Your Worst Trait Is Also Your Superpower

On ADHD, the myth of fixing yourself, and why the thing that wrecks you might be the thing that makes you.

Here’s a question that’s been keeping me up at night since I was seventeen—which, to be fair, is also around the time everything started keeping me up at night, because I was busy playing video games until 3 a.m. instead of sleeping like a normal human being.

The question is this:

What if the thing that’s most wrong with you is also the thing that’s most right about you?

Nobody tells you this growing up. They tell you to fix your weaknesses, sit still, pay attention, stop daydreaming about whether fish get thirsty or what would happen if gravity reversed for exactly one second. (For the record: catastrophic. It would be catastrophic. I’ve thought about it.)

But here’s the uncomfortable truth that no self-help book puts on the cover: the traits that hold you back the most are often the same traits that make you exceptional.

The Medication Bargain

When I was seventeen, I was a mess. And I mean that in the most literal, physical sense—my room looked like a tornado had an argument with a laundromat. My grades were terrible. I slept through half my classes. The other half, my brain was busy constructing elaborate thought experiments about fish hydration instead of learning algebra.

Then I got diagnosed with ADHD. Got put on medication. And honestly? It worked. Grades went up. Room got clean. Video games turned off. I could sit through an entire class like a functional member of society.

But something else happened too. My interests narrowed. My social life quieted. I became productive, functional—and completely uninterested in most things I used to love.

And that’s the bargain nobody warns you about. The medication didn’t just fix the “bad” stuff. It filed down the edges of the “good” stuff too. Because the distractibility, the obsessive curiosity, the inability to shut your brain off at 2 a.m.—those aren’t just symptoms. They’re features. Inconvenient, chaotic, occasionally grade-destroying features, but features nonetheless.

The Double-Edged Sword You Can’t Put Down

Let me be honest about what this actually looks like in practice. I struggle with boredom constantly. For years—many, many years—I smoked too much weed and over partied, because a brain that refuses to sit still will find something to do, and it doesn’t always pick wisely. I lose patience with people quickly. I get obsessive about obscure topics that nobody asked about. I start ten projects and finish none of them.

And here’s the cruel joke: those aren’t separate problems from the things that make me good at what I do. They are the things that make me good at what I do—just wearing different clothes.

Think about any trait you admire in someone. Go ahead, pick one.

Confidence? That’s stubbornness wearing a nicer jacket. Passion? That’s obsession with better PR. Spontaneity? That’s impulsiveness after it got a haircut and learned to smile for photos.

Every strength is a weakness that learned to work the room.

The person who can hyperfocus on a project for 14 hours straight is the same person who forgets to eat, ignores their phone, and looks up to discover their family has reported them missing.

The boredom that drove me to smoke is the same restlessness that drives me to create. The impatience that costs me relationships is the same urgency that gets things done. The obsessiveness that sends me down rabbit holes at 3 a.m. is the same intensity that lets me master a subject in a week.

What causes your successes will also cause your failures. Same engine. Different direction.

This is the fundamental problem with the “fix yourself” industry. It assumes you can surgically remove the bad parts without touching the good. That you can keep the creative fire while putting out the chaos. That you can have the curiosity without the distraction, the drive without the obsession, the sensitivity without the pain.

You can’t. They’re the same thing.

The Real Trick

So if the answer isn’t to fix yourself—and popping pills that flatten you into a beige, productive zombie isn’t exactly ideal either—then what is it?

The trick is to stop trying to eliminate the trait and start learning to aim it.

Your brain won’t focus on the spreadsheet? Fine. Maybe the spreadsheet isn’t the point. Maybe the point is that your brain is desperately trying to focus on something it actually cares about, and you keep dragging it back to quarterly revenue projections like a dog on a leash past a squirrel convention.

The ADHD brain doesn’t have a focus deficit. It has a focus allocation problem. It has too much focus—it just deposits it in places you didn’t authorize, like a bank routing your paycheck to a random account in the Bahamas.

The goal isn’t to kill the thing that makes you different. It’s to build a life where that difference becomes an advantage. To find the environments, the work, the people, the systems that turn your so-called disorder into your unfair edge.

You don’t need to become a different person. You need to find the right context for the person you already are.

A Gentler Way to Look at Yourself

I spent years thinking I was broken. That the way my brain worked was a defect, a design flaw, a bug in the operating system that needed to be patched. And maybe in some narrow, clinical sense, it is.

But every great inventor, artist, entrepreneur, and weirdo who ever changed anything was also, in some narrow clinical sense, broken. They just found the arena where their particular brand of broken was exactly what was needed.

So here’s what I’d tell my fifteen-year-old self, sitting in that doctor’s office, feeling like there was something fundamentally wrong with him:

There is something fundamentally different about you. And that’s not the same thing.

The traits that make you terrible at sitting still in algebra class are the same traits that will make you extraordinary at things that don’t require sitting still in algebra class. And luckily, it turns out, most of life doesn’t.

Your worst trait is also your superpower. The only question is whether you’ll spend your life trying to suppress it—or learn to fly with it.

And for what it’s worth: fish don’t get thirsty. They absorb water through osmosis. But I’m glad I spent time thinking about it. That curiosity built something.