ADHD: Hidden Superpower?

 

A few days ago, I watched a program about high-income skills by renowned king of high-ticket sales Dan Lok, and ideas have been brewing in my head since that program. 

 

When I took an assessment, it was clear that I was under the label of Silent Rainmaker (there was a little page they made to express this very fact). 

 

This means, for those who don’t extrapolate well, that I have the means to succeed. All of the keys of success lie within the region of space occupied by this brain, and the keys to succeed remain in the sense that we must develop a system which works for us. 

 

See, ADHD allows us to use our brain without even really understanding why we have this particular difficulty in the first place. We have a very specific set of rules which are not universal– that is to say, what works for one ADHDer might not work for the next. 

 

Our understanding of certain things is unsurpassed by all except those who have hands-on experience in such fields, but the very thing which gets us into some trouble is the lack of organization skills, the lack of planning skills, the lack of [skills considered boring to us because that’s just how it is], general forgetfulness, and a slew of other things which might have been repeated in past posts. I have oftentimes overlooked very important aspects of life, such as planning and organization, specifically because I had never expressed such an interest in learning those skills. 

 

It seems to occur to me now that we can unearth skills considered “beast mode” to some, but to those people who don’t have ADHD, we just do a lot of nothing. We appear to be lost in our thoughts constantly. But at the same time, we tend to lose focus a lot of the time because of the sheer volume of ideas randomly coming to the forefront of our conscious minds from the depths of the unconscious or subconscious minds. 

 

Here is where things become interesting. We have ideas all the time. As children, we were taught in a traditional schooling system which only served to grant us enough rote and quoted information (legalized plagiarism, if anything) to get us through high school. As adults, we are given the boot to go straight to work, college, military, or self-education. Among all of these given bits of information, we have not yet developed a system of education which caters to those who have very specific learning capacities due to the sheer number of teachers who have the tolerance to deal with us ADHDers being– well, critically low or non-existent. 

 

This is a difficult subject to deal with, and it is unfortunately the reality for many people. The basic education system is intended to help those of us who might later in life wish to become general education instructors. 

 

YOU HAVEN’T MADE A POINT YET, BRANDON

 

Yes, I know, and I am getting to it. I just wanted to start a new section.

All right, so the point here is that we must consider the natural talents of a child with ADHD. If you receive an official diagnosis for him or her, your job might be to adapt to the environment and concentrate on what skills they are exploring. If they develop an interest in, say, coin collecting, learn about specific coins and where you can obtain them, and teach them the differences between certain coins. Learn about precious metals, like silver and gold. Coins used to be made of precious metals, after all!

For another example, I expressed a strong affinity for learning about science and the planets as a child. I gained tons of insight just from reading books (elementary school textbooks proved to be surprisingly effective at getting the basic point across as an entry level to self-directed expansion of understanding). As such, there might be ways to ensure that we can develop their interests when traditional classroom education might fail to help with these skills.

I know a little about a lot of things, and each of these unrelated subjects can often lead to fresh, new ideas. My frustration is that realizing them is difficult because it almost literally takes someone to show me a particular method in order for me to learn. That’s just how I operate, and understanding this is a vital piece of knowledge.

It proves to be somewhat challenging to explain this because my focus for learning is always shifting, to the inclusion of writing this out and actually finishing posting these posts (I have given up on at least 15 blog posts because I lost interest in finishing them, and they would have made for excellent reading to a non-ADHDer).

COME ON! YOU’RE LITERALLY RAMBLING

Yes, I am. I cannot help that.

The ideas presented to me in the form of abstract images and words and even sounds might seem like hallucinations based on the way I am describing them, but this is how my brain processes everything. Right now, for example, I am listening to Fleshgod Apocalypse in my head while typing this out and becoming inspired to play similar music while fighting the urge to laugh at..

You know what? That’s going nowhere still.

Our disorganized thoughts need a form of organization in order to function properly in the social world, and with the least possible discomfort. That said, when we laser focus on something, we tend to absorb information at lightning speed because we want to know everything RIGHT NOW. Given enough time to organize ideas, we then tend to develop our own systems of learning and structure. If we focused on organizational skills long enough, we would become master schedulers, and masters of our own routines.

The best way to learn about organizing things is to practice those skills. This is true for anyone and everyone.

This is why I have recently become more in tune to financial knowledge and literacy.

