Driving the Bus While the Pizza Flies

A Toy Inventor Walks In

Richard: Good morning. I’m Richard Lowe, and this is the Leaders and Their Stories podcast. I am here today with Mike Merkur. He’s a toy inventor, a coder, a podcaster, and he lives in Toronto. He has two patents on a method for turning song lyrics into color. Mike, how you doing today?

Mike: Very good. Very good. Amazing. Thanks for having me on.

Richard: Oh, you’re welcome. You’re such an interesting person that I couldn’t resist. As soon as I saw your profile, boom. It was like, this guy’s got to be on my show.

Mike: I love the what you have going here was just checking out your website and leadership. There’s so much to learn. There’s so much to know about it. It’s not one-dimensional. It’s not a course in computer science. It’s not attending some trade shows. Leadership is hard. And I respect it.

Richard: No kidding.

Mike: Glad to be a character in your show.

Richard: Leadership is not a game for the faint of heart. That’s one way to think of it.

Driving the Bus While the Pizza Flies

Mike: I’ve learned this in many different ways where I’ve been in a situation and the computer technical person goes, okay, Michael, okay, Mike, what do next? And it’s my job to answer that. And then the younger 13 year old who’s building the website goes, and what updates should we make now? And The rabbi goes, where are the puzzles to teach all the illiterate Jews, the 14 million illiterate Jews on the planet?

Where are the puzzles that you’ve been building? Where are your charts, Michael? And I’m like, I’m working on it. It’s difficult. And he goes, well, we need what you have. And, and leadership is It’s like driving a bus, a school bus, and in the back everyone’s throwing pizza slices and hats are flying around and you have to drive while the yelling is going on while you’re looking in the mirror while shoes and pizza slices are coming at you have to get the kids home.

You have to get everyone home safely and you have to get them on the bus and you have to get the bus has to go where it needs to go.

Richard: Yeah, safely. It has to get there safely.

Mike: And when there’s a speed bump or when there’s traffic, you have to everyone on the bus where everybody, it’s Michael up here thank you for being on board. We’re going a little slow this month. I think we’re in traffic. It’s delayed. What do you mean it’s delayed? You promised this. I’m like, Well, there’s other factors. I’m driving the bus here.

You want to drive the bus? You don’t want to drive the bus.

Richard: Yes, I’ve been getting a lot into AEO. That’s artificial intelligence version of SEO. And the speed problem drives me crazy because you do something and it doesn’t happen in a day, a week, a month, might be a year. It’s very slow. Because your site’s getting crawled by all these different AIs and they’re all different. And it’s making it very frustrating because I’ve made changes.

They’ll show up in a few weeks or a month or two months or five months, or maybe not at all. But it hard to do that iterative step that you do, like, okay, what did I do wrong? Now I need to fix it. What did I do wrong? Now I need to fix it. It’s really hard.

Mike: It’s hard to understand. It’s hard to balance the different facets of an online presence, a new idea, a new technology patents. It’s really hard because that’s just the idea, inventive kind of legal structure. But then the leader, the inventive leader, as I’ve learned from talking to many others, dozens of people, they say, Mike, that’s great.

Okay, great. But now we have to come out of the basement, out of the inventor’s workshop. The mad scientist has to now sell and present. And it’s not enough to just be wear a clown. Even the other day, Michael, it’s not enough to just wear a clown costume and make videos. We must form, we must do real life presentations, real life partnerships, real life investor materials, real life banking materials, and someone who comes on the bus, a contractor, a mentor, a friend, a student or educator, a rabbi, a rabbinical student, a person just who’s Jewish and interested in Judaism, they just want to be onboarded They want to be involved, but they need to be onboarded.

It’s all aboard. We can’t leave this heading from Toronto to Florida and to Miami all aboard. It doesn’t work like that. It’s not a train and it’s not an 1840s train railroad station and everyone comes on and you take and you go, no, no, not at all. Leadership is you have to communicate the right things in the right way to the right people.

My four-year-old daughter wants to use the computer sitting next to me, and my eight-year-old son is ready to play, but a 62-year-old rabbi wants to know if it’s kosher. Lest the destruction and curses fall upon the earth. And whoever’s in charge, by default, that’s Mike Merkur. And I don’t know what I’m doing. And I’m juggling and my wife’s yelling and my mom comes over and says, why did you drop out of chemical engineering?

