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I'm glad this worked for you, but I don't think that you understand OP's central argument about the penalties imposed by the substantial ergonomic mismatch bet

I'm glad this worked for you, but I don't think that you understand OP's central argument about the penalties imposed by the substantial ergonomic mismatch between ADHD "smart" and the conventional species, and may not have as strong a sense of what being on the inside of this condition feels like. ADHD wiring essentially forces every task to be derived from a set of fundamental axioms about why the task must e done, why it must work the way it does, with an almost proof-like causal chain working all the way back to first principles, in order to simply remeber it in a stable way. Being interested in a subject can benefit you only in so far as it will provide you with motivation to build out a vast knowledge graph scaffold around the set of tasks that need to be done, in order to not feel like you are kicking a dead whale up the beach every time you have to start doing one of them. But if you are presented with a subject where there is no time to do this, or the type of subject where it is actually not possible and only the muscle memory of rote memorization will power you through it, it doesn't matter how much it subjectively appeals to or interests you. You are going to be at the back of the pack despite your best efforts. Attempts to give you help will only frustrate your (very likely memorization-gifted) tutors and mentors: they don't understand what's going on, so you merely look stupid, unmotivated or both. However, if you had enough runaway, they would find that not only you would catch up to wherever everyone else was (in one third of the time it took you,) but after another third share of prep time you would move from the bottom decile to the top, with gains still compounding. But this occasion almost never presents itself, because you're typically flushed out of the cycle long before you build enough inertia in the domain to show what you're capable of. One can go almost sick with envy over the way neurotypically smart people are almkst unaware of how easily and quickly they retain multiple arbitrary lists of "how" steps in processes, even when these are largely self-contained and unconnected to any other chain of reasoning, and just get shit done without having to know how the entire superstructure is put together. You'll be almost comically bad at (and find little pleasure in) all board games (except the most popular ones you've had years of exposure to), if you have not had time to master them ADHD style - even if you genuinely enjoy board games in principle. Whereas peers in your same nerd adjacent circle seem to reach competence or even mastery of any example in this genre of bureaucracy-as-a-sport within a few plays. Performing on stage, if there are more than a handful of lines to memorize, is utterly out of the question. Even if you love acting or theater, it's just not for you. My own testament to this paradox is not from board games, but incredibly demoralizong experience trying to learn the piano (as an adult no less), something I had more than ample interest in and motivation to learn, but which in the initial stages presented almost insurmountable obstacles when it came to simply memorizing the basics of sight reading, scales, and the learner's songbook. skills that I watched 7 and 8 year olds, teens and even fellow adult learners, acquire in weeks but took me well over a year to reach parity. Since my job and self-image werent riding on being at the top of the class, I was able to keep with it accordimg to my own pace. And although I probably still wouldn't get hired even for a gig in the local shopping mall, my ability to improvise and stylize outside the set pieces I had received my basic training on inexorably began to surpass most of that cohort who had lapped me several times over back when we were just doing the rote basics.

