When you are the kid who edits the yearbook, coordinates the winter carnival, plays on the basketball team, is a member of both the concert and jazz bands, and DJs Friday night dances, people think they have you figured out: Extrovert. Type A. Born leader.
For years, I wore those labels. Growing up, teachers, peers, and parents constantly reinforced the idea that I was a socially dominant, high-strung go-getter who thrived in the center of the room. I was routinely funneled into activities meant for the outgoing: recruited by Mrs. Jorland to join the speech team; tasked by Mr. Lindstrom to serve as the master of ceremonies for the homecoming coronation; and enlisted by Father Bouchard to read the Passion Narrative on Palm Sunday. Because I didn’t shrink from these responsibilities, everyone assumed I craved them.
But behavior is a poor mirror for the soul.
Years later, as an adult, I realized these were fundamental miscategorizations. I am not an extrovert, and I am certainly not Type A. In reality, I am an introvert with distinct Type B tendencies. If you looked at my personality through the lens of the Big Five traits, you would see someone exceptionally high in openness to experience, low in agreeableness and neuroticism, and highly variable in conscientiousness—meaning my focus and discipline are driven entirely by the context of the situation, rather than some rigid, overarching internal protocol.
So how does a low-agreeableness, low-neuroticism introvert end up running the show? The answer is simple: intellectual curiosity and the ability to learn quickly.
What the adults around me mistook for a hunger for attention was actually just a fierce, relentless desire to figure out how the world worked. I didn’t join the yearbook staff because I wanted status; I joined because I was genuinely intrigued by the mechanics of how a massive book is compiled, designed, and published from scratch. I joined the student council because I was curious about how a student-led organization actually operates from the inside. When I was first drawn to high school theater, it wasn’t to hear the applause—it was because I wanted to know how the audio and lighting systems functioned. When Mrs. Jorland asked me to step on stage as Linus in the musical You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, my compliance wasn’t a desire to be seen, but rather a casual, anxiety-free shrug: “Sure. I don’t sing, so this will be interesting.”
Because I lacked the social anxiety (low neuroticism) that stops many introverts from taking risks, and because I didn’t particularly care about conforming to a specific “introverted” social script (low agreeableness), I looked like a fearless leader. In reality, I was just a scientist entering a lab.
Take my time DJing high school dances with my best friend. To an outsider, a DJ is the ultimate social orchestrator, the life of the party. But for me, it was never a mechanism to derive social connection or bask in the spotlight. It was entirely a problem-solving effort. My brain looked at a school dance and thought: “Okay, when a DJ does a dance, what are the components that go into it? You need speakers. You need audio equipment. You need lighting. You need a music library.” It was a puzzle to solve, an operational challenge to execute.
The point is that my intellectual curiosity, combined with my ability to learn quickly, drove my teenage academic and social activities. And the same psychological blueprint—and the exact same social misunderstanding—followed me straight out of that small Minnesota town and into the corporate world.
My professional life began far away from boardroom strategies. A lifelong Minnesotan, I spent my summers doing the grueling, practical work of helping run my parents’ fishing resort. When it came time for college, I chose to follow my girlfriend to Concordia in Moorhead and simply let my curiosity dictate my trajectory, just as I had in high school. I worked at the college TV station, interned at a video production facility, spent six weeks touring Western Europe, and graduated with a BA spanning four distinct majors: Communications, English Writing, Political Science, and History. To an advisor, it might have looked like a frantic attempt to do everything. To me, it was just the natural byproduct of a brain that refuses to stop asking how things work.
When I moved to the Twin Cities after graduation, I was looking for a job in film and video post-production. Instead, I pivoted into sales—first selling video cameras and big-screen TVs, then spending three years selling Apple computer hardware and software across two different companies. When the dot-com bubble burst, my career took the kind of winding path that only makes sense to a polymath. I managed a small business for my brother, jumped to a supply chain software company, and then moved to an Oracle consulting firm—all while attending classes to earn a master’s degree in marketing and corporate strategy.
That is when Grainger found me. They brought me on as a consultant to analyze customer supply chains, but my role evolved to provide the ultimate sandbox for my intellectual curiosity. I immersed myself in the unglamorous, highly complex world of MRO (Maintenance, Repair, and Operations) procurement and material management. I began discovering a series of hidden insights, deconstructing the chaos into strategic models for continuous improvement and inventory management. I documented the whole puzzle in two massive, extensive reports for an executive customer council. Because I had figured out how the engine worked, corporate leadership handed me the microphone: just as I had been tasked with commanding the stage at homecoming, I was charged with authoring and presenting seminar content at Grainger’s annual trade show.
Shortly thereafter, leadership assigned me to the team responsible for rebranding Grainger’s inventory management service, and I devised a core value proposition that 2,500 sellers used to double installations. Then, because the analytical side of my brain wanted to prove it worked, I designed, built, and deployed a comprehensive suite of applications for reporting, analytics, and value demonstration. (Around this same time, my need for complex, hands-on projects spilled over into my front yard, and I started getting a little nuts about building massive Christmas light displays).
By 2013, my knack for translating complexity into market execution landed me on a newly formed go-to-market strategy team. I spent five years refining messaging, creating digital content, and building the backend infrastructure required to enable data-based features and benefits. Under our watch, installations more than doubled, and revenue more than tripled. (And yes, the number of Christmas lights in my garage increased significantly, too).
To an outside observer watching this corporate climb, I looked like a textbook Type A executive—socially dominant, aggressively ambitious, and thriving in the spotlight of high-stakes corporate strategy. But the truth remained: I wasn’t driven by a desire for status or a love for corporate politics. I am a low-agreeableness, low-neuroticism introvert. I didn’t care about conforming to a traditional corporate climber script, and I didn’t have the baseline anxiety that makes people shrink from presenting to executives. Every massive corporate project was just a high school dance by another name—a complex, data-driven problem-solving effort requiring a balance of left-brained analytics and right-brained storytelling to pull off.
Now, in the last phase of my career, I understand I will probably always be miscategorized by my peers and management. But I’m entirely comfortable with that. I am a polymath with a diverse, unsiloed background who excels at simplifying the impossibly complex and finding intuitive ways to make organizations faster, smarter, and far more valuable to their customers.
I don’t need the spotlight to feed my ego, and I’m not driven by a constant need to win. I just need a complex problem, a blank canvas, and the room to let my curiosity run wild.
