I built the tool
I needed myself.

My brain is still 15. My body disagrees.

I spent the first half of my career as an industrial designer — working with IBM, Hewlett-Packard, companies building technology that was supposed to make everything easier. I was good at it. I was also constantly late, frequently lost, and absolutely certain that whatever was happening right in front of me was the only thing that existed.

Around 2003 I moved into education. SCAD, Ohio State, Georgia Tech, Drexel. At Drexel I built a design program from scratch — a thinker-maker curriculum for students who didn't fit the standard mold. There's a specific irony I'm quietly proud of: I designed a program I couldn't have gotten into when I was 18. Bad student. Always in trouble. The kind that couldn't sit still, kept getting lost in his own head, forgot what day it was.

I was diagnosed with ADHD at 36, which explained a few decades of things. I'd had acute dyslexia since I was eight — masked it well enough to build a career, but it came back hard when everything moved online during the pandemic. ADHD and dyslexia together are interesting traveling companions. They've cost me things. They've also given me a way of seeing that I wouldn't trade.

So instead I built strategies. Systems for the hard parts. Ways to turn the good parts — the hyperfocus, the pattern recognition, the ability to connect things other people don't — into actual assets. That's been the work of the second half of my life.

I live entirely in the present tense. Retirement requires thinking about the future.

Here is the specific ADHD problem with retirement planning: it requires you to care deeply about something that isn't happening yet. For a brain wired to live only in the now, planning for a future self is genuinely hard. Not laziness. Not avoidance. Neurology.

I'm 66. My mind still runs like it did at 15. My body has started sending strongly worded memos. I need to figure out what the next chapter looks like — but I have never once naturally thought about the future. I had to build something that would help me do that without making me feel like I was failing.

Every calculator I tried gave me a scary number and a vague suggestion to save more. None of them asked who I wanted to be. None acknowledged that some of us have irregular incomes, patchy employment histories, and a complicated relationship with bureaucratic paperwork. None felt like they were talking to me.

The short version.

Two decades in the design industry. Two decades in design education. I've taught hundreds of students — many of them neurodivergent, many the same kind of bad student I was — how to think with their hands and build things that matter. The Product Design program I built at Drexel is for beautiful outliers and inquisitive minds. It is guided by a simple belief: community first, process second, outcomes last. Here, ambitious, self-directed students learn to become thinker-makers — people who question deeply, make boldly, and shape ideas into meaningful things.

A few things I believe about this.

A few things that are also true.

I prefer to stay in the background. I built a whole career helping other people's ideas become real things, then a whole second career teaching others to do the same. Being the one out front is not naturally comfortable for me. This page is a stretch.

Eraserhead changed something in me when I was in college. The idea that reality is stranger and more layered than it appears — that there are things underneath things — became a kind of operating principle. I've been a David Lynch devotee ever since and I've never fully apologized for it.

I got into Transcendental Meditation because Lynch was into it, which is exactly the kind of rabbit hole an ADHD brain falls down. It turns out it genuinely helps. Twenty minutes of sitting quietly with your own mind is useful when your brain normally runs at the speed mine does.

I still get lost in things. I still lose track of time when something has my full attention. I've stopped trying to fix those things and started building a life that works with them instead of against them. This tool is part of that project.