Burgers with Bill Gates
The first time I met Bill was almost thirty years ago in his backyard. A pair of burly security guards dressed in too-tight purple Microsoft polo shirts politely escorted me through his home on the West Side of Lake Washington. It was a mansion to my mid-western eyes, though only a fraction the size of the more famous home he would later build sprawling across the hillsides of the lake’s eastern shore. Windows 95 was still in the future, and I was at Microsoft working on the older operating system known as MS-DOS. I was just a temporary intern –– not even a full-time “blue badge” employee yet –– but back in those days, Microsoft was small enough to allow Bill to invite the top college prospects over for a backyard BBQ.
Out on the lawn with a microbrew in hand, we all clustered around him, hoping to catch his interest in conversation. Each of us had no doubt prepared something clever to say, just in case the opportunity presented itself: perhaps an insight about, or criticism of, a Microsoft product so perceptive or biting that he’d recognize our innate genius amongst the crowd and pluck us, like a gem, from the front lines. That was the daydream. The starker reality was that after our burger and beer we’d be hurried out the front door and back to headquarters in Redmond to work another of our 16-hour days, competing directly against one another for the top spots. Everyone came from the best schools: MIT and Princeton in the United States, Waterloo in Canada. With over 100,000 job applications coming into Microsoft every year at the time, just being one of those 30 was an incredibly big deal –– especially if you were from the University of Regina like I was.
That’s in Saskatchewan if that helps any, but either way, I was only really at Microsoft by virtue of having put myself through college on the proceeds from writing software for a competing computer platform. My program, HyperCache, had already sold a few thousand copies before it popped up on Microsoft’s radar. My task now was to write something like it for their MS-DOS, releasing it for a hundred million PCs instead of just a few thousand. If that went well, there was a good chance of a full-time spot upon graduation – complete with their famously lucrative Microsoft stock options. Failing that, I could always go back to my old job at 7-Eleven (and so you can imagine why I wanted to make a good first impression).
We gathered in concentric circles around Bill as the setting sun glistened off the lake behind us. Few dared probe toward the center, where Bill himself stood alone, but I had an advantage with Ben, my manager. He knew Bill and seemed completely unfazed by fame or fortune. Ben pulled me straight through the gauntlet of would-be nerds and presented me directly to Bill as if I were a prized protégé.
He told him: “This is Dave, our intern from Canada. In the space of four months…” his voice trailed off to list the very real technical accomplishments that I had worked so hard to complete that summer. I listened in earnestness at first, but soon became highly distracted with one very real problem: it hadn’t technically been four months as Ben had said. It had only taken three months –– not four.
It was a small thing, but an important detail. I was sure they’d want to know. I cleared my throat, spoke up, and interrupted them with the correction:
“Three months.”
Surprised, they both stopped, turned, and looked at me. My heart sank. Once again –– as always –– I had spoken out of turn, somehow saying just the wrong thing at precisely the wrong time. That much was obvious, and that was three decades ago.
And yet I just found out last week that I have autism! (I’m writing this part raw, in the aftermath of that diagnosis, to capture my early thoughts about it.)
Ben and I had both long since moved on from Microsoft, and I had not seen him in several years. At some point along the way he had been surprised by a diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder for his own adult daughter, and apparently, after better understanding the symptoms and seeing them in the context of his own family, one of his early thoughts was “Dave should get himself tested”. Soon after, he took me for lunch and told me about his daughter’s diagnosis, and without really being specific at all as to why, he encouraged me to investigate being tested for autism myself.
I wasn’t really bothered by the idea, but I was a bit confused as to what would lead him to think so. I went home and took the Autism Spectrum Quotient test online and, of a possible fifty points, I scored forty. Clearly, I thought, I must be answering the questions with personal bias, so I had my wife of twenty-five years sit down and make sure I was being accurate and honest. I retook the test with her to be sure that I did not exaggerate. My score went up: forty-two.
For years I had joked that “I’m not on the spectrum, but you can see it from here”. I later upgraded that to “I might be on the spectrum, but I’m on the non-visible portion”. Still, I didn’t really consider it possible. I’m empathetic, sensitive, emotional, and funny –– all things that I thought would preclude me from being anywhere on the autism spectrum.
Wait, I’ve Got What?
