Over the years, I’ve noticed something in my ADHD patients.

Despite having an intellectual disability, most of them excel at life in general.

They excel compared with most people I know.

A surprising number of my patients with ADHD are resilient, productive, exuberant, and make six figures. I have a patient with ADHD who is a very successful street artist in Hawaii with millions of followers on social media. True, she may have trouble reading chapter books. She may have trouble organizing an office, and she may have a disability.

But she also seems to have a superpower which sets her apart.

My ADHD patients rarely, if ever, get severely depressed. They seem almost incapable of severe depression. The internet will tell you it happens all the time, but I am telling you I just don’t see that.

Those with ADHD rarely get severely depressed, because they do not ruminate. Depression is caused by over-thinking and, absent an extreme stressor, people with ADHD do not over-think. They may have a negative thought, but they are unlikely to dwell on it all day long. Distraction is good in this case. They do not ‘stew’ in negative thoughts. Or, at least, not enough to cause a problem in neurochemistry.

By contrast, there are the naturally focused people (like myself) who can sit in an armchair for three hours and read two hundred pages of Charles Dickens. As impressive as that is, it puts me at an increased risk of depression. Intense focus is not necessarily healthy: “I swear to you that to think too much is a disease, a real, actual disease.” —Dostoevsky. The ability to direct all one’s thoughts, does not necessarily lead to healthy thoughts. One thing psychedelics have shown is that any experience that is scary, humorous, wondrous, or jolting can, like a hallucination, divert a person from their depression.

But those with ADHD are constantly diverted from negativity.

The world is indeed full of many wondrous things, if we are impulsive and distracted enough to notice.

So: on mood and depression, those with ADHD have an edge. But there is also the topic of money.

I’ve noticed that a significant portion of my ADHD patients are successful.

They are more likely to be entrepreneurs, run businesses like food trucks, or become a freelance physical therapist, masseuse, or chef. They prefer jobs where they can work on their feet. They tend to be comfortable taking risks in business, and they get richly rewarded for it. I have numerous patients with ADHD who are realtors, making six figures, who could not function in a cubicle or typical 9-5 normal workplace. Being a freelancer or entrepreneur is chaotic and stressful, but where others would be stressed out by it, they thrive. They love the chaos of sudden phone calls, marketing cold calls, house showings, and in person meetings.

A lot of people with ADHD get down on themselves, especially in their early twenties. They didn’t perform well in school, and they develop an academic inferiority complex.

Many of them are smart, but underperformed on standardized testing. I like to remind them that real life is not like school.

In fact, the real world, and the marketplace, are extremely chaotic. School does not prepare you for the chaos of the real world, or the chaos of the marketplace, and may even hinder a person from excelling at it. This is why so many CEO’s and business owners have ADHD. Joe Rogan has a talk show with an endless supply of guests many of whom have raging ADHD and who are extremely successful.

So, to my patients who didn’t do well in school, and who let it get to their self-esteem, I generally say: school isn’t real. Just wait.

I also like to explain to them that hardly anybody owned books prior to the 1600s. The Gutenberg printing press did make books more available, however, they were very expensive. Families were lucky if they owned a single book.

A large portion of Europe could not read, and yet, they had huge vocabularies. Shakespeare’s plays attracted an illiterate audience from all over England, many of whom could not afford books… Stop and imagine this fact. It was as much as 75% of his audience that could not read. Imagine understanding Shakespeare’s plays without being able to read… the working vocabulary of an average Englishman was very large. Despite not being able to read. The average man memorized a lot of the Bible, or Chaucer, however, he could not read. Reading was limited to monks, nobles, and the wealthy, since books were difficult to come by, expensive, and transcribed by hand, by monks.

Back then most people were involved in physical jobs like cobbling shoes, making candles, and what not. In such a society, those with ADHD would not stand out as a ‘disability.’ In that time, being hyperactive was more of a superpower than a disability. In an oral society, i.e., a society that does not rely on books, a person with ADHD may even stand out. When people learn on their feet, on-the-job, and listen and learn through the ears, through memorization, those with ADHD may even have an edge.

It has been shown in some research that those with ADHD have superior verbal memorization capacity.

Many people with ADHD have an astounding ability to memorize song lyrics after hearing a song only a few times on the radio.

And books, anyway, are a piece of arbitrary technology. We have to understand that books are like iPads. They are not the sine qua non of an educated person. You can be very educated and nearly illiterate. And we must realize that books can harm education in the same way that PowerPoints, or ChatGPT can harm education. E.g., graduate school education (e.g. medical education, my own) has, in my opinion, been seriously harmed by lecturers reading from their own PowerPoints.

You want to ask these lecturers: “If you can’t give a lecture by heart, how do you expect me to remember it?”

And just as lecturing, oral teaching, and debate have become lost arts, so too have conversational skills.

Since those with ADHD are attracted to low-tech, old fashioned, in-person conversation, they seem to naturally have better conversations. Especially so, as our society has become too dependent on technology and one-way conversation.

True, we have texting, however, texting is still one-way conversation. It isn’t LIVE. The other person isn’t required to text back within a time frame. That’s why texting is fundamentally a socially flawed form of communication. As such, texting is like talking into a void: it seems to promote monologues, with no organic feedback of how the other person is responding.

I believe this has unfortunately promoted people to talk too much and people who are boring.

If I had to choose whether to converse with an inattentive person, or a person who is pedantic, who hogs the airwaves and goes on and on and on, assuming I’ll listen for ten minutes straight… I’ll take the inattentive person every time.

At least when talking to an inattentive person, you’re forced to keep things interesting. Talking with a person with ADHD is more stimulating and real. They seem to naturally enjoy more back and forth. Whereas it is obnoxious when some people control, or lead conversations too much. But those with ADHD almost never do this. Their conversations are extremely free flowing and natural.

Those with ADHD seem to know a secret: if it’s interesting, we’ll come back to it later.

Regarding stimulant medications like Adderall, yes, they can be incredibly helpful, and I prescribe them.

But they should not be taken to help force a square peg in a round hole. If you have ADHD, do not try to become a CPA. Do not go into accounting or corporate finance or something that is fussy. Do not take a stimulant so that you can tolerate being in the wrong job.

Instead, take a stimulant to help you for a few hours with the reading or the organizational tasks that don’t come naturally to you, but also, try to go into a line of work that you are naturally suited for…

Think of yourself as having a superpower.

You will find the world offers plenty of places for you to shine well beyond your peers.