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I Took Ritalin to Change My Life

Mar 29, 2024
Today I want to talk about how getting diagnosed with ADHD at age 25 and then starting Ritalin treatment completely

change

d my

life

. One of the fundamental beliefs and messages I have to send with this channel is that it is possible to make significant

change

s in your

life

independently. where are you right now if you are new to this channel my name is javela and early owl is about learning to be more deliberate with the mindsets and processes that shape our lives so to start this story I think I need to start where I was before I was diagnosed.
i took ritalin to change my life
I feel like this story is as old as the ADHD diagnosis. You start off with someone who is somewhat intelligent who breezes through the first few years of school, but then at some point the schoolwork becomes too difficult. that you can't keep up without being able to study and things just fall apart. I remember even at a very young age, in first or second grade, my mom basically had to bribe me to do my homework. I think he offered me like five dollars for every time I sat down and actually did my homework, which was a lot of money for a kid at the time, but basically the plan didn't work because I couldn't sit down and do my homework except go to school. school.
i took ritalin to change my life

More Interesting Facts About,

i took ritalin to change my life...

Everything went well until it became progressively more difficult and for me the point where everything fell apart was my sophomore year of high school. I basically dropped out of my sophomore year of high school once and then tried again the next year and didn't do it. I didn't drop out of school then, but my grades and attendance were so bad that they wouldn't let me continue to third grade. I think there is a story that perfectly sums up how this impacted my life. It's a little embarrassing or well, it's not. It's embarrassing now, but it was embarrassing when it happened and I don't think I've ever said this to anyone.
i took ritalin to change my life
In Norway we have something called a stipend that students receive if their household income is below a certain threshold and for a student attending secondary school. This is quite a bit of money, something like two three hundred dollars a month that you get just for being a student and I was in this and I remember basically all I had to do to get this money was fill out a form. get my mom to sign it and bring it to school and I would get 300 in my account every month and what happened one semester is I kept putting it off and I kept forgetting about it and I had guidance counselors or People at school reminded me that I had I had to turn it in, but I put it off until the last minute and then beyond and finally, because I was too late to turn it in, I didn't get the stipend for that quarter, so Six months where I didn't get anything just because I was too lazy, forgetful or with ADHD to do something so simple.
i took ritalin to change my life
The only feeling I still remember from the high school experience was just trying to pay attention and how hard it was. I don't have the hyperactivity of ADHD, it's just inattention. I basically had two modes at school, one I would just sleep or not pay attention at all and feel like this was a complete waste of time or I would just sit around. I was trying my best to pay attention and just trying to glue my eyes and ears to the teacher, but it was very uncomfortable and gave me a sort of low-key anxiety and I still felt like I couldn't understand him. nothing was said so that was my experience with Add in high school after that I dropped out of school and basically didn't do much of anything productive.
I think I spent most of my life in World of Warcraft from then on, which I don't regret doing to this day, many of my best friends are still people I met through wow. I spent a little time trying to play online poker. Basically I couldn't get over 25 without limit because it's so difficult. To get good at poker if you can't study, I spent a couple of years working at a place called Technique Magazine, which was a wonderful place to work, but for me at the time I was just trying to make the minimum effort, so what could I do? getting paid, I had some short term jobs like phone sales and stuff like that, but for the most part I was just unemployed playing video games and not learning or doing anything, so I realized for the first time adding ADHD without the hyperactivity. being a diagnosis when I was like 21 and living in Thailand, I met another person who had been diagnosed with the disease as an adult and it just checked all the boxes for me and I started reading it and researching it, and at that point I just got in touch with a psychiatrist in Thailand and I said, "Hey, I think maybe I have ADHD, can you help me?" So I

took

Ritalin for the last month or two.
I was in Thailand and used it to learn a little bit about web development, but then when I came back from Thailand I didn't have my writing to look up the diagnosis, like finding a psychiatrist and making that appointment requires a minimal amount of concentrated effort, so It basically

