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~Owner’s Origin Story~
I’ve written this site with one simple belief in mind; that the anomalies and abnormalities of the world are what lead us to great empowerment, that you cannot lead without being different from those who follow you. Before I ask you to listen to me, my opinions, my beliefs, or my vision, I want you to know who I am. If you find that you can trust me, keep reading. If you’re doubting me now, already, then click off the site and walk away. Please, do not waste both my product, and your time, for the sake of appearing interested.
For starters, while I know it’s not the best way to start off a site like this, I must tell you that I was born with Autism. People judge, and others say that I should be more protective of their pleasant perceptions of me. In all honesty however, I don’t care what strangers think about me. In truth, I’d rather have a thousand of you click off this site and have it be read by the people that’ll actually listen, than have it be bought by countless strangers, and never be read, or listened to at all.
As I was saying, I was born with Autism, ADHD, Anxiety, and Bi-Polar Depression (although the medical term is “Manic Depression”). I was diagnosed with Bi-Polar only in 2018, 20 years after my birth. The rest were diagnosed at a very young age. I was always told, repeatedly, pretty much since birth, the same old mantra: “Connor, you’re not able to socialize like everyone else. You may never be able to. You’re just going to have to learn to live with that.”
And yes, ladies and gentlemen, I am the one writing my own site. Please do not assume that the holy word of all professionals is correct without exception.
I have been underestimated since birth. I’ve been considered a freak, and a weirdo, among other things. What I can tell you for certain is this: You can’t lead without being different from those who follow you. In my most recent years, people have come to me for advice even when I’ve specifically told them that I most likely don’t hold the answer. I’ve gone from being seen as “retarded”, their words, NOT MINE, to being seen as quote “Genius”, “Charismatic”, and if you’re looking for a name “A Gentleman”.
I did it, not by listening to the adult claimed “professionals”, not by studying the crowd of “normals”. I did it through a stack of paper; but perhaps not the type you’re thinking of. As I said, I believe in the power of abnormalities. You may think I’m too weird, but I often believe that you’re all, too normal.
In third grade I was alone. I wasn’t just alone because I didn’t have any friends. I was also alone because I couldn’t make them.
One day, I was out on the blacktop, doing math, at recess, by myself, because I had nothing better to do. When I looked up from my notepad, everyone had vanished. “They forgot me out here.” I thought to myself “This is a whole new low, even for me.”, but then I looked over to the teacher’s picnic table. It’s the one place that everyone avoided, and yet there they were, every single student surrounding the table. I went to the outskirts of the crowd and decided to stand on my tiptoes. With a quick look over my right shoulder I saw a man, a grown man, doing card tricks. “Shit!” I thought to myself “It’s a frickin’ teacher pulling everybody in.” Yes, ladies and gentlemen, I had a potty mouth back in the day. We aren’t all born sophisticated, you know. By the time I had thought these French thoughts of mine it was too late, He had spotted me standing out from the crowd like a kid in exile, and what does a good teacher do with a kid in exile?
He pointed two fingers at me, palm up, then curled them in and out twice, to form a come hither motion. “Wanna see a magic trick?” asked the ignorant man while doing so. This is how I, me, the kid with no friends and a lot of enemies, terrified of even opening my mouth or being the center of attention for fear of ridicule, ended up sitting down at a table, with tens of students blocking all exits, starting a match of wits with a man who’s already shown me that he’s a professional swindler.
He started by having me pick a card. The It was the 7 of Diamonds (I say for example). I then placed the card in the middle of the deck. Then he shuffled the deck and looked at me, all serious-like. After all this, he finally decided to pick up the top card from the deck and ask “Is this your card?” showing the 5 of Hearts (I say... for example). And that my friends, in case you were unaware, was not my card (You know what I want to put here). I, in turn, said “No,”. He flipped over the next card. That wasn’t it. Another, and another, until there were 7 cards on the table (...).
I said, rather proudly, “You might want to try a different trick.”. He smiled, asked me to hold out my hand. I pinched the cards. With one swift motion, all the cards from my hand were on the ground, all but one. There was one card in my hand, my dearest readers. It was the 7 of Diamonds, my, freely selected, card (I say. For example).
I was astonished, confused, bamboozled. I had to know how it was done. It was just like I had seen on TV. I thought it was only POSSIBLE on TV. I asked him - No. I begged him. He wouldn’t tell me. I went home, and began my “research” on my brand spanking new iPod Touch. Ah, those were the days. I looked up every detail, from fake mistakes to card slapping, until the day I finally found it. There was only one problem. All the tutorials used terminology I had never even heard of before. It took years to be able to perform the tricks, years that I would be willing to sacrifice to beat that schmuck teacher.
You need to understand. I hated teachers, not because they were bad people, but because of all the awful misunderstandings I’ve constantly had with them. You see, in school, everything is about communication. Knowledge is useless until it is shared in some way, be it a product, or a lecture, or any other form. Don’t misunderstand. I was smart, I was doing exponents in second grade, solving quadratics in every known method by 6th. It wasn’t just math. I just... knew things. For example, I understood what Shakespeare was saying without any prior experience or lecturing. He just... made sense to me.
