Why Can ADHD Be a Flow Advantage?

Steven Kotler treats ADHD as an evolutionary superpower because it is hyper-focus, not an inability to focus. The problem is work you do not care about. On work you do care about, the lock-in can last for months. He has met very few people at the top of business, athletics, or the arts who do not have it, and he calls it a superpower in business and everywhere else. Ned Hallowell, the Harvard psychologist who coined the term ADHD, shares the view.

Autonomy and attention are coupled systems in the brain, so focus cannot be maximized unless the person is the one driving. When a boss assigns a hated task, reframe it. Most of the task can be irrelevant, and the remaining slice can be the skill you actually want, such as becoming a better salesperson. Early in a poor journalism career, unwanted assignments still got written, including 5,000 words he did not want to write, by focusing on the part that taught how Wired magazine structures a story. Without a slice of autonomy, attention does not show up.