ADHD Insights: WHY It's Not What You Think – Featuring Gabor Mate

So how does ADD and ADHD develop?

Yeah, so ADHD is said in medical terminology to be the most heritable mental health. Illness, mental disease. Well, in this book I make the point that to say that ADD is the most heritable mental condition is like saying that quartz is the most chewable crystal because it's neither a disease nor is it inherited. So go back to your childhood, you being abused. Go back to my childhood, the wartime persecution, all the things as I said earlier. Could we have escaped? No. Could we have changed the situation? No. Could we have fought back? No. What does the mind do when, when it's under too much stress? One of the things it does is automatically tunes out. So the tuning out, but this is when the brain is developing. The human brain develops from really from in utero to adulthood. And already stresses on the mother during pregnancy can affect the brain of the child. So if a mother is very stressed or depressed during pregnancy, that kid is already at risk for ADHD later on. It's got nothing to do with genetics or very little to do with genetics. I'm putting it that way.

You underwater.

Thank you. So the tuning out is simply one of these natural protections, one of these automatic wise dynamics on the part of your organism to protect yourself from stress. That's too much. Now what you have to understand again is that the human brain biologically develops under the impact of the environment. And as an article from the Harvard center on the Developing Child, which is the world's most prestigious child developmental organization, published in the journal Pediatrics, which is the official journal of the American pediatric academy in February 2012, pointed out, the human brain develops from in utero until adulthood. And the most important input into the physiological, healthy development of the human brain is the quality of adult child relationships. So we're relational creatures, which again is what Yuruka is all about. And our brain itself develops only the impact of our emotional interactions with our parents. Now, if you look at why more and more kids are being diagnosed with this condition, it can't be genetics. Genes don't change in 10 or 20 or 15 years. Now that we're seeing ADHD in countries that never used to have it under the impact of corporate globalization, it's because parents are more and more stressed in this world. They're more and more isolated. And the parents are stressed and isolated. And by the way, we were never meant to be parented in nuclear families by a couple or perhaps a single parent. We evolved for millions of years and hundreds of thousands of years. And even in the existence of our own species. We've been here for about 150, 200,000 years. If our species existence can be measured in one hour, then until six minutes ago we lived in small band hunter gatherer groups where parents had support from other people, where the kids were with the parents the whole day, where kids developed in the context of adult relationships. That's our need. So in this society which is more and more stressed, and if you look at the triggers for stress, these are the research proven triggers for stress in people. It's uncertainty, lack of information, loss of control and conflict. Our society could not be better designed to stress people. So parents are stressed, not their own fault, not their own fault. They're stressed, the kids are stressed. When the parents are stressed, you can measure the kids stress hormone levels, they'll be elevated. Now how do kids deal with that stress? They tune out. And now they're being diagnosed with this so called disease. It does have a biological template in the brain because the biology of the brain develops in interaction with the environment. So sometimes medications can help, but they're not the answer. The answer is to change the atmosphere so kids can develop in a healthier way, so they can feel safe. And when that happens, the brain will start developing in healthier ways. So ADHD is not this disease, inherited, otherwise it's actually a response to stressful circumstances in this culture, despite the best efforts of parents. And the way to really deal with it is not to medicate these millions of kids and to try and just control their behaviors, but to try to understand what's happening for them.

Very good.

So.

What?

I hope so with your book and my book, and this may sound like.

I am a marketer, but let me jump in here for a moment if I may. In this society we make certain assumptions about human nature. And the assumption that we make is that human nature is competitive and aggressive and selfish and aggressive. Don't we just make that assumption? Whenever somebody does something selfish or aggressive or manipulative, what do we say? Oh, that's just human nature. But when somebody does something kind or generous or giving, do we say, oh, that's just human nature. So we make certain assumptions. But your book, which is actually designed for the entrepreneurial world, it's not about what's in it for me, it's about what's in it for them. And it's about building connections, which is actually human nature. We're wired for connection, you see, and we're actually more wired for love than we are for selfishness. If our needs are met and so if you ask yourself this, anybody in this room, just ask yourself, when do you feel more at peace inside? When is your viscera, your guts and your heart and your lungs more expansive and more relaxed? When you've been selfish and aggressive and grasping, or when you've been kind and generous and connected with people? Well, the answer is going to be, in most of our cases, that it's under the second condition that should tell you what human nature is actually all about. So your book here is actually an appeal to people's essential needs.

Thank you.

Yeah.

And see, what I hope is I want to take the givers of the world to have them be better, less jaded or not jaded and better boundaried givers. Because if you are a giver, you're going to have takers. You're going to have. And I hope it can reach the takers of the world to get them to realize this is probably not the best operating system. And I understand why people become takers and to a degree, narcissists and sociopaths and psychopaths. And there's a lot of trauma as a result of that for those people. And I think your book is just a course in how to be a more compassionate, caring, connected person. Because what I say is, you know, my book is disguised as a capability book, but it's really a character book.

Yeah, yeah.

And if people develop the capabilities and they develop the compassion, they are going to be more connected givers. But I say if you're disconnected from yourself, it's really hard to go out and connect with other people, because how do you develop relationships really authentically if you hate yourself or if you're disconnected with yourself or you have all this pain internally and oftentimes externally? And I think both of our books do really well together. They help each other. Because my whole thing is I just believe we can really build a better entrepreneur. And of course, my goal with Genius Recovery is to change the global conversation about how people view and treat addicts with compassion instead of judgment and find the best forms of treatment that have efficacy and share it with the world. So it's an educational platform, and you're one of the best educators in this particular area. So it's always to. To my interest and my goals to take you and share it with the world as much as we can, because it's important, it's significant.

So I want to ask you this.

Question in front of everyone just to kind of see your perspective off. I have a VR company called Genius X and my co Founders are here in the room. And Deanne Adamson, who, you know, she's got. We've got a course with her on addiction recovery, and I want to do courses on fantasy contamination and meaning. Going past the fantasy, where being someone in the VR world, what would happen if you change the environment? And where this came from is you introduced me to Dr. Bruce Alexander, who wrote the Globalization of Addiction. He's the one that originally did the rat park studies. And one of the things that my co founders we said. I said there's so much tech that. That is doing destructive things. There's blood sports, there's gaming, there's gambling, there's distractibility. And we don't want people to live in the VR world. What we want is to be able to change the environment, and you can do that immersively and let people experience stuff. I would love to, and I would pay for it with you, just to develop a program with you in virtual reality, because we want to do it right, meaning people immersively. I think we can build a compassionate inquiry process in VR where people can literally hear Gabor talking to them. And I know that sounds crazy.

Thank you, Joe. I'm really looking for more things to do in my life. I know.

Yeah.

You know, that's actually funny. You know what, is this too narcissistic of me to have socks that say.

What'S good for them?

You know? No, but. And by the way, I'm not saying you even need to be involved in it. I just like the whole. The whole. You've already created it. You've already said it. I'm just saying another way to, like, one of the ways that you. You're so. You're reaching so many people is you're out there. And by the way, most people don't know this. He was at a. You're at a very. You're in the middle of a big conference in. Across the country right now, and he flew in last night just to come and do the interview here, and he has to fly out right after this, literally just to be here. So I want to just acknowledge you.

For that because it's.

It's.

It's huge. And.

Well, you're not easy to say no to. Let me put it that.

Yeah.

And plus, I just know that we help so many people. I mean, that was evidenced by the stuff that we've done. So the point is, there's a lot of different ways to treat trauma, to address depression, to address anxiety, and you have studied and document so many of them here. And the best people in the world that are helping others with it. You're personal friends with all of them, and I know a handful of them, too. So for things that. For everyone here that really. How many of you just totally resonate with what Gabor is saying? I mean, you can just see yourself and what he's describing.

Yeah.

Sir, you didn't put your hand up. What's wrong with you? I'm joking.