I read books all the time, and never finish them. Overloading information about a single income stream without connecting the dots to real-life examples tends to frustrate us, but once we make ONE transaction, more successful transactions tend to snowball. I have now become a household economist in the sense that I appropriate funds to work around our budget and debt relief.

So, how does that bring us to this post? Have I finally made a point?

NO, YOU HAVEN’T

All right! Stop yelling at me!

Figuring out systems which work is a challenge. As we discussed (as I wrote) earlier, developing systems comes after time, but only after practice. As soon as one can break down a successful set of rules, time limits, and meeting actual goals one can generate a system on their own to habitually increase the quality of their lives.

This brings me to the point, finally.

I understand that having a credit score is something that people are most familiar with when it comes to making purchases, and I think I have just made a solid idea as to how to utilize credit score improvement. I will, of course, put this into practice once I have reduced our debts to $0 (with the exception of the house, obviously), or I will actually utilize this idea in the middle of it. I haven’t quite decided.

See, the problem with me doing this is that it might actually be WAY too good to be true. This might not work at all, but at the same time, it combines two things: debt and investing.

Real estate is something I have been reading about, and I have made zero action on it. However, as Robert Kiyosaki has mentioned in books and videos, the idea is to use debt as a means to bring about wealth. On a small scale, this can work into much larger transactions.

One can use money to make money grow in the form of net worth, using things that are specifically NOT real estate. As a future owner of rental properties, one thing I can be sure of right now is that I have to USE the free information out there, and it can be found and turned into a gold mine. In a few short years, I can be OUT of debt and growing my wealth exponentially, and not a single second of college would have helped me out to any degree–  and most certainly, none of the information I learned in elementary school would have been responsible for this.

I learned basic mathematics, but using mathematics in real life (quadratic formula and square roots and other stuff like that) always made absolutely no sense to me, even through college.

But!

Using calculators as a means by which to figure out how to determine the speed of a train leaving two points at the same time on two islands in Hawaii is not practical for me to know.

THE NEXT MORNING

I started typing this out yesterday and was sidetracked by the fact that we needed to go somewhere. Happy birthday to me!

For and ADHDer, time management presents itself as a bit of a problem. If we take too much time to perform a task on a daily basis for weeks on end, we burn out. This, I believe, explains our short-lived attention to a hobby— at least, that is, in my experience. This is how we forget appointments, and sometimes we have a tendency to be late because we are trying to finish another hobby-related task before going out to do the adulting thing. It is almost as if we have a force guiding us to do something against the very grain of our daily lives, sometimes to the exclusion of other peoples’ needs. If you have ever been in the presence of an ADHDer, and they seem to lose track of time, understand that this is a daily struggle. Their (our) minds wander over and over again.

I have just somehow remembered the basic element of this thing that I am typing, and have lost track again, all in the course of three seconds.

Look, as difficult as it is to complete this, I feel it necessary to tell you these things because there are a lot of people out there doing the exact same thing that I am doing, on a daily basis, who have to struggle to stay on topic. Some people have a much milder version of ADHD than I do, and some who might have more profound symptoms and behavioral traits.

YAWN, MAN. YAWN.

Okay, I wrote it down.

Robert Kiyosaki knows how to invest. He has an exorbitant net worth because he knows how to use his money in the sense that he has it working for him. The basic method he teaches is to not spend on liabilities, but on assets. When you purchase assets, you begin from that very day to earn money on nearly autopilot. Granted, the cash on cash return is somewhat low, with some returns as low as 3% and some as high as 12%, or better. But the point here is to express that if you invest, you will, over the course of time (the long term), have passive income in the form of dividends.

Now we are back on track.

He also teaches that people who become millionaires almost always have real estate in their portfolios, and the reasons why are actually fairly astonishing to someone who has never even dabbled in a book on real estate. Lots of people in real estate deal with one type of real estate, particularly due to the fact that they like to invest into what works for them based on their familiarity.

Some others advance from residential to commercial real estate and raw land.

But almost every single real estate investor has tax-free cash flow. With enough properties under your belt, your cash flow can surpass the basic monthly expenditures for your own home, vehicle payments, and utilities. For example, if your monthly expenditures are $3,000 for gas, food, utilities, mortgage, insurance, and debt payments, then your monthly cash flow from properties to the tune of $3,001 per month will allow you to become financially free. At this point, you can double up on your real estate holdings to $6,000 tax free income, then $12,000, and so on and so forth.