But, communication was essential. In math it was always, “show your work”. In English it was always, “Did your parents tell you that?”. No matter what I did, I was misunderstood. If I tried to answer they wouldn’t understand me. This often led to them thinking I was cheating. If I said nothing, it was assumed I didn’t really know anything, and I was ignored. I’ll say it again.
I, hated, my teachers.
In such, to beat this teacher at his own game, not in some game of words, but a game of action, cleverness and wit? The thought was invigorating to the highest degree.
I ended up studying for 3 years, and as if by the hand of Fate, I ended up in his sixth-grade class. This was still elementary school, and the first day often allowed for a bit of free time. When the moment was right, and we were both free and available to talk with one another, I went up to him and asked, with a smug grin on my face:
“Wanna see a magic trick?”
“Sure.” He said, and so, I began performing his own trick back to him, afterward performing an erdnase one handed cut (a one-handed shuffle often performed by card professionals). He said, “Wow, I don’t know what that cut is, but have you seen this one?” He then proceeded to pull a deck of cards from inside the desk drawer and do a different one-handed cut. “It’s called the scissor cut,” he said proudly. And so, I went home, and looked up… yes, you guessed it, the “scissor cut”. This, ladies and gents, is how my one-sided competition began.
Eventually, however, I started to recognize something interesting - and important. You see, I had been practicing on other people. These people, over time, grew highly interested in the card tricks. They were becoming interested in me. Now, people were asking me questions and actually waiting to hear the answers, and, somehow, I was… able to communicate effectively. They understood me. It was clear they understood me, but how?
I often learn best by analogies, so I started with the basic concepts of intelligence and learning and then extrapolated from there. I realized that to be taught to an extraordinary level with such speed, you’d need an extraordinary teacher. This is why I began looking into “Geniuses”. Eventually, I found that the same saying kept popping up, over and over again.
“There’s a thin line between madness and genius.”
I began looking into this quote and eventually found something quite strange; an anomaly, or abnormality, if you will.
People often say this quote. It’s very well shared, and yet… very few people who have heard it, have ever become smarter. If people knew the locations of madness and genius so well, as to even know the space between them, surely they’d have become more intelligent by now. That’s when I realized - they had no clue what they were talking about. It was all an illusion, just one big magic trick. There isn’t one thin line between madness and genius. There are two. These two lines are so similar from our perspective that they almost perfectly overlap within our vision. They’re so similar that we often mistake the difference. They even start and end with the same letters. These lines, are Sanity, and Society.
A genius is just a madman who’s being restrained by Sanity and Society. This is why you can have a man deemed loony in one year, and a genius several years later. If society finally catches up with him, and he’s finally within their realm, he’ll be considered genius. But that begged the question: Who lives, most, on the outskirts of sanity and society? I couldn’t go explaining it away as, “Smart people are too stupid, therefore there is no answer.” I had to keep digging. I knew I was close, and so I dug… and so I dug.
Who lives most on the outskirts of sanity and society?
I have my own interpretation, but I always like to allow for dispute and discussion. In such, I’d like to phrase it to you as a question. (I create through debate.)
In all of humanity, who lives more on the outskirts of sanity and society, than a child?
I cannot think of anyone greater. Now, sadly I must confess, what I’ve found on the other side of madness is not, in fact, intelligence. It is wisdom. There are several key differences:
- Intelligence can make all the right statements, while wisdom can ask all the right questions.
- Intelligence is about the facts, and knowing what to think. Wisdom is about the art of thinking and knowing how to think.
- Intelligence comes from studying. Wisdom comes from experiencing.
- Intelligence is stable. Wisdom is resilient.
- Intellect does not usually lead to wisdom, but wisdom does usually lead to intelligence.
- Adults have intelligence, but children have wisdom, and geniuses have both.
In short, what I was looking for was not merely an intellectual, but a successful human being, and I found them. Success is a result that often spawns, not just from intellect or wisdom, but from bot intellect AND wisdom. When a grown man or woman gains the insight of a child, you have the makings of a genius.
This is why I achieved what was once deemed impossible for me. I may not have learned from children, but I learned from perhaps the only communications specialists that have ever had the child’s seal of approval. I learned from magicians, masters of attention, story-telling, and directing. It’s no wonder people trust me to lead them. People always trust their magicians, so long as the performer’s good enough. That’s why we can lead you astray.
While children are not the only anomaly in my wheelhouse, the discovery of everyone’s lack of attention has led to many changes in my life, because one inaccurate claim can ruin someone’s life, and often it’s the people I care about. However, the moral of the story is this: I did the impossible through means the average person would have laughed at. In such, I have found a power that many people simply haven’t grasped.
Because they never even tried.
And I did it ALONE.
Because I had to.
Most people consider me too weird, and I, in turn, consider them too normal.
For you to do this, to achieve success, admiration, friends, loved ones, it’ll take risk. It’ll take going into places you’ve never been before, some out of fear, and some out of ignorance. You’ve gotten a taste of what it will be like on here, on this site. This journey will be a relatively difficult process; one that may take multiple sites, and multiple authors, but we have to start somewhere. It can be here or it can be there, but here. We. Are. This is the crossroads. Will you journey where you’ve never dared to travel before, or will you read the same old information you always have, site, after site, after site?
It’s your choice.
You need to choose.