What’s wrong with you? And leadership is that you hold it in. You stay strong and you protect all the stakeholders and all the would-be employees and all the mentees and all the users. They have to be protected and shielded from the chaos of what it’s really like to connect all the people who are just the end users don’t want to know about the gasoline pumped out of the car.

They don’t want to know that poisonous gas has to be moved out of the car. They don’t want to know that the seat they’re sitting on was barfed on by a baby two days ago. We have to give them a little bit of a ride, get them on, take them where they need to go, get them off very quickly. No, they don’t want to know. They don’t want to know about the engineering car analogy.

They don’t want to know about under the hood at all. At all. They want in out. They want to go where they want to go. He who builds a tool, he needs to put it in the hand, the right hands in the right way for its use case. And at 99% of everything else, for that particular user, for that particular use case. Everything else has to be concealed and put underground just that they get their use.

And that’s I think that’s one of the hardest lessons I’ve learned recently is only say what the person needs to hear in real time. Because if you give too much, The person says, I don’t need some complicated Jewish guy telling me I have to learn a new language and colors. Who does he is? But if it fits the right angle to the right person in the right way, then it’s a blessing.

Otherwise a curse. Very black and white.

The People Who Just Want to Go Home

Richard: Yeah, I managed the computer department of Trader Joe’s for 20 years. The director of IT and not director of IT, director of computer operations. So I managed operations. And it took me a long time to figure out that all my guys wanted was to do their job and go home. They didn’t have any other goals. Let me do my job and go home.

It’s like they didn’t want training. They didn’t want anything. They just wanted to do their job and go home. And then I had to become okay with that because I couldn’t replace them. I mean, they were my staff. I had eight people and I didn’t want to replace them because they were nice guys and they did a good job. So it’s It’s interesting managing a team that has almost no motivation to do anything more.

One thing is we had a very flat structure. So they weren’t getting promotions. So they didn’t have any motivation to do anything to get a promotion because there weren’t any.

Mike: It’s so true is that one needs to take into account that it’s like human nature. Not everyone wants to launch rocket ship businesses to the sky or invent new ways to change the earth or new educational systems or new types of products, toys, games, puzzles. The average person, even if they say otherwise, that’s not what their goal is in life. The goal to 90% of people on the planet, and we know who they are.

Some people say 99%, but I would say 9 out of 10 people are not to be leaders, are not intended to be inventors or creative, start from nothing entrepreneurs. No, no. And that’s not to say that they’re better or worse. It just means that’s a different makeup of a person. My wife, if you tell her she has to start her own business, and that’s the only she’ll be like, what?

No way. And you tell any of her, not all, but like you tell any of her cousins or sisters, they’re like, no. But if you tell her that you’ll be a special education teacher, you’ll be working in this department of this large Jewish institution, then she’ll be perfect. I know what’s expected of me. I don’t she doesn’t want to see financial statements of you lose $10,000 because you have to pay legal fees.

No, that would kill it. That would give her a heart attack.

Richard: Right. Yeah. And another thing I learned after I left Trader Joe’s, this is part of being a ghostwriter in the marketing, is you have to talk about what’s in it for them. It’s never, most copy starts with benefits and I’m a gross rider. I’m this, I’m this, I’m this, I’m this. That’s not the way you do it. You got to say, by doing this particular thing, making getting these toys that are have a Jewish slant, you’re gaining this.

And you’re gaining that and you’re gaining this. Nobody cares what’s in it for you. For the most part.

Mike: Yes, when I totally agree. When someone’s paying or even at an earlier stage when someone’s a beta testing their heart and mind is naturally focused on their immediate personal gain the exchange of time or money they don’t they don’t need to hear, they don’t want to hear the big picture. Now some do. If they’re the odd entrepreneur person who’s their own game board, board game maker, whatever, then yeah, they’re going to be like, Mike, how did this start?

Whatever. If it’s a podcast on, I’ll interview you. That’s also different. But in real life, a consumer packaged good or a digital tool that a person uses, they do not want to meet the maker. They do not. The user does not want to know which version of Claude you used on which type of how much water was in the cup when Merkur was gluing together the they don’t they just want the so to speak, they just want the little booklet.

