ADHD — The Greatest Gift I Was Ever Given
Dispelling the Myth of this ‘Disorder’ and Explaining How It’s Changed My Life and Career for the Better
I have ADHD. That’s Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder. Many people throw this term around lightly because they are finding it hard to focus or worse, some people don’t even believe it exists and think it’s some Americanised BS Pyscho-analysis term used to increase pharmaceutical sales through scare mongering and targeting hypochondriacs.
Well it’s not. And if not approached in the right way, it’s a struggle. A big one.
Some people advised I shouldn't write this post for potentially reducing my career opportunities. In fact, I want to explain why ADHD is the very reason that I think I will succeed.
There’s three reasons I feel compelled to get this post up:
- It annoys me when people say I’m ADD or ADHD because they have TWO Chrome tabs open simultaneously or are feverishly jumping between two tasks — that’s not ADHD
- I honestly don’t believe it’s a disorder — there are some drawbacks and quirks, but many more virtues. Recognizing them and captialising on them is the key to having a great career and not just ‘coping’
- I want to give people a true understanding of what ADHD is and why some of the best hires you’ll ever make will have it or indeed if you are ADHD you’ll have so many huge opportunities when you harness your wacky powers ☺
What ADHD Actually Is…
This is the toughest part of this post. It’s hard to describe. People assume that it’s the inability to focus due to hyperactivity. It’s not that simple.
I was diagnosed at 23 but I knew I had it since I was 10. I knew I thought differently and had different challenges and skills than other people around me and the older I got the harder it became.
Here’s some insights:
Insane volumes of noise and thoughts simultaneously
You have HUGE levels of noise in your head. Now I don’t mean you can hear things. I mean that you are thinking so many things at the same time it can be hugely distracting. Focusing on a thought can be like trying to have a conversation with a friend who’s on the opposite side of a jam-packed bar by lip-reading. There’s so much between the two points of focus that will distract you. If you feel like this too, then multiply it by a factor of 10 and that’s ADHD.
The key is learning what’s useful and what’s useless and filtering it. Get someone with ADHD to channel all those thoughts in one direction and you’ll get a year’s worth of brainstorming in about 3 minutes.
Often people with ADHD are poor at articulating themselves not because they are poor communicators but because they see 50 ways to say the same thing or have 50 things to say and get very muddled.
Virtue: focus this energy on something you are interested in and you will get 20 times the volume of work done that a mere mortal would :)
Sparking the Interest of Someone with ADHD is… well… Difficult. But when you do…
When I was a teen I was a skateboarder; choir boy; soccer nut; lead guitarist; pianist; aspiring paleontologist; gamer; wannabe fashionista; devout Christian; raver; aspiring pilot and golfer. Not one of these things even REMOTELY hold my interest 10 years later. None.
Why? Because they couldn’t keep my interest peaked. That’s the thing when you have ADHD. If you love it, you will gladly spend 12 hours a day doing what you love and you will give it everything.
So it’s not actually hard to focus when you have ADHD. It’s just really hard to peak my curiosity and interest in the first place, but when you do, I will hyper-focus to levels of obsession.
I have given pretty much everything to my career in marketing for the past 10 years because I love it and it’s the only thing that I know I will most likely never give up on. At 28 I have a job as a CMO that some 38 year-olds would be proud of. Why? Simply because I’m so passionate about it I hyper-focus there by default. I have easily put more hours of thought into what I do than some people have in a 20 year career. It never stops — that’s why people with ADHD have to do something they love. Otherwise, they’ll be in despair. Working to live is not an option for people with ADHD.
JetBlue Airways Founder and CEO David Neelman, the poster-boy for people with ADHD in business, famously said, “One of the weird things about the type of [ADHD] I have is, if you have something you are really, really passionate about, then you are really, really good about focusing on that thing. I get ideas instantly and they’re usually out-of-the-box. I have an easier time strategising and monetising a 20 aircraft fleet than I do sitting down to pay the light bill.”
As a 21st century marketeer, getting bored easily is a hugely useful ‘skill’ to have. I am the ultimate critic of what’s mundane and not, and in a World full of noise, that’s a great skill to have. I assume that just like me, people’s attention is incredibly hard to grab.
Virtue: People with ADHD need to be inspired. Spark our interest and we’ll give you everything!
The Big Picture
This kind of follows on from the point above. People with ADHD have an exceptional ability to see the big picture. Give me a 100 piece jigsaw and I’ll see in seconds how it goes together — the only problem is, I find it really hard to know which piece I should start with.
People with ADHD not only want to focus on what interests us but we feel instinctively that we need to and we always think about the big picture. Now throw obsession, passion and strategy into something and you will truly make a difference — a big one.
It’s Not ALL Rosy
There are some things that people with ADHD have to control. We’re by nature highly-strung; we obsess over what we love and we have HIGHLY additive personalities e.g. people with ADHD are twice to three times as likely to suffer from alcoholism and drug-addiciton as the ‘ordinary Joe’. But then we’re also twice as likely to be sitting down to our Christmas dinner thinking about our next product launch — half measures are not in our nature.
Then we have quirks — we can’t sit still for a nanosecond; we won’t let you finish your sentences; we’re hyper sensitive to touch and we wear our hearts on our sleeves.
The darkest side of ADHD though is an overwhelming sense of underachievement. This can drive us, but we have to put a lot of time and effort into making sure it doesn’t drive us to depression and a complete lack of self-worth. We are NOT good at dealing with negative people and unfair criticism often validates unjustified self-esteem issues we suffer from. But once copped, we can all learn to manage them. Simply put, we are hyper sensitive to negativity and the simplest way to deal with this is by avoiding it!
Some people with ADHD also suffer from ‘laziness’. The reality is that it’s just a lack of interest in anything they’ve done to date. They need to find that drive in the form of something they adore doing. Thankfully I’ve done just that.
To Conclude:
ADHD does exist but it’s not fair to say it’s a disorder. We’re just different and the sooner we embrace that, the more likely we are to succeed.
I honestly, hand-on-heart, feel it’s the greatest gift I was ever given. I am not ‘attention deficit’ — I’m just ‘attention different’ and that’s exactly what I want to do: focus on things that inspire me to make a difference.
Watch this space — soon I’m going to be blogging, vlogging and helping people lucky enough to have ADHD, realise… that they’re lucky to have ADHD. Thanks for reading.
