For as long as I can remember, I’ve had a chaotic monkey mind that’s been both a blessing and curse. When I stop to think about it, I realize there were signs from the very beginning: when I was a child and my mother would bring me to the library, I’d get everybody’s library cards and borrow comically tall piles of books, as many as I could carry in my little arms. I wish I had a list of all of those books to reference, but I can vaguely recall that they ranged from things like natural disasters and ancient civilizations to chess and cartoons and dinosaurs and outer space…

I’ll concede that lots of kids are probably interested in lots of things when they’re young; the world is big and full of unknowns. But I remember continuing to be interested in things for a long time afterwards– I remember reading about Nazi Germany, about Abraham Lincoln and the team he assembled, things that in hindsight weren’t really all that relevant to a skinny Tamil kid in sunny Singapore. I kept at it past the point when my peers would gently or sometimes not-so-gently make fun of me for it: Visa with his stacks of books, Visa with his grand theories of everything, Visa with his Facebook essays. I bristled at some of it at the time, but now I look back on it with fondness. My peers were giving me the gift of telling me who the fuck I am. That’s me. I’m a nerd, a blogger, a librarian, a performance artist, a street busker, a bit of a preacher (sorry).

^ I started writing this in my head in the shower earlier while thinking about where I’m going with ‘all of this’. And by all of this I mean everything from… this specific substack (what will the next 50 essays look like?) to my wider body of work (do I want to be tweeting as much as I have these past few years, or do I want switch things up? do I want to make more polished video essays? do I want to update my first two books soon, or might I even write a third book next? what would it be if I did?).

I cycled through a series of goals in my teens and 20s, and the specifics have changed, but some core elements remain quite consistent. I’ve long felt like I was destined for “an audience”. Not necessarily the largest possible audience– I had a glimpse of that path while I was writing about local news and politics, and I found it to be a sour one. The fastest way to grow an audience is to hit hot-button issues, things that result in outrage, anger, disgust, high-arousal emotions. I’ve been studying how other authors and public intellectuals etc have had that play out for them over the years, past and present, and it’s something practically all of them end up regretting. You can’t unsummon a demon. Once you’ve assembled an angry mob, you quickly lose control of it. I want a thoughtful, kind, patient audience. I know such people exist, and I have always sought them out.

That said, I don’t particularly believe in “playing small”, either. There’s a lot of tricky nuance to get into here. Some people want to keep their operations small as a matter of taste, or personal limitations, or any other reason. I respect that. But I’ve always felt like a “high voltage person” (which is part of why this substack is titled ‘voltaic verses’), and as a consequence of that it always seemed inevitable to me that I would eventually have a substantially large audience. I don’t expect to have say, a Taylor Swift or Mr Beast sized audience, but I think I’m on a path that wouldn’t look too dissimilar from say, John and Hank Green, who still have millions of followers. When I was younger I might have thought of “millions of followers” as something to aspire to, but now I almost think of it as something to tolerate, en route to achieving deeper goals like spreading good ideas and perspectives.’

Marketing

At this point I feel like I should backtrack a little and mention that I used to work in marketing. And this also ties back to the chaos monkey mind situation. I like how Peter Drucker (one of the OG management consultants who actually really knew his shit) simplifies things: “Marketing and innovation produce results; all the rest are costs.” I tend to translate that in my mind as something like, “you’re either making the thing, selling the thing, or keeping the lights on.” Out of those three categories, marketing/sales is in my view the domain which is most suited to the chaotic-minded. You definitely don’t want a chaos-minded accountant, or legal, or HR guy. In those roles you want someone orderly, someone who likes keeping things orderly. I’ve met such people. We are very different. I’m glad they exist, so that I don’t have to be that way.

Between innovation and marketing, it’s a little more complicated, especially at the cutting edge. There’s some amount of chaos in the innovation process: imagining new possibilities, trying things in different configurations. But I’ve met enough excellent engineers and builders to know that I don’t quite have the right temperament to match them at the top of their game. There are elements of precision, thoroughness, etc that go into great innovations that I admire– and even aspire to– but I recognize that such qualities aren’t quite abundant in myself.

In the realm of marketing, though, [cracks knuckles] hoo boy, I can go all day. I’ve always been obsessed with understanding how people perceive things. When I look at guys like David Ogilvy or Rory Sutherland, I see myself. I’m always interested in stories and narratives and alternate points of view. And this domain is very error-friendly. It costs nothing to spin up a new way of seeing or thinking about things. Or at least, it feels to me like it costs nothing. My former boss Dinesh likes to point out that a person’s ‘edge’ is something that feels quite easy and natural to them, and they likely don’t even think of something that they’re particularly good at– rather, they’re likelier to reveal it when you ask them what they find strange about what everyone else doesn’t do, or does poorly.

So far this essay has felt like…

tbc