Edward Hallowell Quotes
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A streak of Puritanism runs deep within American society. Permissive and pioneering as we may be on the one hand, we are strict and conservative on the other. As much as we may be a country of mavericks and entrepreneurs, we are also a country of finger waggers and name-callers. As much as we may be a country of compassion for the underdog, we are also a country that believes in self-reliance.
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To tell a person who has ADD to try harder is about as helpful as telling someone who is nearsighted to squint harder.
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Sometimes, if I am not in a situation where the truth matters, I take the liberty of becoming playful and making up a profession. I’ve said I’m a chef. I’ve said I train astronauts. I’ve said I’m a fisherman. One time I said I was a spy. The person I was talking to became instantly animated and started peppering me with so many questions it would have been easier if I had simply told the truth. As it was, I had to fabricate a wild set of statements based on my uninformed speculation about what a spy does! But such is the mind of a person who has ADHD—in this case, me—that making up stories comes quite naturally. Some people call this lying, but when there is no harm done, I call it playing.
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I agree with Stephen Covey that too many people spend too much time on doing what is urgent rather than on doing what is import.
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Newcomers should be put in an established position where the expectations are known and help is available. New major assignments should mainly go to people whose behaviors and habits are well known and who have already earned trust and credibility.
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They describe the feeling of being online as a kind of anesthesia that eases the pain of everyday life.
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Whatever you do, please don’t think of sleep as wasted time, an indulgence, or a generous reservoir from which you can steal time for work. Do what your brain and body beg you to do: get enough sleep.
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Without knowing it or meaning to, we are training ourselves to be constantly on the alert for interruptions; to seek out messages incessantly, to process data rather than discover, invent, think, or feel, and in general to lose the propensity or even the capacity to ponder, pause, imagine, or give full focus to anyone or anything for more than a few restive moments.
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If you tell a person that she has a mental disorder, you create a mental disorder—not only in the patient but in those who love her as well. The disorder is fear. Chronic fear holds more people back in life than any other mental infirmity.
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People associate hard work and overload with stress. But, like suffering, stress is complicated. Bad stress is stress that a system can't endure without suffering damage. It is unplanned, uncontrolled, allows no time for rest and recovery, and exceeds the capacity of the system to adjust to it. As the popular phrase suggests, it burns people out and, over time, it can decimate an entire workforce.
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A heightened distractibility and a persistent feeling of being rushed or in a hurry, even when there’s no need to be, combined with a mounting feeling of how superficial your life has become: lots to do, but no depth of thought or feeling.
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The term attention deficit disorder completely misses this point. It is not a deficit of attention that we ADD-ers have, it is that our attention likes to go where it wants to and we can’t always control it.
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A human moment is a term I invented to distinguish in-person communication from electronic. Human moments are exponentially more powerful than electronic ones. I mean face-to-face, in-person contact and communication. I have identified several modern paradoxes and the first is that, for various reasons, we have grown electronically superconnected but we have simultaneously grown emotionally disconnected from each other.
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ADD is a neurological syndrome whose classic defining triad of symptoms include impulsivity, distractibility, and hyperactivity or excess energy.
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It is the greatest feeling in the world. When we shine, we defy death for the moment. We enter into a state of immersion in the craft we ply, a state in which we become one with what we do.
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The modern danger is that we grow so engrossed with and seduced by what matters so little, busy with and ruled by whatever presses upon us, that we overlook and thereby destroy our most important projects and goals through neglect.
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People with ADD often have a special “feel” for life, a way of seeing right into the heart of matters, while others have to reason their way along methodically.
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Barkley’s comment that ADD is more impairing than any syndrome in all mental health that is treated on an outpatient basis. More impairing than anxiety, more impairing than depression, more impairing than substance abuse. The “morbidity” of untreated ADD is profound.
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Insist on time with the person you love and make extended time for one another. learn to say no to desirable offers. get wise to the tricks of the multitude of thieves of your time and attention that swarm around you like gnats every second. have a clear vision of the life you want. You have to know what matters most to you, and you have to make time for that, with iron-fisted determination. Here is a hard and fast Law of Modern Life: if you do not take your time, it will be taken from you. If you do not insist on making time for what matters, you will not do what matters.
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Your reflex to help others starts to control you if you don’t understand what’s happening and take steps to prevent it.
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Lack of respect for the worker. This nourishes disconnection, fear, anger, phoniness, and all the bad stuff that impedes excellence.
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All people have their own special skills. Instead of just identifying deficiencies, schools should try to identify and promote those special skills as early on as possible.
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Never before has it been so easy to stay in touch with so many people electronically, but rarely has it seemed so difficult to maintain genuine human closeness.
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No work is "most important." Or, put differently, all work is important but work done poorly becomes most important.