Well, I've been saying this as a joke, too. There's a lot of my. I said this yesterday when I was talking to my friend Marie Forleo. I was interviewing her. Is that a lot of my friends, some that I've introduced you to, that won't do the deep work or have a fear or a wall to go in and do therapy or do a journey. What they do instead is they start a podcast.

Yeah.

That explains all the podcasts.

Yeah, it really does. Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video. And I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out in. And if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description. Or you can wait till the end of this video, or you can Simply go to joe'sfreebook.com and you can get a copy there. So you talk about stuff like medicine journeys, and you talk about some. That, to a lot of people, seem incredibly extreme. And I'm very careful to go tell people to go do ayahuasca or MDMA or psilocybin, because it's not the. It's not the medicine itself or what some people say is a drug. It's the. It's. It's, as Timothy Leary said, I think, in the 50s, the set and setting.

Right.

And could you speak to that? Just because it's. It's become a trendy thing now, and there's people that are doing it well, and there's others that are putting people in dangerous situations.

Yeah. So I do have one chapter out of 33 on psychedelics, which kind of puts it into perspective. Like, it's not the major thing of what I do. And recently I refused to write a blurb for a book. And I said, even this is the best book ever written in the history of the universe. I will not blurb this book because of the title. The title was How Psychedelics Will Save the World. I don't think anything is going to save the world. No one particular modality is going to save the world or even the medical system. I think, for that we need transformations on a much larger level in our thinking and in our activity in our institutions and how we relate to each other. Nevertheless, psychedelics can make a contribution. And as you heard me speaking today, and Joe and I are conversing, so much of what drives our behaviors, our unconscious patterns that we adopted in response to traumatic events in childhood, so that so much of what pushes us and drives us, we're not that aware of it. And so many of the mental health challenges, for example, or physical health challenges for that matter, that are plaguing us have to do with childhood dynamics. So, for example, depression. So depression is this inherited biological illness? No, it ain't. You know how much evidence there is that depression is a biologically caused illness? Zero. That's how much evidence there is. And the fact that now I've taken antidepressants and they've helped me, but the fact that an antidepressant helped me doesn't prove like the serotonin, which is the medication, the brain chemical that the antidepressants elevate, like Prozac or Zoloft and so on. Okay, so that made me feel better, but that doesn't prove that my depression was caused by a lack of serotonin any more than if, you know, you go to a party and you're feeling very shy and you have one shot of bourbon, and now you feel more sociable and you talk to people and you're more confident, don't. Does that prove that your social shyness was caused by lack of bourbon in your brain? So we make these false connections. If you look at what depression actually is, what does it mean to depress something? It means to push it down. That's what it means. And what do people push down when they're depressed? Their emotions, do they feel flat? Now why would somebody push down emotions? Because in childhood it was too dangerous for them to experience them because their environment rejected them somehow if they experienced their emotions. So they pushed their emotions down in order to belong and to be accepted. And then 30 years later, they're diagnosed with this condition called depression. Now you ask about psychedelics, whether we're talking about depression or addiction or the self induced stress that drives many of the autoimmune conditions out there. What the psychedelics do is they temporarily remove the membrane between the conscious and the unconscious. And now you get to see all the rage and all the pain, all the fear that you've been carrying inside, but you get to see it in a safe environment, ideally. And by the way, not all environments are safe. And there's a lot of negative stuff that happens in the psychedelic world. We have to acknowledge that. But in a safe environment, with the right guidance now, you get to see what's been driving you no longer as the helpless, isolated child, but as an adult with the capacities of an adult. And you get to witness yourself guided and supported and kept safe. What a powerful experience that can be. And also, of course, under the impact of the psychedelics, people can have the experience of getting to know their true selves, the part that they got disconnected from, long, long time ago. So ideally, and in a very romanticized nutshell, that's what psychedelics can do. It's more complex than that. And it's never just. Here it is. I know, I've got it. I mean, believe me, I've done psychedelics. And if you don't do the integrative work, if you don't, they just open the door for you. It's still up to you to go through that door, walk through that door and walk that path in your actual life. You can't rely on that psychedelic experience. But a lot of people have found it transformative. They've made realizations about themselves that would have taken them a long time, if at all, to get to through ordinary psychotherapy. So they certainly have a role to play, and they've been shown to play significant potential positive roles in the treatment of ptsd, for example, various medicines can do that in the right conditions. People can overcome addictions. People can just be closer to themselves. So that's the ideal but realizable benefit of psychedelics.

Very good, very good. And there's a great chapter in the Myth of Normal on this. So thank you.

