Nicholas Ferguson
I’m not a physicist. I’m a computer systems engineer.
Almost nothing in this book came from other people’s books; it came through thought games and conversation.
To me, what follows isn’t speculation. It’s a translation of something I understood whole, and I’m going to tell it to you the way I understand it.
How TSR came to be
- Fourth grade A Note Before We Begin
When I was in fourth grade, in a YMCA league in Denver, I played a basketball game where I couldn’t do anything wrong. My mom and dad and my sister were in the bleachers. By my coach’s stats I had a quintuple double that day: points, rebounds, assists, steals, blocks. Nine years old. I was in the flow, the way athletes talk about it, and somewhere in the middle of it I noticed a voice. It wasn’t quite mine. It was quieter than mine, and simpler. It told me where to go and what to do, and every time I followed it, something good happened. A basket. An assist. A steal.
Afterward I told my mom. I said I could hear another voice in my head, a quieter one, and when I followed it I was always right.
Then she told me I should never tell anybody else about that voice, because they would think I was crazy and lock me up.
So I didn’t. For most of my life I never told anyone.
- By 2016 Prelude
By 2016 I was running technology at a hedge fund, and for the ten years before that I’d been watching projects and people go through cycles. The same cycles of change, over and over, in projects and in people. Once I’d noticed them I couldn’t stop seeing them.
It’s the résumé of somebody who spent twenty years forcing things to happen. That turns out to be decent preparation for noticing what happens when you stop.
- From 2017 Chapter 14 · The Knife
I did the same thing almost every day. Meditate for fifteen minutes. Write a page or two in a journal. Then paint. Before the cruise, most of what I made was about inner and outer being, and about love. Hearts, figures holding each other. It wasn’t about reflection yet.
- July 2019, the hot seat Chapter 4 · The Hot Seat
The room went completely silent for about fifteen seconds, which on a stage in front of a crowd, with Esther standing a step away and looking right at you, is a very long time. You can hear it on the recording. Nothing. The whole room waiting. I’d leaned back from the microphone with my hands folded in my lap, and I wasn’t reaching for anything. I wasn’t trying to work out what they meant, or what I was supposed to say next, which is the first time in my life I can remember not doing that. There was nothing to do but sit there and let it in.
What they gave me was fifteen seconds in a room with a few thousand people in it and no resistance in me at all, and what came through that opening is the rest of this book.
- The first night home Chapter 5 · Receiving
The best word I have for it is a download. Concepts, information, relationships, all arriving as a flow. It came in pictures more than words, almost like movies. The thought game I told you at the beginning, awareness first and the particles and the collisions, came in that first night. It wasn’t a sentence. It was the whole flow at once, from before the beginning forward.
- The recording Chapter 12 · Five Seconds
When I finally stopped and played it back, there were five seconds on the recording.
Over the next year, what I’d said into that recorder came back to me one relationship at a time, along with a great deal more. It came back through ease. Effort had only kept it away.
- October 7, 2019 Chapter 14 · The Knife
On October 7, 2019, about eighty days after the hot seat, I drew the whole thing by hand for the first time, as rings: expansion dilation across from time dilation, lenses and wells, Tuning on one side and Focus on the other, and an E in the middle that I labeled “the valve, the blend.” Some of the names have changed since. The structure hasn’t.
- 2020, the first book Chapter 6 · The Four Directions
And what I believed then was that I was a technology executive who understood projects and teams, and that this was the language people would listen to from me. So I wrote the whole theory as a book about project management. That’s actualization. The Art of Influencing Project Success came out in 2020, and for a weekend it was a top seller on Amazon.
- The next five years Chapter 11 · The Gap
I couldn’t take it back. So I did the next thing, which was to decide, somewhere below the level of deciding, that it had failed and that I was the kind of person whose big idea fails.
That’s an expectation. I installed it myself, and it ran for five years. I kept playing the thought games. I kept the drawings. I didn’t show them to anyone, and every time the idea of writing it properly came up I felt the old shape close around it.
- 2026 Chapter 21 · What I Don’t Know
What changed wasn’t the theory. It was that I finally had readers, people and machines, who could check the physics row by row and tell me where it broke, and mostly it didn’t. That took the verdict out of someone else’s hands and put it where it belongs, in the table, where anyone can look.
What his mother asked
Last question. What did your mother say, when you finally told her?
The morning after the download I woke up with more energy than I’d had in years, five-second recording and all. I called my mom. I was walking the back yard while we talked, out along the tree line where our property met the Natchez Trace, the air clean, the birds going, and I couldn’t sit down. I told her everything I could remember. That I’d found what felt like the secret of the universe, and roughly how it worked.
She wasn’t especially surprised. She listened. She was skeptical, logically skeptical, the way she should have been. And then she said something like: “That’s a lot. What are you going to do with that now?”
It’s the best question anyone has asked me about TSR. It took me years to answer it. You’re holding the answer. So is the other question, the one from the stage. Did you get it? Yes. This is what I got. And it was made the way the book says things are made. Every question in it came back In From someone, people and machines, who pushed on what I thought I knew, and what came back changed the shape. The questioner in these pages is the world answering me. That’s the mirror in the title.
Anything else?
One thing.
When I was a kid, a quiet voice told me where to go on a basketball court, and I was told to keep it to myself. I did for most of my life. What I know now is that the voice was never only mine, and never anyone else’s either. It was the Current, coming through a kid who was having too much fun to resist it. It comes through you the same way, in flashes, whenever you stop holding it off.
Nothing you’ve ever wanted has been lost. It’s all still there, a little further out than you are, waiting for you to let it in. Every hard thing you’ve lived through has only added to it.
The surface isn’t blank. You’ve got a history, and it’s cut into you, and it shapes every layer that comes after. That doesn’t mean you’re finished.
There’s room for another mark.
