Unexplained underachievement. The person is simply not doing as well as innate talent and brainpower warrant. There’s no obvious explanation, like poor eyesight, serious physical illness, or cognitive impairment due to head injury, say.

Trouble sharing and playing with others early on, but at the same time, a desire to make friends. As life progresses, social problems can develop, due to trouble reading the social scene and inability to control the impulse to interrupt or butt in. In adulthood, this translates to seeming gruff, awkward, rude, self-centered, unfiltered, or aloof; b

The psychologist Russell Barkley, one of the top authorities in the field, sums up the danger in stark statistics: Compared to other killers from a public health standpoint, ADHD is bad. Smoking, for example, reduces life expectancy by 2.4 years, and if you smoke more than 20 cigarettes a day you’re down about 6.5 years. For diabetes and obesity it

Uncannily accurate intuition, coupled with a tendency to overlook the obvious and ignore major data.

Allen’s superpower is that he’s a problem solver. And as long as he is intellectually challenged by the problem and is meeting interesting people and learning how things work, there’s almost no one better at turning chance into opportunity.

“ADHD” is a term that describes a way of being in the world. It is neither entirely a disorder nor entirely an asset. It is an array of traits specific to a unique kind of mind. It can become a distinct advantage or an abiding curse, depending on how a person manages it.

High energy (hence the use of “hyperactivity” in the disorder name), coupled with a tendency toward lassitude, often mistaken for laziness.

in less clinical terms, it helps to think of ADHD as a complex set of contradictory or paradoxical tendencies: a lack of focus combined with an ability to superfocus; a lack of direction combined with highly directed entrepreneurialism; a tendency to procrastinate combined with a knack for getting a week’s worth of work done in two hours; impulsive

A person with ADHD has the power of a Ferrari engine but with bicycle-strength brakes. It’s the mismatch of engine power to braking capability that causes the problems. Strengthening one’s brakes is the name of the game.