My ‘LinkyBrain’
My good friend Doug Scott and others have started an accidental movement around LinkyBrains. It seems to be getting out of hand and starting to make a real difference…In honour of this randomly bold effort to leverage the power of non-linear thinking I thought I would contribute my LinkyBrain story.
What is a LinkyBrain?
To me a linkybrain is a mind that connect things that most people can’t see. Whilst everyone has this potential very few people have actually learned to tap into the human mind’s ability to work this way.
The story of my LinkyBrain
I grew up in an entrepreneurial family where the board room table was the dining room table. From birth I was exposed to non conventional experiences around the world that help develop a highly questioning mind that had a fascination with seeing how things worked and related to each other.
Right from early on not a lot of the world seem to make sense to me. Two of the greatest things that get sold to everyone is make money and get a good education. My Dad has always made a lot of money and yet he left school at 14 with little education. He has always been more successful than most people and yet I would openly question whether for a significant part of his life that wealth brought him true fulfilment. I spent time growing up in Africa and witnessed more joy on the faces of people who had nothing than I ever witnessed in the places where resources were really abundant.
If there was one thing that seemed to be consistent in everything that ‘measured’ me during a large part of my life it would be the phrase ‘has the potential but must try harder’. I was seen as highly gifted but very lazy. What people didn’t realise at the time is that I could not motivate myself in any way to buy into a world at its root that I just didn’t believe in. It was all part of a 30 year battle to get out of bed in the morning. Not that I was ever diagnosed but if I had visited a doctor today about it then I would most likely have been given a significant mental health diagnosis and put on pills for the rest of my life.
By the time I was 32 I had GCSEs, A-Levels, 2 degrees and built and sold an 8 figure direct marketing business with my brother. I did all of this without ever being that motivated and without ever really truly loving what I did. I did it without working that hard either. There are two hyper skills that I developed in that time. The first was to find the shortest route to do something and the 2nd was the ability to manipulate other people to do things for me. I am as good as it gets at both of those skills. I remained fascinated at all times with contrarian thinking and doing things differently. I was obsessed with outliers that chose to do things in a differently and longed for experiences that allowed me to live that way. Part of the reason why I didn’t enjoy work and education that much is that the things that I were inspired by weren’t really at the core of how traditional education or company building was designed.
I would describe myself as highly misunderstood during those years. Not able to express the things that I could see and feel. I often describe that feeling of and inability to express myself properly as screaming inside a glass box that I couldn’t get out of. I could see things that others could not see. I had no idea how or why I could see them and why on earth anyone else could not see what I saw. The loneliness of an existence like that is so deep and the yearning to truly connect with others was at times overwhelming. Being so sure of mind and yet the whole world treating you as if you in some way had lost yours was highly damaging over time. During my entrepreneurial career I had two nervous breakdowns where the cause can only be attributed to not working in a way that was true to who I was.
My joys were brief and hedonistic. From drinking to food to travel to watching sport I would pursue peak experiences to try to feel good at some level. The rest of the time I would feel numb and disengaged just doing what had to be done.
I would’t change a day of my life but as a parent of linky brain children I can see the value of having the right mentors to guide people through the world. I just didn’t have them and that meant that I had to find my own way out of the invisible cage that we all in some way live in. It just doesn’t need to be this way.
My life changed in 2008 when I started mentoring entrepreneurs. I was hooked. I could get all of the joy and interest of working with people working on interesting things and yet I didn’t have to do any of the work. I tried briefly and unsuccessfully at investing but soon realised that I wasn’t interested in the returns as much as helping the people I invested in thrive. I became really good at helping entrepreneurs developing strategies for building businesses that were aligned with who they really were. Helping them move from being slaves to business to helping them develop businesses that served who they truly were. I was training people to become free thinking linky brains. I also became very good at getting people to leave their jobs.
In 2010 I had an epiphany of self forgiveness whilst reading Tim Ferris’s book The 4 Hour Work Week. I had come across something where my 2 hyper skills were being used to make a difference to millions of lives at scale. It took me 6 months to get off the ceiling as I restructured all of my life and personal branding around who I truly was. During that time I actually finally accepted myself and began to move from self hatred to self love. I was going to be the guy that did the least to achieve the most. I was going to be the person that took leverage to a whole new level.
The big mission
In 2012 I was drunk in a pub in London and said that I wanted to change the world. The person that I was talking to told me to go to Singularity University in Silicon Valley. I ended up there in 2013 and it literally blew my mind. It took me a week to get to sleep as I tried to consume, understand and condense the gravity of what I learnt whilst I was there. They teach people about the impact of exponential technology and encourage people to build things that positively impact a billion people within 10 years.
