> The article defines the overconfidence as a belief in an outcome despite what reasonable past statistics tell us.
Following this same logic, a nerdy guy who has 100% rejection rate should accept it and do nothing. However from all the self-help/marketing literature we know this is a doomed philosophy.
At least to me, symptoms you wrote sound totally normal and not necessary ADHD. Of course since nowadays everything that deviates from common character traits is considered ADHD...
You could take a look at MBTI character types and find out that this is very normal for some (e.g. INTP).
In fairness, what I've written is only a very small facet of the larger set of problems I face on a near daily basis - a lot of which I'd really rather not write about (mostly out of embarrassment, some of which purely because of the massive sense of failure I experience daily).
I'm not saying you are one but ADHD deniers tend to dismiss symptoms described in isolation off as "oh this is normal". Without the ability to describe in coherent way how deep the rabbit hole actually goes, many people with ADHD suffer needlessly when trying to seek help.
ADHD symptoms are often described as "everybody experiences the symptoms to at least some small degree, perhaps in combination or maybe one alone, but a sufferer is where they experience the majority of the symptoms to a massive degree on a daily basis". In a lot of ways, it DOES look normal. What isn't normal is how extensive the symptoms are and how much of impact they have on daily functioning.
Fair enough, I had no intention to minimize your problems or deny existence of the problems. Just by description of symptoms (which I didn't knew were only small part), I put forward another possibility.
I can only imagine that its frustrating to hear such comments over and over again from people who have no idea about your situation. However the problem is that partially this is the problem of rampant ADHD miss-diagnoses which creates natural tendency to first question it.
While it won't make you an expert, it will perhaps help you understand what it is people with ADHD suffer through.
There are bad doctors and bad policies out there which are being resolved. They don't diagnose young children anymore even if it seems likely since some children will "catch up" and stop exhibiting symptoms. This is the source of many teens and adults today that discover that once they stop taking medication they don't need it. As our understanding of the disorder grows so does our ability to accurately diagnose it.
That said, while I can't speak for the person you replied to that shit is incredibly frustrating. Your empathy is unusual and appreciated but regardless of the rate of misdiagnosis you are not a doctor and are admittedly entirely ignorant about it.
I can't emphasize enough to those reading this that no matter how much you might doubt it, the people who work in this field do in fact know more about it than you do and making an armchair diagnosis or questioning a doctor's diagnosis does nothing but make you look like the kind of know-it-all that really knows nothing while maligning someone who has to read ignorant comments like yours in every damn discussion on the internet where ADHD comes up.
I know it's easy to think you've got all of the answers when understanding complex problems comes naturally but these doctors don't spend nearly a decade or more in school sitting around with their thumbs up their asses. There are tremendous amounts of research going into ADHD by doctors and scientists who actually understand the problem domain more thoroughly than you ever could simply by reading a headline about a study that documents the rate of misdiagnosis for a disorder.
Please understand this disorder is not some cry for attention or an exaggeration of one or two symptoms you mildly share with those that suffer through it every single day. It's not "laziness" or a lack of discipline and determination. People with ADHD lose their jobs and destroy relationships with family and friends alike. It's humiliating and the cherry on top of the shit sundae is friends, family and every asshole on the internet accusing you of faking it. No one wants that. No one wants to learn that there's a genetic component and guess what, your kid's lives might suck too. Even with medication. Methamphetamine is not some magic cure-all. It only addresses a subset of symptoms. No one wants to struggle every day wondering why they should even bother getting out of bed because it's exhausting fighting yourself.
No no, it's fine. I understand your point. Looks like we hail from different countries.
In the UK, at least, there is simply no rampant mis-diagnoses. My diagnosis has taken 2 years and this is average, perhaps quick, given the state of things.
> At least to me, symptoms you wrote sound totally normal and not necessary ADHD.
The diagnosis is sometimes unclear to people without ADHD.
This is why generally it requires a registered psychiatrist to make the diagnosis and prescribe treatment.
People with the "predominantly inattentive" subtype (previously called ADD) typically go undiagnosed for long periods, or indefinitely. I was diagnosed when I was 32.
