How I Run a Company with ADHD

This hits way too close to home.

Found the English version :)

The Answer: How to start a relationship and make it last

https://www.amazon.com/Answer-start-relationship-make-last/d...

> Well, hard-working but not clever people will do useless work and create extra work overloading everyone else. BUT, this happens when they don't have good management and leadership above them, to prioritize and handle them bite-sized pieces, and to set their frame of mind to focus on "results in the bigger picture".

I've always thought of "stupid" as different from "not smart". I can't fault people for not having the experience or knowledge that I or others have. I tend to think more of an "active stupid" as a lack of common sense, and making actually poor choices as opposed not making good ones.

To me, it's more the difference of "My laptop is overheating and I can't figure out why" versus "My laptop is overheating so I poured water on it to cool it off."

When I'm anxious, for sure the racing-thought/chatter is more pronounced; I've also been diagnosed with BPD and that psychiatrist actually asked me to do and ADD/ADHD test because these go hand-in-hand (I've scored 6/9 for ADD, which was apparently sub-threshold for ADD in adults).

Depersonalization/feelings of emptiness -- I do experience those occasionally because those are part of BPD, but they've gone down significantly over the years and I have a pretty stable life right now.

The bad thing for me is if I'm well rested/not anxious I'm usually not interested in doing anything at all; it's just my hypothesis that anxiety is my high-functioning mechanism for my ADD.

While on certain stimulants (they're not all the same) things just click and I am very calm, zero chatter in my head, I feel a bit dumber than usual, but I also can just focus and do meaningful things. Other stimulants make me euphoric and while I can focus I can easily end up focusing on the wrong things; on other stimulants I'm more anxious than usual, more driven and still better able to focus; unfortunately I live in a country where adults cannot receive stimulants period, let alone find a psychiatrist who's willing to play with stimulants/non-stimulants, dosages and so on.

> I remember back in the day I had massive gaming sessions (like 10 hours a day for weeks). Games that are competitive and "skillful" too, not just lounging around playing them 1 handed. It required tremendous focus.

It's deceptive; from the outside games seem like a single task that you can just focus on, unlike those other single tasks. But games are usually made up of a lot of things to keep track of, remember, etc. and it oddly works well for ADD/ADHD since you repeatedly switch focus between them all, something we're actually great at doing.

Take a competitive game like Overwatch: there's the general things to focus that any FPS has, but you also have to keep other things in mind like: map layout, your own positioning, ability cooldowns, enemy positioning (where you remember them and where they're likely to be next), the objective, whatever strategy you or your team have, etc. Instead of being distracted off the single task of "playing Overwatch", you're actively switching between the different phases that make up "what am I going to do next", even if you don't notice it.

Conversely, if a game is going slowly, you might get distracted and wander off looking for something more intense to do -- like killing an enemy -- and get yourself caught out of position.

Or in a PvE-multiplayer/single-player sense, consider raids (10-20man group vs. 1 boss) in MMOs: you have your own character's attack rotation to do, but also the flow of the current boss to think about: incoming spells, curses/debuffs to watch for, positioning, next objective (if the boss is more phase-based rather than just repetitive attacking), etc. If you're a melee character positioning and moving might be a constant thing to focus on, too. Even if you're already used to it and it's automatic to you, it's still something your mind actively thinks about and switches focus between.

Even in a game that has much less mechanics going on, your ADD/ADHD might just switch focus between the game's visuals, just as you physically get distracted by things around you (except this time they're the in-game environment and not distractions, but things the devs intended for you to interact with).

TL;DR: A video game isn't a single, coherent task that goes from A-Z, it's a giant collection of many tiny repeating (but not necessarily repetitive) tasks that you constantly switch between, like a processor context-switching between processes. And that plays into ADD/ADHD's pros rather than cons.