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There was a study done recently that showed that people with ADHD are better foragers. It didn’t go into detail as to why, but I imagine it has to do with the fact that the ADHD mind has a tendency to “look for the greener pastures”.
Imagine you are picking blackberries and you start with a bush that has dozens of ripe berries. After awhile, the easily accessible berries are fewer and fewer, even though there still may be hundreds of ripe berries on the bush. You have a choice. You can move on to the next bush, ten feet away, with dozens of accessible berries, or you can painstakingly reach through the spider webs and sticker bushes to get the less accessible berries. Or maybe the first bush you started on has only a couple of ripe berries due to it’s location being in the shade of some trees. Does it make sense to keep searching that bush for more when you can see another bush 20 feet away with hundreds of ripe berries on it?
Creative people do a lot of “foraging”. They may try dozens of jobs before they find the one that they stick with. They might start a youtube channel, a podcast, or a band, only to abandon it a few months later. To an outsider it may look like they aren’t good at finishing what they started. Maybe their goal was only to start, or to experiment, or to find the appropriate outlet for their creative energy. Maybe their goal was to learn. One thing is for certain: A person who learns to move on when something isn’t working has a much higher chance of being fulfilled in life, and if they learn to harness their foraging superpower, rather than allowing society to force them to stick with what they started every time, they may even have a good chance of being successful as well.
A writer I follow, David Kadavy, posted this quote from Annie Duke in his blog this week. It says “Success does not lie in sticking to things. It lies in picking the right thing to stick to and quitting the rest.”
Thanks for reading!
Rebecca H. Lee
Audiobook Narrator
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