There is a population of adults with ADHD that academic research has barely examined. They are not necessarily the people who arrive in a psychiatrist’s office because their lives have become unmanageable. They are the people who have found ways to thrive, sometimes without medication, and whose lives might teach us something about the conditions that make success possible.
Dr. William Dodson became interested in precisely those adults. In an August 21, 2021 email to me, he wrote:
Most of all I wanted to talk with the adults with ADHD who were NOT in my office. I wanted to know what they had figured out that so many others had not that allowed them to thrive and commonly do so without the aid of medications.
After 25 years of asking these questions, I came up with only one thing they all had in common. What you call the “execution of Empathy”. Our group used a term of which I am not personally fond... the kid had a Cheerleader. The term I use is Advocate. The term does not matter because they are all the same thing and all happen the same way.
I like another word for that person: a caddy.
A good golf caddy does not swing the club for you. The caddy knows the course, knows the player, sees hazards the player may not see, offers information when it is useful, helps select the club, and then gets out of the way. The player still has to hit the shot.
The best caddies don't simply tell their players what to do. They understand how that particular player plays golf. They learn the player's strengths, tendencies, rhythms, and weaknesses. Their job is not to turn the player into somebody else. Their job is to help that player become the best version of themselves.
That may be one of the simplest ways to understand what happens when childhood goes reasonably right for an ADHD kid.
The Big Jackpot Lottery
I have met a handful of adults with ADHD who were diagnosed or recognized their ADHD relatively late in life, yet had already built successful lives. They weren't necessarily free of difficulties. They had developed ways to work around them, often without knowing that what they were compensating for was ADHD. What interested me was not simply how intelligent or talented they were, but the environments in which they had grown up.
Imagine an ADHD child whose home is not an escape room, whose school is not an escape room, and who has not experienced significant childhood trauma.
That's the Holy Trinity.
Home is not an escape room because both parents are supportive, with at least one genuine Advocate. School is not an escape room because teachers recognize the child's abilities and provide an environment where those abilities can develop. And significant childhood trauma has not compounded the difficulties of growing up with ADHD.
That child has won the Big Jackpot Lottery.
The way I think about it, roughly 80% of life's challenges have already been taken care of. Not because ADHD has disappeared, but because they aren't fighting themselves or carrying the baggage of their past. They have the confidence, competence, and support to figure things out or ask for help when they need it. And that advantage doesn't end with childhood. It follows them into a successful adulthood.
Most importantly, there doesn't have to be a dramatic intervention or a major pivot. The developmental runway was already there.
The Teacher Who Believed the Math
I worked with a Puerto Rican woman who had grown up with many of the conditions I mean when I talk about winning the Big Jackpot Lottery. She had a very high IQ and extraordinary mathematical ability. She also had two supportive parents, an Advocate at home, and the benefit of attending private school in Puerto Rico.
But there was something unusual about how she did mathematics. She could see the first few steps of a problem, and then the answer would simply arrive. She didn't necessarily experience every intermediate step as a conscious sequence she could write down.
A rigid classroom could have turned that into a problem. Show your work. You skipped steps. You're not following the process.
Instead, her teachers knew her. They knew the work was hers, understood that she knew the mathematics, and recognized that this was how she solved problems. They didn't lower the mathematical standard. They stopped confusing the standard with one prescribed pathway to reaching it.
Her intelligence gave her the capacity to develop her own strategies, while the supportive environment gave those strategies room to develop without constantly being treated as evidence that she was doing something wrong.
She went to college, pursued graduate education, and eventually completed her master's degree later in life. Along the way, she built a successful career as a consultant with Deloitte & Touche.
When she told me about her accounting background, I couldn't reconcile the profession with the person I knew.
“How can you have ADHD and sit there looking at spreadsheets all day? That's insane.”
“Oh, I didn't do that,” she told me. “I was a consultant.”
Suddenly, it made perfect sense.
“Oh, you're like an ER doctor. You're an accounting MacGyver.”
“Exactly.”
She was interacting with customers, encountering new problems, figuring out what was wrong, developing solutions, and collaborating with teams. The accounting knowledge was her toolkit, and the work involved using that toolkit against a changing stream of problems. Of course. That was highly creative work.
She hadn't forced herself into the conventional image of an accountant sitting behind spreadsheets all day. She had found the part of the profession that fit how she worked, and she had done so without knowing for most of her life that she had ADHD.
She was in her forties when her son received a formal ADHD diagnosis. Recognizing herself in his experience, she came to the realization that she had ADHD too.
Think about what had happened across her life. She had high intelligence, but she also had parents and teachers who recognized her competence. She had been allowed to develop her own ways of solving problems, and as an adult, she found work that made use of those abilities.
Her life wasn't organized around a long list of things she supposedly couldn't do. It was organized around what she could do.
She didn't need somebody to rescue her from a failing educational pathway or a dramatic intervention that changed the direction of her life. Her parents and teachers had already provided the conditions in which she could develop.
She won the Big Jackpot Lottery.
And that is exactly the sort of developmental history that academic ADHD research should be interested in examining.
The Public School That Wasn't an Escape Room
I recently met a man who had been diagnosed with ADHD in high school but had never taken medication for it. He was highly athletic, exercised regularly, and had built a successful life without the baggage of shame and negative self-talk that I have encountered in so many other adults with ADHD.
As we talked about his childhood, I began recognizing something familiar.
He described his upbringing as privileged. His mother was a social worker, and both parents were extraordinarily supportive. His mother wanted him to become the best version of himself. She wasn't interested in changing who he was or forcing him to become somebody else.
You be you.
His father was a little more whimsical. He moved from job to job, never quite settling into a conventional career pathway. My new acquaintance suspected that his father might have had undiagnosed ADHD, although that was never established clinically. But whatever his father's neurological makeup, he was supportive of his son.
