Many years ago one of our community members mentioned they were at an SEO conference where a speaker from Distilled mentioned that SEOmoz had hired them to try to outrank us for seo tools, though they were unable to. At the time I think Moz had around 200 employees, while I had around 2.
How was I able to outcompete at like a 100:1 ratio? At the time I chalked it up to love for SEO. However, if you are self-employed and are hyper-successful that can hide autism quite well.
My daughter recently turned 9 and was diagnosed as being autistic. Years before she was diagnosed formally I thought she might have been a bit on spectrum from an interaction we had. My wife bought some new shoes (from Dr. Comfort no less!) that did not have particularly good grip, and she missed a step on the stairs, breaking a bone in her foot. When I had Giovanna in a wheel chair and we were about to leave Aja came over and I thought she was going to wish her mother a speedy recovery, but instead she asked what button she should press on the iPad playing a game. Upon seeing that I was like ... I think she might be a bit on spectrum.
Years later, after multiple other examinations, the same conclusion was a formal medical analysis. After she was diagnosed, I spoke with some mental health people and took an online test recommended by Allison Osborne.
When I took the test I was thinking I bet I score a bit high. Then I saw the results and was like ... yup.
| |
Score |
Percentile |
Descriptor |
| Total (0-50) |
36 |
99.7 |
Pronounced |
| Social Skill (0-10) |
8 |
99.1 |
Pronounced |
| Attention Switching (0-10) |
10 |
99.93 |
Pronounced |
| Attention to Detail (0-10) |
8 |
88 |
Consistent with Autism |
| Communication (0-10) |
6 |
97.1 |
Consistent with Autism |
| Imagination (0-10) |
4 |
84 |
Consistent with Autism |
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The respondent's score on the Attention Switching subscale is on the 99.93rd percentile when compared to adults in the general population and the 87th percentile when compared to Autistic adults. This suggests a preference for predictability and routines, and they may experience increased stress in response to unexpected changes. They might find it challenging to shift focus quickly, impacting their ability to adjust to new activities or interruptions.
The respondent's score on the Social Skill subscale is on the 99.1st percentile when compared to adults in the general population and the 60th percentile when compared to Autistic adults. This suggests possible difficulties with social confidence and comfort in interactions, which may lead them to feel less at ease in social situations or less inclined to engage in group activities. They may find social norms unclear or challenging to navigate, impacting their preference for or
enjoyment of social gatherings.
The respondent's score on the Communication subscale is on the 97.1st percentile when compared to adults in the general population and the 27th percentile when compared to Autistic adults. This indicates potential difficulties in conversational flow and understanding indirect communication cues, such as tone of voice, body language, or facial expressions. They may find interpreting these social cues challenging, which could contribute to occasional misunderstandings in social exchanges.
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A lot of life experiences made sense when I examined them through the above lens. Like a lot of my jokes tend to be deadpan or plays on words. My wife is a social butterfly, so I seem more colorful and real when I am under her halo. When I am by myself most of the time I prefer to be in my own world thinking and learning, or walking and singing without much talking to other people.
Some of the experiences which are a bit aligned with the above are related to times in the Navy. When September 11th happened my boss and his boss were off the submarine and we were cooling down the reactor plant, then the planes flew into the World Trade Center buildings during the middle of that, so we flipped and brought the reactor plant back online. I think I was the second most junior person in my division but was responsible, so I was leading the division that day. A 4-star admiral was in the engine room and asked the boat's captain how long until the reactor plant checklist would be completed and I answered "about a half hour, but you are both in the way."
In retrospect that is pretty absurd, but that's sort of just how I work when I am locked in on a particular task. The other side of that intense focus is the ability to do things to an extreme degree that most can not comprehend. Like when we did drills I was always given the hardest drill set because I was best at being really aggressive with rapidly raising reactor power while still having it be controlled - like perfectly riding the line of the limit. You can imagine growing power at like a half million or three million percent each minute and keeping it there until the reactor plant is fully up. A person on this page mentioned 9 decades per minute, though our limit on the sub was a bit lower than that.
When you are low in the power range the stabilizing aspects of the negative coefficent of reactivity doesn't really kick in the way it does when you are higher in the power range. Sometimes there are errors too, like one time my roommate put the air conditioning plant online when we were still low in the power range and I had to shim in the control rods for about a minute and a half straight to offset the impacts of the more dense moderator from the cooling of the plant by the heavy HVAC load.
