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I have ADHD.
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It did not cause my success at all.
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Every time I have had more of a wrangle on my ADHD, I was radically more successful.
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Hey folks, Mike Gisvertel here for the Making Progress channel.
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Is ADHD a superpower?
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I have ADHD, formally diagnosed, so I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about this.
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So let's talk about it.
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First thing we want to do is analyze what ADHD really is and analyze it from the spectrum perspective, which is how it's best to see this sort of thing.
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So ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder, which means a lot of people grow out of it, but not everybody.
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And it really is typified by persistent inattention and or hyperactivity and or impulsivity that interferes with life.
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It's not simply boredom.
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It's not laziness.
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It's not insufficient ambition.
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It's an inability to put your sustained attention on a task and consistently getting distracted with either external or internal stimuli that throw you off.
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And sometimes the distractions are so big, you have to do something about them, which is what the impulsivity thing is.
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You're a little kid.
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You want to get up out of your desk and dance, but you're supposed to be doing your notebook stuff.
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You get up out of your desk and dance.
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People are like, holy crap, that's impulsive behavior.
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You like have to yell things out and stuff like that.
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Big sign of ADHD.
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Here are the main levels of attention span and regulation.
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We're going to go up from the top all the way down.
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So some large fraction of the population of humans on Earth has a high attention span and strong ability to regulate what they want to do versus what they actually do.
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Attention is relatively easy for them to sustain, direct, and redirect to where they need it.
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And not only do they have a powerful ability to focus, but their focus is under their control.
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Everything to you is meticulous and purposeful.
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Big deal.
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These will be incredibly high success individuals in many cases.
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Most people have the next rung down, which is a normal attention span.
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Yeah, distraction and boredom happen, but attention generally supports everyday responsibilities without persistent substantial impairment.
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Sometimes you need a little bit of caffeine or a little bit of just rubbing your eyes together or a little bit of just getting into a small room and doing your thing.
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It sounded weird.
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Getting into a small office and doing your work away from distraction.
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But this is the thing.
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And so normal attention span folks –
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people that are like super gifted at laser focus, they will sometimes joke and say and sometimes not joke that they have ADD.
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Oh, my God, I'm so ADD.
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I get so distracted.
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And you're like, yes, but you run a business all by yourself and you do like six hours of deep work every day.
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How do you have ADHD?
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And they're like, well, it's just like, ah, that was rhetorical.
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You don't.
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So a lot of normal attention span people think they might have ADHD and all of them do not because they test at normal attention span.
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Where it really gets tricky is people in the next group who have low attention span, but it's subclinical.
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It's not low enough for you to get diagnosed with ADHD.
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You can be a little bit more distractible and forgetful and procrastination prone than the average person.
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But you don't meet full ADHD criteria.
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This is tough sometimes because some people hear benefit from ADHD medication.
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Some people hear benefit from lots of caffeine and parazanthine.
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Some people hear benefit from really good, really good structure and all this stuff.
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But sometimes, you know, they're missed in the diagnostic criteria.
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A lot of times they're –
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because we've been, quote-unquote, over-diagnosing ADHD, which to some extent is true for the last 20 years, luckily a lot of these people are like, they're sordid.
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But there's lots of people out there that could benefit from a lot of ADHD-style interventions, but don't because they're just above clinical.
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Next rundown, the second to last, is low clinical attention regulation.
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So persistent symptoms, meaningfully impaired life across settings, and
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This means you probably have ADHD and you need to get a diagnosis which requires symptom evaluation and consideration of alternative explanations.
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It could be high anxiety.
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It could be going through something.
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But a lot of times they'll give you all the tests.
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They're like, yes, both your life and these tests reveal that you probably have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
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And the last rundown is…
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people who have, of the group average, the most debilitating attention regulation.
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Starting, organizing, remembering, and completing ordinary tasks for these folks can become major obstacles to work, relationships, and daily responsibilities.
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I had this when I was a child.
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My parents would send me to school, and like half the time I would show up back home without my hat.
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Where did my hat go?
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Fuck, I know.
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I wasn't keeping attention on my hat.
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I couldn't be reliably dependent upon to bring things to school or get them back.
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Homework was a non-starter.
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The whole thing was total shit.
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There's a few videos on our channel where I talk about my journey with ADHD, and you guys can see I talk about all that stuff.
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It was really, really bad.
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Like, I failed every single class, more or less in school, for, like, most of my schooling because of it.
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Now, if you're able to focus for a long time in certain contexts, that doesn't mean you don't have ADHD.
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You can have intense absorption with substantial ADHD symptoms.
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The question is how reliably can you deploy attention versus being sucked into something?
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If it's only when you get sucked into something you're passionate about, you could still have ADHD.
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If you can pay attention to something you don't necessarily really wanna pay attention to,
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but you're able to direct your mind to do it, you almost certainly do not have ADHD.
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Now, what are the core claims of people that say ADHD is my superpower?
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Because I've had people tell me when they find out I have ADHD, they're like, oh my God, like, that explains so much about you, that's like a superpower.
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Hold on a sec.
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What are these claims?
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The big claim here is I can focus super, super deeply
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on things I'm super passionate about, sometimes for hours, with everything else disappearing into the background.
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Another claim that's very different from that is the idea that my distractibility, my ability to go off on tangents,
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makes me ultra creative because in some sense, a very linear thought process is not creative.
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But thoughts that branch and then reconnect those branches and branch and connect those branches to other parts of your world model can make you very creative.
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Noticing unusual connections and generating ideas other people miss can be a thing that people say, because I'm not so laser focused like all these non-ADHD people, my ADHD gives me the ability to be more creative.
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And there's truth to both of these things.
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The other thing is people will say, I'm so restless, when they have hyperactive version, ADHD, like my restlessness gives me a ton of energy.
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I bring enthusiasm and momentum when something excites me.
