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I want to emphasize this opinion. There is definitely survivorship bias, and I dislike people calling it a 'superpower'. Yes it can make you more reckless and

I want to emphasize this opinion. There is definitely survivorship bias, and I dislike people calling it a 'superpower'. Yes it can make you more reckless and impulsive to take risks like founding a company, but it's important to keep in mind that ADHD is a serious cognitive disability, and we should treat it as that. There is so much it messes with on a daily basis and it absolutely sucks. So much coping, self-doubt, lack of motivation and drive, procrastination - it's not nice. Yes we get better in managing it over time as we learn about it, but it still comes back and bites us, and it's depressing to see coworkers being so much more organized and 'on top of things' compared to me, no matter how hard I try

tonyarkles 4y ago
> Yes it can make you more reckless and impulsive to take risks like founding a company, but it's important to keep in mind that ADHD is a serious cognitive disability, and we should treat it as that. There is so much it messes with on a daily basis and it absolutely sucks. I think the r/ADHD approach on Reddit nails it: even if it did have benefits for you, please don't refer to it as a superpower because there's a lot of people who will feel even worse about their own experience of the disability when you do that. And, yeah, for me it's been very much a double-edged sword. I started a consulting company while in grad school; it was awesome for my (undiagnosed at the time) ADHD brain: new projects every couple of months! Learn something new every time! Hell, I went to grad school very likely because of ADHD; I couldn't handle the stale "every day is more of the same" feeling I had in the regular working world. I went to study a hard problem, but about 16 months after I started really digging into it, commercial solutions started appearing that essentially did the same thing I was researching... I lost interest quickly, especially when all of the research was done and writing and editing my thesis was all that was left. I've worked on so many wildly varied projects over the years. I've got an EE/CS dual degree, and I've been down at the schematic and PCB design level and up at the web & mobile app level. I'm just as comfortable writing Verilog as I am writing React code. Deep GNSS work and software-defined radio, 2D high resolution imaging, 3D depth field imaging, audio processing, ultra-low-power sensors, level-sensing in 80,000L fuel tanks using a clever pressure-sensing approach, drone flight planning and control algorithms, yadda yadda yadda. And all of those different things all are related to each other in some tangential ways that I pick up on right away while others just scratch their heads. On the other hand, I lose things all the time, forget to pay bills for months, lose touch with people I care about, struggled for years and years to maintain a romantic relationship, forget my bag in the car and forget to lock it (that was an expensive mistake). I've spent a ton of money starting new hobbies only to lose interest. I have a multi-year backlog of projects I've started but not finished. My house is a disaster. I'm almost 40 and have almost nothing saved up for retirement. I got lucky and made it through undergrad and a masters program. Hell, I got lucky and made it through high school... if my teachers had followed their own rules to the letter I probably wouldn't have, but they saw "my spark" and made enough concessions that I ended up, just barely, on the honour roll instead of failing out. I had no insight into any of this being related to a disability until last year.
- sprkwd 4y ago
  i believe you might be me.
- bitexploder 4y ago
  Thank goodness for auto pay on bills and a NT wife. I don’t know how she puts up with where my brain has ended up some years, but we have done great together as a family :) Also, I totally get that picking up random links thing. I always found I could sort of link together certain kinds of concepts together really quickly. Never super deeply, but like, learning new programming languages, I could just dive in, look at code, and things would just click together pretty often. I also get having a disaster of a house, spending money on hobbies and losing interest <glares angrily at his very expensive mill and lathe he uses only occasionally>. Some of the time I read tech people’s ADHD experience and I feel so… understood. Like, are you me? You could be me.
  - jasonladuke0311 4y ago
    > Some of the time I read tech people’s ADHD experience and I feel so… understood. Like, are you me? You could be me. Exactly what I thought reading this post :D Strangely enough, I applied at your firm and we have traded emails.
    - bitexploder 4y ago
      Oh yeah! You are in the area even. Last year that time was pretty crazy because we had just finished up our transaction. Small world some days :)
  - tonyarkles 4y ago
    > and a NT wife. Partner and I have been together for 13 years now. She’s almost certainly on the ADHD spectrum but less severe than me. Things are great besides the fact that we both neglect a lot of stuff that NT folks don’t really struggle with. But retrospectively, that’s one of the most interesting things for me. I think back to a lot of the previous relationships I had, and the vast majority of them failed due to conflict that I can now see was ADHD-induced. Impulse control and finances, house cleaning, new random hobby obsession, boredom, substance abuse… When I finally realized a year and a bit ago what ADHD actually was and how a lot of my behaviours weren’t typical, I had this very profound moment where it simultaneously felt like all the air was sucked out of the room and everything finally made sense. Edit: > <glares angrily at his very expensive mill and lathe he uses only occasionally>. I swear to god I’m going to get the mill running again this year.

