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Attention Deficit Delight
The other day I was at a gathering of digerati and media types and was talking to a well known and sucessful entrepreneur and a well known and sucessful technology journalist. Somehow the subject of ADD came up and I said, "I am surely ADD although I've never been diagnosed as such". They both laughed and acknowledged that they too were surely ADD.
Growing up I never was able to study for long periods of time, could never watch TV for long periods of time, I'd always move on to something new. I can't do repetitve work for more than 15-20 minutes without going crazy. I don't like to drive if I don't have to becaue my mind wanders. I am curious to a fault and am terrible at organizing things. I just pile stuff up, and move on to new piles. It drives the Gotham Gal crazy.
But if you look at most successful entrepreneurs, they exhibit many of these characteristics too. They can't focus on anything for long periods of time, but they lunge into new stuff with a voracious appetite to figure it out.
I don't know about the clinical side of this disorder. I am sure that there are many cases where the disorder is terribly disabling. But I really wonder if a moderate amount of ADD is a bad thing. I think it may in fact be a good thing. It's certainly a trait I have come to know and love in entrepreneurs.
Comments (19) | Posted September 30, 2006 in Venture Capital and Technology
Comments
u sure made me happy with by correlating ADD and entrepreneurial spirit Fred..
boy, how I wish this meant being a 'successful' entrepreneur though :)
Posted by: uday | Sep 30, 2006 9:56:47 AM
Fred, for years I would beat myself up over my ADD tendencies. Even though I've always done well, I thought certainly I would do even better if I was one of those "focused" people.
Then I figured out that this was a strength. Now that I embrace it, things are that much better.
And my office looks worse than yours. :)
Posted by: Brian Clark | Sep 30, 2006 10:04:02 AM
My ADD drives my better half bananas.
Posted by: Raj Bala | Sep 30, 2006 10:07:19 AM
I always thought about ADD as the healthy child syndrome
Posted by: Rogel | Sep 30, 2006 10:09:48 AM
I think you've been eating too many twinkies.
Seriously, I'm sure you can concentrate for more than twenty minutes if you haven't got to the bottom of something and your home office is far from messy.
Posted by: John Dodds | Sep 30, 2006 10:14:37 AM
I've long regarded ADD and ADHD as an evolutionary adaptation to a faster and more complex world… it's a good thing. I figure that people who complain about change, or being overwhelmed by the speedy pace of things are the poor throwbacks less graced by the "disorder."
Posted by: john t unger | Sep 30, 2006 12:59:40 PM
Fred-
Long time reader, 1st time commenter. I can totally relate to this post. I too am extremely curious about how everything works and love to "figure it out". One thing I think is a real strength is that by figuring processes out & understanding them, it makes it fairly easy to find out how to improve them. One thing I can't stand is doing tasks that are inefficient.
Posted by: Drew M | Sep 30, 2006 1:42:40 PM
John Gartner describes similar characteristics in "The Hypomanic American" at ChangeThis:
http://www.changethis.com/17.HypomanicAmerican
Posted by: Roland Turner | Sep 30, 2006 2:23:42 PM
One other trait of ADD that helps make successful entrepreneurs: hyperfocus. It seems weird, but people with ADD can (and have to) focus on things they are interested in. To the point of excluding all other input for hours on end. I've never been diagnosed, but I'm pretty sure if I was even a couple of years younger I'd be drugged to the gills right now.
Posted by: Toby | Sep 30, 2006 2:30:51 PM
Funny! I've noticed this as well. I actually know a guy who has a prescription for Provigil for the times that he needs to "turn off" his ADD and concentrate on something tedious.
Step 1 in any new venture I jump into... hire someone who thrives on doing the tedious operational tasks that I can't.
Posted by: Todd Allen | Sep 30, 2006 3:20:12 PM
Fred,
I think this is the first time I've commented here, but I've been a huge fan of your blog for a long time.
I missed the ADD "just-diagnose-and-drug-em" period by just a few years. Instead, when my parents called the school administration to try and figure out why I wasn't paying attention in class, they simply threw up their hands and said, "there is nothing we can do for him."
It took me years to learn how to be effective with what most people describe as ADD ... and I'm successful as an entrepreneur in large part because of it.
What scares me is an educational system that, currently and systematically, looks at kids with these skills as "bad" and something to be "eliminated."
Are we medically eradicating the next generation of great entrepreneurs?
Anecdotal evidence tells me no, but it still disturbs me to see how many people look at those of us with different ways of managing and processing information as somehow disfunctional.
Anyway ... my way of describing things now is that we "ADDers" were born with Formula 1 brains ... and it takes a while to learn how to harness all of that power without crashing into the wall. A worthwhile pursuit, and one of a lifetime, to be sure. :-)
Be well,
Michael Cage
Posted by: Michael Cage | Sep 30, 2006 3:21:29 PM
As someone with ADD who's currently on medication - medication doesn't mean you lose the "ADD edge". For me, at least, properly prescribed and dosed meds means I can focus when I need to without losing my curiosity, hyper-focus, or passion. (And I still make huge piles, leave messes, and drive my wife nuts.)
