I’m not certain where I’m going with this, but let’s try it.

I’ve always felt the connection between things. I’ve always been interested in how things are connected.

How things fit together.

In the Myers-Briggs Personality Types, my N (Intuition) is very much my dominant function.

To the point that when I’m relaxed I can literally feel the connections between everything around me.

Interestingly, in periods of my life when I’ve let myself be influenced by toxic relationships, or I’ve not been in a good headspace, that’s largely gone away. But when everything’s calm, I can feel the connection between things.

I’m more interested in the patterns, and analogies, and what things might mean, and how else things could be, than in how things are at face value.

And one thing that that’s meant is that I’ve always kept a very childlike curiosity. I just always found that that was such a valuable asset that I didn’t grow out of it when… when other people grow out of that for whatever reason. I found it very useful to keep.

And one thing it’s always done is it’s meant that I can pick up new skills incredibly quickly.

As long as I’m interested in it… which most things I am because, apart from anything else, even the fact that I don’t already know about it in itself makes it interesting. I don’t apply any… I don’t bring a lot of preconceived ideas or judgments about things. If it’s something new then I want to know about it before I make any decisions about it.

And so if there’s a technology that I don’t know about, I’d, you know, I’d want to learn it, and I can learn it very quickly.

I think it’s also how I—that sense of how things fit together and spotting what might happen next as a result—when people do—people do sometimes see it as mind-reading, or psychic, it isn’t—it’s predicting.

I’ve won a lot more poker tournaments than you might expect for how little I’ve played. And I think it’s also how I ended up in that exam where I had just seen it—just done the entire paper that morning [TODO explain the story]. It wasn’t just the material itself that I was interested in. I was much more interested in the exam as a system. The sequence of what questions might come up given what there’s been in the past. It’s that kind of thing.

And so, in the same way if I’m interested in something new, and I can see how things fit together quickly, it makes it very very easy to pick up new skills, new technologies, that kind of thing.

I’ve never understood the idea of being a programmer in one language. I’m so much more interested in what’s happening on the deeper level. If I’m using a programming library, the whole time I’m digging into the source code of that, and maybe even the source code of the operating system, and then what’s going on beyond that. That’s why I learnt a lot about electronics.

It’s all about going to those lower levels of abstraction.

I do the same thing with the universe as well: ‘OK, I can think about things, that’s really fascinating… but what’s going on with the neurons in my brain?… and then beyond that… how am I able to feel?… How is it that I can be aware of the fact that I’m thinking?… How is it that I can be aware of what my feelings are?’

That suggested I’m not the thoughts, or the feelings, I’m something beyond the science.

And then I start wanting to understand more about things outside the context of science. Beyond that realm, or that context. Which generally get wrapped into the term ‘spirituality’, which I think has a lot of misconception around it, but you know, it’s just—it’s always all about going to those lower levels of abstraction.

The computer program can only do the things that its language allows it to, but if you just peel back another layer and look at: well, how is it the computer program is able to run?

Now you can see that the operating system is able to do the things that the computer program didn’t even know were there.

It’s—kind of matrix style, you know, if you’re living in a world that is a computer simulation—you feel like whatever layer of abstraction you’re at is the deepest one. You can’t—you have no awareness of what’s beyond it, but that says nothing about—that has nothing to say that there isn’t something beyond it.

The other analogy would be dimensions. Physical dimensions. If you lived in a 2D world, the people who live in the 3D world would be able to see the sheet of paper that you live on and see that there’s something beyond it, but you in the 2D world on the sheet of paper—you can’t—to you that’s all there is. You can’t see over someone’s head—that notion doesn’t exist in your context; it very much exists to someone in a higher dimension.

And so on and so forth.

So—

Where was I?

So I start to deconstruct things. And it makes it very easy to pick up new skills, because I can ‘break out of’ the system and look on a deeper level at—how did the system come to be?

And I think that very much helps in—that makes you better at doing things and operating within the system.

I think—the MU or MIU or whatever system in GEB by Douglas Hofstadter, it’s very early on in the book, though the idea gets revisited a lot throughout: it talks about a similar idea that within the confines of the system it’s impossible to prove whether the system itself is solvable. You could keep going forever without ever finding out whether the problem is solvable or not, but as soon as you’re able to break out to a deeper level, as soon as you’re able to break out of the system and look at it from an outer perspective, you’re able to figure out for definite whether it’s solvable or not. Very easily.

So being able to do those things, which is to break out of the system, and to see how things connect, makes it very easy to pick up new skills, like programming languages—I don’t see why you’d be confined to one.

And, so when it comes to… I’m wondering how this entire chain of thought started.

It was something around how when the iPhone came out I could see that the App Store was going to be popular. As soon as the ability to make those apps was at all on the horizon, I taught myself how to do that. How to make apps. Because I could sense that the market would respond very well to this. On a technical level, I didn’t have an iPhone yet, but I could use the simulator and so on to begin with, and it all came to me very intuitively. Because I could see how it interconnected with the programming that I done in the past, in different languages, on different systems, and so I learned that. And it set me up very well for several years when I became an iOS consultant. I’m talking 2008-9, through to 2013, I started a SaaS, and built the iOS app, and so on, ran that for a couple of years.

But it’s that intuition, that ability to see systems from outside the systems, taking things apart in that way, that sets me up to be able to do that kind of thing.