Find your Field

I took Domino camping last weekend!

As you may know, Domino is an Australian Cattle Dog. He lives in a one-bedroom apartment in San Francisco. His primary responsibilities include barking at skateboards, napping, and herding me toward the kitchen at 6pm sharp. To my knowledge, he has never seen a cow up close. His exposure to livestock is limited to a lamb squeaky toy that he decapitated within 10 minutes of receiving it.

So this past Saturday, when we woke up surrounded by cows in the pasture, he immediately locked onto the herd, dropped into a crouch, and started circling them with choreographed precision.

Nobody taught him that. I certainly didn't. He just knew.

I spent a while watching him work (if you can call it that, he was clearly having the time of his life) and started thinking about instincts. About the stuff that comes pre-loaded and about how much of what we do, the careers we chase, the habits we can't shake, is actually just biology running its course.

A study published in Science Advances last year mapped the genomes of twelve herding breeds and found specific genes tied to the exact behaviors I watched Domino perform in real time. One gene in particular, EPHB1, is linked to spatial memory and locomotor drive. Working-line border collies carry a specific variant of it at nearly 84% frequency. Show collies, the ones bred to look pretty at Westminster and sit nicely for photos, carry it at just 22%.

Same breed, but entirely different wiring.

I've always been someone who organizes. People, information, systems. I track my biomarkers and health trends with a devout rigor. When I was a kid, I used to plan out my summers week by week, color-coded and scheduled down to the activity. Which in retrospect explains a lot about where I ended up.

Then, in college, I took filmmaking classes. I wanted to be a “creative”. I pictured myself behind the camera, shaping narratives, developing a directorial voice. But every time we started a project, my brain skipped past the story and went straight to the shoot plan: the schedule and travel logistics; who needed to be where and when. My classmates were debating shot composition and I was building the production timeline in a spreadsheet.

I often treat that impulse as a deficiency… something to overcome.

The Minnesota Study of Twins Reared Apart ran from 1979 to 1999, and is legitimately insane.

Jim Lewis and Jim Springer were identical twins, separated at four weeks old and reunited at age 39. Both had married women named Linda, divorced, and remarried women named Betty. Both had worked in law enforcement. Both had childhood pets named Toy. Their firstborn sons were named James Alan and James Allan.

I know, crazy right?

Across 350+ twin pairs, the study found that identical twins raised in completely different families were just as similar in personality, career interests, and social attitudes as identical twins raised together. All those family dinners and bedtime stories and summer vacations accounted for almost none of the variation.

Around 70% of IQ differences were attributable to genetics. Personality traits like neuroticism, openness, and conscientiousness clock in at 40-60% heritable. A 2022 case study compared identical twins separated between South Korea and the United States, different countries, different languages, different cultures entirely, and found a correlation of 0.95 (near perfect) across 38 behavioral measures.

The data suggests a large portion of who we are was decided before anyone had a say in the matter.

Behavioral geneticist Eric Turkheimer boiled the entire field down to three laws:

Researchers call that third law the "non-shared environment," which is a clinical way of describing the most human thing imaginable: the unrepeatable, idiosyncratic experiences that belong only to you. A teacher who saw something in you before you saw it yourself. A book you found at exactly the right age. A conversation that quietly rerouted your entire trajectory.

I think about this a lot as a founder. The best operators I know weren't shaped by their genetics alone or their upbringing alone, but by specific encounters. A mentor, a failure, or a fleeting experience.

While our wiring may set the range, these encounters determine where we land within it.

The distinction matters. Genetics gives us the instrument and non-shared environments teach us what to play. So many people are too busy trying to learn someone else's instrument that they never sit down with their own.

Before all you determinists get too comfortable: our DNA is the blueprint, but epigenetics determines which parts of that blueprint actually get built.

Diet, stress, trauma, exercise: all of these leave chemical marks on your genes that turn expression up or down. Some of those marks can even pass to the next generation. In one study, mice given folate supplements produced offspring with enhanced nerve regeneration across three subsequent generations. The offspring never received the supplement, but they inherited the edit.

Biology writes the first draft, but the margins are full of revisions. And some of those revisions get passed along whether you intended them to or not. The implication for anyone building a life, a company, a family: the conditions you create for yourself aren't just shaping you. They may be shaping your kids before they exist.

I am so happy Domino got to check out what is surely a bucket list item for him. He has spent much of his life being vaguely neurotic, nipping at bikers' ankles, and trying to organize groups of strangers at the dog park into formations. All behaviors that read as problems in a city apartment.

But in that field, every single one of his idiosyncrasies became an innate skill.

The twin studies suggest we spend a lot of energy trying to train ourselves into people we're not. The epigenetics research suggests we have more flexibility than pure determinism would allow. Turkheimer's third law suggests the right encounter, at the right time, can reshape everything within our range.

All three of those findings point to the same practical question, and it isn't "what are my strengths" or "what's my passion." It's blunter than that.

It’s: are you even in the right field?

Because the traits we keep apologizing for, the instincts we keep suppressing, the impulses that feel like liabilities in our current context, might be exactly the thing that makes us extraordinary in a different one. The organizer stuck in a creative role, the risk-taker trapped in compliance, or the builder buried in a management layer that rewards consensus over conviction.

You might not need another productivity system, another mentor, another pivot within the same industry. You might just need to find the field where your wiring finally makes sense.

Up and to the right.