i
I am someone who has
always wanted to know more.
Elementary school. A flashlight, a book, and whatever Game Boy cartridge I'd been told to put away — all smuggled under the covers. I was already in the habit of staying up too late with whatever world I was inside. Books, Saturday morning Pokémon, music, video games. Everything was an entrance into somewhere worth knowing.
In third grade I followed my favorite teacher into the chess club. Made it to the semifinals against kids years older than me. Lost the final match. Didn't actually mind losing — by then I'd figured out that the playing was the thing.
In my early teens, I started taking apart broken laptops. The ones my family had given up on. I got a few of them working again — not because I knew what I was doing, but because I wanted to know how they worked.
Around the same time, I started drawing. Graphite, pencil, charcoal. Mostly portraits — faces are harder than anything else, and I wanted to know if I could. I spent hours getting an eye right, a jawline right, the way light falls across a cheekbone. The intake had become output.
I fell out of reading for a while. The intake never stopped, though — it just kept finding new shapes. YouTube, games, conversations, code. Different shapes; same hunger.
Later in my teens, someone handed me a copy of the D&D Player's Handbook, and that was a different door entirely. Suddenly the worlds I'd been escaping into as a kid were ones I could build myself. I started writing — characters, settings, the rules of invented places. I still do. Worldbuilding turned out to be the thing where reader, writer, builder, and dreamer all collapse into the same activity.
By age 24, I'm Chief Business Officer at Comix Wellspring. We help comics creators handle the back-end of running their businesses, so they can keep drawing, writing, creating. On the side I build things for myself — a personal dashboard, a personal library of knowledge called Commonplace, random software tools, things I needed and couldn't find. Most of what I make is just my philomath habit, externalized.
Lately, breadth doesn't feel like enough.
I've spent my whole life pulling threads from everywhere — fields, books, conversations — building what I can only describe as a knowledge web in my head. Each new thing connects to something else. The web grows. That's the part I love.
But I can feel the pull toward depth now. Toward picking one thing and going deeper than feels reasonable. I'm circling a PhD — in strategy, in psychology, in something at the intersection where business and human behavior actually meet. I don't know yet. I'm trying to figure out which thread, when pulled hard enough, would unravel into something worth giving a decade to.
I don't have the answer yet.
This site is where I think out loud while I find it.
Below: what I'm writing, what I'm building, what I'm trying to work out.
— JS