23 for me - this year in fact! It's somewhat harder for PI adults I think because there's a long trail of failures that are perfect explained through the lens of ADHD-PI. Even harder with vivid long term memory.
All the school reports that say "James could do better if he stopped daydreaming|looking out the window and focused more". I was lucky I that I came out with absolutely decent GCSEs (mostly As and Bs) but unlucky in that I felt shame and now defeat that I could have done much, much better. College was a write-off, I attempted 3 times but gave in after 3 months each time because the stress caused my inastentiveness in lessons made horrendously boring stoked psychosis which landed me in hospital each time.
A lot of my life seems wasted having not known about ADHD-Pi (and of course my parents and educators), except for programming and computers which not only kept me in some degree sane (I could have been worse) but also led me into a job that seems matched to my traits and with a manager that is willing to overlook my big flaws because he thinks my skills with a computer far outweigh them.
What a journey. I say there's enough to write a book but I've just never got round to it...
EDIT: I've just walked head first into a pole just after pressing submit. Sums up my life entirely.
I had a very similar experience, right down to the early school reports and scraping by on having a good memory. It took me a decade and three attempts to graduate from university.
Interesting technique. But I cannot help to think that it is good mostly for people who are already good (or at least not that bad) at context switching anyways.
What I mean is that many people, inherently are more chaotic, and over-structuring their lives is counter productive. It could make productivity constant but overall worse.
Thinking about psychology of this, I believe this might be good to "right brained" types, but it would be such a burden for someone who solves problems mainly via extroverted intuition - random thoughts that are generated so quickly and without any structure - you would need to write down something every few seconds basically, forget about actually doing something.
I do something similar, and I'm very chaotic, not at all structured. When Im doing something I have my notebook open, if an idea pops into my head I write it down, maybe make a few notes about it, then go back to what I was doing before. Whatever I'm currently working on has a star next to it in the notebook. And once I finish I cross it out (usually). Its not organized like a list, basically just a brain dump. ( Examples of old pages: http://paste.click/VvnUdAhttp://paste.click/RZyWLGhttp://paste.click/CsVaoa ) Doing it in a text editor would be just one more thing to get distracted by, and it doesn't really work for the brain-dump/brain-map style, since spatial relations between what I write has significance. This way instead of going off on a tangent I can finish what I'm actually trying to get done, but still keep track of the unrelated ideas/thoughts.
Obviously it won't work for everyone, but it's boosted my productivity massively, and I'm the furthest thing from structured and awful at context switching (Well I'm great at switching, its the switching back that I'm bad at :) )
I used to write stuff down, but in my case on sheets of paper that got filed with the project. But I kept thinking "Dammit, I know I've met this problem before, what was the solution?". Doing the same note-taking thing, but using the PC instead of paper, makes it searchable. You're right about the mind-map diagrams though.
Yeah I have plenty of pages filled with the project. Not having them searchable is a pain, but every time I've tried to use vim for it, it ends up being a bigger distraction than the ideas themselves.
When do you get to research your unrelated ideas? Do you have a set time of the week for it? Or do you just go through your list one by one as and when you finish the current item?
I notice that in software industry there is common recommendation of doing some project (or just hack something) to to learn or get better at something. This advice I think is solid and is generally good for many people.
However, I feel that it is not valid or valid only in very limited way to some people. This all depends on character types I guess. E. g. myself, if I ever tried following it I would not get anywhere, because projects for the sake of projects is something my mind has big problems with. It's simply not in my nature.
I would argue that regarding this point I am part of silent minority in IT industry since I noticed quite a few developers who are similar in this regard.
So what is alternative if projects/portfolio/... might not be a thing for you. What works for me:
1. Concentrate on Theory. This addresses few things: I must understand theory to not get frustrated, I m more interested in theory than practice in general, Often theory is just enough and mind will just find solution when you need.
