As we sat down to dinner last night, my son said, “Look. Kobe died.”
I looked at the phone screen. My first thought was: he was so young and oh my gosh his daughter. My next thought was: the rape.
I have never stopped thinking about the night Kobe raped a 19-year-old woman while she was working at his hotel. Read more
I coach lots of parents who look at scaling back work and worry about what they’ll do when their kids grow up. If you are one of those people, you are about to save the $350 coaching fee.
What you want to do for work when your kids are young is not what you want to do for work when your kids are grown. For one thing, you can’t imagine what will be available when your kid is 18. Also, you can’t imagine what you’ll be like when your kids grow up.
Shortly after I raised $500,000 for Quistic, I realized my kids needed a lot more attention than I was giving them. I tried to adjust how I spent my time, but more pressure made me feel more crazy. So, finally, at a board meeting, I explained to investors that running a startup is so intense that it’s actually as inflexible as working 9 to 5 (which is really 8-7) in an office, and I am missing too much of my kids’ childhoods.
I assumed the investors would replace me as CEO, but they told me to just slow down the growth of the company. “Take a few years break,” they said.
We agreed that when the kids got older I’d start scaling the company again. I was relieved to not have to give up everything permanently. I could go back.
But now the kids are older, and going back to that life feels like taking a step back. Last year I forced myself to try something new and I offered a one-year writing program. I loved it. All year long I talked with people about their writing, and books we love, authors we hate. It was exciting to watch people in the course become great writers over twelve months’ time.
Earlier in my life, I taught one-day writing courses at Brown and Cornell and told everyone my real job is launching startups. I have changed. That’s how I know you will, too. You will do something you did not consider before you had kids. And you will be good at it. It’s just so hard to imagine until you give it a try.
Another industry I said I’d never be a part of is publishing. It didn’t make sense to me when there was so much more money in startups. But I’m offering the one-year writing program again this year, and I’ve added something really special: a book deal. The best writers from this year’s program will be published in an anthology. I’m excited for the book to be special and important to the writers who are published. I want the book to be nice to hold and fun to read; it should be the quirky book people leave out on the table to share with their friends.
I am so happy to have spent the last year cultivating a group of writers — many of whom had never really written before. And I am happy to offer the program for a second year to people who want to be part of my writing program. We will all grow together because I’m still growing into my new choice too. As a startup founder, I used my platform to promote other startup founders and their companies. This year I will use my platform to promote other writers and their stories.
This turn of heart is not anything I expected years ago when I admitted I had to scale down my career. At that time I was disappointed and terrified. But I didn’t need to be so scared. It turns out each of us has a new episode in our career when our kids get older. We get a new chance to decide what we want. And we get to look
at the world in a fresh way as we enlist people to help us get what we want.
Not all of you have thought about writing before, but many of you have. And I hope you’ll consider joining me for this year’s writing program and all the potential that comes with it. For all of us.
Here’s the information about this year’s writing course. The price is $1550 now, but the price will go up February 1, 2020. Sign up now!
When asked what traits society values most in boys, only 2% of male respondents in PerryUndem’s survey asked men what traits society values most in boys, 2% answered honesty and morality, and 8% said leadership skills—traits that are, of course, admirable in anyone but have traditionally been considered masculine. Orenstein says that when she asked boys what they liked about being a boy, most of them drew a blank. One college sophomore said, “Huh, that’s interesting. I never really thought about that. You hear a lot more about what’s wrong with guys.”
Here are some areas where we lack clear language to describe a phenomenon the media covers over and over again:
Feminism celebrates women who choose paths typical to men over women who choose paths typical to women. The problem with this approach is that in the last ten years researchers have found that women who think like men are not neurotypical women; these women have Aspergers. Read more
Recently I wrote about how most women over 40 working full-time in an office have autism. One of the comments on that post was from Marcy. She wrote:
The US is one of the only countries in which working extremely long hours is extremely rewarding. Other countries tax very high income to the point that it’s not worth earning. In those countries, it’s possible to take care of children and have an interesting job. Because even if a job is really interesting, people don’t work very long hours. Read more
Generation Z has identified the people obstructing their way, and Gen Z calls that group Boomers. Regardless of age. A Boomer is anyone not taking action to support Gen Z’s agenda. I love that. Read more
My older son has been entrenched in science curriculum ever since he was 12 and hired his own tutor. I told him we were unschooling and I don’t believe in standard curriculum. We argued. Then he said, “Mom you’re so good at finding people to hire, you should find me a biology tutor.”
