In praise of inconsistency

How Hyperactivity, Impulsivity, Distraction, Hyperfocus, Inconsistency and Time Blindness makes us into entrepreneurs and then breaks us.

“What is creativity after all, but impulsivity gone right?”

Ed Hallowell

Were you called dreamy?

Did school say you were scatterbrained?

Do you find it hard to delay your gratification?

Do you come from a family of bohemians?

Do you march to a different drummer?

Have you struggled with a drifting career?

Do you feel your life is fragmentary?

Are you inconsistent and proud?

Do you have an internal creativity that you cannot shake off?

Do you think you might secretly be an artist?

Have you always done the wrong thing?

I can help.

Almost from my first months as an entrepreneur I knew I was good at the startup bit and hopeless at the management bit.

This is a given in the startup world. Some people are born managers, some grow into it and some have management thrust upon them. Some recruit wisely and find a role that suits them and the company. Some almost destroy the business that they started by refusing to recognise that they are not made for management.

That was me.

ADHD brings you hyperactivity, impulsiveness, distraction, hyperfocus, inconsistency and time blindness can all be incredibly useful tools in business, if controlled.

In my decade long business career I was all of these things. They gave me the inquisitiveness to notice something new was happening in the world and the hyperfocus to dive deeply into it. They were what got me going with a company in the right place at the right time and they were what ultimately caused the failure of my business career. It wasn’t so much failure of business (I sold it at the top of the market to a listed company) as a failure to thrive. Looking back, the introduction of a good manager who was actually interested in that job rathe than in the next shiny thing may have allowed us to be the acquirer and grow a billion dollar company. If you want to get on in the world it is considered better to have stillness, consideration, attentiveness, varifocus, consistency and timeliness, not a chaotic interest in the next stimulating thing. But where’s the fun in that?

Of course, I knew none of this at the time. To paraphrase Hemmingway, I discovered my disorder slowly at first and then all at once. The sudden blinding realisation that there might be an explanation for my lifetime cycle of rebellion, insight, inventiveness, dissociation and failure caused me to reassess my entire life and then to look at the world in a different way. Finally I decided to become an ADHD Coach and use that skill and my experience to help creative people get a handle on their lives and perhaps to achieve what I never could.

It is the outcome of a lifetime watching myself and others in the world without realising why we were as we were or even that we were different. The ebb and flow, the roads taken and no taken, the inability to thrive, can, in retrospect, all be ascribed to attention surfeit (which is what ADHD largely is).

I had always suspected something was up with me and I pondered therapy to try and work out what. One day I came across a list of the attributes of ADHD and It was as if a light had gone on in my brain (and that’s an ADHD effect if ever there was one). I just knew. The scales fell from my eyes.

Now I believe that that ADHD is the substrate of all creativity. That doesn’t mean that nobody without ADHD is creative, or that all people with ADHD are creative geniuses. It means that beneath all creativity there moves a mysterious thing which we call attention deficit and knowing a bit about that can help focus creativity.

ADHD can be a very difficult condition to live with. It fucks people’s lives up. It has fucked my life up, repeatedly. But it can also bring great value. As an ADHD Coach I use my experience as an artist, an entrepreneur and a writer, but also as class clown, a punk rocker, school dropout, failure, hustler and ne’er again bright confident morning manager. With my clients I examine how ADHD is both the driver and the underminer of creativity and how different ways of thinking and of approaching things can change their lives.

ADHD is deeply embedded in how we are in the world. It is fundamental to our being human, just as art is fundamental to our humanity. It is about our myriad ways of being creative and how that might come about, what creativity is and why it is related to this mysterious way of being. Even people who are consistent, who have no trace of ADHD in their lives, live in a world shaped by ADHD.

I explore how ADHD affects your life, our lives. I will explore how it drives and undermines your creative life. How it is a strange thing, almost inexplicable, recognised by those who have it even as it constantly astounds them. How it is rewarding and how understanding it liberates your creative urges and changes your life.

This is for all of you, good, bad and ugly, who are creative in one or more of the myriad ways that we can be creative and who might have often wondered about why exactly the world was so goddam difficult.

Ivan Pope is writing a book titled In Praise of Inconsistency.