Growing up with adhd

One of the questions I get asked most often is a version of this: how can you have had the career you’ve had and yet have ADHD?

It’s a fair question because ADHD is often described through the lens of school. Learning difficulties. Behavioural issues. Missed potential. When that becomes the dominant story, it can sound incompatible with professional success.

I also think this is bigger than one post. There are a few different angles to it. I’m going to start with something specific. How some traits that were visible in school carried straight through into my working life.

Inspiration

I was a bright kid at school. Looking back, I can see I was fortunate in a few ways.

When you’re little, everything is new. You’re fed a constant stream of novelty and curiosity. For an ADHD brain, novelty is fuel. If you’re interested in something, you can’t get enough of it. So the fact that school itself kept me interested helped enormously. Hyperfocus and education is a very lucky combination.

Teachers mattered too. When you’re small, teachers are often more sensitive and more caring. I remember being inspired by several of mine, and that inspiration is one piece of the story of how I ended up in my chosen profession.

Praise

There was another piece of the puzzle, and it’s one I didn’t properly understand until much later. Praise.

When you do something well as a child, particularly something that matters like school, you get praised. That rush of dopamine from praise, especially from the people you love most, is powerful.

Looking back, I can see how this created a pattern that followed me into work. Inspiration leads to good work. Good work leads to praise. Praise increases drive. Drive leads to more good work. It can become a virtuous circle, although not always a healthy one.

Professionally, I work best when I get some positive reinforcement. I don’t need to be told I’m great all the time, but indifference from leaders can be genuinely distressing for me. I’ve learned to tame that reaction. CBT has helped. But I’ve also had to accept that this is part of how I’m wired. I come as a package.

Disengagement

I only really had one teacher I didn’t get along with, and it’s no coincidence that year coincided with the only bad reports I ever got at school.

I remember sitting in one of her classes and, completely out of character, not caring. It was strange. I’ve always been conscious of letting my parents down. I’m an only child, and I now recognise myself in the idea of an anxious achiever. Yet I felt no anxious reaction, even though I knew I wasn’t engaging.

My report scolded me for not listening, not concentrating, and talking too much.

At that point I’d lost all respect for the teacher. I even ran a small experiment during extended group work. I said nothing and still got told off for being noisy.

It’s possible we were never going to get along. She was obsessed with gymnastics and sport. That was very much not a hyperfocus for me at that age.

Respect

Saying this out loud, I can see a pattern that carried straight into my professional life. I need to respect the people I work for and I need to believe in what my company is doing.

Every period I’ve found rough at work has involved one or both of those things not being present. I’ve still pushed through, because adulthood comes with mortgages and bills. But those have been the periods where stress and anxiety have flared up most.

An uninspired ADHD person has to work harder than everyone else to get through what is already hard.

Secondary school was better. I had great teachers who were passionate about their subjects. Even PE teachers managed to inspire me into something my primary school teachers had basically told me I was a dead loss at. The pattern continued. Most subjects were engaging enough, and I was able to drop geography by fourteen, which I was very happy about.

Focus

Around that age I found a new hyperfocus.

My dad worked for IBM. When his work PC was upgraded, he brought the old one home. The games were good, but the more important discovery was that someone had left some code on the hard drive.

By then I was starting to outgrow Lego, and the code became the next version of it. I spent solid hours reverse engineering how it worked, changing it, dismantling it, and building new programs. I devoured books from the school library to fill the gaps in my understanding. The reward wasn’t just something working. It was the moment a penny dropped and another gap in understanding closed.

It was also a creative outlet. I was constantly thinking up new ways to solve problems. When fantasy football leagues became a thing and others were using coins and dice, I wrote an application to automate it.

Structure

There was another contradiction I can now see clearly.

My desk and the world around me could be a mess, but I found structure in code calming. Creating order in a controlled space was soothing.

It was as if keeping everything else tidy was too dull and overwhelming to bother with, but within a system I could control, structure felt rewarding.

That trait is still with me. In technology terms, I’m an architect. A big part of that job is providing structure. One of the contradictions of ADHD is that you can be messy, especially with things you don’t care about, while finding chaos anxiety-inducing. That inner tension to resolve chaos can become a strength, especially when you’re doing it for other people.

Creativity

The other thing that carried through from that old PC was divergent thinking. In a school setting, it can look like distraction. In the right context, it can become creative problem solving.

I eventually learned to shape that trait rather than be led by it. When I was at IBM, I filed over thirty patents. In my current work, I love finding different ways to help organisations get the most out of the software they’ve bought. In previous roles I kept that creative energy going by helping create new offerings and methods for others to use.

That is one part of the answer to the question. The same brain that can struggle with routine can excel at invention.

Rapport

There’s one more piece of the puzzle I want to flag, and I think it deserves its own post because it is complicated.

As a youngster, I was an anxious friend. I worried about keeping friendships cordial and staying connected. I learned, sometimes clumsily, how to become a people pleaser in the relationships I cared about. In the ones I didn’t care about, I tended to take the opposite approach. That is another story.

In work, that sensitivity translated into rapport. Being able to build relationships, find common ground, and help different parties get what they need is a big part of commercial life. People skills combined with creativity and technical depth has become one of my unique strengths.

It is also tiring, and it can come with a cost. That cost is what we’ll focus on next.