I booked the necessary appointments and over the course of a few weeks completed all the testing. I would have done better on the SAT and math sections with a little advanced practice but going in cold as an adult was also interesting in its own right. It sure had been a long time since I’d done much long division! Preparing the full report took a few weeks, and my wife accompanied me to receive the results.
The good news? Apparently, I’m reasonably clever. As in “three standard deviations” smart. On some portions of the cognitive testing, I even achieved perfection –– something they’d apparently never seen before. But I was also slow. I got the right answer but took my own sweet time to get it. Each test runs to completion without you knowing the time limit, but they watch and record where you were at when the set time limit expired. I scored 1,550 (of 1,600) on the SAT but only if time wasn’t considered: had I been cut off at the official time limit, I would have only scored 1,150, a fairly average score. The reason? Apparently, I have serious Attention Deficit Disorder. Oh, and as noted: it also turns out that I have autism.
More accurately, I was officially diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder. As the doctor, my wife, and I flipped through the pages of the report in unison, terms like “significant social dysfunction” stared back at me. When we finally got to the autism-specific behaviors section, my wife was pleased to note: “Well, at least the numbers are good here, far above average!” –– but then the doctor corrected her:
“No, no… higher is worse.”
I used to be “gifted,” but now I had a “diagnosis.” And it had a “better” and a “worse.” That’s about all I felt in those initial minutes.
Not everyone appreciates popular media portrayals of autism, but we’ll leave that aside, for now, to make use of two such examples as handy measuring devices: if I were forced to use a pop reference as perhaps the least accurate but most communicative way to express the amount of autism that I am affected by, I would say I have 80% as much as Sheldon Cooper on The Big Bang Theory. At current exchange rates, I’d estimate that makes me about 25% as autistic as the title character in the movie Rain Man. As you can guess these are not professional metrics, they’re numbers pulled from the air by a layman[1].
From the actual test report, I can see that I’m more autistic than roughly 98.5% of the general population. While that might sound quite “autistic”, I’m still fairly “high functioning”. I don’t use those terms a lot, however. I’m also highly impacted in many ways –– which is what makes my “balance” point interesting, I believe. In short, I’m far enough into it to deeply understand the autism thought process that is normally inaccessible to neurotypical people, yet still conversant enough to explain back to everyone what they are missing –– and even how this condition can be of use in their own lives at times. Hopefully, I can explain it to you!
Unfortunately, as with many people on the spectrum, my brain is “complicated” in other ways as well. As I noted earlier, I have significant attention deficit disorder (ADD) (my mother says she would add hyperactivity to the list, but I was never tested as a youth). I also, to my great regret, smoked cigarettes for thirty years, and I believe it was that stimulant that allowed me to manage my dopamine and stay focused for most of my adult life. This probably explains why the ADD only really came to light when I quit smoking (or while sitting without them for long exams, depositions, etc.). On top of this, I’ve also suffered from anxiety, which has been known to lead to bouts of depression if not well managed.
Or could it be that these are just aspects of my autism, mischaracterized as unrelated anxiety and mood disorders for decades? These were among the questions I would attempt to answer for myself.
Learning these things about myself didn’t happen all at once. In fact, it has been a process of discovery over the course of more than 25 years, treating problems and issues whenever and wherever they arose without systematically looking for a deeper connection between them. That I did not eventually diagnose my own autism surprises me. I don’t feel bad for missing it, however, given that for decades more qualified educators and professionals also overlooked the same symptoms. To be honest, however, I cannot blame them either: over the years I’ve become a master at “masking,” or the art of acting “normal”, which makes a diagnosis without specific testing even more difficult. Girls are reportedly even better at such masking, going undiagnosed even more often as a result.
The good news is that this odd mix of brain disorder and ability has not caused my life to descend entirely into chaos: in fact, quite the contrary. Although it has been a wild ride at times for both myself and those around me, this exotic brain of mine has served me incredibly well! If you will briefly indulge some self-congratulatory details: I graduated at the top of my university with an engineering degree (though years late in starting it because I had dropped out of high school); I have made multiple fortunes many different ways; I have invented, designed, and engineered products used daily by billions of humans around the globe; been issued half a dozen patents; started my own company in my den that went on to achieve over one-hundred-million dollars in sales; married my beautiful soulmate; raised four happy and successful children . . . and much more. And yet, for all this self-indulgent list of success, privilege, and grace, I still struggle with simple things like eye contact… and conversation flow... and relationships, and anger, and anxiety, and meltdowns, and a dozen other things we shall soon turn to look at.