Posted by: Joshua Herzig-Marx | Sep 30, 2006 5:46:35 PM
Fred,
Sometime I think I should work for you ;-). If not for you, for an american fund. It's a pitty I'm in Italy.
Here at work, the investment director of the fund I work for as an analyst got so mad when he discovered I had a blog where now and then I treat some job relating stuff (nothing confidential). He said I was subject to ADD and that in the long run that can affect my performance.
At the moment I think is more of a strenght. When someone should cover an unknown market sector or run some business intelligence, they still turn to me. And when I do it (even if I'm a blogger), I feel like I'm having fan; my ADD is doing it for me ;-)
Posted by: Daniele | Sep 30, 2006 6:00:16 PM
Prevalence of symptoms fall along a continuum, and the presence of a disability is, not surprisingly, the inability to function normally. Clearly, you all seem to be functioning normally...so you likely don't have the disability. You're probably just a couple ticks over to one side of the continuum than the average person.
As one in the educational system, I don't look at ADHD kids as "bad", merely "difficult to teach." Nor do we try to eliminate them -- we'd lose a significant percentage of our student body to special ed schools (that charge the district $25,000+ per student...twice what my school spends on each kid).
And if you've ever seen an unmedicated, truly ADHD kid struggling to complete a task -- with that "Formula 1" brain winding out in neutral -- you might not be so quick to align the disability with an entrepreneurial spirit. Hey, I'm just sayin'...
Posted by: Kelly | Sep 30, 2006 9:08:12 PM
Kelly,
I'm certainly not a medical expert. I can, with certainty, state that at no time during my schooling was I functioning "normally". One year I'd be skipped a grade, the next year I'd be held back. Many heads were shaken, many meetings were had.
Incidentally, the same words used to describe my "disfunction" in school were used to describe how I went about things when I built my first successful business. The biggest commonality, aside from me, being the mindset of the people making the comments. That mindset was not good or bad, just different than how I see and interact with the world.
I don't doubt that there are people with much more severe characteristics (sorry, won't use disease words a la symptom) than I.
I do believe that had I not had to learn and develop strategies to harness the way my brain works ------ if I had a "crutch" in medication that I never had to throw away ------ I may be humming along in a dilbert cube somewhere today. /grin and /shudder.
My biggest gripe about education is right in the language you used.
"Difficult to teach."
I'm a great learner, but not in the way most "formal education" is designed to teach. To try to force someone who "learns different" to adapt to a specific teaching style is backwards, IMO. In a perfect world, the education system would adapt themselves and learn how to teach to a child's strengths ... not try to kill their strengths in favor of a uniform teaching environment. The latter made sense in the industrial age when ability to conform was highly valued. The former is required to be competitive in the internet age.
BTW, thanks, Kelly. From your comments I take it you are involved with teaching kids, and ... agree or disagree about this specific issue ... you have my utmost appreciation and respect for that.
And, Fred, I don't mean to hijack your post ... hope the debate is ok.
Be well,
Michael Cage
Posted by: Michael Cage | Sep 30, 2006 10:09:25 PM
Excellent as Fabrice Grinda puts it :
“Hypomania is a mild form of mania, often found in the relatives of manic depressives. Hypomanics are brimming with infectious energy, irrational confidence and really big ideas. They think, talk, move and make decisions quickly. Anyone who slows them down with questions “just doesn’t get it.” Hypomanics are not crazy, but “normal” is not the first word that comes to mind when describing them. Hypomanics live on the edge, between normal and abnormal.”
http://www.fabricegrinda.com/?p=76
Posted by: leafar | Oct 1, 2006 8:17:10 PM
Fred,
Great post, good to see this in a public forum – based on my informal survey many great entrepreneurs are ADD/HD
There is more on this topic in the Books “The Di Vinci Method” and “The Edison Gene”.
Folks interested in the Start-up/ADD overlap may also find these interesting:
http://www.intuitive.com/blog/are_entrepreneurs_all_suffering_from_adhd.html
http://mattinglot.com/blog/2006/05/15/are-entrepreneurs-typically-adhd/
http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=62-1594770492-0
Posted by: Jeff Stewart | Oct 1, 2006 11:38:05 PM
Fred:
I'm with reader Toby. In fact, you inspired me to blog today on Fanatic Focus Factor (F cubed); I think this rather than ADD is the "disorder" which makes entrepreneurs.
Posted by: Tom Evslin | Oct 3, 2006 11:07:13 AM
I like the hyper-focus ... except that it is now 3 a.m. and I need to be alert and in a suit at 9:30 a.m.
Being readily able to 'multi-task' makes me great at starting things and lousy at finishing them. Bosses and customers seem to think that finishing things is important.
ADD/ADHD is not as much fun as it might look like from the outside. Try keeping quiet when your mind is bubbling over with conversational points ... but wisdom calls for silence. There are frequent times when I wish for all the world that I could just shut up. But can't.
When I interviewed with the Social Security doctor she said I was fit for menial / repetitive tasks. No way, Jose'.
Posted by: Bill in Detroit | Jun 7, 2008 3:09:50 AM
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