It's Never Too Late

Feb 19, 2025

Hey there true believers. Today, I wanted to take a moment to talk about something that’s always been very important to me and something I’ve always struggled with - self improvement. Self-improvement has always mattered to me, maybe too much. I’ve spent years chasing it while wrestling with untreated ADHD, usually to mixed success.

A Childhood Struggle with ADHD

My story is probably familiar to some of you. I was always a “smart kid,” but I also struggled academically. I had trouble sitting still, paying attention, and focusing or engaging with the class. Always a disruption. Despite performing really well on cognitive tests, and being placed in the “gifted” program early on, I had mediocre grades at best. Teachers and guidance counselors urged my mom to get me evaluated and treated for what was obvious ADHD, but this was in the ’90s when much of the narrative focused on “are we over-medicating our kids?” That and my adamant stance that I didn’t want to take some pill that would “turn me into a conformist zombie” (I was super edgy like that) led to me never being formally treated. I wish I had been; my life probably would be a lot different by now. Not that things aren’t going pretty good for me now, but I definitely took the long road to get here.

Navigating High School and Beyond

My ADHD symptoms worsened as I got older. Though I did well on tests, I neglected homework and skipped class constantly, resulting in below-average grades and frustrated teachers. My argument was that I was doing fine on the tests, therefore I knew the material, and that’s all that should matter. I had a problem with authority and cared way more about chasing girls than chasing grades. I also had absolutely no idea what I wanted to be when I grew up. Growing up everyone told me that I could do anything with my life. Nobody told me what I should do with my life.

After High School I had no real direction so I enrolled in an online Video Game Design degree. It sounded fun, I enjoy video games, I like art and technology, so why not? I did get much better grades, but I credit that to the courses being online and the grades being almost entirely based on the final exams and project assessments. No attendance needed. But if I had been smarter I would have stayed at home and gotten a nice Computer Science degree from my local college, milking that free rent and cheap in-state tuition.

After college, and still lacking direction, I coasted through my 20s, settling for relatively low-effort, high-paying tech jobs. I justified it by telling myself I was working jobs that would give me the freedom to work on my side projects, believing that I would inevitably come up with some app or idea or something that would change the world (and make me rich). I was “really smart,” after all, it was only a matter of time. That’s what everyone always told me. It didn’t matter that most of my ideas never made it past the “Hello World” phase (I would always inevitably get distracted or come up with an “even better” idea and move on, the ADHD curse).

Pro Tip to all the parents of “gifted” children out there: Telling your kid that they can do anything they want is great and all, but please also make sure to tell them they’re still going to have to work for it. The world isn’t going to just recognize their innate greatness and hand them everything.

A Turning Point

And that’s pretty much where I stayed for a long time. Plenty of ambition and great ideas, just no follow through. Making enough to pay my bills and being more concerned with my social life than my professional one. Then, everything changed when the Fire Nation attacked. Err, when my nephew was born. It was no longer just about me. Now there was a person out there for whom I had the responsibility of being a role model. Someone that I might need to take care of one day. Someone that I could guide and help them not make the same mistakes that I did. It was the wake-up call I needed to stop bouncing around and actually do something with my life.

So I decided to become a Software Engineer. This was the time of the Great Developer Shortage (or so all of the tech blogs would lead you to believe), where everyone was talking about how learning to code was the ticket to wealth and coding boot-camps with six-figure job guarantees were popping up left and right. I had taken some Computer Science courses in high school and college, I had been sort of self studying it since, and at the time I was working tech support for a SaaS company. My job did involve some very basic web development. I began auditing classes through my alma mater and taking some online MOOC style courses. I figured I could learn enough to get an entry-level programmer job somewhere and work my way up.

That’s not what happened. Instead, I landed a job at an Atlassian Professional Services startup. There was absolutely an element of luck here, a right place, right time sort of thing. I had a friend who was working there, they were expanding fast, and they just needed smart bodies that they could train up. No experience required. I applied, interviewed, and started pretty quickly.

And I’ve been doing the Atlassian thing ever since. I now work for an amazing company that does awesome things, and I am making more money than that kid who grew up poor in rural Alaska could have ever dreamed.

Continued Improvements

It didn’t happen overnight, of course. I still had untreated, pretty severe ADHD. It’s not that I don’t like learning; I love it. It’s that I am easily distracted by shiny, new things. My biggest issue is that I will be learning about A Thing, and while learning that Thing I will come across another Thing, and my brain goes “ooh, this new Thing sounds very exciting, clearly, you need to drop everything and learn that first, then you’ll circle back to the first Thing.” I was perpetually 20% of the way through several books and online courses at any given time. Wikipedia or YouTube rabbit holes were my nemesis, I’d lose entire weekends to them.

So over time I learned to deal with and control it more. I developed a lot of personal systems, routines and habits to counteract my ADHD tendencies. I read countless blogs and articles on managing your ADHD, read books on CBT, tried I don’t know how many to do list and habit tracker apps. Got deep into the Second Brain life (which was honestly really helpful). Tracked my time, started breaking my life up into pomodoros, put sticky notes to remind myself of my goals and current things to focus on everywhere.

But I still hadn’t done the one thing that I should have done 20 years ago. Then, about three years ago, I finally sought professional treatment for my ADHD. I had avoided it forever, I always thought that that was something that kids and teenagers did, not adults. But, one day, I woke up and just said “enough is enough.” There was no one local that had any availability, but I was able to see someone through Talkiatry. It took a while to dial in my medication, and it’s not a magic bullet, but it has been an absolute game changer overall. There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t regret not doing this years ago. That, combined with all of the systems I had already developed, like night and day compared to how I was before.

Cliché Inspirational Takeaway

I guess what I’m trying to say is that it’s never too late. It’s a bit cliché to say, but it’s true. I didn’t get my act together until my early 30s. If I can do it, then you can too. So, whether you’re in your 20s or your 60s, remember that the opportunity to improve yourself is always present. Don’t be ashamed to admit your faults or to seek help for them, especially now when you can get treatment from almost anywhere and learn almost anything on the internet.

The Future

This post is significantly longer than I originally planned it to be. It was initially going to be more of a fluff piece on my plans for self-improvement over the next year, but as I decided to add a little context and backstory, it took on a life of its own. I do plan to write about some more specific things in the future, specific techniques that have worked for me, techniques that haven’t, how I organize my digital life, all that. But those are for future posts.

Thanks for reading and keep killing it out there everyone. We’re all in this together.