The Creative Enneagram Type 5: The Mastermind

As a Creative Enneagram Type 5, The Mastermind, you live in a world of complexity and nuance, architecting intricate solutions to multifactorial problems and creating works of creativity that others often step back and say, “Wow, you planned that all out in your head? How did you do that?”

You tend to be a deep thinker, and wrestling with thorny issues to accomplish some creative pursuit is second nature to you. As with all types, your greatest gift can also be your greatest curse, and shutting your mind off to sleep, or separating work and art from family and other pursuits is a challenge.

Though you tend to be secretive and isolated, preferring to work alone on your master work, you find that some of your greatest creative breakthroughs have come by both working in community with others and by forcing yourself to experience new things, pushing past your current comfort zone and living in the world, instead of living in your head.

Your mind is a powerful processing machine, one that never seems to shut off, and if you get stuck then you often need to remind yourself that God created you as a whole human being composed of body, spirit, soul, emotions, and much more than just your mind. When you go for a walk, or have coffee with a friend, or step away from your creative sticking point to engage some other dynamic of full personhood then you often find that the answer clicks right into place. When you fully see yourself as a created and creating being made in the image of a creative and multi-faceted God then your prodigious world-changing gifts can be immense.

The Creative Enneagram Type 5, The Mastermind, has both healthy and unhealthy manifestations.

The Creative Enneagram Type 5 – Healthy

You can see how all the pieces fit together to accomplish your creative vision. You retreat to your lair and figure out complex issues and then surface when you have a sophisticated and creative solution. You image our Creator’s vast omniscience.

The Creative Enneagram Type 5 – Unhealthy

You can prize ideas over execution to your own detriment. You hesitate to act until you’ve figured out three chess moves ahead without realizing that sometimes you have to take the first step before it’s possible to understand the next steps to take.

Famous Enneagram Type 5 – Adam Ford

When you launch a website that gets hundreds of millions of page views on the Internet, has Snopes breathing down your neck to fact check your work, and lands your new company CEO on cable news to defend against inquiries from CNN, then it helps to enjoy the spotlight. But what if you don’t? What if you hate the spotlight?

When Adam Ford launched the Christian satire website, The Babylon Bee, he had a hunch that it would become “something of a social phenomenon” but was taken aback by just how big of a deal it would quickly become. With evangelical Christian inside baseball humor and political news hot takes in a style reminiscent of The Onion, article headlines like “Local Christian Would Do Anything For Jesus Except Believe Things That Are Unpopular”, “CNN Purchases Industrial-Sized Washing Machine to Spin News Before Publication”, and “Mountain Climber Recovering After Decision to ‘Let Go and Let God’” were catnip for certain reader demographics and infuriating for others.

Adam quickly found himself drawing attention that he did not want. He recounts that, “If you’ve followed me for some time you probably know how averse I am to the spotlight. It makes me very uncomfortable, especially in person. As a general rule I never told people that I ran the Bee, but, you know, people find out. And everywhere I go, it’s all people want to talk about, and I just don’t know how to handle that. I never could get used to it.” [1]

As a talented illustrator, web comic creator, and digital publisher, Adam has been creating and masterminding online projects for years, but The Babylon Bee was quickly starting to consume his life, sap his creative drive, and even wear him down physically. It was time for him to evaluate who he was and what he was called to do, because it seemed pretty clear The Babylon Bee was starting to demand a very different skillset and level of involvement to run it and scale it then to create it.

It’s a question many successful entrepreneurs and founders face when their “baby” begins to take on a life of their own: am I called to grow and manage this project or am I called to create something new?

Just a couple short years after launching, when the trajectory of The Babylon Bee seemed to only be climbing, Adam made his decision. He sold a majority interest, giving up control to the new owner and CEO, the Christian entrepreneur, Seth Dillon—someone ready to go on national television at the drop of a hat and do what was needed to take The Babylon Bee to the next level (but more on that later)—and Adam knew it was the right decision for The Babylon Bee, and more importantly, for himself.

“The Bee has become way bigger than me. Running the Bee, I was hesitant, for various reasons, to do the things necessary for it to continue growing to new levels. I wanted to publish satire; I didn’t want to run a growing company. I didn’t want to hire people. With the new owner comes resources and aspirations that the Bee has never had before. This is good. As big as the Bee has become, it can be a whole lot bigger, and I know that. I just didn’t want to pursue that route. Even though it was my project, I sometimes felt like I was holding the Bee back.” [2]

Seth Dillon, along with longtime Editor-in-Chief, Kyle Mann, seem poised to take The Babylon Bee to the next level of success, continuing Adam’s mission to use satire to draw people’s attention to the truth. In a world where the church’s creative output can tend toward the saccharine and the superficial, the schmaltzy and the sentimental, The Babylon Bee reminds us that the world is not a Thomas Kinkade painting or a Precious Moments scene. The Babylon Bee uses satire and sarcasm that can be biting and even divisive, but if they model themselves after Jesus and His masterful use of wit, wordplay, and incisive questions, then they will reveal something important about the Christian message and the world around us. And Adam? He has since masterminded another new venture: Christian Daily Reporter, a Christian news aggregator in the minimalistic Drudge Report aesthetic that has since morphed into DISRN. When healthy Christian creatives work together, using their unique gifts for God’s glory and the good of the world around us, then this calling to create for change can truly be world changing.

[1] https://adam4d.com/i-sold-the-babylon-bee-and-am-no-longer-running-it/#

[2] Ibid