A. Concentrate more on studying theory.
B. Use micro-projects just for testing and understanding concepts, not something useful by itself.
C. Study "best practices". To compensate for project problem.
2. Look for a way to have goals (projects) forced on you. Addresses few things: it frees your mind from over-thinking (e.g. "whats the big purpose of this?"), it must be done - you cannot just quit when lose interest/reason-to-continue.
A. Hobby. Join online courses with assignments, university (if it allows).
B. Job. Try to look for positions with more "projects".
Well, whatever your opinion is of Spring (mine is negative) or however you look at this you need to acknowledge that Spring MVC is probably the best Java "Action" framework. Combine it with the fact that it's most popular framework too (arguably above JSF) and also the fact that people get things done with it on consistent basis.
My only complaints are something along the lines you mentioned - Spring overall and MVC specifically to me is framework without philosophy. It once had very clear philosophy, but now it become just mixture of features and multiple ways to do same thing. Once it was like "understand principals and let your mind do the magic", now its more like "there are no principles, just multiple snippet for doing thing you want - just Google it when you'll need it". Basically, it's no longer rewarding.
Second complaint is - Spring MVC, despite being so popular, is just not a 5 minute project setup technology, setting it takes time.
I don't follow this too much, so might be talking nonsense, however I don't understand where all this fuss is coming from.
From the start of this I interpreted situation this way - Java's goal was "run everywhere" (wherever it succeeded or not is for everyone to decide, but its irrelevant here). Java JDK follows this goal with main license requirement - you can implement your own SDK, but you should take all APIs, not part of it - all or nothing deal. Goal being that programs from main JDK should run on your new SDK.
This principle was violated by Google and I just don't see why anyone would support Google side from rational point of view (not talking about morality, innovation or whatever).
Sorry, but in my opinion, this kind of attitude in software development community is the main reason why we are in useless flame-wars all the time as an industry.
So common pattern: pick something that is totally and utterly irrelevant in regards to main message and dismiss the whole thing so arrogantly.
In my mind this is the root of many problems in our industry and world overall. Big discussion regarding ideas are just not possible, because so many considers The Message as just a combination of words/arguments in isolation, but it is not, it is so much more!
For me personally, main problem with Scala is somewhat hard to explain, but can be summarized with few very abstract phrases which are overlapping:
* Dirty (opposite of Clean) language.
* Relationship between theory and practice is so far away from being "1 to 1".
* "Not In My Head" anti-patterns (something that will constantly require checking your notes/internet if you haven't worked with it within e.g. a month) everywhere.
Everything seems to be made overcomplicated on purpose for no reason (apart from JVM compatibility I guess, which is no excuse for me as user). Starting from simple things, variable function declarations, so many ways to declare functions, so much theory on var/val/def/lazy/ and how they differ at some corner cases. Function vs. Method stuff in combination with currying/partial application makes things so overcomplicated with so many corner cases which I will never be able to remember. I mean I have many pages of my notes from time I studied Scala, consisting just of corner cases and explanations of why they are present.
If you consider how Golang is viewed by many - as huge step back in our knowledge of language design. I consider Scala as step back in what is known in clean code, overall lessons from designing nice products. It just makes me feel like, it betrays everything I care internally and if Scala becomes dominant platform, it would just show to me that we as an industry just don't have standards and can accept just anything, we will never have something nice, close to perfect.
So my stance on Scala:
* If you just want to learn functional programming - pick something else, F# for me looked a lot cleaner and much closer to "1 to 1" - you can just apply functional theory without fighting the language.
* If you looking for language to make you happy - don't pick Scala. Unless you're into "The Abyss" thing @ Crockford.
* If this is for the money or because it sucks less than X (e.g. Java) in some ways - Scala is good consideration.
Yes, you right, Scala comunity tend to be friendly and helpful when you want to learn something. But only until you criticize something about Scala :) That's at least my experience. After some critique I even had some private emails saying that "yes, I feel the same" but nobody dared to step in and say it publically. Maybe they just learned the lesson.
Following this same logic, a nerdy guy who has 100% rejection rate should accept it and do nothing. However from all the self-help/marketing literature we know this is a doomed philosophy.