Entrepreneurial Tendencies Among People with ADHD
papers.ssrn.com
papers.ssrn.com
The article speaks of entrepreneurial tendencies among ADHD individuals, but I admit evaluating the claim based on the data given was difficult. I didn't have the time required to make sense of the opaque presentation. However, does appear sampling biases were likely since subjects were obtained from ADHD support groups, where attendees are likely not representative of the entire ADHD population. Furthermore, it's not clear what, if any, diagnostic processes were used to determine ADHD status, thus the sample probably a "mixed bag" and hard to know which populations conclusions apply to.
There is a major difference between vernacular usage of "ADD", and the plight of seriously affected individuals that come to clinical attention. As I apply the term, ADHD is not a minor or trivial condition, the data show it's associated with increased health risks, comorbid psychiatric disorders, as well as worse outcomes in social and occupational achievement.
Certainly it's worth pointing out that having ADHD does not mean lack of abilities or talents. It's always the goal to enable developing talents, including in the entrepreneurial realm. In reality, the problem is having ADHD is more likely than not to impede reaching that goal.
The science literature on ADHD has repeatedly shown decreased success in important quality-of-life arenas, e.g., greater rates of divorce, less educational achievement, higher rates of unemployment, poorer driving records.
OTOH when the right treatment is provided, ADHD individuals can have a better outcome. The "gold standard" is functioning in a way that's "indistinguishable from normal". It may not be easy to achieve, though I've seen it happen in, well, a lot of cases.
HBO 2013 documentary on dyslexia, with Charles Schwab & Richard Branson: http://www.amazon.com/The-Big-Picture-Rethinking-Dyslexia/dp...
Books with behavioral strategies:
Organizing for the Creative Person, http://www.amazon.com/Organizing-Creative-Person-Right-Brain...
Neurodiversity, http://www.amazon.com/Neurodiversity-Discovering-Extraordina...
Learning to Learn, http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Learn-Rosemary-Bowler/dp/0684...
Learning Outside the Lines, http://www.amazon.com/Learning-Outside-Lines-Disabilities-Ed...
ADD Success Stories, http://www.amazon.com/ADD-Success-Stories-Fulfillment-Attent...
Spark (exercise), http://www.amazon.com/Spark-Revolutionary-Science-Exercise-B...
Personally, I believe ADHD is a gift and a problem(s). And the problems need to be solved to receive the gift.. And I read these workarounds or solutions are basics of successful entrepreneurship.
Focus - Staying focused requires significantly more effort (even not doing anything is an effort). This is stressful. When I am working on X, my brain wants to switch to Y, and it goes on with multiple tasks. This used to drive me crazy in early days and had to find a solution early on. For me the solution was a bit change in work schedule, exercise and one ginseng based multivit a day.
Passion - I can work 100+ hour week consistently without burn out - only if I have do some creative work. For a repetitive or not-creative task - it gets boring soon and even 15 hrs a week is a struggle. This makes it very difficult to keep up with processes and discipline. This forces early delegation/automation of boring work and forces me to find out areas I like to work on. (Clearly this doesn't work as an employee).
Attention to detail is deficient naturally, we have to work around this with discipline and practice even in non-entrepreneurial jobs. After some time we get pretty good at it (because of practice).
ADHD folks are likely to have failed a lot in early life. And I believe they are better equipped to tackle failure as adults.
People with ADHD may have a very diverse experience, they know something about everything - probably because they cannot focus/disregard in a natural way. Gaining expertise is more than just hard work for us.
When one cannot remember a lot of things, it forces you to keep it simple. Being a bit forgetful was a bad thing, but now it feels like a good thing - I am a programmer, and I tend to forget my own code if I do not work on it for couple of weeks. However that limitation forces me to write modularised intuitive code. I would consistently forget syntaxes of a language I worked for 5 years - but I would forever remember the patterns/designs I followed. I think, the world to us is more about patterns and behaviours rather than facts and figures. And it is easier to learn with the glass half-full.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SCAGc-rkIfo
After viewing this video, it seems like many people diagnosed for ADHD could be in the CDD/SCT like. This distinction was not made few years back. In fact ADHD sounds seriously scary after looking at this video.
I like to think of it as a gift of creativity.
I can't make claims about anyone else's experience, but the really frustrating thing for me is that these new tangents might actually be truly good ideas worth pursuing[1]-- maybe even better things to work on than what I'm doing currently. But I've been through this process before, and so I just write down whatever this amazing new thought was in a notebook, and then convince myself I'll follow up on it later.
I almost never do.
Still, the fact that I can't trust myself to switch tasks really bothers me, and even the strategy of writing things down and pretending I'll handle it later is not 100% effective[2]. So it's a mixed bag, where you might think of it as a gift because new and exciting thoughts are always popping in, ready to distract you, but in my case it is definitely also a disorder since a lot of the things I want to do require a certain degree of focus and commitment, and if I abandon them when I first start to feel bored I'd likely be unable to get through to the really worthwhile stuff.
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1. The key is of course that they seem to be good ideas, but that might just be my brain fooling itself in order to persuade me to goof off.
2. I currently have something like 800 tabs open, the results of thinking "oh I'll just read a little about this", getting distracted/having to sleep, and now they sit across my various browser windows, preserved in the amber of my virtual memory.
Martin Scorsese's Notebook for The Godfather: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=DJfJJogeOdo
People with ADHD can also be found in professions like accounting and law – which provide compensatory external structure.