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That's a real thing that can happen.
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There are ways in which that struggles because you can't bring coherent energy to anything, but in some cases that energy can be a good thing.
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And a lot of folks will say, because I'm ADHD and typically I can't focus, when there's a lot of pressure, I thrive under it because it gives me the ability to focus like I don't have in the rest of my life.
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So maybe in those situations, I have superpowers.
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And, you know, folks will say, if you give me something that's up my alley for my intense interests, I'm a real rapid learner.
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I can dive into a subject, absorb enormous amounts of information and process it.
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If, especially, I'm given the right environment, it's not my ADHD condition that's the problem, it's the environment.
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Put me in the right setting and what looks like a disability becomes a huge advantage.
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Right?
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There's a lot to parse there.
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So let's take a look at what is true in those claims.
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And afterwards, we'll take a look at what is not true.
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And not to get ahead of myself, but my opinion on this is that there are ways ADHD can be used to your benefit, but there are many other ways in which it screws you over, and ideally you just don't have it.
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So it's probably inappropriate to call it your superpower.
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Sorry.
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Now, what are the truths in those claims of ADHD making you better at stuff?
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It is true that a person with ADHD can outperform a person without it.
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But that comparison alone can't tell us whether the ADHD helped, whether it only helped in that circumstance and it would hurt in others, or whether it actually hurt that person but because they're so much smarter or conscientious or more diligent or more organized than the other person that that's what really got them across the finish line.
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Like if you had to fight a pro MMA fighter who was 280 pounds and six foot six and jacked and lean, but he had been in a car accident and now has like one of his, like his shin bones is like an artificial.
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And he beats the living crap out of you outside of a nightclub.
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You're going to be like, dude, I would have had him, but one of his legs was fake.
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That fucking peg leg definitely gave him the advantage.
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It was like, no, no, no, no, it didn't.
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It made him worse at fighting.
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It just so happens that he's a pro-MMA fighter and he could beat you up with no legs.
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So it wasn't the disability that helped him.
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It was his other abilities.
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So we have to make sure we keep that in mind.
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And here's the thing.
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People have a ton of strengths and they still count.
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You don't need to have everything be caused by your diagnosis to be genuine or worth celebrating or worth investing in.
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There's people that can draw incredibly well, communicate incredibly well, and they have attention deficit disorder.
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And a lot of people, there's this thing on the political left, especially at the extreme left, really owning your disorder, really identifying with it, like, oh, I am ADHD.
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That's just a part about you, man.
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Doesn't have to be the core thing about you.
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And a lot of the good stuff you're doing is because you're a gifted artist and you're dedicated.
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It's not because ADHD helps you draw.
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Maybe it doesn't.
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Maybe it just doesn't affect that part.
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And a local advantage is not a global advantage.
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ADHD helps me do this doesn't mean it helps all around.
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Very, very different.
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Now, how can ADHD actually help you?
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The two ways it can probably help you or seem to help you is hyper-focus and creativity respectively.
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The reported hyperfocus that people have for attention deficit disorder symptoms is real.
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Studies consistently find that people with more ADHD symptoms often report more prolonged intense absorption.
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Not everyone with ADHD experiences it, but it's a thing.
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Experiencing deeper absorption doesn't automatically establish a superior performance in the task.
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Because a lot of this is people's reports, not objectively greater learning, accuracy, or productivity.
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But a lot of times when you're deeply absorbed in something and it's your job to be doing it, that really does make you way, way better at it.
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Now, here's the reality check to that.
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I'll probably say this more than once because it's super, super important.
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What ADHD people feel as incredibly intense absorption is
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is in my view and reading of the literature and my own experience with ADHD, so intense feeling, so absorption and focus feeling precisely because the default of folks with ADHD is so unabsorbed.
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If you don't have ADHD and you're incredibly good at focusing, you focus deeply on your math homework, you focus deeply on your literature, you focus deeply on what someone's telling you in a conversation.
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And so when someone's like, do you ever get into like places where you'll just focus super deeply?
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They're like, not really, because it's default for them.
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It happens all the time.
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People who have attention deficit disorder may look at their math homework and be like, nope.
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Look at literature homework and be like, nope.
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But when someone's telling them some fascinating story that's right up their alley, they're ultra, ultra focused.
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And you ask them later, like, so do you ever like have periods of ultra focus?
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They're like, yes.
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For things they're really passionate about, they'll be super focused.
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But people who don't have ADHD can get just as focused and probably more focused on things they're passionate about.
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But to them, it doesn't seem as exceptional because they can also focus on everything else.
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Imagine a person who really – you put four – you put five plates of food in front of two people.
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Separate experiment.
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One person loves one of those foods but doesn't like the others.
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That person is going to report to you like, okay, this food here, the chicken and whatever, the dish was unbelievable.
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And everything else sucked.
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Okay.
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Then you look over to the other person and you give them the same five foods.
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But this is a person who's not quirky like me.
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I would be the guy who says only one of these meals is great.
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Everything else is shit because I'm weird with food.
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You give this person who is like an Epicurean, somebody who's like a real foodie, all these five foods.
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And they say amazing things about all five foods.
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And then we actually measure the neural impulses.
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the total brain activity, the total sensor network activity of how much they enjoyed that chicken dish.
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And we end up comparing and we go, oh my God, the person who liked all five of the dishes enjoyed the chicken dish exactly as much as the person who hated all the others, but said the chicken dish was unbelievable.
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Why?
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Because when there's a huge comparator, you tend to exaggerate because it feels relatively like a bigger deal to you.
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With attention deficit disorder, this happens all the time.
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When in my childhood, I considered mega super psychotic attention that I paid to my hobbies and interests was really kind of the kind of attention that people with high focus paid to everything they wanted.
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It wasn't a superpower.
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It was just I was at least at parity for that one time.
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Very, very big difference.
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Now, for creativity, there are legitimate hints of creativity-related advantages.
