How I Used ADD to Build Great Businesses
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As someone that has always struggled with ADD, I can tell you that sugar makes it 100x worse. Since I went on a strict Paleo diet (and especially recently when I've cut out alcohol), my baseline clarity and ability to focus my thoughts have improved immensely. I would recommend trying the Paleo diet for a month and seeing what kind of affect it has on you.
[I know what you think about a subject isn't a scientific determination but I feel it's still relevant as an indicator.]
What I came to find out later, after I started a company at 19, was that if I could train my brain to sift out all the incredible noise, there was actually a lot of useful activity going on. 20 years later I finally feel I have a handle on it. I also learned I wasn't the only one. I wish I could sit down with so many more young ADD-laden students, founders and kids and help them along.
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.
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.
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.
Indeed, ADHD is a bane, not a superpower. Yet, more? I don't know. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger, which in turn makes you able to overcome ordeals and achieve things, sometimes worse, sometimes better, and anyway differently. This is how I live with ADHD, how I learned to work around or abuse it, how I made it a part of me.
PS: the acronym is only correct when you are hyperactive in addition to the attention deficit part. the H trait is not always present — or at least not as prevalent — which sometimes makes ADD hard to detect.
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 have it that do not. Many psychiatrists misdiagnose patients with ADHD, when the actual problem is a different disorder. And many people are struggling in life because they have not been diagnosed with ADHD yet.
ADHD has only ever been a huge burden on my education, relationships, and quality of life. It does not give people with ADHD any sort of "super powers" or "exceptional intelligence and creativity". It doesnt have any beneficial traits whatsoever.
Hyperfocus is a form of self medicating. It is the only time when the chaotic hurricane in our mind is calmed. We can focus on certain activities that stimulate us because its the only time were not extremely uncomfortable.
The problem is that we cant control what we hyper focus on. Many of us can not self motivate ourselves to not procrastinate. Many of us can not remember what we just read or where we put our keys 5 seconds ago no matter what. Many of us can not stop ourselves from saying absolutely offensive and cruel things without provocation. Many of us hardly have any real friends, and the friends we do have are just like us. Many of us can barely speak a full sentence clearly without stumbling over our words because our minds float away on a tangent.
ADHD is a horrible disorder to suffer with. Just as bad as schizophrenia, bulimia, bipolar disorder, depression, anxiety, and autism. Anybody who is trying to live with ADHD untreated should seriously reconsider and seek professional psychiatric help. Research ADHD and all other closely related disorders, and figure out how you can help your psychiatrist better help you.
Its the single best decision I've ever made.
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.
The current theory suggests that ADHD is caused by a mild disorder somewhere between when dopamine is released to communicate between the brain's neurons via synapses and when most of it is reuptaken back into the brain's dopamine bank and the rest is transported to other parts of the body. Some of this dopamine is converted in norepinephrine (adrenaline).
Explained in the simplest way, ADHD is caused either when not enough dopamine is let out, too much dopamine is reuptaken back into the storage and transported to become norepinephrine, and/or norepinephrine is reuptaken too fast.
This is why, theoretically, different ADHD medications are only effective on different types of ADHD patients.
This damned problem has been just that. I went without medication for over 18 years but in the last year have had to seek treatment again. I definitely needed to do it sooner but as life becomes more and more complex and I'm beholden to other's schedules something had to give.
Life with the medication is a much better place for me. Wish I'd pursued it again sooner.
Eating two eggs, fresh fruit and whole wheat toast provides lots of energy.
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 "feel sad".
I have no idea how many founders actually have ADHD - ie, DSM 314.xx - but I take any HN post about "ADD" with a whole heaping of salt. It's nothing personal, but let's just say that my internal Bayesian classifier has been trained to detect most as pure noise.
[0] I put this in quotation marks because the term has been outdated and deprecated for quite a long time in the medical community - in my experience, most people who say they have "ADD" haven't received any medical treatment recently, because that's not the term that any current psychologist/psychiatrist would use.
To be fair though, it can be difficult to diagnose even in the medical community, particularly given that it seems to be the default fallback for any parent wanting to medicate a child that may be going through a natural hyperactive phase.
On the other hand, I wasn't officially diagnosed until I was 20 so I spent 18+ years in the dark. Others I know went through similar (longer) periods of quiet self-diagnosis before they finally decided to go through what would be considered an appropriate test.
Exactly - I literally just had this discussion here yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5475037). ADHD is incredibly tough (read: expensive) to diagnose properly, and almost impossible to self-diagnose with any appreciable degree of confidence.
My frustration comes from the fact that people first misdiagnose themselves or their kids, or diagnose themselves through inappropriate tests, which then leads people to conclude that ADHD doesn't really exist (see randallsquared's reply).
In other words, "our [cheap] classifier model is incapable of making accurate predictions reliably; therefore the latent variable we're predicting must be imaginary", instead of "our [cheap] classifiers are incapable of making accurate predictions reliably; therefore those diagnostic models are inadequate".
On a related note, there should be an "ADDers Anonymous" for startup founders, bootstrappers etc (if there isn't already) for those with executive function type issues.
