A lot of people with ADHD, myself included, share one very obvious trait.
For things I’m genuinely interested in, I enter a 10+ hour flow state where I forget to eat or sleep, and I’ll fly into a rage if interrupted. For things I’m not interested in, I can’t sit still for even half a minute — I’ve got the YouTube video on 2x speed and still don’t have the patience to finish it.
In my life, 95%+ of my interests have been a flash in the pan, a three-day fever that couldn’t last two weeks. But once something makes it past those two weeks, and I find that “I can keep the flow state going,” then there’s a good chance I can do that thing for a decade or more — and do it better than anyone else.
Luckily, the first such thing was studying and taking exams. Hence a perfect basic competency exam score, a 73 on the GSAT, a 760 on the GMAT, and Jianguo High School and NTU.
So at the end of the day, I teach AI not to rake in cash, but entirely because aside from the things I’m obsessively interested in, ADHD basically makes me a useless person. And right now my interests are AI and teaching.
The upside is that with the things I’m obsessed with, I dig in deep very easily. Compared to certain instructors who just run a course to fence off money, I’ve got an extra layer of respect for the things I’m obsessed with, plus a self-imposed demand to be exceptional at them. It’s the positive feedback after reaching excellence that loops back to stimulate my dopamine.
Hard to describe this feeling. Not sure if anyone else with ADHD has gone through the same thing.
(You have to look at childhood. ADHD isn’t acquired later in life; the vast majority is congenital, and the clinical diagnostic standard requires symptoms to appear in childhood. So asking family, or your teachers and classmates and friends from when you were a kid, will be more accurate.)
By the way, the biggest trouble after I started using Claude Code was discovering that the ADHD symptoms that weren’t obvious in my childhood had been completely unleashed by AI.