The Best Career for ADHD

What’s the best career when you have ADHD? It really depends on two things.

Finding a job that maximizes the things you do well and minimizes where you struggle.

I was naturally funny but struggled with a short attention span. Which turned out to be perfect for writing, performing and directing skit comedy.

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Hi I’m Rick Green. Whenever I give a presentation about Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder there are four topics that invariably come up in the question and answer period afterwards.

They are medication number one, natural remedies, getting diagnosed, decluttering, who should you tell, and finally finding the right career, and of these four, these four, no wonder I always run long, and of these four the most important may be finding the right career.

Linda Walker, PCC: I think everybody’s got something to bring to the world, and because you’re, you’re stuck with the idea that you can’t and you’re stuck with all these challenges, you never get a chance to really tap into your true potential, your true strength, and they can’t tap into it because they’re so busy just trying to survive every single day of their lives at work.

Rick Green: I’ve met so many people with ADHD who struggle for decades, sometimes their whole lives, moving from job to job, seeking a field where they can Excel, Excel… heck even just do okay and not get fired.

Wilma Felman, M. Ed: People with ADHD have faced so much adversity, and in the wrong job we can be totally depleted.

Rick: When I graduated from high school with a perfect C minus average I had no idea what I was going to do for a living, let alone find a niche where I could actually thrive.

Wilma Felman, M. Ed: We put tremendous pressure on our young adults to make major career decisions, decisions that cost thousands and thousands of dollars and years and years of their time and effort, and the general population struggles with that. The ADHD population really struggles with that.

Rick: Listen I got lucky, I work with some great people and I stumbled into what turned out to be a wonderful career for me. First as a comedy writer and performer eventually progressing to directing and then naturally producing and inevitably as an advocate for people with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), wasn’t as linear it was kind of there was a lot of this.

Finding the right career can take time, I know, it takes patience, I know, I know, I know, it’s not a simple process because ADHD is not simple it’s not one size fits all, we’re all a little different in our own quirky unique way.

Wilma Felman, M. Ed: People will come in and say, um I hope this won’t take very long, um I have ADD, ADHD and I need that list, the list of add friendly jobs and I’ll pick one and I’ll be gone. But it’s really not at all that simple we’re very complex beings, we’re made up of hundreds of puzzle pieces and if you took 15 of those people and put them in a room chances are none of the 15 would be exactly the same, they would all have pieces of different symptoms and to varying degrees.

Rick: ADHD is so individual, you got the combined subtype, the hyperactive subtype, the purely in attentive subtype, you got 18 core symptoms, some may be strong, some may not.

Wilma Felman, M. Ed: It’s the combinations of those symptoms and to the varying degrees that you have them result in somebody having a very different skill set and challenge set than someone else, both ADD people, perhaps both in the same career field, and they operate totally differently.

Rick: The right job for you depends on you and your flavor of ADHD. You want to look at both the areas where you struggle and where you soar. You can thrive in the right situation despite or sometimes partly thanks to your symptoms.

Dr. Mark Berner: My son is a high school teacher and he loves it because he can be up and about, he can be animated, he can use his energy, he can use his creativity, he can be at the front of the room, the back of the room, sitting, standing, and and for him that’s perfect.

Dr. Edward Hallowell: People with ADD focus in a crisis. they’re calm cool and collected in a crisis, so they’ll often seek dangerous jobs or high stem jobs like a trial attorney.

Racing a motorcycle.

Dr Hallowell: Race car driver.

Margaret Weiss MD: Taming wild horses.

Dr. Hallowell: Entrepreneur.

Margaret Weiss MD: Running a bungee jumping operation.

Dr Hallowell: Brain surgeon.

Margaret Weiss MD: An emergency room physician.

Dr Hallowell: Trader on the Commodities exchange.

Margaret Weiss MD, PhD: A stock broker is in a crazy overstimulating environment, taking constant risks that would make anybody else think twice with someone else’s money. It’s perfect!

Dr Hallowell: Really the the key to treating adult ADD is to marry the right person, and find the right job, and adults with ADD often make the same mistake in both domains, they marry and work for someone who is controlling, demeaning, picking, and someone who doesn’t really like them all that much, because they got the idea round about fifth grade that that’s what they needed, that they were a hopeless case, so they had to be ridden hard on, they had to be controlled, they had to be demeaned and put down.

Rick Green: By the way some of these experts have ADHD themselves, most of them are pretty open about it, and they found their happy place. As my mom told me if you love what you do for a living you’ll never have to work a day in your life, and Mom she she was a mob hit woman she and she loved it.

