Be Different: Adventures of a Free-Range Aspergian With Practical Advice for Aspergians, Misfits, Families & Teachers

by John Elder Robison

  I think that’s an Asperger thing. My social disability kept me miles away from MaryAnne, whatever she may have thought. Yet when I turned to machines instead of people, I had great success, and I knew it, and that made me confident in that arena. Finally, my concentration and focus let me dive into the light show in ways that ordinary people simply couldn’t.

  Why music at all? Why not rocketry, or psychology, or chemical engineering? The simple answer is, those things didn’t really interest me. In addition, there was the reality of my situation, when I started my work life at age sixteen. People who look at my life today often assume I chose music from the whole universe of careers that exist. That’s not accurate. I didn’t choose to be a high school dropout; I became one when I could not (or would not) do the work my teachers set in front of me. Dropping out pretty much limited my career options to the trades (being a plumber or car mechanic), low-income service work (changing bedpans in a nursing home or waiting on tables), crime (stealing things or dealing drugs), or doing something weird (joining the circus or playing rock and roll).

  None of those options seemed very good. I feel bad saying that today, with my adult perspective, because I’ve learned that you can have rewarding and successful careers in any of those areas. After all, I went on to have great success in life as a mechanic by founding Robison Service when I was about thirty years old. I know people who’ve done very well owning and running restaurants, nursing homes, junkyards, and even electrical contracting companies. Most of those folks—like me—came up through the ranks by learning their trade and then running the business. All of us are proof that you can make it outside the traditional college, white-collar-job career path; and doing so can leave you richer and more fulfilled than many bachelor’s-degree-carrying drones.

  However, all that knowledge was far in the future the day I found myself set free of school. At that moment, I could not see any sure or safe paths to success and happiness, so I chose the thing that sounded easiest and most fun … music.

  Even then, I sensed that my ability to repair musical instrument electronics and fix and modify amplifiers was rare. At age sixteen, I could name a hundred local musicians, but I could not think of a single person who could do what I did, and who did it in music. You might say I found a niche and exploited it.

  I saw that there were lots of musicians. I knew that most of them would never make it to the big time, but as long as they were on the journey, someone had to keep their amplifiers humming and their guitars playing. Could that be me? I wondered. Why not? Musicians did not care if I had a high school diploma, much less a college degree. They just cared how I made them sound. It was a results-oriented thing, pure and simple. That was ideal for me, because my endless electronic experimentation had made me into a results-oriented guy.

  At the same time, I knew there were other people who could do what I did. Sort of. For example, there were Fred Smead, John Fuller, and Sam Skilling back in the AV Department at Amherst Regional High School. They all knew how to fix amplifiers, but did they care? Not really. Those guys had secure jobs keeping all the electronics of the Amherst School System humming. They had no need for a bunch of grungy musicians; they had steady paychecks from the school.

  So the people who needed me (musicians) didn’t know anyone else with skills like mine. The people with skills like mine (commercial electronics technicians) didn’t care much about musicians. It was a perfect opportunity, and I made the most of it.

  Finally, there was me, and my own differences. In the world of music, Asperger’s did not disable me. In fact, my brain differences were really key to my success. How? you ask. I’ll show you.…

  My lack of social skill isolated me from other people. That made me lonely, but it also gave me time to find other interests. While nypical kids were dating and partying, I studied circuits. By the time I was eighteen I’d invested so much time learning music and electronics that a nypical kid would be hard-pressed to ever catch me.

  My Aspergian special interests and focus really kept me on target. While the nypical kids flitted from one interest to another, I stayed locked on my goals. From the time I turned thirteen, I pursued just two interests: music/electronics and transportation machinery. I’ve stayed on course with those interests ever since. I may not have had many friends, and I sure felt the hurt of being alone, but I was able to find solace and success by doing what I was really meant to do. Now, as a successful adult, I find myself making lots of new friends because people appreciate what I’ve done with machines, and I’ve come full circle. Today, I am on the verge of being popular.

  When you’re a kid, people make fun of your special interest. When you’re a grown-up, though, your special interest makes you the expert—the go-to guy—for whatever it is you really love.

  Plastic Brains

  People often comment on the speed with which I can acquire new knowledge. When I was a kid grown-ups would tease me when they saw me reading books about ships or machinery, but they were always impressed with the technical details I remembered. I don’t have a photographic memory, but I am pretty good at retaining the essence of whatever I read. I also remember things I see and do, which is a help whenever I have to find my way home from a strange place, or reassemble something I took apart.

  “That’s a wonderful gift,” my grandmother would tell me. “You’re such a smart little boy.” I may not have known about Asperger’s, but I knew I learned fast from an early age. I could see the difference between the speed with which I picked things up, and the struggles of other kids in my class. I wish I could say that made me a top student, but it didn’t. I may have known I was a better reader than Mikey Thomas, but he still plodded along and got As, while I flitted from one book to another and struggled for a C.

