Broken brains

Edited June 2022

I actually first wrote this little piece during my first time in San Francisco, a time when I was still trying to grasp the enormity and minusculity of the world and figure out what my place was meant to be in it. I’ve got a much sharper idea of this now, but sharing these little thought acorns from my mind will likely always be a something I do for fun (and it is just for fun — I’m pretty sure no one actually reads these articles except my parents (love you both)). Here’s a quick take from a few months ago:

Me and my friends have opinions of things that range from immaculately aligned to opposite ends of the spectrum, but if there’s one thing we undoubtedly agree upon it’s that our brains are broken.

Literally. From a personal standpoint, I’ve always looked at the world in a way no one else around me seemed to empathize with, and it took me 21 years of growing up to eventually get to the point where I was interacting with adults around me who seemed to be able to grasp the same rational and angles in which I perceive random situations.

The core of this is that my brain still doesn’t function in a straight line. I’ll have these wild energy highs where I’m writing, building, ideating, pouring my full self into things and muster so much convincing confidence that simply demands the attention of those around me — if I’m choosing to be loud about it. I also have these more mellow instances of keeping to myself and working quietly, drawing up sketches of a sick idea that pops into my brain, contemplating the meaning of life while others are busy living it and are busy chasing the things they’ve convinced themselves are where meaning lies, and reverting to instant gratification moments when meaning doesn’t seem to be met and contenting themselves with the blissful unknown of keeping their faults of hidden potential locked and stowed away, vaults that often require doing something truly contrarian or inviting someone else in, someone who exists at a higher energy level, to instantiate enough encourage them to unlock themselves, gain a photon so to say, and jump to the next level above them.

It’s human nature to rather beat on your way rather than traveling horizontal to the current, breaking into unknown waters without the guarantee of finding any treasure island at the other side.

My point in case: I meant to write this little blurb as an intro to the kind of content you’ll be seeing more of from me and ended up in Great Gatsby territory. My brain is broken, but all of the greatest ones are.

Someone told me years ago that they didn’t like working with entrepreneurs, which I thought was the stupidest thing I’d ever heard. When I obviously asked why, their response was, “Eh, they’re quirky. It takes someone who’s off to actually want to start a company.”

I was taken aback for only an instance then realized this couldn’t be more true. The universe of personalities I’ve encountered in the world of founders — not the tech wannabe’s that I encounter on the day to day in happy hours around SF, but true groundbreaking, groundbreaking, civilization-altering founders — is that their head isn’t screwed on just right. This ranges from everything from having a niche perspective on their surroundings, to having little itches and quirks that they have to fill, to having a high-driven mind, to actually having severe and even life-threatening mental conditions that cause them to break free from the crowd in a way often deemed unnatural and discarded by society.

The thing that all of these founders share, I’ve found, is that they don’t give a shit about conforming. They thrust their wake apart from the steady current without caring what others think or how they’re perceived, release all judgement, and go all-in into the things that truly speak to them and chase the actual values they care about, which could be building, or communicating, or whatever the heck else it is that invigorates their broken brain in some way that no one else can wrap their mainstream head around.

Anyway, back to the written content I’m pumping out.

My goal will be to document everything I’m perceiving, living, breathing, in this crazy journey as someone who shares this one gnarly similarity with many great founders before me, with the ultimate goal of normalizing heads that aren’t screwed on just right, redefining how our society operates and thinks through the new world we build, and chasing treasure islands that may or may not exist.