Let me bring you into the world of ADHD, a world that I live in, obviously. I'm 71 years old. I've been living in it for 71 years, and I've been treating by now thousands of people who have it. I know this condition inside and out, and I'm here to tell you the term is completely misleading. Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is a terrible term. Throw it away, throw it away. We don't have a deficit of attention at all. If we did, it would be a form of dementia, which it's not. We have an abundance of attention. Our challenge is to control it. Our mind is going a mile a minute. We've got a race car for a brain, a Ferrari for a brain. We have just so much attention. We're brimming with attention. But the Ferrari engine that drives us has bicycle brakes. So Our challenge is to control all this attention, to control this tremendous mental activity. Not to suppress it, but to direct it. I make the analogy with Niagara Falls. It's just a lot of noise and mist until you build a hydroelectric plant and then you can light up the state of New York. So I'm pretty much in the hydroelectric plant business. I take people with these incredibly powerful Niagara Fall brains and help them build their hydroelectric plant. And entrepreneurial activity is a really good example of a hydroelectric plant. Most entrepreneurs have this condition. What is it? Well, the condition is a collection of ways of being in the world. Again, I don't see it as a disorder, I see it as a trait. And if you manage it right, it becomes a superpower. But if you don't, you see it's high stakes. If you don't, you live a life of underachievement, of frustration. Worst case scenario, addiction, incarceration. The prisons are way overrepresented people with undiagnosed adhd. So are the halls of the addicted, the unemployed, the people who can't stay in relationships, the people who are getting in their own way time and again, self sabotage and whatnot. It's undealt with unrecognized. It can be holy hell living with this condition. But if you recognize it and learn how to develop braking power and learn how to channel the tremendous power that you've got, then super success. And I could name you so many people who have it. In addition to your host, Joe Polish, the man who founded JetBlue Airlines, David Nealman, big time add. And he went from JetBlue to found another airline, then another airline, now he's finding yet a fourth airline. And he invented the electronic ticket, by the way. And I think it's ironic that it's someone with this condition with ADHD who thinks of a way for us to go to the airport and not have to remember to bring our ticket. He also came up with the idea of putting television sets in the back of the seat in front of you, because the ADHD boredom is kryptonite. And so he didn't want to be bored on flights, so he said, why not put a TV in? So suddenly? And that's David Nealman. You've all heard of the PCR test for Covid. The PCR stands for polymerase chain reaction. Well, the man who invented that, Cary Mullis, he's now in heaven. But he won the Nobel prize in chemistry. It was one of the biggest advances right up there with double helix in terms of advances in chemistry. He had flaming adhd. Gary Mullis was one of his favorite things to do was walk on the beach in Malibu with a penguin. He was a genuine eccentric fellow, as people with ADHD tend to be. So if you manage this right, the sky is the limit. I'm mentioning sky. Richard Branson has it too. So you're in really good company. But watch out, because the downside, as I pointed out, is also very real. Probably the biggest pothole in the road of ADHD is addiction. And addiction is 10 times more common amongst us. And we're basically self medicating. And it's not just chemicals, it's behavioral addictions as well. But if you get your ADHD diagnosed, then it's a lot easier to control the addiction. See, our greatest asset and what sets us apart from Joe and Jill normal is our imagination. We have an extraordinary imagination and that can serve us or it can impede us. Let me explain a little bit more of what goes on in our busy, busy brains. The condition is defined in the diagnostic manual in terms of three core symptoms. Distractibility, impulsivity, and hyperactivity. We are remarkably distractible. We are remarkably impulsive and we're hyperactive or very restless. Got to be moving. When you take each one of those supposed negative symptoms and turn it on its head and you get a tremendous asset that you can't buy or teach. The flip side of distractibility is curiosity. We are unbelievably curious. We are driven by curiosity. The ADD brain is like a toddler on a picnic. It goes wherever curiosity leads it with no regard for danger or authority. Off into the lake, into the woods, stick your hand in a snake's nest. I mean, we are driven by curiosity. We will not sit still until we find out what's in there, what's over there. Well, that's what makes us distracted. We're distracted. What's that? What's, what's that? We, we want to know. We're the opposite of lazy. We're the opposite of, you know, taking things as they come. We, we are forever investigating. And that's why we're such great scientists and such great entrepreneurs and such great creators. You know, we noticed the petri dish changed since we left it. And next thing you know, we've, we've, we've discovered penicillin. So, you know, we are, we are. Curiosity is our driving force. And you know, and as I mentioned before, boredom is our kryptonite. The minute we feel absence of stimulation, curiosity drives us off to find something else. You know, that, that that will, that will engage us. You see, we, we have to be engaged. We have to be stimulated. We can't deal with lack of stimulation. That's called boredom and that's kryptonite. We repel from it. We reflexively. We just can't stay. We can't stand that state. Like nature abhors a vacuum, ADHD abhors absence of stimulation. Or cold boredom. That's distractibility. Again, you have these paired opposites. Distractibility, curiosity. Each negative has a paired positive. Impulsivity may be my favorite one. Impulsivity is what gets us all into trouble. Impulsive decision making, reckless deal making, impulsive romances, impulsive actions, danger seeking behavior, all that impulsive. Well, let me ask you, what is creativity but impulsivity? Gone, right? You don't plan to have a new idea? You don't say, it's 10 o', clock time for my creative idea and lay it like an egg? No, Creative ideas pop. They come spontaneously, unbidden, unplanned, in the midst of something else, completely not related. They come impulsively. If you tamp down all your impulses, you will not be creative. And those people who have what I call attention surplus disorder, they never have new ideas because they're, they're, they censor them. Before they reach consciousness, their, their mind rejects them as being, you know, too new, too alien, you know, so, so it's the ultimate conformist who's just, you know. But we are the ultimate non conformist. We welcome the new idea. Now, 9 out of 10 of them are useless, but 1 out of 10 wins you the Nobel Prize, you know, so, so our creativity and our impulsivity go hand in hand. And that, that's why you don't want to get rid of, you don't want to turn your, repress, your impulsivity so much as you want to have breaking power, you want to be able to direct it and know when to shut up and when to speak up. You know, and that's hard for us because we tend to just, you know, we blurt things out. We, you know, I used to, when I was dating, I can't tell you how many women I asked to marry me on the first date. I'd say, well, we're having fun, let's just make it last forever. And now I've been married to my wife sue for 33 years, so I'm not in danger any longer of proposing marriage at the spur of the moment. But you know, there is in that also a tremendous positivity. We fall in Love, if you will, pretty quickly with a deal, with a project, with an activity, with a cause. We are prone to fall in love and in a good way. And that's part of our impulsivity, if you will. We are ready for action. We're ready to give it our all. We're ready to go for broke. And we're kind of innocent in that way. And people say, well, we should be more cautious. Well, the best way to do that is to partner up with someone who's more cautious because it's awfully hard for us to exercise that on our own. I've been trying for years to learn how to be more cautious and I've not succeeded. But I have good friends and advisors who are naturally more cautious. Then the third element of that triad, hyperactivity. You get to be my age. I'm 71. It's called energy. I'm really glad I've got this little turbo pack on my back. You know, I was born with a genetic, you know, extra charge of energy and it served me very well throughout my life, you know, but once again, you know, you can be out of control. And so you need to learn to put the brakes on. You know, you have this runaway brain that's forever wanting to jump out of the corral. And so you have to, you have to learn how to, you know, to saddle it up and ride it so it doesn't ride you, so it doesn't run away with you. And that's the challenge. Well, but it's a very doable thing. So I'll mention one other quality that I want to get into management a little bit. But our sense of time, you know, we, we don't have the same executive function skills that other people do. We're not detail oriented by nature. We have trouble sweating the details, planning, organizing, prioritizing. And it's particularly noticeable around time. Our sense of time is fundamentally different. In our world, there are basically only two times. There's now and there's not now. So you say the proposal is due on my desk next Thursday, not now. And it's just gone until not now is almost now. And so we are forever getting things done in a panic at the very last minute. And what we're doing, what happens in a panic is your body puts out a lot of adrenaline. So you're essentially self medicating with adrenaline. And adrenaline is chemically very similar to the medications we use to treat adhd. And that's why you find a lot of people with ADHD drawn to very high stem Professions, Entrepreneur, trader on the commodities exchange, trial attorney, Navy seals. I've worked with them and they're not allowed to take medication, but they say that doesn't matter because danger is their medication. And that's exactly right. They get the adrenaline hit. Okay, so what do you do in terms of, as I like to put it, unwrapping the gift or strengthening the brakes? And there are a number of steps. The most commonly talked about one is medication. And medication used properly is great. It operates like eyeglasses. It's effective about 80% of the time. In my case, it doesn't work. My medication is coffee. But 80% of people will respond very favorably to stimulant medication. Now 20% won't. So, you know, it's not anywhere near 100%. But if you, if it does work, it works like eyeglasses. It allows you to focus, doesn't take away your creativity any more than eyeglasses do. In fact, it allows you to use your creativity with, with greater care and direction and, and it'll, and it allows you to focus even when you're not super stimulated. So, so when the meds work, they, they can be really life changing and take you from here to here in a short amount of time. But remember, they don't, they don't always work. Now what else goes into unwrapping the gift or learning how to direct the power of this brain? One of the most important ones, and I stress it in my new book, is finding your right difficult. Yeah. Now what do I mean by that? Well, I mean, it has to be the combination of difficult. See, if it's not challenging, we'll get bored. We love difficult, but it's got to be the right difficult. So it's also got to be in your wheelhouse. It's got to be something that resonates with you. We're very mission driven, so. Appeals to the mission. Well, you know, for an entrepreneur, the mission is to grow something, to grow the business. And that's a big turn on. And it's, you know, it's. By the way, it's growth that turns us on, not money. We like money. Sure. Who doesn't? But it's really that feeling of growing something that is so exciting for us. So the right difficult and challenging. But in my case, I discovered my right difficult in 12th grade. It was writing. And writing is a very stern taskmaster. It's never as good as you want it to be. But I've written 21 books and the reason is if I don't Have a book going, I get depressed. So you know, I finished ADHD 2.0, now I'm on, I'm writing a novel, my next one. And you know, I have to have something going. And for you guys and ladies, I'm virtually certain you have to have some deal cooking or project cooking or something you're working toward in order for you to feel right. So it's really important to find your right difficult. If you don't, you won't be at your peak. Another real important step is to learn how to manage your dark side. Learn how to manage. Most people with a tremendous imagination, which is really the hallmark of adhd, have a dark side. Have a side they maybe don't talk about, but they have a dark side where they brood and ruminate and get down on themselves and think they're a fraud and imposter. And by the way, that's when they're most likely to turn to drugs, is to self medicate the dark side. So you want to learn how to manage that dark side, obviously without illicit drugs or behavioral addictions like spending, shopping, sex, gambling, whatnot. And the best way to do that, let me explain it to you because this is fresh out of new neuroscience. Turns out when you're doing something constructive, positive, four different regions in your brain light up in aggregate. They're called the Task Positive Network. We can see this on FMRI and functional magnetic resonance imaging. We can see the imagination in action on fmri, the tpn, the Task Positive Network. Now when the task is completed, when the deal is done, when the cake is baked, whatever it might happen to be, the TPN shuts down. What lights up instead is called the Default Mode Network, the dmn, which I call the DNA for the following reason. In those of us with adhd, the demon which is the seed of your imagination, instead of building castles in Spain, you know it attacks you. It sends out this terrible onslaught of negative messages. You suck. You're stupid, you're ugly, you're boring. You're never going to achieve your goal. You're never going to become the person you wish you could. All the other people are doing better than you. You're way behind in the race, you're never going to get there. And furthermore, you're ugly and boring and you just lay it on yourself. You just attack yourself viciously and horribly. One reason you keep in that state is contentment is too bland. You never say someone was riveted in contentment, but you do say they were riveted in self hatred. In fear, in anxiety, in images of gloom and doom. So it's riveting and gripping. Remember, we're always looking for stimulation. And so we'll sit there in this dark, dark place for extended periods, unable to snap out of it. What's the treatment? And this is a terribly important insight because it's so common in highly creative people. The treatment is not medication. Medication really doesn't touch it. The treatment is so simple, but so difficult to enact. Sometimes it's to shut off its oxygen supply. The DMN depends upon your feeding it with your attention. So you have to redirect your attention. And that's hard to do because like I told you, it's very gripping. Painful, but gripping. So you have to rip it away. Redirect your attention to something else. Go for a run, have a conversation with a friend, blast loud music, go out and chop down a tree. I mean, do something that will engage your imagination and shut off your attention. Being directed to the default mode network to the demon. That's a tremendous life skill if you can learn to do that. You basically will exorcise that demon. You will exercise the power that the dark side has over you. No medication, just redirecting your attention. And the motto is don't feed the demon. And what we tend to feed it with is our attention. Don't feed the demon. Redirect your attention so you do not have to be living in fear and the grip of the, of the dark side, which most highly creative people, most entrepreneurs have, that they tend not to talk about it because we tend to want to be positive and upbeat. But it does haunt an awful lot of us. And if you'll just do what I just recommended, you'll be able to master that, to tame that. There's a whole chapter about it in ADHD 2.0 that I recommend to you. I want to add one more element in terms of unwrapping the gift. And then I will stop and entertain your questions. That is the force of connection. We live in highly disconnected times. Covid certainly threw a tremendous curveball into all of our lives. And people are separated physically and the warring with each other over politics and positions and all that. And that's not good for us. That is not good for us. We really desperately need connection. So you guys coming together, for example, example. So good for you. You are extending your life by having this meeting, just being with each other, sharing each other's energy. I call it the other vitamin C vitamin connect. And it's way underappreciated. In terms of how powerful it is, you know, loneliness, social isolation. And most people don't know this is as dangerous a risk factor for early death as cigarette smoking. Social isolation is as dangerous as cigarette smoking. And the beauty is social isolation you can cure if you make a priority of doing it as you all have done by coming to the Genius Network meeting. But keep up with friends, talk to people in the supermarket. Don't walk around with your head down, glaring and glowering and feeding the dmn. Instead, try to look up, look outside. And I prescribe dogs. Dogs are the world's greatest provider of connection. Get a dog. You know, it's no accident that God spelled backwards as dog. And you know, so prioritize friendship, prioritize dogs, prioritize participating in causes, going to meetings. It's not enough to believe in something, go to the meeting, connect, you know, really. And connection is really the source of pretty much the best of life. And disconnection is the source of pretty much the worst of life. So whenever you're feeling a little bit out of sorts, connect. One of my favorite mottos is never worry alone. It's fine to worry. It's good to worry. You solve problems, but when you worry alone, you tend to catastrophize and make things worse. When you worry with someone, you start into problem solving. Well, those are three of the of the main methods of helping you unwrap the gift. Basically, I hope you've identified with what I'm saying. I hope you can see it as a. As a real positive in your life as long as you manage it properly. And it does separate you from the pack. Because, you know, you, You've got us, you've got a special power. And it's just a matter of learning how to manage that special power and develop it and, you know, hook up to your hydroelectric plant, find your right difficult. And then the. The world is just an incredibly exciting venture for as long as we get to be here.

