Alastair Davies

When you make something, when you improve something, when you deliver something, when you add some new thing or service to the lives of strangers, making them happier, or healthier, or safer, or better, and when you do it all crisply and efficiently, smartly, the way everything should be done but so seldom is—you’re participating more fully in the

Explicitly connecting tasks to higher-level goals can help motivate action. It creates a link to something we are, hopefully, passionate about. And passion is one of the things that can engage our interest-driven ADHD brains.

you consistently put forth the effort, lack of progress is an indication that a different, possibly similar, creative approach is needed for your ADHD brain. And if you find you are not motivated to put in the effort, creativity can often be applied to make the strategy more interesting, fun, or stimulating.

“higher HRV was associated with better self-control and improved predictions of choice behavior” (Maier and Hare 2017).

Long-established neural pathways persist. It is the same with ADHD behaviors that have existed over years or decades.

there will always be a slippery slope back to the old behavior, particularly the older you are when you get started.

• Introducing a long delay between when you do the work and when it is shown to the world. Annie Ernaux writes about this in A Simple Passion, a memoir about how she becomes obsessed in a banal way with a man who is having an affair with her—the thought that others will read th