Can you spot the ADD-type person?
In hunter-gatherer type societies, in order to eat and have shelter, people have to hunt and gather. They have to find the stuff they need to build their shelters. They have to find food, whether that's an animal or a plant of some sort.
When they're out on the hunt, when they're chasing down a wild boar, they need aware of everything that's going on around them, all at once--the slightest noises, the littlest branch that is broken in the woods. They need all of their senses keyed up. They need to be on edge a little bit, just pumping with adrenaline, in order to have their minds focused on all those things that are going on around them.
In the agricultural model, people plant the corn, in perfect, straight rows. And they go back and they water it everyday. And they wait and wait and wait. They go back every day and weed a little bit. Then they harvest and process the corn. Then they do it again.
To some people, that is phenomenally exciting because they're building foundational types of things. To ADD (Attention Deficit Disorder) people, that is so extremely boring.
Those of us who have ADD are distracted more often than anything because our brains are simply looking for more to do. For this reason, certain jobs out there are perfectly created for an ADD-style brain.
For example, many sales positions are great for people with ADD. For the most part, we're not talking about having a cash register job in a pharmacy. That's generally not a great ADD job because there's a little bit of sales and a lot of repetition. The sales usually aren't commission-based so even if you do a great job, you probably still get the same hourly wage. There's no real incentive to do a great job, which makes people with ADD bored.
When I'm talking about sales jobs, I'm talking about jobs where either you go out and it's your job to find the appropriate prospects and close the sales, or when you're put in an on-the-spot, high-pressure--not necessarily negative, but high-stakes--position, where it's up to you to make your own money. That's perfect for the extroverted person with ADD. They need opportunities to be outwardly expressive.
Another great job for someone with ADD may be that of a story-teller. You can change things whenever you want to. You're always working with the crowd and changing things. People with ADD might be in art, film, or theater, and are more likely to want to use their ADD-enhanced creativity in these fields.
But in perfect ADD jobs, you have constant, new stimuli coming in and you're constantly shifting, changing and going with the flow of what happens. The point here is that there are certain activities, certain jobs, that utilize distractions in order to really make that job fly. You have to be paying attention to everything that's going on around you, and the jobs are perfect for people with ADD.
One woman ended up in tears because she said, "I'm doing this job that I think everybody should be able to do." (It was a secretarial job with filing.) She said, "It's something I can do." She was just doing it for the money, basically, and her ADD was giving her a really hard time with the filing. She kept thinking, "Why can't I just do this? I should be able to do this thing because it's so simple."
The reality is, for those of us with ADD, that's just not true. That type of job is repetitive. It's boring and it requires prioritization and organization, which are not our strengths, necessarily.
It becomes an issue of, "How do I put myself in a position where my ADD-enhanced ability to pay attention to several things at once allows me to truly excel?"
For some of us, that needs to start as a part-time gig or a volunteering situation. If you're employed full-time and your income and you're livelihood comes from something that's terribly monotonous and boring, but at the end of the day is how you pay the bills, we're not telling you to rush into doing something completely different on a whim. Absolutely not. What we're saying is work toward this. Work toward it every day.
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