11–20 of 63 posts
I love this. Definitely would love to hear more about how you manage your ADD and keep focused moving forward -- its something I struggle with at times still, although I've found daily meditation to be extremely crucial. Shoot me an email if you get the chance: gailees@umich.edu
Sounds more like you screwed up at least 8 businesses....
(author here). The first 18 years of my life, particularly in school, were dreadfully plagued by ADD. I graduated at the bottom of my class in high school, went to summer school year after year, and was generally considered an awful student. I just couldn't concentrate and it was incredibly frustrating. It left me at a point where I really didn't think I had any capacity to do anything, and by 18 I hadn't even bother…
When I went to technical college, I started getting interested in my own things more and more. Normally that's probably not a good thing for someone with ADD - but in my case it turns out that I was interested in anything related to programming and Unix. This required extraordinary amounts of reading. Ridiculous amounts of reading of quite technical material meant that I had to develop concentration, and now I ironically don't have a deficit of attention, I have hyper-focus on the task at hand and get irritated if someone tries to distract me.
Funny how life happens sometimes.
(author here). The first 18 years of my life, particularly in school, were dreadfully plagued by ADD. I graduated at the bottom of my class in high school, went to summer school year after year, and was generally considered an awful student. I just couldn't concentrate and it was incredibly frustrating. It left me at a point where I really didn't think I had any capacity to do anything, and by 18 I hadn't even bother…
It's funny - I was absolutely hopeless at school. I don't want to use ADD as a crutch, but honestly it really got in my way. When I went to technical college, I started getting interested in my own things more and more. Normally that's probably not a good thing for someone with ADD - but in my case it turns out that I was interested in anything related to programming and Unix. This required extraordinary amounts of r…
There might be scientific research proving the existence of ADD, but in diagnosing ADD the same rigor is not applied to each individual's situation. It's just a statistical test.
There are two possibilities I think for us:
1. Is that ADD might be primarily a childhood to adolesence problem, and that our brains just grew out of it.
2. The explanation I prefer for myself: that I really did not care about learning anything until I started coding. I don't think it was a disorder. I think I truly didn't care. I guess apathy could be considered a disorder in some ways, like if you didn't care that your home was on fire. But frankly saying it's a disorder that kids don't want to be force fed information on a daily basis with no choice as to what they're learning? I'd say it's a natural reaction of anyone who truly enjoys their freedom.
(author here). The first 18 years of my life, particularly in school, were dreadfully plagued by ADD. I graduated at the bottom of my class in high school, went to summer school year after year, and was generally considered an awful student. I just couldn't concentrate and it was incredibly frustrating. It left me at a point where I really didn't think I had any capacity to do anything, and by 18 I hadn't even bother…
It's funny - I was absolutely hopeless at school. I don't want to use ADD as a crutch, but honestly it really got in my way. When I went to technical college, I started getting interested in my own things more and more. Normally that's probably not a good thing for someone with ADD - but in my case it turns out that I was interested in anything related to programming and Unix. This required extraordinary amounts of r…
And yeah, I share the difficulties in traditional academia with all of you. It can be almost impossibly hard to concentrate on getting a task done (irrespective of difficulty) if you don't have buy-in as far as what you're doing. School was one of those things for me, day jobs another. I drift constantly and find it hard not to think about the project I'm working on while at the day job.
As somebody who has ADHD (Please start using the correct acronym.) I feel it is my obligation to make it absolutely clear to everyone that there is nothing beneficial about ADHD. If we are successful with ADHD, then we would only be more successful if we didnt have ADHD. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUQu-OPrzUc