You know, I was. As I think about our time today, I want. I look at it that what I look at myself as is kind of an advocate for all of our people, as I'm one of them. Our people, meaning entrepreneurs with ADD Proudly, who are, you know, making their way in the world here. And as I was thinking that, I realized that you're one of our people too. And you may be, if I think of myself as an ambassador of our people, you beyond all odds, you're one of our people with adhd, but also with dyslexia, who has not only managed to get by in life. But you have managed somehow to summit the academic pentathlon of getting to the top of a very demanding field in medicine. And on top of that, a specialty in medicine that allows you to be not just a doctor, but a psychiatrist. All things that require amazing focus and ability to read and comprehend. So you're living proof of you figured something out here. So it was just dawned on me as I was thinking about your accomplishment here.

Well, and Dean, honestly, I'm small potatoes compared to some of the people who have these conditions. It's just a myth that ADHD and dyslexia are disorders. They can be disorders, don't get me wrong. They can ruin your life if you don't know what's going on with them. The prison population is full of people and the unemployed and the addicted, but so are the halls of the gifted and the supreme entrepreneurs. Most entrepreneurs have this, and I often think we should rename it the Entrepreneur's trait. And I'll just name a couple, just so you be more specific. David Nealman, who's become a friend of mine, he founded JetBlue Airlines. And, and he's the guy who invented the electronic ticket and the typical add, it just came to him out of nowhere. And, and it is ironic that it's someone who has ADD who thinks of a way for us to go to the airport and not have to remember to bring our ticket.

Exactly.

And, and, and he also, because, you know, we adders, we hate boredom. He came up with the idea of putting televisions in the seat in front of you so when you're on an airplane, you don't get bored. You know, those are. And then, you know, of course, Branson famously has ADD and goes to outer space. And it's not just men, women. The woman who runs Indigo Books, Heather Reisman, up in Canada, big time add. And I'll add one more just because it's so appropriate to our time. The man who invented the polymerase chain reaction, the PCR test that we're all getting our Covid tested, Kerry Mullis won the Nobel Prize in chemistry for inventing that. He's since passed away, but he was hugely add, very eccentric, but obviously gifted. So, you know, my life's mission is to free people from the, the stigma, shame and ignorance. And it was so appropriate. I'm just going to read you, if I might, an email I got this morning. I gave a talk this morning to a group of doctors and the man who organized it sent me this email and I just so this is today, he says, I was the rambunctious child who got straight A's without studying or ever paying attention. My parents would say he's really smart, but he's all over the place. I was the kid who failed every time standardized testing, was placed in remedial classes in middle and high school, but then moved up to the advanced classes in the first week of school. I was the freshman engineering student who became truly despondent after his first failed exam, convinced that he was stupid and incapable of earning an engineering degree. Then I learned about adhd, read several of your books, and realized that I was probably not a stupid imposter posing as a smart person after all. Well, now this guy is a resident in surgery, and he's got prizes for his engineering projects, and he's going to change the world. But had he not learned about adhd, he was ready to cast himself onto the slag heap, which is what happens. I mean, all of you guys in Genius Network are shining examples of how to turn it into gold, but unfortunately, you're a minority. The majority of people who have this condition still struggle, and sometimes extremely so. And it's largely because the public is still ignorant as to what this thing is. They think it's hyperactive little boys who are overturning tables in classrooms. And there's so much, so much more to it than that. I mean, it is. And the notion of it being called a deficit disorder is so misleading. We don't have a deficit of attention. We have an abundance of attention. Our challenge is to control it. You know, and the. One of my favorite analogies, it's like we've got a Ferrari engine for a brain. We've got this incredibly powerful imagination that just never stops. It's constantly churning up new ideas, new projects, new thoughts, new images, and it's just. Just. Just incredibly powerful mind. But with the Ferrari engine for a brain, we've also got bicycle brakes. We don't have the braking power to slow it down, to come in for a landing, to stop and to focus. And so. And so. But. But I'm a brake specialist. And. And, you know, once you get some control, then the sky's the limit.

