ADHD: Is Efficiency Always Good and Impulsivity Always Bad?

"I didn’t build my life by being efficient. I built it by being willing to explore when efficiency no longer made sense."

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

One of the more damaging myths of modern life is the idea that efficiency is always good and impulsivity is always bad. We treat efficiency as a moral virtue and impulsivity as a character flaw.

If you’re methodical, predictable, and optimized, you’re “responsible.” If you jump, pivot, change your mind, or follow instincts, you’re suspect. But that moral framing collapses the moment you look at how humans actually survive and adapt in the real world.

I’ve been called impulsive more times than I can count. By bosses, teachers, editors, and even well-meaning friends who couldn’t understand why I’d walk away from a stable situation to chase something uncertain. And yet, nearly every important success in my life came from doing precisely that. From taking a leap before all the data was in. From exploring when the “rational” move was to keep optimizing what already existed.

Only later did I learn that what looks like impulsivity from a Farmer’s point of view often isn’t impulsivity at all. It’s random exploration. And from an evolutionary and cognitive standpoint, random exploration isn’t a bug. It’s a feature.

Cognitive scientists studying decision-making have identified something that maps almost perfectly onto the Hunter versus Farmer divide. In stable environments, the optimal strategy is exploitation: pick the best known option and keep refining it. But in unstable, noisy, or changing environments, pure exploitation leads to stagnation and collapse. You get locked into yesterday’s solution while the world moves on. That’s where random exploration comes in.

Random exploration is not about being reckless. It’s about deliberately injecting unpredictability into your behavior so you don’t get trapped. It’s what pushes someone to try a new route, test a weird idea, start a business no spreadsheet can fully justify, or ask a question nobody else is asking. From the outside, it looks inefficient. From the inside, it’s how you discover options that don’t yet have names.

There’s real science behind this. Studies published in peer-reviewed journals like Nature Communications show that people who engage in higher levels of random exploration often score higher on traits we usually label as impulsivity. But the same research also shows that these traits can be advantageous in environments where rewards shift, information is incomplete, or conditions change rapidly.

In other words, the behavior that gets punished in a classroom or cubicle can be exactly what keeps a group adaptive over time.

This resonates deeply with my own experience. Every time I’ve started something new, it looked irresponsible to someone. Why leave a known income stream? Why jump into an industry you haven’t mastered yet? Why abandon a working model instead of refining it?

The answer was always the same, even if I couldn’t articulate it at the time: because, as my old friend Richard Bandler would say, the map no longer matched the territory.

Farmers are extraordinary at running stable systems. They make things reliable. Repeatable. Scalable. But Hunters are the ones who sense when the system itself is becoming brittle. When optimization starts producing diminishing returns. When yesterday’s success is quietly turning into tomorrow’s trap.

What worries me is that modern society has almost entirely lost the ability to distinguish between destructive impulsivity and adaptive exploration. We lump them together, label them as pathology, and try to suppress them. We design institutions that minimize variance, eliminate randomness, and punish deviation. And then we act shocked when those institutions fail catastrophically in moments of crisis.

History tells a different story.

Groups that survive long-term uncertainty almost always include a minority of people who behave “inefficiently.” Who waste energy exploring dead ends. Who chase ideas that don’t pan out. From a narrow accounting perspective, they look like liabilities. From a systems perspective, they are insurance policies against collapse.

I’ve seen this in business ecosystems. Startups that look chaotic from the outside are often the only ones positioned to pivot when markets shift. Legacy firms optimized for efficiency keep squeezing the same processes until the ground disappears beneath them.

The same dynamic shows up in politics, media, and culture. When norms tighten and deviation is punished, societies lose their ability to adapt.

This is where the Hunter versus Farmer frame becomes more than metaphor.

Farmers want predictability. Hunters tolerate ambiguity. Farmers eliminate randomness. Hunters understand that some randomness is essential. Without it, systems become fragile. They look strong right up until the moment they shatter.

Personally, I’ve learned to stop apologizing for this. The restlessness. The urge to move on once something becomes routinized. The instinct to explore instead of optimize. These aren’t signs that I failed to grow up. They’re signs that I’ve been navigating a world that keeps changing faster than our institutions can admit.

The real danger isn’t that we have too many impulsive people. It’s that we’ve built a culture that treats all exploration as a problem to be solved rather than a resource to be managed.

We don’t need everyone to behave like a Hunter. But we absolutely need some people to do so, and we need systems that can absorb their volatility without trying to crush it.

Civilization needs Farmers to keep the lights on. But it also needs Hunters to notice when the power grid is being built on sand.

As Thomas Edison proved with so many of his inventions (as I detail in my book Hunter in a Farmer’s World) random exploration is messy. It wastes effort. It produces failures. But it also produces breakthroughs, adaptations, and escape routes when the old paths close off. Strip it out entirely and you don’t get a perfect system. You get a brittle one.

I didn’t build my life by being efficient. I built it by being willing to explore when efficiency no longer made sense. From the outside, that often looked impulsive. From the inside, it was the most rational response I could imagine to a world that refuses to stay still.

We don’t need fewer Hunters. We need to stop mistaking their randomness for recklessness and start recognizing it for what it is: one of the ways humans and human societies survive uncertainty.