Hire the absent-minded

I recently returned from a psychiatric day clinic.

The reason was severe recurring depression. In the past I just pushed through it: worked out more, got up early, took cold showers, whatever. Those behavioral interventions worked, but eventually the depression always came back. At some point I thought: you can't keep doing the same thing over and over and expect different results. That's what an idiot does, as the popular saying goes.

So I went to the day clinic. It was a good experience, even though it definitely ticked a few clichés. I did craft work: weaving, making a spinning top out of stone, painting pictures that displayed my emotions, and so on.

But I also had one-on-one therapy with a psychiatrist who is also a trained psychotherapist, plus guided group therapy with other people dealing with mental health issues. That really helped.

A few things stood out.

1. Internal Family Systems

My psychiatrist introduced me to the Internal Family Systems model. The basic idea: you are not one unified personality. You consist of different parts, each with its own desires and needs, but also its own strengths and weaknesses. When two or more of these parts are in conflict, you get some kind of negative emotion.

I don't know whether that's objectively true, but for me the model is really useful. I've mapped several of my own parts. Two of the most important ones:

• The dad: protects his family and his team, and provides for them.
• The creative artist: writes blog posts, has ideas for side projects and businesses.

There are many more, and they often come into conflict, because meeting the needs of one interferes with the needs of another. I haven't solved that. But being aware of it already helps.

2. Emotions have a purpose

Especially the negative ones. The basic idea: if you feel a negative emotion, some of your desires and needs are not being met.

Take anger. Anger is a signal that your boundaries have been violated, and it helps you protect them.

All models are wrong. This one's useful. Before therapy I would have said: anger, that's not helpful, just ignore it and push through. Now when I get angry I see it differently. Okay, this means one of my boundaries has been crossed and my emotions are telling me to protect it. Which boundary could it be? That really helped me.

3. Undiagnosed ADHD

This was the big one. On maybe the second or third day I asked my psychiatrist whether he had a preliminary idea about the reasons for the depression. He said they'd need further tests and analysis, but based on the current information he thought it was highly likely that I have ADHD.

That surprised me, because my picture of ADHD was people running around all the time, wild all the time.

So I did some research: frontier language models, some internet research, and so forth. And I thought: oh, okay, this actually sounds true. There's confirmation bias, of course, but it would explain a few things.

Then came the tests:

• my elementary school grades and teacher reports were evaluated
• my wife filled out a survey about me
• I filled out a couple of surveys myself
• I did a structured interview with my psychiatrist

The result: yes, I meet the diagnostic criteria for ADHD.

What I did with that

Knowing helped. Knowing the specific criteria I need to be more careful about, the things I'm not as good at as other people, and the things I'm better at. That's basically just knowing yourself.

On top of that I got medication. I tried different methylphenidate formulations, first Medikinet retard, then Concerta. Both are extended release, and I've stayed with Concerta for now because it provides a smoother, slower release and a longer duration.

The goal is not to take it every day, but to use it as a fallback in stressful periods, and otherwise work on structures and mechanisms to better deal with my own peculiarities.

Coming back to work

You can't be gone for a while without people noticing. Before the clinic I had told my whole team what was going on and what I was doing, and I told the management of the company as well.

After coming back I didn't want any rumors circulating, because when you're gone for a while that can easily happen. The other reason I wanted to share it with everybody: a lot of people end up in situations like this, and it's good to know that other people struggle too. So first, people are aware that this is okay and that it happens. And second, I'm not alone in it.

I wrote a long message covering roughly what's in this post, and ended it with: if anyone ever wants to talk who's in a similar situation, let me know.

I was a little anxious before publishing it, but decided to do it anyway. So that there's no misunderstanding and no talking behind my back, but also to support people in a similar situation.

The feedback was overwhelmingly positive. I was pleasantly surprised. A lot of people reached out to me personally, via DM or by calling me, and told me they'd had depression before too. They were glad I published it, glad there's someone they can relate to, and glad it's handled so openly in the company. So that was really good.

The unexpected part: the ideal employee

Something else happened that I didn't expect. I was approached by several people with a similar diagnostic profile: diagnosed ADHD plus high intelligence [1].

Funnily enough, these turned out to be some of the highest-performing employees in the company.

So funny that I even thought about reaching out to my psychiatrist to ask him: whenever you have other people with ADHD and high intelligence, just send them to me and I'll hire them.