On the submarine I think there are 7 different copies of the reactor plant control manuals. Some aspects of the manuals are based on limitations from prior plant designs and then they update them periodically over time. I was the person who put all the manual changes in all 7 sets, which made it easy to memorize the changes as they happened. Sometimes during ORSE they would grade you on a drill that you were not allowed to even test on, and then if you did something in a way that would be the logical way to do things you could lose points for not doing the procedure aligned with older way on older ship designs, and then they would update the reactor plant manuals to the way you should do them as you did & lost points for. :D
The ship also had the ability to run the coolant pumps and arbitrary frequencies to change the submarine's sound signature. One night while standing watch one of the pumps went offline and I had to switch the pump configuration. If you were in an active war zone the response procedure to this would be different than the response when you are not. This is something you are never drilled on either.
When I joined the Navy I had a 99 score on the ASVAB and then took the nuclear test, which was mostly just math and logic stuff. The test had 80 questions on it and they asked me how many I thought I got right. I said 76 and they laughed at me, saying nobody ever scored that high. Then I explained there were 4 questions left when I got bored and the correct answer was not even listed as an option one of those last four questions and they said "oh you saw that one" and I was like "yep." They then got my test score and it was 76.
The above math stuff was consistent with early childhood. In second grade my teacher would take the workbook away from me because I would do it in advance. After grade school they had me take the college level entrance exam and I was at college sophomore level in math and was only at around my grade level in literature. Thus, as logic might not suggest, I became a writer.
My wife met me around the height of my popularity, so my domain expertise hid a lot of the ... erm ... flaws in my personality. Like if you love a topic and are seen through that lens you look better than you are, because you are being judged at your best rather than your average. Quite often I swing and miss on the social front. If ever I get too frustrated with things I just walk away to reframe because sometimes I don't know how to re-center without like a frame switch. My wife and I both like watching the Love on the Spectrum series on Netflix, though she still wants to see me as being a bit less eccentric than I am (love is blind & all of that).
If I were born at a different time I might have been featured in a show like that Netflix series. In high school someone was stopped just outside of the class by a police officer and they were doing a field sobriety test. I said I am not as think as you drunk I am occifer and the whole class laughed. Then a classmate named Amy, who I believe was the homecoming queen and prom queen blurted out "I bet Aaron would be a fun guy to go out with." The teacher in that class was great at ribbing me, but in this instance he immediately goes into cupid mode.
him: You like him?
her: Yes
him: and you like her?
ne: Yes
him: so why aren't you going out?
me: I don't know.
That was the last time that topic came up at school and that was that. Or almost the end of that story.
Then a little over a year later I am in the Navy and go home to visit my family for the first time. My brother has me take him to a dance club and he does not tell me it is a gay club, but tells all his friends I am his 18 year old brother in the Navy. I felt like the prom queen or homecoming queen with all the pitches there but was all "no thanks." This club is like 70 miles from where I lived and out of the blue the same girl from high school is randomly there that night. I still am socially awkward and it is loud as hell, so she probably concluded "oh that is why" without understanding the autistic part.
A lot of people struggle to distinguish between when I am being dead serious or joking. Some of the real stories sound fake and some of the jokes sound real, but I don't mix up the deliveries anywhere near as much as I should, and sometimes the effort to say I am being real or it is just a joke is taken as the affirmation of the opposite.
When we ran an office I told our workers they should be able to get at least 2 or 3 links a day. They thought I was being overly optimistic, so then I spent a day implementing the same advice I was giving and got like 18 links that day. Angel was a consistent performer until the office closed. Ralph was more hit or miss, but when he saw the results he became more consistent.
