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One of the real struggles us Hunters typically have is sorting out the urgent from the important. It’s challenged me my entire life, and one of my correspondents had some very, very insightful thoughts on the subject:

Steve in Philadelphia says:

I’ve always kept a to-do list, and am pretty good about keeping dates organized on my laptop calendar. (I’m so ADHD and inherently disorga­nized, these are survival strategies!) A few years ago, though, a friend shared with me a concept which has literally changed my life.

I was going through my list of things to do with him, mostly bragging and complaining about how swamped I was.

“A lot of that seems urgent," he said. “But how much of it is important?”

“All of it!” I replied indignantly.

“Not necessarily,” he said. “I’ll bet a lot of those things that you think are important are really not all that important if you examine them in the context of your life’s goals. They just seem important, because they’re urgent.”

I was lost and asked him to explain.

“When the phone rings, is that urgent or important?” he asked.

“Both!” I said.

He shook his head. “Nope. You only know that it’s urgent. The ringing creates the urgency. But what if it’s some guy trying to sell you insurance?”

“I guess it could be either.”

“Right. Some things are urgent, but not important. Some are im­portant, but not urgent. Some are neither, and some are both.”

“So I should only do the urgent and important things?" I said.

“Nope,” he said. “That’s the most common mistake people make. And what happens is that they end up not doing the important things, because they’re constantly dealing only with the urgent/important things. Remem­ber the song Cat’s Cradle’?”

I nodded, thinking about the song about the dad who was always putting his son off, and when the son grew up he started ignoring his dad.

“Your family is important to you, right?” he said.

I nodded again, starting to see his point.

“But I’ll bet you haven’t spent much time with your kids this week, because you’ve been dealing with so many urgent things. So, instead, write down that you’re going to spend time with the kids. That’s import­ant, and it needs to be done, too. And you’ll find the same thing is true in business, in your relationship with your wife, and in just about every other area of your life.”

So now whenever I’m looking over my To Do list, I ask myself, “Is this item important, or just urgent?”

And I’ve learned that my Hunter instinct pushes me toward handling the urgent things first, when actu­ally they’re often not even all that important; they’re just easy to check off the list, or the most recent thing that was in my face. So now I’m working hard to deal with the important things, too.

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Getting kids in a Hunter household to maintain any sort of an organizational system is a challenge, particularly when you realize that for Hunters if something isn’t always visible it often may not exist at all. Martha in Michigan found a solution that echo’s my filing system in my office, where everything is in a basket or on a shelf where I can see things.

From Martha in Michigan:

This is probably so simple that you won’t want to include it on your website, but it’s really helped me out and I’d like to share it.

I used to be totally disorganized in my laundry. I did the laundry for the entire family (I have two ADHD kids, one twelve and the other fifteen, and an ADHD husband, not to mention myself), and everything was always a mess. The kids and my husband both just threw their dirty clothes on the floor, and I had a pile in my closet (which I thought, at least, looked a bit more organized because I could close the door).

Then a friend showed me a system she’d developed for her home, and it’s incredible how it’s helped here at my house!

She went to K-Mart and bought a dozen laundry baskets, half red and half white. With an indelible felt pen, she wrote on each of the red ones the name of one of her family members, along with the word “colored clothes,” and on each of the white ones she wrote a family member’s name and the word “whites.” Then she gave each person in the family their two baskets.

When the person takes off their dirty clothes, they go directly into the baskets: the whites into the white basket and the coloreds into the colored basket.

And then she did something that I thought was both unthinkable and impossible: she told everybody that they were now responsible for doing their own laundry. She did a little seminar on a Saturday morning and showed her kids (her youngest is seven) how to use the washer and dryer, and how to fold and put away clothes. And they did it!

Well, I told her that would never work in my house because everybody in my house has ADD and the place always looks like a tornado hit it. “Just wait until they run out of clean underwear,” she said. “They’ll do it. Just try it.”

So I did.

And it works!

It’s really amazing to me how the kids have taken to this. One of the boys has even become a connoisseur of laundry detergents, and he’ll only use Tide, so every month or two I have to take him to the store to buy his detergent.

In addition to cleaning up the floors and making our bedrooms look considerably less messy (I suppose I could probably go the next step and use hampers instead of baskets if I really wanted a showcase house, but the baskets are so easy for them to carry to the laundry room when they’re full), this system has taught my children about being organized and about personal responsibility.

They aren’t as quick to abuse their clothes as they were before, and are more careful about spills and stains. And I think this is probably a very good life skill for them as they grow up.

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Over the past three decades, since my first book on ADHD made the July 18, 1994 cover story of TIME magazine and went on to change the paradigm used by psychologists and therapists nationwide, I’ve spoken to support groups on four continents in probably two dozen or more countries.

Some are modeled on traditional groups like AA, others are more like social circles for sharing experiences, and some are organized to help people learn strategies and techniques for dealing with their Hunter kids or spouses.

For about two decades, in the 80s and 90s, I also ran the ADHD (then called ADD) support group on CompuServe, which is where Hugh first found me and sent me the email below (printed with his permission, first in my book ADD Success Stories.

With today’s sophisticated search and AI machines, it’s much easier to find a group, both local and virtual. If it’s run well (and not like a cult; I’ve actually visited a few like that), having a supportive group who understand how your brain works can be life-changing.

Hugh in New York writes:

When I first learned about ADHD, it was a shock. Both good and bad, if you know what I mean. Good, to learn what had been going on all my life, and bad, to learn that I probably would never become the perfect husband or employee that my wife and boss wanted.

It also raised a lot of questions in my life about what I could or couldn’t do. Should I try to get some medications? Should I consider therapy? Would my ADHD get worse? Was I doomed?

Since I’m a computer programmer, I’d been on CompuServe al­most since it started, or at least it seems that way. So I went online and tried the GO word of ADHD, and, bingo, found myself in the ADHD Forum! What an amazing place: nearly 40,000 people with the same condition I have!

From the ADHD Forum, I learned about an ADHD support group here in New York. So I attended a few meetings and got to know some of the people there, and that was great for me, too.

My local group isn’t like AA, where we’re all trying to keep each other from being ADHD or something, but more like just a network of friends who under­stand what it’s like to be misunderstood all your life.

Knowing that there are other people out there with ADHD, many of them very successful, has been such a help to me. It gave me hope, and I’ve learned many valuable tips from the people I’ve met online and at my local support group.

