Who designed this chair? It’s one of the most uncomfortable chairs I’ve ever sat in – and they claim to be a five star restaurant? There has to be a better way to make this. Did I finish that paper I was working on? I thought I did but I think I may have gotten distracted and forgotten to submit it. The line of people waiting to be seated is making the dining area entirely claustrophobic – isn’t there a better way to structure the flow of seating? I feel like these people are standing on top of me. And I can literally hear everyone’s conversations at the tables around me. I can’t even focus on what this guy is saying. Did I unplug my curling iron this morning? I hope it’s still not plugged into the wall. I really need to stop doing that. Why is he wearing that shirt? This is supposed to be a business meeting. I wish business meetings didn’t have to be so stuffy. If only every business meeting could be over ice cream sundaes, or maybe over bowling, or I’ve always wanted to have a meeting on one of those yachts that I saw in that movie one time. He has green stuff in his teeth – am I supposed to say something about that? Hmm, better not. I’ll stick to the salmon just in case. I wouldn’t want my teeth looking like that when I stand up to talk. I’m so late. There goes another one down the drain. I should really stop making three sets of plans in one night. Should I get up and leave? It’s probably okay, right? I mean, I’ve been here for three hours – how much of my time do they really deserve? What excuse should I use this time – keep it vague or go specific? This silverware is terrible. My rice keeps falling through the holes in my fork, and I feel like a child eating it with a spoon. I think it’s time I try to innovate on silverware – I mean, we’ve had the same three utensils for how long now? What were we talking about again? Oh, right – sales figures of some sort. Let me flip through the presentation real quickly on my lap. Or did I leave it in my other bag? Am I supposed to travel tomorrow, or was that next week? If only I could find my calendar. That’s a terrible idea. I don’t understand why we’ve been talking about this for forty minutes. We could have accomplished this in ten. Focus, Jenna, focus. Look at the person in front of you, and control your mind – control your thoughts. Finish what you need to and flesh out your ideas later. Or maybe I should just jot them down on my napkin really quickly, because I might forget. I doubt anyone will even notice.
Whether at a business meeting, dinner, a movie, or an event – these are usually the types of nonlinear thoughts that are flowing through my mind. I can’t help it – it’s how I’ve always been. Since the time I was little, my mind has always gone to crazy places, and the gears are always turning. As I started to get older, I began to wonder if everyone thought like this, if all people sat down for a meeting, starting out talking about revenue figures and then went to the beaches of Santorini, to analyzing the person at the table’s wardrobe choices, to brainstorming ways to make the table they're sitting at less shaky or the pen they're writing with stop smudging on their paper, all before the presentation is over. When I came to realize that not everyone’s minds went to the imaginative lengths that mine did, I started to wonder if I was somehow ‘broken.’
I had never met anyone who noticeably had a mind quite like mine, until I crossed paths with an entrepreneur who had recently come to New York to scale a company he had started in Cleveland. For as long as I can remember, I always wondered if I was the only one whose mind went to ten different places and back again all in the midst of maintaining a conversation about the movie that I saw last weekend; but when he started taking momentary pauses in the middle of dinner to write down the ideas that would come to him, I began to see that his mind was a lot like mine – spinning in circles and jumping from one place to the next in a nonlinear fashion. Seeing the way that his mind worked in action simultaneously scared me and excited me, as nobody else’s way of thinking had so closely resembled my own. Maybe I wasn’t crazy after all - maybe I was just ‘different.’ Or maybe we were both crazy, and our wandering minds would begin to feed off each other, stretching our imaginations to new limits.
His mind fascinated me – not only because it was the closest I had ever found to one that resembled my own, but because in many ways, he was even more divergent than I was. In a midst of minutes, even seconds, he can rattle off ideas left and right – identifying countless problems over one dinner. After all of the years that I had spent trying to mask my divergence to try to fall in line with the system, I couldn’t help but wonder how powerful my mind could really be if I started surrounding myself with people more like him - if I learned how to fully capitalize on my ability to think differently rather than trying to cover it up.
After meeting more and more entrepreneurs whose minds were somewhat similar to mine, I began to realize that I’m not broken, but simply different. Fitting in has always been hard for me; I always want to do things differently, to find a better way rather than accepting the conventions that society has placed upon me. I used to wonder if thinking in this way was problematic, in fear that I would never be 'normal' or fit in. But why fit in when you were born to stand out? Though it may take a while to find your ‘group,’ to find those people who you can sit around a table with and feel like in many ways, you’re looking at a reflection of yourself – they’re out there. You just need to keep looking – for people to collaborate with, for people to support you, and for people who can help you to channel your divergence into new ideas and products rather than encouraging you to fall in line with everyone else, when maybe you were never meant to be in that line altogether.