Three quotes:

An inability to stay quiet is one of the conspicuous failings of mankind.

No great work has ever been produced except after a long interval of still and musing meditation.

All the best stories in the world are but one story in reality – the story of escape. It is the only thing which interests us all and at all times, how to escape.

- Walter Bagehot, British Businessman and Writer (1826-1877)

There’s Nothing as Dangerous as an Idea When It’s the Only One You Have.

– from Do One Thing Different and other uncommonly sensible solutions to life’s persistent problems, Bill O’Hanlon (1999)

I have long-respected this book for its focus on action, and for several of O’Hanlon’s eye-opening observations that very potent but also deceptively simple.   I’ll quote more of his book later but wanted to offer this quote for today.

What is troubling us is the tendency to believe that the mind is like a little man within.

– Ludwig Wittgenstein

“When Richard Pryor hosted, NBC wanted a five-second delay because Richard might say something filthy. We ended up with a three-second delay, I think. But it was a new negotiation every week.”

–Bernie Brillstein, quoted in Live From New York: An Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live by Tom Shales, James Andrew Miller

I can’t imagine how much stress I could have prevented or how much time I could have saved if I had a three-second delay on my mouth. How many times did I say “yes” to something — a colleague’s request for help I didn’t have time to give, an invitation to a meeting I didn’t need to attend, or even the urge to offer an unnecessary and perhaps incorrect or inappropriate comment — that didn’t deserve it, but that cost me time, money, or something else? Or how many times did I ask or tell someone to do something for me that was later proven a waste of time?

Impulsivity. The hyper speed to speak or decide or do. A hallmark of people with attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder. Where is NBC when I need it?!

Steve Allen is best known as a comic and as creator of the Tonight Show, but he’s also an intellectual and teacher whose books include Dumbth — The Lost Art of Thinking.  In Dumbth, he offers “101 Ways to Reason Better & Improve  Your Mind.”

Here is one in particular for the executive with attention deficit disorder:

Rule No. 22.  Know that reason need not be the enemy of emotion.

When some people hear reason being endorsed they assume that, if the amount of rationality in the world is increased, it must inevitably follow that certain increments of sensation and emotion will decrease.

Entirely false, of course.  Reason helps us know which plans and ideas are truly strong or even great.  Knowing that, we are encouraged and at liberty to pursue them with gusto, excitement, delight.  Fully and without nagging doubts born out of uncertainty.  That sounds like a nice emotional mix to me.  If ADDexecs enjoy excitement perhaps even more than regular people, then it makes all the more sense that we should pursue it.  When it makes sense.

—–

Bonus: Steve Allen also suggests Rule 99.  “Be humble when consulting your memory.”  No explanation needed on that, right?

All man’s troubles come from not knowing how to sit still in one room.

–17th century French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal, apparently familiar with adult ADHD. Quote from the online-readable Pensées

.

The problem of resolving fear has two aspects. We shall have to try for all the freedom from fear that is possible for us to attain. Then we shall need to find both the courage and grace to deal constructively with whatever fears remain.

– Bill Wilson in As Bill Sees It: The A. A. Way of Life …Selected Writings of the A. A.’s Co-Founder

You don’t need to be in a 12-Step program for this quote to look familiar.  It’s essence is derived from (or at least parallel) to the Serenity Prayer: “Lord, let me have the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.”

Relevance to executives with attention deficit disorder?  Executives and business owners strive for excellence, and seek to eliminate mistakes in work, and in the way we manage our own lives.  Of course we want to manage our ADD and of course we want to get rid of as many of its problems as we can.

What we need to stay wise about is that we’re not going to make all of our ADD nature go away.  We have to learn how to live with the parts that we’re going to have to live with.  We can’t obsess about it.   It would really stink to have our attention deficit disorder be more of a problem because we paid too much attention to it.

If my attention is wandering, there is somewhere it wants to go, so obviously it does not want to be where I am holding it in the name of some self-styled obligation.

– Hugh Prather in Notes to Myself — my struggle to become a person. 

Prather isn’t writing about ADD, but it’s nice to remember that sometimes a wandering attention is just fine.

“I don’t remember anybody’s name. Why do you think the ‘dahling’ thing started?”

- Zsa Zsa Gabor, quoted in The ADDed Dimension — Everyday Advice for Adults with ADD

Master Your MoodsDepressing and bad moods are notorious thieves of time. In a depression or bad mood, many people stop doing anything productive and often do things that are destructive.

Even the most up-beat individuals must occasionally confront a wily time thief called depression. If you can learn how to fight off bad moods and keep them from making off with your day, you will have acuqired an invaluable ability. Here’s how:

Develop your willpower through exercise. The ability to keep going when it’s hard to keep going is the mark of a true pro. Ray Charles, the singer, once described how much he enjoyed performing before a crowd, how there was nothing like the exhilaration of being in front of a big crowd when it’s with you. I asked: “And what do you do when the crowd is small and isn’t with you?” Ray Charles replied: “That’s when you find out whether you’re a pro or not. That’s when you work harder than ever.”

– B. Eugene Griessman, in Time Tactics of Very Successful People (1994).

With this quote, Griessman shows what I think are both the strengths and weaknesses of his book as a possible resource for executives with attention deficit disorder.  On the plus side, Griessman demonstrates that even the greatest talents — like Ray Charles, or Mark Twain who is quoted on the next page — obtain some of their success by working very hard when they don’t really feel like it.  This is always good advice, perhaps even especially for the ADDexec whose first problem — attention deficit — can immediately derail the very idea of work, much less the actual doing.

At the same time, Griessman seems to oversimplify by putting “bad mood” and “depression” in the same basket, which they’re clearly not.  Same goes for clinically evident attention deficit disorder.

In “Master Your Moods”, Griessman offers fourteen different tips ranging from “Yield to temptation” (i.e., take some time off) to “Do low-priority items on your list” (i.e., knock out some easy tasks if you can’t do the hard ones) to “Pick a career that suits your temperaments”.  I suspect that an experienced ADD coach or an experienced ADD psychotherapist or psychiatrist would tell any client, “pick and choose carefully from this list.”  Some items might be useful.  Others entirely counterproductive.

In sum, I think that Time Tactics of Very Successful People offers both useful tips and real-life inspiration to the executive with attention deficit disorder.  However, the useful parts are mixed in with much information that’s either oversimplified, incomplete, or inappropriate for an ADDexec.  If you happen across this book, give it a skim and make note of any items that look useful to you.  But don’t rush out to buy it.