Think about it for a moment and consider that people, like you and me, with ADHD, we are seemingly held to higher standards. I don’t mean higher standards in that we are better than anyone else. I mean that if you have ADHD you are expected to do more to improve yourself. Our responsibility to ‘self-improvement’ is much higher than the average. First we must strive to attain what normal people attain, and then we must compete to be even better. Due to public opinion of ADHD we are constantly proving ourselves. Even so, it’s not the general public that concerns me, it’s the attitude and behavior of ‘a few’ who take it to the next level and are quite offensive towards anyone with labeled imperfections.

Have you ever experienced a quantum leap in your efforts for self-improvement?

If you have, I bet you can remember exactly when you noticed it and perhaps for a few days or weeks, after noticing it, the improvement seemed to wane, but when you stopped thinking about it, it eventually became your next level of existence and the search went on for the next quantum leap. Or… maybe it didn’t, maybe you actually fell back to a level even lower than your previous level before the quantum leap?

The search for self-improvement is fraught with difficulty, setback after setback always seem to get in the way and just when you think you are going to make it, well, something happens to disrupt the momentum. That’s just ADHD… right? Perhaps, perhaps not…

I used to consider one of my biggest flaws and worst character traits, or better said – lack thereof, was that I did not have any willpower. 

They seemed to possess some secret power that I had somehow missed out on.

I have willpower, but like most people with ADHD I just did not know how to access it and this lead to a certain kind of frustration, which ran painfully deep. It started early, at a very young age. I grew up with a belief that willpower did not exist for me. It was so obvious to me that I lacked something (I didn’t know what it was called way back then) that I could see whatever it was so clearly in others. As a kid I was in awe of classmates who could set their mind to doing an assignment and just do it. They seemed to possess some secret power that I had somehow missed out on. This awareness for what others seemed to have, which I lacked, made me feel terrible as a youth. It was maddening and quite demoralizing to say the least.

I was listening to an audio book recently: Challenge to Succeed by Jim Rohn. I recommend it to anyone interested in self improvement. In the audio Jim makes many good points about wealth, health and state of being. The most important point he makes is this: “What you don’t know will hurt you.”

Any late diagnosed ADDer will tell you that this is too true. What if we had known 10 years, or, 20 years earlier? What if our parents had known and we were diagnosed as children? What a difference would that have made? We can deal with ‘what if’s’ all day long, but, what about today? Today there is a wealth of information available in books and on the internet. There is no reason we cannot self-educate ourselves about our condition, not in an information packed world such as ours.