Whilst I loved what I learnt I also saw them recreating the same problems that I had already seen and experienced. Entrepreneurs building and growing organisations following sets of pre-defined cultural rules rather than shaping those organisations and missions around what was best for the entrepreneur. I announced publicly that I was going to positively impact a billion people within 10 years. To be different my mission was to do all that by just having coffee. I also realised that people spoke about Government there as though it was an unsolvable problem. Growing up in a ‘tax haven’ I saw people change legislation and policy to create wealth and I quickly joined the dots that those same mechanisms could be used to make it easier to do new things in healthcare, education, welfare etc.
In 2014 I co-founded and launched a moonshot called the Dandelion Foundation with another crazy linkybrain to use a small self governing nation state to solve all of the world’s major systemic issues in one place. We set a mission to make Guernsey (where I live and was born) the best place to live on earth by 2020. Guernsey is a self governing nation that is 25 square miles and has a population of 63,000 people. In Guernsey you can solve major issues at coffee scale. That dynamic turns impossible problems into problems that are barely possible to solve. With my mind I like those odds.
4 years on my community is at the tipping point of being one of the greatest stories in the world that has yet to be told. It is the birthplace of a new kind of systemic revolution in grassroots problem solving that hasn’t been witnessed before. A system that has been unlocked coffee by coffee and event by event, to empower people to find their true potential. We now have a collective of individual hearts and minds within a small place with both the desire and the power to change things relatively quickly.
Ironically the project I work on at the moment is not the highest impact thing I have done. The highest impact thing I have done to date is spend 45 mins on a blog post that created a worldwide meme that has been seen by tens of millions of people and that has transformed countless lives. It was the ultimate act of a linky brain thinking that involved joining a venn diagram around purpose with the Japanese concept of Ikigai. See the post here and read the full story behind the meme here. It is another thing that just got out of hand and demonstrates why the world needs linky brains.
The really important stuff
I have 3 beautiful linky brain children, Charlie (6), Bertie (2) and Emilie (1 week). I want to build a school that doesn’t force them to be linear and helps them maximise who they can be. This was a slide deck I did on that school project and I hope to make progress on building it this year as my eldest hits school age this year.
I married a highly talented linkybrain called Valerie who is working on transforming education amongst other things. This is a talk she did on women (the real linky brains) connecting with who they really are.
I have a dog called Henry who I regard as my first true mentor.
I’m truly happy. I could die tomorrow and feel like I found my way out of the cage and connected with who I really am. There was a long time where that wasn’t the case.
What I have learnt about LinkyBrains
Every human I have met only taps in a tiny fraction of their potential. I mean a tiny fraction. I think about what that means for education and the world if we can unlock that potential. I think about what the world would be like if we all use that linky brain we all have properly. In 50 years there will be people doing things that make Elon Musk look average. How do we raise kids like that? Why can’t we be that person now? Why does making a difference like that need to be about hard work? What if it was easy?
There is a big mental health cost to not being true to who you are. Society is structured for the linear mind and can cause a lot of harm to those that think differently. To capitalise on the true potential of the human collective we need to design systems that maximise and leverage cognitive difference rather than seek to homogenise the world into a single way of being and thinking. When you spend a lot of time thinking what that means you can see why I work on a whole system transformation project in a small self governing state.
Where you can learn more about my LinkyBrain
I have written a blog which is literally a window into my mind called The View Inside Me. There are hundreds of LinkyBrain posts on there.
I have a podcast called Coffee From The Edge where I spend time talking about crazy solutions to the world’s toughest challenges with other LinkyBrains that are out there making a difference.
My website that links to all my work and my contact details is here. I have coffee with anyone that asks.
What do I need
I need LinkyBrain philanthropy that wants to invest boldly in people that can see things that most people can’t see.
To support me individually visit my new Patreon Page. Patronage is the old way of funding the most non-linear and creative minds. It would be good to see it come back for the people want to dedicate their life to joining dots in the world. We need non-linear funding more than ever in the world right now.
To support the bold work of the Dandelion Foundation visit our Paypal Giving Page.
How can I help
There isn’t anyone that spends time with me that doesn’t hit a whole new level of personal possibility. Just ask Doug.
And what about your LinkyBrain?
If this post in any way resonates with you and you want to be part of a movement that contains, supports and develops linkybrains then visit https://linkybrains.com/ for more information.
