First, I apologize. I don’t want to say people with disabilities or challenges aren’t normal. But some of them can do things that “normal people” can’t do.
For example, people with Asperger’s Syndrome process information and interact with the world in ways many of us can’t comprehend. This is an advantage for someone featured in Michael Lewis’ book, The Big Short. It’s an account of how a few people saw the problems with the housing bubble and made a lot of money from it. When Lewis talked about his book on Fresh Air, he had something interesting to say about one of these players:
[TERRY] GROSS: Now, I should mention here that Michael Barry has Asperger’s Syndrome, although he didn’t know it at the time when he started his hedge fund, and he thinks that helped him be very kind of obsessive in reading the kind of reports that he needed to read. But how did he figure out that these subprime mortgage bonds were bad?
Mr. LEWIS: It was interesting because there are a number of different ways to get to that conclusion, but he does it really by studying the prospectuses of subprime mortgage bonds. And as he put it, no one who didn’t have Asperger’s Syndrome would read these things, they’re so tedious.
via Michael Lewis’ ‘Big Short’: How A Few Made Millions Betting Against The Market : NPR.
By doing something few people could or would do, Barry was able to make a nice profit. This is a good way to show that being normal is way overrated.
If you’re a Steelers fan, you’re not normal. If you’re a Steelers blogger, you probably should get yourself tested. Oh anyone can start a blog and rant about a quarterback controversy. But you’re not normal if you watch an entire preseason football game and take notes on each block by the offensive line.
Who has time to do this and analyze the data? A guy who writes the kind of blog that fans will value.
Too few people have the desire, time or attention to detail to do this. That’s why the audience will return to the blog. He gives them something no one else will. If your blog is to succeed, you need to dedicated yourself to the kind of information the audience can’t find anywhere else.
