ADHD: Study the Lives of Other Unique People

When I was around ten years old, my mom gave me a biography of Thomas Edison. He’d been thrown out of school because, his teacher said, he was “slow” and didn’t “pay attention in class.”

Image by Gordon Johnson from Pixabay

When I was around ten years old, my mom gave me a biography of Thomas Edison. He’d been thrown out of school in the second or third grade because, his teacher said, he was “slow” and didn’t “pay attention in class.” The conductor of a train car where he was supposed to be working as a young teenager was so upset with him that he “boxed” (slapped) his ears, bursting one of his eardrums leading to lifelong hearing loss. He was socially awkward.

And yet he overcame it all, and changed the world for the better. And he loved science, as did I. That biography, and the crystal radio set I got for Christmas the previous year, changed my life.

A woman we met at a conference where I was speaking in Denver years ago shared a similar story, and her determination to pass along positive role models to her daughter through biographies.

Beth in Fargo writes about her love of biographies:

As I was growing up, 1 put together my life skills the way some people assemble a jigsaw puzzle. It’s probably because I was ADHD and didn’t know it, but I always had a feeling that I was different from other people, and also that I was missing some secret formula or important bit of information.

If I could just find that special thing, or those things, I could then finally start to pay attention in school or keep my room clean or whatever. So I embarked on a search for life skills, looking for the qualities that I should build into my life and personality.

I knew they were out there! I figured the best source of them would be found in the lives of other people, so I embarked on my search by reading biographies.

From just about every famous person’s life, I could find at least one lesson-one thing that I could do in my life, or one way that I could improve myself as a person.

I learned about persistence from the story of FDR’s Labor Secretary Francis Perkins, about passion from the biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, about com­passion from the story of Florence Nightingale (“the Lady with the Lamp”), and about courage from the life of Joan of Arc.

There were hundreds of lessons over the years, and I loved (and still love) reading the stories of real people who’d lived and struggled, and overcame those difficulties to become not only successful but famous. (I’m convinced that, for exam­ple, Marie Curie was ADHD herself.)

Now that I have my own children, I mourn the loss of role models in our modern society. I was watching TV with my 10-year-old daughter the other day, and, frankly, was horrified by the way the children on this TV show were acting. And I see her picking up some of those behaviors.

So I’ve started reading her biographies, whenever I can, and cut back on the TV. It’s not always easy, because the only time she sits still is in front of the TV, but I’ve found that reading to her before bed works pretty well. And she’s learning lessons, just like I did, from these people’s lives.