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Sometimes, celebrating and working around our personal differences constitutes one of the best ways to make relationships work. Acceptance is really powerful stuff!

From Kenneth on the ADHD Forum on CompuServe:

“Early to bed and early to rise” was one of Ben Franklin’s favorite sayings. He must have been like me: I function best in the morning.

I’ve intuitively known this all my life, but for the past ten years I’ve been married to a woman who’s a classic night person.

She stays up until at least midnight every night, drags herself out of bed in the morning to drink three cups of coffee before going to work, and then sleeps literally until noon on Saturday and Sunday to catch up on her lost sleep.

Thinking that the nature of marriage was compromise, or some­thing like that, for years I’ve been following her pattern. The problem is, though, that I can’t store up my need for sleep the way she can. I’m burned out by Wednesday, and by Friday I’m dying.

It took me several years to figure out that there wasn’t something wrong with me in this regard. I always figured that if she could do it, I should be able to, too.

I took sleeping pills sometimes, because if I get over-tired I have trouble going to sleep (I don’t understand it, but it’s true). I took coffee in huge quantities in the morning, and then when my ADHD was diagnosed I switched to dexedrine. That made it even harder to sleep, but at least I was functional at the office during the week.

Then last year I attended a conference for entrepreneurs put on by IBM. One of the speakers, oddly enough, was a doctor who was a sleep expert. He said that some people can store up their sleep bank account, and others can’t. He said that people who need more sleep and don’t get it become distractible, impulsive, and grumpy. (That was me!)

It sounded to me, from listening to him, that my sleeping patterns were making my ADHD worse, and his information also helped me to stop feeling guilty for not being able to stay up like my wife does.

So I started going to bed at 10pm, and my wife would stay up and watch TV downstairs (she’s a late-night comedy junkie). The difference was amazing: I now wake up in the morning refreshed, looking forward to the day. I don’t crave coffee or even use much of the dexedrine any more. And my ADHD symptoms are less severe.

At first my wife and I fought about this: I wanted her to come to bed with me at ten, and she thought I was being unreasonable and couldn’t understand why I couldn’t work the same way she did.

Finally we decided that we must just have different body chemistries or something, and she now lets me go to sleep without getting upset. We have an agreement that either one of us can wake the other up to make love, so it hasn’t hurt our sex life much; in fact, in some ways it’s improved it and added variety to it.

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Disorganization has been the curse of my life, and I’m guessing that’s true for most Hunters. Sandy found a way around it…

From Sandy in suburban Atlanta:

They opened this new store near my house, called Everything’s Organized. I’ve always been major disorganized. The house is a disaster, I can’t find the kid’s school records, I constandy run out of milk because I forget to make lists, and on and on.

My husband is even worse than I am. He’s so ADHD that he’s on Ritalin, and even that doesn’t make him organized, it just slows him down enough to be able to have a conversa­tion. But that’s another story, this is about how my house was in a shambles.

So I visited this “organizing” store. It’s the size of a department store, and the variety of stuff is amazing. They have books on how to get organized. They have trays and baskets and tables, and systems for just about everything imaginable from organizing your books to your spices.

I know that some rich people hire organizational consultants to come into their houses and tell them how to set up systems. Stephanie Winston in her book on getting organized talks about how she does this for people as a consultant. But we could never afford anything like that, and I’d be embarrassed to death to ask any of my well-organized neighbors to come into my house and help me.

But this store was like having a consultant. It was incredible. And the people in the store knew about the stuff they were selling, and the books on how to get organized that they have there are pretty useful, too.

So I went on a shopping binge there, getting racks for my clothes closets and color-coded filing systems and even organizing my pantry. It’s been almost a year now, and the house is still pretty well-organized!

My mother in Los Angeles says that there’s a store like this near her, too. Apparendy, they’re popping up all over the country. So my ADHD success story is one that many people will appreciate: go shopping!

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This idea of intentionally programming your unconscious mind is an old one, and the business-card-in-your-wallet-and-on-your-bathroom-mirror is straight out of both Claude Bristol (The Magic of Believing) and Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich). I did the same thing in my twenties with “successful author” and it seems to have worked for me, although I never got as far as, say, Stephen King.

Nonetheless, I agree with Ron that it probably works really well; give it a try or, at the very least, share the suggestion with your ADHD children…

Ron in Seattle uses cards to reprogram himself:

When I was a kid, a teacher in high school asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I was struggling with school (now I know it was my ADHD), but anyhow, I said that when I grew up I wanted to be an attorney. It kind of just popped out.

I guess I’d thought about it a lot, but I’d never really said it out loud. And, really, I didn’t think there was much of a chance. At that time, I wasn’t even sure I’d be able to graduate from high school.

We were sitting there after class, because I had flunked a test and had to take it over, and my teacher started up the conversation with me.

When I said attorney, he pulled a small pile of business cards out of his shirt pocket. They were from a Mexican restaurant in town that always had a stack of them on the check-out counter next to the matches, toothpicks, and gum.

On the back of six or seven cards, he carefully printed the words SUCCESSFUL ATTORNEY, and handed them to me. “Do you have a wallet?” he asked.

I did, as I’d just gotten my driver’s license, and told him so.

“Put one of these in your wallet, on top of your driver’s license under that plastic window, so every time you open your wallet you’ll see it. Put another on the mirror in your bathroom so you’ll see it whenever you get up and before you go to bed when you brush your teeth and comb your hair. Put one on the dashboard of your car when you get one, where only you can see it. Put one on the wall next to your bed. Stick one inside the door of your locker here in the school.”

“Why?” I asked.

“If you don’t have a vision of your destination, you’ll never get there,” he said—and I remember those words exactly to this day. Then he added, “Those cards will help you keep the vision alive and vivid.”

I did what he suggested, mostly because I didn’t want to piss him off, as his class was the one where I had the greatest chance of failing that year.

Today, I’m a successful attorney. I’m ADHD as hell, and have two great paralegals who are good Farmers working for me to keep things on an even keel. It was tough work going through law school and I had to take the bar three times before I passed it.

But I’m a successful attorney, I win more cases than I lose, and I’m making damn good money.

I can’t tell you absolutely that those cards had anything to do with it, but, honestly, I think that they did. For years, there wasn’t a day that went by when the words “successful attorney” weren’t run through my mind, and that had to have an influence on me.

And even today I have one of those cards in my wallet.