And you said something. You and I and Joe were talking a little while ago, and you had said something new that. I hadn't heard you say that, because I've heard you talk about the idea of the Ferrari engine with the bicycle brakes, and I get that, but you were likening the. The tools that you need, the.

The.

The learnings or the Approaches to this as harnessing, like the hydro power plant, harnessing the power of a waterfall.

Yes.

The waterfall is just untapped potential until you put a hydro converting mechanism in place to turn it into power. Can you say more about that? Because that was. I got that. And I want to explore that a little bit because it's, I think, a very, like, profound unlock for me. I'll share with you what I've done since you shared it, but I want to hear you expand.

Good. Yeah. I add, you think of Niagara Falls.

Yes.

It's just a lot of noise and mist. I mean, titanic noise and mist, you know, incredible noise and mist. But when you come right down to it, it's just a lot of noise and mist and water. Well, when you build a hydroelectric plant, then you can light up the state of New York. You captivate the power of the, of Niagara Falls by building a hydroelectric plant. And then. And then you light up the state of New York. And. And I'm a hydroelectric plant contractor, you know, and so my job is to help people find their hydroelectric plant. And it really is true. We, most of us have, you know, our buddy Dan Sullivan calls it your, your unique ability. We have something that we can turn into power, electricity, value. And a lot of people are stuck because they haven't found their hydroelectric plant, you know, and they're stuck doing something they're not meant to do. And, you know, I say, don't give up. My gosh, we just got to find your hydroelectric plant, your place to plug in so that all this, all these ideas and energy and stuff you've got going on can become. Can become productive.

So here's where this has gone for me since we had that conversation, because I look at that, it's such an elegant visual, even if I've never seen the inner workings of a hydro plant. But I know that there's a series of gears and mechanisms in place that the water actually moves things into motion that carries the energy into somewhere that distributes it.

Right.

It's captured and distributed through all these. Leverage is really what does that. Right. And I look back, we all know early on that we're, that we're different as, as entrepreneurs. We don't know before we know the words add. We're being accused of underperforming or we're being, you know, like one of your number one traits is unexplained underperformance.

Exactly.

If I looked at my. My mother passed maybe almost eight years ago now, and I got the report cards that she had Been storing away from my elementary school and middle school. And I remember seeing them then, but I remember looking at them now. The summary statement that sums it all up for me was, dean is able to achieve excellent results with what seems like little effort. Imagine if he applied himself. That's the rallying cry that people who have. That can only be people who have figured out their rules and mechanisms for doing things that seem so impossible to us that what they're really saying is, if you were like me, you would be able to do right. You need to apply yourself and work harder.

Right. Right.

And I. I've been thinking about this, that I wonder if there's a. A loophole, a workaround in this. Because when we're saying apply yourself, what they're really saying is, you need to work harder, is you need to buckle down, buster, you know, like, get control of yourself and do these things. But I'm wondering. I said this to Dan Sullivan. We had a great conversation about it. That is the freedom may be in that separation of yourself and separating it to your self and yourself being your unique way of doing things, that. Imagine if you applied your self, your unique way of doing things, not just worked harder like everybody else contributes. And that's where I think that when. If I can surround myself with gears and levers and funnels that create my. Surround myself with who's, as we've been calling them in the who not how idea of thinking, surrounding ourselves with support system that can take our ideas and take them out into the execution realm. Pretty exciting.

Oh, totally exciting. And it is. You know, I have nothing against the work ethic. Everything gets better with hard work, but it is not the cure all. And telling someone with add, which is what these poor kids get all day night, all day long and all night long telling kids, or an adult for that matter, to try harder.

Right.

It's about as helpful as telling someone who's nearsighted to squint harder. You know, it misses the basic point. Yes. There's a better way, a smarter way.

Yeah.

You know, it's one thing to work hard. Maybe it's even better to work smart and to find your hydroelectric plant to build your. I mean, like your. One of your brilliant insights is this. Whiskers versus cheese.

More cheese.

That probably came to you in a few seconds.

Yeah.

And yet. And the power of that concept. I, I was. I think about it now often and, and when someone's pitching me something and I think, God, too much whiskers, you know, I mean, you know, and. And you know, you know, you don't understand. You know, I want cheese, I don't want whiskers. And, and you know, that didn't come from your working hard.

Right.

You didn't sit down and say, I've got to come up with a brilliant idea. I'm going to really work hard to come up with this brilliant idea. You know, the brilliant ideas pop.

Yeah.

You know, and one of our. One of our qualities that's considered pathological, it's part of the diagnostic manual, is impulsivity. Well, what is creativity but impulsivity? Gone. Right. You know, you're coming up with that insight that was impulsive. It was outside the box. It was not. You weren't following directions. You were, you know, you were off, you know, thinking, daydreaming and impulsively so. So if anything, we should not work that hard because when we're drilling down and working hard, we're often excluding that part of our mind that really does contribute unique stuff like that insight you had.

That insight probably came to me while I was daydreaming and I was supposed to be working hard on.

Exactly, exactly, exactly. That's exactly right. You know, the trick is, of course, we don't want to encourage our kids or our employees to goof off, but maybe we do. You know, goofing off, depending what you're doing when you're goofing off is where new ideas come from. You know, and we just were so guilt tripped into feeling ashamed if we're not, you know, doing something that we've been told to do. But the world is improved not by people who are doing what they're told to do, but by people who are not doing what they're told to do who are going off on the path less traveled. I'll tell you a quick antidote, then I'll shut up because I want you to talk. But some years ago, I was consulting to the Harvard Chemistry Department because they had a suicide there. And one of the things I learned, the Harvard Chemistry is maybe the best department in the world, and they have five Nobel Prize winners on the faculty. So they get every year applicants from around the world to come to that department and be a postdoc or a grad student. And every year they arrive in Cambridge and the mandate is go into the lab and discover new knowledge. Well, one group runs into the lab, so excited to have all the resources of Harvard at their disposal, they're ready to blow up the building. Whatever. The other group freezes up. They say, no, you've got to tell Me what to do. I'll do whatever you want. I'll wash your test tubes, I'll grade your papers, I'll stay up all night and watch your lab hum. Those are the people who lost the capacity to innovate, to initiate, to dream, to play, to innovate. And they got really good at doing exactly what they're told to do. But their imagination got castrated. They lost their unique ability. They lost their, they're never going to win a Nobel Prize, you know, because they're never going to go outside the box. And, and that's why we should really take pride in what we've got and not, not feel, you know, that we just need to work harder.

I think in every, in every role there's that different, that sort of distinction. Because when you're describing that, I was thinking about how people, as entrepreneurs, we often will hire an assistant and the, the two different types of assistants without really knowing it are people who, you give them an idea or you give them something that you is kind of a mess and you want them to take it on and organize it and turn it in to something. And for some people, that's what they love. They thrive on taking it and making it organized and turning it into a system. But then they don't want to continue to run that system.

Yes.

Or you get the other side of that where if you hand them a mess like that, they get this deer in the headlights look and they don't know what to do unless you tell them what needs to run. And so that was a big distinction for me, understanding whether people are process oriented, process managers, meaning they need to follow checklists or project oriented, where they need to make checklists but not follow them. And so I think that there's, it sounds like if I put this under this category of you call it unwrapping the gifts of your entrepreneurial mind. That is so much of that self discovery, self awareness of understanding who you are and what your, your mode is. Is that kind of basecamp one in your mind or how, how do you start to.

