I sometimes wonder why I am so detached from reality and why most of my mental space is occupied by things that seem impossible to do. Yet I am more comfortable in that headspace than I am in reality. While some people think of fantasy as dragons, castles, monsters, and mystery, for me fantasising is where I go to get into real technical detail.
AI is helping me refine this even more. I only get to talk it out and let it help me with research. I know there are tools out there that can visualise my thinking, but very few have the level of precision I hold in my mind. That makes using them frustrating because no tool yet allows me to fully visualise my endless ideas. I have to assume Elon Musk is like this except he has the money to build anything he can think of.
Like all things my ideas happen in waves. Sometimes I am exploring all manner of things, sometimes I am obsessing over just one, and other times I am not thinking of anything at all. I do not know if my ideas are good but they seem worth exploring and I can spend every free moment turning them over.
I am certain I am a visual thinker as Temple Grandin describes in her book. The more time I give myself to think free of life’s distractions the more detailed my thoughts become. I often imagine being asked to live in a house with everything I could ever want inside and I ask myself whether I could stay there for 100 days or even a year. Honestly I think I could. The isolation appeals to me. Of course I miss physical contact but I am able to go into monk mode quite easily and could certainly stay the course if the incentive was big enough.
I do get restless and I do switch gears but most of the time I am all in. Recently I have been working on a superyacht complete with its many structural details and aligned with a lifestyle philosophy woven into the branding. Then today I found myself thinking about the perfect desk setup and spent hours piecing together the most detailed configuration of a desk for someone like me. When I go deep I do not just think about its measurements and materials I think of all the different uses, the comfort and flexibility, the customisation. I am obsessed with the details.
This is not perfectionism. That comes much later in my process and often I never get that far. I simply do not have the means. I am convinced my mind is magical but I have little evidence for people to see. At best I sketch some things on paper. The design tools available to me together with my limited experience in using them make them not an option. AI might offer some hope but nothing available right now gives me what I need.
So the ideas remain in my head. At times it feels like an absolute waste. It can be frustrating and it can pull me into darker moods. I rarely show it but the truth is that I often feel down because I cannot bring what is in my head into reality.
Still I love the world in my mind. I can create all manner of things there far beyond what I make professionally or through the teams I lead. And I have come to realise this. Even if my ideas never fully exist in the real world they still shape the way I see it. They shape how I lead, how I create, and how I push at the boundaries of what is possible.
This is living in a maker’s mind.