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Impulsivity can be a real struggle for people with ADHD. Frank in Kansas City shared with me the techniques he’s learned to deal with it…

Frank in Kansas City has found a way to deal with his impulsive cravings:

There are some things in life that I’m a junkie about. Sex, sugar, new toys (especially stereo equipment and new computer enhance­ments), and sometimes just some wild-ass thing that I see on TV or in some catalog.

Used to be that when I’d get it into my mind that I wanted something, nothing could stop me from getting it. Now, instead, I ask myself if it’s a useful craving. If it’s not useful but it’s not destruc­tive, I’ll usually indulge myself just to get it over with. Things like grabbing a quick candy bar or masturbating fall into this category.

If it’s something that could get me into trouble financially, or emotionally, like jumping into a new relationship with a woman, for example, then I’ll run through my list of other things that I like to do, and try to go for one of them instead. Maybe go to a movie, or get some friends together for a party.

What I’ve found is that my cravings are deep, somehow under­neath everything. I don’t know exactly how to describe this other than to say I think they’re coming out of some essential part of me: they don’t really hook into the specific desire that they seem to be attached to at the moment.

If I can find something more useful to crave (even something at work, like a new project), the first craving will diminish or even disappear.

I don’t know if this will work for everybody, but it does for me.

I still make a lot of mistakes along these lines, but at least now I’m aware when I’m making them, and they’re far less frequent.

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Remember the old Boy Scout motto, “Do a good deed every day”? Turns out it’s not only good and moral advice for living your life well, it’s also therapeutic!

This is from a former Dale Carnegie Course instructor in the midwest:

Most people know the Boy Scout’s saying about doing a good deed every day.

What most people don’t know, however, is that many years ago that saying was slightly different, and, I believe, the older way was the more powerful way.

The old adage said to do a good deed every day in a way that the recipient of it didn’t know you were the deed-doer.

This was based on that part from the Sermon on the Mount about not letting your left hand know what your right hand is doing when you do good. We do it for God rather than for the thanks that we might get for doing something good.

I’ve found that this is a way of bringing power into my life. I don’t know what to call this power other than, perhaps, spiritual power. (I imagine the Indians had a word for it.)

Whatever it is, I know that when I do good for other people and they don’t know that who brought it about, I get a feeling of empowerment that’s almost euphoric. Not just the rest of my day goes well-the rest of my week or month goes well.

Think back: when was the last time you went out of your way for somebody in a way that they’d never be able to thank you for or even know that it was you who helped? This is a very rare experience, because you have to work at finding the opportunities.

Sometimes they’re right in front of you: the person who left his lights on in the parking lot, for example, with the doors unlocked. Other times it takes some creativity. I was once visiting a family that was having a hard time, as the husband had been recently laid off from work.

When they were out of the room, I slipped a $ 100 bill into their family Bible, where they’d probably find it in the next few weeks but have no idea how it got there. And I called a few people who I thought might be good job prospects for the husband out of work. I convinced one of them to call him in for an interview, on the condition that my name not be used.

So many of us with ADHD find that life can be a struggle. We forget things, we misplace things, and we generally have a harder time in this world than our Farmer counterparts. This can be very disempowering and demoralizing

But I’ve found that helping others gives me the inner strength to push through just about any sort of adversity.

And I agree with the founders of the Boy Scouts that if everybody would do one anonymous good deed every day, the world would be a very different, and much more pleasant, place to live.

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The idea of a need for regular “down time” is almost a cliché, it’s been around for so long. Nonetheless, most people don’t take it seriously, particularly us Hunters. I’ve always tried to either take Saturday or Sunday off from work, although have never accomplished the discipline that Mark brings to it. We can all learn from him.

Mark on CompuServe wrote:

I have to have my Saturdays. During the week I’m a good boy at work, and with my friends and family, but on Saturdays I allow myself to totally veg out.

I don’t clean the apartment on Saturdays. I don’t answer the phone very often. Sometimes I’ll even have a few beers in the middle of the afternoon (maybe three or four times a year, usually when there’s a good game on TV). Sometimes I’ll go out of town, or take a drive in the country with the top down, or just read a good book.

Whatever it is, I’m beholden to nobody. It’s my day. I make abso­lutely no commitments for Saturdays.

I got this from my parents, who kept trying to be Orthodox but rarely kept it together for more than a few months at a time to really keep a kosher kitchen and keep the Sabbath. But the idea of that one day off, even though I don’t do it in a religious way like they did, is something I think is really important to ADHD people.

We get so wound up during the week, that if we don’t take a day off we just go nuts. I think Moses himself must have been ADHD (look at all the things he did impulsively), and he knew (or maybe they’re right and G-d knew), that people, particularly us Hunters, need a day off each week.

So my best success strategy has been to take that day off and do whatever I damn well please with it.

Procrastination is an eternal struggle for Hunters; there’s always something more interesting or fun to do than the drudge work that keeps us fed and paid. But there are a few tricks you can use to overcome a tendency toward delaying things, and one of the best is to prioritize both work and fun, but in a particular order.

A few years ago I sat next to a business guy on a plane and we got into a conversation about ADHD; he later emailed me his summary of our conversation (per my request). Here it is:

From Bill, A guy I sat next to on a flight from Phoenix to Cincinnati:

I find that my most destructive procrastination has to do with those things that are the most important, but not the easiest to knock off quickly.

When I walk into my office, there’s the stack of mail and phone calls to return. That stack is calling me, like the siren’s song, because I can flick through them fast. They all represent a higher level of stimula­tion and interest than the boring stuff, the report that I have to write, or the marketing analysis that I have to have done sometime in the next two weeks.

But I’ve found that if I take the important things first, and, among them, the most unpleasant important things very first, I get much, much more done.

The mail then sits at the corner of my desk as a reward to me for doing the job of writing the report or spending an hour on the thing I knew I really didn’t want to do.

I also find that once I’ve finished the hardest job of the day, or at least taken a bite out of it as my starting point for the morning, that the rest of the day goes well. I don’t have that thing hanging over my head, and I’m not feeling guilty about it not being done.

The little things are always easy, like opening the mail and returning phone calls. They’re even fun, usually. But if I do them first, then the rest of the day is a let-down and I find that I’m descending from the fun stuff into the drudge work.

So, by simply flipping the order in which I do things, and doing the unpleasant stuff first, this little system works well for me and makes my days better.

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Rob Kall is a psychotherapist in Pennsylvania who put on an annual EEG Neurofeedback conference. At one of his conferences in Key West, I had breakfast with Rob and he shared what he considers to be one of his most powerful techniques for helping ADHD people become successful.