Dr Steven Kurtz: If somebody happened to have ADHD and they had my job it would be perfectly suited. I’m never in the same place for more than 45 minutes, I am managing lots of different projects at the same time, I have an executive assistant to help with things that might make somebody else disorganized. So one can learn to use them to their advantage.

Margaret Weiss MD, PhD: I actually remember a seven-year-old who I said what are you going to be when you grow up and he said a radio announcer, and I said why is that, and he said because it would be so wonderful if people could just press a button and turn me on and turn me off.

Rick Green: However for those with the purely inattentive subtype the more quiet thoughtful ADD adults a busy workplace can be overwhelming, short deadlines ygh stressful constant interruptions debilitating and yet they may flourish in a field that has very few set rules or strict deadlines or standard operating procedures, artist, long distance trucker, writer.

Dr. Mark Berner: If people with ADHD could live on the farm and get up with the crows and go to sleep with the cows they’d be much better off, they wouldn’t have that that regimentation, but that’s an attribute of our society and the challenge then is you know, obey the rules of society in order to fit in.

The joke was always that the worst job for somebody with ADHD would be to work in the Motor Vehicles Department you know processing papers, or in an you know in a bank, or you know being a toll collector or whatever, because it’s so boring.

I think having like the worst kind of job I can think of would be working at a call center, where you’re kind of stuck in a chair and you have to respond to people, and you have to be civil, and have to be nice all the time.

Rick Green: Unless you love being helpful. There’s no one list of ADHD friendly jobs or ADHD unfriendly jobs.

Wilma Fellman, M.Ed.: Traditionally people have steered ADD individuals away from certain jobs like accounting and like anything that requires them to sit for long periods of time. The truth is that your set of symptoms may be such that you are a hyper focuser.

Dr Steven Kurtz: So if you have a job where you can stay hyper focused on a project and you don’t need to be shifting sets often, that’s great, but you’re going to do poorly on the tests, on the neuro pychological tests that we use, that measure the ability to shift sets.

Wilma Fellman, M.Ed.: Yes there are careers that ADHD people are drawn to, whether they’re a good fit for it is a whole other thing.

Sometimes we don’t know really what the tasks are of a particular career because there’s so many attorney shows, people think that it’s like what’s on TV, and it’s ladies and gentlemen of the jury, and if I’m a good presenter or I’m a good orator, or I talk well with people I’m going to be a great attorney, and truthfully if you look at the dictionary of Occupational titles which is online, it breaks down jobs into tasks and gives what they call the essential tasks of each job, and you would find that law is 75% data. So people think they’re attracted to a particular field that doesn’t necessarily line up with what they’re all about.

Rick Green: Of course there are exceptions to every rule, you might be drawn to something that doesn’t seem at first glance like a match for ADHD.

Wilma Fellman, M.Ed.: And if you are you could still be very ADD but you don’t have the hyperactivity component and you might make a wonderful accountant, you might make a wonderful researcher.

Dr. Mark Berner: But I have a client who’s a lawyer who deals with the most complicated and involved legal that go on for years as well so…

Rick Green: But generally we prefer variety, novelty, fresh challenges, very clear tasks do this do this short deadlines.

Margaret Weiss, MD, PHd: I don’t understand why cooking is often ADHD friendly, it’s everything that ADHD people should hate, it’s boring, it requires time management, requires following a recipe.

Rick Green: Okay cooking doesn’t float my boat but ADHD is rampant in the restaurant business, check out an episode of The Bear.

So to summarize understand your particular version of ADHD, and then understand what the jobs entail.

In the next episode what if you finally score a job you love and you’re so good at it you get a raise and a promotion to a different job? Welcome to management, you’ll be tracking paperwork, detail work, Financial, schedules, organizing, long meetings.

We’ll also talk about career counsellors and why so many don’t get it, online tests, and jobs with structure, with real structure, for some people that is frustrating, for others it provides focus and Clarity.

All right thanks for watching do share your thoughts and experience in the comments, or drop by the house, bring lunch.

After a few days once you’ve digested all the ideas in this video check out part two, yeah two days who am I kidding you’re going to watch it right now, I would, but you might want to grab a pen and a paper to jot down stuff that resonates with you, I know I always have lots of thoughts and ideas and these aha moments, and oh yeah, and that’s good, and I could this or what about that oh and you know what else that reminds me and each new idea makes me forget what the last Epiphany was … what was it this is good, boom that gets bumped and so by the end I’m… I can’t…. what was I going to say here? Oh I had something here… it’s ah ,I lost it because I ah!

This video features: Linda Walker, PCC; Wilma Fellman, M.Ed, LPC; Dr Mark Berner, Edward (Ned) Hallowell, MD; Steven Kurtz, PhD, ABPP, Margaret Weiss, MD, PhD, FRCP(C); Anthony Rostain, MD, MA