The Optimist's Manifesto

This sums up my story and why I believe it's time for us to start an optimist's revolution.

I’m starting a revolution: an optimistic revolution.

Over the past few years, I’ve been through a meat grinder. Sure, there are all these tiny events, like a global pandemic, political unrest, and technological changes so rapid that nobody knows which jobs will be around in the next five years, but there have also been a number of events in my personal life. 

Because of all these changes, I’m now a die-hard optimist. And I’m going to make you one too.

In 2020, I had to re-learn who I was. That’s when I figured out I had lived the first 35 years of my life according to the wrong instruction manual. Turns out, that’s what happens when you have undiagnosed ADHD and Autism. Suddenly, things like “top of class in high school” to “7 years to complete college degree” made a lot more sense. There was a period of mourning where I thought about the life I could have had, if I had only been living my life with the right instruction manual. Then I discovered writing. Actual writing, about the things that I wanted to write about, not writing down whatever I was supposed to parrot to get a good grade.

And then I discovered that I could not only write, I could get paid for writing. Jackpot. So I went from writing online to help people all the way to writing online to build financial freedom. I ate up the content - make a 6 figure income from simply writing online! It’s so easy, if you aren’t doing it, there’s something wrong with you!

When I saw the class on how to make a 6 figure income on Medium, it was a no-brainer. We learned how to write headlines that made people click on them. We learned how to pour our emotions onto the page, really make people feel what we were feeling. This was new for me. Being Autistic, I’ve never been particularly good with emotions. Since they were so alien to me, my tendency was always to suppress them. All they ever did was screw things up for me. But I was caught up in the class, and determined to write my way to financial freedom. That was the promise, and that was my goal.

While learning all of this, I got into a fight with my dad over politics. It was a common thing for us. We’ve never seen eye-to-eye, so we’d argue about something in the news, and that would be that. Except for this time. Because I was a WRITER!

So I took what I had learned in the class. I wrote a title that I knew people would click: “Today, I gave my dad a choice: Trump or his grandson”.

Then I poured all of my emotions out into the post. I wanted the world to know how I was feeling. I wanted them to feel it with me. Except, turns out, when you’ve been suppressing emotions for a really long time, those emotions really want to come out. So if you start letting those emotions out, they’re going to start bringing out all sorts of other emotions along with them. The gate was open, and they were flooding out.

And not only were they flooding out into this post for Medium, they were flooding out on to social media. I was finding all the political articles being written, and responding to comments with my post. I was determined to get the eyeballs I wanted on this post. And I did. 200K views over a weekend. It was such a rush! Until it wasn’t, and then all I wanted was for it to be over.

See, there are some factors at play when writing online that I had no idea about at the time. First of all, the more extreme the headline, the less likely it is that people will actually read what you wrote. They’ll get all their emotions from the headline, and then fill in the details of the story with facts that fit their beliefs. When you put yourself out there, you get to see a reflection of yourself in the comments people write back. 

I got to see the reflection of a monster in the eyes of my readers. Sure, not all of them, but enough of them that it made me feel like one. After that weekend, I took the post down and replaced it with two others: one apologizing for the post, and one explaining how I had tried to craft it to be as emotionally charged as it could be, and then why I shouldn’t have done so. But the damage was done.

I’d already been added to lists for coordinated attacks on my social media accounts. Suddenly, I was getting weird mail, from out of state addresses. Have you ever had the experience of calling the cops about weird mail? And then had them come to your house because the mail was suspicious? And then explaining to them that you were a little worried because you had written stuff online that pissed people off? And finally having them carefully open cards (yes, they bought cards!) that contained handwritten threats?

Oh, and in addition to all of that, there were also a non-zero number of calls to my employer, trying to get me fired. There wasn’t any chance of that, because while I might have been an asshole to people online, I wasn’t threatening them or anything like that. I was simply sparking their anger to help get more readers.

I ended up deleting all of my social media accounts. They weren’t usable at this point. Nothing but constant attacks, and it wasn’t worth the cost to my mental health. I hoped that by going away, things would die down. And they did eventually.

But damn, that was a hell of a way to make $100. Not quite the 6-figure per year financial freedom I’d been promised. At this point, I had a choice to make. 

I could shrink back into myself. Put the Autistic Mask back on and go back to living mostly in my head, while I was externally the person who followed all the rules I was supposed to. That’s what I realized I had been doing with the weight of family responsibilities. All I had wanted was to be a good little employee who eventually had some economic breathing space, but no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t manage it. I pushed myself harder and harder. I was on medication for anxiety and depression, which pushed the real me deeper down. I used more and more energy on the mask I was wearing, trying to be the person I thought the economy wanted me to be. And when I didn’t have the energy to be that productive little employee, I took medication that kept me awake long enough to be “productive”. 

I couldn’t go back to that hell again. So I decided to take a different path.

The pandemic had freed me from that hell. It was one of the best things that ever happened for me, because it completely changed the rules of the game. For the first time, I had enough space to learn who I was and explore. Sure, I screwed up this first attempt. And I screwed it up big time. Not many people have gotten to experience failing on such a large stage. But damn, I’m never going to forget that experience. Really changed the “what’s the worst thing that can happen?” equation for me.