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But in the literature, findings vary.
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And divergent thinking advantages are more consistent with subclinical ADHD traits than with diagnosed ADHD.
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Why?
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Being able to jump from one mental thread to another and integrate them can be radically pro-creativity.
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Here's the fucking problem, you guys.
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And this is a problem I have dealt with in my life and then resolved.
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And so I can tell you with a very, very big degree of clarity what the real crux is.
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In order to do that thread jumping and have enough context window and coherent memory at the end to synthesize all of that in a proposal that is accurately creative and constructive, you need sustained attention on that whole thing to make it work.
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I go from one thread to another thread to another thread back to here.
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Holy shit, that's a connection.
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Hey, Mike, what did you just do?
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I don't remember.
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Fuck me.
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There goes your attention span because now my brain is somewhere else.
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So sustained attention is highly important.
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Now, if you have too much of a rigid focus, you'll be really good at doing pre-prescribed tasks, but your creativity won't be that great.
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If you have a ton of focus spread everywhere, your ability to have seeds of creativity is awesome.
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but your ability to pursue the seeds as linear tracks of extrapolating on them and connecting them is going to suck because your attention sucks.
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The real trick to creativity is twofold.
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Part one, free your mind, be chill, be loose, and try to just vibe on some connections between different things.
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That creates a lot of hypotheses and a lot of connections.
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You write them down, you take pictures of them, you sort them out, you remember them,
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Now you have a lot of proposed creativity.
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It's not true creativity yet because you don't know what's going to come out of it.
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You have proposed connections of how the system works between its different various nodes.
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You could have only generated that with distributed attention, not focused attention.
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but you could have only systematized and remembered that if you applied tracts of focused attention to get that whole system down.
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Once you've done that, you go into narrow focus mode and you go into every single line and in that nodal network and you go, okay, this doesn't make sense.
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Nope, that's dumb, that was a stupid idea.
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This makes a ton of sense.
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Oh my God, it connects to all these things too.
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And then what you do is you have a pass, a creative pass, a generative pass, brainstorming, and then you have a pass on top of that.
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So there's three things, brainstorming,
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solidification and coherent formalization of brainstorming.
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So there's not just vibes, ideas, but you wrote stuff down that already requires more attention.
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And then the last layer is parsing everything through super focused attention to make sure it actually makes sense node after node, connection after connection.
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So you need the freedom to not be incredibly laser focused all the time.
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Then you need to be normal focused to make it all coherent.
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Then you need to laser focus to make sure it all makes sense.
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That's how you do creativity.
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That's the
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If you have attention deficit disorder, sometimes you're damn good at brainstorming.
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You're probably no good at coherently brainstorming, and you're probably total dog shit at vetting.
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And so if you pair up with people that don't have ADHD and they're very, very good at focusing, you can accomplish a shitload together.
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But the people that do the best creative work are typically people that aren't psycho laser focused sustained attention people, but they're not totally out to lunch ADHD people like me, like on a fucking sailboat by myself and rough seas with no shore in sight.
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They're in the middle somewhere where they can still be free enough to see a lot of the different tracks, but organized enough to consolidate all that into one schema and then evaluate it.
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So yes, being a little bit mildly inattentive can help you with creativity, but you better have a way to flip the creative switch into focus when you need to.
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The way I do this is in my modern time, I will recreationally use marijuana weekends and some evenings off.
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THC, I do the drink because I don't smoke anything and the drink goes through me faster and I don't have as much of a hangover.
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When I take THC, a lot of times ideas will just spill out of me and I'm on my phone and I'm talking to ChatGPT and I write this down, write this down, write this down.
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And then later, way later, it could be days later, it could be weeks later, when I'm at work and it's quiet and calm and I'm completely sober, maybe even I'm on parazanthine, so I'm extra focused, I look at those ideas and I vet them.
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That was not sure.
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That was dumb.
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High thought.
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This is a good idea.
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Vet, vet, connect, vet, connect.
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And then I have the best parts of being creative and the best parts of being systematized enough to prune out the shit that doesn't work.
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Severe ADHD is kind of like being high on marijuana all the time.
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Not a lot gets done.
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That's the big problem.
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So deep focus, to reiterate, is not an exclusive to ADHD.
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People without ADHD also experience intense absorption and flow.
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And if you look at the evidence, there's no actual objective evidence that ADHD people can focus better than people who don't have it.
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What you want is depth plus control.
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A free attention span to point where you want, but when you point it where you want, it stays there and you can really wrangle through some complex topics.
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The other thing is with AHD, folks, some people get stuck in this persistent mode of hyperfocus and they can't snap out of it.
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That's not ideal.
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You should have cognitive flexibility to where you focus on a task and then you unfocus and you go to another task.
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I don't have that shit.
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Never did.
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But that's the ideal.
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And so if you think ADHD is a superpower, gee whiz, you're giving up a lot to have a superpower.
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May not be that big of a superpower.
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And the real critical thing that puts a lot of cold water on these claims of ADHD being a superpower is like even passion still has paperwork.
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Like if you love filmmaking, it doesn't eliminate the fact that filmmaking both involves the creative stuff in ideation and the creative stuff in camera pointing.
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but you have to do file backups and revisions and scheduling and invoices.
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And like, you know, your dream job has a lot of administration.
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So if you have pretty severe ADHD, you could be pretty good at the creative parts, but you better have yourself an assistant to the rest or you better do it yourself because there are very few jobs that require no coherence whatsoever.
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Another thing with ADHD to look out for is absorption and accomplishment are two different things.
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Spending six hours perfecting the title of a project is much worse than actually working on the project itself.
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You just got sucked in.
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So if you have a tendency to get sucked in with ADHD, make sure you have a to-do list so you get sucked into the right stuff.
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And a lot of people will fight back on this and say, I have ADHD.
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I'm super successful.
