Overcome Overwhelm and Defeat Distraction: Secrets From The World’s #1 ADHD Expert, Dr. Ned Hallowell - I Love Marketing Episode #417

You know, 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 connectivity.

If you'd like to join world renowned entrepreneurs at the next Genius Network event or want to learn more about Genius network, go to geniusnetwork.com now. We spent the last four decades helping thousands of adults and children live happy and productive lives through his strength based approach to neurodiversity and has ADHD and dyslexia himself. Dr. Halliwell is a New York Times best selling author. He's written 20 books on multiple psychological topics. The groundbreaking Distraction series which began with Driven to Distraction, which was co authored by Dr. John Rady in 1994.

If I think of myself as an ambassador of our people, you beyond all odds, you're one of our people who 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 also. All things that require amazing focus and ability to read and comprehend. So you're living proof of you figured something out here.

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. Because most entrepreneurs have this and I often think we should rename it the entrepreneur's trait. David Nealman, who's become a friend of mine, he founded JetBlue Airlines and he's the guy who invented the electronic ticket. And typical add, it just came to him out of nowhere. 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. 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 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. 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 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. 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. The brilliant ideas pop, 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, 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 something.

Exactly. 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 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.

As entrepreneurs, we often will hire an assistant. And the two different types of assistance, without really knowing it, are people who, you give them an idea or you give them something that 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. 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.

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, 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 gotta 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. I'm at play. But it's disciplined, difficult play, but it's still play because I don't know where I'm going. I Don't know what's coming next. And I'm innovating constantly, 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, 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 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. 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 find. You know, it's got to be difficult or we'll get bored. Yeah, 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.

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 stream 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.

You're constantly innovating in your brain. You've got an amazing brain that's constantly innovating. And then. 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.

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, 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. We'll 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. The things that we have to do, entrepreneurs have to do. Define add. Think on your feet. Be creative. Change quickly. Be amazingly resilient. Come up with new ideas. Fix problems there's no fix for. 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. It just, you know, and it's in our DNA. And that's. That's. That's. Most entrepreneurs I know, we really need structure. We really need encouragement. We really need, you know, the freedom to create and innovate. 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 creative outlet and really honor it and respect it. You know, I really stress the importance of maintaining a very robustly connected life. And, 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. Cultivate lilies and get rid of leeches. Leeches are people or projects that just aren't worth it. So if you can get rid of a leech boy, you'll do yourself a huge favor.

And people with ADD 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 not now is almost now. And then we get it done in a panic, you know?

Yeah.

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