How My Chaotic Brain Made Me a Founder

My friends call me “chaotic.” They mean it as a joke, but when they say it after watching me do a full cheer-kick in the elevator so the key fob I tie to my shoelaces (so I never forget it) can reach the key reader… I see it.

From the outside, my brain looks like someone dumped a filing cabinet down a flight of stairs.
But if you could peek into my brain, you’d see something more organized than Martha Stewart’s spice drawer.

To me, my thoughts make perfect sense. It doesn’t feel jumpy — it feels logical. I’d even call it calm.

Take conversations: you tell me a story about your cat, and I immediately ask what your favorite trail mix is (in a non-socially awkward way).
To you, my logic seems unhinged. To me, it’s straighter than Leonardo DiCaprio. 

We were talking about cats → I once cat-sat for a friend → her freezer had ice cream → I like pistachio ice cream → why don’t more trail mixes have pistachios → what’s the best trail mix?

This happens constantly. From the outside, my thinking looks like a stack of papers that got scattered through a park by a leaf blower.
On the inside, it’s like 47 browser tabs, perfectly labeled and color-coded — I just switch between them without announcing that I’m hitting Ctrl + T.

A new tab pops open for anything I think, see, hear, or experience. I don’t have an internal mute button. Everything is a police siren grabbing my attention.
That’s why I can point you to every coffee shop in a neighborhood I walked through once — despite not drinking coffee. My brain runs at “three espressos,” but in the Zoom call where everyone talks at once sense, not the productive sense.
I’m not trying to remember any of it. The data just auto-saves.

My room works the same way. It might look chaotic, but I can tell you exactly how many socks are buried under the covers at the foot of my bed. Everything has a place — and if something doesn’t have a place yet, it waits in the corner until it does.
I can’t put something “away” just to hide it. Fake order is more stressful than grabbing your mail shoeless and remembering your elevator key is… tied to the shoe you left upstairs.

Here’s the contradiction: when I focus, I lock in like Simone Biles mid-routine. One tab gets promoted to its own window, and suddenly everything else disappears. It’s great for productivity and terrible for replying to texts.

That mix of 47 open tabs and sudden hyperfocus is  why founding ShareSkippy made sense to me.

People imagine founders as hyper-focused, cold-plunging discipline machines with 5 AM routines and gratitude journals. Meanwhile, I started ShareSkippy because it was the only job chaotic enough to match my internal operating system.

Most workplace environments want you to pick one lane.
Entrepreneurship gives you twelve, throws in five detours, and says “good luck” — but with that comes permission to follow a thought wherever it wanders.

It’s messy, unpredictable, and somehow extremely organized at the same time — basically what I’d look like if I got the Tom Brady dog-treatment (which is equally chaotic) and reappeared as a career path.

At times, I’ve wished for a brain that followed the speed limit, stopped at red lights, and kept its thoughts driving in the same direction on a tidy mental highway.

But I also know that when I let my tabs talk to each other, ideas collide, creativity happens, and solutions appear.
My brain is like a quantum computer — complicated, parallel-processing, glitchy with simple tasks but great with chaos.

“Normal” brains go A to Z in a straight shot.
My thoughts form a constellation — still straight, just connecting a completely different set of points.
Sometimes that means I land on a brilliant idea; usually it means I spend three times as long deciding that trail mix shouldn’t have dried fruit in it.

Not better. Not worse. Just a different operating system.

So yeah — maybe I look chaotic. But every tab has a purpose. You just can’t see the system. And honestly, that’s fine. Because it works. Mostly.

When you’re running on a different operating system, though, you eventually realize you need a translation layer — some way for other people to see the constellation instead of getting lost in the chaos.

So I’ve opened a new tab: figuring out how to make things a little more readable without changing the system. How to let people in on the pattern without feeling like I’m slowing myself down.

If your brain also looks like chaos but somehow runs like a surprisingly competent machine, drop your story. I’m curious how other people make their operating systems work with the rest of the world.

Follow me on Substack (https://substack.com/@getmekaiac) or Medium (https://medium.com/@kcolban)