Home was not an escape room.
Then I asked about school. He told me that school had been a positive experience, too. That immediately caught my attention because he had attended public school.
How does that happen?
He explained that he had attended a public magnet school for the arts.
Suddenly, I understood.
"So you were going to school with a bunch of neurodivergent creatives?"
"Yeah."
"And the teachers were neurodivergent creatives, too?"
"Yeah."
"So the teachers created classrooms that fit how they naturally operated, which meant those classrooms automatically fit how you operated."
"Yeah, that's it exactly."
Think about the implications of that. Here was a public school that wasn't an escape room for an ADHD student. Not because somebody had developed an elaborate intervention plan or because the school had implemented some extraordinary ADHD accommodation program.
The teachers were creative people teaching creative students in an environment organized around creative work. The learning environment that suited the teachers also suited him. He wasn't constantly being asked to suppress the very characteristics that made him successful. His interests, abilities, and natural ways of engaging with the world belonged in that classroom.
School wasn't something he needed to survive. It was somewhere he could develop.
He eventually attended the Savannah College of Art and Design, better known as SCAD, continuing along an educational pathway that built upon the strengths his earlier schooling had already nurtured.
Then I asked him another question.
"Do you take any medication? Adderall?"
"No."
"Do you exercise regularly?"
"Oh, every day."
He described playing table tennis, rollerblading, going to the gym, and maintaining a rigorous daily workout routine. Physical activity wasn't an occasional intervention. It was an ordinary part of how he lived, and I suggested that his exercise regimen might be providing enough support for him to self-regulate without medication.
His exercise habits reminded me of something Dr. William Dodson had observed in his clinical practice. Dodson described adults, often highly athletic, who first presented with significant ADHD difficulties in their mid-20s through late 30s after suffering injuries that prevented them from exercising for extended periods.
Their ADHD hadn't suddenly appeared. Their rigorous exercise routines may have been providing enough regulation that they had never needed medication or even recognized the extent of their difficulties. When the exercise stopped, those difficulties became impossible to ignore.
That raises a fascinating possibility about professional athletes and other highly active people with ADHD. How many have never needed a diagnosis or treatment because their athletic lives provide the stimulation, structure, and physical activity that help them function successfully? And what happens when an injury or the end of an athletic career takes that environment away?
We'll explore those questions in greater detail in the Athletics & Sports Psychology chapter.
But there was something else about my new acquaintance that struck me. He didn't appear to carry the baggage of shame and negative self-talk that I have encountered in so many adults with ADHD. He didn't describe the same kind of ADHD-related social anxiety that I have experienced myself.
He had grown up knowing he was different without being taught that being different meant something was wrong with him.
His mother wanted him to be himself. His father supported him. His teachers provided an educational environment in which his natural abilities could flourish. And physical exercise remained an important part of his daily life.
He had the Holy Trinity.
Home was not an escape room. School was not an escape room. And he did not describe the significant childhood trauma that has complicated the lives of so many ADHD adults I have known. He didn't need a dramatic pivot because the developmental runway had been there all along.
What makes his story especially compelling is that he didn't have to discover this pathway after years of failure. He was already living it.
And the public school deserves particular attention. We spend enormous amounts of time discussing how schools should accommodate children with ADHD. Yet here was an example of a public school whose ordinary educational environment was already well suited to a student with ADHD.
The teachers weren't necessarily trying to accommodate a neurological difference. They had created a place where that difference wasn't an obstacle in the first place.
School was not an escape room because the classroom already fit the child.
That's the Big Jackpot Lottery.
The Second Lottery: When a Pivot Becomes Necessary
But what happens when the Holy Trinity isn't there? What happens when school becomes an escape room, even though home does not?
A child can be miserable at school and still have a home where they feel understood, valued, and safe. They may experience bullying, rejection, academic failure, or constant criticism from teachers. Some of those experiences can leave lasting psychological injuries, but their parents don't necessarily see the same child the school sees.
They see a kid who struggles to complete homework but spends hours working on something they love. They see talent, focus, commitment, curiosity, and extraordinary effort in an area that school may barely recognize.
The passion might be filmmaking, acting, music, athletics, art, technology, or even the moving business. And here is where real empathy becomes essential.
The parents may have absolutely no personal interest in that passion. They may not understand it, and it may have nothing to do with the future they imagined for their child. But they can see what it means to the child, and they can see where confidence still exists.
The child may be the one who recognizes that the existing pathway isn't working. They may discover another direction and want to pursue it. Sometimes the adult recognizes the possibility first. Either way, the adult has a decision to make. Do they insist that the child continue along the pathway they had imagined, or do they recognize the competence and commitment the child is already demonstrating?
When parents practice real empathy, they can become the catalyst that makes a necessary pivot possible.
Sometimes that means supporting a different educational pathway. Sometimes it means investing money, time, or resources in an interest that other adults consider impractical. And sometimes it means changing their own lives to provide the scaffolding their child needs.
The Big Jackpot Lottery didn't require a pivot.
The Second Lottery does.
And the difference is the intervention.
Chuck and the Moving Truck
My cousin Chuck was tired of school. He was in the eleventh grade, tired of the nagging, tired of struggling, and tired of trying to make himself fit an environment that wasn't working for him.
School had become an escape room, but home hadn't.
Chuck had two parents who loved him dearly and recognized that school was not bringing out the best in him. They had also seen him working in the moving business during the summer. He liked the work, knew what he was doing, and was willing to work hard.
Eventually, Chuck told his parents that he didn't want to go back to school. He wanted to start a moving business. He wanted a truck, and he wanted to work.
His parents didn't simply tell him that he was throwing away his future. They gave him a condition.