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Here's how I leverage it.
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Possibly.
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But success stories are not controlled experiments.
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A successful person's ADHD does not prove ADHD caused their success.
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It could have been in spite of it.
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And so you guys can imagine I have feelings about this.
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When people who don't have diagnosable ADHD, I'm like, oh my God, like my ADHD is like a superpower.
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I just go into like work mode.
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I'm like, I'm sorry, did you say work mode?
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That is the opposite of what ADHD is.
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I'm on my persnickety meaner days.
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I love throwing it into people's faces that like when they start saying ADHD is a superpower, but I can tell you two things.
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One, it's not.
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And two, I can for sure tell you don't fucking have ADHD because when you really have ADHD, it does not feel like a superpower.
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It feels like something's missing because it is.
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Can you still leverage your advantages as well?
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You should.
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Should you feel bad about it?
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No fucking way.
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But are we going to sit here and joke and lie to ourselves that ADHD is some kind of massive superpower?
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That's insane.
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It's a deficit.
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Some people say things like, well, you know, society's just not made for ADHD people, but there's no society that could be made for ADHD people.
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The entire understructure of society is organization and dependability and daily tasks and boring stuff.
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You can leverage your own personal workflow to be more fun things that you like, that's awesome, but you still gotta get, the other shit's gotta get did.
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And so there's not like some kind of conspiracy to like put a bunch of boring work in front of ADHD people.
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Like it's not me that's wrong.
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It's society's wrong.
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No, man.
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No, man.
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That's not how it works.
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But you can lean into your ADHD in a few ways.
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You can build your workflow around your actual demonstrated strengths, not diagnostic stereotypes that other people tell you should be having.
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Under what conditions do I actually produce good work?
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Rather than like, what am I supposedly gifted at?
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Because you could have ADHD and not be super creative.
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You need to be doing creative stuff.
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You can have ADHD and your best work is when you're ultra focused.
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That's my best work.
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Then you have to lean into the best ways to allow yourself to focus.
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And you can be really, really good at stuff.
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Another one that's huge, and we have tons of these in these other videos, is that make your next step in every process small and concrete.
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Don't just be like, I'm going to do a presentation.
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Be like, I'm going to do the first slide right now.
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Then I'm going to do the second slide.
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Then the third.
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And so on and so forth.
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Take breaks as you need because your attention span will get tired.
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Gets tired faster when you have ADHD.
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Another one that's huge and it's absolutely massive.
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Keep as much memory outside of your head as possible.
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I am so bad at remembering small details about things or to do anything for two reasons.
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One, I have ADHD and so it escapes me.
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But two, and a much bigger reason in my adult life is I actively do not train my memory at all.
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I train a variety of things in my cognitive processing.
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One of them is the ability to do deep recursion on topics, to do the next hierarchical examination in a neural network, to see the big picture of something, and then the bigger picture, and then the bigger picture, and zone right through, and then come back out.
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That stuff's super critical, building a very complex world model, building a lot of skepticism in the right way, really asking, really red-teaming about what's going on.
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But memory, I don't fucking do.
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If you're asking me what I have to do tomorrow, I barely remember.
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Why?
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I got Google Calendar, pimps.
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I don't need to.
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I use a calendar.
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I have reminder systems.
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I have alarms for shit that's important.
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And I have to-do checklist every single day that I'm awake.
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And a lot of people don't like to do this because you're like, well, I want to train my brain to remember.
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Okay, dope.
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Why?
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Do you anticipate we'll just not have technology tomorrow?
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Because I got to be honest, if we don't have any tech tomorrow, you're going to die because you're going to drink water that's not sufficiently sanitized because the sewer system doesn't exist anymore.
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Technology is here.
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You can leverage it.
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Eventually, we'll have brain-machine interface.
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You'll feel real weird not leveraging it.
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If you have ADHD, you can do all of your scheduling, all of your appointments, all of your to-do lists completely outside of your head.
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So when I forget what I'm doing, I get distracted.
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I just look back at my notepad on my phone and go, oh, shit, that's what I'm supposed to be doing.
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It's the easiest thing in the world.
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And all of a sudden, functionally as measured in capacity, I'm like damn near normal compared to someone who's normal.
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And you're like, well, it doesn't seem like you have a problem keeping thoughts in your own head like that.
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It's because they're out here.
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They're on my iPhone.
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I don't need them in my head at all.
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Of course, make distraction less available is a big tip.
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Try a quieter workspace, fewer notifications.
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Take your phone, put it the hell away from you, turn it upside down.
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I have multiple videos about all this stuff.
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Lots more.
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I could say lots more about how to help yourself.
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We have whole videos about it.
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Now, here's what I'll say for the last part of this video.
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Yes, ADHD can allow for deep focus on passion stuff.
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But to me, that's just a case where it doesn't screw you over as badly as it could.
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And I will put my cards out.
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Overall, ADHD is a disability.
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And I don't like claiming it's a superpower, especially when people that don't have it very bad claim it's a superpower.
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Okay.
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That grinds my gears.
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I have a four video series as of now on this channel about how to think about ADHD.
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Two of the videos are about how to do deep work.
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One is about like how I, you know, struggle with ADHD.
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But one, the last video is about all the medications you can take for ADHD.
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I would highly recommend you guys, if you struggle with ADHD, to look into the how to organize your thinking and your workflow and especially the medications so that you can be your best.
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If you do or don't have a diagnosis, so you can be your best.
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Because, folks, we can all use some enhanced attention focusing ability.
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And saying that a disability is your superpower is cope.
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I'm not doing it.
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And if you want to do it, God bless you.
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But if you do that, what you should also be doing is trying to be your best by reducing the degree of that disability, by enhancing your workflow, and also potentially by looking into medication.
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Time to get hate.
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All with love.
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See you guys next time.
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I have ADHD.
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It did not cause my success at all.
