A clear and concise description of my new company with bullet points

just kidding

I continue the conversation with myself about what it is I’m after. One of the questions on a test I took recently about where I fall on a scale between, as the test styles it, “Neurotypical” and “Neurodiverse,” was:

Do you have difficulty describing & summarizing things like events, conversations or something you’ve read?

And obviously I don’t.

But then I had the thought of, “If I answered that question with, ‘obviously I don’t,’ in the presence of someone, anyone, besides myself, someone in the physical position to notice my mouth moving, visually—would this other person’s brain agree?” That’s a great example of the convoluted way I must approach myself to ask the question, “Is the thought you are having actually accurate, or completely, wildly inaccurate?”

And basically, I realized, they would laugh at that. Then my head was hearing, “Oh, okay, evidence suggests the prior thought is wildly inaccurate.” My confidence in the fact that everyone would laugh at that (except my wife who would roll her eyes) is indicative of my split brain: I simultaneously know I am good at summarizing and know that everyone thinks I’m terrible at it. Okay not a split brain, just a very clean-sliced perspective on words like “good at” and “summarizing.”

The swiftness with which any person who has interacted with me would break into laughter when they heard me suggest that obviously I don’t have a problem summarizing, and the loudness of the laughter, I realized, would be an effective way to correlate how many minutes they have spent in my presence (capping out at like, 30 minutes—after 30 min I don’t think the data would be useful).

It’s not a good question in the first place. That’s some of the problem. Describing is distinct from summarizing. I’m good at describing things, I think, in the way that a musician is good at describing things. I put a premium on accuracy. And then I define the thing differently than anybody else and I do so accurately. And then I ignore the cost of length to the audience. This is a compulsion, not a strategy.

If I have any sense of what the test is about I’ll ace the descriptions. My reading comprehension is solid (both perfect score on the ACT test type solid, and long-term-memory deeper themes type solid). My description of what it’s like to, say, suck at being a dad, is probably much better than other mediocre fathers’ descriptions, in part because I’d make an effort at describing how bad I suck if you let me, and I won’t tell a joke at the end to signal that I’m just a self-aware humble father, leaving you with literally the best ever description of what it is like to be a genuinely mediocre father.

Are you good at translating from one language to another? Do you translate all the words and present them in the same order, ignoring grammar? What does that mean, to translate? I’m pretty sure it’s an extremely subjective experience, translating. Most of meaning seems like it’s trapped inside the structure of the sentence relative to what’s typical, the rhetorical choices made by the author relative to those made by the author in other contexts and by other writers in the same context, the tone, the culture that the sentence rises from. The words themselves are small and important parts of all of this, their order, their pitch and rhythm, how they feel in your head.

Let me stop right now and just attempt to summarize what I’m trying to get at: I possibly suck at summarizing.

Right now I’m trying to get a Pomodoro done with a goal of spearheading a bit of the ideology that has risen slowly in my head over the past few months as I’ve been engaged in building a product for a new company I have “started.”

I’ll summarize the product:

Nah, nevermind. I deleted the next bit, which was a 3,620 word summary. I decided to turn this Medium blog into my own personal anonymous-ish blog. I have resigned myself to never writing about business in the specific. I just don’t want to have that kind of online platform. I will always and only be able t0 connect with the other insane people online, not customers and not colleagues and not investors. For them, I will provide the IRL version of me, who hires marketers to write blogs.

Goals for This project have changed. It’s not “personal blog / company founding blog.”

It’s an anonymous blog with the full range of my personality and ambitions and intentions and neurosis.