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What are the advantages of being Autistic?

I Sperg

I've just remembered, I actually came here to be helpful to my fellow Autists and Aspies!

I can write a good title, I believe, but now I have to reel in my reader, and get him her or it to reflect on those times where their "being special" gave them a "head and shoulders" advantage over the Neurotypicals. 

So if you've got any instances, where being on the spectrum is clearly giving you an advantage  please, try and share it with the rest of us.

THIS thread COULD be a useful resource, for those of us who feel Autism is all disadvantage, or those poor souls who have little idea of the great power they can be weilding without understanding..

Which to be frank, is where I've been for the vast majority of my life and if I can save ONE OTHER PERSON from that particular fate, with this thread, I will have "won" under the rules of the game I play...  I know some people will post good stuff, and I'd like to say thank you up front, rather than be cluttering up the thread with my comments.

This, although part of my schtick is for YOU GUYS, I'll be busy wittering on another thread, although, I'll monitor this one of course, I may learn somethinig useful! :c)

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  • I was 18 years the Finance man on Europe's CFSP crisis management team, leading the guys who sorted out the crashed Albanian economy in 1997, pathfinding Malta's accession into Europe, and stuff I can't talk about. Roughly equal to Nick Hine, the Second Sea Lord, in terms of authority: we were gonged with a Nobel Peace Prize in 2012.

    During my diagnosis in 2015, my X-Men weird did its thing in front of the Savile Club, half the Cabinet, including Boris: they saw me handle a major strategic issue with plenty of foresight, and hand it over to the one person capable of delivering without a ripple. This may be one reason the Cabinet Office is looking for weirdos and misfits: we pay attention to and are good at pattern-recognition at the heart of superforecasting, which was just my starting point: I spotted the fall of the Iron Curtain a decade ahead, earning myself an MI5 Viva, but it took some Intervention from on high to place me where it mattered when: I got to actually complete the join of East and West a couple of years later. Banks are desperate for the skill, too.

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  • in reply to aidie

    As I said, it was the foundation for something Nobel Prize-winning. But that's a conflict of values to me: I prize humility. Seriously. I know my CV's ridiculously achievement-orientated, and so can appear boastful, but I've whittled it for over-statement and Mittyism and it's fair. When the Secretary General of NATO calls across a reception full of Heads of State, by my first name, astonished to see me there, because he knew me in another context, you can't play the mouse any longer, however much I was supposed to: it took another name he knew and the memory of how I first came to his attention to help him place my move, for all that it caused considerable debate in NATO because I was the first, and so far only, spouse to meet the criteria of one of the unwritten rules, the Rosenberg Interdict. Many jumped to the obvious conclusion strings had been pulled, but at the end of the day, even my harshest critic apologised, when he found the reality, that I'd run the finances on a shoestring of a budget.

    The important message here is that nobody'd interfered by telling me I'm Disordered. I'd been built by slow degrees to the point where I was taking the authority of a Head of State, leading the team which restabilised the Albanian economy, under authority delegated from the UN through NATO to us in WEU, I did the pathfinding for Malta's accession to the EU, and completed the work Gandhi left unfinished when he was assassinated. Nobody else did those last two, I did, without a mandate, because the ball fell in front of me, I picked it up and ran with it. I'd been positioned to do this, not by decisions of my own, but because it was so written, a Muslim would say. We each have our own paths, and looking back with that Gandhi deal in my pocket, full of praise and thanks on high, I realised it had been managed long before my parents met: when I tried to follow my own less ambitious agenda, it was immediately blocked and a series of serendipities then placed me exactly where I was supposed to be. There's only one step upwards from changing world history, and it indeed came my way, but that's for another time.

    My message is that telling High-Functioning Aspies they're useless, troublemakers, incompetent, is one huge, malevolent lie: prove them wrong by diligence. Craig Wright's written on the subject, The Hidden Habits of Genius, for a class of those who haven't yet stood out. I left my eternal mark on the world aged 14, by suggesting "not a bad idea" which was actually such a good one it's at the heart of almost all computer code, unnoticed, as such an idea should be.

    Nick Hine's saying the same thing. The David Bretts of the world may hate your guts, but that's because you're the real deal, and they aren't. We don't conform to their norms? Good, all their norms do is hold humanity back. We're the cutting edge, so find your Milk of Human Kindness (an engineer's term for lubricant, but it does here!) and something needing to be reamed, bored and countersunk, and do so. Polished to perfection. A good job jobbed.

  • in reply to aidie

    A viva-voce exam is normally run by the professors to make sure you know your stuff, by going into details face-to-face. This one was from the UK Security Services, who have an interest in strategic issues: my take-away from it was that I'd spotted something very serious indeed. It wasn't the first time I'd dealt with them (age 11) nor the last.