We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Max Yee a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.
Max, so great to have you sharing your thoughts and wisdom with our readers and so let’s jump right into one of our favorite topics – empathy. We think a lack of empathy is at the heart of so many issues the world is struggling with and so our hope is to contribute to an environment that fosters the development of empathy. Along those lines, we’d love to hear your thoughts around where your empathy comes from?
Growing up with ADHD, I had many opportunities to learn about suffering and misery through my own lived experiences of having to survive within the school system and my day-to-day misunderstandings. Over time, I made an active attempt to try to understand other people’s perspectives and experiences the way I wished others understood me. Eventually, the empathy I developed became the foundation for my compassion. As I entered college, I found myself more in leadership roles where I had the opportunity to recruit and direct others. I noticed that many of my highly competent peers often struggled with leadership as they have never developed a very sophisticated ability to express empathy as they never had to struggle as much or were highly capable individuals and thus lacked the ability to relate to those who may have a hard time performing the same way they did. However, because I had a great amount of understanding for those in my care, I was able to bring people around me and motivate them through difficult challenges. In a way, my early childhood difficulties and hardships provided me the experiences I needed to develop my compassion which I employ a lot in current leadership roles.
Appreciate the insights and wisdom. Before we dig deeper and ask you about the skills that matter and more, maybe you can tell our readers about yourself?
Currently, I am starting a company called Frontera and we are a program that allows individuals to turn any idea into a project and help them get it off the ground. We are hoping to be a platform that helps any individual with any idea to find teammates, communities, and resources to help them start building their project. We hope to accomplish that via our software platform which helps match people with similar project ideas with people who want to work on them.
I was inspired to build this company with my sister Claire after a program in San Francisco called buildspace shut down, many of the people in their program really loved the community and people they were able to meet through buildspace since they were from around the world and were extremely supportive of their fellow members projects even though they were radically different from one another. Some people were working on tinder for surrogate parents while another participant was working on a bumblebee themed video game. There were also people trying to start their own tea business, youtube channels, and UI/UX consulting agencies. All of these people were some of the craziest, creative, and ambitious individuals I met that came from all nationalities and walks of life. When the program shut down, some the alumni (myself included) got together to found Frontera in hopes of cultivating a similar program and community but approaching the problem of supporting project development in a different way. Before Claire and I applied to buildspace, I was also thinking of building a software platform that helped people find other builders and creators that want to collaborate since I knew many people at my university who wanted to start their own business or build their own app had a hard time finding those who were interested in working together. As a result, I think many project ideas end up not going anywhere due to the high starting costs and barriers to entry. I wanted to help support the builders like the ones I met in buildspace since I was very inspired by the project and ideas many of them were trying to bring into this world and I believe there needs to be a home for all of these talented creatives.
If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?
I think some of the most important qualities I developed were what I called the three C’s which were curiosity, courage, and compassion. Each of these qualities are not only important but they work together in harmony and help drive many of the decisions I made in my life and helped guide me on my journey. For instance, to be curious and compassionate, one must be courageous to take the first step to understand others and to learn about them. Oftentimes that results in many uncomfortable conversations that would be avoided by most people due to certain questions or actions being perceived as “socially inappropriate” by others.
Each of these qualities has greatly helped shape my morality and ethics towards many choices I have made along with helping me find the strength to take on very risky, ambiguous opportunities I come across. Although curiosity is not a quality that can be developed to a significant degree (as it is closely intertwined with trait openness), I believe compassion and courage can be greatly improved through simple exposure. By taking on actual fears (and not uncalculated risky endeavors), people can greatly improve their courage since they will feel more empowered as they conquer bigger and bigger fears. The same goes for compassion by taking on opportunities to serve or give to others around you. However, one mustn’t bite off more than they can chew. In other words, a person should start with a small very manageable challenge and then build strength to take on larger challenges over time. It’s important to know one’s limits and where you are when you are starting.
What would you advise – going all in on your strengths or investing on areas where you aren’t as strong to be more well-rounded?
I think as someone with ADHD, I have a rather unique perspective on this that I think would apply across the board. When it comes to one’s strengths and weaknesses, its important to know where the potential limits are. The general rule of thumb for me is to develop one’s strengths as much as possible and to just mitigate weaknesses or only develop one’s weaknesses to a point where it is manageable. The reason being both from a economic and social perspective is that we live in a world where everyone has vastly different interests, goals, and skillsets. If you have a unique skillset that no one else has then one should definitely work to sharpen it as it will be harder to replace.
The reason is because we live in a world where there will always be limitations we all naturally have and it is pointless to try to be something that you are not. Many of the best engineers are terrible at communication. They only need to improve their weaknesses to a degree that allows them to function normally since their core skillsets is often doing technical work. Much of the reason behind this is due to their natural limitations since they can spend their entire lives working to improve their communication skills only to be outperformed and outcompete by a people who are far more talented than they are in this domain and who spent only a fraction of their effort. Many of these experiences have stemmed from my ADHD since I have many limitations I can never develop and improve to the levels a neurotypical can have. However, instead, I focused on my strengths with opened up opportunities that most neurotypical people cannot possibly understand let alone capitalize on. If I were to spend my entire life trying to make up for my neurological and cognitive weaknesses, it would honestly be a pointless pursuit but by trying to improve my unique advantages has allowed me not only to do well in my domain but also to be more comfortable and confident in my own skin as well.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.instagram.com/frontera.official/?hl=en
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/maxyee.jpg/?hl=en
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/max-yee-7b4b79220/
Image Credits
Claire Yee
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