Some people would find it easier to locate objects if all containers (boxes, closets, drawers, fridges) could be made transparent on demand. Until then, we have vertical surfaces, metal wires + strong magnets, foamcore, whiteboard paint, mesh drawers and transparent plastic containers.
When I need to describe to people where it will go, it rarely works well. I seem to have determined that the direction my mind takes me tends to be good though, and I should trust it. Some things didn't make sense for a year and then finally clicked once other things fell into place.
I'm speaking as an entrepreneur. The article describes me well. I also keep many, many tabs open.
One thing I've always wondered is how adhd folks didn't get selected out through their risky behaviour. Their existence could certainly confer some group benefits - but I thought group selection was no longer well regarded in the evo biol community.
Best relationship ever was with a ADHD risk-taking person. Would do again.
I mean, the guy who takes the time to make a spear and plan an attack is probably gonna live a better life than the dude that charges right into a slap-fight with a lion and the other dude cowering inside the cave.
Adhd is not a superpower. It's an incurable brain disorder. It fucking sucks.
No, it isn't. It's a fucking neurological disorder which affects dopamine production, which interferes with normal brain function.
Imagine sitting down to work on something you really want to finish, but you can't. You're reading reddit instead, because that gives you a quick dose of entertainment. You keep yelling at yourself to do the work, because it's your job on the line. But no, you'll end up looking at cat pictures, because, hey, cats. That's what ADHD is like.
Tapes from older conferences: http://www.audiotapes.com/browse.asp?Topic=3
There is useful practical information buried among clinical studies and pathology discussions.
ADHD doesn't make you some magical hunter, patience does. Reaction time has nothing to do with ADHD, it comes from paying attention when the stimuli comes about, something a person with ADHD can't do.
As for "normal", I base it off the figure of 95%. That is, our brains are different from 95% of humanity. That strikes me as a good definition of abnormal, better than "I surround myself with th those like me, so I'm totally normal".
There is no normal, that's the main point. If you get enough people with "AD(H)D" in a room, and ask a few questions about preferred cognitive styles (sound, light, touch, motor movement) you will discover clusters of preferences and a wide range of differences.
The label ADHD is most useful as a search term for a vocabulary of common challenges. Naming any problem is necessary to develop shared solutions. Prior to the advent of this term, non-neurotypical people independently named their logistical challenges and independently re-invented solutions.
Are you familiar with the term hyperfocus? Is that a strength or weakness?
I've met plenty of people who are 100% ADHD, both parents, all their children, it is inheritable, and the degree to which each person needed treatment for their personal ADHD symptoms tends to vary a lot. ADHD isn't a binary condition, you can have ADHD tendencies, mild ADHD, severe ADHD, etc.
The frustration felt by those suffering with the worst symptoms when people fail to appreciate their condition is hard to fix. While Autism has been the subject of the decade thanks to a particularly disgusting pustule of a human being publishing a particular fraudulent paper in a medical journal, ADHD is quietly toyed with now and then. Most improvements to treatment for ADHD have been accidental and is further hampered by the usual concerns regarding psychoactive pharmacology, what is a legal treatment in one jurisdiction is an illicit narcotic in others.
We're all human, I like lots of other people, have ADHD. Consequently I'm going to post this as written rather than try to edit away the lack of a clear direction or good summation. I've learned to cut my losses on tangential trains of thought, this one has already lead to a rather mushy breakfast :-/
And I totally agree. Some people are given wrenches, other people hammers. The solution isn't to make people really good at tightening bolts with hammers.
I do wonder if survival back in the day actually required the level of risk taking that adhd people are capable of. If you stayed in one place - maybe you ran out of food - things like that.
Can we really say that it is a brain disorder? All that we know is that people with ADHD don't fit into the cultural definition of normal, but that doesn't mean that the definition of normal is correct or that not being normal is a "disorder". How do you know it isn't just a slightly different model of cognition that suffers at some tasks but excels in others. Humans are very good at detecting errors, such as ADHD caused impairment, but not very good at quantifying or detecting potentially positive effects of something like ADHD.
I didn't know, and so I struggled mightily against myself to get to where I am today. In the few months during which time I have been medicated, I have made more career progress than any 5 other years prior.
We only get half a decade of productive life, if something that makes us piss away that time is not a disorder, well then wtf is it?
At this point i'm writing up my thesis, where tracking down, interpreting, and coherently organizing old notepads/napkins, papers, and result files is a full time job. If i want to keep my health (to actually sleep) i really only get 9-10 hours while the remaining 8 are anxiety that it's not getting done or frustration that i can't push out pages at any reasonable pace.
The best advice I can offer is to accept your lack of control over some things. If I don't listen to my body and mind I will suffer. Like what you mentioned with sleep, I actually find it more beneficial to sleep than to work through the tiredness. That way I can come to the subject with a fresh mind.
From personal experience, it's easy to spend money when you don't associate how it will impact your ability to pay rent in 15 days.
I always wondered whether the former is predominant in people with ADHD...
And interestingly computers/smartphones allow us to easily turn the latter into the former.
"Tulving's research has emphasized the importance of episodic memory for our experience of consciousness and our understanding of time. For example, he conducted studies with the amnesic patient KC, who had relatively normal semantic memory but severely impaired episodic memory due to brain damage from a motorcycle accident. Tulving's work with KC highlighted the central importance of episodic memory for the subjective experience of one's self in time, an ability he dubbed "autonoetic consciousness." KC lacked this ability, failing to remember prior events and also failing to imagine or plan for the future."
Can I get a summary, in text?
Thanks! :-)
To others, do not be intimidated by the length. If you have or know someone with ADHD you've got to watch this and get the friends and family to watch too.