Making ADHD your Superpower | George Cicci | TEDxWVU

When people meet me and find out that I have a loving wife and a loving daughter and an amazing career working with some really big brands and that I have ADHD, they are often surprised and I am too because I wasn't supposed to be here, you see, in seventh grade, they took me to the counselor's office to schedule my eighth grade classes and there were my mom and dad in the counselor's office and I didn't expect the counselor to be talking about how George shouldn't be in academic level classes Next year, I should be in the basic level classes.

There's something he wasn't really paying attention to, but my ears perked up when he said to my parents, mr. and Mrs. CC,

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son is not going to go to college, in fact, he is going to have a hard time getting out of high school. Now he knew that this was not the case. I have friends and family, he didn't go to university, my grandmother did. I didn't go to college and she founded a business empire within the dance industry. My best friend didn't finish college and he's the IT director of a huge national corporation, but the thing is, I wanted to go to college.

I have an uncle who is only 10 years older than me, he went to Duquesne University and when he came home from college for any family occasion like Thanksgiving or Christmas or something like that, it was an event where the family would surround him and I would ask him all these questions. He asks me how college is going, what you do for fun, what classes you're taking and he would talk about these exotic topics that I'd never heard of before and for fun. I remember one time he said that he and his friends stayed up 24 hours a day. back-to-back in a dance marathon to raise money for a children's hospital and I said that's what I want, I want to be able to stay up 24 hours straight with my friends in a dance marathon do good things for good people, but I also want this experience of coming home from somewhere and having people say, "hey, you're George, how have you been?" and I idolized him.

I begged my parents to let me go to college with him, they relented. I was. For about half a day I went to Duquesne University and he took just me, him and some of his friends and I got to see his dorm room and it was cool again, it's the 80's, remember I had this Devo. sign and he had the little mini refrigerator which is the first time I had seen it that I don't love it I'm like this this is what 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 at the moment the pièce de résistance is that I had to go to class with him there was one he couldn't escape from So we sat in the back and he took notes and I I doodled and ate the popcorn we microwaved in the hallway I'm in.

I want to go to college, but they weren't in seventh grade and they told me you're not going to have it. none of that you're not going to have the homecoming dance it's just that you're not going anywhere, you sure couldn't eat microwave popcorn in the back of a conference room in eighth grade. This time they took me to the principal's office because he was jumping all over the place in gym class acting crazy. They called my dad from the company he runs to come and talk to the director. I told him, Mr. CC, we believe that

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son's own drugs possibly accelerated my father defended me vehemently and said that he is just enthusiastic and energetic and that you are lucky to have him as a student and what I learned that day from my counselor was also took advantage because I could have done it.

I've been on speed, the great irony here is that in my Walkman there was a Minor Threat cassette tape, see, the band, the irony would just kill their rule band, okay, that's the joke of that, but the guidance counselor at the principal basically that day said: Yo, if you want to succeed in eighth grade like it's a goal and make it to ninth grade like it's a goal, you need to sit down, shut up and stay quiet, this is what I'm genetically incapable of to sit down, shut up and stay quiet. ADHD is genetically capable of sitting, shutting up, and being quiet.

I didn't know at the time that I only found out about this after I was diagnosed at age 31, at the urging of many good friends, a loving wife, and a tired daughter. of me losing my keys and couldn't take her anywhere when I could after treatment have a slower mind and read my first books from cover to cover and at 31 I became obsessed with who ADHD was, I don't have it I am and I discovered some surprising things: these studies, these scientists who studied genetics and found that the three main traits of ADHD are impulsivity, risk taking, and constant novelty seeking, you know, finding new ways to do something when you don't do it.

There is no need to find new ways to do something, like stopping projects to start new projects because they are more exciting or calling it ingenuity. Those same three traits are linked to a genetic mutation in the drd4 gene. This genetic mutation inhibits the production of dopamine. -good chemical so for people with ADHD to feel good we need stimulation and if we don't find stimulation we will cause stimulation, fight, get extremely long penalties and games of hockey, escape or buell snowboarding. will go to punk rock concerts in the rough parts of Pittsburgh every Friday and Saturday night for six years straight just to feel normal and quote normal, not normal, but to feel good.

The same scientists also discovered that this genetic mutation has been positively selected for since time immemorial. Now, if you're like me, you had to look for positively selected men, that means that every time one of our caveman brothers or sisters exhibited those same three traits, impulsivity, risk taking, resourcefulness, they had to do this more often. It's usually a time when people with ADHD in the crowd will feel a little prouder and will be less embarrassed, but why do these three traits have to do with passing on a gene? Think about it, we're on the same page. tribe or clan of cave people it is night we are sitting in front of the cave we have a small fire going and beyond the edge of that fire beyond what we can see there is a faint snap of a twig now there are about a hundred of us here right now, that means five to seven of us are often at night with Spears and we sink them into whatever made that saber-tooth sound, tiger, bear, wolf, whatever it is, we go back to the tribe we saved and mated. with your partners and this is phenomenal if we are being chased by saber-toothed tigers, but how do we take a survival mechanism in the Stone Age and turn it into a success mechanism in the 21st century? "flight or flight" response we see people with ADHD are the fight or flight response, our nervous system is primed to live with our head on the move and constantly looking for that saber-toothed tiger because we are ready and when it happens, we are ready.

At our best, when things are worst, we do best, so how do we generate this fight or flight response over a better question? When do we present this fight or flight response? We generate it at the moment of overwhelming everyone. Experiences overwhelm you at some point in your life. People with ADHD experience overwhelm several times a day because our brains work very fast and you have all these ideas, a billion ideas flowing at once and you have immense physical energy and you have all this happening and you are trying to do all these things at once. at the same time, except there aren't enough outlets for all the energy and suddenly you close, closure is what ends the careers of people with ADHD, although there is that moment before closure or it feels like the world stops collapse on you and you want to run away from whatever you are doing, that overwhelms you, that is when we lift the spear, now the spear in this case is a pen and you do a very simple exercise called brain.

I keep this notebook with me and one like it with me everywhere. I've been through about 70 80 90 things in one second you start to feel your chest tighten you feel like the world is collapsing around you you open the notebook and put the pen on the paper and start writing, it doesn't have to be readable to anyone, but it doesn't even need to be readable to you, it doesn't need to be grammatically correct, it could be thoughts, it could be words. It could be a complete sentence, it could be scribbles, it could be anything, as fast as you can think of it, on the page, in your head, on the page, in your head, on the page, over and over and over again, the front cover, back cover, back cover, paid as long as you can and something incredible is going to happen, it's just going to stop and it's just going to stop because you've been impulsive, you've allowed yourself to do this, you've committed to fight or flight, you've jumped into the darkness , you have sunk the tip of the spear. the saber tooth tiger, this feeling is what we get after fighting after interrupting a class, it allows you to take all those ideas you had before, that we are spinning and coming at you at the speed of light, and categorize them to prioritize them. with them to do things to create the true

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with ADHD is to learn balance the two sides of this gift is to know when to fight or flee so you can use these ideas and work with people and do mundane things like balance books and know when you need to remove hands off the wheel and being impulsive and a little reckless and taking risks and having that flight of ideas that everyone with ADHD needs to master this skill, it's not enough that we save the human race that we got here. because the human race is facing many important problems right now and the only way out of them will be with impulsiveness, risk taking and ingenuity, thank you