Where it’s already done for them. It’s already printed for them. And you’re just like, oh, here’s some puzzles. This is just an example of like a similar product of a logic puzzle, right? People just want to play. The kids just want to play. Parents just want peace of mind. And that’s what That’s what a big part of educational resources are.

Teachers want a break. Parents have a headache. Kids are annoying. Gimme, gimme, gimme. Make everyone happy and you have my money. What do you think?

Richard: I think that’s very true. Now, even an entrepreneur, you could say it’s still what’s in it for them. It’s just what’s in it for them is different than what’s in it for a normal consumer or something.

Big Leaders Help Small Leaders

Mike: Yeah, totally. I’ve also learned a lot the importance of, you have to as a leader, or I have to, one has to, you have to be honest at some point. If you’re, I haven’t done so much, but if you’re hiring someone for a role or you need help with sales or the vision is so big, that it’s just so much that a person carry. There’s a lot of honor, not the selling of the product, but in building, in establishing a vision or inventing something new.

One has to be honest and you have to say you have to at times I even use the word to supplicate. You have to sometimes just supplicate and be like, oh, person wiser and smarter than me. I have this vision I want. I want like all of Judaism and expressed as like unique, colorful tiles. And I see this clearly, but I want to do it.

You have to help me. People who are not your average Joe, but like a person of certain wealth or influence. If you come to a person of a certain amount of entrepreneurial wisdom or 30 years experience, and you go to them and be like, I insist that like all of Judaism is taught wrong and 90% of Jews cannot even read the Hebrew language and I need your help on this quest. So long as it’s the leader who confesses sins or like pleads and supplicates, is always honored.

Now, some will say, okay, I’ll talk to you for half an hour or I’ll give a little advice. Others will come over to your house for six hours and film you. There will be people who go, I can only help a little bit, but leaders, big leaders help small leaders. Because leadership is like an honor code, like that of almost like army.

When you talk about army, just knowing some military American people, whatever, they always say that like, once you’re a Marine, you’re always a Marine. It doesn’t matter if you’re a. Yeah, and once you’re a leader, once you lead, once you’re a leader, you’re always a leader. It doesn’t matter if you failed and you went back to doing something else.

Leadership is like one who has run the marathon, one who has ascended the mountain. So it is not always charted on the shirt like military regalia or the coolest Hawaiian shirt in Florida.

Richard: It is cool. It is cool.

Mike: But what are your thoughts? Do you feel that once you were in a leadership position, you broke the you broke through and you are always a leader?

Richard: It kind of depends. That’s generally true. And then there are those people who go into leadership and then they just don’t like it. And they leave and those that’s the exception uh they just decide they don’t like it and they never come back and then they become I’ve known several people who took that route and I know one he was a C um we call CISO uh which is a chief information security officer right and he lost his job because they were laying off people and CISO is usually first because it’s perceived as not a cost Center not as a the revenue center and he was looking for a job.

And finally he got a job just entering data on a computer and making enough money to get by because he was close to retirement. So he had his retirement fund. I think he was retired. And he liked it better. He didn’t want to be a leader anymore because now he wasn’t responsible for people and he didn’t have all this responsibility on his shoulders.

And that was very refreshing to him. Now he could just focus on his job, do his job, go home. Not have to stay late, not have to worry about crashes and crisis season things. He was very, very happy with that. Did an interview of him. He’s on one of the podcasts on leaders and their stories. Nice guy. And that’s what he found.

And I kind of found that too a little bit. I mean, I’m a leader of sorts. I lead clients to ghost write their books or to help them get their website working with artificial intelligence. But when I managed the staff at Trader Joe’s, it was very, very stressful. I was on the point. Something was down. I was the call at midnight or on Christmas Day.

And when I left, wow, it was like a breath of fresh air, even though I had no idea what I was going to do. I mean, I had enough in my funding, my bank account stuff that I could live for quite a while. So I had that luxury, started my business finally, but I was scared to death. Because not scared to death. I mean, I was happy as I was scared because I was out on my own and I was happy that I didn’t have all responsibility anymore.

