About pages are a peculiar type of navel-gazing. My writing is so seldom not about me, so rarely not about how I think or what I see. An about me is just a more transparent dramatis personae I’m performing as. I don the costume of the person I want to be seen as, give this person lines and a backstory, and in a few paragraphs, I’ve manufactured this character’s self-affirming monologue.

I could summarize myself by listing a bunch of nouns, of things I like or things I eat or things I make, building a composite me of the material stuff of my life. But does knowing I’m a “reader” tell you who I am? You can affix me within whatever mental model you have of “people who like to read” and say this guy is like those other “readers”. Which probably wouldn’t be wrong. Imagine someone who likes to read, is a technologist, and not only has dogs but also an inordinate amount of pictures of dogs and dogs feature heavily in his day to day and identity and you probably aren’t too far off. In the words of Ted Lasso, different people are different people, but those differences are often declared in the margins.

I could attempt a more circumspect meditation on self, trying to balance a consuming desire to sound With It and smart but also aloof and not really concerned with whether you think I’m With It; an anvil on floss. A balance some who’ve made it this far might call drunkenly teetering at best, who might say trade the anvil for cruise liner and you’ve got a better sense of the balance you’ve struck between Fonzi-esque effortless and Urkel-like effortful, claiming anyone who uses the term dramatis personae in any context whatsoever without being prepended with the phrase “what the hell is” can’t pretend to not be trying a bit too hard.

Like the Treaty of Tordesillas, I’m going draw a line of demarcation between head-firmly-inserted-into-navel meditation on who I really am and the ordered list of likes and dislikes1. Instead, here are five things I think about myself.

  1. I am deeply curious about everything. Curiosity and persistence is the secret sauce of creativity, the bedrock of mastery, autonomy, and purpose.
  2. Most everything is made up, problems are almost always communication problems, and most any system, whether technological or organizational or interpersonal, can be understood.
  3. I have a deep and abiding hatred of boredom. I'm privileged to be able to worry about boredom rather than physiological or safety needs.
  4. One time as a socially awkward kid I made a group of people laugh and I've been chasing that high ever since.
  5. I want to be extraordinary.

  1. Don’t apply too much pressure to that spaghetti and marshmallow structure of a metaphor – the geopolitical realities of 15th century Spain and Portugal are no where near a clean map for any type of navel gazing thus described and this metaphor is deployed solely because I both 1) recently read about the treaty in a book and thought it would be fun to allow it to elbow into conversations it doesn’t belong in and 2) I like the way Tordesilla sounds, like a fun Mexican dish to accompany a quesadilla. ↩