One of the things that surprises me most about ADHD is that almost every conversation focuses on the challenges.
The distraction.
The procrastination.
The forgotten appointments.
The unfinished projects.
Those things are real.
But after being diagnosed in my forties, I found myself wondering something else.
What if some of the things I like most about myself came from ADHD too?
Not all of them, of course. ADHD does not get credit for every success in my life.
But the more I have learned about how my brain works, the more I have started noticing something interesting.
Many of the same traits that led to my diagnosis are also traits that have served me incredibly well throughout my career and my life.
The first is curiosity.
I have never been particularly good at leaving well enough alone. If something interests me, I want to understand it. Not just the surface-level answer. I want to understand how it works, why it works, and what would happen if we changed it.
It is probably why I joined peer groups. Why I serve on boards. Why I started Värkrz. Why I continue to put myself in rooms where I know very few people.
Most people walk into a room and wonder whether they belong.
I walk into a room and wonder what I can learn.
That curiosity has opened doors throughout my career that I never would have found otherwise.
The second gift is hyperfocus.
Most people hear the word ADHD and think lack of focus.
Anyone who has ADHD knows that is not quite right.
The issue is not a lack of focus.
The issue is control over where the focus goes.
When something captures my attention, I can disappear into it for hours. Sometimes that means researching a topic that nobody asked me to research. Sometimes it means building a project, solving a problem, or chasing an idea far beyond the point where most people would have stopped.
Some of the best work I have ever done has happened during periods of hyperfocus.
Ideas became plans.
Plans became projects.
Projects became businesses.
The third gift is what I would call connecting dots.
As a CEO, I spend a lot of time looking at information. Financial data. Employee feedback. Client trends. Operational challenges. Industry changes.
What often surprises me is how frequently my brain connects things that do not initially appear related. A conversation with an employee leads to an idea about a process improvement. A client issue reveals a training opportunity. A trend in one department predicts a challenge somewhere else.
I cannot always explain how I arrived at the conclusion.
Sometimes the dots simply connect.
Over the years I have learned to trust that instinct.
But connecting dots is only part of it. What happens next is where things get interesting.
Once my brain sees a pattern, it naturally starts imagining where that pattern leads. When someone tells me something is difficult, my brain starts asking a different question.
“What if it worked?”
When I became CEO, there were plenty of things I did not know.
When I joined boards, peer groups, and industry organizations, there were rooms where I knew almost nobody.
When I started Värkrz, there was no guarantee it would succeed.
Yet somehow my brain rarely starts with all the reasons something cannot work. It starts with the possibility that it can.
I do not think that is optimism. I think it is how my brain is wired.
The fourth gift is one I only recently recognized.
Challenge.
One of my favorite quotes is:
“Go ahead, underestimate me. This will be fun.”
For years, I thought I liked solving problems. What I have realized is that I really like proving people wrong.
Not in a petty way.
At least not most of the time.
But there is something about being told something cannot be done that immediately gets my attention.
A few weeks ago, I found myself in a situation where I felt challenged. Most people would probably describe the situation as stressful.
What surprised me was my reaction.
I had more energy that day than I had in weeks.
Projects got finished.
My to-do list disappeared.
Problems got solved.
I felt completely engaged.
The more I thought about it, the more I realized this has been true my entire life.
Give me a routine week and I can spend far too much time deciding where to start. Give me an impossible problem and suddenly I am operating at full speed.
Tell me something cannot be done and my brain immediately starts searching for a way to do it. Tell me I cannot do something and I become even more interested.
Looking back, many of the biggest leaps in my life and career happened because someone underestimated me, challenged me, or assumed something was impossible.
My brain hears those moments differently.
Most people hear obstacles. I hear invitations.
When I talk about ADHD this way, people sometimes assume I am ignoring the challenges.
I am not.
The procrastination is real.
The distraction is real.
The forgotten details are real.
But those are only part of the story.
People often think ADHD is something they succeeded despite having. I understand why. The challenges are easier to see.
What is harder to see are the gifts that arrived in the same package.
The curiosity.
The hyperfocus.
The ability to connect dots that others miss.
The tendency to see possibility before proof.
The energy that appears when something genuinely matters.
Those gifts matter too.
In fact, they may matter more than we realize.
A few years ago, if you had told me I would someday say the next sentence out loud, I probably would have laughed.
But here we are.
I feel bad for people who do not have ADHD.
Not because life is easier with ADHD. Some parts certainly are not.
But because they will never know what it feels like to become completely consumed by an idea. To chase curiosity down a rabbit hole for hours. To connect dots that nobody else sees yet. To feel your brain light up when a challenge appears. To see possibilities where others see limitations.
ADHD gave me challenges.
It also gave me many of the traits that helped build the life I have today.
And I am not interested in separating the two.
They arrived together.
They always have.
Gratefully,