It's Never Too Late

Feb 19, 2025

Hey there fellow nerds. This post is a little different. I wanted to talk about something that’s always mattered to me, maybe too much: self-improvement. 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 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 conversation was focused on “are we over-medicating our kids?” That, plus 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 would probably be a lot different by now. Not that things are going badly 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. 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 final exams and project assessments. No attendance needed. If I had been smarter, I would have stayed 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 gave me the freedom to work on 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 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 they can do anything is great and all, but please also tell them they’re still going to have to work for it. The world isn’t going to 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 I had some responsibility to be a role model for. Someone I might need to take care of one day. Someone I could guide and maybe help avoid a few of the mistakes I made. 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 since then, and at the time I was working tech support for a SaaS company. My job involved 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 programming 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 meaningful work, 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 manage it better. I developed a lot of personal systems, routines and habits to counteract my ADHD tendencies. I read countless blogs and articles on managing ADHD, read books on CBT, and 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 everywhere to remind myself of my goals and current focus.

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 was something kids and teenagers did, not adults. But one day I woke up and just said “enough is enough.” There was no one local with 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 a massive help overall. I regret not doing it years earlier all the time. That, combined with all of the systems I had already developed, feels 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. And even then, “getting my act together” mostly meant finally admitting what wasn’t working and getting help. 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 a lot longer than I originally planned. It was going to be more of a fluff piece on my self-improvement plans for the next year, but once I added the backstory it took on a life of its own. I do plan to write about more specific things in the future: 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.