hackable_sand 3y ago
Perfect writeup.
sn9 3y ago
This describes much of my own experience, but I didn't know it might be attributable to ADHD. Is this something you figured out through introspection of your own experience or is there something you read that showed you it was ADHD that was the root cause? Are you formally diagnosed? Were you able to find treatment and solutions? Is there anything I might ask a medical professional to help me figure things out?
- ChainOfFools 3y ago
  No, I didn't recognize it at all, thus I didn't have to ask a medical professional anything since my presentation was evidently obvious. The only advice I can give, or what is close to advice as I can get, is to recount how I moved from ignorance to action in my own situation, and to emphasize the importance of getting in front of a professional psychiatric diagnostician as soon as you can. They will know what to ask you. no need to guide them to any particular conclusion, nor would I recommend trying this. Due to coincidence I happened to have a professor in college who was the same person my parents had been referred to (on my behalf) for behavioral examination and intervention following a sudden precipitous drop in school performance between ages 8 and 9. This person had given me a battery of performance tests yielding unambiguous data indicating that the deficiency in academic performance (and comorbid peer group socialization problems) resulted from an excess of raw ability. Emphasis on 'raw.' In those days (80's) this was quite counterintuitive, and perhaps still is. Separate classes for gifted students did not yet exist in our district - "gifted" was still a novety also. Skipping a grade (the conventional solution) was likely to aggravate the problem instead of addressing it. So my circumstances prompted the creation of a trial program mainly so that I could attend it, though I resented being singled out and separated from the few friends I had. to my great relief half a dozen or so other students quickly joined once the program became a reality. Once we both acknowledged that we had encountered one another many years before, my professor asked whether I had interest in testing again, because they saw that well over a decade of growth had done little to improve the fundamental challenges I faced, though I had become much better at masking them from others as well as from myself. In the intervening time, the diagnostic profile of ADD had become formalized and increasingly visible outside medical circles, though still mainly centered on early childhood dev stages. They recommended that I look in to getting a formal diagnosis, because although they believed they saw pretty obvious signs I fit this profile, this did not amount to a professional diagnosis. I, being a teenager still, reflexively rebuffed the entire notion that I might need psychiatric evaluation, or could be meaningfully affected (much less improved) by medication - something I associated with "weakness." This would turn out to be a catastrophic misjudgement, and although I did eventually get a formal diagnosis and a protocol, delaying for more than a decade was the most regrettable self-inflicted setback of my life, one that unquestionably cost many millions over the next 20 years.

hackable_sand 3y ago

Perfect writeup.

sn9 3y ago

This describes much of my own experience, but I didn't know it might be attributable to ADHD. Is this something you figured out through introspection of your own experience or is there something you read that showed you it was ADHD that was the root cause? Are you formally diagnosed? Were you able to find treatment and solutions? Is there anything I might ask a medical professional to help me figure things out?

ChainOfFools 3y ago
No, I didn't recognize it at all, thus I didn't have to ask a medical professional anything since my presentation was evidently obvious. The only advice I can give, or what is close to advice as I can get, is to recount how I moved from ignorance to action in my own situation, and to emphasize the importance of getting in front of a professional psychiatric diagnostician as soon as you can. They will know what to ask you. no need to guide them to any particular conclusion, nor would I recommend trying this. Due to coincidence I happened to have a professor in college who was the same person my parents had been referred to (on my behalf) for behavioral examination and intervention following a sudden precipitous drop in school performance between ages 8 and 9. This person had given me a battery of performance tests yielding unambiguous data indicating that the deficiency in academic performance (and comorbid peer group socialization problems) resulted from an excess of raw ability. Emphasis on 'raw.' In those days (80's) this was quite counterintuitive, and perhaps still is. Separate classes for gifted students did not yet exist in our district - "gifted" was still a novety also. Skipping a grade (the conventional solution) was likely to aggravate the problem instead of addressing it. So my circumstances prompted the creation of a trial program mainly so that I could attend it, though I resented being singled out and separated from the few friends I had. to my great relief half a dozen or so other students quickly joined once the program became a reality. Once we both acknowledged that we had encountered one another many years before, my professor asked whether I had interest in testing again, because they saw that well over a decade of growth had done little to improve the fundamental challenges I faced, though I had become much better at masking them from others as well as from myself. In the intervening time, the diagnostic profile of ADD had become formalized and increasingly visible outside medical circles, though still mainly centered on early childhood dev stages. They recommended that I look in to getting a formal diagnosis, because although they believed they saw pretty obvious signs I fit this profile, this did not amount to a professional diagnosis. I, being a teenager still, reflexively rebuffed the entire notion that I might need psychiatric evaluation, or could be meaningfully affected (much less improved) by medication - something I associated with "weakness." This would turn out to be a catastrophic misjudgement, and although I did eventually get a formal diagnosis and a protocol, delaying for more than a decade was the most regrettable self-inflicted setback of my life, one that unquestionably cost many millions over the next 20 years.