took

me three years of not doing much until I thought okay, I should probably do this. I think I got a diagnosis and started Ritalin treatment in February 2014. Just after turning 25 I always felt a little ambitious, I just never acted on it. I just assumed I would eventually do something with my life, but when I started Ritalin treatment I felt like I could let go of these giant shackles.
The first thing I decided to do was start studying, since I had never finished high school. I needed to mix and match a bit to get into a program, but I was able to enroll in a course that would give me a Bachelor's degree in programming and I started that course in August 2014. I quickly realized that I both really enjoyed programming and also that it was quite good at that, so from there I tried to accelerate my learning and my pace more and more, not because I felt like I had to catch up in a bad way, I felt guilty for where I was, but rather I felt like I had something to show and that had not yet been shown.
The first year of school was great. I did a ton of extracurricular activities and became one of the top students, which was quite new for me. I still had this horrible mentality where I felt like if I could get the same results with less effort, that was somehow a victory, I think I'll talk more about that. that's in another video, but in short, it's not a good mindset having to learn to push yourself is a good thing, it's not something you should try to avoid a year into my career. I was lucky enough to basically be offered an internship through my wonderful sister Sarah, who worked at a startup in London called Tap Deck and that was basically my hyperbolic time chamber for learning programming.
I feel like people talk a lot about imposter syndrome, but I think it was just an imposter that I didn't have. Like a very long interview and they didn't evaluate my technical skills much. I remember the first assignment I was given, which was my internship assignment, was to build a database API and if someone had asked me before I got the internship if I knew what an API was I wouldn't have had anything intelligent to say during the first months of that internship. I basically just had a little panic attack every time someone asked me something technical, but I learned very quickly and became pretty decent at my job after a few months. and after finishing the internship they offered me a full-time job.
I decided to stay in london but still got my degree from school in norway. Then I had two years where I worked full time at a startup in London and doing the degree was basically a side project on top of my job which mostly worked well. I definitely could have used some of my current scheduling techniques because I had a habit of doing nothing for the first few months and then just cramming it all in. in the last few weeks before the exams, but I passed and got good grades, so I guess overall everything went well, it's more that my life had a tendency to fall apart when exam period came around, so that gave us brings. a bit closer to where we are today, I finished school and work full time in London and then along comes my lovely sister sarah, once again she left tap deck a few months after I joined and basically did other things but now she was co-founded a startup with two other people and she asked me if I wanted to help them part-time for a few months.
She was working part-time for this company while working full-time for Tap Deck and then the company. that I'm working on for now, Safety Wing was invited to Y Combinator and that's when we realized okay, this is real, this company is happening when the company came into Y Combinator, I joined full time and I've been there since I started. Basically it was just four people plus me, we had a vision, an idea of ​​where we wanted to go, but there was no revenue, there was no website, there were no clients, it was just us and a vision, and now I'm the head of engineering at En In this company we have around 70 people employed and almost 10 million in annual revenue and we recently raised a significant round of 8 million, which is also pretty crazy to think that everyone on the team has contributed enormously to where we are today and where we will be in the future. future, but I don't think it's wrong to say that I also played a big role in making this work, so it's a little crazy for me, almost a little emotional, to think about where I am today, where I am.
It was seven years ago when I started Ritalin and then 12 years ago I failed to complete my sophomore year of high school twice. I hope the main takeaway from this video is that it is possible to make significant changes and improvements in your life and I'm not saying that magically anyone can do anything, you just never know what the next turn in your life will bring, maybe Once you learn a new skill, meet someone new, read a book, change your way of thinking, anything could happen. It could completely change the trajectory of your life and I think an important part of this is simply being open to the possibility.
I don't think you should expect drastic changes, just focus on improving yourself and what you're doing one percent every day. and over time something good is likely to emerge and even if no major groundbreaking changes occur, the incremental improvements become groundbreaking enough after a while to cover the changes I have seen in the last seven years since I started treatment with my guy Ritalin and just to reiterate the point, I was 25, I had no career, no education, nothing and then I went to a doctor, got the right treatment and it changed my life completely. I hope some of you find this story inspiring as well. to this whole security wing thing about two years ago, I started making a game in two years, this is still very early, but I made a video in November that was kind of an annual update on that project and some other things, like this What if I want to see that you can see that somewhere around here.
Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next Wednesday.

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