¶ The Osseous man or woman can do his best work with things. Those with which he works best are lands, forests, the sea, the plains, the mountains and certain kinds of mechanical things.
Instead of combining things and people in his work, like the Alimentive; machines and people, like the Muscular; or people only, like the Thoracic, the Osseous must not only confine himself almost exclusively to working with things, but he must work with them away from the interference or interruption or superintendence of other people.
Capitalizes His Independence Instinct
¶ The Osseous, like other types, succeeds in work which automatically brings into play his basic instincts. His fundamental instinct is that of independence. He never succeeds signally in any line of work in which this instinct is repressed or thwarted.
He chafes against restriction, enjoys mastering a thing and when let alone to work in his own way he makes an excellent employee. As has been stated, he is the "steadiest" of all.
Chances for Money-Making
¶ Chances for the Osseous to make a great deal of money are few. Unless he confines himself to finance—working as exclusively with money as possible—or to dealing with natural resources, the Osseous seldom becomes rich.
He cares more for money than any of the other types, saves a much larger portion of what he earns, and no matter how rich, is seldom extravagant. His greatest obstacle to money-making is his tendency to hang on to whatever he has, awaiting the rise in prices which never go quite high enough to suit him.
An Osseous friend of ours has lived for forty years on almost nothing while holding, for a fabulous price, an old residential corner on a desirable block of a downtown street in one of the large American cities. He could have sold it years ago for enough to make him comfortable for life, to give him travel, leisure, comforts and self-expression, but he refused.
As has been pointed out before, each individual prefers the self-expression common to his type. This man has found more of what is real self-expression to him in defying the destruction of this building and the march of commerce in that neighborhood, and in opposing prospective buyers, than all the money-bought comforts in the world could have given him.