I have yet to develop a system to get started.

In order to invest in real estate, you always have the option for creative financing. In order to take advantage of that, consider how much you might need to leverage. If you have, say, $50,000 to invest, that will allow you to make a single purchase for a $200,000 property.

You can take out a loan (which isn’t your money) to finance the property, and then immediately rent it out. Property management is always available to help screen applicants.

You can also find another investor and split the cash flow 50% (half to you for finding the property, and half to the investor who funded the property acquisition).

I would be MORE than willing to have someone take me by the hand and show me the ropes to real estate investing, and fork out half the profits to someone else because they helped me out.

But! What if you want to take smaller risks?

Well, this is also an option, but this is only a system I have devised. In order to test to see if it would work, I would have to perform the same actions, but for smaller investments.

Once I can see how it pans out, I can then capitalize on that idea. Taking on consumer debt is always a bad idea, but taking on good debt for leverage is where the real money is.

The entire point of this post has finally come to fruition. That took me a while.

You might wish to consider reading more about Robert Kiyosaki, and I will post affiliate links (yes, I would earn a small percentage of your purchase at no extra cost to you).

I am verily still in the learning stage of this new lifestyle, and my goal is to fight my way to the top without having to require someone else’s permission.

I know this blog post is hard to read, but it was difficult to get to this point. Interrupted thoughts do not even have to occur from outside stimuli— they come from within more often than not. We ADHDers pay attention to the noise in our heads, but when we can clear that noise, we can learn anything and everything we wish to. I am putting focus on financial freedom.

Thanks for reading. Sorry for it being all over the place.

Living With ADHD: Ups, Downs, And Some Other Things– I Think

One of the biggest hurdles as someone living with AHDH is the fact that there aren’t any public programs available to allow those of us with this condition to learn how to control our hyper-focus, because obviously, ADHD isn’t a one-size-fits-all by any degree. The range of individuals can be anything from a baker to a homeless veteran to an expert salesman to a fry cook at a restaurant.

We are everywhere, in the sense that less than 6 percent of the global population is affected by ADHD.

A good portion of the rest of the 94-plus-percent of the global population at least knows someone with this condition.

It can be difficult to discern who might have ADHD, so while you’re reading this, it might be helpful for someone on the inside to sort of expose the difficulties, the conditions, thought patterns, and a whole list of other qualities and quirks we have based on my personal experiences.

However, I must remind everyone that ADHD is not an umbrella term with very specific symptoms which apply to everyone with ADHD. The characteristics are going to range from mild to profound, and in my case, I’m not severe enough to be considered profound, but I do have it somewhat bad. It just so happens that my ADHD makes me like writing more than I like doing much of anything else– and it helps to understand, as well, the point that I drive home by the end of the article will allow you to understand not just me, but to understand what we ADHDers have to go through on a daily basis.

BEHAVIORS

Oh, how lovely it would be to be normal. But what is normal?

I don’t think we fully consider what it means to be normal, because normalcy is a far cry from the natural order of things. Carrying yourself professionally in public is considered a normal behavior (and of course! Who doesn’t want to be considered well-to-do while on a stroll at the mall?); presenting yourself to people as a “normie” is a challenge when you have ADHD. You happen to have a lot of energy for no reason whatsoever, and when someone brings up a subject of great interest to you, you dive deep into expressing your knowledge of said subject. People would normally run it across you in passing dialogue without thinking much of it, but as a ADHDer who knows a lot about this particular subject, your sole focus is on THAT subject, right then and there, and you’re in it for the long haul (here, meaning, you lead the entire conversation for a long, long time).

Now, the person who mentioned it is hearing all this babble, he or she being equally knowledgeable about the subject, politely nodding away as you chatter nonstop about this that and the other about it. The ins and the outs. Details.

Now here’s the problem– most of this is book knowledge. A good portion of it doesn’t come from on-the-job experience. My type of ADHD possesses literary strength, so I can speak from direct experience on writing and grammar in general. But seeing a video of someone doing some woodworking lets you know that you can explain what you saw in the video but cannot actually perform those action because you aren’t trained and you have zero hands-on experience. You then become frustrated because the professional woodworker makes it look easy, while your piece looks like complete garbage.