Get your GED first. Then we'll help you get a truck, and you can pay us back whenever you're able.
That was the beginning. Chuck initiated the pivot. His parents recognized that he had found something he could do well, and their intervention made that pivot possible.
What makes this story so important is what happened afterward. His parents didn't merely finance the truck and walk away. They continued providing support as Chuck developed the business. Eventually, they became employees of the company themselves.
They were his scaffolding.
In a very real sense, they became his Tim Cook to his Steve Jobs. They helped supply the support and structure that allowed Chuck to concentrate on building the business.
Today, Chuck's moving company is one of the most successful independently owned moving companies in the US.
But that's not the most important part of the story. His parents had no way of knowing how successful the company would become. They weren't making a calculated investment in a future multimillionaire.
They were responding to the child standing in front of them.
They had seen him struggle in school. They had also seen him work hard and demonstrate competence in the moving business. They recognized the difference, and instead of insisting that the only acceptable pathway was the one that wasn't working, they helped him build another.
Steven Spielberg and the Camera
Steven Spielberg struggled in school and experienced bullying. His grades weren't strong enough to get him into the University of Southern California's film program, so he attended California State University, Long Beach.
But filmmaking was already where his passion lived.
As a child, Spielberg had been making movies with a camera, experimenting with storytelling, directing friends, and developing the skills that would eventually become his life's work. His parents supported that interest even when school was difficult.
They couldn't have known they were raising one of the most successful filmmakers in history, much less someone who would be compared with John Ford. They didn't need to know. What mattered was that they recognized something their son cared deeply about and helped him pursue it.
Spielberg eventually left Long Beach State to pursue filmmaking professionally. His father was initially upset, but then recognized something he already knew about his son. Steven was a chip off the old block. When he set his mind to something, he was going to pursue it.
His father didn't have to know where that decision would lead. He already knew his son.
The camera wasn't merely a hobby. It was a place where Spielberg could exercise imagination, develop competence, and experience confidence while other parts of childhood were difficult. His parents helped preserve that place. And when Spielberg recognized that his future lay outside the conventional college pathway, his father's understanding helped make that pivot possible.
Jennifer Lawrence and the Acting Audition
Jennifer Lawrence's account of her childhood, including her 2018 60 Minutes interview with Bill Whitaker, provides another example.
She described struggling in school, feeling unintelligent academically, and being hyperactive. The conventional classroom wasn't an environment where she experienced much confidence.
But acting was different.
When she discovered acting as a young teenager, she found something that engaged her in a way school had not. Her parents eventually saw that difference. They saw her happiness, focus, and commitment, and they supported it.
Lawrence left school at fourteen and never earned a GED or high school diploma. In the interview, she described herself as self-educated.
Her parents didn't know she would become an Academy Award-winning actress. They saw their daughter doing something that gave her confidence, something she approached with a level of focus and commitment that school had not brought out. They recognized what was already there, and they were willing to support a different pathway.
Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and the Pivot to Microsoft
Bill Gates left Harvard because he recognized that the opportunity to build a software company was more important to him than continuing along the conventional college pathway.
He initiated the pivot.
His parents had every reason to value a college education. But instead of treating his decision as a rejection of everything they had provided, they supported him. His father's financial support helped make the entrepreneurial pathway possible.
And Gates had something else: Paul Allen.
In a recorded discussion of ADHD and working in groups, Dr. Dodson describes what he calls an implementer-finisher partner. He uses Gates as an example, identifying Paul Allen and later Steve Ballmer as people whose complementary strengths helped turn Gates's ideas into reality.
Dodson's point isn't that the person generating the ideas is incapable of doing meaningful work. It's that different people bring different abilities to the same project. The person who sees the larger problem, develops a vision, and works out a solution doesn't necessarily have to be the same person who organizes every detail of its implementation.
Gates had a vision for what software could become. Allen brought complementary technical abilities and helped build the company. As Microsoft grew, Ballmer brought additional strengths in management and operations. The contributions were different, but they were all essential.
And this is where the Second Lottery extends beyond childhood. Gates's parents supported the pivot. Allen and later Ballmer helped provide the scaffolding that allowed the work to grow.
The pivot didn't eliminate the need for support. It changed what kind of support was needed.
Steve Jobs and Miss Hill
Steve Jobs's story adds an important variation because the person who intervened wasn't one of his parents.
It was his fourth-grade teacher, Miss Hill.
In an April 20, 1995 Smithsonian interview, Jobs described growing up with a father who encouraged his curiosity. Paul Jobs was a machinist, extraordinarily skilled with his hands, who gave Steve a small workbench in the family garage when he was five or six.
He taught him how to use tools, build things, take things apart, and put them back together. He also introduced him to the basics of electronics.
Jobs grew up surrounded by engineers in Silicon Valley. A neighbor named Larry Lang, who worked at Hewlett-Packard, introduced him to more electronics and Heathkits—products sold as kits that people could assemble themselves.
Those experiences taught Jobs that the complicated objects around him were not mysteries. They were things human beings had designed and built, and he developed confidence in his ability to understand and create.
But school was another matter.
His mother had taught him to read before he entered school. Jobs wanted to read books and explore the world, but he encountered a kind of institutional authority he had never experienced before.
He didn't like it.
By third grade, he and a friend were getting into serious mischief. They were bored, disengaged, and frequently in trouble. Jobs later described how close the school system had come to extinguishing his curiosity.
Then he entered fourth grade. The principal had decided that Jobs and his friend should not be placed in the same classroom. Miss Hill volunteered to take one of them, and Jobs ended up in her advanced fourth-grade class.
She watched him for approximately two weeks. Then she approached him with a proposition.
She offered him a mathematics workbook and told him that if he completed it at home, without help, and got at least 80% correct, she would give him five dollars and an enormous lollipop.
