Sisyphean

A Sisyphean goes deep rather than wide. The same craft, refined a thousand times, reveals more than ten new starts ever could, and there is real satisfaction in pushing one thing toward its best possible form. This pole maps to the Adaptor in Kirton's theory, whose Adaptors desire to do things better rather than differently.

The name is a quiet joke turned compliment: the Sisyphean rolls the same boulder by choice, because mastery lives in the repetition. In Five-Factor terms this is lower Openness paired with patience and persistence, the exploitation end of the exploration-exploitation tradeoff, where compounding attention to one thing produces depth others cannot match.