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Every time I have had more of a wrangle on my ADHD, I was radically more successful.
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Hey folks, Mike Gisvertel here for the Making Progress channel.
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Is ADHD a superpower?
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I have ADHD, formally diagnosed, so I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about this.
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So let's talk about it.
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First thing we want to do is analyze what ADHD really is and analyze it from the spectrum perspective, which is how it's best to see this sort of thing.
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So ADHD is a neurodevelopmental disorder, which means a lot of people grow out of it, but not everybody.
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And it really is typified by persistent inattention and or hyperactivity and or impulsivity that interferes with life.
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It's not simply boredom.
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It's not laziness.
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It's not insufficient ambition.
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It's an inability to put your sustained attention on a task and consistently getting distracted with either external or internal stimuli that throw you off.
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And sometimes the distractions are so big, you have to do something about them, which is what the impulsivity thing is.
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You're a little kid.
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You want to get up out of your desk and dance, but you're supposed to be doing your notebook stuff.
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You get up out of your desk and dance.
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People are like, holy crap, that's impulsive behavior.
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You like have to yell things out and stuff like that.
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Big sign of ADHD.
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Here are the main levels of attention span and regulation.
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We're going to go up from the top all the way down.
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So some large fraction of the population of humans on Earth has a high attention span and strong ability to regulate what they want to do versus what they actually do.
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Attention is relatively easy for them to sustain, direct, and redirect to where they need it.
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And not only do they have a powerful ability to focus, but their focus is under their control.
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Everything to you is meticulous and purposeful.
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Big deal.
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These will be incredibly high success individuals in many cases.
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Most people have the next rung down, which is a normal attention span.
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Yeah, distraction and boredom happen, but attention generally supports everyday responsibilities without persistent substantial impairment.
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Sometimes you need a little bit of caffeine or a little bit of just rubbing your eyes together or a little bit of just getting into a small room and doing your thing.
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It sounded weird.
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Getting into a small office and doing your work away from distraction.
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But this is the thing.
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And so normal attention span folks –
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people that are like super gifted at laser focus, they will sometimes joke and say and sometimes not joke that they have ADD.
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Oh, my God, I'm so ADD.
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I get so distracted.
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And you're like, yes, but you run a business all by yourself and you do like six hours of deep work every day.
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How do you have ADHD?
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And they're like, well, it's just like, ah, that was rhetorical.
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You don't.
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So a lot of normal attention span people think they might have ADHD and all of them do not because they test at normal attention span.
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Where it really gets tricky is people in the next group who have low attention span, but it's subclinical.
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It's not low enough for you to get diagnosed with ADHD.
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You can be a little bit more distractible and forgetful and procrastination prone than the average person.
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But you don't meet full ADHD criteria.
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This is tough sometimes because some people hear benefit from ADHD medication.
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Some people hear benefit from lots of caffeine and parazanthine.
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Some people hear benefit from really good, really good structure and all this stuff.
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But sometimes, you know, they're missed in the diagnostic criteria.
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A lot of times they're –
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because we've been, quote-unquote, over-diagnosing ADHD, which to some extent is true for the last 20 years, luckily a lot of these people are like, they're sordid.
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But there's lots of people out there that could benefit from a lot of ADHD-style interventions, but don't because they're just above clinical.
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Next rundown, the second to last, is low clinical attention regulation.
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So persistent symptoms, meaningfully impaired life across settings, and
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This means you probably have ADHD and you need to get a diagnosis which requires symptom evaluation and consideration of alternative explanations.
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It could be high anxiety.
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It could be going through something.
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But a lot of times they'll give you all the tests.
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They're like, yes, both your life and these tests reveal that you probably have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
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And the last rundown is…
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people who have, of the group average, the most debilitating attention regulation.
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Starting, organizing, remembering, and completing ordinary tasks for these folks can become major obstacles to work, relationships, and daily responsibilities.
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I had this when I was a child.
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My parents would send me to school, and like half the time I would show up back home without my hat.
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Where did my hat go?
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Fuck, I know.
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I wasn't keeping attention on my hat.
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I couldn't be reliably dependent upon to bring things to school or get them back.
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Homework was a non-starter.
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The whole thing was total shit.
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There's a few videos on our channel where I talk about my journey with ADHD, and you guys can see I talk about all that stuff.
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It was really, really bad.
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Like, I failed every single class, more or less in school, for, like, most of my schooling because of it.
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Now, if you're able to focus for a long time in certain contexts, that doesn't mean you don't have ADHD.
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You can have intense absorption with substantial ADHD symptoms.
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The question is how reliably can you deploy attention versus being sucked into something?
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If it's only when you get sucked into something you're passionate about, you could still have ADHD.
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If you can pay attention to something you don't necessarily really wanna pay attention to,
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but you're able to direct your mind to do it, you almost certainly do not have ADHD.
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Now, what are the core claims of people that say ADHD is my superpower?
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Because I've had people tell me when they find out I have ADHD, they're like, oh my God, like, that explains so much about you, that's like a superpower.
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Hold on a sec.
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What are these claims?
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The big claim here is I can focus super, super deeply
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on things I'm super passionate about, sometimes for hours, with everything else disappearing into the background.
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Another claim that's very different from that is the idea that my distractibility, my ability to go off on tangents,
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makes me ultra creative because in some sense, a very linear thought process is not creative.
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But thoughts that branch and then reconnect those branches and branch and connect those branches to other parts of your world model can make you very creative.
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Noticing unusual connections and generating ideas other people miss can be a thing that people say, because I'm not so laser focused like all these non-ADHD people, my ADHD gives me the ability to be more creative.
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And there's truth to both of these things.
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The other thing is people will say, I'm so restless, when they have hyperactive version, ADHD, like my restlessness gives me a ton of energy.
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I bring enthusiasm and momentum when something excites me.
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That's a real thing that can happen.
