The Saving the World Strategy Guide: Teach a Man to Fish (October to November 2022)

What I went through to make sure the world knows about community wealth.

I've been estranged from my family for a long, long time.

I was adopted by my great aunt as a child. I had 2 last names before I was two, 3 before I was ten and dads and moms to go along with those numbers. And I've seen my adoptive parents and family only a few times in my adult life.

I was trying to establish some relationships, and my aunt is a respected doctor and great person and she's who invited me to LA. We actually had a great time together, I enjoy talking with her. I heavily suspect she's also ND.

When I confided her about my situation though, she said to me:

Give a man a fish and he'll eat for a day.

Teach a man to fish and he'll eat for a lifetime.

I hadn't told her because I expected her to help financially. If anything I was just struggling to stay grounded and develop a plan.

That's actually what I could've used the most help with.

But what that told me is it wasn't okay to ask for help.

So I didn't.

At LAX, I was panicking planning what I was going to do when I got back. I didn't have a home to go to. He had made that clear before I left.

I couldn't even drive my vehicles anymore. I had borrowed my Office Manager's car to get to the airport.

And then, to add to the tension, my flight kept getting delayed over and over again. I had such a queasy feeling about it, I didn't want to get on the plane even if it did take off.

I had virtually no money left.

Then I remembered that one of my first friends online ever from the Ready Player One fan group circles.

I have fond memories of Dustin Ma showing me what true friendship could be, and I aspired that all my relationships would be that great from then on.

Well, Dustin also happened to be one of the first 150 at Doordash.

Maybe he could help advise me on what to do next to get my startup to launch with no funds and with no access to my equipment and no place to stay?

I took a chance and called in a favour to get a ticket to Austin, Texas. I had an autistic friend there I asked if I could crash with, Heath, and I contacted Dusty and asked him to meet and buy me lunch.

He said yes.

I was off to Austin.

Heath, whom I'd never met IRL, came to my rescue and picked me up from the airport. I wasn't feeling well and thought I might have COVID, which I didn't want to give to his whole family, so we got me a test and he put me up in a hotel for the night just to be safe.

Thankfully, I was negative.

The next day I met Dusty for lunch. The advice he gave me was pretty golden. He said instead of building it myself, just build a simple system with spreadsheets and coordinate the people who want the products with the people who can make the products.

He told me how that's basically how Doordash did it. They started with a phone number and some PDF menus.

It was great advice, still is to this day. Seemed simple enough!

But execution is everything.

And trying to execute while you're in fight or flight ups the difficulty level by miles.

Before I left back for NC and the uncertainty of my future, Heath and I had a long conversation that meandered into many places, including "undifferentiated heavy lifting," and something I saw through Heath's eyes for the first time quite clearly: why it's ok for some businesses to die.

Because business is a bit like living art.

The old mom and pop pizza restaurant with the 1980s Boris Vallejo artwork on the walls will just never have the same feel as a chain or if family took over. No one puts the love into your passion and purpose like you.

And that's ok.

Some things will live forever, or at least over generations. But like a book and fanfiction, it takes on a form of its own often far from the original author's intent.

And that's ok too.

It's the first time I really saw business as an artform, and that was beautiful.

Finally, it was time to face going home -- to no home.

When I got to Raleigh, I used the very last of my funds to get my Office Manager's car out of airport parking. I had asked her if I could keep it for a while, planning to sleep in it.

That wouldn't have been my first time living out of a vehicle. I would've had a chance with that. But she said no.

I couldn't blame her. She had just lost her job and I had only just hired her on for Villej.

So later that evening I was standing in the parking lot outside her apartment with two suitcases and no idea what to do.

I was petrified and didn't know what else to do, so I called my former partner and asked for just a few days until I could get something sorted.

He and kiddo came and picked me up.

I was partially relieved, but mostly still terrified. I ended up sleeping on a cot in the store room for almost two days straight. I felt paralyzed and as though I was in a fog.

Then, that Sunday, my former partner barged in and shouted at me for about fifteen minutes straight. He had been speaking with my adoptive father, the one who had adopted me at ten, and the only person I had ever remembered calling dad.

But they all thought I was crazy. I genuinely think now they were scared too and didn't know what to do.

There was talk that they might try to commit me. Which I was terrified of, because I had tried to commit suicide as a child, and then when I did it as a teen, I was in a mental ward for a while.

One of my greatest fears is institutionalisation. I think as an autistic person, there is a lot that gets misread about us, and they just didn't understand how someone so smart (I am also highly gifted) could make such -- to them -- crazy decisions.

At the end of the tirade, he gave me two options:

1) go live with my dad (where the threat of institutionalisation was and at the very least all my electronics would be taken away and I would not be able to have contact with my friends or build community wealth)

or

2) I was out on the street.

I chose the street.