Chris Harper

Lifetime member of God's special ed class.

[California Zephyr 2026 @SantaFeAlways]

B&O 7591, 3767, and 6045
Point of Rocks, MD
December 1980

Roger Puta Collection
Description by Marty Bernard
Public Domain 🇺🇸

[Chris Harper @workisaprayer]

@RodinAuguste2 @col_a_buendia That's how they refer to us.

[Andrew Beck @AndrewBeckUSA]

You are depriving yourself of experiencing life through the eyes of God by not having children.

[Chris Harper @workisaprayer]

@davepl1968 @brockpierson 300 was enough to play TradeWars 2002.

[Dave W Plummer @davepl1968]

@tautologer He wants to be seen as smarter than Matt.

[Chris Harper @workisaprayer]

@BowTiedBroke I know a couple of these guys. If they would stop lying I would do business with them again. I hold them at arms length with a heavy heart because they are friends.

[Chris Harper @workisaprayer]

If you've always been good with machines and technology, but struggled with people. This book might have some answers.

[Dave W Plummer @davepl1968]

Ten million dollars was waiting for me on the other side of the world.

All I had to do was get on a plane.
I couldn't go.

Not "didn't want to." Couldn't.

The company I'd started in my den — nights and weekends at first, mailing diskettes from the kitchen table — had grown into a real business with real offices and more than two million customers. A publicly traded California company wanted to buy it, and after months of due diligence, audits, and lawyers, the deal was nearly done. One task remained: fly to Jaipur, India, and personally introduce our American buyer to our overseas software partner, a company run by my good friend Shrishail, who had built some of our most popular products. A handshake trip. A victory lap. The kind of moment founders dream about.

I had never flown overseas, and even a domestic flight takes a toll that I try not to let anyone see. This trip meant days in an unfamiliar country with none of my routines, capped by a midnight bus trek through the countryside on a road the locals cheerfully called the "Road of Death."

From the moment it was proposed, something deep and inaccessible in me began to panic. And here is the part I couldn't explain to anyone, then or for years afterward: I wasn't afraid of the airplane, and I wasn't afraid of the road. I was afraid of myself. I knew — with the certainty of an engineer reading a gauge — that somewhere between the airport and the negotiating table I would come apart, the kind of collapse my wife and I privately called an "episode," in front of the exact people who were deciding whether to write the check. I honestly didn't think I was well enough to go. I could not have told you what "well" meant, or what, precisely, I had instead.

Understand: I am not a timid man. I had dropped out of high school and clawed my way from a 7-Eleven in Saskatchewan to Microsoft. I routinely risked a million dollars a month on advertising and slept just fine. I'd been sued by the state attorney general and lived to tell the tale. Whatever this was, it wasn't cowardice and it wasn't nerves. It was some kind of hard limit — a ceiling I could feel but couldn't see. And skipping the trip might look strange enough to spook the buyer and sink the whole acquisition: life-changing money if it closed, a devastating loss if it didn't, like misplacing a winning lottery ticket.

That's when a trusted friend saved the day. Allen, a former U.S. Marine who ran our marketing division (I'd recruited him from Microsoft years before) already handled our Indian partners, and he offered to make the trip in my place. It made sense in every way but the one that mattered: I am nearly incapable of delegating anything important, and this was the most important trip of my life. I was now gambling my future, my retirement, and my family's security on another man's performance, all to avoid getting on an airplane. When you catch yourself doing the math on that trade — and taking it anyway — some part of you begins to suspect that what you have is not just a quirk.

Allen made the trip and performed brilliantly. The deal closed a few weeks later. I accelerated the vesting of the employees' stock options so the team — Allen in particular — could share in the sale alongside me, say my goodbyes, and take one last long look around the offices. I handed in my keys and went home with a check that meant I'd never have to work again. By most measures by which a life can be scored, I had just won.

And nobody — least of all me — thought to ask the obvious question: what kind of man stakes his entire fortune on a proxy rather than take a trip? What was that ceiling I'd been living under, and how long had it been there?

It took another decade before I asked, and the answer turned out to have a name. I have autism. I found out long after the career, long after the company, long after the check had cleared. What follows is, in part, the story of how I finally got there — and everything I've learned since about the invisible thing that had been quietly running my life all along.

[This is the new intro to my Second Edition of “Secrets of the Autistic Millionaire”, everything I now know about living a successful life with autism that I wish I had known long ago.]

Check it out here: https://t.co/J7I8oiQuwW

Love to get your feedback on this new introduction!]

[Chris Harper @workisaprayer]

@BowTiedBroke The oral stuff processes differently than the stuff you apply to your skin. This helped in our house: Pro-Gest Balancing Cream. Good luck, Sir. Hang in there.

[BowTiedBroke @BowTiedBroke]

Millennials with 3% mortgage rates finally outboomered the boomers.

[Chris Harper @workisaprayer]

@davepl1968 @pr0ud_americans 2.3 Ford 4cyl was reliably boring.

[Chris Harper @workisaprayer]

@mattdykema It's always been this way. A new SaaS comes out every week promising to solve it once and for all. 😂

[Chris Harper @workisaprayer]

@HunterGlenn @PIAccount1 @QuetzalPhoenix Bro beat me to it.

[Chris Harper @workisaprayer]

@CBKimbrell Tier 4b 😡

[Chris Harper @workisaprayer]

@SlenderSherbet Kung Fu Panda was a documentary.

[Chris Harper @workisaprayer]

@SCHIZO_FREQ "the autist cares much more about solving problems than about managing their own reputation"

[🅶🅾🆁🅺 @Raclure03]

🥹

[Chris Harper @workisaprayer]

@SosnaArno @nikitabier There's already a branch in every company that practices this. It's called "sales". Accounting only exists as a rear view mirror to call bs when these folks get out of control.

[Arno Sosna @SosnaArno]

@nikitabier Can't wait for non-deterministic accounting.

[James Lucas @JamesLucasIT]

This painting depicts one of the most heartbreaking farewells in art history...

It's called Ein lieber Besuch, "A Dear Visitor," and it was made by the Austrian artist Max Kurzweil in 1894. A mortally wounded officer lies in bed, and a fellow soldier lifts him gently so he can reach up one last time and touch the face of the horse that carried him through war.

The animal is right up to the bed. No one is holding it. It came on its own. It lowers its head toward the frail hand reaching for it, and the way it stands, uncertain, careful, tells you it senses that something is wrong. Its master, who was once strong and full of courage in the saddle, is now a shadow of the man it knew, and the horse seems to be trying to understand why. Why he does not rise. Why he does not come. Why the hand that reaches up is so weak...

It’s something anyone who has shared a deep bond with an animal can understand: two old friends who went through everything life brought their way together, a man and a horse who trusted each other with their lives, given one final moment before the end.

We often think the deepest bonds are the ones we can put into words, but Kurzweil painted the opposite: a farewell where not a single word is spoken, because none is needed. Everything they mean to each other passes between them in silence. And for one brief moment, before they part, that silence says everything...