When we are tired, we are attacked by ideas we conquered long ago.

- Nietzsche

Last year I asked my friend Barry about what lessons he learned from his highly-respected father, who lived several decades in a wheelchair after a motorcycle accident:

Bob wasn’t big on lectures or life lessons, but he taught me a couple of hugely important things by example:

(1) Persistence and focus will beat the living shit out of undisciplined genius 99 times out of 100 (not that Bob wasn’t plenty smart, understand, but he was one of the most determined people I ever met.) Even after a grievous injury, he bounced back and went about all the things that were important to him, hammer and tongs, like some kind of demented blacksmith – and God help you if you got between him and his anvil.

(2) A sense of humor, especially about yourself, is one of the most important survival skills in life. Humor will get you through bad times when nothing else will.

Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still.

– T.S. Eliot quoted in The Little Zen Companion

Take rest; a field that has rested gives a bountiful crop.

- Ovid (43 BCE – 17 CE)

We folk with ADHD sometimes plow quickly into action before taking the time to ask advice. With simple things this is often fine.  But with complicated things?

From the Accordion FAQ

Q: How likely am I to pick up bad habits by teaching myself?

A:  A friend of mine’s son taught himself to play concertina. One day he noticed that everyone else was playing theirs upside down relative to the way he was doing it. Needless to say, the rest of the world was not wrong. Please make sure that you at least know which side is for the right hand vs. the left hand.

– Accordion FAQ compiled by Alan Polivka (1993)

Order is not pressure which is imposed on society from without, but an equilibrium which is set up from within.

– Jose Ortega y Gasset  (1883-1955)

Order doesn’t always come naturally to ADDexecs.  Seeing that we’re out of step with the expected standard, we sometimes “justify” our disorder by saying that we’re marching to our own drummer.  But if so, are we protesting the wrong thing, to our own harm?

A lack of planning on your part does not constitute an emergency on my part.– sign on the door of Eric R., intended to thwart the best ADHD efforts of our project manager Steve P.

Eric was a steady planner and an excellent engineer whom I worked with at my first job.  Steve P. was our boss — visionary, ambitious and always lighting fires.  I’d say that Eric’s sign worked about 75% of the time for getting Steve off his back.

The bonus is that this sign works two ways for an executive with ADD.  First, it gives people a means of forcing you into a little more organization.  Second, it’s a reminder that when other people try to dump an “emergency” into your lap, you’ll be reminded that maybe you’re not actually required to attend to it right then and there.