
How I Used ADD to Build Great Businesses - sgacka
http://www.fundable.com/blog/how-i-built-9-businesses-by-turning-my-add-into-productivty
======
superplussed
"So the first thing I do when I wake up is make chocolate Pop-Tarts (I eat
like a 10 year old)"

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.

~~~
easy_rider
+1 for quit the sugar. It makes things MUCH worse. In contrast however,
marihuana..... ( Hey it's healthier for you than synthetic cocaine or meth. :)
)

------
wilschroter
(author here). The first 18 years of my life, particularly in school, were
dreadfully plagued by ADD. I graduated at the bottom of my class in high
school, went to summer school year after year, and was generally considered an
awful student. I just couldn't concentrate and it was incredibly frustrating.
It left me at a point where I really didn't think I had any capacity to do
anything, and by 18 I hadn't even bothered to apply for college.

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.

~~~
chris_wot
It's funny - I was absolutely hopeless at school. I don't want to use ADD as a
crutch, but honestly it really got in my way.

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.

~~~
readme
I was the same way. I could not concentrate on anything until I started
programming. I was told I had ADD before but I did not believe it.

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.

------
mortdeus
As somebody who has ADHD (Please start using the correct acronym.) I feel it
is my obligation to make it absolutely clear to everyone that there is nothing
beneficial about ADHD. If we are successful with ADHD, then we would only be
more successful if we didnt have ADHD.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NUQu-OPrzUc>

~~~
saosebastiao
I have always been told by my doctors that I have ADHD because there is a
component of hyperactivity in addition to my ADD.

~~~
mortdeus
ADD was changed to ADHD-PI in 1994 when the DSM-IV was published.

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.

~~~
saosebastiao
Oh I agree with you. I was just reiterating what my doctors have told me. And
my medication has helped me in ways I could have only dreamed of. I am married
and have been with my wife for six years, whereas before my wife (and
medication) I could only maintain a relationship for 6 months max. I took 8
years to complete a 4 year degree, only because my 1.5 years were medicated. I
still have bad credit because I never seemed to be able to pay bills on time,
but as of today, I am debt free (including 8 years of student loans).

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.

~~~
mortdeus
Im glad you found help. Better late than never.

------
julianpye
I tend to give my brain play-time, when it can freely roam around. At that
time a whiteboard however is much more useful than a browser with tabs, where
you will end up with 40 open tabs that you plan to 'work through'. What I also
found most useful is cycling outside. I research and let my brain binge on
information, then I do a long walk or a cycling trip for two hours. During
that time the puzzle solves itself. Then I have a voice-recorder ready and
record my completed train of thought, which later at night is typed into
Powerpoints for work and Mindmaps. The trickiest part of all this is that it's
difficult to fit this around fixed schedules.

------
OlivierLi
It has been my experience that nutrition plays a big role in controlling ADD.
Especially eating a good breakfast.

Eating two eggs, fresh fruit and whole wheat toast provides lots of energy.

~~~
seivan
For me cutting starch/carbohydrates/sugar helped. But only by a little, it got
rid of the "fog" brain.

------
clicks
I'm noticing that there have been a whole lot of discussions/articles on HN
recently relating to ADD/ADHD. Do a significant amount of founders have this
disorder? I'm wondering what's the explanation here.

~~~
chimeracoder
Note: This is a response to clicks's comment, not to the linked article.

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.

~~~
bmac27
In my case, I've gone through a pretty extensive battery of tests with two
separate behavioral psychologists that go beyond self-evaluation or those
(largely nonsensical) questionnaires that primary care physicians have you
fill out. But I agree with what you're saying. There are folks out there
who've made claims to being ADD without being officially diagnosed, some in
startup spaces.

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.

~~~
chimeracoder
> In my case, I've gone through a pretty extensive battery of tests with two
> separate behavioral psychologists that go beyond self-evaluation or those
> (largely nonsensical) questionnaires that primary care physicians have you
> fill out. But I agree with what you're saying. There are folks out there
> who've made claims to being ADD without being officially diagnosed, some in
> startup spaces.

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".

------
bmac27
I'm starting to finally make use of Things in a more constructive fashion
(after buying it a year and a half ago and having it waste away on my
mac/phone etc.) It helps prioritize these kinds of things, although a lot of
my notes still find their way into a "bottomless pit" scenario where they
don't get looked at again for days, weeks, months etc.

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.