Jobs thought the offer was ridiculous, but he did the work. As he recalled in the interview, she had essentially bribed him back into learning with candy and money. Yet something much more important happened: he developed enormous respect for her.
Miss Hill didn't stop with the mathematics workbook. She found other ways to engage him, including giving him kits for building cameras. Jobs even ground his own lens.
He later said that he probably learned more academically in that single year than in any other year of his life.
The school subsequently tested him and proposed moving him all the way into high school. His parents refused, allowing him to skip only one grade. They understood that academic ability was not the only consideration in his development.
But the most revealing part of the interview came when Jobs reflected on what Miss Hill had meant to his life. He believed that without her and a few other people who had taken a personal interest in him, he might have ended up in jail.
He recognized that the same energy and curiosity that eventually helped him build extraordinary things could have been directed toward entirely different ends.
Miss Hill changed the direction of that energy.
She used real empathy.
She watched him. She learned what engaged him. She recognized his intelligence and curiosity beneath the behavior that had frustrated other teachers. Then she changed her approach to reach the child standing in front of her.
She didn't demand that Jobs become a different person before she would teach him. She found a way to teach Steve Jobs.
That was the intervention, and Miss Hill became the catalyst for his pivot.
Jobs returned to the importance of that kind of relationship later in the same interview when he discussed computers in education.
Despite having helped put computers into schools, he argued that technology was not the most important element of education. The most important element was another person: someone who could stimulate a child's curiosity, guide it, and feed it.
He understood that from experience. He had been that child, and Miss Hill had been that person.
Sometimes the Advocate Arrives Later
Not everyone wins either lottery. Some children grow up without the developmental runway of a supportive home and school. Others carry significant trauma into adolescence and adulthood, still trying to figure out how to manage emotions and experiences they were never taught to navigate.
But sometimes the Advocate arrives later.
Sometimes his name is John Chaney.
John Chaney and Marc Jackson
John Chaney was the legendary basketball coach at Temple University in Philadelphia. He was demanding, fiercely competitive, and sometimes intimidating. But his players knew something else about him. He loved those young men, and he understood that his responsibility to them extended far beyond basketball.
Marc Jackson was one of those players. Jackson had grown up around Temple's campus, dealing with a difficult family life and helping raise his younger brother. He had spent much of his childhood without the guidance of a father.
In 1996, during a game against Duke, Jackson lost control and elbowed Greg Newton. He knew what he had done was wrong, but as he later explained, he hadn't learned how to cope with certain emotions or what to do when they overwhelmed him.
Chaney held him accountable. Jackson was suspended for Temple's next game, and Chaney supported the suspension. But Chaney also recognized something more important.
Jackson didn't simply need punishment. He needed someone to help him understand what had happened, how to manage those emotions, and what to do differently the next time.
Chaney called Jackson into his office, cleared the room, and talked with him. Jackson later described receiving the kind of guidance a father gives his child.
Then came Temple's next game against St. Joseph's, a Philadelphia rival and conference opponent. Jackson couldn't play because he was suspended. Chaney could coach, but he chose not to. Assistant coach Jim Maloney coached Temple while John Chaney stayed with Marc Jackson.
Think about that decision. A Division I basketball coach voluntarily missed a conference rivalry game because his suspended player needed him more than his basketball team did at that moment.
Chaney didn't remove the consequence. Jackson still served his suspension. But Chaney understood that accountability didn't require abandonment.
Years later, at Chaney's memorial service, Jackson described what that relationship had meant to him:
The word coach means dad.
And the relationship didn't end when Jackson left Temple. He eventually became a mentor himself, working with young men and passing along the lessons Chaney had taught him.
That's what an Advocate can accomplish when the intervention arrives later in life.
The Big Jackpot Lottery gives a child the developmental runway without requiring a pivot. The Second Lottery gives a child parents or teachers whose real empathy makes a necessary pivot possible. But John Chaney reminds us that the opportunity to become an Advocate doesn't end when childhood does.
The Child Is More Than the Relatable Things
These stories have something important in common, and it isn't extraordinary wealth, fame, or even talent. It's the willingness of an adult to recognize something about a child that may have nothing to do with the adult's own experiences, interests, or expectations.
That is much harder than it sounds.
Dr. Joseph Llinas, my psychiatrist, has spent decades working with children and families dealing with ADHD and autism. He is a two-time American Psychiatric Association Man of the Year for his clinical research on ADHD kids and autistic kids from low-income families.
During one of our conversations, I asked him a question that had been bothering me for years, particularly after everything I had witnessed in the classroom.
“How much of the problems in the parent and ADHD child's home dynamic come from the parent not being able to see past what they see of themselves in their child? That's where their expectations begin and end, and the child cannot neurologically meet those expectations.”
“Almost all of it.”
Now, I'm a mathematician. Almost all is not a particularly satisfying numerical answer.
“Okay, almost all of it. What are we talking about? Eighty, eighty-five percent?”
“Try ninety-five to ninety-eight percent.”
“Wow.”
Then I thought about all the students I had worked with.
“What about the classroom?”
“Same thing.”
“Same percentage?”
“Pretty much.”
Think about what he was telling me. In his clinical experience, the overwhelming majority of the parent-child conflicts he encountered weren't simply about the child's ADHD symptoms. They involved parents projecting their own experiences, expectations, and ways of functioning onto children whose neurology didn't necessarily allow them to meet those expectations.
And he was seeing essentially the same problem in the classroom.
That doesn't mean every disagreement between a parent and an ADHD child is caused by projection, or that these percentages represent a measured population statistic. These were Dr. Llinas's estimates from his clinical experience. But the pattern he was describing was unmistakably familiar to me.