We had one writer who had a fake college degree. I did not want to hire her because I saw excessive keyword repetition in her writing sample. The lawyer wanted me to wait like a quarter year or something before firing her. I go home frustrated every time I read her work because I knew I spent more time and effort rewriting it than she spent writing it in the first place. The topic depth was such that she could write an article about search engines broadly and somehow just happen to miss the existence of Google. When it comes time to fire her my wife and lawyer went in the room with me and I have to look like a total heel as both of them tell her they were rooting for her and I just come across as like a destroyer of dreams or something (when really she was just mailing it in). Then the worker comes in to pick up her last check a few weeks later and my wife means to text me a message and accidentally sent it to the ex-worker. This is a rare instance where karma overrides my wife's social graces and I am a little less bad than I looked previously. :D
For as horrific as my interpersonal skills are, which rely on socially awkward jokes as like table stakes right after hello & get bored quickly, my old business partner who made it to partner at an ad agency before quitting the agency world to work online told me I had the best marketing instincts he had ever seen by someone not actually formally trained. But, me being the fool that I am, I tried to pair him (an eloquent perfectionist who has a keen eye for kerning and monochromatic design) with another one of my friends who tended to do things a bit sloppy but was fast as hell. That did not work out too well. My social awkwardness made me unaware that my range of being able to work with A or B did not mean A and B would work well together. It was only after I engineered that trainwreck that I realized what I did there.
A lot of my marketing knowledge actually came from collecting baseball cards in high school and selling them at flea markets and baseball card shows. One time at a flea market an older guy who was selling cards came by with a fat stack of cash and was like "I am cleaning up" so then I checked out his layout and approach and instantly got the contextually relevant stuff. The baseball player who was born nearby will sell for above book price, organizing cards by favorite player makes it easy for people to self-select categorizing what they would like to pay the most for, having oddities that are offbeat or weird guarantees having something that a player collector does not yet have, you don't always need to have the newest products to make sales, being organized was a great way of adding value to product, some cards would sell better at card shows and others would sell better at flea markets, you can predict trends by media coverage and (for example) know that certain players would become widely collected as their media coverage went up after being traded (like Dennis Rodman going to the Chicago Bulls), and on and on.
One time in high school I was sick the same day that another kid named Aaron was sick. He was a year ahead of me in math. Then the next day the math teacher was sick and the substitute teacher gave me the wrong exam. I did a little over half of the test and I turned it in to the teacher because I explained it had to be the wrong exam as it would take me almost the entire period to complete. She asked if I was sure because I had all the answers right so far.
Somehow a lot of my life has been a bit self-organized around autistic stuff without any of it being intentional. I told my friend who was the best man at my wedding about my daughter being diagnosed as on spectrum and he told me the nut does not fall far from the tree, he is on spectrum and is almost certain I am. My lead writer I am sure is on spectrum. When we had an office he was in his own world in a way that our glue player and lead designer were a bit in awe of. He added social charm to situations in about the same way I did. When I showed my head programmer my test results he (who calls me out when I am wrong) was arguing that if anything my answers were completely reasonable to him and his score would be even higher, then he sent me Am I German or Autistic?.
Result: Both. The Wittgenstein Result. German 47%. Autistic 51%.
For the skills I have in math some of the interpersonal skills I have suck because I can get bored and/or sidetracked. My wife is great at seeming interested in just about everything. I am much narrower in my interests and am not even capable of faking interests in most topics. I have always only ever had like a few close friends who really cared for me and then not much of a big circle beyond that. You can always go watch pro sports, live music, or Cirque du Soleil for some inspiration. Though most of life is the boring day to day stuff. Having a consistent routine, trying to be healthy, and get your 20,000 steps a day if you can.
Tokyo is such a great city to walk around.
There are certain actions people take that I would just not estimate were in the realm of human potential. Like historically I thought some large systems of power were highly corrupted through layers of inefficiency and principal-agent problems stacked atop each other, but I simply failed to grasp how some people are absolute psychopaths until seeing the trail of carnage they created.
The good news for psychopath criminal frauds Christopher Angus and Stella Huh is they are going to get a lot of media exposure in the near future.
The bad news for psychopath criminal frauds Christopher Angus and Stella Huh is the type of exposure they will be getting.
They will be accurately branded as the utter human garbage that they are. I will blog regularly until both of the criminals are rotting in cages where they belong. And since their crimes are of the racketeering variety, each charge of each type is a separate 20 year sentence. Both of these scumbags will die in cages - as they should.
Shout out to Karl Blanks and Ben Jesson from Conversion Rate Experts. Back when we worked together they told me their favorite blog posts of mine were the flame-styled posts. Those posts never made many sales but were always super satisfying, as though a blog post was helping to realign the universe. I predict a record fruitful harvest this year. Karl was a former rocket scientist, and I am about to blast off soon.
I hope Chris and Stella enjoy the ride as much as I love becoming the captain of their lives. Excitement ahead. Things will fall into place. :)