Mike: That is so true. And that always needs to be addressed. I tell anyone who asks. You don’t know, you do not want to be your own business owner. You do not want to be an inventor. You do not want to know what it is. And they’re like, but I saw this YouTube clip. I saw this TikTok video and I’m like, no, my life is not summed up in a 21 second video.

It takes three to five years for a single patent. Large scale innovation has to go through all the procedures and also you have to actually invent something. There is that. You actually have to invent something and I tell a lot of people. You have to actually invent something. You can’t just be, this is not like, I’m going to, in or I live in Canada.

So we say that, there’s a, in some sports, the fan can go on the field is a great analogy. If you’re playing soccer or football, it’s grass. You can jump on the field. In hockey, you don’t, no one, no fans do not come on the field.

Richard: That’s true.

Fifteen Times, and the Gift Underneath

Mike: Or die. You would immediately die, because there’s a guy skating at you with blades on his feet and an enormous weapon, six foot five and angry, and there’s violence. So that’s what inventing new types of computer languaging or visual models of data is like. Or preparing things for block companies to make sets. You get on the ice, you’re in the arena, it’s cold, you’re alone, and you get checked.

You get knocked down every day. But I like that. I kind of need that. I always joke that 15 times I’ve been either fired, dismissed, moved out of a project, thrown off a startup thrown out of a religious school or told we don’t really like your style. So 15 times in different points of my life. And then I woke up one day and realized that I think differently.

I have all these autistic traits, so there’s the neurodiversity layer there, but I’m good when I’m by myself for many hours, focusing, hyper focusing and sitting in front of a few computers and phones, really deep in encoding language data. That’s like a gift, but the gift comes with some weaknesses I’m not the clearest I was told the other day I’m not the clearest communicator. I talk and run on sentences and I divert the topic too many times and I’m I’ve been called a wild goose. I’ve been called a octopus with reaching after all things, running in a million directions and people can’t rein me in.

And I thought that was a compliment. It was not. So how about you? Have you carried a burden as well, running Trader Joe’s IT department for all those years? That’s a huge burden. That’s bigger than what I’m doing.

Richard: It was a huge burden. Yeah, it was. I could tell you war stories of computer crashes and things. I’m not going to bore you. Maybe on your show because I’ll be on there tomorrow night. It was very interesting. And I had the hidden thing that I didn’t know until when I turned 65. What I didn’t know is I am strongly ADHD. And that is something that I didn’t know.

So once I found that out, And that’s, by the way, that’s a high level ADHD, meaning like 97%. It just, everything in my life became, oh, well that explains that. I wasn’t upset. It was more relief. It’s like, oh, okay, now I understand. And then I read about it and I go, oh yeah, that’s an advantage. Hyperfocus, you mentioned, is a huge advantage if how to use it.

I’ll sit there on a weekend and I’ll just bear down and I’ll finish something. It gets done. I finish probably 20 times more than your normal person will finish in an afternoon and they finish it in a month. That’s how come I can ghost write so many books at once, and I write them myself. It unnerves people when they find out how many books I can do.

Well, the answer is I’m a hyperfocused ADHD person. For example, I’m a Christian. But I wasn’t always. I converted to Christianity a couple years ago, got baptized, and the church was driving me up the wall. And I couldn’t figure out why. And then when I found out I was ADHD, I went, oh, okay, that makes sense. I wrote a book on it, The ADHD Christian.

Mike: I love the theme of like religion or even religious wisdom and ancient texts. Whether it’s Old Testament, New Testament, whatever, different beliefs, Quran and the idea of, yeah, a person with neurodiversity means that you need to explore. There needs to be stimulus. You can’t just be told, oh, okay, we’re only learning book one page one, chapter one.

The neurodiverse person needs to see like a world needs to be overwhelmed with excitement. But.

Richard: They can’t be overstimulated. And that’s what was happening to me in the church was all the stuff was going on, bright lights and people talking, and they weren’t talking about things that I cared about. A lot of it is we need money. That just drove me up the wall because I’m here to learn about Christianity. I’m not here to learn about how much they need money.

And so I wrote the book and part of it is aimed at the pastor and part of it’s aimed at the person. And you said you’re ADHD, I think you are autistic, and it’s the same kind of problem. I’m also autistic, so I got best of both worlds.

Mike: Brothers from different mothers, sisters from different misters.