Rob told me that we all have a lifetime of experiences and memories which can either strengthen or weaken us. We’ve had times when we failed, when we did things about which we feel guilty, and which we wish we could do over or avoid. We’ve been hurt, we’ve hurt others, and we all carry a little child’s voice inside us which repeats the words of parents and others about how weak, small, powerless, and incompetent we are.

“We all also have had positive experiences throughout our lives, successes ranging from sparkling moments to major life events,” Kall said. These are the times when we’ve accomplished our goals, done things we’re proud of, reached beyond what we thought were our limits, and experienced our own strength and resiliencies.

Rob told me that in his early therapy practice, he often did as he’d been trained in school: look for people’s areas of weakness, their wound- ings, their repressed traumas. But the problem, he found, was that when he explored these experiences with people they became weakened, disempowered, and leaned even more on him to help them process and integrate the information contained in those memories.

So, instead, he started looking for what he calls people’s “Positive experience resources.”

He’d ask people to remember the times in their lives when they were unusually strong, when they were outstandingly capable, when they rose above adversity, and when they were genuinely happy. These positive experience resources can be a wellspring of strength for people, he told me, and they’re often totally overlooked in many traditional pathology-based therapeutic models.

“Even when you’re dealing with people’s weaknesses and pains,” he said, “if you’ve helped them re-connect with their internal strengths then they can bring those strengths to the job of resolving the pain and pushing through the weakness. People can improve many of the skills related to positive experience behaviors, ranging from experiencing good feelings and the sensations of the moment more deeply, to learning to stay with a positive experience flow state for a longer more concen­trated period of time.”

Many of the ADHD adults I’ve interviewed in writing for my books and this Hunter in a Farmer’s World website have told me stories of a particular teacher, person, mentor, coach, peer, or parent who was significant in their lives.

When I ask for details, more often than not, what I hear is that that significant person helped the ADHD adult — as a child-to discover or nurture an inner strength or positive experience resource.

Whether it was praising them for how well they could paint, or play the flute, or play baseball, that experience of suc­cess — and the grounding of the experience in their lives by having it validated by another person — became the basis for other future successes.

Kall recommends that instead of bemoaning our ADD fate and complaining about our weaknesses, we should instead look back into our lives and try to find those patterns of positive experience of which our inner strengths are composed.

Remember the times when we could do something well, and revisit those memories often. Dwell on accom­plishments, rather than failures; on strengths rather than weaknesses; on the times we took control of our lives rather than the times we were victims.

“Learn your patterns of positive experience and duplicate the suc­cesses,” he said. “Be brave. It takes courage to be happy. There are countless things you can do which you haven’t done yet. Gently, realisti­cally, challenge your resources and start moving forward.”

This isn’t just happy-talk, Kall insists, pointing to dozens of similar examples from Charles Darwin’s less famous book Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals, to Bill Moyers’ PBS series Healing and the Mind. It is, instead, a powerful technique to build our internal and emotional strength.

We find in these success memories a power which will infuse the rest of our daily life.

Our willingness to undertake new projects and efforts, our belief in our ability to accomplish things, and even the speed with which we heal emotionally (and physically, according to Moyers and others) from traumatic events in contemporary life, are determined by the strength of our emotional underpinnings.

And those underpin­nings are found in our memories of our times of greatest strength and competence.

Tim shared this story with about a decade ago and, while little booklet-like pocket calendars have largely been replaced by electronic ones on our smartphones and laptops, the advice still sticks.

Tim in Detroit learned the importance of calendars:

One of the things that I never could seem to get a handle on was managing my time. I’d forget appointments, miss project deadlines at work, always turn things in at the last minute in school (even when I finished them). I’d constantly forget even the most simple things like my parents’ birthdays.

Then, when I was about twenty and had gotten a job as the manager of a health food chain store, the regional manager gave me some advice (actually, it was an order) that changed my life.

One day about two weeks after I’d started the job, he was walking me through the store, telling me things he wanted done before he returned in a few weeks. “Move those vitamins up to eye-level and replace the sign,” he’d say, and, “don’t forget to check the raisins every morning to see if they have bugs.” Lots of little details like that, as well as big things like the procedure to transmit the daily sales to the corporate office headquarters.

About halfway through his spiel, he stopped, tilted his head to one side, and said, “You’re not writing this stuff down.”

I told him-as I had told people all my life-that I had a good memory and would remember the things. While that was partially true, what was really true was that I had always believed that everybody else was just born with a great memory, and I somehow missed out on it. I was good at faking it, though, and so although I knew that I forgot things easily, I didn’t want him to know it.

So I was standing there, working as hard as I could to remember the things he was telling me, but knew deep down inside that I’d forget some of them. In the past when that had happened, people would just remind me again, and eventually I’d get everything done. I’d gotten used to people chastising me, and most often they forgave my lapses.

But he wasn’t going to let me get away with it, and he also knew something about the rest of humanity that I didn’t: everybody has a lousy memory, to one extent or another.

He said, “That’s not possible. Everybody forgets things, particularly long lists of things like this, if they don’t write them down. Where’s your calendar?”

“Calendar?” I croaked, thinking of the wall-hanging contraptions decorated with scantily-clad women that my dad used to have on the walls at the garage where he worked.

He marched to the back of the store, rummaged through his briefcase, and pulled out a small pocket calendar with the name of an out-of-state bank printed on the front of it. With a flourish, he slapped it into my hand.

It was about six inches high, two inches wide, and a third of an inch thick: anyplace you opened it, you saw a full week displayed, half on one page and the other half on the facing page. The last dozen pages were for names and addresses.

“That’s a pocket calendar,” he said. “It’s yours now. I want you to keep it with you at all times, and that’s now an official part of your job description. If you don’t do it, I’ll fire you. And I want you to write down everything in your life, from your Christmas card list in the back to the instructions I’m giving you. Write the instructions on the days that I’m telling you to do these things. And every morning and every evening the first and last thing you will do is check that calendar. Along with checking it throughout the day.

“Additionally,” he added, now warming to his job of teacher/Fiihrer, “whenever you get an idea during the day about something you’d like to do to improve this store, I want you to write it down in there. Either put it on a dated page, or choose one of those first few weeks of January that have already passed and designate those pages as your idea file’ pages.”

“Sounds like a lot of unnecessary effort,” I said.

