Getting Focused

Commercializing my ADHD

In my years of skill hoarding, I’ve worked on many different projects, and I’ve explored and refined skills in many areas. For much of this time, my guiding compass was rather simple: I’d get excited about a new tool, medium, or technology; I’d learn it; and I’d build stuff with it.

In short, I’d found a way to commercialize my ADHD by chasing shiny things that I could use to produce value for others - be it code, electronics, manufacturing processes, etc. I even branded my business as Skill Hoarder Labs in honor of this process of exploration and discovery that I’d felt such a drive to pursue.

Sometimes the skill hoarding was inspired by an existing project that required a new skill or tool. Sometimes I simply had a nagging hunch that learning or acquiring the new ability would somehow be important, even if I didn’t have a specific application in mind yet. And sometimes it was purely just fun to be learning and trying new things.

This process of acquiring new skills and starting new projects has been worthwhile for me. I’ve spent years exploring, building cool things, and loving it. I’ve also discovered many of my own unique strengths and insights that I hadn’t been aware of or confident in, and identified many areas in which I could grow and improve.

I believe exploration is foundational to the development of any project or goal - but - there will always be more new, exciting things to explore, test and put to use. Where does it stop?

At some point, the choice to stay in an experimental mode can become a distraction from bigger goals. This became clearer to me over the years as I started asking myself questions like “when will I know enough?”, or “what tool do I need next?”, and as I saw others building great businesses on much simpler offerings.

The feeling that there’s something more out there.

Over the years I noticed some recurring patterns in my own work, as well as in the projects and processes of those I worked with. A fun thing about patterns is that once you begin to notice them, you tend to notice them everywhere.

This tendency to notice recently learned information more frequently has been dubbed the Baader–Meinhof phenomenon. Just because we notice something more, doesn’t mean that the thing we’re noticing is any more frequent than it was before we identified or learned about it - but it does mean it’s important to us for some reason.

It’s a way our brains have evolved to focus more on things things that might be useful. But rather than taking the position that noticing a pattern has an inherently special meaning, I like to think of it as an opportunity to study the thing more closely and determine how useful a thing it might be.

Where am I going with this?

At the risk of letting my love of rambling win, and keeping this article flowing for a few thousand more words, I’ll get to the point. I’ve been developing some systems and tools that I’ve found to be extremely helpful in my work.

I’ve spent a few years testing and iterating on them, and I believe they address some of the most common obstacles and setbacks that complicate, delay, or halt the completion of a goal or project.

I’m in the process of reformulating how my business works, with a focus on using these tools to lead the way towards doing more focused and meaningful work, and helping the people I work with do the same in their own projects.

Over the next few weeks and months, I’ll begin sharing these tools publicly. I’m very excited to get more widespread feedback on them and learn if they’re as useful to others as they have been to me.

I’ve seen, and experienced firsthand, how much pain can be caused by a lack of clarity in the process of achieving a goal. I feel that focusing on this might be the most meaningful work I’ve done in my career.

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Thank you for reading :)