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Comment by LeonB | Hacker News Reader

I see a big disconnect between:

“ I know! I'll write a roguelike in X! Five minutes later, I'm thinking: fuck roguelikes! I'll write a graphical solitar card game with Y! Five minutes later, I don't care for it anymore, and would rather write an isomorphic strategy game in Z.”

And:

“If you are no longer interested in a project you started, maybe you already got what you came for.”

There is no way that you got what you came for in those five minutes.

There’s several orders or magnitude that fit into this disconnect and it just says “ADHD-I” to me.

...and I feel my eyes roll back into my head when I read this:

“...a personality type (that is definitely not ADHD)”

...because the invention of new personality types and the stigmatic treatment of ADHD is just... very shallow.

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I'm a guy who got diagnosed with ADHD-PI when I was 28 and it instantly made so much of my life make sense. (I went from an unfulfilling career I hated to self-teaching CS and software dev & getting a job in the field within about three years.) And yes, I also got very strong ADHD vibes from this post. Having said that, I'm certainly not a doctor and there are a lot of things besides "can't stick with side projects" that go into a diagnosis.

But if the OP (or others reading) also experiences issues with working memory, losing items like wallets or keys, following directions (not because you dislike them but because you just can't keep them straight), sleep issues (generally, staying up significantly later than average), physical restlessness such as restless legs, forgetting appointments, lots of emotional impulsivity via outbursts, a very strong pull towards stimulating things like reckless driving, dangerous levels of drinking or drug use, etc., among others, they might benefit from discussing with a doctor.

I'm scared of how accurately your second paragraph describes me. Well, there are a few differences (I don't lose things, mainly). Thanks for the glimmer of hope.

My god, literally everything in that second paragraph is what I do.

I have zero issue with focus or any aforementioned issues (save occasional insomnia) but still identify with OP.

Ignoring the fact that “five minutes” was probably just hyperbole, you can absolutely get what you came for in five minutes. Five minutes is long enough for me to validate an idea from “wouldn’t it be cool to do X?” to “man I really don’t want to do X”. And I’ve just gotten what I came for, validating (or invalidating) an idea.

Just because you have an idea doesn’t mean it’s worth pursuing that idea, especially if it turns out you’re not interested in that idea after all.

I think this is a pretty important point. Often times I think I'm interested in doing something or I like the idea of it, but it doesn't take me very long to realize that I'm completely disinterested because of the actuality of the thing. I'm OK with that.

I think the parent is probably trying to say that you definitely haven't done enough exploring on most subjects in a short time to find and glean all the interesting bits, and I agree with that as well. There are work projects that I would have abandoned long ago if they were personal projects that I have got A TON out of by sticking with them and working on them for years. But in those years there has been a lot of slog as well, and it's probably not the optimal way to mine all the knowledge nuggets...

> “If you are no longer interested in a project you started, maybe you already got what you came for.”

I found a method for this which works for me. I have a book labelled "Ideas & Inventions" and when I have an idea, I write down everything that suddenly hit me, and I keep writing until I feel I have exhausted the idea. If the idea then goes, I leave it in the book. If the idea remains, I write about it again, until, if it remains and I have to implement it, I do so.

Sometimes it will be a game idea (I've spent time as a game dev, the last idea cost me a couple of years & my family before I realised it wasn't worth it), sometimes it's an invention (electronics, mechanical, or both), and sometimes it's just an idea in general.

I find that the feeling that I have to make something is my way of preserving an idea, and to simply write down the idea often fulfils this need. And of the many ideas I write down, only the ones which really matter make it past the notebook phase.

Hope this helps others out there, and if you do try this method and find it helps, please let me know!

Thanks for the tip, will probably try to rewrite the idea myself.

I dare to suggest meditation. We all get X number of ideas/thoughts/images/etc flying through our brain every waking minute. To be able to focus and do "deep work" we need to either break through the noise/clutter on our minds, or meditate/use yoga to teach our mind to be "quieter". I managed that after "a while" with Iyengar yoga (I assume that most types of yoga will do) but I liked this one better for its discipline.

For the question, another simple way is to dedicate "X amount of days". Increase the "5 minutes" to "5 days". 5 minutes can be misleading. 5 days is enough time to (for sure) know if you want to proceed or drop. You can try your period to be fewer or more (days), but definitely NOT a 5-minute-cycle.

If you weren’t that serious about making a rogue-like in the first place and what you really wanted was the rush of starting a rogue like project, then sure you got what you came for.

Much like a kid might say they want to be a footballer or musician - what they really want is the fame and recognition of being a footballer, not the 6 hours of intense training every day for years without any fame and glory. We see this much more in tech than we did 10 years ago, because now everyone wants to be a rockstar CEO hacker startup founder making a $1 billion exit at 19.

And in fact in some cases you can suck it up, major in CS, get a prestigious tech job, and then after a few years burn out because you realize you never really liked CS/programming in the first place, you just liked the social stickers that were on it. I’ve seen it happen many times in my career. Often these people will pivot to being PMs or some “tech lite” function and be much happier for it.

The fact that people suck at knowing what they really want doesn’t make the observation any less valid.

What that means is that you have to get really good at knowing what you actually like and enjoy - not what you enjoy on the surface of it not for its own sake, but for some values attached to it.

If this is a pattern that persists throughout this individual's life, it's highly correlated with ADHD. We're talking about someone who literally changes their mind within about 5 to 10 minutes, multiple times a day. At least, that's what would happen to me pre-diagnosis.

You don't necessarily need ADHD for this to be a trait. Source: me. I don't change my mind every 5 minutes, I just lose interest in certain projects.

I can relate this to part of my experience picking up stuffs and putting down in a couple of weeks.

Sometime I can feel that I'm in this or that because of some ego or future bragging and they dropped dead quickly.

But then again this probably roots from my childhood as I tended to appease to my teacher or parents to do a lot of things I don't enjoy. So it's really difficult to tell nowadays if I really enjoy doing this or not.

I read "five minutes" as being hyperbolic, but it could simply be a rapid deflation of interest even without gaining new knowledge. I've read about creating a roguelike but didn't have the interest to really go forward with it.

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