Absolutely. I mean, you know, I think it's like marry the right person and find the right job. But make sure you're in a situation that favors your particular abilities to flourish and come out as opposed to being in a situation that does the opposite. A lot of folks with ADD are stuck in humdrum jobs and they're not doing well. It's not because they lack ambition or talent. They're just plugged into the wrong outlet. And the same thing with Relationships. If you're with someone who is scolding and trying to change you into being Joe Normal, you know, you could. And I've seen people in relationships like this that go on and on and on and it's just horrible. We're never going to be Joe or Jill normal. We're just not. And we got to be with someone who encourages to be Dean or Ned, you know, or Eunice or whoever. And then play, you see, that's the key word, play. And people think of play as being trivial or superficial. No, it's not. My definition of play is anything that engages your imagination. I hope we're all playing together right now. Play is the highest activity of the human mind, in my opinion. So you want to encourage that. Now play can be work. Like when I'm writing a book, I've written 21 books. When I'm writing a book, I'm at play. But it's discipline, difficult play, but it's still play because I don't know where I'm going, you know, I don't know what's coming next. And I'm innovating constantly, you know, and, and so, so. But I've got to have a format and a structure to allow me to do that. If someone else were telling me, no, you should be cleaning out the garage, no, you should be straightening up your room, no, you, what are you doing? Writing a book.

Yeah.

People told me before I published my first book that you're never going to make any money that way. You better have a day job, you're never going to be able to support yourself. And I actually took their advice and went to medical school. My first goal was to be a doctor, but I thought I better have a day job. I mean to be a writer, but I better have a day job. So I became a doctor anyway. I just think we need to understand the creative process better and respect the conditions that favor it so we can flourish. And in the new book I try to stress the absolute importance of having found your creative outlet. I call it in the book, I call it find your right. Difficult. It's got to be difficult or we'll get bored. And it's got to match up with your talents. So it's got to be the right difficult. So find your right. In my case it's writing. In your case it's marketing, coming up with new ideas. You're a multi talented guy.

Like this whole thing, I look at it very similarly. Like if you take what you do at the core, take out the context that you're specifically a psychiatrist working with people. That is a good portion of what you do every day is meeting with patients and helping them out. But when you look at it that it's a very fulfilling thing for you because you're a diagnostician, you're hearing the story, you're talking through, you're helping people discover, you're uncovering the formulas or the strengths or the way that they helping them with your incredible vast experience to propose something that you've seen work other in other situations and then the next day it's a new person and you're going through that same process. It's ever exciting or it's challenging intellectually to uncover the puzzle. Right. Similar.

That's exactly what you do in your consultations.

That's what I was just going to say, that it's the same. And so with. That's what I'm excited about having you when we're going to do a more cheese less whiskers episode as well to break down how similar those things are because I look at that as the. My hydroelectric plant. All I do is talk. And when we record everything I say and transcribe it, it's now digitized and everything that we can do from that, it's an asset in that we've got somebody can listen to that particular episode in perpetuity at any time. So now I've got hundreds of episodes. Joe and I have almost 400 episodes of I love marketing. We've got all of this stuff that can be transcribed, all the articles. Like I send out three emails a week that all are from that, that stream of, of ideas that I've put into the digital world. Joe sends out three emails a week all from the same, the same model. It's such that that's like the mechanism of harnessing these ideas and turning them into something that can reach a lot of people without any more effort on your part.

Yeah. And I think you're. That's your hydroelectric plant and yes, it's magnificent. I would, I would say it's not true. All you do is talk because mechanically speaking, thinking.

Yeah. Right, right.

Talking. Right.

Yeah.

So you're not a wind up toy. That's, that's pre programmed to say the same stuff. You're constantly innovating in your brain. You've got an amazing brain that's constantly innovating and then you're lucky enough that you're articulate, you're able to turn it.

Into words and that's the fastest, I find the fastest bandwidth way to get Something out of my mind into a digital format is. Through my mouth is talking is the fastest thing, faster than writing, faster than any other thing. It's almost as the speed of thought as I'm thinking it, saying it. This is being turned into digital format. So we've. When we say anything here that we want to be able to say again, if we say something that we've never said before, we've captured it right here and we can turn it into an. A non fungible token. And we might be creating magic here today, Ned.

Absolutely. Well, I mean, you. You and Socrates, you know, that's what he did. He just walked around. He just walked around talking, you know, that's so great. You know, it's with a scribe. Yeah, yeah. And people listened and wrote it down. And Epictetus, another one of my favorites. That's what he did too, you know. And, you know, there's this amazing oral tradition and now with our technology, we're able to preserve it far more obviously, far more effectively and permanently than ever before in history. And when people deplore modern technology, I think. Now, wait a minute, wait a minute. It may be. It may be a bugaboo, but it's also probably our defining greatest achievement of the past 20 years is what we've done with this technology.

How has it changed for you? If we were talking about ADHD 2.0, is that we're as. We're moving into a different level of the world. Like your. When was driven to distraction, 1994.

Was that very good, Dean? Wow, I'm impressed. Yes. 1994. Long time ago.

Yeah. Because I remember reading it well before. It was before the Internet was the thing when reading was actually a delightful distraction from the real world.

Right.

I read so much more back then because there was nothing else to distract me from the primary distraction of reading books and magazines. Now what I notice has changed is the Internet, of course, has gone on this, you know, exponential path that started right after that book came out, that the Internet kind of came on. But I look at the pivotal shift as 2007 when the iPhone came out, and all of a sudden the Internet wasn't somewhere that we went to escape the real world as a distraction. The Internet was among us. It was becoming now enveloping. And I really feel like we've gotten to the point where Cloudlandia is the real world and the. The real mainland is we have to pull ourselves away to find time to distract ourselves in the mainland as. How has that changed the. The way that you think about Things or the way that. Because you've seen it all happen. You were still talking about screen sucking back then.

Yeah, screen sucking, exactly. That was a book called Crazy Busy. That is how I met Joe actually was crazy busy. It was around 2007. And, you know, I talked about screen sucking, where we become. We suck on screens the way we. We might suck on a drug or, you know, a breast or what have you, and. And we become latched onto these screens. But. But at the same time, you know, I don't want to be someone wringing his hands. I'm just saying we need to learn how to use it so it doesn't use us. Because if you allow Cloudlandia, you know, to become your ally and to become your, you know, your best friend and you use it, then we can, you know, this is ADD Heaven, today's world. This is ADD Paradise. We. We have constant access to everything. It becomes a huge playpen. And people forget that sometimes because they get so negative. But as long as you're in charge, as long as you retain control, as long as you don't become addicted to the cloud, addicted to the information, addicted to the games, and instead you let it serve you, then it's like we're more powerful than ever. We can run businesses, we can run empires, we can create all. Look at what you. All you and Joe look at what you've created. Look at us together here, right now. Yes, yes. All dependent upon that. And it's a magnificent symphony of ideas. And it only becomes a problem when you allow all of that to replace what I call the human moment, to replace face to face relationships. It's hard to make love in the cloud. You know, you can. You can have. You can have images and all that and cyber sex and whatnot, but. But the actual act requires your physical presence. And, you know, falling in love really does require at some point your physical presence. And, you know, the best thing I've ever done in my life with my wife is have our three children. And they're now 32, 29 and 26. And it feels like yesterday they were 9, 6, and 3, you know, and thank God I didn't get so wrapped up in my career that I didn't make time for that so long answer. But I think again, if you manage it, instead of it managing you, life has never been better. I mean, this is a child's garden of paradise. And we are. We're like kids in a candy store. You watch someone with ADD and people say all he wants to do is play. Well his enthusiasm for video games is translatable into his enthusiasm for something else. You know, and as soon as he meets a Dean Jackson, you know, he's off starting a business, you know, I love it.

And that's something that, you know, I've really. We've been talking, you know, among in strategic coach, we've been talking about this idea of who, not how, as the thing where this is the ultimate connection device that we've got, connection to everybody that we could possibly need at our fingertips to be able to support us and create that hydro mechanism for us. So it's such optimism for moving forward.

I just want to comment on a comment that flashed on the screen. One of you all said, actually you can fall in love online. And I agree with that. I misspoke. You can. And I think of, I fell in love with Shakespeare when I was in high school and I've never met Shakespeare, but I fell in love with, you know, his, his writing. And so yes, you can, you can fall in love without meeting the person in person. I take that back. It's just a little bit different and some. I met my wife online. A lot of people, people meet their spouses online.

