I don’t mean sloppy. I mean that specific hour when everyone’s guard is down and the conversation stops performing. When someone explains the meta experience and how they actually think about their work (let’s call it their “doing”), not the conference version, the real version.

Last night I found myself in a room full of brilliant Seattleites. A nuclear medicine doctor walked me through how AI maps the interaction surfaces of radiography and cancer cells. An entrepreneur explained how she sequences risk so it scaffolds responsibly. Someone else described their decision architecture like it was obvious, like everyone thinks in nested loops.

And I realized: everyone in the room operates on a different plane. It’s like I knew this, but something about the conversations of yesterday, and a lot of conversations frankly leading to yesterday, made this seem very clear.

Here’s what I mean, and just a heads up, I’m being very reductive about this.

Some people have a single axis of genius. One strength, one lens, one way of cutting through. They’re a line. Sharp and useful.

Some people have two axes that intersect, forming an XY plane. They see in two dimensions where others see one.

Some have multiple: an XYZ volume. A space they move through with ease that others might find disorienting.

Sidebar: None of these are more important than the other. They just are.

Everyone has a native plane. The geometry where their experience, relationships, and cognition work effortlessly. The shape that makes them powerful.

I’ve spent years exploring the shape of mine. Last night, I found it. Or at least learned more about it.

Drum roll...

I think my zone of genius is scaffolded curiosity. Systematically realizing how little I know as I start to ask more questions.

Not false modesty. Strategic emptiness. I learn faster than most people in a room because I’m not defending a position. I’m absorbing signal.

When I meet someone who knows something I don’t, which is everyone, about something, I realize that I enjoy asking the epistemological questions, shifting from “what do you know” to “how do you know it.” The facts are nice to have, but I feel more full when I have the architecture of the facts.

Once I have that, something happens inside of me.

I almost feel as if I start to see the shape of their thinking. Feels, ahem, esoteric to say “the shape of it,” but I really mean that. The hinges between one idea and the next. What this thing affords, and what that affordance enables, and what that enabling opens up.

One thing is a hinge to the next thing.

The fun thing is that I don’t think these thoughts alone. People prompt them out of me. I’ve always self-identified as an extrovert, and in realizing my extroverted predisposition, I’m realizing that my cognition is collaborative. Relational.

This is my plane:

X axis: Strategic emptiness. The ability to clear what I think I know.

Y axis: Affordance sensing. Seeing how one thing enables the next.

Z axis: Relational activation. Thinking that only happens in conversation.

The intersection of these three is where I operate. It’s where I’ve always operated. I just didn’t have language for it until last night.

My high school English teacher introduced me to a poem called “You Begin” by Margaret Atwood.

I think that poem was the beginning point for me. It astounds me how much I reference it over a decade later. Like... what would have taken its place if I didn’t know that poem?

The second poem that has stuck with me is T.S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton,” with its meditation on “the still point of the turning world,” that place where past and future gather, where the dance is.

So I wrote a poem to myself, borrowing from both, in case I forget myself in the future.

Still Point

You begin this way: this is your mind, this is a cup. The cup is empty, not because you have nothing but because you made room.

This is your attention, it moves like water toward the other person. This is their mouth, these are their words, that is the shape of how they think. You are inside it now.

This is an eye. The eye affords light. Light affords the path. The path affords the door. The door affords the room you’re standing in. Each thing is a hinge to the next thing.

Outside the conversation is the pattern, green because it is alive, and beyond that other conversations, other patterns, and they are the same shape wearing different clothes.

This is the world, which is fuller and more connective than I have said. You are right to empty yourself that way, to pour out what you knew so the cup can hold what you don’t: the cup fills.

Once you have learned to ask you will learn there are more questions than you can ever finish.

“Once you have learned these words you will learn that there are more words than you can ever learn.”

The question floats above the answer like a hand over a hand. The question anchors and scaffolds, their knowing is a warm stone you hold between two listenings.

This is your vessel, that is their vessel, this is the chain, it is long. Not loose. Has more layers than you can see at once.

It begins with not knowing, it moves through their knowing, it ends with what neither of you knew until the cup and the question and the chain made it visible.

This is your vessel, this is their vessel. They were always one and the same.

This is your hand. Open. This is what you will come back to: the shape that receives.

To say the least: I think to be the most interesting person in a room, you have to treat everyone else like they’re the most interesting person in the room.

Not as a tactic. As a posture. As genuine curiosity.

When you do that, you effortless your way into cognitive spaces you couldn’t have imagined. You help construct a table for mutual existence and appreciation where the builders and tinkers are. And you realize: you belong there. We’ve all been there. We’re all here. Not because you’re the smartest. Because of a certain wisdom:

“Let no man be so proud And confident, To think he is allowed A little tent Pitched in a meadow Of sun and shadow All his little own.”

You’re the most willing to be changed by the conversation.

So here’s my question for you (but really for me):

What plane do you operate on?

What are the axes that define the geometry of how you think? The dimensions where you move with ease while others feel friction?

You have one. Honestly, probably multitudes. You might just not have language for it yet.

Start with this: when do you feel effortless? When does insight happen without trying? Who prompts it out of you?

Maybe that’s your plane. Maybe that’s your shape.

Find it. Name it. Then figure out what it affords.

If this resonated, I’d love to hear about your plane, or simply what resonated.