I've also started using a Chromebook (Samsung's ARM model, 'Daisy') away from my desk. CrOS's limits can actually be a bonus if you just want to get things done (SSH and a browser can be very productive). Kind of wish CrOS had a 'no-tabs, single page per window, all full-screen' mode to cut back the distractions even further.
If you've got mild cases, there are many behavioral techniques that might help you. People in the thread here are sharing them. (Excercise, nutrition, list making, regular brain dumps, etc.)
But once your ADD reaches a certain severity, those can't really get you back to fully functioning. Psychiatrists are _supposed_ to help you find out if you're past that threshold, and they're also supposed to help you find mitigation techniques that work for you.
Sad fact is that many psychiatrists, third-world or not, will not work for you. Not only do they need to be capable at their job in general, they need to be knowledgable about ADD, and you need to be able to connect with them, so things actually make sense.
It's an arduous process finding the one psychiatrist who works for you
And Intuniv is awesome.
Gotta go, I hear a western scrub jay squawking outside.
Shoot me an email if you get the chance: gailees@umich.edu
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 learned how to play and was proficient after a month.
These experiences made me question why I was good in some areas but failed in others. By the time I was 19 I gave up ALL drugs I was taking for ADHD and started my own treatment of "taking responsibility for my life."
This was the hardest thing I ever had done. At that time I was reading at a 6th grade level and has no prospects for jobs. I went to live with my grandparents and received the best education of my life. Discipline. They were farmers.
After 2 months I knew I had to leave and make a life for myself. I was scared and afraid but I had started reading self-help books and when tested again at the department of vocational rehabilitation I was reading 4-5 years ahead of my current age. My spatial skills were off the charts (their words).
I knew I had something special about myself that I could work with. I knew that if I worked hard I could do anything even if it took me longer to accomplish it I could do it.
I started by working my way up a janitorial company. I learned spanish in 6 months using Neuro Linguistic Programming techniques. I met my future wife and got married. I started putting computers together for the purpose of playing video games. I loved it. I was good at it. I eventually worked as a tech for a big box store and then worked in IT at a large insurance company when I found out I was going to be a father.
I learned everything I could about Active Directory. I then learned Perl as my first programming language and automated most of my job. I then started making games at home and learning as many languages as possible. I felt unstoppable.
Then my wife and I were having problems. Not huge problems but enough to get help. We sought counseling and happened to meet with a woman who studied ADHD as a specialty during her phD. Within 1 hour she said to me, "You know you have ADHD right?"
My heart sank. All those years of failure came rushing back to me. I thought it was crap. A ruse. A mis-diagnosis. How could I have accomplished so much. How could I have gone back to college and graduated with a 4.0 for my associates in comp sci and 3.8 for my bachelors. How could I learn all those languages and read over 500 books.
I had to come to grips with the fact that I still had it. But I made it work for me and it was unfortunately affecting my relationship with my wife. We were able to come to an understanding about who I am and accepting the way I think.
Now, I make games for iOS fulltime. From home. ADHD isn't a death sentence. It's only a disorder if it's making your life harder.
The easiest way to know is if Adderall or Ritalin made you feel normal and calm. (sometimes even sleepy. Ive taken naps while medicated on my adderall.) ADHD stimulant meds should have a very profound effect if you have ADHD. How do you feel when the medication wears off at night after having taken it for weeks? Crashed? Not that different? Wanting to take more?
And how did you feel when you stopped medicating after 3-5 days?
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 me. I mean it's an investment in myself to learn as much as possible, but I wasn't getting any credit for it.
Didn't know it at the time, but recently got diagnosed with "severe" adolescent ADHD. In queue for treatment atm. They said pills might not help.
Does anyone have any cool tip on how to focus without getting distracted and look at George Costanza quotes or research about meat eating plants?
For me, cutting starch/carbohydrates/sugar helped. But only by a little, it got rid of the "fog" brain. At least now the 1000 thoughts in my head running concurrently are crystal clear :)
As someone who is actively struggling to concentrate while writing a thesis (hey look I'm on HN now...) I have a few tips that I hope can help you.
Working environment is important. If you're goofing off in your current work spot... then get out of there! Find some other place that you can work from and try working there. You will be surprised how a change in environment can affect your concentration. My experience has been Public and University Libraries are undervalued work spaces. Cafes work really well for me because some part of my brain wants me to appear productive in front of other people, so I goof off less in open working spaces where others can see my screen. I use that to help me concentrate. The point is find that spot that works for you and fight for it. Also don't be afraid to get nomadic, its OK to switch working spots when you feel like it.
Make Lists. Every time you sit down to do work, spend 30 seconds and jot down what you want to do in that particular working session. Then leave that list in front of you. The visual cue of the list in front of you will help you get back to work when your mind strays. It also helps you align your thoughts.
In terms of staying on topic I think it has more to do with personal issues. I've noticed that when work/class induces a lot of stress, that I goof off more and I do less work. So for me, getting over that stress and just simply enjoying the work has been hugely beneficial. I'm not sure if this stress induced distraction is a universal thing, maybe others can chime in.
Finally go get some exercise. Its a panacea and helps everything from ADD/HD symptoms to curing depression.
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.
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)
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.
What you describe is not a paradox. The brain can self-diagnose and regulate the individual. Sometimes it's the introduction of foreign chemicals into the system (food, medication, whatever) and sometimes it is internal restructuring (learning).