Richard: Yeah, it was interesting.

Mike: Your what could you share some wisdom about I mean, you say ADHD Christian, but that can extend to neurodiversity faith and a broader term. What’s that about? Shared some wisdom.

You Do Not Fix It, You Use It

Richard: Well, the main thing is probably true with anything. I also wrote a book called The ADHD Marketer. And ADHD people have to understand that, at least I had to understand, I can’t speak for all, that I had to recognize that I was ADHD and then understand that I get scattered. I’ll work on 100 projects and then I have to pull it back.

And the other thing to recognize is you can’t fix it. It’s not something that’s fixable. It’s something that’s you work that you use as an advantage and you understand just like a normal person as you understand your limitations and your powers and your superpowers and whatever else you’ve got and you use it to your advantage. It’s not something you try and fix.

And that’s what I got across in the ADHD, Christian, is that you have to use your ADHD as a tool to give you an advantage over people who aren’t ADHD. Hyperfocus is the perfect example.

Mike: It’s so true. It’s like having a completely different brain, a completely different thought process. People always tell me they have to repeat the same thing. My wife, literally, I told you 10 times to take out the garbage. And I’m like, okay, okay, you did. And she’s like, I did. Everything’s like this. And I’m like, you got me.

So I’ve learned that whenever there’s something pressing or not pressing, write it down, make a note of it, write it down a few times. Whenever there’s something I need to do, it needs to be in an organized list like okay tomorrow if there’s four meetings I need it color-coded on a calendar very clearly because if it’s not there I forget about it and Leadership is particularly, I wouldn’t say I’m an entrepreneur. I tell people that I’m an inventor and they go, wasn’t that entrepreneurship? Isn’t that the founder of a company?

And I’m like, no, it’s completely different. And at the end of the day, all I really do is I’m really good at enormous systems thinking. That’s what I do. They’re like, what? But don’t you manage people? I’m like, okay, I mean, eventually, yeah, you need a website. And I’m not the best designer of websites and I don’t know that.

And eventually you do need help technologically. And there’s other people to help with that. And of course you need investor pitches and there’s other people to help with that. But my focus is flow charts and large data models. And they’re like, but who, what is that a real job? And I’m like, Well, it’s different. You’re a and I say this, it’s like, well, if you’re a business owner that’s more of a good or service to sell, but you talk to the customer.

Me, I’m the kind of guy they put in the cubby hole. They carve out a rectangle to throw in a pizza box, a circle to throw in a two liter Mountain Dew, and they say, shut up, don’t come out, send your mathematical equations under the door.

Richard: They shove pizzas into the cage every once in a while.

Mike: It’s like a, it’s like a you wanted these like computer diagrams where it’s like input pizza, output mathematical charts that are easy to interpret by like, yeah.

Richard: So that’s the thing that I had to grips with. And I did that before I knew it was ADHD. And then afterwards it made it, oh yeah, I just need to do this. And then it became obvious why I don’t do well in large groups of people. I just don’t. And okay, then we need to readdress that. Well, this podcast is one of those things. There’s going to be another version of this podcast that’s going to be a roundtable.

So I’ll take four to six people like you and invite you and then we’ll all have a discussion that’s a group discussion. And that’s going to start in a month. I’ll invite you for sure. You could drive everybody else crazy.

Mike: I’ve learned also, Richard, in this beautiful forum we have here, I learned myself when I started doing the podcasting. And it actually is really medicinal or therapeutic because it forced me to listen learn to other people, sharing wisdom, real-time useful wisdom. And that’s something really helpful, I think, for a lot of us ADHD, autistic, neurodiverse people, is that sometimes we need to have the discussion, but we need to be a little bit extra passive to dial down the monkey noise, the clowns in our mind that are always there. And then it forces us to listen and ask questions.

And then me, I always watch the recordings. In fact, the podcast, there’s other people watching, but I’ve learned so much by just watching me ask a question and get a clear answer and listen to the spiel, the telling. And so I think I’m a better man All those people are like, hey, Mike, why don’t you do a podcast? And then, you could talk to people and help explore and expand your network, get good feedback.

And then podcasting is also very, very nice, both to be on as a guest and if one knows how and has the wherewithal to put it together as their own host or producer. And you’re doing it. You’ve benefited a lot from yours as I mine. I’ve benefited A lot.

