Note I: A little about me

One day someone asked me how I manage to produce so much. I thought about giving the real answer, and just as I was about to start, I stopped. I let it go and said it was willpower. That wasn't a lie, but on its own it wasn't the whole answer either.

The truth is a little darker than I'd like.

It's a huge lack of social skills.

I run a pretty great company here in Brazil, one that's known across the country, and still I have no tact at all when it comes to dealing with people.

I have a monstrous attention deficit, and for part of my life it kept me in a depressive state. Yes, that's the part.

So I chose to step away from everything. When I say everything, people think I'm exaggerating, but my trusted circle, what some would call a comfort zone, is tiny. It doesn't include the people I deal with at work, the meetings I run or the events I go to. I won't lie: I hate being in those places.

Crowded places fill me with a dread I can't describe. More than three people at the party? For me, that's packed.

It's hard to explain, but it feels as if I hear everything, every sensory stimulus at once.

What I do have, in place of so many other skills, is the ability to turn a problem into a solution. Nassim Taleb, the author of The Black Swan, has a word for things that get stronger with disorder: antifragile. That's close to what I learned to do with chaos, something past what I could call plain resilience. How I got there is a story for another day.

So, to sum it up.

Take a head that can't focus but can't rest either. One that never stops, with an absurd, almost superhuman need to take in information, plus an enormous hyperfocus on technology and computing. What do you get? Output, and more output.

Most of the posts on this blog were written months ago, some even longer. Others started as notes in Notesnook and were quickly adapted to explain things to someone else. All of it comes from months, sometimes years, of work and observation, and from a deep kind of isolation.

That's it.