tonyarkles 4y ago

> Yes it can make you more reckless and impulsive to take risks like founding a company, but it's important to keep in mind that ADHD is a serious cognitive disability, and we should treat it as that. There is so much it messes with on a daily basis and it absolutely sucks. I think the r/ADHD approach on Reddit nails it: even if it did have benefits for you, please don't refer to it as a superpower because there's a lot of people who will feel even worse about their own experience of the disability when you do that. And, yeah, for me it's been very much a double-edged sword. I started a consulting company while in grad school; it was awesome for my (undiagnosed at the time) ADHD brain: new projects every couple of months! Learn something new every time! Hell, I went to grad school very likely because of ADHD; I couldn't handle the stale "every day is more of the same" feeling I had in the regular working world. I went to study a hard problem, but about 16 months after I started really digging into it, commercial solutions started appearing that essentially did the same thing I was researching... I lost interest quickly, especially when all of the research was done and writing and editing my thesis was all that was left. I've worked on so many wildly varied projects over the years. I've got an EE/CS dual degree, and I've been down at the schematic and PCB design level and up at the web & mobile app level. I'm just as comfortable writing Verilog as I am writing React code. Deep GNSS work and software-defined radio, 2D high resolution imaging, 3D depth field imaging, audio processing, ultra-low-power sensors, level-sensing in 80,000L fuel tanks using a clever pressure-sensing approach, drone flight planning and control algorithms, yadda yadda yadda. And all of those different things all are related to each other in some tangential ways that I pick up on right away while others just scratch their heads. On the other hand, I lose things all the time, forget to pay bills for months, lose touch with people I care about, struggled for years and years to maintain a romantic relationship, forget my bag in the car and forget to lock it (that was an expensive mistake). I've spent a ton of money starting new hobbies only to lose interest. I have a multi-year backlog of projects I've started but not finished. My house is a disaster. I'm almost 40 and have almost nothing saved up for retirement. I got lucky and made it through undergrad and a masters program. Hell, I got lucky and made it through high school... if my teachers had followed their own rules to the letter I probably wouldn't have, but they saw "my spark" and made enough concessions that I ended up, just barely, on the honour roll instead of failing out. I had no insight into any of this being related to a disability until last year.

sprkwd 4y ago
i believe you might be me.
bitexploder 4y ago
Thank goodness for auto pay on bills and a NT wife. I don’t know how she puts up with where my brain has ended up some years, but we have done great together as a family :) Also, I totally get that picking up random links thing. I always found I could sort of link together certain kinds of concepts together really quickly. Never super deeply, but like, learning new programming languages, I could just dive in, look at code, and things would just click together pretty often. I also get having a disaster of a house, spending money on hobbies and losing interest <glares angrily at his very expensive mill and lathe he uses only occasionally>. Some of the time I read tech people’s ADHD experience and I feel so… understood. Like, are you me? You could be me.
- jasonladuke0311 4y ago
  > Some of the time I read tech people’s ADHD experience and I feel so… understood. Like, are you me? You could be me. Exactly what I thought reading this post :D Strangely enough, I applied at your firm and we have traded emails.
  - bitexploder 4y ago
    Oh yeah! You are in the area even. Last year that time was pretty crazy because we had just finished up our transaction. Small world some days :)
- tonyarkles 4y ago
  > and a NT wife. Partner and I have been together for 13 years now. She’s almost certainly on the ADHD spectrum but less severe than me. Things are great besides the fact that we both neglect a lot of stuff that NT folks don’t really struggle with. But retrospectively, that’s one of the most interesting things for me. I think back to a lot of the previous relationships I had, and the vast majority of them failed due to conflict that I can now see was ADHD-induced. Impulse control and finances, house cleaning, new random hobby obsession, boredom, substance abuse… When I finally realized a year and a bit ago what ADHD actually was and how a lot of my behaviours weren’t typical, I had this very profound moment where it simultaneously felt like all the air was sucked out of the room and everything finally made sense. Edit: > <glares angrily at his very expensive mill and lathe he uses only occasionally>. I swear to god I’m going to get the mill running again this year.