Anyone who comes up with ideas for businesses has more than one they can use. So if you want to start a business and you don’t have an idea, just steal one. Here’s an idea I’m not doing anything with.
This picture is of my journal from third grade. I’ve been keeping a journal since before I could write. Sometimes I’ll open a volume randomly and find something notable and send it to my brother.
The circled text says, “Most kids have to brush their teeth, but we don’t.”
I didn’t realize everyone was brushing their teeth every day until my mid-20s. I thought brushing was like making a bed. We all KNOW we’re supposed make our bed but it’s not fun so people don’t always do it. I thought brushing was optional and that this was understood by everyone.
That’s a recurring problem for people with autism. We know that a lot of things that should happen are not all that important. It’s just that neurotypical people have a natural sense of what everyone agrees is important. Whereas people with autism assume that if the task is a pain, then we can ignore it.
Writing in a journal is something people admire. So no one ever thought to look at WHY I was writing so much. They just assumed that writing is good, and self-discipline is good, so writing in her journal is good. But actually, I’ve found that when someone is doing something more than almost everyone else, they have a gift but also a corresponding deficit. Because there is no free lunch in anything, including neurobiology.
The reason I wrote so much is that it helps me with anxiety. Also, I felt that nothing in my life really happened until I wrote it down. By the time I got to college, I would avoid seeing people or going to class so that I could catch up on documenting my life in my journal. By my mid-20s I was writing in my journal three or four hours a day.
When I took anxiety medicine, in my 40s, I stopped wanting to write in my journal. I just stopped. Because my brain was calm for the first time in my life. That’s when I started thinking about the huge number of things I was doing in my life to compensate for autism. Lots of people say, “Just do xxx.” But it’s really really hard for people with autism to “Just do” what other people can do. So we hide.
Also, people with autism have superpowers. And the more we understand what’s special about us, the more we can leverage that to circumvent things that we can’t make ourselves do. When you see someone with autism who is successful, you are seeing that person avoiding everything they don’t want to do. It’s a trick. I’ll show you how to do it.
The biggest problem with not understanding autism is not understanding who we are and why we do what we do. I’ll help you put everything together in a way that does not feel lonely or exhausting—for us or the people dealing with us.
Here’s what we’ll cover in the course:
Day One: Everything you’ve been told is wrong
Did you know that 90% of women with autism are not diagnosed? This is because the medical community has no idea what they’re doing. And the result is that most of the research about autism is understated because half the people who would have been a yes—for any type of research—are a no.
I’ll tell you what this means for people with autism and how you can leverage the research that is just coming out to make better decisions about treatment. Here’s just one thing you’ll find out: Most prodigies have autism. See? No one reports this stuff. You have to get it from me.
Day Two: How to stay employed and stay married
Adults with autism are happy if they love their spouse and their spouse loves them. And they are not stuck on philosophizing about what the word love means.
So the most important skill for someone with autism is to stay married. I will give you hard and fast rules to guide you in picking a spouse. For example, if you pick someone with autism one of you needs a trust fund. And women with autism are the most likely candidate to be engaged to a sociopath.
If you are already married, I’ll show you how to look like you function as a normal adult without really doing it. And I’ll tell you the three signs that the person with autism is destroying the marriage and needs to be contained.
And I’ll show you how you will stay employed if you use the same rules at work for staying married at home.
Day Three: Introduction to the world of paid friends
The reason you don’t need socializing in childhood is that you can buy friends. Neurotypicals cannot do this, because they want so much in a friendship. People with autism are more practical.
I have been buying friends my whole life. I’ll tell you the types of friends you can buy for home and which you buy for work. And I’ll show you how to tell which problems you can solve with a paid friend. And how to get a real friend if the circumstance demands it.
Day Four: Q & A with Me and You
Ask me anything and I’ll give you a longer answer than you need until my co-host tells me to shut up. We learn through example.
Sign up now to get instant access to 5 hours of video lessons, 6 months of on-going support and weekly meetings with like-minded people. In this course, I will tell you what I’ve learned from coaching 300 people with autism and reading hundreds of peer-reviewed articles. I will send you fun things to read. We will chat. People with autism will be in heaven. People who don’t have autism will be shocked, but in a good way.
Tell me you don’t have autism and I’ll decide for myself and then tell you why I’m right. And then I’ll tell you that I know you have autism because you want to be right as much as I want to be right. And wanting to be right is a neurological tic that makes people want to strangle us.
Figuratively.