"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."
—George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman
According to the 🤖, Jon Saltzman is a software engineer who has written about data systems and data infrastructure. And if you search the Internet, it will tell you he's an IT/developer with 20+ years of experience on a career break.
But I met Jon through Generalist World—a community for people with squiggly, non-linear careers who don't fit under well-defined job titles. After a virtual intro call in which we talked about everything—especially our disillusionments and dreams, I asked if Jon wanted to collaborate with me.
👩: I literally have no idea what it would look like or what we'd make. But wanna try?
👨: Sure!
We began our collaboration at my co-working space. With our product development backgrounds, we knew that we had the skills to push any idea into reality. The real question was: Which one? But we agreed that neither of us were interested in sticking to the frameworks in our toolkits.
👨: Let's just see where the squiggly path takes us!
👩: OK!
In what became a bimonthly-ish cadence, we would usually meet for 4-5 hours and just talk—as if the conversation were a river and we were discovering the landscape in real time. When the session was over, we'd moor the boat and wander back into our lives. On return, we'd just pick up where we left off—but the time apart always brought new understanding and insight into the journey.
Here are some things we talked about in our first session:
#1
My Batman vs Bruce Wayne self, and how much I just wanted to create and be creative all the time without worrying about the Bruce Wayne stuff. But how I also acknowledged an art piece could never inherently be a commercial product. One is meant to drive transformation through its creation whereas the other is meant to fill a gap in the marketplace that is preventing a desired transformation from occurring AND money.
"Time to walk the plank Bruce"
#2
How whatever entities we intended to build also necessitated the deployment of firewalls in order to protect our core values from the constant hunger of the modern world.
All my firewalls
#3
How all modern innovation and value seemed to be driven by this equation:
You have an idea, and often, the decision of whether you even attempt it gets weighed against its future monetary value—thus killing the idea in its entirety. When that happens, all the transformative, squiggly, undefined, dark forest-y possibilities and potential go extinct, and Jon and I had seen that happen over and over again in our careers. In fact, that was the part that bummed us out the most.
But Jon is a student of principled pragmatism, which means trying to be ethical and realistic at the same time. Which is how we discovered another equation that had guided us through our lives.
[image: equation graphic redux]
On one side, there was what the world said was possible and probable. On the other, there was the secret yearnings of our hearts. The answer almost always had been some practical compromise that bridged the two—like my Batman/Bruce Wayne lifestyle—AND didn't make us feel like sell outs.
Jon and I unlock the light!
In our first session, we ended by articulating the bigness of our intentions. Together, we wanted to create frameworks for individual human resilience through actionable experiments and hypotheses. Individually, well…
👨: What happens when you put people together? They form economic systems and fulfill needs by helping each other!
👩: Transformation, connection, creativity, interaction, and making your own rules through creativity. So maybe a product and poetry thingamajig?
And then, in our second session, we figured out Virgil.