~~~
ConstantineXVI
I'm currently using a mix of Remember the Milk (mostly near-term tasks) and
Trello (general notes/planning) to great success. Even if I never look at the
board again, it's there and not rattling around in my head.

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.

------
joonix
You may want to skip the chocolate poptarts and have a better diet. I know
that my focus improves when I eat more choline (eggs), omega 3s (walnuts, fish
oil), whole vegetables, etc.

~~~
DamagedProperty
This is my diet as well. I find my mind is clearer, especially on a whole
vegetables diet. Digestion of red meats, sugar and carbs makes my
concentration tank.

------
ucflibrary
Music always helps. But it has to be music with no words that doesn't make you
think about anything. Foreign language music works.

~~~
readme
Agreed. There is also scientific research that proves white noise can help.
Good instrumental music is not far off from that.

------
shadeless
As a long time lurker with a (self-diagnosed) ADHD I read quite a few comments
telling people to seek treatment. Is the general consensus that the medication
is necessary in treating ADHD? (I'm not trying to avoid meds, just happen to
live in a third world country where lack of focus and motivation is dismissed
by psychiatrist as just laziness)

~~~
groby_b
The consensus is that it takes a (good) professional to decide if the
medication is necessary.

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

------
reeses
Org-mode. Make capturing painless. Omnifocus Quick-Entry is good too.

And Intuniv is _awesome_.

Gotta go, I hear a western scrub jay squawking outside.

------
lightup88
I'm really digging the concept of putting a twist on the traditional to-do
list. Categorization and prioritization are still there, the items themselves
are just thoughts rather than discreet action items. Very cool and very likely
useful to a wider audience than just those with ADD.

------
gailees
I love this. Definitely would love to hear more about how you manage your ADD
and keep focused moving forward -- its something I struggle with at times
still, although I've found daily meditation to be extremely crucial.

Shoot me an email if you get the chance: gailees@umich.edu

~~~
wilschroter
Just shot you an email. Happy to share/help.

------
DamagedProperty
TL;DR I have ADHD and it made me a better person

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.

~~~
mortdeus
IMHO you probably dont have ADHD. Though we have alot in common, (Im also a
musician and dropped out my jr. year of high school), reading your story gives
me a feeling you may have been unfortunately misdiagnosed.

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?

------
goloxc
this is not unlike mindful meditation

------
seivan
I have it, dropped out of college. Remember being up all night learning other
stuff than what the education had planned for me.

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 :)

~~~
reeses
Meds. Even if they say the chance of it working is 60% in your case, work with
your psychiatrist who handles depression, anxiety, and other conditions as
well as ADD. Feel free to shop around until you get the guy who can read you
on the first meeting and tell you something other than how he's going to
change your life.

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.

~~~
nollidge
Is there a name for this technique? Is it just a particular application of
cognitive-behavioral therapy?

------
Buzaga
I say we should diagnose more ADD because really this stuff is way good,
everybody has it and then people sort of like learn to control it or
something! X-men is here folks!

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)

~~~
reeses
My BS armchair psychiatric definition of ADD is that it was useful when our
genetic forebears had to be "distracted" every minute or so to be aware of the
need to attack or protect themselves or their social units.

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.

~~~
Buzaga
Well but then diagnosing this equals to making our own nature wrong(or sick)
by definition and then it's a paradox... if we need to start synthetically
molding our body and cognitive functions that are healthy for the animal we
are because it doesn't fit the society we designed and built for us ourselves
to live comfortably... well, then something's wrong.

~~~
reeses
As a species, those of us in the developed world stopped evolving in many ways
since the industrial revolution. Traits that increased the probability of
reproduction hundreds, thousands, or millions of years ago stopped becoming a
competitive advantage.

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).

~~~
Buzaga
I think your armchair biology is not quite right too.

------
Cacti
Sounds more like you screwed up at least 8 businesses....

~~~
wilschroter
The first one does $2 billion and has 13,000 employees now, so it worked out
OK. Blue Diesel which became Ventiv - public, now private.

~~~
chris_wot
Zing!

