An Artist With Asperger's
I begin with two photos. The first is a conventional wedding party photo. The second is not.
I like the flower girl in the second photo. She is having none of this jumping. She seems to be saying: "I will not sacrifice my dignity."
Needless to say, the second photo got my attention.
I want to tell you how I discovered these two photos. It is a remarkable story. I came across the first step in this story in an article written by James Altucher, who offers a never-ending supply of weird and wonderful stories -- and also depressing ones. This one is wonderful. It is a typical Altucher story: "How to Deal With Crappy People." His titles have a way to grab your attention. Here, I read this:
I was talking about this with Penelope Trunk and Melissa S. [Name deleted as of December 2016, at her request] who works with Penelope. Penelope has an excellent blog I recommend. She also has Asperger's Syndrome which, from what I can gather, means she can't read social cues on people so has trouble knowing how to respond to people. So she told me her technique what she does.She uses something called Myers-Briggs to determines someone's personality type. Then, in advance of meeting that person, she looks up the personality type and figures out how she needs to respond and interact with that person.
I had heard of the affliction, but I did not know anything about it.
I had seen Penelope's blog before I read his article. It is beautifully constructed -- a model for what a blog should look like. Take a look: http://blog.penelopetrunk.com.
I clicked the link. On her front page was an article, "How to build a career if you have Aspergers." She began with this:
Roughly 80 percent of adults with Asperger's syndrome do not have full-time work, according to some studies. By the time I figured out I had the disorder, I had been fired from every job I had ever held. I had offended everyone I knew. Think of all the thoughts and judgments that go through your head that you'd never say aloud: You're fat. You're lazy. Your clothes don't fit. Your office smells. I say these things because they're true, and I've since built a career on saying what no one else will say--or maybe I have a career in spite of that.
How does someone with Asperger's cope with this? Here is how she did it.
If you have Asperger's, the key to building a career is to be very good at something. People accept my quirks because I'm so good at starting companies. My inability to see the rules makes me able to think outside the box. I don't see the box.It is crazy to think you can start a company from nothing and build it to $100 million in revenue. Yet I am excellent at selling this sort of thing to investors. For most of the world, crazy is bad. In the start-up world, crazy is good.
This got my attention.
I kept reading. She has posted links on Asperger's.
James had mentioned Melissa. So, I searched for "Melissa" on Penelope's search engine. Among a group of links, I got this: "Social skills boot camp." Melissa attended.
What I really want to tell you about Melissa though, is that she quit her $150,000/year in international finance to hang out with some nine-year-old Italian after school. She speaks Chinese, which is how she got the family to pay her enough money.
This got my attention. Who would quit a $150,000 a year job to teach a nine-year-old kid English?
Then this:
Like me, Melissa has Asperger's Syndrome. So I can finish her sentences for her, and she can finish my sentences. Which is funny because neither of us ever shuts up. So there are really never any sentences to finish.We are both very high-functioning for people with Asperger's. Both of us were in Special-Ed classes in high school. And both of us were in Honors classes as well.
I searched the Web for anything on her. In 2000, at the age of 15, she had her own website creation company. She was making $1,000 a week. By age 24, she was making $150,000 a year in Hong Kong in a finance firm. Then she quit.
This got my attention.
What is she doing now? She is a photographer. She has a site: http://[deleted at her request]. That was where I found the two photos.
Her career is surely remarkable. She had enormous success by age 15. She had remarkable success by age 24. But the money did not matter to her. She wanted to be creative in a different way. That second photo shows creativity. In 50 years, if the couple is still married, they will look back at that jumping photo as the highlight of the wedding album. It took a photographer who did not think inside the aesthetic box to take it.
I don't know if she will be able to make a middle-class income as a photographer. But when you can make $1,000 a week at age 15, you can always go back into the rat race. That takes a load off your shoulders. At age 15, I probably would have stuck with the $1,000 a week career. Money is tempting. The rat race, at some price, is tempting. I was a pretty good photographer at age 16. But I don't think I would have risked the 1958 equivalent of $1,000 a week for a career in photography.
If a person finds that career niche by doing what he really wants to do, I say "more power to him . . . or her." But I think it might be a good idea to combine photography and website design.
I thing her calling is photography. I think her job was website creation. Few of us ever match our callings and our jobs. I discuss this here: //www.garynorth.com/public/12189.cfm