Adults understand the things about a child they can relate to. They recognize their own abilities, interests, struggles, and experiences, and those become the reference points for what they expect the child to accomplish.
The difficulty begins when the child operates differently.
I learned that lesson myself.
When my older son Andrew was learning baseball, I expected him to field ground balls the way I had. Stay low. Get into the right position. Move your feet. It seemed straightforward to me.
What I wasn't accounting for was that I had naturally developed strong core muscles, quadriceps, and glutes through years of athletics. Those physical prerequisites were already there for me. I was asking him to execute movements without recognizing that his body hadn't developed the same foundation.
I was measuring his performance against my own experience instead of examining what he actually needed.
I ended up being the asshole.
With my younger son, Ben, the differences were even more instructive. He processed language and social cues differently from me. When I tried to teach him golf, explanations that would have worked for me weren't necessarily useful to him.
I had to stop assuming that my way of understanding something was the pathway he should follow.
Hands-on instruction, physical manipulation, and carefully designed drills worked better. I had to learn how he learned, and that required effort.
Most people think of themselves as empathetic because they can relate to somebody else's experience. But relating is only the beginning. The difficult work starts when another person's experience is different from your own.
Real empathy is doing the work to understand everything beyond the relatable things.
That is what the parents, teachers, and coaches in these stories were practicing. They weren't simply supporting interests they happened to share with their children or players. They were recognizing something important in another human being and taking it seriously.
Beyond the Relatable Things
This distinction is especially important when a child has ADHD.
A parent who doesn't have ADHD may have no intuitive understanding of why their child can spend six hours making a video but cannot seem to get started on twenty minutes of homework. A teacher may see a student who can talk endlessly about music, photography, or sports but appears disengaged during class.
The adult sees inconsistency and may interpret it as unwillingness. But the child's capacity for sustained effort is right there in front of them. It is being expressed under different conditions.
The question shouldn't simply be why the child won't apply that effort to everything else. A much more interesting question is: What is happening in this environment that makes that effort accessible, and what can we learn from it?
That question doesn't make the academic difficulties disappear. It doesn't mean a child can simply choose to transfer intense interest to any task. But it gives us a place to begin investigating rather than treating the inconsistency as a character flaw.
And it gives the child something else: an adult who is genuinely interested in understanding them.
In my original August 2021 email to Dr. Dodson, I described how I connected with ADHD students through coaching. I explained that most people's attempts at empathy rarely moved beyond relatable things, and that understanding these children required a willingness to see how differently they experienced the world.
Dodson's response connected that observation to his own work with successful adults. He described the importance of an Advocate who recognizes the child's worth and potential, particularly when things are going badly.
The Advocate is not merely someone who says encouraging things. It is someone who understands the child well enough to recognize what may be preventing them from succeeding and who remains invested in helping them find a way forward.
You Be You
When I was developing ways to use golf to help my son Ben learn to self-regulate, I spent a considerable amount of time following the PGA Tour whenever it came through Florida, Savannah, Georgia, or other parts of the Southeast. Practice rounds were particularly valuable because I could photograph and record golfers working on the mechanics and routines that made them successful.
I watched Bubba Watson practice putting, observed Padraig Harrington working through his routines, and had opportunities to speak with professional golfers, swing instructors, and sports psychologists. One thing I discovered was just how generous these people could be with their knowledge. Harrington was wonderful, and that generosity extended to many of the instructors I encountered. When you approached them respectfully with a thoughtful question, they were often remarkably willing to share what they knew.
One of those encounters was with legendary golf instructor David Leadbetter at the Valspar Championship in Palm Harbor, Florida. He was there working with one of his students, and I approached him during a practice round.
I introduced myself and told him how much I appreciated his instructional DVDs, several of which I had purchased while working with Ben. Then I mentioned one particular DVD in which Nick Price, one of Leadbetter's most successful students, had participated.
I told him I had a question that was a little off the wall.
"No golf instructor in their right mind would teach somebody to have Nick Price's tempo in their golf swing."
Price had one of the fastest natural swing tempos in professional golf. His backswing and transition were extraordinarily quick, yet he was one of the finest ball strikers in the world. What fascinated me wasn't simply how fast he swung, but how Leadbetter had managed to refine his mechanics without fundamentally changing that rhythm.
So I continued.
"My hypothesis is that you built his golf swing around his natural tempo because that's how he's wired. If you tried to change that tempo, he'd constantly be fighting against himself, and he'd never be able to move forward. Is that why you never messed with it?"
Leadbetter looked at me and said, "Nobody's ever asked me that question before. But yes, that's exactly what I did, because that's just naturally his internal tempo."
We exchanged pleasantries, I thanked him for his time, and we went our separate ways.
But that conversation stayed with me because it captured something fundamental about coaching, teaching, and understanding another human being.
Leadbetter recognized that Nick Price's natural tempo wasn't a mechanical flaw that needed correcting. It was part of how Price operated. Rather than impose a conventional swing tempo upon him, Leadbetter developed the mechanics that would allow Price to perform consistently within his own rhythm.
He wasn't trying to change the golfer. He was helping the golfer become the best version of himself.
Now think about how often adults do precisely the opposite with ADHD children. They encounter a child whose natural way of operating doesn't resemble the expected model, and their first impulse is to correct the difference.
Slow down. Sit still. Do it this way. Follow these steps. Stop moving. Stop talking. Stop doodling.
Sometimes instruction and correction are necessary. But are we correcting something that genuinely interferes with the child's ability to perform, or are we simply trying to make the child operate in a way that feels more familiar to us?
That's the distinction Leadbetter understood. He didn't try to coach the Nick Price out of Nick Price, because doing so would have meant asking Price to fight against his own natural rhythm every time he swung a golf club.
