the story behind my work

People sometimes ask me if Mind the Gap, Rent Is Due, Transformation • Connection • Flow, and Define • Describe • Infer are four different ideas. They're really not! Looking back, I realize I've been working on the same question for most of my life. Each idea was just another piece of the answer. I just didn't know it at the time.

It started with a question: How do we actually understand the world?

Honestly, I've been thinking about this my whole life. School was always strange for me. Tests came easily. I could usually teach myself anything. But I was never actually good at school. I didn't like memorizing things just to forget them a week later. I wanted to know how everything fit together. That question followed me into college.

I took the MCAT three times. The first few didn't go the way I wanted. On my fourth attempt, I earned a perfectly balanced 10-10-10 and got accepted to medical school. Looking back, I don't think I was chasing medicine as much as I was chasing understanding.Then life happened.

My twenties were rough in a lot of ways. During that time, I disappeared into books - I call it my hibernation period. Looking back, I think learning became my way of making sense of the world. I wasn't trying to invent anything. I was just relentlessly curious. I read everything I could get my hands on. Science. History. Economics. Psychology. Philosophy. Technology. Art. Evolution. Physics. Pretty much anything that made me ask another question.

Eventually something strange started happening. The subjects stopped looking different. Patterns kept showing up everywhere. Biology wasn't just biology. Economics wasn't just economics. History wasn't just history. Different disciplines were describing many of the same ideas. They just had different vocabulary. That eventually became Mind the Gap. Not another way to memorize information. A way to understand anything.

Then came Define • Describe • Infer…

Years later I was working at Capital One. Part of my job involved process improvement, data, teaching statistics, and helping people solve problems. I noticed people almost always skipped straight to conclusions. We would argue about solutions before we even agreed on what the problem was. So I started simplifying my own thinking.

First...Define: What exactly are we talking about?

Then...Describe: What do we actually observe? Not opinions. Not guesses. Just what's there.

Only then...Infer: Given the evidence, what conclusions actually make sense?

It sounds simple, but it completely changed the way I approached almost every problem.Eventually I realized it worked for almost anything, not just business.

Then I noticed another pattern…

As I kept studying different systems, I found myself asking the same three questions over and over.

• What transformed?

• What became connected?

• What began to flow?

Whether I was looking at evolution, organizations, cities, AI, the internet, or financial systems, those three questions kept revealing what had actually changed.That became Transformation • Connection • Flow. Not because everything is the same. Because those questions seem to uncover the important parts of almost every major change.

Rent Is Due was almost an accident.

This is actually my favorite part. Lately I've been painting a series of small Japanese watercolor paintings of the six homes I grew up in around the world. So I've had this idea of home on my mind constantly. At the same time, I was thinking about innovation and artificial intelligence. One day those two ideas collided.

I suddenly asked myself: What if information has always been looking for a better home? That one question changed everything. Instead of following the history of technology...I started following the history of information. Particles. Atoms. Molecules. DNA. Brains. Language. Writing. Books. Computers. The Internet. Artificial Intelligence. Every time information reached the limits of its current home, it found another one. That's when the whole story appeared: Rent Is Due.

How do we actually understand the world?

Looking back, I don't think I discovered four different frameworks.I think I spent thirty years asking one question from four different directions: How do we actually understand the world?

• Mind the Gap became the mission: help people build understanding instead of memorizing facts.

• Define • Describe • Inferbecame the method: how do we reason well?

• Transformation • Connection • Flowbecame the lens: what questions reveal the deepest patterns?

• And Rent Is Due became the story: what happens when you follow one thing, information, across 13.8 billion years?

They're not separate ideas. They're one journey answering the question that I've been asking for most of my life.