It also got me thinking about what the ideal employee actually looks like.

I think high intelligence plus ADHD is a really powerful combination. You get a lot of interest in a lot of different subjects, and because of the high intelligence you're not just procrastinating and drifting around. I mean, you're still procrastinating, but you're becoming good at multiple different things [2].

That makes for really powerful employees, because they can solve tasks that other people can't.

In his essay Career Advice, Scott Adams recommends getting into the top 25% in two or more skills as the easiest path to an extraordinary career [3]. He later expands on this idea and calls it the talent stack [4].

For someone with high intelligence and ADHD, that's fairly simple to do. They're interested in many different things, and they're intelligent enough that reaching the top 25% in any given endeavor is relatively straightforward. These people will even work on their talent stack intrinsically, because they're interested in so many things and also get good at them.

Good procrastination

There's one other upside: they do the right kind of procrastinating.

Years ago Paul Graham wrote a great post about the three kinds of procrastination [5]. Instead of the task you're supposed to do, you can do:

1. nothing
2. something less important
3. something more important

The third kind, according to him, is the productive one. The absent-minded professor.

What I think is that highly intelligent ADHD people intrinsically tend towards type three procrastination. They work on something more important than the actual task.

That's good: instead of taking care of the invoices, they'll work on a system to improve a specific process, some automation or whatever. The overall business value is much higher, and it's good that they do this.

Of course it leads to problems as well. Accounting, admin, the back-office departments will hate them, because they don't do the menial task. That's basically the problem with them too: they sometimes just don't do the menial task.

I think there are a couple of solutions:

1. Take the menial tasks away from them. Give them a personal assistant or someone else who takes care of all that stuff [6].
2. Automate the process so the menial tasks don't need to be done anymore.
3. Just be aware of it. Have some kind of manual for these kinds of people, or an internal ADHD self-help group.

So that's my idea about the ideal employee. Short version: highly intelligent, with ADHD-related traits.

Hiring for it

I'm now even thinking about changing my interview questions to specifically filter for this profile.

You can spot high intelligence by talking to someone and asking difficult questions.

For those traits there are a few signals. Look at the CV: instead of a straight line, are there detours? That's a tell. Did they run their own company? That could be a tell too.

And then you can just ask questions. One of my more unusual interview questions is asking somebody what their YouTube homepage looks like. The other people from our company always look at me funny when I do this, but someone's YouTube homepage shows what they're interested in.

In the future I might even add other odd questions that are closer to the ADHD surveys. For example:

• Are you interested in a lot of different topics, or do you have weird hobbies? Are you good at several unrelated ones: cooking, instruments, some kind of martial art, reading, writing, whatever?
• Do you sometimes find it hard to focus on a given task because you have so many ideas?
• Do you find it hard to listen to other people, either because you think you already know what they're saying and want to interrupt to make the meeting more efficient, or because in your mind you're solving a really difficult work project or writing a blog post?

Those are questions I might ask in future interviews. They won't solve hiring. But they will make for interesting conversations [7].

That's it.

If you feel like you meet the criteria, or just want to chat, feel free to reach out. I'm always looking for people like that. The email is basically the long version of my first name, at this domain.

Notes

[1] There are obvious caveats. Sample size is a handful. They came to me, not the other way around. So they were confident enough to come forward, which correlates with performing well. This is an opinion piece, not a scientific study. Take it with a grain of salt and think for yourself ;-)

[2] As with anything, there are obvious counterexamples. For a high-performance accountant, it's probably not the best idea to hire someone with ADHD, even if they're highly intelligent.

[3] The essay from Scott Adams is called Career Advice. Apparently the original post got taken down. But here's a currently working link: https://blakeir.com/the-dilbert-blog-career-advice

[4] Scott describes the talent stack in this YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PP91WmrgpBE

[5] The post is Good and Bad Procrastination, link: https://paulgraham.com/procrastination.html

[6] PAs who work with highly intelligent ADHD people and get their stuff done are not doing "menial" or "unimportant" work. It is extremely valuable that they take care of what are "menial" or "unimportant" tasks for others. That becomes their high-leverage work, because it creates time for others to focus on higher-leverage tasks. It is not about some people being more important than others; it is about finding the best role for everyone and maximizing their joint output.

[7] This is not selecting for a diagnosis. This is selecting for traits that tend to go along with it, the same way every company already selects for intelligence without calling it that.