And it's exactly what Miss Hill understood about Steve Jobs. She didn't try to extinguish his curiosity, energy, or unconventional way of approaching the world. She found ways to engage those characteristics and build upon them.
Whether we're talking about a professional golfer or a child with ADHD, the principle is the same. Effective coaching begins with understanding the person standing in front of you, not forcing that person to conform to a model built around somebody else.
You be you.
Build Around the Rhythm
Shane Victorino offers another useful example from professional sports.
Victorino wasn't the kind of player every organization immediately knew what to do with. His energy and unconventional style could be viewed as a problem to manage.
Charlie Manuel, managing the Philadelphia Phillies, saw something else. He saw potential rather than a bother.
Manuel gave Victorino the opportunity, confidence, feedback, and runway to develop as a major-league player. Victorino still had to do the work. He had to learn, prepare, practice, and develop the routines that allowed him to perform consistently.
The manager didn't do those things for him. But Manuel helped create an environment in which Victorino could develop them.
Victorino became a Gold Glove outfielder and a member of the Phillies' 2008 World Series championship team.
What interests me is not simply that he succeeded. It's that a manager recognized a player whose strengths might have been overlooked by somebody more concerned with making him conform.
That is the difference between managing a person and trying to replace the person with somebody else.
Those Extraordinary People Who Still Need Managing
Ed Catmull, one of Pixar's founders, learned something important about managing extraordinarily talented people. Early in his career, he believed that hiring brilliant people meant he could largely leave them alone to do their work. Eventually, he recognized that his approach wasn't working.
Looking back, he explained:
I start off with this theory, and basically the theory was wrong.
And I was trying to avoid a responsibility incorrectly.
And there are a few things I learned from it.
One of them, I just realized, well, first of all, I can't tell when I'm interviewing somebody whether or not they are self-managing.
I can see if they're smart, I think I get personalities, but I actually can't tell if they're self-managing.
But the other thing I realized was that some of those people were extraordinarily good.
They just needed managing.
There it is.
Catmull wasn't describing a failure of talent. He was describing a failure of management, including his own.
And I think that is where a great many managers get things wrong. They want to hire capable people, assign responsibilities, and remain relatively aloof. They expect employees to organize themselves, overcome obstacles, and produce results without requiring much attention.
But that's not necessarily management. Sometimes it's simply avoiding the responsibility of managing.
What Catmull discovered was that some extraordinarily capable people still needed someone to understand how they worked. They needed coaching, feedback, structure, or help navigating obstacles. And providing those things required a manager to become genuinely engaged with the people they were responsible for.
There is an empathic component to that relationship. You cannot assume that everyone organizes their work the way you do, responds to the same feedback, or needs the same kind of support. You have to get to know the person.
That doesn't mean every extraordinary person needs managing in the same way, or even needs much managing at all. Catmull's point was that he couldn't reliably determine who was self-managing simply by interviewing them.
Some of those people were extraordinarily good. They just needed managing.
And that distinction matters enormously for ADHD.
A person can be brilliant, highly motivated, and extraordinarily capable in a particular domain while still needing help with organization, sequencing, scheduling, or navigating institutional expectations. Those needs do not cancel the person's abilities, and providing support doesn't diminish the achievement.
Think about Chuck's parents. They didn't simply purchase a truck. They continued supporting the organization of the business as it developed. Or consider Bill Gates and Paul Allen. Their complementary abilities helped make Microsoft possible. Later, Steve Ballmer brought additional strengths to the organization.
The same principle applies to Steven Spielberg. He may have the vision for a film, but turning that vision into a finished movie requires cinematographers, editors, producers, sound designers, actors, and countless other specialists. The director doesn't have to perform every job on the production.
And neither does Steve Jobs.
Steve Jobs and the People Who Built the iPhone
Years after the 1995 interview, Apple engineers were developing a tablet computer with a multi-touch interface. Jobs saw a demonstration of the technology, including the ability to move information naturally with a finger and scroll through content on the screen.
He recognized something extraordinary.
This wasn't merely a clever technical achievement. It was an interface that people could understand almost instinctively.
Jobs saw the possibility of putting that technology into a phone. The tablet project was set aside while Apple concentrated on developing what became the first iPhone.
That recognition required something beyond technical expertise. It required Jobs to imagine how another person would experience the technology. I would describe that as acquired empathy: an understanding of other people's experiences developed through observation, curiosity, and deliberate attention rather than simply relying on what comes naturally to oneself.
Jobs could recognize the human possibilities of an engineering achievement. But recognizing those possibilities didn't mean he could personally build every component of the iPhone. It took an extraordinary team of engineers, industrial designers, software developers, manufacturing specialists, and operations professionals to turn the vision into a product.
And Jobs brought something else to that collaboration.
His father had taught him an important lesson about craftsmanship. Paul Jobs believed that even the parts of something nobody would see deserved the same care as the visible parts. The lesson was that you should do the work properly because you know what is there.
That philosophy became part of Steve Jobs's approach to design. The internal construction mattered. The number of buttons mattered. The appearance, feel, and operation of the finished product mattered.
Jobs wanted the entire experience to reflect the same attention to detail. His engineers and designers had to figure out how to make it happen.
This is what Dodson was describing when he discussed implementer-finisher partners. Sometimes that complementary partner is one person. Sometimes it is a small group. And sometimes it is an entire organization.
Jobs's vision mattered. So did the abilities of everyone who helped turn that vision into the iPhone.
In his 1995 Smithsonian interview, Jobs described the original Macintosh as a collective achievement. He spoke about a relatively small group of people whose work eventually reached millions of users. He also described the combination of technical excellence and humanistic design that distinguished Apple's most important contributions.
The work was never simply about one person having a brilliant idea. It was about people with complementary abilities creating something together.
