My ADHD Advantage

Normally I write about strictly business issues in this blog, but I feel compelled to write about this subject and this is my best venue. I do, however promise that there will be business implications by the end.

School was really tough for me growing up. I managed to graduate with honors from college, but it was not always that way. I distinctly remember one assignment in kindergarten. I was perhaps the only person ever to get homework in kindergarten. For whatever reason, tracing the circle with the dotted line was extremely difficult for me. I just could not maintain my concentration around the circle. So, the assignment went home with me to finish it outside of class. I remember vividly the feeling of frustration that I had for what was, even in my view, a very simple task. That same feeling of frustration repeated over and over again through elementary school and into High School. I can remember the physical manifestations of my internal frustrations. I think the hair loss that I have today might relate directly to pulling on my hair as I physically became overheated doing math tests in junior high.

Concerned parents and teachers felt it would be good for me to get tested for ADD. Ironically, the term ADD had been abandoned five years earlier, showing how ill-informed the well-intentioned professionals were. I remember during the testing that the instructions for one assessment were so unbelievably repetitive and basic I became bored and started drifting mentally. I found a maze which I began to solve with my eyes while I waited for the special education teacher to finish the monotony. I couldn’t even pay attention in a test about attention!

The results came back, and I was to be perfectly normal. Candidly, I was a little disappointed. I wanted to there to be a reason for my frustrations. I hoped that there would be some magic pill or something I could do that would make all those feelings and disappointments go away.

Fast forward 25 years and I am now a father of five children who have extremely diverse talents and challenges. While dealing with some of those challenges, it became apparent that we should get some analysis by a neuropsychologist to better understand how we can work with our kids. At the end the testing our child was diagnosed with inattentive ADHD, among many other psychological conditions.

While Dr. Lewis was explaining the diagnosis, he looked at me and my wife, Jennifer, and said that ADHD typically comes from one parent who also has ADHD. I could feel Jen’s angry stare burning a hole in the side of my face. Dr. Lewis began asking me a series of questions. While his diagnosis and questioning was not exhaustive, he gave me a very rudimentary diagnosis, which was similar to that of my own child. I immediately related to the challenges that he explained to what my child was going through.

At one point, I asked him when they would get over it like I had. He then said to me perhaps one of the most profound things anyone has ever said to me. He said, “Steve, you haven’t gotten over it, you have just learned to cope with it.”

Wow. That hit me like a ton of bricks. As a matter of fact, it keeps hitting me like a ton of bricks even months later. I really pondered my daily challenges and debated is I was cured or coping. Of course, Dr. Lewis was exactly right. I still have many of those same childhood frustrations, but I have learned to deal with them and, in many ways, have been able to cover those weaknesses by enhancing my strengths.

Let me turn away from my story for a bit to tell the story of an extremely special young lady who has had to deal with challenges far greater than mine, but who is on a path for far greater than I may ever see. As Melissa Rey worked her way through school, she struggled with reading. It wasn’t until the fourth grade that she could read. Melissa has dyslexia. So in the fall of 2008, Melissa was an unlikely participant in the Discovery Education 3M Young Scientist Challenge held at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. Seemingly more unlikely was that she beat out 10,000 fellow students to be named “America’s Top Young Scientist”. When faced with head-to-head competition with some of the country’s leading middle school geeks and nerds, she had an advantage none of them had. The competition wanted to find creative problem solvers. What was a stretch for mathematics geniuses, was a daily task for Melissa. She calls her dyslexia her “dyslexic advantage” because of the creativity in problem solving that she learned just to try to keep up. While others relied on skill, Melissa relied on imagination, creativity, and problem solving.

So, as I reconcile her story, with Dr. Lewis’s comments about learning to cope, I realize now that I have an ADHD advantage. It turns out that my ADHD mind is not very well suited for sitting at desks set up in a grid pattern and having data un-inspirationally spoon-fed to me in a factory like setting. On the other hand, my ADHD mind is very well suited for the real world. The danger is that factory floor mentality of education can so discourage the ADHD mind that we may grow up and believe that we are not good enough or qualified enough to be in the real world. Maybe that’s why nearly one-third of kids with ADHD either drop out or delay high school.

David Neeleman, founder of JetBlue Airways credits his ADHD  with his success observing that with the ADHD comes creativity and the ability to think outside the box.

There is no question, ADHD is adversity. We can choose to let that adversity beat us or make us better. As we look at some of the greatest successes in the world (the most decorated olympian of all time, Michael Phelps, or the Sir Richard Branson, founder of, well, lots of cool things to name a couple), I think we see cases where many of these mental adversities, such as ADHD and dyslexia, have wildly contributed to the success of some amazing people. On the other hand, we know prisons are filled with the same mental anomalies.

As a society, I feel we need to embrace these adversities. We need to stop calling things like ADHD a mental disorder. My mind is not disorderly, it is just ordered differently than the majority of people and, dang it, I have no desire to be like the majority of people!

I’m afraid that if we treat these differences like diseases that should be medicated, we do an incredible disservice to those afflicted with this adversity by numbing their pain and not allowing them to learn how to cope and adapt. That pill that I so desperately wanted, and perhaps my parents and teachers also wanted me to have, would have made my childhood and educational experience easier, but I would not have learned to cope with my adversity.

I am certainly not saying that all medication is bad. I’m not qualified to say that one way or the other, but, I know in my case it would have been a short-term gain with a long-term loss.

What made this difference for me is that I was constantly challenged with hard things in ways that I could overcome. While school beat me down, I was blessed to have other outlets that let me accomplish really hard things. That glimmer of hope was enough to help me see that I could make it, even if making it, meant enduring school long enough just to survive and pass.

I feel lucky and blessed that I am not in those ADHD statistics that are in prison, but instead among those that are relatively successful in my career, my community, my family, and my church responsibilities. I think the difference between success and failure, is learning how to cope. We have to stop trying to treat everyone the same and instead teach different people in the different ways that they need to learn. We need to teach kids how to cope. I am grateful for those, even if unintentionally, who taught me how to cope, or provided a framework where I could teach myself how to cope, or understood that we all learn differently.  I am forever grateful to Dr. Lewis for his profound words so that I could recognize in my life what I have been able to do.

I love my ADHD. Okay… maybe it’s more of a love/hate relationship. For example, I’d really like to be able to concentrate better when reading. It’s embarrassing at times, but on the other hand, if I had read all those Shakespeare plays in high school, I would not have learned to compensate by listening intently in class so I could still pull the occasional A without reading. Reading and other weaknesses are part of who I am and, while I’d like work on improving a few things, I would not trade the whole package.

Okay, now to keep this a business blog… I think that successful ADHD adults that have learned how to cope should be an essential ingredient we want on our team. They know how to problem-solve. They know how to think differently and achieve above-average results,. They know how to overcome adversity, and are the person you want on your team when everything starts to fall apart.

Having an ADHD mind is not necessarily better. I’d make a terrible accountant. There are still many seemingly simple administrative tasks that I really struggle with. We need a good mix of people. For example, there are plenty of weaknesses that I have that my wife does not and vice versa. Our different approaches to our shared values are an eternal blessings to our marriage. As we look for the type of minds that we want in our workplace, we should seek diversity. Not necessarily the diversity that we usually talk about in business which is only skin deep, but the diversity on the inside, which is the diversity of thinking.

PS It took me a about 20 minutes to write the first 90% of this posting, and a month to do the rest. Oh look, squirrel!