He shook his head, half-smiling and half-angry. “You may think so, but this will make you the kind of store manager I need on my team. In fact, I intend to check your calendar each time I visit your store, and if it’s not up-to-date, I’ll send you home for a few days without pay to get it filled out.”

Having no choice now, I started writing down his instructions as he resumed our walk through the store. That night, I went home and filled in the address pages with the names and addresses of a few dozen friends and relatives. I wrote in birthdays and anniversaries, and for the rest of the year, on each Friday’s page, wrote “send weekly report to head office” and the other things that my manager had told me I must do regularly.

At the time, it seemed like a stupid waste of time. Within a few weeks, though, I realized that I’d never truly known what it meant to be organized with regard to my time and my schedules. I got more done than I ever thought possible, and I rarely missed a deadline or detail.

My manager pulled two sneak visits over the next month, each time only to check my calendar! He was pleased to see that I was keeping it up, and then let me thumb through his. I was amazed at how every day on every page was filled with things. He even kept track of the money he spent while traveling, saying it would help him survive an IRS audit.

I’ve been carrying a pocket calendar like that ever since: it’s been over fifteen years now. Every year I get a free one from someplace, last year it was American Express. The year before, my bank sent them out. The year before that, a calendar company sent me one soliciting my business.

Each Christmas, part of my Christmas Day ritual is to copy my address list and birthdays (I write the birthdays in red, so they jump out) to the next year’s calendar, and put the old one in the back of my underwear drawer. That drawer now has a complete record of my past fifteen years, should I ever need it, and I can honestly say that I owe much of my job success to that little calendar that’s always in my pants or jacket pocket.

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Is it hyperfocus of a craving for the dopamine rush that risky behavior, drugs, and general accomplishment provides? I’m not sure, but this story from a fellow who tracked me down online is spot on:

Tom in New Hampshire takes it a step further:

I think the worst part of ADHD is hyperfocus. When I’m hyperfocus ing on something, and it’s something I want, I just go nuts. I’ve gotta have it. I went through it with tropical fish, with woodworking tools, with computer stuff, and I go through it all the time with food, booze, and sex.

Then a few years ago, I went to an AA (Alcoholics Anonymous) meeting with a friend. I was drinking a lot, and he was a recovering alcoholic and he thought he’d pegged me as an alcoholic, so I went along with him to check it out.

I got two things out of that meeting The first was that I probably am not an alcoholic: I’ve always been able to take or leave booze, and mostly just drink when I’m bored. I’ve never been so drunk I’ve blacked out or anything like that.

But the second thing I got was the most useful. AA has this saying about living life one day at a time, and they use that as one of their ways to deal with the craving that many alcoholics have for booze. The idea of saying that you’ll never, ever, ever again do something (like drinking) is pretty overwhelming But just about anybody can say that they won’t drink for just one day.

Although drinking wasn’t my problem, I knew that lots of other things were.

So now, when I’m hit with a craving or impulse, unless it’s some­thing really important (this can become an excuse for procrastination if you’re not careful), I say to myself, “I’ll wait just one day and see if I feel the same way.”

Sometimes I have to wait “just one more day” for a week or so before the craving settles down to the point where I can look at it dispassionately and really make a rational decision about it. This is particularly useful when it comes to buying cars, computers, and houses, all things I’ve bought in the past on an impulse!.

So my ADHD success strategy is to take life one day at a time, and wait to see if my feelings stay high on something long enough to make me pretty sure that I really should get it.

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People react to an ADHD diagnosis in a wide variety of ways. Kathy tells the story of learning to use humor to blunt people’s judgement of her:

Kathy on the Internet writes:

I didn’t learn that I had ADHD until I was twenty-four, about two years ago. Prior to that time, I’d always figured that my problem was that I was blonde. You know all those jokes they tell about blondes? That’s me.

I’m forgetful, distractible, impulsive (I used to be a pushover on first dates, unfortunately), impatient, and always interrupting people. After being told for so many years that I was just a typical blonde, I’d come to believe it, that there was something genetic or whatever about blondes. I’d always be relegated to the dumb blonde jobs, and viewed as a dumb blonde by men.

When I learned about ADHD, I realized that my problem wasn’t about being blonde, it was about having ADHD. I’m a Hunter, as you describe in your books, and, looking back, I see that I come from a long line of them. My mother and father, my mom’s parents, my brother, at least two of my cousins — you get the picture.

So at first, when I learned about my ADHD, I really struggled with trying to become a different and more normal person. I took Ritalin for a little over a year, and it helped me in college but I didn’t like how it would make me feel a bit jittery and then I’d crash, craving sweets by the end of the day like there was no tomorrow. And when I didn’t take the Ritalin, I was more distractible.

I think, though, that two things have really helped me the most. The first is understanding what ADHD is and how it affects me. I now know what my challenges are, and I’m working on them one at a time. I have my impulsivity under control, now, for example, to a very large extent. And I’ve learned other coping strategies. That year on Ritalin taught me a lot about what I was capable of.

But the second thing, and, I think probably the most important, is something I learned from my days as a dumb blonde. (I have an IQ of 147, by the way.)

Back in high school, whenever I’d space out or lose something like my car keys or forget my homework, my friends or teachers would make jokes about my being a typical blonde. I learned very early on, probably around the 7th grade, that if I got upset about those jokes, they’d just make more of them.

On the other hand, if I made jokes about myself, and went along with their jokes, they were more willing to forgive me my foibles. Making jokes about myself allowed me to just be me, knowing that I wasn’t quite like everybody else, but not sobbing about it or playing the part of the victim.

I’ve applied this now to ADHD. My friends who know about my ADHD now hear me make jokes about my ADHD, instead of my being blonde. With others who don’t know what ADHD is, when I forget something or am late or whatever (and, really, it’s happening less and less), I revert back to my blonde jokes.

A good sense of humor is a powerful tool. It helps me keep my self-esteem intact, and deflects upset or anger on the part of others. I highly recommend it as an ADHD success technique.

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One of the most common stories I hear from Hunters in this Farmer’s world is how they’ll beat themselves up for their ADHD, often hearing the voice of a parent or teacher as they’re doing it. Bill figured out how to put an end to that self-destructive cycle…

From Bill in Kansas City:

I’m a binger. All my life I’ve binged on things. In school, I binged my homework. I used to go through a different set of friends every six months or so. I went through relationships like that, too: very intense for a few months, then I’d lose interest. I understand that this is the hyperfocus part of my ADHD.