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There are ways in which that struggles because you can't bring coherent energy to anything, but in some cases that energy can be a good thing.
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And a lot of folks will say, because I'm ADHD and typically I can't focus, when there's a lot of pressure, I thrive under it because it gives me the ability to focus like I don't have in the rest of my life.
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So maybe in those situations, I have superpowers.
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And, you know, folks will say, if you give me something that's up my alley for my intense interests, I'm a real rapid learner.
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I can dive into a subject, absorb enormous amounts of information and process it.
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If, especially, I'm given the right environment, it's not my ADHD condition that's the problem, it's the environment.
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Put me in the right setting and what looks like a disability becomes a huge advantage.
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Right?
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There's a lot to parse there.
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So let's take a look at what is true in those claims.
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And afterwards, we'll take a look at what is not true.
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And not to get ahead of myself, but my opinion on this is that there are ways ADHD can be used to your benefit, but there are many other ways in which it screws you over, and ideally you just don't have it.
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So it's probably inappropriate to call it your superpower.
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Sorry.
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Now, what are the truths in those claims of ADHD making you better at stuff?
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It is true that a person with ADHD can outperform a person without it.
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But that comparison alone can't tell us whether the ADHD helped, whether it only helped in that circumstance and it would hurt in others, or whether it actually hurt that person but because they're so much smarter or conscientious or more diligent or more organized than the other person that that's what really got them across the finish line.
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Like if you had to fight a pro MMA fighter who was 280 pounds and six foot six and jacked and lean, but he had been in a car accident and now has like one of his, like his shin bones is like an artificial.
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And he beats the living crap out of you outside of a nightclub.
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You're going to be like, dude, I would have had him, but one of his legs was fake.
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That fucking peg leg definitely gave him the advantage.
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It was like, no, no, no, no, it didn't.
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It made him worse at fighting.
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It just so happens that he's a pro-MMA fighter and he could beat you up with no legs.
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So it wasn't the disability that helped him.
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It was his other abilities.
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So we have to make sure we keep that in mind.
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And here's the thing.
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People have a ton of strengths and they still count.
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You don't need to have everything be caused by your diagnosis to be genuine or worth celebrating or worth investing in.
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There's people that can draw incredibly well, communicate incredibly well, and they have attention deficit disorder.
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And a lot of people, there's this thing on the political left, especially at the extreme left, really owning your disorder, really identifying with it, like, oh, I am ADHD.
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That's just a part about you, man.
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Doesn't have to be the core thing about you.
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And a lot of the good stuff you're doing is because you're a gifted artist and you're dedicated.
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It's not because ADHD helps you draw.
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Maybe it doesn't.
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Maybe it just doesn't affect that part.
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And a local advantage is not a global advantage.
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ADHD helps me do this doesn't mean it helps all around.
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Very, very different.
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Now, how can ADHD actually help you?
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The two ways it can probably help you or seem to help you is hyper-focus and creativity respectively.
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The reported hyperfocus that people have for attention deficit disorder symptoms is real.
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Studies consistently find that people with more ADHD symptoms often report more prolonged intense absorption.
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Not everyone with ADHD experiences it, but it's a thing.
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Experiencing deeper absorption doesn't automatically establish a superior performance in the task.
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Because a lot of this is people's reports, not objectively greater learning, accuracy, or productivity.
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But a lot of times when you're deeply absorbed in something and it's your job to be doing it, that really does make you way, way better at it.
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Now, here's the reality check to that.
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I'll probably say this more than once because it's super, super important.
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What ADHD people feel as incredibly intense absorption is
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is in my view and reading of the literature and my own experience with ADHD, so intense feeling, so absorption and focus feeling precisely because the default of folks with ADHD is so unabsorbed.
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If you don't have ADHD and you're incredibly good at focusing, you focus deeply on your math homework, you focus deeply on your literature, you focus deeply on what someone's telling you in a conversation.
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And so when someone's like, do you ever get into like places where you'll just focus super deeply?
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They're like, not really, because it's default for them.
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It happens all the time.
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People who have attention deficit disorder may look at their math homework and be like, nope.
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Look at literature homework and be like, nope.
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But when someone's telling them some fascinating story that's right up their alley, they're ultra, ultra focused.
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And you ask them later, like, so do you ever like have periods of ultra focus?
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They're like, yes.
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For things they're really passionate about, they'll be super focused.
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But people who don't have ADHD can get just as focused and probably more focused on things they're passionate about.
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But to them, it doesn't seem as exceptional because they can also focus on everything else.
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Imagine a person who really – you put four – you put five plates of food in front of two people.
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Separate experiment.
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One person loves one of those foods but doesn't like the others.
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That person is going to report to you like, okay, this food here, the chicken and whatever, the dish was unbelievable.
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And everything else sucked.
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Okay.
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Then you look over to the other person and you give them the same five foods.
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But this is a person who's not quirky like me.
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I would be the guy who says only one of these meals is great.
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Everything else is shit because I'm weird with food.
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You give this person who is like an Epicurean, somebody who's like a real foodie, all these five foods.
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And they say amazing things about all five foods.
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And then we actually measure the neural impulses.
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the total brain activity, the total sensor network activity of how much they enjoyed that chicken dish.
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And we end up comparing and we go, oh my God, the person who liked all five of the dishes enjoyed the chicken dish exactly as much as the person who hated all the others, but said the chicken dish was unbelievable.
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Why?
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Because when there's a huge comparator, you tend to exaggerate because it feels relatively like a bigger deal to you.
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With attention deficit disorder, this happens all the time.
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When in my childhood, I considered mega super psychotic attention that I paid to my hobbies and interests was really kind of the kind of attention that people with high focus paid to everything they wanted.
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It wasn't a superpower.
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It was just I was at least at parity for that one time.
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Very, very big difference.
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Now, for creativity, there are legitimate hints of creativity-related advantages.
