ADHD: Visualize the person you want to be, and determine what will be necessary to get there
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.
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!
"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."
I have wondered, since you claim to be ADHD, how you became as successful as you are. My dad was a blue collar tradesmen, and a very good one. In an old school manner most of my upbringing was relegated to my mother, who I now suspect was ADHD, and suffered from depression.
I almost didn't graduate from high school, largely from the antipathy of the school system to my gifts and talents. I was virtually discarded by some teachers who viewed me as "that weird kid who act;s smart."
I wound up in the blue collar trades myself, influenced by things my dad was capable of teaching me. It may have also had to do with inherited spatial cognizance. I had great success in it, alternating with some spectacular crash and burn. Inattentiveness made me prone to sabotage by coworkers who envied my rapid rise in the Tool and Die trade. My greatest successes were at establishments that were run by those who appreciated my gifts. Economic factors beyond my, and their control, ended a few of those.
My average length of employment over a forty five year career was about two years. Some of those transitions were due to me being poached by other companies. Good machinists were hard to find. I was sometimes done in by some of the less talented.