One of the unpleasant parts of my binging is that I’d also binge on self-criticism. While I was growing up, my mother was always telling me how I wasn’t living up to my potential.

My father was more blunt: he just called me stupid. But we all knew that I had a very high IQ, even if I did start flunking out of school around the 8th grade, and never graduated from high school. (I got a GED, and, at 24, binged two years of college; now I’m an engineer with a radio station.)

There was always this voice in the back of my head, usually my father’s voice, criticizing me every time I did anything. Every time I broke up with a girl, every time I changed jobs, every time I didn’t follow through on something or did something wrong I’d even find myself criticizing myself for mistakes I made in traffic.

This self-criticism would sometimes run in very large binges, too, sometimes for weeks or months. During those times, I’d get very de­pressed, be really hard on myself, and that made it even harder to do a good job or have good relationships. This then gave me even more junk to criticize myself about.

I tried going to a therapist about my self-criticism, but all he wanted to talk about was my parents and my childhood, and I thought, this is dumb, this is what I’m trying to escape. Why wallow in the mud when you want to clean yourself off?

I tried it for a while, let him get me all worked up and cried a few times. I spent one afternoon hitting his desk with a newspaper and shouting at my father, but it didn’t do a thing for my self-criticism. If anything, actually, it seemed to make it worse.

(I’m not talking about hearing actual voices in my head, by the way. I’m not like the Son of Sam. But I’d be saying things to myself, and adopting my father’s tone of voice, even, when I said them to myself in my own head. I think many people do this.)

But at least this therapist got me interested in the idea of changing myself, and maybe learning ways to do it. So I started attending seminars and classes at the local New Age center. Most of them were way too weird for me, and I found myself sitting in the room silently criticizing the person speaking, and then criticizing myself for being there wasting my time and money listening

But one guy said something that changed my life, so I suppose it was all ultimately worthwhile. He said: “We can’t always control what happens to us in life. But the one thing that we can control is our reaction to the things that happen to us.”

I thought about that for a week, at first making fun of it in my mind, then finding ways to criticize it, and then finally realizing that it was true. So I decided to change the way I reacted to things.

I know this sounds stupid, that you can just decide to change things. And my therapist would have told me it was impossible, although I’d dumped him by then anyway. But I did it anyway. I did it by giving myself reminders (I put PostIt notes on my bathroom mirror), and by putting some effort into it.

Whenever I noticed that I was being critical, I’d force myself to find something good to say to myself, too. I applied this to everything: my criticisms of other people as well as those of myself. That way I was doing it all the time.

So I’d say to myself, “That was pretty stupid, the way you could have made it through that yellow light but instead you hesitated and didn’t.” Then I’d notice that, and say to myself, “But many people would say that that’s good driving, to be so cautious, and, besides, you’ll get to your destination soon enough anyway. It’s no big deal, and probably was the right thing to do.” Or something like that.

The area where this was even easier was with my ADHD behaviors. I used to kick myself around the block for them, for interrupting people, or forgetting things, or whatever. Now I just tell myself that it’s ok, that that’s just because my brain’s wired differently, and it doesn’t mean that I’m a bad person, or defective. I’m just different from other people, and I have a lot of strengths, too.

I really binged this for the first few days, which then made it a little easier to stick to it as a habit. I found that when I do it regularly, I don’t criticize myself so much. And even when I do it now, another voice inside me says that I’m ok.

The biggest result of this is that I’m happier. I don’t mean that I’m happy-talking myself into being happy, like some of those idiots at the New Age center (there I go again). Well, they may have been idiots, but they had some good ideas once in a while, too, and one of those ideas has really improved my life.

I am actually happier. Because I don’t criticize other people and situations so much, I’ve discovered that most people aren’t really so bad or so dumb. And life isn’t so bad, either. Because I’m criticizing myself a lot less, I feel ok about myself more, too.

I’m probably not doing a good job of articulating this for you, but at least I’m trying and I hope you understand what I’m saying I think this is a useful technique for anybody with ADHD, and maybe even for people without ADHD.

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If we want our ADHD children to be successful in later life, a great starting point is to help them experience actual success as kids. This story was shared with me a few decades ago when I ran the ADD Forum on CompuServe, but it’s as important and meaningful today as it was then.

This story is from Sandra, the mother of a teenager in Southern California:

I hate the current teenage skateboard culture. They wear baggy pants, engage in a dangerous sport, have weird haircuts, and listen to music that seems, to me, obscene.

On the other hand, they’re kids. When I was a teenager, I remember that I and most of my friends rebelled. So I’m assuming that this skateboarding stuff is really just a form of teenage rebellion. It’s part of a child becoming an adult: carving out for themselves a separate identity in the world. This is an early experiment at that, but I seriously doubt my son will be a skater permanently.

Another mother I know has reacted to her kid wearing baggy pants and all by trying to whip him into line. She punishes him, berates him, makes fun of him and his friends, and does everything she can to get him to stop. His response has been to talk back to his parents in a vulgar and rude fashion and to ignore his schoolwork, which further infuriates his parents, and, ultimately, to run away from home.

I figured, though, that this teenage rebellion could be an opportu­nity. My son has struggled with ADD all his life, although it was only diagnosed last year. Therefore, he has a lifetime of failure experiences and frustrations. But he’s good at skating, and he thinks he looks good in those idiotic clothes.

So I encourage him. I listen to his stories of doing double 180 flips, and tell him how coordinated that means he is. It also shows that he has good concentration and learning skills: skateboarding is not easy.

I allow him to keep his self-respect intact by not criticizing his clothes or appearance, and will even occasionally compliment his appearance when he’s dressed in a bit less radical fashion.

The result of this is that he and I have become closer, and he’s improving in other areas of his life. He tells me intimate stories about his other friends: I know which kids in the neighborhood are using drugs, who’s having sex, who’s flunking out of school, and who’s being beaten by his father.

He tells me about what he’s doing, within limits (of course, I realize there are some things that no teenager will ever tell a parent). When I think he’s making bad choices I tell him in a non-critical way, framing it in the context of how it will effect his future.

This has, I believe, given him a basis for feeling like he can do things competently. After two years of skating (and my gritting my teeth and smiling), he now has a part-time job.

His grades in school have improved, and he’s thinking about college and careers. And he’s more often than not dressing normally. He only skates on the weekends now, and has even commented to me a few times about how some of the skater kids he once thought were so cool and such great role models are really losers.