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But in the literature, findings vary.
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And divergent thinking advantages are more consistent with subclinical ADHD traits than with diagnosed ADHD.
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Why?
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Being able to jump from one mental thread to another and integrate them can be radically pro-creativity.
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Here's the fucking problem, you guys.
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And this is a problem I have dealt with in my life and then resolved.
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And so I can tell you with a very, very big degree of clarity what the real crux is.
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In order to do that thread jumping and have enough context window and coherent memory at the end to synthesize all of that in a proposal that is accurately creative and constructive, you need sustained attention on that whole thing to make it work.
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I go from one thread to another thread to another thread back to here.
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Holy shit, that's a connection.
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Hey, Mike, what did you just do?
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I don't remember.
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Fuck me.
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There goes your attention span because now my brain is somewhere else.
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So sustained attention is highly important.
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Now, if you have too much of a rigid focus, you'll be really good at doing pre-prescribed tasks, but your creativity won't be that great.
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If you have a ton of focus spread everywhere, your ability to have seeds of creativity is awesome.
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but your ability to pursue the seeds as linear tracks of extrapolating on them and connecting them is going to suck because your attention sucks.
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The real trick to creativity is twofold.
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Part one, free your mind, be chill, be loose, and try to just vibe on some connections between different things.
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That creates a lot of hypotheses and a lot of connections.
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You write them down, you take pictures of them, you sort them out, you remember them,
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Now you have a lot of proposed creativity.
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It's not true creativity yet because you don't know what's going to come out of it.
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You have proposed connections of how the system works between its different various nodes.
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You could have only generated that with distributed attention, not focused attention.
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but you could have only systematized and remembered that if you applied tracts of focused attention to get that whole system down.
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Once you've done that, you go into narrow focus mode and you go into every single line and in that nodal network and you go, okay, this doesn't make sense.
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Nope, that's dumb, that was a stupid idea.
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This makes a ton of sense.
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Oh my God, it connects to all these things too.
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And then what you do is you have a pass, a creative pass, a generative pass, brainstorming, and then you have a pass on top of that.
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So there's three things, brainstorming,
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solidification and coherent formalization of brainstorming.
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So there's not just vibes, ideas, but you wrote stuff down that already requires more attention.
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And then the last layer is parsing everything through super focused attention to make sure it actually makes sense node after node, connection after connection.
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So you need the freedom to not be incredibly laser focused all the time.
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Then you need to be normal focused to make it all coherent.
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Then you need to laser focus to make sure it all makes sense.
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That's how you do creativity.
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That's the
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If you have attention deficit disorder, sometimes you're damn good at brainstorming.
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You're probably no good at coherently brainstorming, and you're probably total dog shit at vetting.
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And so if you pair up with people that don't have ADHD and they're very, very good at focusing, you can accomplish a shitload together.
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But the people that do the best creative work are typically people that aren't psycho laser focused sustained attention people, but they're not totally out to lunch ADHD people like me, like on a fucking sailboat by myself and rough seas with no shore in sight.
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They're in the middle somewhere where they can still be free enough to see a lot of the different tracks, but organized enough to consolidate all that into one schema and then evaluate it.
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So yes, being a little bit mildly inattentive can help you with creativity, but you better have a way to flip the creative switch into focus when you need to.
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The way I do this is in my modern time, I will recreationally use marijuana weekends and some evenings off.
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THC, I do the drink because I don't smoke anything and the drink goes through me faster and I don't have as much of a hangover.
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When I take THC, a lot of times ideas will just spill out of me and I'm on my phone and I'm talking to ChatGPT and I write this down, write this down, write this down.
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And then later, way later, it could be days later, it could be weeks later, when I'm at work and it's quiet and calm and I'm completely sober, maybe even I'm on parazanthine, so I'm extra focused, I look at those ideas and I vet them.
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That was not sure.
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That was dumb.
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High thought.
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This is a good idea.
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Vet, vet, connect, vet, connect.
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And then I have the best parts of being creative and the best parts of being systematized enough to prune out the shit that doesn't work.
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Severe ADHD is kind of like being high on marijuana all the time.
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Not a lot gets done.
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That's the big problem.
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So deep focus, to reiterate, is not an exclusive to ADHD.
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People without ADHD also experience intense absorption and flow.
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And if you look at the evidence, there's no actual objective evidence that ADHD people can focus better than people who don't have it.
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What you want is depth plus control.
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A free attention span to point where you want, but when you point it where you want, it stays there and you can really wrangle through some complex topics.
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The other thing is with AHD, folks, some people get stuck in this persistent mode of hyperfocus and they can't snap out of it.
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That's not ideal.
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You should have cognitive flexibility to where you focus on a task and then you unfocus and you go to another task.
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I don't have that shit.
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Never did.
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But that's the ideal.
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And so if you think ADHD is a superpower, gee whiz, you're giving up a lot to have a superpower.
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May not be that big of a superpower.
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And the real critical thing that puts a lot of cold water on these claims of ADHD being a superpower is like even passion still has paperwork.
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Like if you love filmmaking, it doesn't eliminate the fact that filmmaking both involves the creative stuff in ideation and the creative stuff in camera pointing.
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but you have to do file backups and revisions and scheduling and invoices.
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And like, you know, your dream job has a lot of administration.
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So if you have pretty severe ADHD, you could be pretty good at the creative parts, but you better have yourself an assistant to the rest or you better do it yourself because there are very few jobs that require no coherence whatsoever.
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Another thing with ADHD to look out for is absorption and accomplishment are two different things.
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Spending six hours perfecting the title of a project is much worse than actually working on the project itself.
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You just got sucked in.
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So if you have a tendency to get sucked in with ADHD, make sure you have a to-do list so you get sucked into the right stuff.
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And a lot of people will fight back on this and say, I have ADHD.
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I'm super successful.
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Here's how I leverage it.