And that brings us to something Dodson emphasized near the end of his discussion of implementer-finisher partners: mutual appreciation. Everybody involved needs to recognize that the contributions are different, but that doesn't make one person's contribution less valuable than another's.
The person solving the problem isn't slacking off because someone else implements the solution. The implementer isn't merely carrying out somebody else's work.
Both are contributing their strengths.
That is how effective teams work, and it is how effective scaffolding works.
The Caddies
This brings me back to Dodson's Advocate.
In his August 2021 email, Dodson described a three-part message that the Advocates in his experience consistently communicated to ADHD children.
First, they recognized the child's effort and intelligence. They understood that if the problem could have been solved through sheer determination and hard work, the child would likely have solved it already.
Second, they recognized that something important had been missed—an obstacle that wasn't being understood.
Third, they committed themselves to staying with the child through the difficult parts until they could work toward a solution together.
There is something profoundly different about that approach. It doesn't begin with an accusation or an assumption that the child isn't trying. It begins by recognizing the child's worth, acknowledging that the current approach isn't working, and committing to figuring out why.
Dodson wrote something else in that email that has stayed with me:
If a child knows that you see the potential for greatness in them, they will walk through Hell for you to deliver that greatness.
He also told me:
You discovered what it has taken me 25 years to understand. You discovered where every ultimately successful child has to start. I wished I had known this back then.
That was an extraordinary thing to hear from someone who had devoted so much of his professional life to understanding ADHD.
My own understanding had developed through years of mentoring and coaching children, many of whom had experienced significant trauma. And what I kept encountering was the same basic problem. These children had been judged so frequently by what they couldn't do that the adults around them had often stopped looking carefully at what they could do.
Sometimes there was still one surviving passion.
A child might have almost no confidence in school but love drawing. Another might be fascinated by music, photography, or editing video. They might be disengaged in class yet spend hours pursuing something creative.
That passion was where I started.
If a kid loved doodling, I might hand them an iPad, open Procreate, give them an Apple Pencil, show them a few things, and tell them to go play.
I wasn't trying to make them complete another assignment. I was introducing novelty into something they already cared about. And sometimes the change was remarkable.
The child who had been withdrawn or practically shut down suddenly became curious, engaged, and eager to explore. They wanted to show me what they had made. They wanted to know what else the tool could do.
And something else happened: they began to recognize that my interest in them was sincere.
That is an important part of mentoring that isn't always easy to explain within the conventional boundaries of education. Teachers need professional boundaries, and children need protection. Those boundaries exist for good reasons.
But genuine connection also requires an adult to move beyond the emotionally detached role of someone who merely delivers instruction and evaluates performance. You have to be willing to understand what matters to the child. You have to become personally invested in their development while maintaining appropriate professional boundaries.
In my experience, children who have endured years of criticism are particularly sensitive to whether an adult's interest is genuine. They know the difference between somebody performing empathy and somebody doing the work. And when that connection forms, it can change what becomes possible.
The caddy doesn't hand you executive functions. The caddy gives you enough scaffolding and runway to develop your own.
The caddy also recognizes that a player's success doesn't mean the relationship was unnecessary. Sometimes the support continues as the player becomes more accomplished.
Chuck's parents remained involved as his company grew. Charlie Manuel continued managing Victorino as he developed into a championship player. Creative organizations continue needing people who understand how to support their talent. And Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, and Steven Spielberg continued working with people whose abilities complemented their own.
The point is not to make people permanently dependent on somebody else. It's to recognize that human beings often achieve their best work through relationships that complement their strengths.
It’s Not That Hard
When I look at the adults with ADHD who managed to build successful lives without spending their childhoods trapped in escape rooms, I don't see a single personality type, profession, or formula.
Some had extraordinary intelligence. Some had unusual creative abilities. Some found professions that matched their interests and natural ways of working. Some developed compensation strategies so effectively that they didn't recognize their ADHD until middle age.
But the environments in which they developed mattered.
For some, home and school were both places where they could grow without constantly being judged or humiliated. They had avoided significant childhood trauma and had adults who recognized their potential.
They won the Big Jackpot Lottery.
The Holy Trinity was already in place. The way I think about it, roughly 80% of life's challenges had already been taken care of by an environment that allowed them to grow. They could figure out much of the rest themselves or ask for help when necessary.
There was no dramatic intervention and no pivot required.
For others, school was an escape room, but home was not. They struggled academically, encountered criticism, or experienced bullying. Yet their parents recognized a passion that remained a source of confidence. They invested in it, even when it had nothing to do with their own interests or expectations.
Sometimes the child initiated the pivot, as Chuck and Bill Gates did. Sometimes an adult recognized the need to intervene, as Miss Hill did with Steve Jobs. What mattered was the real empathy behind the intervention.
The adult saw the child, recognized the competence, and helped make a different pathway possible. And sometimes the adults changed their own lives to provide the scaffolding that allowed that pathway to succeed.
Those children won the Second Lottery.
Then there are the children who didn't have either advantage. Home was an escape room. School was an escape room. Trauma compounded the difficulties. Their surviving interests and abilities might have been ignored, dismissed, or treated as distractions from what adults considered important.
Those were often the children I encountered as a mentor. And they were the kinds of young people John Chaney devoted his life to helping.
I couldn't undo their childhoods. I couldn't make the trauma disappear. But I could look for the part of them that still held some confidence, introduce new opportunities, and begin building from there.
The principles weren't fundamentally different from what Chuck's parents did with a moving truck, what Miss Hill did with a mathematics workbook, or what John Chaney did when he chose to stay with Marc Jackson.
Find the passion. Recognize the competence. Support the effort. Provide the scaffolding.
And understand that the passion doesn't have to be yours.
All of it requires real empathy. Your child, student, player, or employee is more than the things you can relate to.