  My problem with learning fast in school was simple. The scope of what the school gave me to do was too small. My teacher might say, “This weekend, I want you kids to read about the Louisiana Purchase on pages 60 to 73 of your American history book.” I’d go home, get interested, and read the whole book. Somewhere inside, I’d find something a lot more interesting, and off I’d go on that tangent, leaving the original assignment behind. By Monday it was totally forgotten. Or even worse, I’d pick up the book, decide it was poorly written or wrong or boring, and simply move on to something else. None of those actions led to good grades, even though I acquired a lot of knowledge on the path to a C or a D.

  Knowing that, I’ll bet I could have done a lot better in school if I’d had a grown-up to keep me focused on the assignments. Someone who said, “Hold on, John. Let’s do what the teacher asked before moving on to the history of California.” I know some Asperger schools do that today, with great success.

  My ability to acquire new skills may not have gotten me ahead in school, but it saved me after I dropped out.

  When I was nineteen I decided I needed a regular job in addition to the work I’d been doing with local rock-and-roll bands since leaving school. I thought about what I could do and settled on being a car mechanic. I’d never worked for any legitimate employer before, and I had no experience fixing cars other than working on my own and my friends’, but I went for it anyway. A help-wanted ad for Don Lorenz GMC-Buick-Cadillac caught my eye. I didn’t know much about GMC, but my grandfather always drove Cadillacs, and that’s what I decided to become—a Cadillac mechanic. I got some copies of Hot Rod and Motor Trend, and reread the Handbook of Automotive Technology that my uncle had given me.

  I studied for several days, and went to the job interview with my brain packed full of all the automotive knowledge I could fit. It worked. The service manager talked to me for about half an hour, concluding with “When can you start?” He went on to say I was the most literate-sounding person who had ever applied there, and one of the only ones who could fill out the job application legibly. I thanked my lucky stars for all those quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog writing exercises in grammar school.

  Within a few months I’d combined m
y love of cars and my fascination with electronics to turn myself into the dealership’s resident auto electronics expert. I rebuilt alternators and starters, and solved wiring problems no one else could unravel. From an experience base of zero, I made myself into an above-average Cadillac mechanic, or at least a Cadillac electronics mechanic. I worked at Lorenz for two years before leaving to return to the music world full-time.

  One of the keys to my success was that I became an expert in something no one else understood—automotive electronics. That happened to be a subset of auto mechanics where I could really shine. Other areas of mechanics required strength, fine coordination, and many hours of practice on a particular car—none of which I had. But when a Coupe de Ville blew a fuse every time you opened the passenger door, you did not need strength, long practice, or a steady and smooth hand to find the problem. You needed abstract reasoning skill. And it turned out I had that aplenty.

  A few years later, I repeated that performance when I saw the chance to get a job as a digital engineer. Unfortunately, my only engineering experience was with analog circuits, and that wasn’t traditional workplace experience—my designs were done on sheets of paper in all-night diners and prototyped in the basement of my house. But as luck would have it, I had something no other applicant had—experience designing sound systems. And that’s what the job was about—designing talking toys and sound effects for Milton Bradley, the electronic game maker. So I got some books on digital design, studied hard, and less than two weeks later I presented myself as a digital designer with audio experience. It would be tempting to say I just bluffed my way into that job, and maybe I did, but my boss always said I was one of his top engineers. So I must have learned fast enough for him!

  Once again, I combined a small amount of experience and practical knowledge with my innate reasoning power, and I succeeded. I used logic to unravel how something worked, which added to my store of practical knowledge. The first time I solved a problem, I started with a clean slate, asking, How does this function? Each solution I figured out added to my collection of mental shortcuts. Those shortcuts then saved me time when I used them to build new things or to attack similar problems. In that way, I built a powerful technical capability rapidly and effectively.

  Those are all examples of how I’ve used my autistic brain plasticity to acquire new skills rapidly and use them to get ahead. Autism has presented me with many challenges, but plasticity is truly one of my gifts.

  Attention to Detail

  I have always paid attention to the little things. My first ten-speed bike was a case in point. When my father took me to pick it up, I immediately turned it over and began studying the gears. “What’s that?” I asked, pointing to the mechanism at the rear wheel. I saw SIMPLEX printed on the casting. “That’s a derailleur,” the bike man said. “It swings in and out to shift the chain from one gear to another. Watch.” He pedaled the bike and moved the lever. I watched the chain move up the gears, and I was smitten.

  There was just one problem. I was troubled by the word “derailleur.” When I heard it, the pronunciation was deRAILer. Well, I knew what a derailer was, and it wasn’t something on the back wheel of a bike. A real derailer is a device bolted to a railway track to derail a runaway train car before it crashes into something more important. But I decided to let his derailleur slide, because I was old enough to know that claiming greater knowledge often meant more trouble in dealings with strangers. Especially strangers with bogus French-sounding words on bikes.

  Some boys my age had girlfriends. I had mechanical devices. Once I discovered bicycle gears, I had to know all about them. I went to Peloton—the bike store in my town—and stared through the glass at brand-new derailleur sets in boxes. I compared the different brands. Campagnolo was the best, and it showed. The whole assembly was made from beautifully finished aluminum alloy. My Simplex set was just plastic, a cheap toy by comparison. Then there was the Shimano, and a few others whose names I’ve forgotten.

