About This "Hunter's Stories" Section

A series of stories shared with me by Hunters in this Farmer's World

“Great ideas come into the world as quietly as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear among the uproar of em­pires and nations a faint fluttering of wings, the gentle stirrings of life and hope.”

—Albert Camus

After the publication of my first book on ADHD in 1993, I took on the job of head systems operator (Sysop) for the ADD Forum on CompuServe, the world’s largest online computer information service. The forum had, at its peak, over 40,000 members in dozens of countries, and had — in the 1990s — grown to be the world’s largest interactive, 24-hour-a-day, international ADHD support group.

The publication of my books also brought an avalanche of speaking requests, and I’ve traveled from Israel to California to England to Israel to Taiwan to address groups of parents, teachers, school superintendents, ADHD adults, attorneys, col­lege professors, psychiatrists, psychologists, and even a science fiction convention.

At each stop, people invariably come up to me after my presentation with stories from their own lives. They tell me about ways they’ve used their ADHD to be more successful than the Farmers they’ve known, or describe techniques they developed to overcome some of the problems Hunters encounter living day-to-day in this Farmer’s World.

As I was expanding the normal two-hour speech that I give on ADHD into a full-blown course on how to be successful in life with ADHD, I sent out an electronic mail message to thousands of the members of the ADHD Forum on CompuServe. I asked if they had stories from their lives they’d like to share for my course, and ultimately for this book, and also began to solicit and write down stories from people I had met at speaking engagements.

Some people eagerly gave me both their stories and their names. Others had stories, but preferred to be anonymous. Some stories were so long and autobiographical that they required shortening to fit in this series; others were so short and terse that a bit of amplification was necessary.

So here we have a collection of stories from fellow Hunters, travel­ing across the terrain of this Farmer’s world. I’ve tried to organize them in logical categories, although there is some overlap and a few could probably fit in several different areas. Most have been edited in one way or another, and a few were written entirely by me from memory, describ­ing stories that were told to me by people in lecture halls or classrooms.

All are true stories, however, and all offer practical ways to improve our quality of life. And, as you’ll see and hear in these stories, persistently practic­ing new ways of living can lead to permanent changes.