Real empathy is doing the work to understand everything beyond the relatable things.
Maybe that is why something so simple becomes so difficult. The instructions themselves aren't complicated: see the kid, protect them, find their competence, help them build around the things that are hard, and don't mistake a different pathway for a defective one.
Don't try to coach the Nick Price out of Nick Price, the Nick Foles out of Nick Foles, or the ADHD out of an ADHD kid.
Give them caddies. Give them enough room to become themselves.
It’s not that hard.
Epistemic Status & Testable Predictions
The central argument of this chapter is a developmental hypothesis informed by personal observation, mentoring experience, clinical correspondence, and illustrative biographies.
The Big Jackpot Lottery and Second Lottery are proposed developmental patterns, not established scientific categories. The 80% figure is a conceptual illustration of how much a supportive developmental environment may contribute to later functioning, not a measured population statistic.
Dodson's observations about successful adults and Advocates are his reported clinical findings. His account of athletic adults experiencing increased ADHD difficulties following injuries that interrupted their exercise routines is also a clinical observation. The possibility that sustained physical exercise can help some people regulate ADHD symptoms, and that losing access to exercise can expose previously manageable difficulties, deserves systematic investigation.
The new acquaintance's experience provides a particularly useful developmental example because supportive parenting, educational fit, and regular exercise were present together. His story cannot establish the independent contribution of each factor, but it suggests questions that can be tested by examining developmental histories, educational environments, exercise patterns, and adult functioning.
The biographical examples illustrate the importance of supportive interventions and complementary relationships. Their eventual fame or financial success is not the measure of whether those interventions were worthwhile.
1. The Big Jackpot Prediction
ADHD children who grow up with supportive homes, supportive schools, and without significant childhood trauma will demonstrate stronger long-term confidence, adaptive functioning, and self-developed compensation strategies than otherwise comparable children who lack those conditions.
2. The Pivot Intervention Prediction
When ADHD children encounter sustained academic difficulties or school rejection, those whose parents or teachers recognize an existing passion and actively support an alternative developmental pathway will demonstrate stronger subsequent engagement and confidence than children who receive no comparable intervention.
3. The Advocate Prediction
ADHD children who experience a sustained relationship with an adult who recognizes their strengths, understands their difficulties, and remains invested in their development will show stronger trust, persistence, and willingness to seek help.
4. The Complementary Scaffolding Prediction
ADHD individuals working with people whose abilities complement their own will demonstrate stronger sustained performance in complex projects than comparable individuals expected to perform every function independently.
5. The Authentic-Empathy Prediction
A child's perception that an adult genuinely understands and values their interests and experiences will predict trust and engagement more strongly than generic encouragement alone.
6. The Later-Arriving Advocate Prediction
Adolescents and young adults who experienced significant childhood adversity but subsequently develop a sustained relationship with a trusted Advocate will demonstrate improvements in emotional regulation, self-confidence, persistence, and adaptive functioning compared with otherwise similar individuals who do not receive comparable support.
7. The Environmental Fit Prediction
ADHD students attending educational programs whose instructional methods, classroom culture, and opportunities for engagement align with their natural interests and cognitive strengths will demonstrate stronger academic engagement, confidence, and developmental outcomes than otherwise comparable ADHD students in conventional classrooms.
This effect should be examined alongside the influence of supportive home environments, childhood trauma exposure, and sustained physical activity, rather than assuming that any one factor independently explains the developmental outcome.
These predictions provide opportunities to investigate the developmental patterns described in this chapter.
References
Dodson, William. Personal correspondence with the author, August 21, 2021. Discussion of successful adults with ADHD, the execution of empathy, Advocates, and the three-part message of support.
Personal correspondence with William Dodson, August 19, 2021. Original discussion of empathy beyond relatable experiences, mentoring ADHD students, and coaching.
Dodson, William. Recorded discussion of ADHD, group work, and implementer-finisher partners. Audio supplied by the author, Dr. Dodson Finishers in Business Gates and Jobs.
Dodson, William. Clinical observations recounted by the author concerning athletic adults whose ADHD difficulties became apparent following injuries that interrupted sustained exercise routines. Original source details to be added.
Llinas, Joseph. Personal conversations with the author regarding parent-child conflict, parental projection, and similar dynamics in the classroom. Clinical estimates reported from his professional experience.
Jobs, Steve. Smithsonian oral history interview, April 20, 1995. Unabridged interview and rough transcript supplied by the author. Includes Jobs's accounts of Paul Jobs, Miss Hill, childhood education, Apple's collaborative development, and Pixar.
Jobs, Steve. Interview at the D8 conference, 2010. Discussion of Apple's early tablet work and the development of the iPhone.
Whitaker, Bill. “Jennifer Lawrence's surprising trip to the top of Hollywood.” 60 Minutes, CBS News, February 25, 2018.
Catmull, Ed. Recorded remarks on early management philosophy, self-managing employees, and the responsibility of managing extraordinary talent. Audio supplied by the author, Ed Catmull's Mistake in Hiring Early in His Career.
Catmull, Ed, with Amy Wallace. Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration. Random House, 2014.
Sisko, Joseph. “John Chaney: A Model Mensch for ADHDers in the Classroom.” ADHD Escape Room. https://adhdescaperoom.com/john-chaney-a-model-mensch-for-adhders-in-the-classroom-2/
Winnicott, D. W. Referenced in Dodson's August 21, 2021 correspondence regarding the supportive adult who preserves the child's sense of worth.
Personal observations and accounts: Chuck's family and business development; the Puerto Rican Deloitte & Touche consultant; the public arts magnet school graduate who attended SCAD; David Leadbetter's discussion of Nick Price; coaching and mentoring experiences involving ADHD students; and family experiences involving Andrew and Ben.