I Am a Nerd. Here Is Why That Is Not an Insult.
BrachyNerd POV Series — Article 1 of 10
KEY DEFINITION
- Brachy (βραχύς) = narrow / short / close
- Nerd = nerd
- Ergo ==> BrachyNerd = The Short Nerd — David Gehry. Short in stature. Building something large.
Let me tell you what the name means. BrachyNerd.
My website describes me as David Gehry — AKA BrachyNerd — The Short Nerd.
Brachy comes from the Greek βραχύς. It means narrow. Short. Close.
Nerd means nerd.
So BrachyNerd means The Short Nerd. That is me. Literally. I am short. I am a nerd. I put them together and called it a brand, and somewhere along the way it became the most honest thing I've ever called myself.
There is something I want to say about why I lead with the short part.
The short person builds the tall thing
I have spent most of my professional life operating in contexts where people did not expect the short guy to be the one in charge. In emergency medicine — where physical authority can read as clinical authority, and it shouldn't, but it does. In boardrooms. In city halls. In every room where the person who walks in first sets the tone before anyone has spoken.
Being short teaches you something that tall people sometimes miss: you cannot lead with physical presence. You have to lead with something else. For me that something else has always been the depth of what I know and the clarity of what I'm trying to do.
That's the nerd part. And the short part and the nerd part have always been the same thing for me. The short person who couldn't lead with physical authority developed the habit of leading with intellectual depth instead. And somewhere in that necessity, a disposition formed.
I cannot stay at the surface of anything.
What a nerd actually is
The word nerd has been used as an insult for so long that most people have lost track of what it actually describes.
A nerd is a person for whom the depth of a subject is more interesting than its surface. That's it. Not someone who is socially awkward — that's a stereotype, not a definition. Not someone with a specific category of interest.
The actual thing is a cognitive disposition. An orientation toward the world that says: the thing in front of me is more interesting than I currently understand it to be, and I would like to understand it better.
The specific marker of the nerd is this: they get interested in things and then get more interested. They discover that every subject, examined closely enough, opens into a landscape of complexity that the surface view gives no indication of. And they develop — through enough of these experiences — a kind of cognitive irreversibility.
Once you've felt what genuine depth actually looks like, the surface becomes genuinely less satisfying. Not because you're superior to people who are satisfied with the surface. Because the experience of depth has recalibrated your sense of what interesting means.
Where I found this identity
I came to this through emergency medicine. I spent a decade as a critical care and flight paramedic. Which might seem like an unlikely place to find intellectual depth — prehospital medicine is loud, fast, physically demanding, and structured around action rather than reflection.
And yet the best practitioners I worked alongside were all, in this specific sense, nerds. They knew the mechanism of action of every drug in the kit. Not because the protocol required it. Because the mechanism was interesting. They found the why more interesting than the how.
They were, without exception, the better clinicians.
The cognitive disposition of genuine curiosity — the willingness to go deeper than the situation requires, the habit of asking why rather than accepting how — is the disposition of the excellent practitioner in any field where the surface understanding is inadequate for the demands of the work.
In emergency medicine, the surface understanding is always inadequate.
The short nerd building the tall thing
I am building a university. I am building civic institutions. I am building something significant in a mid-sized Ontario city that most people drive through on the way to somewhere else.
I run a holding company. I wrote a memoir. I publish academic research on paramedicine and civic development.
I do all of this as a short nerd from Belleville.
The contrast is the point. Not in spite of being short and nerdy and operating in a place people overlook — because of it. The BrachyNerd disposition is precisely what makes it possible to look at a city with significant institutional gaps and see opportunity rather than limitation. To follow the thread of why the gap exists, how it could be closed, what it would take — all the way down to the place where the answer becomes a plan.
That is what happens when you cannot stop at the surface.
If this is you
If you've been apologizing for the depth of your curiosity — for the rabbit holes, for the questions nobody else in the room is still asking, for the 3am reading about something with no immediately practical application —
Stop apologizing!
The thing you're doing is not a personality quirk to be managed. It is the cognitive orientation that makes the work that actually matters possible.
Interesting doesn't require a credential. Depth doesn't require permission.
And being short doesn't require you to build small things.
Keep going.