I decided to take that experience and learn from it. I wanted to know: how did I change my approach so quickly? What factors influenced my behaviors? 

Instead of going back to my hole and burying myself again, I got curious.

And once I started asking different questions in my life, I started getting different answers. I started making different decisions. I started to change. 

When you start to change, weird things end up happening. Especially when you change quickly. As I said, I had been living in my head for a long time. I didn’t talk much about hopes or dreams of the future. I simply tried to exist, because it was all I could do. So when I was suddenly writing online, having things blow up, talking about exciting ideas, my family had an intervention for me. They were worried about the change. So I got to go spend some time in intensive group therapy in order to prove that no, I didn’t have a mental breakdown. In fact, it was the opposite. I had mental clarity, more clarity than I’d possibly ever had.

Oh, and then I ended up quitting my job with no notice and trying to launch a startup. That failed pretty miserably. Turns out, it’s not as easy as it looks on Twitter. More pain from that. But I met my best friend! Also finished as a finalist in a pitch competition and got to blow my shot on a zoom call with a well-known billionaire investor. Made more mistakes, learned a ton, and continued to grow.

After shutting down that failed attempt, I got a job as an early employee at the startup I had been following closely. One that I was enamored with. One that made it look so easy, I thought it WAS easy.

It was the best job I ever had. For almost 2.5 years. Then they fired me, 3 weeks before the company retreat to Cancun. And I was finally happy again. I felt so light and free. Because even though it was the best job I’d ever had, it was still a job. It was limiting me to a box that I couldn’t fit into anymore. I just didn’t realize it until I was free.

After that, I decided to launch my own thing again. I knew what I had to do, I just needed to do it. And 4 months later, here I am. That equity I had vested in 2.5 years? Gone. Didn’t have enough cash to buy it before the options expired. My bank account keeps oscillating between empty and negative. I’ve got products in development and a lot of hope, but that hope doesn’t pay the bills. 

It’s a skill issue. I’ve realized that lately. So I’m continuing to get better. I have absolutely no doubt in my mind that I’ll be ok. Eventually. 

Because I’ve taken the pathless path. I went off-road and blazed my own trail. Sure, I’ve been caught in thorns, mauled by wild animals, starved, dehydrated, and infected along the way, but I’ve survived. (Note: that’s all metaphorically. Luckily, the products I build all take place online, so turn those words into their social media equivalents and you’ll understand if you’ve spent enough time on there). 

Throughout all of this, I’ve learned something that I want to share with the world. I’ve learned that optimism is rooted in agency. It’s easy to be a pessimist if you don’t have control over your future. If you sit and scroll social media, seeing everything bad with the world, and feeling powerless to change it, that’s where pessimism takes hold. The more you scroll, the less power you feel you have, and the darker your visions of what’s coming. 

That’s what social media tries to convince us of, because those are the emotions that are easy to trigger. It’s easy to share negative emotions. Social media algorithms inevitably pick up on those emotions first. Those are the strongest, most immediate emotions. That’s what I tapped into when I went viral. I saw how easy it was. That’s what I picked up on first too. 

I was the algorithm and it was me. But I decided I didn’t want to be that algorithm any more. I chose the path of optimism. Once I saw that I could affect the emotions of other people, I decided to use that power for good instead of evil. Turns out, that’s a lot harder, especially at scale. But it’s easy to do one to one. That’s why I love hopping on Zoom with someone and sharing my optimism with them. That’s a positive impact I can see and feel immediately.

It’s harder when you aren’t face to face. But when you start with one on one, you feel more confident in your one to many. I can’t always see the positive impacts I make with my videos, my writing, my podcasts.

But I know they are out there, because I see the impact when I’m sharing the same ideas face to face. 

That’s how I’m able to be an optimist. Because I’m not the only one working to make the world a better place. In my journeys, I’ve found a lot of other people who are also making the world a better place.

They aren’t as loud, they aren’t as obvious, and sometimes, they aren’t even online.

But they are out there. If you aren’t seeing one locally, that’s your opportunity to be the one.

I’ve made a lot of mistakes on my path. Because I’m willing to try and fail, I end up failing. But every time I fail, I bring more people into my circle. I give more people the confidence to try and fail. And the more attempts we make, the closer we get to success.

That’s why I’m optimistic as I keep failing. Even when I can’t see success, I see progress. That’s something you miss when you aren’t taking agency over your own life. You only see the talking points. You don’t see all the days in between.

With agency, you get to connect the dots yourself. You get to see the future moving closer. You can adapt to the world you begin to see more clearly.

That creates a flywheel that starts to build momentum. Once you take an optimistic view of the future, you believe you have agency in making that future happen. That sense of agency gives you energy to take action. The actions you take bring the future you want to see into focus. The future you see creates more optimism. And you build up momentum.

That’s why I want you to have a sense of optimism. Because it starts the flywheel, it’s our biggest defense against the pessimists. They won’t have the energy to make their negative futures a reality.

Instead, our positive visions of the future will build up the momentum we need to make it a reality.

And that starts with you. It’s time to be an optimist. It’s time to join the revolution. 

Because I’m making the world a better place. And I invite you to join me.