[This frustration is common for me. I can watch people making objects out of clay, but my hands aren’t trained for that kind of work. Sure, I can make a thumb pot, but the price of a pottery wheel far exceeds the monthly budget.]

Another basic behavior you might notice is easy distraction or losing train of thought. This is exactly what has happened just a little while ago in this article, but it wasn’t too obvious. One can be in the middle of a conversation and immediately forget what was just being said. There is a physical equivalent to this behavior in the form of reading: I can read a paragraph or a full chapter of a book or magazine article and grasp literally none of what I just read, thus forcing me to go back to reading the same passages. I have to maintain mindfulness to a task, lest I forget what happened. All too often, this is normal, frequent, and above all, uncontrollable. This leads to a change of subject entirely, and this is one of the more frustrating things that the family of an ADHD-mind must understand. We don’t do it on purpose, and we don’t mean to hurt your feelings. Sometimes, even the very things in which we exhibit great shared interest in the moment can still go by the wayside out of left field.

Regardless of how entertaining something might be, the thing which makes us lose interest is sustained attention. If the information is not profound or new, it might be perceived as a waste of time (I do sincerely apologize). That having been said, there are benefits to ADHD:

— When we focus on something, we FOCUS. We tend to get lost in time just reading or doing or learning. There have been days where my attention on something has gone for hours on end, and I will forget to eat meals entirely, to the tune of 30 minutes before dinner I finally realize I didn’t eat anything since breakfast this morning at 3 a.m., even before and after my nap. But I will have put in 10 hours of learning in one day, where that kind of focus in a classroom environment might be considered brutal, boring, or just plain impossible (10 hours straight of concentrated focus is entirely possible for an ADHDer to perform, and it even might be normal for us).

— We fall very quickly into learning things which snag our attention, and it can be something as insignificant to a normie as magnets or collecting coins from your birth year. Now, when this happens, the unexpected avalanche of learning takes place. Instead of simply and temporarily minding a refrigerator magnet, we with ADHD will run off to find books on magnets, learn about rare earth or neodymium magnets, learn about magnetic forces of the planets, which leads to a study on loosely understood elements of gravity, then atomic energy, then string theory, and then magically straight to guitar or music, and finally, when the chatter in your brain is finished– you have 30 open tabs, 12 unfinished articles, some death metal playing in the background, a paused audio book, and a run-on sentence in the form of a paragraph for your next blog post.

The amazing thing about this is not that there are a ton of open tabs, or the string of subjects directly, but the fact that each of these seemingly unrelated subjects are the basis of creativity and thinking. See, ADHD tends to lend its hand to wishing to learn everything. When you can sit down for hours upon hours and just study, what is going on is that the brain is forming pathways to creativity which can be used for problem solving. Those seemingly unrelated subjects I pseudo-listed in the preceding paragraph leads to considerable creativity in thinking outside of the “box” towards new goals, new lines of thinking, and new ways to climb to achieve new heights.

However, organization is a major problem for me, and I easily become drowned in these thoughts. Fifty subjects are fighting for my attention all at once, so all of those neat ideas very often become nothing more than passing thoughts. If we were to bring to fruition each of the myriad ideas, there would be an unlimited amount of constructive help I could bring to the table, but putting thoughts into business ideas is not exactly my forte– some people with ADHD have figured out how to master this skill, and I am currently studying these things to get out of debt and literally earn my way to freedom, which leads me to yet another benefit:

— Some of the wealthiest people in the world have signs of ADHD. They seem to never stop. In fact, ADHD might be the very thing which allows entrepreneurs to effortlessly make money to the tune of six figures per year after hyper focusing on one thing long enough to make something out of an idea. Not everyone who goes to college is a wealthy human or makes a good living out of their knowledge, but of course, this is subjective entirely.

SHORTCOMINGS

Benefits are well and good, but there are obviously some shortcomings to this condition.

— Forgetfulness! You know beyond all shadow of doubt that forgetfulness is a huge factor in life. We must remember things in order to perform properly in life. However, losing your train of thought mid-sentence is a problem of sorts for me, but my biggest problem is going to the grocery store to get a few items. I actually have to have someone send me a text to help me remember to grab something. If you verbally tell me before sending me a text and you do not include that spoken item in the text, I will forget. This happens all the time, and I do not ever realize it until someone asks where the onion is. “Did you text it to me? If not, then no. You might have told me, but if you didn’t text me the item, then the onion you need is still sitting at the store.” That’s just as matter-of-fact as I can be about practical forgetfulness. It results in multiple trips to the store.