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Possibly.
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But success stories are not controlled experiments.
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A successful person's ADHD does not prove ADHD caused their success.
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It could have been in spite of it.
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And so you guys can imagine I have feelings about this.
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When people who don't have diagnosable ADHD, I'm like, oh my God, like my ADHD is like a superpower.
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I just go into like work mode.
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I'm like, I'm sorry, did you say work mode?
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That is the opposite of what ADHD is.
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I'm on my persnickety meaner days.
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I love throwing it into people's faces that like when they start saying ADHD is a superpower, but I can tell you two things.
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One, it's not.
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And two, I can for sure tell you don't fucking have ADHD because when you really have ADHD, it does not feel like a superpower.
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It feels like something's missing because it is.
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Can you still leverage your advantages as well?
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You should.
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Should you feel bad about it?
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No fucking way.
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But are we going to sit here and joke and lie to ourselves that ADHD is some kind of massive superpower?
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That's insane.
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It's a deficit.
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Some people say things like, well, you know, society's just not made for ADHD people, but there's no society that could be made for ADHD people.
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The entire understructure of society is organization and dependability and daily tasks and boring stuff.
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You can leverage your own personal workflow to be more fun things that you like, that's awesome, but you still gotta get, the other shit's gotta get did.
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And so there's not like some kind of conspiracy to like put a bunch of boring work in front of ADHD people.
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Like it's not me that's wrong.
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It's society's wrong.
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No, man.
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No, man.
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That's not how it works.
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But you can lean into your ADHD in a few ways.
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You can build your workflow around your actual demonstrated strengths, not diagnostic stereotypes that other people tell you should be having.
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Under what conditions do I actually produce good work?
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Rather than like, what am I supposedly gifted at?
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Because you could have ADHD and not be super creative.
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You need to be doing creative stuff.
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You can have ADHD and your best work is when you're ultra focused.
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That's my best work.
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Then you have to lean into the best ways to allow yourself to focus.
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And you can be really, really good at stuff.
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Another one that's huge, and we have tons of these in these other videos, is that make your next step in every process small and concrete.
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Don't just be like, I'm going to do a presentation.
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Be like, I'm going to do the first slide right now.
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Then I'm going to do the second slide.
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Then the third.
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And so on and so forth.
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Take breaks as you need because your attention span will get tired.
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Gets tired faster when you have ADHD.
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Another one that's huge and it's absolutely massive.
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Keep as much memory outside of your head as possible.
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I am so bad at remembering small details about things or to do anything for two reasons.
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One, I have ADHD and so it escapes me.
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But two, and a much bigger reason in my adult life is I actively do not train my memory at all.
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I train a variety of things in my cognitive processing.
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One of them is the ability to do deep recursion on topics, to do the next hierarchical examination in a neural network, to see the big picture of something, and then the bigger picture, and then the bigger picture, and zone right through, and then come back out.
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That stuff's super critical, building a very complex world model, building a lot of skepticism in the right way, really asking, really red-teaming about what's going on.
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But memory, I don't fucking do.
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If you're asking me what I have to do tomorrow, I barely remember.
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Why?
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I got Google Calendar, pimps.
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I don't need to.
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I use a calendar.
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I have reminder systems.
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I have alarms for shit that's important.
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And I have to-do checklist every single day that I'm awake.
335
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And a lot of people don't like to do this because you're like, well, I want to train my brain to remember.
336
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Okay, dope.
337
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Why?
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Do you anticipate we'll just not have technology tomorrow?
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Because I got to be honest, if we don't have any tech tomorrow, you're going to die because you're going to drink water that's not sufficiently sanitized because the sewer system doesn't exist anymore.
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Technology is here.
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You can leverage it.
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Eventually, we'll have brain-machine interface.
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You'll feel real weird not leveraging it.
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If you have ADHD, you can do all of your scheduling, all of your appointments, all of your to-do lists completely outside of your head.
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So when I forget what I'm doing, I get distracted.
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I just look back at my notepad on my phone and go, oh, shit, that's what I'm supposed to be doing.
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It's the easiest thing in the world.
348
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And all of a sudden, functionally as measured in capacity, I'm like damn near normal compared to someone who's normal.
349
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And you're like, well, it doesn't seem like you have a problem keeping thoughts in your own head like that.
350
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It's because they're out here.
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They're on my iPhone.
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I don't need them in my head at all.
353
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Of course, make distraction less available is a big tip.
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Try a quieter workspace, fewer notifications.
355
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Take your phone, put it the hell away from you, turn it upside down.
356
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I have multiple videos about all this stuff.
357
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Lots more.
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I could say lots more about how to help yourself.
359
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We have whole videos about it.
360
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Now, here's what I'll say for the last part of this video.
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Yes, ADHD can allow for deep focus on passion stuff.
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But to me, that's just a case where it doesn't screw you over as badly as it could.
363
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And I will put my cards out.
364
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Overall, ADHD is a disability.
365
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And I don't like claiming it's a superpower, especially when people that don't have it very bad claim it's a superpower.
366
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Okay.
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That grinds my gears.
368
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I have a four video series as of now on this channel about how to think about ADHD.
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Two of the videos are about how to do deep work.
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One is about like how I, you know, struggle with ADHD.
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But one, the last video is about all the medications you can take for ADHD.
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I would highly recommend you guys, if you struggle with ADHD, to look into the how to organize your thinking and your workflow and especially the medications so that you can be your best.
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If you do or don't have a diagnosis, so you can be your best.
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Because, folks, we can all use some enhanced attention focusing ability.
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And saying that a disability is your superpower is cope.
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I'm not doing it.
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And if you want to do it, God bless you.
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But if you do that, what you should also be doing is trying to be your best by reducing the degree of that disability, by enhancing your workflow, and also potentially by looking into medication.
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Time to get hate.
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All with love.
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See you guys next time.
