[Music] when people meet me and they find out that I've got a loving wife and a loving daughter and an amazing career working with some really big brands and that I have ADHD they're often surprised and so am I because I wasn't supposed to be here you see in seventh grade I was taken down to the guidance counselor's office to schedule my eighth grade classes and there were my mom and dad in the guidance counselor's office and I wasn't expecting that the guidance counselor was going on about how George shouldn't be in the academic level
classes next year he should be in the basic level classes there something I wasn't really paying attention but my ears did perk up when she said to my parents mr. and mrs. CC your son is not going to go to college as a matter of fact he's gonna have a hard time getting out of high school now I knew this wasn't the case I have friends and family it didn't go to college my grandmother didn't go to college and she founded an empire of a business within the dance industry my best friend didn't finish college
and he is the head of IT for a massive national corporation but the thing is I wanted to go to college you see I have this uncle who's just 10 years older than me he was going to Duquesne University and when he would come home from college for any family occasions like Thanksgiving or Christmas or anything like that it was an event the family would swarm him and ask him all these questions how is college going what are you doing for fun what classes are you taking and he would talk about these exotic subjects I've
never heard of before and for fun I remember this one time he said that he and his friends stayed up 24 hours in a row at a dance-a-thon to raise money for a Children's Hospital and I said that's what I want I want that I want to be able to stay up 24 hours in a row with my friends at a dance-a-thon doing good things for good people but also I want this experience of coming home from somewhere and having people be like hey it's George how have you been and I idolized him I've begged
my parents let me go to college with him they relented I went for about half a day and I went to Duquesne University and he took me around just me and him and some of his friends and I got to see his dorm room and it was so cool once again this is the 80s like remember he had this Devo poster and he had the tiny mini fridge that's the first time I had seen that I don't I'm loving it I'm like this is this is it I need this in my life and then he
shows me where the rest of his classes are and they're not all in one building we walked between buildings to get to his classrooms this is getting better by the moment the piece de resistance is I had to go to class with him there was one he couldn't get away from and so we sat in the back and he took notes and I doodled and ate the microwave popcorn we cooked out in the hallway I'm in I want to go to college but there wasn't 7th grade being told you're not gonna have any of that
you're not gonna have the homecoming is you are not going anywhere you sure as hell aren't could eat microwave popcorn in the back of a lecture hall in eighth grade I was pulled down to the principal's office this time because I was bouncing all over the place in gym class acting like a crazy person my dad was called away from the company he runs to come up and talk to the principal I said mr. CC we think your son's own drugs possibly speed my dad vehemently defended me and said he's just enthusiastic and energetic and
you're lucky to have him as a student and what I learned that day from my guidance counselor was also pulled in because I might have been on speed the great irony here is that in my Walkman was a cassette tape from Minor Threat look the band up the irony would just slay their straightedge band okay that's the punch line for that but the guidance counselor in the principal basically that day said to me if you want to succeed in eighth grade like that's a goal and get to ninth grade like that's a goal you need
to sit down shut up and be quiet here's the thing I'm genetically incapable of sitting down shutting up and being quiet nobody with ADHD is genetically capable of sitting down shutting up and being quiet I didn't know that at the time I only found this out after I was diagnosed at 31 years old the behest of many good friends and a loving wife and a daughter who was tired of me losing my keys and I couldn't drive her anywhere when I was able after treatment have a slower mind and read my first books from cover
to cover and 31 years old I became obsessed with who I was ADHD I don't have it I am and I found some amazing things out there are these study these scientists who have studied genetics and they found out that the three main traits of ADHD impulsivity risk-taking and constant novelty seeking you know finding new ways to do something when you don't need to find new ways to do something as stopping projects to start new projects because they're more exciting or call it ingenuity those same three traits are tied to a genetic mutation on the
drd4 gene this genetic mutation inhibits the production of dopamine the feel-good chemical so in order for people with ADHD to feel good we need stimulation and if we don't find stimulation out there we will cause the stimulation we will fight we will draw extremely long penalties and hockey games we will escape or buell snowboard we will go to punk rock concerts in the dangerous parts of Pittsburgh every Friday and Saturday night for six years in a row just to feel normal and quote normal our normal not your normal but to feel good the same scientists
also found out that this gene mutation has been positively selected since time immemorial now if you're like me you had to look up what positively selected men that means that whenever somebody of our caveman brothers or sisters exhibited those same three traits impulsivity risk-taking ingenuity they got to make more often this is usually the point when people with ADHD in the crowd kind of sit up a little more proud you'll less ashamed but why is that what do these three traits have to do with passing on a gene think about it we're in the same
tribe or clan of cave people it's night time we're sitting out in front of the cave we have a little fire going and out beyond the edge of that fire beyond what we can see there is a very slight snap of a twig now there's about a hundred of us here right now that means between five and seven of us are often in the night with Spears and we sink them into whatever made that sound saber-tooth Tiger bear wolf whatever it was we return to the tribe we saved and we mate with your partners and
this is phenomenal if we're being hunted down by saber-tooth Tigers but how do we take a survival mechanism in the Stone Age and turn it into a success mechanism in the 21st century you do it by purposefully engaging the fight-or-flight response see people with ADHD we are the fight-or-flight response our nervous system is primed to live with our heads on a swivel and constantly look for that saber-toothed tiger because we are ready and when it happens we are at our best when things they are worst we do better so how do we bring this fight-or-flight
response about a better question is when do we bring this fight-or-flight response about we bring it about at the moment of overwhelm everybody experiences overwhelm at some point in their life people with ADHD experience overwhelm multiple times a day because our brains work so fast and you have all these ideas going a billion ideas flowing at once and you have immense physical energy and you have all this going on and you're trying to do all these things at once except there aren't enough outlets for all the energy and all of a sudden you shut down
shut down is what kills careers for people with ADHD there's that moment before the shutdown though or it feels like the world is collapsing in on you and you want to run away from whatever it is you're doing that's overwhelmed that's when we pick up the spear now the spear in this case is a pen and you do a very simple exercise called a brain dump I keep this notebook with me and one just like it with me everywhere I've gone through about 70 80 90 the things in a second you start to feel it's
tightening your chest you feel like the world's collapsing around you you crack open the notebook and put pen to paper and you start writing it doesn't need to be legible to anybody but you doesn't even need to be legible to you it doesn't need to be grammatically correct it could be thoughts it could be words it could be entire sentence it could be doodles it could be whatever as fast as it comes into your head onto the page into your head onto the page into your head onto the page over and over and over again
front page back page front paid back page for as long as you can and something amazing is gonna happen it's just gonna stop and it's just gonna stop because you have been impulsive you have allowed yourself to do this you have engaged fight or flight you have jumped into the darkness sunk the head of the spear into the saber-tooth Tiger this feeling is what we get after we get in a fight after we disrupt a class it allows you to take all those ideas you had before that we're swirling and coming at you at light
speed and categorize them to prioritize them to do things with to create the real superpower with ADHD is learning the balance the two sides of this gift it's knowing when to go into fight or flight so you can use these ideas and work with people and do mundane things like balance books and knowing when you need to take your hands off the wheel and be impulsive and be a little reckless and take risks and have that flight of ideas everybody with ADHD needs to master this skill it's not good enough that we save the human
race we got us to here because the human race is facing a lot of big problems right now and the only way out of it is going to be with impulsivity risk-taking and ingenuity thank you [Applause]
