Thread by @QuinnyPig

So a thread I've been "meaning to write" for the past few years but somehow always found an excuse to avoid. No more!

My entire career (and life, really) have been shaped by ADHD. The key was finally emphasizing for things I'm good at, while avoiding the things that I'm bad at.

ADHD is a spectrum disorder. Different people have different expressions of it. This is how it affects me; I've never met someone else who had it affect them quite this way.

An analogy that stuck with me is "everyone has to hold 100 marbles at once, but they all have a bag and you don't." Medication gives you a bag with a hole in it. You still drop marbles from time to time, but it's so much better than not having one at all.

I need constant input. Weird confession for someone with two podcasts: I don't listen to podcasts, or watch videos. They're all too slow and don't hold my attention most of the time. I'm not a movie person for the same reason.

That's the drawback. The corollary, or advantage to offset it, is that my primary means of consuming information is reading, and I read quickly.

@mike_julian finally asked me to take a reading test online. It came back a bit above 3400 wpm. I retain all of it, too.

"How do you keep up with @awscloud releases?" I usually give a pretty glib answer when someone asks me that question, but the truth is I read everything they put out. Yes, that's as much material as it sounds like.

The reason @mike_julian and I work so well together is that he's basically my complete opposite. When I was independent I would talk to someone who wanted help with their bill and then just... not send them a proposal. It was maddening.

He keeps the things going around me.

So much of what the internal Duckbill Group processes are, are really "structure built up around the barely controlled chaos that is me."

I feel bad on some level every time I see it. "They shouldn't have to do that on my account."

Take Screaming in the Cloud, my interview podcast. My process is always the same. I book an hour via a form that the guest fills out. The next time I talk to them is "it's time to record the show."

We chat for a few minutes first to establish the point of the show, and then I whack record. There's no script; it's entirely improvised every time. And because I suck so thoroughly at preparing for things, I've gotten effective enough at it that it works.

Some days I can sit down and start writing, and twenty minutes later I have a couple of thousand words that are pretty close to being ready to ship.

Other days I struggle to write a tweet.

It's always a mixed bag, and I have to seize the productive moments when they show up.

Between the AWS Morning Brief, Screaming in the Cloud, and Last Week in AWS, we're putting out two newsletters and five podcast episodes every week. The team was kind enough to take an AMB day off my hand; the rest is me.

Then there's... y'know. The shitposting on Twitter. The analyst work I do. Keeping up on AWS / the tech industry. And all the reQuinnvent / parody music videos / webinar / conference talk / charity fundraiser nonsense things.

I thrive when no two days look much alike.

When I was an SRE type, there was a pattern. The first three months were great. Things were broken! I could fix them. And then things started working smoothly, and the boredom set in.

So I found other problems to work on.

In other people's orgs.

Who didn't appreciate it.

One of the hardest parts of running a business is managing your own psychology.

One of the hardest parts of being me is managing my own psychiatry.

A great example of "something I suck at profoundly" is filing taxes. It's a lot of "hurry up, then wait" spread across a bunch of different stages.

My trick here was surrounding myself with people who will force the issue. Otherwise I'd be one of those "didn't pay taxes for a decade" types.

So, what's the point of this thread?

Because I was diagnosed when I was 5, and I've struggled with this my entire life. I tried to white-knuckle it for a while in my 20s. If this resonates with you? Talk to a psychiatrist. They have tests for this now.

For most of my life this all expressed itself as "Corey, you just suck." I won't even get into the havoc it wreaked on my personal relationships; let me just say that @bequinning is a goddamned saint for putting up with me.

And it drives @mike_julian *NUTS*. In the Before Times we'd be sitting down strategizing, and a common pattern was him going through an agenda, and me flitting all over the place.

"Corey, will you please just focus and--wait what was the last thing you said?" We work together.

Again, the things that make me suck also make me awesome. Some days Mike looks at my calendar and gets almost physically ill by how full it is with random meetings.

I see from a few of the comments to this thread that many folks didn't realize I was on the ADHD bus.

I hide it in plain sight. Easy example: the cloud industry is boring. I'd lose interest quickly, so I fix that via snark. The jokes keep it interesting, and they're for me.

"How close to the line can I go without crossing it or being repetitive?" It's high risk--if I get it wrong I'll hurt people. Get it TOO wrong and I could realistically get sued over it.

But it isn't dull.

A few other questions have come up. "Can I multi-task." No. Not for crap. But I can context switch quickly. If I fall into the trap of looking at my computer screen while on a phone call, I'll miss the next 30 seconds of what you say.

"I read super quickly too." That is... unlikely. Not like this. I generally try not to expose it too much just because people find it actively disconcerting.

https://twitter.com/mike_julian/status/1357549436432379904

"Why don't you talk about this more?" Because I don't want it to define me. I'm "me." It's a part of who I am, and I've mostly found ways to live with it.

But not everyone has, and that's why this thread is important for me to write. You're not alone.

Here's an example. I'll write that 2000 word blog post. I'll send it to our technical editor, who will go over it and shoot it back to me.

I'll then procrastinate for DAYS rather than spending 2 minutes to shove it into WordPress.

I used to record podcasts for Screaming in the Cloud and then sit on them for WEEKS before getting them to the production team.

Now the form sets up stuff the team needs, and the recording setup automatically dumps the audio files into Dropbox.

I don't have to do anything.

Eep I broke the thread. Continues here:

https://twitter.com/quinnypig/status/1357553387303178241

So in conclusion I want to say this:

I had to build the company and job from scratch to do it, but this is the first time in my life I feel like I’m operating at a level anywhere close to my potential.

My DMs are open.