And the other kids in the neighborhood? What I see is that those kids who are successful at skating, but whose parents are denying or denigrating or dismissing that success, are working even harder at it. Their hair and clothes get weirder and weirder, and they’re taking greater and greater chances in their skateboarding.

In my opinion, what’s hap­pened is that they’re experiencing success, and they know it intuitively, even though their parents and most of the rest of society doesn’t acknowledge it. And that feeling of success is such a good and empow­ering feeling that they want more and more of it.

But they’re locked into skating as the only source of their success, because their parents haven’t taken the opportunity to acknowledge it and then use that as a reference point or metaphor to show them that they can be successful in other areas.

I was watching one of those daytime talk shows the other day where they have weird guests, and they had on some guys who were career criminals. They’d killed people, robbed them, mugged them, and all sorts of things. But they seemed proud of themselves: they were successful.

I’m not a psychologist, but I think that success is a very important thing to people. If the only success somebody can experience is as a break-in artist, they’ll latch onto that for the rest of their lives.

So, for my children, anyway, I’m trying to use their unconventional successes as a way to talk about all kinds of success, it’s a tool to give them the self-confidence to try to become successful at things like school where they’ve had trouble before. And so far it’s working.

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I owe much of the success I’ve had in my life to multiple mentors who were generous enough to share their knowledge with me.

My father and a friend of his started an ultimately unsuccessful vitamin business out of our basement when I was around 10 years old. Watching and learning from them — from how to advertise to fulfilling orders to doing the bookkeeping — launched me into a lifelong career as a serial entrepreneur with five successful companies behind me.

When Louise and I started each of our businesses, we sought out people who knew the industry and asked their advice. When we started a program for abused kids we tracked down people who ran similar programs and asked their advice over lunch or dinner. Ditto for when we started a travel agency, two advertising agencies, a training seminar company, an herbal tea company, and a publishing company.

Harry learned much the same lesson, and was eager to tell me about it when I posted a note asking for “success stories” by people with ADHD.

Harry owns an advertising agency in Michigan:

When I first got into the advertising business, I didn’t know much about it. Of course I’d gotten a degree in advertising, and I could recite textbook theory, but I really didn’t know what worked in the real world. I had no idea whatsoever about how real advertising agencies work.

My first job was as an account executive, which is a fancy word for salesman. I sold advertising, prospected for accounts, all that sort of thing. But I really wanted to be on the creative end. I’m a pretty good writer, and I figured that writing copy was my forte.

There was another guy in Detroit who freelanced for a lot of agencies; he was famous locally for the advertising copy he wrote. I wanted to be just like him: the guy was brilliant, and he also made a lot of money.

So I invited him to lunch one day and asked him a million ques­tions about his life, his business, and how he wrote copy. I guess he was flattered by my interest, because he shared with me all sorts of tricks and techniques. We started getting together for lunch every few weeks, and he sort of took me under his wing.

I started to use some of his ideas and helped my clients write ad copy. In many cases, they liked my copy better than that our copywriters had produced.

The end of this tale is that I quit the agency and went out on my own. I go out of my way not to compete with the guy who taught me the business, and, even at that, I’m doing very well.

We’ve talked about collaborating a few times, but both know that we work best alone. We’re still both independent freelancers, although someday we may open an agency and hire some AEs to do the grunt work of bringing in the clients.

In the meantime, though, the reputation of our work has been solid enough to build us both up to the point where we don’t have to worry about where the rent check is going to come from.

And, of course, I’m a Hunter as you describe in your first book. It’s what drew me to the advertising business, what I believe is responsible for much of my creativity and certainly what forced me to go out on my own. And so is the freelancer I mentioned: he’s probably even more ADD than I am.

The lesson here, though, is to find a good role model. Find a person who shares your personality characteristics and who’s successful in the world. Then screw up your courage, swallow your pride and buy him or her lunch and ask that person to give you the secrets of their success. Who knows, you just may end up rich and famous, too!

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Hunters are famous for interrupting people; most will tell you it’s because they know if they don’t blurt out their thought it’ll vanish into the mist by the time the person they’re speaking with has paused.

But there are strategies to deal with this, as Steve in Atlanta found out.

From Steve in Atlanta:

I learned something from a sales training seminar that has really helped me out. I’m ADHD and it shows up by my always blurting out my comments and opinions and interrupting people.

So I went to this sales seminar, and they said that the best way to sell is to ask questions: that way you learn what your client wants or needs. You then can use his own words to tell him how your product will fulfill his needs or whatever.

I started doing this with sales prospects, and learned something else about asking questions. If you listen carefully to people’s answers, they’ll tell you what is important to them. Not just with their words, but with their tone of voice and their body gestures.

So I started asking people questions about the things that seemed important to them. Pretty soon people were telling me all sorts of things that they probably wouldn’t have bothered to let me know about other­wise. I was learning enough about their businesses so that I could sell to them really well.

But there was another benefit to this. I also started doing it with my personal life.

I started with my wife. It was really hard at first, but now it’s becoming second nature. When we’re talking and I see that she’s animated about something, I’ll ask her for more details about that. She then goes off on a tangent, and 1 learn something new; she knows that I’m really listening to her.

It was incredible for her, too. The first time I tried this, we had about an hour-long conversation. Normally, with my short attention span, I would have been out of there in ten minutes, but the challenge of looking for those little signs of what was important to her kept me there.

I kept asking her questions especially about those things that made voice got loud or higher, or when she started gesturing Suddenly, after about an hour of this, she stopped and gave me a funny look.

“What are you on?” she asked.

“Huh?” I said.

“Have you been smoking pot or something? Did you finally go see the doctor and get that Ritalin you’ve been talking about for months?”

“Nope,” I said. “I’m just enjoying listening to you.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Of course not! Why would you think I’m kidding?”

That led us off on another tangent. When we were finally done she told me that after being married to me for five years that was the first time since courting her that she really felt I cared about what she had to say.

Of course I nearly always care about what she has to say, but because I’m usually so busy interjecting my own opinions, or wanting to move the subject along, or wanting to get up and do something else, she never felt as though I cared about her.

I use this technique all the time now. 1 told a friend of mine about it, who’s ADHD himself, and he told his CHADD group about it. A week later, he told me that there was a shrink at the meeting who said that that’s called “active listening,” and it’s one of the skills that they teach psychologists in school.

I wish somebody had taught me that in school!

