presses onto people, and especially onto you. Everything filed under “boring” or “negative”: the fine print, the paperwork, the plodding, the staying-put.
It probably began early. Maybe home was restrictive, or chaotic — or maybe simply, unbearably dull. Either way, the one way you kept your sanity was to escape: into fantasy, or as far from the house as your legs would carry you. As an adult, you escape by breaking, bending or bypassing whatever rules you can, by chasing the new and the untried. That becomes the theme of your rebellion early on, and your quarrel with the world later: you’ll point out how restrictive society is, how ridiculous its rules, how boring everybody else has become. That you break a few of your own along the way, you’ll simply look away from.
Here’s the strange part. As you move deeper into the years when you’re meant to be settling — the job, the mortgage, the family — the running doesn’t slow down. It speeds up. Being tied down is the very thing that kills you, so you go the other way, harder: bigger schemes, bolder promises, one more grand escape. You become more the visionary and less the finisher, more one-sided rather than less — the optimism turned all the way up, precisely when life is asking you to come down to earth.
And all the while, quietly, without your permission, something else is being gathered. Life keeps handing you data that doesn’t fit the story: the deal that fell through because nobody read the fine print, the rule that turned out to be useful after all, the plodder who overtook you while you chased the next big thing. At first you’ll ignore it. But it accumulates. And there comes a point — you may fight it hard first, digging in, upping the ante with grander promises — where it dawns on you that you don’t have to run anymore. That you can sit still, read the fine print, do the hard yards, and the walls won’t close in. That the solid earth you’ve spent a lifetime trying to escape might be less a cage than the only ground firm enough to build something real upon.
The great arc of your journey is learning to finish what you started.
The great arc of your journey, in a phrase, is freedom learning how to finish. Read between the lines and you can already feel where the doorway is.
You’ll travel it as four men. In your rebelling years you’re the Dreamer. In your complying years you become the Start-Up Guy. Through the long middle passage, if you let the shadow do its work, the Start-Up Guy matures into the Founder. And at the far end, tested by every kind of loss, you arrive as the Visionary.
Where each man gets stuck, and what finally breaks through, is the journey itself — and that’s exactly what the full report is for.
Download your Type 7 report — The Restless Optimist — and walk your own journey from Dreamer to Visionary, one stage at a time.
Neil Bierbaum is an Enneagram practitioner and leadership coach with more than 20 years in practice and over 500 type debriefs. He created the Four Stages of Male Maturity framework — adapted from the work of Carl Jung and Robert Bly — and The Enneagram for Men series, mapping each type’s path through the stages of maturity and the work of shadow integration. He works with men one-to-one through the Enneagram and the four stages of male maturity →.
