You may want to skip the chocolate poptarts and have a better diet. I know that my focus improves when I eat more choline (eggs), omega 3s (walnuts, fish oil), whole vegetables, etc.
How I Used ADD to Build Great Businesses
41–50 of 63 posts
Re: How I Used ADD to Build Great Businesses
#42TL;DR I have ADHD and it made me a better person I was diagnosed with ADHD as a kid. I received many different types of drugs and treatments that, IMO, didn't work. I barely passed the 3rd grade, failed the 6th grade and dropped out of school when I was a junior. I was also a gifted artist, like my father, I could draw anything. I wasn't fantastic but it came easily to me. At 16 I picked up the guitar and quickly lea…
Sounds like you have ADHD and a gifted mind. I'd be wary of attributing the positive effects of the latter to the former.
Re: How I Used ADD to Build Great Businesses
#43You may want to skip the chocolate poptarts and have a better diet. I know that my focus improves when I eat more choline (eggs), omega 3s (walnuts, fish oil), whole vegetables, etc.
This is my diet as well. I find my mind is clearer, especially on a whole vegetables diet. Digestion of red meats, sugar and carbs makes my concentration tank.
Re: How I Used ADD to Build Great Businesses
#44Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have always been told by my doctors that I have ADHD because there is a component of hyperactivity in addition to my ADD.
ADD was changed to ADHD-PI in 1994 when the DSM-IV was published. ADHD comes in 3 subtypes, Hyperactive-Impulsive, Predominantly Inattentive, and Combined (which is what I am diagnosed with). There is also a disorder called Slow Cognitive Tempo that is similar to ADHD, but still a different classification of disorder. The truth is, ADHD is way more complex than what most people believe ADHD is. Many people think they…
Oh I agree with you. I was just reiterating what my doctors have told me. And my medication has helped me in ways I could have only dreamed of. I am married and have been with my wife for six years, whereas before my wife (and medication) I could only maintain a relationship for 6 months max. I took 8 years to complete a 4 year degree, only because my 1.5 years were medicated. I still have bad credit because I never seemed to be able to pay bills on time, but as of today, I am debt free (including 8 years of student loans).
I'm not under the impression that medication is the only way to treat this condition, but without it, I would be homeless, bankrupt, and alone.
Re: How I Used ADD to Build Great Businesses
#45I have it, dropped out of college. Remember being up all night learning other stuff than what the education had planned for me. School: learn MySQL Brain: learn Redis. School: Learn javabeans and JEE and etc Brain: Learn Obj-C and Cocoa Contrived example, but something along those lines. Had to drop out, it was killing me staying up all night experiment with stuff that was not related to the education plan setup for…
Meds. Even if they say the chance of it working is 60% in your case, work with your psychiatrist who handles depression, anxiety, and other conditions as well as ADD. Feel free to shop around until you get the guy who can read you on the first meeting and tell you something other than how he's going to change your life.
It sounds as if it is an "easy" solution, but your brain is out of whack. Once I got into my mid-30s, after a few half-assed attempts every five years, I went to a good psychiatrist who focused on psychotherapy. It was expensive, with more than one visit a week for over a year, but it not only gave me cognitive techniques to deal with my challenges; he identified the places where he felt medication would help, both in the short and long term. The DIY crowd would call it 'stacking' but it amounted to tuning the effects of a number of mild medications to get the right results from the complete protocol.
The frequent check-ins were key, as well as avoiding my initial impulse, which was to write an iPhone app to ping me every n hours to rate myself on the factors I was attempting to improve as well as side effects.
After about six months, we got things dialed in so that the cyclone was a brainstorming technique I could pull up on demand, rather than being the perpetual noise dragging every thought to a tangental and unhelpful reference.
Things went quickly from there. I started three companies with a friend, but the difference being that they're all profitable and still exist after three years. This after a long trail of books, applications, sites, and other things that were created and never taken seriously.
I will say "The Blob" in the noisy times is a good way to build knowledge so that when you have focus, you can apply thousands of years of reasoning, philosophy, and cheesy buzz-words to current problems. In retrospect, I don't regret randomly reading the encyclopedia when I was a kid, spacing out in class, getting horrid grades, or being the master of six degrees of any actor. It made the first few years out of school more difficult, but like distance running, you have to build a base.
Feel free to PM me for my regimen, keeping in mind we have different physiological factors as well as different problems, either in nuance or category. It may give you a starting point in discussions with your doctor.
Re: How I Used ADD to Build Great Businesses
#46I say we should diagnose more ADD because really this stuff is way good, everybody has it and then people sort of like learn to control it or something! X-men is here folks!
Really, I have no idea what the fuck is ADD since it's symptoms seems to be stuff that everybody has to deal with and the best I can see people coming up with "no but when you have it it's like a LION is trying to eat you and you still can't focus, like, completely not normal"... I wonder, in case it's a legitimate thing, how the fuck have we gotten so far with 20% of brains shipping out with defects!? Amazing.
(I also guess the reason ppl are so proud of it is because this label is laid on them early on as childs, tweens... then they just start wearing it)
(Downvote at will)
Re: How I Used ADD to Build Great Businesses
#47TL;DR I have ADHD and it made me a better person I was diagnosed with ADHD as a kid. I received many different types of drugs and treatments that, IMO, didn't work. I barely passed the 3rd grade, failed the 6th grade and dropped out of school when I was a junior. I was also a gifted artist, like my father, I could draw anything. I wasn't fantastic but it came easily to me. At 16 I picked up the guitar and quickly lea…
Doesn't sound at all like you have ADHD, but then again, I'm not a "professional."
Re: How I Used ADD to Build Great Businesses
#48I have it, dropped out of college. Remember being up all night learning other stuff than what the education had planned for me. School: learn MySQL Brain: learn Redis. School: Learn javabeans and JEE and etc Brain: Learn Obj-C and Cocoa Contrived example, but something along those lines. Had to drop out, it was killing me staying up all night experiment with stuff that was not related to the education plan setup for…
Go for a run.
Amen. Mens sana in corpore sano. Or ^anima if you want to remember it every time you lace up your ASICS.
Re: How I Used ADD to Build Great Businesses
#49I say we should diagnose more ADD because really this stuff is way good, everybody has it and then people sort of like learn to control it or something! X-men is here folks! Really, I have no idea what the fuck is ADD since it's symptoms seems to be stuff that everybody has to deal with and the best I can see people coming up with "no but when you have it it's like a LION is trying to eat you and you still can't focu…
My BS armchair psychiatric definition of ADD is that it was useful when our genetic forebears had to be "distracted" every minute or so to be aware of the need to attack or protect themselves or their social units.
It's one of those hypotheses that I don't have the intellectual honesty or rigor to follow up, but it's a simplifying lie that allows me to put it to the back burner. Selfish gene, blah blah.
Re: How I Used ADD to Build Great Businesses
#50I'm noticing that there have been a whole lot of discussions/articles on HN recently relating to ADD/ADHD. Do a significant amount of founders have this disorder? I'm wondering what's the explanation here.
Note: This is a response to clicks's comment, not to the linked article. I'm not going to comment about OP, but I will say I've noticed that, in the majority of these posts, the person is self-diagnosed and has received no psychiatric evaluation whatsoever. A significant number of founders may have "ADD"[0] in that they have trouble focusing, etc. This is like self-diagnosing depression based on the fact that they "f…
You said the worst three letters for self-diagnosis. "DSM" generates more "Hey, that's me!" than horoscopes. Now that IV will be out of date and available at every used bookstore for $5, expect a run on them. (Or buy up every copy you can and throw them up on Amazon :-))