Yeah. We can't have a baby.

Maybe that's correct. You can't do that. I don't know. You can arrange to have a baby.

Maybe you can, maybe you can. Who knows? That's exactly it. So where I, you know, I, I wanna, I could talk like this forever. This is so exciting because you and I could be like, I love your phrase of two toddlers at a picnic. We could just go and explore all these things. I want to make sure my, I want to make sure that we're going to direct the conversation to the things that you have that you want to present or prepare or share with people. And my also priority is that I promise Eunice on every one of these that I'm going to go through. And there's certain things that we need to address. So I always have my Eunice list here in front so we can make sure that we're.

Let's get to the unison. Can I do it?

Can I, can I just make a comment and ask a really quick question before we get to the units list, which is much better. But Dr. Hallowell, it's like when you talk about this Ferrari brain, it's almost like we hope that we have ABA or adhd. It's like, oh, darn. I'm not like Dean. I'm not like Dr. Halloo. I'm not like Joe, should we feel that way?

Absolutely. I gave a talk at my old high school. I went to Exeter, which is a prep school up in New Hampshire, a very rigorous prep school. I gave a talk to the student body about add, and when it was over, the principal of the school came up to me. He said, well, Ned, that was very good, but you came perilously close to saying people ought to wish they had it. And I said, not perilously close. That's exactly what I want them to do. I want them to have ADD envy. I want them to say, gosh, I wish I had that special power. Because the downside of ADD, you can correct, but the upside, you can't buy and you can't teach. You can't buy and teach entrepreneurial flair, entrepreneurial tenacity, grit, imagination, you know, so you can't. You can try, but. And you can take courses on entrepreneurship, but there's an X factor that you just got to be born with. And that's what this condition conveys. That's why the deficit disorder model is so misleading. Yes. When I meet someone, they say they have add. I say, great. Or someone says, oh, I think my kid might have add. I say, why are you sounding so downcast? That's wonderful. Will unwrap his gift. Or her gift. So, yes, indeed, I truly would not trade my ADHD for the world. And the same goes for dyslexia.

Timothy, would you.

The only residual problem with dyslexia for me is I'm an incredibly slow reader. It takes me forever to get. My wife says, I don't know how you know anything. It takes me so long to read, but I can do it, you know, Like, I majored in English at Harvard and graduated with high honors while doing pre med, so I'm able to jump through those hoops. But, you know, I'm not a. I'm a very slow reader. That's the residual of dyslexia. But with. See, another thing with dyslexia people, dyslexics tend to be very creative, you know, and, like, Winston Churchill had dyslexia.

So I was speaking to a group of entrepreneurs yesterday about the annual event coming up, and I read a bio that I wrote on you. It's shorter than the bio that I read at the beginning of this session. And one of their responses was, wow, I'm glad that was a short bio, because I'm so attention deficit. So I like that. And I can hardly wait to hear what Dr. Hallowell has to say at the annual event. Was the response. So my question is, what percentage of entrepreneurs? If you were, I mean, you can do that through all of your experience, what percentage do you estimate are add?

Well, what I believe is it's a much higher percentage than people who know they have it. So if you want to talk about what percentage know they have it, maybe 40 or 50%.

Yeah.

And that's maybe optimistic, but I think what percentage actually have it, I'd say 80%. I almost think like it's an entrance requirement because the things that we have to do, entrepreneurs have to do. Define add. You know, think on your feet, be creative, change quickly, be amazingly resilient, come up with new ideas, fix problems there's no fix for. You know, come up with hope where there's no hope. You know, pull yourself up in the middle of the, you know, the darkest night you've ever had. I mean, that. That's add. People are used to doing that because they've been doing it all along. You know, turn. Turn lemons into lemonade. And, and you can't teach that. You can give lectures about it and you can sermonize about, you know, never give up and all this kind of stuff. But, but that's who we are. We just don't give up. Up. It just, you know, and it's in our DNA. And, and that's, that's, that's most entrepreneurs I know. And, and so, you know, I would say 80%. And, and the, and another thing that I get passionate about is I want them to know it because once they know it, they can, they can, you know, make a better hydroelectric plant. You know, they, they can, they can make, they can get more done with less effort if they employ the techniques for handling adhd.

And everybody could probably. I mean, that's true. Things that you're saying are not just for people with adhd.

Exactly. People say what? Classroom management. Well, whatever is good for ADD is good for everyone.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

It's just that we really need it. You know, we really need structure. We. We really need encouragement. We really need, you know, the, the freedom to create and innovate.

What. What are a couple of your favorite, like, go to strategies that somebody could use to, to help feel.

Well, remember, what works for me won't work for you necessarily, but, but certainly have a creative. Follow your creative outlet. If. If I don't have a book going, I get depressed, you know, so, so, and I've learned that. And so. And I think most of us are like that. If most on. If you don't have a Project in motion or several projects you feel stopped up. You just don't feel right. You feel, you know, just out of sorts a little bit. So honor the creative imperative. And that don't. That doesn't mean you're a workaholic or these negative terms. It means you've got to be creating in order to be at your best.

Yeah.

And that doesn't mean you neglect your family. It doesn't mean you don't go to church or whatever. It just means that you've got to. Your mind has got to be engaged, your imagination has to light up or you're just not going to be at your best. So that's probably, probably number one is to find your hydroelectric plant. To find your. Find your creative outlet and really honor it and respect it.

It.

You know, then the other one is obvious. Marry the right person, be with the right job. I don't mean you have to marry, but be with the right person and find the right job. And a lot of people, it's, it's, you know, they miss the fundamental. That's. They make the. Once you engage with the wrong person or sign up for the wrong job, you're going to short circuit your abilities and you're not going to become all that you can be. And then there, and then there are. I really stress the importance of maintaining a very robustly connected life. And I don't mean access to the Internet. That's where having memberships and groups that you care about. That's why the Genius network is so empowering. Feeding off of each other's energy. It's not just the ideas. If it was just the ideas, you could send a printout every week. But there's something about coming together and the energy in the room where you, where you feel really rejuvenated. I call it the other vitamin C Vitamin connect. And the world is starving for vitamin C these days. And when you have your big meetings together, you just feed off of each other. It's a force that we haven't learned to measure yet, but it is very real. That's what teamwork is all about. That's why people thrive on teams when you put your energy to each. So connect would be another major tip that I would cultivate connection, cultivate friendship, Cultivate. Now don't have too many connections because then, then the connections can become a burden. I talk about, you know, cultivate lilies and get rid of leeches are people or projects that just aren't worth it. Yeah. So if you can get rid of a leech Boy, you'll do yourself a huge favorite. But at the same time cultivate lilies. Lilies are people or projects that are worth the time you put in. The three biggest lilies are my kids. They took a ton of work and money, but my gosh, were they ever worth it, you know, but you be careful because we're so, we're so life enthusiastic. We can have too many lilies and then the lilies begin to feel like leeches. So make sure you don't overcrowd your garden with, with too many lilies. So but, but get rid of leeches. Oh my God. Get rid of leeches.

Those lilies that I think like that metaphor can apply to projects or, or everything is that.

Yes, yes, yes. Like your, your whisker cheese. That's a lily of an idea, you know, that, you know, which gives, you.

Know, there's something about the. What that allows me to do is it creates a context that allows me to have a fixed thing that the eight profit activators, for instance, as a framework and this model that now I can get variety in that by bringing in different businesses. Just like you've got your. All of the tools and all the ways to diagnose and help people unwrap their, their gifts and you. The input that changes is the new people coming in. One of the things that I've discovered was, I'm calling it my. Your power verbs, right? Like my, my power positions kind of thing. If I think about what I actually.

Do.