A police officer in Phoenix adds:

One of the basic techniques of interrogating a witness is to watch for their emotional cues. When they start to squirm, or their eyes move around the room, or whatever, then you know that you’ve hit a button with them.

This is a good skill to have in general life, too. While an interroga­tion with a suspected perpetrator can get brutal, you can just as easily look for those emotional cues in normal conversation and use this information in a positive way.

If you just observe people as they talk, they’ll tell you what they really want to tell you, what they’re really interested in.

Most people just don’t bother to watch for the cues. But even for a distractible guy like me it wasn’t that hard to learn.

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Decades ago, Robert Putnam wrote a brilliant book, Bowling Alone:The Collapse and Revival of American Community, positing that television and screens were causing us to lose the human interaction that’s so critical for functional societies and good mental health.

Back in the 1980s, when Louise and I lived in Atlanta, I joined a group for entrepreneurs/small business owners. We’d get together at a different restaurant every month (private meeting rooms only) and go around the circle, each of us sharing something about their lives, their families, and the joys and struggles they were experiencing.

We had demonstrations of everything from martial arts to a fellow who serenaded us with a flute. We became friends and metaphorically held each other’s hands. We helped each other through grief and success, business and personal struggles and victories.

The Terminus Group still exists all these years later and, although I haven’t seen any of the guys in decades, many of us still keep in touch.

It’s so easy to become socially disconnected in this internet-based world. Here are some stories of people who’ve broken free and rejoined their families and friends.

An entrepreneur in New York writes:

I have four daughters. The oldest is now twenty-four, and the youngest is twelve.

For the past twenty-four years, I was always saying to myself that “next week” or “next month” I’d spend time with my kids. Well, it never happened. There was always something, usually having to do with the business, that got in the way. (And, truth be told, a lot of what the kids would want to do was boring to me anyway. I don’t like to play Go Fish, and I hate the zoo. I’m a high-energy, high-stim guy, and even amuse­ment parks get boring to me after a half-hour.)

Then it hit me about six months ago. My oldest “little girl” has grown up, moved away, gotten married, and I still don’t know her. I know my business associates better than I know my own kids.

We still have two at home, and one at college who’s not yet married. So now I’ve set aside every Saturday just for my family. It’s damn hard to do, this kind of self-discipline, but I made the commitment to them all, and I also asked them if they’d help me keep my commitment. That’s been the most helpful part, because the girls and my wife now remind me every week.

And I’m discovering that my kids are really interesting human beings. They’re every bit as interesting as my business associates, and we’ve worked out things to do together that we all enjoy, from watching TV together to going shopping to playing Trivial Pursuit. When I find myself getting bored, I either push through it, or try to get us all doing something else that will keep my interest.

I’ve lost my first child, and will probably die never really having known her all that well. I’m not going to lose the rest.

A person in Philadelphia adds:

I just wanted to suggest that many people, particularly those with ADHD who may not have the best self-image or high self-esteem, should plan social time in their lives.

I joined a women’s business group here in Philadelphia, for exam­ple. Before that, because I make my living as a freelance writer for magazines, I was almost always at home in front of the word processor. I had contact with many people — perhaps hundreds a year — as I was doing interviews and research for articles, but no social life.

Joining that women’s club was one of the best things I ever did. It got me out of the house, got me thinking in new directions and doing things in new and different ways, and created an instant circle of friends for me.

Now, two years later, I’m closer to some of those women than I have been with anybody since we moved away from Chicago when I was twelve and had to leave my best friend.

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Dr. Oliver Sacks, the elder statesman for people with neurological differences, has suggested that different brain chemistry might be a requirement for creativity. And one of the world’s top neuroscientists, Dr. Richard Silberstein, has even published a brilliant paper drawing a direct and positive correlation between ADHD and creativity.

Similarly, many of the people who shared their stories for me to publish here at Hunters in a Farmer’s World said that expressing their creativity was an important part of their lives and helped with building and maintaining their self-esteem.

From Nancy in Detroit:

I’ve known since I was in kindergarten, and maybe even before then, that I’m an artist. It was in kindergarten, though, that I first encountered paints, and understood, solidly and down in my soul, that painting and unusual expressions are essential to me.

So I paint, and I’ve been painting for years. I’m pretty good at it by now, and have even made a small living over the years at it.

The point of this as an ADHD success story, though, is the impact that painting has on the rest of my life. During those times when I’m not painting for more than a few weeks at a time, I find that I become very distractible, spaced-out, and irritable. My fuse gets short and I snap at people. I’m unhappy.

It wasn’t until I was in my late twenties with two children that I understood this correlation between my painting and my moods and mental abilities. I’d been so busy being a mom that I’d given up painting for almost a year, and my life was going down in flames. So my husband suggested I start painting again, thinking that it would take my mind off my problems with our kids (who both have ADHD, too).

It was amazing to me that when I started painting again, the old me came back out. I felt like a door had been opened inside me, and, as my creative juices were flowing, so was every other part of my life.

I don’t know how many other ADHD people consider themselves creative, or if there’s a connection between creativity and ADHD, but I can tell you that for this ADHD woman, expressing my creativity several times a week is the best therapy I’ve found.

Norman in Denver writes:

I like to write. I’ve never had anything published, but I’ve been writing since I was a teenager. First it was poetry, and nowadays I’m writing science fiction more than anything else.

I also write long letters to people, and, for a couple of years, used to keep a journal (very sporadically!).

The point of this is that I think that the writing is a good focusing exercise for me.

I set up specific goals for my writing—such as today I’m going to write the scene where the Kurians take over the planet—and then make myself stick to those goals. Because I’m doing it just for me, I don’t get in a sweat about it, and while I don’t always hit my goals, I’ve gotten pretty good at it.

Writing feels good for me, and when I’m doing it there’s a certain “flow” feeling that I get. Over the years, this has become an anchor for me, a feeling that I like to get from my writing. And when I’m in other situations, like at work or when I’m in an intense conversation with my girlfriend, I’ll sometimes pause and click back to that flow feeling, and bring it into the situation when I need some extra strength or creativity.

I don’t know how to describe how I do this other than to say that I just do it; it’s not quite visualization, but I’m able to hook into that feeling

Most of my friends who are ADHD are also pretty creative people, from what I can tell, although I don’t think any of them have developed the discipline that I have to write every week. I think it would be a good habit for them, though. I view it as mental weightlifting: I’m strengthen­ing the muscle of my brain, the same as people who pump iron a few times a week strengthen their biceps.