  I knew and loved them all. Whenever I passed a bicycle parked on the street, I had to stop and examine its hardware. Sometimes I even moved the levers to test the “feel” of the mechanisms. People made fun of my fascination with gears, but I knew that the people who designed racing bicycles were just as fascinated as I was. The only difference was, they were older and they had jobs. I was just a kid in school.

  Some people would say my whole fascination with gears was weird. They’d say, “Most kids would be interested in riding the bike, not figuring out how its gears work.” Maybe that’s true. But for every hundred people who ride bikes, at least one designer and a few repairers will surely be needed. And who will they be, if not kids like me?

  I ignored the kids who made fun of me and taught myself how bicycles worked. I taught myself to clean and adjust every single part. Each brand was different, but I learned them all. I taught myself how properly adjusted gears feel by placing my hands on the lever and the mechanisms as I pedaled the bikes on my bench top. I have pretty sensitive touch, which allowed me to sense the condition of mechanical things through my hands. And the more I practiced, the better my ability to sense machinery became.

  As I turned the pedals on an old bike I’d feel tiny bumps as grains of sand passed through the gears. If I cleaned the chain with an oiled rag, those little bumps would go away. But that wasn’t all—I’d feel little grabs as I pedaled through tight spots, where the chain might not be properly oiled. I could even feel sloppiness when the crank bearings were too loose. I learned to feel every moving part of the bicycle with just a few simple touches. When I adjusted the derailleur mechanism I’d feel carefully to make sure the chain ran perfectly in both the top and bottom gears. With that ability, I could almost diagnose and adjust bikes blindfolded.

  Other kids saw what I could do, and they started asking me to tune up their bikes. Somehow, bikes I adjusted didn’t look any different, but they shifted better and rode smoother. It was a small triumph that gained me a measure of respect at school. I felt good about that, but pride wasn’t all I got for my efforts. They also made me lunch money.

  A few years later, I applied my mechanical talents to motorcycles instead of bikes, and had even more success. My friend Juke told me about an old Honda 150 Dream motorbike abandoned in a basement. After buying it for twenty-five dollars I turned it into a smooth-running machine that carried me all over New England. That motorcycle was what allowed me to escape the confines of Amherst High into the real world. As soon as I started riding my machines through the halls of the school, the administrators threw me out.

  For the past twenty years, I’ve actually made a career of my love of machines. I founded a company—J E Robison Service—that specializes in difficult service on Land Rovers, Mercedes-Benzes, Rolls-Royces, BMWs, and other fine cars. I chose those makes because they have the best craftsmanship in the world, and they are owned by people who value what they have. It’s turned out to be a good match.

  My clients can see my love of their machinery, and they appreciate my talents. It’s a grown-up version of the bicycle tinkering I did in high school. Cars are a lot more complex than bikes, but my skills have expanded to match. It’s worked out well. My social skills may still be weak, but that’s not what people look for when they bring me a Land Rover to have its rough-running engine repaired. They want craftsmanship, something a person like me can deliver in spades.

  “How do you do it?” When I hear those words, I think what people are really asking is, “What do you do to achieve such a great result with my car? How are you different from other mechanics?”

  There are several answers. The first is that I work with the machines I do because I have a real affinity for them.

  Once I took an interest in them, I made it my business to know all things Rover. I took them apart and put them back together until I figured out how they worked. Today, I work around Land Rovers during the day. I write articles for Land Rover enthusiast magazines. I get in my Range Rover to drive home, and
on the weekend my friend Dave and I pile into our Land Rover Defenders for some serious off-road driving. So I am immersed in the machinery that surrounds me.

  There is a sharp contrast between people like me and mechanics who are just in the trade for money. They go to work at the Cadillac dealer, then climb into a Subaru when it’s time to go. They don’t “live” Cadillac. They don’t immerse themselves in the machines like I do. My job is my love; his is a living.

  The next component to my success is practice. The saying “Practice makes perfect” does hold true. I’ve seen thousands and thousands of Land Rovers, and I’ve handled every bit of every model. Cars are like people—they evolve and change with time. Every year there are new models and little changes, and I spend the time to stay current. Even existing Rovers change as owners fix and modify them. I know how Land Rovers feel, how they fail, and what to do to make each one sing. There is really no substitute for practice and the long easy familiarity that comes from it.

  The first two components of my success are within reach of anyone, Aspergian or nypical. The next secrets to my success are ways in which my Asperger’s sets me apart and gives me key competitive advantages.

  Like many with Asperger’s, I have an extraordinary power of concentration. I can look into a mechanical system until it becomes my whole world. That hyperfocused concentration is a key to really understanding what’s going on at an elemental level. It’s an ability I used to take for granted—I assumed everyone could do it. Today I know it’s a rare gift. People ridiculed me for being in my own world as a kid, but no one ridicules me as a grown-up tuning an antique engine.