Grief, and 980,000 Photographs

Richard: I’ve benefited A lot. But I’ve had ADHD, things that I didn’t recognize as ADHD when my wife passed away 21 years ago. I was in grief, of course, and I don’t like grief. Grief is not a good thing. There’s nothing good about grief at all. Well, how can you fix that? I mean, my ADHD brain is thinking how do I fix this? So I went out and started photographing.

And I photographed national parks first, all of them in the Southwest, state parks, Renaissance fairs. And then I ran into belly dancers at the Renaissance Fair. And I became the Renaissance Fair photographer for Southern California and Arizona. I was invited to every show. I did like 1200 shows. I went to every show on in the area and photographed.

I had the front row center of every show. And then finally, one day, I’m like, okay, I’m done. And Renaissance fairs and photography. Just done. And that was just, I didn’t recognize the time, but that was just an ADHD thing. I’d used it up. It’s done. And I have 980,000 pictures on my, my picture site of those travels and things.

I was traveling every weekend, every night. But that’s, that’s, that’s ADHD at work. Hyperfocus, going to three shows a week plus the Renaissance Fair on the weekends and flying or traveling to Moab or, or any of the other parks. And then it was done. And now I’m in Florida. That was in California at the time. Now I’m in Florida.

And I’ll probably start that back up, but more of a probably more passive because I’m a little older now. And the amount of time I spent walking, wow.

Mike: I love to I used to do a lot more photography, but I love art. I use it both therapeutically and for testing out, complicated math things. And I love, I mean, photography is 1 layer of art, but media podcasting is. Is also beautiful. I’ve always been a huge fan of like Lego or similar such blocks and building models and a lot of doing things with my hands.

And I’ve learned that the, as we’ve talked about, the weaknesses that turning one’s weaknesses into their strengths or identifying the neurodiversity realities because it’s so broad and there’s so many charts and this, this and this. And I’ve learned over the smartest and most creative people I’ve ever met, sometimes a bit yelling and grabbing, but the smartest and most creative people I’ve ever met They all have something a little bit off in other areas of their life. And I always tell them that whatever problems you have, I have the same. I just maybe a little bit better under the rug and they’re like, really?

You also do that? I’m like, I’ve done that ten times. I just navigated it differently and It’s fascinating. And no, so and sorry, very sorry to hear about your wife’s passing. That was quite some time ago. But I had yeah, like three years ago, my father passed away. He was 78 and had some health complications as well. But yeah, grief, a lot of grief.

I was learning, talking to different rabbis and therapists, and I’ve always advocated that King Solomon says in Proverbs, better the house of mourning than the house of feasting. And that’s a bit about leadership too, is we have to fail. And failure is on the, is a natural progression on the way to better presentations and more better products and better ghost writing and better storytelling. It’s through personal failure, personal struggles, loss, tragedy, that these things build a person.

And I try to always encourage a person. We don’t always open the book of Proverbs and King Solomon. Not everyone’s so Bible thumping. But Yeah, I’m always impressed sometimes when I talk to other, I don’t know, founders, entrepreneurs, inventors, and they’re like, I’m like, wow, how did you do that? How did you file those 12 patents?

Or how did you sell those 11 board games and market them and invent them? And always someone says, well my father died or I got divorced or I had to accept the bipolar disorder. I had to accept the schizophrenia instead of taking medication. So there always is the pain before the pain and the grief and the suffering, before the success, always, always, and the struggle and the pain and the adversity and the failure, and then the overcoming it.

And then we learn, oh, so-and-so did this. And that’s a theme I see again and again, whereas on the other side of the coin, the people who are with their great ideas and bragging can they, who will send the mountain? You gotta overcome yourself first. And I always look, I always whenever someone shows me a cool idea or I’m chatting with someone or there’s always the people entrepreneurial groups and founder groups and inventor groups and people are throwing ideas around and showing what they’re working on.

And I always tell myself, I’m like, oh, that guy will be successful and he will be successful. Because of that horror he endured in this area of his life or that. And what are your thoughts about the success comes from raw adversity?

