I rebuilt my house and my brain in the same place.

The kids

My body remembered them before my mind did. A visceral yearning that said these people matter, with no memories to attach to it. Then one day it dawned on me. I had not lost their memories. I had lost mine. Theirs were still alive inside them. I just had to learn how to get them out.

That became the question that drives every engagement now: how do I understand what someone else knows that I do not?

The constraint

I could not read, or use screens for more than minutes without my brain seizing. Traditional cognitive rehab was screen-based, and it was Covid. So I asked my neurologist to clear me to install outlets and lay flooring instead of doing puzzles. He did. I rebuilt my house and my brain in the same place, at the same time, with my hands. The street was Whiterock Road.

The budget

Early on I had a fixed amount of processing to spend in a day, and it ran out fast. It has normalized since. But when every step cost me something I could feel, friction stopped being background noise. Every time I hit one I reverse engineered a way around it, because I could not afford to pay for it twice.

Most people have normalized their friction. Dread, delay and difficulty stop looking like problems and start looking like the job.

The methodology

A friend invited me to Clubhouse, where the best UX designers on the planet had gathered to teach user-experience research as the world went digital overnight: the exact discipline my mission required. I had no social conditioning telling me who was allowed to ask questions in a room like that. I just had a mission. So I asked the same four questions of every senior practitioner I could reach. The resources became my curriculum. The questions became my pick axe.

Why AI clicked

Most people came to AI carrying years of sci-fi narratives, fear, and hype. I came in without any of it. I did not remember the narratives, and I had no picture of where AI was supposed to belong.

I just saw a tool.

So I did not point it at rewriting emails. I pointed it at whatever was costing the most: a system nobody had mapped, or a brief that reverse engineers the friction in someone's week and gives them the bandwidth back. I approached it the way I approach broken systems. Start with friction, not tools. Map what is actually happening before recommending anything. Build what removes the weight without losing what is human. Whiterock Road is the practice that brings that lens to leaders.

The unexpected part

This is not a story about loss, and I do not tell it for sympathy. The reset took my design bias with it: the inherited assumptions about how a problem is supposed to be solved. What was left turned out to be the part that mattered: I ask questions relentlessly until I understand the whole problem, and I am strong at reverse-engineering the one thing that actually works for the person in front of me. Not a generic best practice. Their version of good.

Why this matters for your AI

Here is what rebuilding my own model of good taught me about the technology. AI is always guessing at your version of good, and when it has to guess, it defaults to the average of everyone's. I had no choice but to make mine explicit. Most people never do, and that, not the technology, is the reason AI so often misses.

You should not have to lose your memory to learn this. The work is to start documenting your good today.