Nicholas Howell

I am an intentional generalist, and so my pursuits both in thought and practice vary widely. Since childhood, I have been unable to avoid daily fixation on the state of existence, constantly ideating on the role of humanity and how we can evolve at the individual and societal level. Thus, by my nature I developed an obsession with pushing the limits of human potential, leading me to seek challenges and unorthodox paths in search of a greater capacity across body, mind and soul.

In my early years, I found the pacing of school – the fact that it is generally fixed for everyone – to be relentlessly displeasing. In my particular case, I wanted to go faster. As a young adolescent, I was physically training daily to develop my body, spending most of my mental energy on existential ideation and moral positioning, immersing myself in music and the piano, thinking of systems and outputs that could invoke societal shift, and planning how I could leave school early to spend more time on what was driving me. I tested out of high school young, got my college degree in finance as a teenager while training to be a concert pianist at university, and then I was suddenly off to the races. Unlocked, excited, hopeful, and expectedly naïve.

I have spent the majority of my professional life as an entrepreneur, technologist and engineer, building platforms I believe to be useful for mankind. Across endless late nights of writing code, it was clear that the entrepreneurial environment provided a framework through which I could summon and synthesize disparate abilities into comprehensive output; I still feel that way. Outside of philosophical endeavors, my current days are filled with family time and raising children, intense physical training, artistic exploration and product engineering (entrepreneurship).

Nonetheless, and as described in my works, I believe deeply that how we go about our journey, the “means,” is infinitely more important than the things we build or achieve, the “ends.” Our only real measure is how honorably we lived, and whether we gave more than we took. I have long desired to share works that I believe could contribute in some way to how we think about human life and our potential. My works center around a concept I call Sapien Prime, a mindset we can all successfully adopt and embody, a mindset dedicated to striving toward an apex potential that cannot be reached, only pursued.