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Comment by chris_wot | Hacker News Reader

It's funny - I was absolutely hopeless at school. I don't want to use ADD as a crutch, but honestly it really got in my way.

When I went to technical college, I started getting interested in my own things more and more. Normally that's probably not a good thing for someone with ADD - but in my case it turns out that I was interested in anything related to programming and Unix. This required extraordinary amounts of reading. Ridiculous amounts of reading of quite technical material meant that I had to develop concentration, and now I ironically don't have a deficit of attention, I have hyper-focus on the task at hand and get irritated if someone tries to distract me.

Funny how life happens sometimes.

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I was the same way. I could not concentrate on anything until I started programming. I was told I had ADD before but I did not believe it.

There might be scientific research proving the existence of ADD, but in diagnosing ADD the same rigor is not applied to each individual's situation. It's just a statistical test.

There are two possibilities I think for us:

1. Is that ADD might be primarily a childhood to adolesence problem, and that our brains just grew out of it.

2. The explanation I prefer for myself: that I really did not care about learning anything until I started coding. I don't think it was a disorder. I think I truly didn't care. I guess apathy could be considered a disorder in some ways, like if you didn't care that your home was on fire. But frankly saying it's a disorder that kids don't want to be force fed information on a daily basis with no choice as to what they're learning? I'd say it's a natural reaction of anyone who truly enjoys their freedom.

The hyperfocus phenomenon is symptomatic of those that suffer with ADD. I've always likened my brain to a lawnmower where you have to pull the cord 20 times just to get it started; but once you get going, you can zero in for hours at a time. And you get really grumpy when someone interupts you from what you're doing. (OK maybe the latter is just my experience)

And yeah, I share the difficulties in traditional academia with all of you. It can be almost impossibly hard to concentrate on getting a task done (irrespective of difficulty) if you don't have buy-in as far as what you're doing. School was one of those things for me, day jobs another. I drift constantly and find it hard not to think about the project I'm working on while at the day job.

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