There are certain quirky discoveries that delight you to the core, the mere thought of which continue to bring a giddy smile to your face because of how endearing they feel.
This morning, listening to a podcast on the short drive home from a dawn patrol session at my local break, I sank my teeth into a delicious new morsel of information:
Sal Khan, the founder of the free educational platform that bears his name (Khan Academy), spent his high school years as the lead singer in a death metal band called "Malignancy."
That's awesome. It's the kind of fact that makes the world a better place just by being true. But that's not all.
He grew up with a single mother as the only East Asian kid in his region of Louisiana, where the convenience store his mother worked at for $16,000 a year faced the largest "David Duke for President" advertisement in the area. One group of friends did Knowledge Bowls, the other did drugs. Despite these inauspicious origins, he went on to study at MIT and Harvard Business School.
His story grows even more unlikely. While his friends made oodles of money doing the things that MBAs do, he founded an eponymous nonprofit and left his management consulting job to dedicate himself to making education available to anyone, anywhere.
Sal is a misfit in the best sense of the term. He's someone who loves learning but also heavy metal; he appreciates a good New Orleans style of revelry but also an economic epiphany that helps him understand the world.
Best of all, he feels comfortable enough is his own skin to act on his passions and convictions, and in so doing he helps to repair a broken world.
I was in a funk at the start of this week.
Knowing that Sal is 1) acting in good faith to 2) assist people he does not know with 3) no desire for personal benefit restores my faith in humanity.