It is only now, in retrospect, that I can look back and see specifically where certain aspects of autism impacted my life, for better and for worse, and it is here that I tell those stories. If I am successful, it will be because I not only explain and entertain, but I will have done so in a way that empowers you to apply some of those lessons learned to your own life –– whether you are personally affected by autism or not. Because to be clear, life with some autism can be spectacular!
What’s Inside This Book
Within these pages, I have four related goals. The first is to give you a better understanding of high-functioning individuals with autism –– the real Sheldon Coopers[2] of the world if you will. I want you to understand what makes us tick, what we think, why we think it, how we act upon it, and why we do it that way. From there the book will take an in-depth look at some important autism topics, often from multiple perspectives. For example, the chapter on employment considers both what it means to be managed by an autistic manager as well as what it takes to manage an autistic employee. The vantage point will continue to shift as we tackle topics such as parenting and marriage. The second goal is to help you understand specifically what makes some of those with autism so relentless in their pursuit of success. After identifying and discussing those traits and attributes, my goal is to help those with similar traits capitalize on them. Perhaps if a neurotypical person reading this can understand the characteristics, routines, and habits of certain individuals with autism, they too will be able to increase their odds of success through learning new approaches for their own lives.
There is no easy way to know if public figures such as Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg are on the autism spectrum. If they are, none have publicly shared that information, and unless and until they do, it’s a private health matter that I won’t speculate on. We can, however, observe and identify certain traits and characteristics that they exhibit in common with people on the spectrum and note how they may have served to make those individuals so driven to succeed in their own endeavors, regardless of whether they experience the disorder or not. Which is almost the point: irrespective of who is officially diagnosed with what condition, if something worked for me, and it worked for them, it might work for you!
A third goal is to entertain you along the way, as it has been quite an interesting journey: not just for me, but for the loved ones around me, who must have sometimes felt as untethered as I did.
The tales of how autism has impacted my life and career are not here merely for the vicarious enjoyment of others. I truly believe that for someone with the disorder, and for those close to that person, both knowing how I persevered and seeing where I stumbled and failed can be useful and instructive.
The fourth and final goal is to help assure loved ones, especially any parents of children newly diagnosed with autism (at least those at a level of severity like my own). Having a diagnosis in hand can make things much easier to manage. In truth, this perceived responsibility I feel toward parents of such children remains my primary motivation in “coming out” about my autism. If I had known in my youth what I know now, my life would have been even better… or at least a much easier journey. Knowing that in just a few chapters I could tell you things that took me (and my family) a lifetime to learn by trial and error was a driving factor in me completing this book. In this way, I hope to possibly save you a great deal of angst and misery!
If you come along on this journey you’ll watch as I go from being a bullied youth to winding up a high school dropout, then turn my life around sharply enough to return to school and ultimately secure distinguished research grants and scholarships. Next, we’ll leave the small farming city in Saskatchewan for Microsoft at the height of the 90s tech boom as I get married, graduate, and emigrate all in one crazy weekend. Follow as I build a company –– starting in my den –– whose sales explode geometrically causing me to sell it for cash to a NASDAQ company. Right at the peak, I will be sued by the government, federally compliance-audited, and state tax-audited all at once during the sale, potentially scuttling the entire deal and prompting an autistic meltdown right in the offices of the attorney general!
Moving on from my personal experience with autism we will look at selected topics related to the disorder. Because autism is probably still new for most of us, we can follow the standard model of instruction: “Here’s what I tried, and here’s what worked and what did not, and why I think that is.” We will follow that approach for important topics related to autism, such as Empathy, Emotions, Masking, Mindblindness, Marriage, Parenting, Employment, and many more. By the end of this book, you will know a great deal more about what it’s like to live with autism, and for those that were already keenly aware, you will learn a few secrets for staying sane and being successful: the things that I have discovered along the way.
Finally, we shall turn to some more speculative topics. As we unwind the complex attributes, characteristics, methods, and mannerisms of those with autism I believe there is much to be learned by neurotypical people as well. What caused the obsessive drive towards success in some people with autism? And if this is identifiable, can it be emulated? Are medical students cramming for board exams really “faking autism” selectively for brief periods? Can someone really be a “little bit autistic”? Should people with autism “fake it” to make friends, and where should the limits of such masking end? Are some movies and television shows with autistic characters as exploitive as some would assert? We will consider all these issues and more.