— Poor grades were my normal in elementary school because I simply didn’t have an interest in school whatsoever. Later in college, I realized that it was still true. Educational settings and meetings are SO BORING that I literally become sleepy as soon as I know I have to sit through a lecture. No offense to the lecturer; because I have this condition, I must yawn profusely until I can escape. I must tap my pencil in my hands or on the desk in order to focus. I know it sounds like it would be some kind of a distraction to the rest of the classroom, but I cannot focus that much on what equates to crap. Sorry, humanities teacher– you’re a great human, but lectures bore me to death.

What I’m trying to say is that the educational system does not cater to us very well. The regular population can sit and learn in an institutional environment, while I must literally escape to feel better. It isn’t a fear, it’s just a very uncomfortable place to be. The reason my grades were bad was because of the perceived element of overwhelm of homework. I really, really tried to do well in school, but I simply couldn’t do it. If people had an opinion about me, I wouldn’t have ever known it, save for the few bullies who would quite literally find things intentionally to irritate me or upset me. Sometimes it didn’t work because I would be completely ignorant to their motives, which actually irritated the sometimes. There was one kid who randomly pushed me into the mud despite my efforts to not be in the way between classes (this was around 7th grade, actually). He didn’t really care much that I caught a hold of him and dragged him into the mud with me, but all he did was get mad that I reacted that quickly and ruined his new, white shoes and socks.

Wait, I wasn’t talking about that. I was talking about… Mindlessness? Something. Obliviousness?

Probably. We can be completely mindless sometimes, and that can really burn bridges.

MINDLESSNESS

Okay, yeah. We pay attention, but only to what we want, or to that which piques our interest. We fail sometimes to acknowledge the needs of others (we are very self-aware and usually tend to cater to our needs). This does not mean we do not care, but it is rather that we don’t understand that this element very well. This leads to relationship problems. The partner doesn’t understand that we don’t fully understand how to act in a relationship as it pertains to emotional feelings and mutual terms. We are fairly absent-minded because we are thinking of something other than the very stimulus needed for a successful relationship, and this can create stress in both individuals.

The needs of the significant other must be met, and this is oftentimes either completely dismissed (not intentionally) or there must be an element of reminding the ADHD mind that they have things they would like as well. ADHD is a form of special needs, but in my case, I am a terrible provider of emotion. I tend to bottle it up because for some reason the needs of others tends to sip away from my mind. This can be a significantly negative trait of ADHD– we do not mean to ignore you. We do not mean to go weeks without contacting you or communicating. I, for one, must apologize profusely for it– but it is something I cannot control.

But this does not mean we are completely heartless, because we have our own feelings to deal with. Pervading thoughts wish to make themselves known multiple times throughout every hour, and this can become frustrating to someone who hasn’t figured out a way to manage them. We feel on a very deep level, yet some of us might have very low emotional intelligence. Considering the needs of others is difficult when your needs haven’t been met.

This can translate loosely into poor relationship history, or at the very least, difficulty maintaining relationships. The forgetfulness combined with the urge to learn a new skill every month and a lack of capacity to organize time properly in conjunction with worrying about how long it takes for certain actions to take place– it’s a complete and utter jumble, a mess, and it can lead to dishevelment and a lack of proper care, such as hygiene, cleaning the house, doing laundry, appropriately cleaning dishes, and in some cases a person living with ADHD might not think about the nutritional value of their chosen diets. we WANT to eat clean, but we simply give the brush to our health in favor of the convenience of pizza and other fast food places.

CONCLUSION

Being ADHD can be a fun experience sometimes. It can be more frustrating than anything if there is not a proper guide to allow someone to direct their focus in a healthy and constructive way. The constant worry can be troublesome, but the constant entertainment you obtain by simply reading about new things all the time is actually a very enriching experience. Done correctly, someone with ADHD who learns a path to success for himself or herself is someone who has obviously found the perfect way to play the game of life, given their problems, their struggles, and their general quality of life.

I would like to remind you, reader, that these experiences are related directly to myself. There are varying degrees of inattentiveness and hyperactivity which might not be reflected in this post specifically. If you made it this far, thank you very much.

Questions? Just ask!