Richard: I think it’s more basic than that. So look at your normal life, my life. You’re cruising along, everything’s fine. You’re getting along fine. Everything’s stable. You fall into a rut. You’re going for years doing the same thing, going into work, punching a clock or whatever you do, going to your desk, doing your work or working from home, whatever it is.

And it’s just fine. And then something comes that’s a tragedy. Somebody dies, you lose your job. Could be any number of things. That’s the shock. It’s a shock to the system. And there’s a great movie, by the way, called A Shock to the System. You should watch it. It’s wonderful. Michael Caine, then it has nothing to do with this, though.

Mike: I’m looking it up right now.

Richard: A Shock to the System. It’s an older movie. So anyway, that is causes the chain, the change. And if you just, a lot of people just take the wrong approach, oh, I’ll drink more. I’ll do more drugs or whatever they do, or I go need, I need to a psychologist or psychiatrist and stuff. And that’s that’s probably fine. But the idea is, and what I always did is I used it.

That’s just my ADHD brain. Okay, I’ve had this terrible tragedy in my life. What can I do with it? And I think a lot of people that’s unconscious. They just they have to do something. So they go off and do it. Like you say, the tragedy causes the change. And it does. But it causes the change because it breaks your reality. The way you perceive normal.

Suddenly it’s not normal anymore. Okay, I’m going to go off and photograph things because I need to get rid of this grief that broke the normal. Oh I had to leave Trader Joe’s. I decided to leave. That was, even though I made the choice, it was still a big loss. So I’m going to the other coast. I’m going to make a new life. I don’t know what it’s going to be yet.

And I went through several things like affiliate marketer, a seller on eBay. I went through a dozen things, made a lot of money, and then finally settled on ghostwriting and found out that was my passion. And it has a constant one of those breaks that hits it. And that’s, I am not a marketer. And so all the time I have to force myself to market.

You Suck at Marketing

Mike: I love it. I love how you’re saying that. I’ve had, I think a dozen people, I’ve walked into trade shows and after the first person came to the booth I was in, this happened many times, someone comes up to me right after and goes, okay, look, You got some crazy puzzles. That’s really cool. If you could turn the book of Genesis into art and it’s memorable and we can pull out which chapters and Abraham this and Adam this and Sarah this, that’s kind of cool.

But presenting, you suck. Marketing, you suck. You need to, someone else needs to run the business. You need to take a step back, Merkur. And you need to acknowledge what you’re good at and what you’re not good at. And you may be the coolest, craziest character ever, but someone else needs to help on the clear communication side and on the this is what we’re doing and why side, because you are a tangential thinker and you’re kind of autistic savant crazy man color coding everything.

And it’s a hard pill to swallow. And but I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to accept that’s the secret to life is that sometimes we have to know what we know. We have to know what we don’t know. And we have to find, we have to make a list. I am good at this. I am not good at that. I will never be good at that. We just have to lean into our strengths and we can surround ourselves with smart people who will If they’re really our friends, they will give us an honest reply.

And faithful is one who receives an honest reply. Oh, we pulled out a King Solomon again. Sorry, King Solomon.

Richard: Good old King Solomon. Well, we’ve been going for quite a while and it’s probably time to wrap up. Do you have any final words you want to our visitors?

Mike: Just that this was a beautiful moment and I love your style and I love that you wrote a book called ADHD Christian. I think we need a Jewish version of that as well.

Richard: Well, we can talk about that.

Mike: Copyright patent pending.

Richard: Well, thank you for coming on. This has been Leaders in Their Stories. I’m Richard Lowe. Thank you for coming on the podcast. Let me ask you, where can people find you?

Mike: Yeah, you can check, you can, anyone’s welcome to reach out to Mike Merkur on LinkedIn. And I have also on YouTube at the Impossible Puzzles Show. You can search for that, the podcast. And then I have a songpuzzle.ca is where I do all my puzzles for Hebrew language and other foreign languages and hold your favorite song in your hands.

Yeah.

Richard: Very good. Very cool. Yes, those look interesting. Those are interesting.

Mike: They’re interesting, particularly to us neurodiverseologists.

Richard: You should make a Christian version.

Mike: Copyright.

Richard: Yes. All right. Well, thank you for coming on the show. And we’ll hang on and we’ll talk a little bit more.

Quotable moments