And setting myself up, up in those things that are. When I'm at my best, what am I actually doing? And so often that's on the phone recording something, whether it's a podcast, a consultation, a, you know, one on one with somebody, or recording for the purpose of recording something. A conversation is one of my power moves. Another of my power moves is sitting on my. In my reading room in my comfy chair or on the white sofa in my courtyard with my remarkable tablet and hatching evil schemes, doing, thinking, brainstorming, writing, thinking about trying to solve a problem or applying something that, that I need to do. Brainstorming, outlining something that I can then record is. Is that part of my hydro plant that makes it all work.

Now what I see is. And that's. That's a beautiful description of play. You're sitting. You're sitting there like a kid making mud pods. You're.

Yes.

Yeah.

And what I've discovered is that my brain doesn't care as much what particularly I'm thinking about.

Exactly.

Whatever's in front of it.

As long as it's engaging. As long as it's stimulating. Yeah.

If I. If I have. As long as I. I muster the adult level sort of supervision of setting myself up. What you. As one of the biggest impacts on my life was a conversation that you and I had maybe 15 years ago, 10 years ago, I don't know, whenever we first kind of met, you introduced me to this idea of you can go through your day like a toddler at a picnic and just wander around and go wherever your mind takes you. Or you can set up borders and a direction and zip through it like a bobsled run. And that to me was like, so amazing because I often think about time like that. I often imagine that it's this bobsled run and I visualize that track that I get on the bobsled run and we're moving at the pace of 60 seconds per minute and 60 minutes per hour and 24 hours per day. It's constantly moving at that. And I envision almost like Guitar Hero things that are coming at me and when they're going to arrive. And it's a really interesting thing to fit things into those times, like playing Tetris where you have this. Lots of things that are coming at me and I can establish them when I'm going to do them and. But realize you said something two weeks ago when we talked that, that I've been using about lead generate, lead conversion, that there's only two time frames now and not now. And you said to me, you know, I just wrote that in the, in the book about that. People with ADT only experience two time frames. Yes, yes, now and not now.

In our world, in the world of add, we have a fundamentally different sense of time. We don't have the linear sense of time most people have. In our world, there are two times now and not now.

Yeah.

So you say the paper is due next Thursday, not now. And it's just gone until. Exactly. Until not now is almost now. And then we get it done in a panic, you know.

Yeah, there was a great TikTok meme going around where it's someone talking to themselves, you know, are you going to do that? And they go, I'm going to do it later. And they go, yeah, but if you do it now, you won't have to do it later.

Exactly.

And they go, yeah, but if I don't do it now, I don't do it and I do it later.

Yeah. Hence procrastination. And that's exactly right. That's why we're so prone to procrastination. And then at the last minute, what happens in a panic, you get a good big burst of adrenaline. And adrenaline is chemically very similar to the stimulant medications we use to treat add. So you're basically self medicating with panic, self medicating with adrenaline by procrastination.

Wow, that's a very interesting thought. I'd heard Joe Rogan, I think, was talking about how we medicate for removing that feeling of stress. And it joked that that's how the rent gets paid. That's how things. That's a valuable, useful thing in our lives to spur us into action.

Yes, if our.

If our ancestors had access to it.

No, absolutely. Stress is one of those words. Again, like so many things, there's an upside and a downside. The upside of stress, what I call good stress, that's what drives excellence. Lifting weights, editing your manuscript, you know, working under a deadline. Bad stress is like depression, paranoia, backbiting, gossip, you know, people who are, you know, just out to hurt people. That's bad stress.

Yes.

You know, but good stress is, you know, striving and, you know, trying to get it done and, you know, negotiating and all the kind of stuff that, you know, allows us to achieve big goals.

I love it. Well, do we have. What I'd love to do, Ned, is, is open up and see. Maybe Timothy can help us here. I know Timothy's got a run too, so Gina also could help us with some of the questions that people are.

Did we do Eunice's list here?

Yeah, we're.

This is.

Let me. I'm going to double check and we'll do that while Timothy's. Have you been monitoring the chat, Timothy?

I have, and Gina actually has a.

List, so Gina's going to.

Okay, great.

The questions with you?

Yes.

Well, all right, so our first question so far. You guys feel free to post your questions in the chat or raise your hand on Zoom and we'll call on you. But Dean Anthony, his power went out, too. Dean. And his name is also Dean. And he's back on. He had a question. What's the best way to find the person to keep an ADHD on track? And Dean, do you even want to come and ask your question? On track and focused. And he's thinking maybe it's a better half. Maybe you need a good wife, maybe an RH person, somebody who's super organized. So that's what he's looking for. The best way to find that person to help keep him on track.

Well, multimodal approach is the answer because there's a lot of things you can do, from medication to exercise to structure, but a coach can make a world of difference. And it's very hard for your spouse to be your coach because the nag factor gets in the way. It's why it's hard for your parent to be your coach. Nag factor gets in the way. So a coach is someone you hire. You pay to ride herd on the details, to ride herd on the stuff that you tend to overlook. Forget, procrastinate, put off. And a coach can be worth his or her weight in gold. I'll give you the name of the single best coach in the world. She is without doubt the best coach in the world. I have referred to hundreds of people to her. She is, she's the ADD whisperer, in my opinion. She is just, she just has magic in her, in her, in her, in her methods. And her name is Jen Zobel Bieber and her website is jen zbcoaching.com and she's incredible. Now there are thousands, if not tens of thousands of coaches out there, and there's a coach Academy that trains coaches. If you Google ADHD coaches, that's one way you can go to Coach Academy. That's the name of it. Coachacademy.com I think a coach, the right coach, can make a huge difference. The wrong coach is just glorified secretary and it's a waste of time and money. But the right coach, the person who really gets you, David Nealman, who I referred to earlier, his administrative assistant, has been coaching him for 40 years. I mean, he would be lost without her. She basically knows when to tell him to go to the bathroom. I mean, she's got everything. And so he can just go and be himself and she'll pick up the pieces. And so if you can have someone like that in your life, whether it's your admin assistant or a coach or just, just don't have it, be your, your, your partner.

I've been working with a service called Commit Action for the last eight weeks or so, about maybe three months now. I've been doing this and I talk with my coach once a week and we look at the calendar and we've got the projects and things that I'm working on that I want to commit to getting done this week. And we put them in the calendar as to when I'm going to actually do them. And then we get back together on the phone next week and we move those things in and just that level of accountability. I've been working on it with, you know, a couple of projects that I've been. I don't have it. We don't go through my entire week and, you know, organize everything. But I really want to get these particular couple of projects done. And so I've been scheduling those times with. With them. And it's. It makes a big difference because it. It likes, just like you were saying, Ned, that, you know, the only things we see are now and not now. It's almost like you're. You're time traveling. And, you know, the most reliable form of time travel is to travel into the future and cordon off the area where you want to do something and have it prepared for when you get there. And it's now you look at the calendar and I had cordoned off 2:30 on Wednesday to be here with you. And I don't know about you, but I never miss things that I've put in my calendar that are involving other people.

Absolutely. And you see and that you referred earlier to the toddler and the bobsled ride. The toddler way. The toddler on a picnic is just driven by curiosity with no regard for danger or authority. So that's you playing on your pad there. You're a toddler on a picnic. You're going wherever curiosity leads you. Now, the other mode, which is also incredibly valuable, is the bobsled mode. And that's when you impose structure. So having a time to meet or having an order of things, you're supposed to do structure. Then you're zipping forward. There's no getting waylaid. There's no wandering off into other places. There's no room for curiosity to take you off the ride, because with structure, then you get maximum forward progress and you tick off goals. So you want to have both of those modes at your disposal, the toddler mode and the bobsled mode.

Especially when you're filling things. When you're filling it with things that you fundamentally want to do.

Right.

Like you were saying about writing the book is play. You don't mind the writing the book. It's just the sitting down to actually write the book. It's getting, you know, putting that time aside.

Okay.

I hope you found that video awesome and useful. So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here. And if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome, click here.

Go ahead, you're over here. Do it now. Come on.

Thank you.

Watch them.