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saw a tweet screenshot today that said "you're not a jack of all trades, you just have ADHD" and it cut me to the bone
@mathowie you jack, matt. you jack.
@dansinker @benbrown @mathowie I’m glad it isn’t just me. I’ve been feeling like this since my last startup ran out of gas in 2020. I’ve literally never found anything I can’t do, but I’m never going to be the best at anything. I often feel like I’m doomed to kind of coast from early startup to early startup, where I’ll bail out when it starts going well and we need specialized people.
Also Generally Unemployable would be a good name for a podcast.
@dansinker @will @benbrown @mathowie There's a very difficult challenge in making the work style of serial projects with a breadth of skills but a briefer tenure of engagement be legible to organizations that offer institutional stability. (Capitalism wants cogs, and ADHD makes us more of the chains or belts that connect cogs together.) But! It is doable, and sometimes just takes practice, community support or coaching in how to frame these skills. I'm happy to help talk it through for folks.
@dansinker @will @benbrown @mathowie (I think about this a lot because I spent ~20 years being moderately well-known in our nerd circles, but at no point did the majority of people I was connected to have any clear idea of what I actually _do_, which makes for a confusing resume and undermines credibility with those who seek institutional endorsements or traditional credentials. What you do is valuable, it just needs translation.)
slow learner, 
deep feeler @joshmillard @jessamyn @anildash @dansinker @will @benbrown @mathowie well, I spent all my time learning how to nurture growth in humans and support us where we are at. I ended up doing massage, and people love me, but there aren't enough of them to support me. I'm AudHd but I failed to explore tech, so the problems you mention plus traditionally unpaid skill development.
@anildash @dansinker @will @mathowie well put.
Being the connective tissue at bigorg most of the time means being a manager which takes you out of the actually doing stuff thing you were so good at.
@anildash
Tell me about it! And it's not all ADHD either. If you are in the top 0.5% of IQ you will understand and map a solution to typical problems about 50x faster than institutional decision making. Stuff that takes an organization a year to agree on will be stuff you figured out in the first 3 days. Who has the energy for all that faffing about? People below the 95%tile
@dansinker @will @benbrown @mathowie
@anildash
It's just a fact that we don't have institutions capable of taking advantage of the top 5%. Contrast to something like the Manhattan project.
@dansinker @will @benbrown @mathowie
@dlakelan @dansinker @will @benbrown @mathowie IQ doesn't exist, we don't need to perpetuate destructive myths that make some people feel good.
@anildash @dansinker @will @benbrown @mathowie
Even if you don't like a single dimensional summary of intelligence (and I don't, brains are very definitely multi-dimensional) IQ is still one of the dimensions (in a Principal Component Analysis for example). A student who can without test prep sit down and bang out a 1500+ on the SATs/GRE is not doing the same thing in their brain that a person who struggles to get an 1100 after 3 weeks of test prep is.
@anildash @dansinker @will @benbrown @mathowie
There is variation across people in their ability to do things, that's just a fact. For example I have Aphantasia and so I can zero percent imagine photographs or paintings in my mind. In any case, those who get high test scores on academic type tests without major test-prep tend to relatively rapidly integrate multiple requirements to figure out the relatively narrowly implied solution space. Organizations on the other hand tend to hem and haw.
@anildash @dansinker @will @benbrown @mathowie
If you are a person who can take requirements A,B,C,D,E and use those things to prove logically that there can only be solutions of type Q or P then spending a year dealing with proposals for L and T and R and F and soforth is just maddening. How much time do we need to spend talking about how great it would be to have everyone use an electric car when we can prove that there isn't even 1/20th as much lithium in existence to make it work?
@dlakelan @dansinker @will @benbrown @mathowie there’s no such thing as IQ and I can’t believe you wouldn’t just take the word of someone who has a higher IQ and therefore is better able to judge
@anildash
Right, I'm sure any random selection of people could have replaced Fermi, Teller, Oppenheimer, Ulam, Feynman, etc on the Manhattan project. There was nothing different about them. In any case, this convo wasn't meant to be. Next time I guess.
@dansinker @will @benbrown @mathowie