About Dan Herring

I came into the world bleeding. Forceps to the head before I'd taken a breath.

Johannesburg, Lesotho, a boarding school in Bloemfontein, Bethal, Vanderbijlpark. Raised by nannies while my mum worked double shifts as a croupier. Mixed race in a sea of black faces, called Lehua, white one, and never quite either. Always moving, always slightly to the side of whoever I was standing next to.

So I went inward. At the cinema mostly, left to my own devices, sat alone in the dark while Ghost Ship and Signs poured into me, films I had no business watching at that age. At home it kept going. Blank tapes from the shop, recording The Amazing Spider-Man straight off the telly, watching it over and over until I knew every frame. When the boredom hit I taped something new over the top. You'd get these accidents: the old episode flickering through for a second before the new one took, a hard cut where one ran into the other. Scratchy, grainy, and yours. You held it in your hands and chose what was worth keeping. Now it all streams, endless and on tap, and nothing has to be chosen.

Dragon Ball Z, uncut, the slow burn that hooked me because it wouldn't let go. The other kids traded Tazos, the little discs you got in crisp packets, building their stacks, winning. I sat off to the side copying the illustration on the disc, line by line.

May 2004. The night before the flight I looked up at the moon and thought, I'm going to see that same moon from somewhere else now. A heavy thought for a ten-year-old, but I knew something was ending.

Everything I pictured about England fit on a football sticker: Manchester United, David Beckham. We moved to Leeds. Nobody knew what Leeds was. Including me.

Everything was different. Terraced houses pressed up against each other, low fences, no security walls. Home was three of us in a one-bedroom council flat in Pudsey. An older dad from the harder generation, a drinker. My mum as alien in this place as I was, still trying to catch her bearings. The two of them clashing, and me in the middle.

I joined school at the tail end of Year Six, the perfect time to land: SATs done, high school around the corner, nobody with much to do but keep their head down and ride the year out. I was still the outsider, peppered with questions that showed how little British kids knew of anywhere past Britain. What do you do about the lions? Like I'd grown up in a hut, half-naked, a rag over my junk and a spear in my hand. You can't shift that picture once it's set in someone's head, so I didn't try. Mrs. Metcalfe, my form tutor, started calling me Picasso, and that was the one that stuck instead. The artist kid.

So the creative kid kept making. Picasso followed me into high school. Consistent A's in art. Socially I drifted between worlds: the nerdy kids, the ASBO crew drinking and smoking and up to no good, and the in-betweener, which was probably my natural state.

Then something else started pulling at me in the background. Guitar Hero broke it open, and I picked up a real guitar and took to it fast. Because my friends wanted to be Sum 41, I became 'Brown Sound' by default. The mixed-race kid, the inherited title. We rehearsed in a friend's grandad's barn, amps as loud as we wanted, no rules. The kind of gift you don't recognise as a gift until much later.

Towards the end, the art started slipping. By twenty I was at Bradford College of Art, not Leeds, the one I'd actually set my heart on. My portfolio wasn't strong enough. So I went to Bradford and barely showed up: a legendary party house, drugs every week, scraping a pass. Didn't go to graduation. Didn't do the final exhibition. The lowest stretch of my life, and by the end of it I was done with art.

Then a few years of floundering. Gap years that weren't really gap years, no clue what to do with myself. Somewhere in the drift I watched my bandmate Phil get into music production, and something clicked. That's it. Not perform. Make the thing. I applied for a proper music degree. Fifty grand of debt is what that turned into, with the interest, but I didn't know that yet.

Drawing. Bands. Music production. MLMs. Dropshipping. Graphic design. T-shirts. Property investing. Affiliate marketing. By twenty-five I'd tried all of it, and none of it had paid the rent.

In between, Screwfix. Keyholder promotion, £1 extra an hour, ten times the work. Are you fuckin' serious!?

So I pivoted again. Property books. Seminars and masterminds and credit card debt that climbed from eighteen grand to thirty. My student loan sat at £48,214.80, sixteen years to clear, though I didn't know what interest really meant when I signed.

The pattern took me a decade to see, and even then I caught it in flashes: four in the morning with another half-finished course on the screen, at the Screwfix till watching the clock crawl, in a Peterborough boardroom listening to a man explain why his strategy was the strategy. I kept changing the vehicle, hoping it would change the destination. What I had was a wiring problem with no name yet: hyperfocus, impulsivity, a brain that always pulled me toward the next thing before I'd finished the last.

I was doing everything except finishing. Finishing was the work.

I never got the diagnosis. ADHD, probably, if I sat in the right chair and answered the right questions. The more I read, the less I wanted the label. What I've got is a brain wired for openness: too many ideas, the pull toward the next one before the last one's gone cold. For years I treated that as the thing to fix. Then I quit fighting it. I'm built this way, and the job got simple — point the wiring at work that rewards it.

It started with Leonardo. I'd assumed genius was something you were handed at birth. Then I read how he actually worked: notebooks full of anatomy one week, moving water the next, a painting the week after, dragging ideas across fields nobody else thought to put in the same room. Not blessed. Built. Then Munger, reading chemistry and psychology and physics just to think clearly about money. Then Federer in David Epstein's Range, the kid who played every sport going before he ever settled on tennis, and got better for it. These were people wired the way I am. The thing I'd been told was a flaw was the engine in all of them.

So I built around the wiring instead of against it. Short sprints. Five days, start to finish, a digital asset shipped before the dopamine wears off. I catch the energy at the front where it's highest and I'm gone before the boredom turns up. Most people compound by grinding one thing for a decade. I compound by stacking: a skill here, a discipline there, the talent stack Scott Adams talks about, the circle of competence widening one sprint at a time. Same brain that couldn't sit still. Finally given the right shape of work.

The shy boy who came in bleeding spent thirty years thinking something in him needed correcting. Turns out it just needed aiming.